The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories

by Ian Rankin

  Opposite the television set sat another sunken armchair, looking as if it had not been sat in this whole afternoon. Rebus could guess why: the deceased’s chair, the throne to his tiny kingdom. He smiled towards the two women. Grace Gallagher only half looked towards him.

  ‘Thanks for dropping by,’ she said, her voice slightly revived from earlier. ‘It was good of you. Cheerio.’

  ‘Actually, Mrs Gallagher,’ said Rebus, stepping into the room, ‘I’m a police officer, Detective Inspector Rebus. Dr Aitken asked me to look in.’

  ‘Oh.’ Grace Gallagher looked at him now. Pretty eyes sinking into crinkly white skin. A dab of natural colour on each cheek. Her silvery hair hadn’t seen a perm in quite a while, but someone had combed it, perhaps to enable her to face the rigours of the afternoon. The daughter-in-law – or so Rebus supposed the woman on the arm of the chair to be – was rising.

  ‘Would you like me to …?’

  Rebus nodded towards her. ‘I don’t think this’ll take long. Just routine really, when there’s been an accident.’ He looked at Grace, then at the daughter-in-law. ‘Maybe if you could go into the kitchen for five minutes or so?’

  She nodded keenly, perhaps a little too keenly. Rebus hadn’t seen her all evening, and so supposed she’d felt duty bound to stay cooped up in here with her mother-in-law. She seemed to relish the prospect of movement.

  ‘I’ll pop the kettle on,’ she said, brushing past Rebus. He watched the door close, waited as she padded down the short hallway, listened until he heard water running, the sounds of dishes being tidied. Then he turned back to Grace Gallagher, took a deep breath, and walked over towards her, dragging a stiff-backed dining chair with him. This he sat on, only a foot or two from her. He could feel her growing uneasy. She writhed a little in the armchair, then tried to disguise the reaction by reaching for another paper hankie from a box on the floor beside her.

  ‘This must be a very difficult time for you, Mrs Gallagher,’ Rebus began. He wanted to keep things short and clear cut. He had no evidence, had nothing to play with but a little bit of psychology and the woman’s own state of mind. It might not be enough; he wasn’t sure whether or not he wanted it to be enough. He found himself shifting on the chair. His arm touched the newspaper in his pocket. It felt like a talisman.

  ‘Dr Aitken told me,’ he continued, ‘that you’d looked after your husband for quite a few years. It can’t have been easy.’

  ‘I’d be lying if I said that it was.’

  Rebus tried to find the requisite amount of iron in her words. Tried but failed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I believe your husband was, well, a bit difficult at times.’

  ‘I won’t deny that either. He could be a real bugger when he wanted to.’ She smiled, as if in memory of the fact. ‘But I’ll miss him. Aye, I’ll miss him.’

  ‘I’m sure you will, Mrs Gallagher.’

  He looked at her, and her eyes fixed on to his, challenging him. He cleared his throat again. ‘There’s something I’m not absolutely sure about, concerning the accident. I wonder if maybe you can help me?’

  ‘I can try.’

  Rebus smiled his appreciation. ‘It’s just this,’ he said. ‘Eleven o’clock was a bit early for your husband to be coming downstairs. What’s more, he seemed to be trying to come down without his walking-frame, which is still beside the bed.’ Rebus’s voice was becoming firmer, his conviction growing. ‘What’s more, he seems to have fallen with a fair amount of force.’

  She interrupted him with a snap. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean he fell straight down the stairs. He didn’t just slip and fall, or stumble and roll down them. He went flying off the top step and didn’t hit anything till he hit the ground.’ Her eyes were filling again. Hating himself, Rebus pressed on. ‘He didn’t fall, Mrs Gallagher. He was helped to the top of the stairs, and then he was helped down them with a push in the back, a pretty vigorous push at that.’ His voice grew less severe, less judgemental. ‘I’m not saying you meant to kill him. Maybe you just wanted him hospitalised, so you could have a rest from looking after him. Was that it?’

  She was blowing her nose, her small shoulders squeezed inwards towards a brittle neck. The shoulders twitched with sobs. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You think I … How could you? Why would you say anything like that? No, I don’t believe you. Get out of my house.’ But there was no power to any of her words, no real enthusiasm for the fight. Rebus reached into his pocket and brought out the newspaper.

  ‘I notice you do crosswords, Mrs Gallagher.’

  She glanced up at him, startled by this twist in the conversation. ‘What?’

  He motioned with the paper. ‘I like crosswords myself. That’s why I was interested when I saw you’d completed today’s puzzle. Very impressive. When did you do that?’

  ‘This morning,’ she said through another handkerchief. ‘In the park. I always do the crossword after I’ve bought the paper. Then I bring it home so George can look at his horses.’

  Rebus nodded, and studied the crossword again. ‘You must have been preoccupied with something this morning then,’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s quite an easy one, really. I mean, easy for someone who does crosswords like this and finishes them. Where is it now?’ Rebus seemed to be searching the grid. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nineteen across. You’ve got the down solutions, so that means the answer to nineteen across must be something R something P. Now, what’s the clue?’ He looked for it, found it. ‘Here it is, Mrs Gallagher. “Perhaps deadly in part.” Four letters. Something R something P. Something deadly. Or deadly in part. And you’ve put TRIP. ‘What were you thinking about, I wonder? I mean, when you wrote that? I wonder what your mind was on?’

  ‘But it’s the right answer,’ said Grace Gallagher, her face creasing in puzzlement. Rebus was shaking his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. I think the “in part” means the letters of “part” make up the word you want. The answer’s TRAP, Mrs Gallagher. “Perhaps deadly in part”: TRAP. Do you see? But you were thinking of something else when you filled in the answer. You were thinking about how if your husband tripped down the stairs you might be rid of him. Isn’t that right, Grace?’

  She was silent for a moment, the silence broken only by the ticking of the mantelpiece clock and the clank of dishes being washed in the kitchen. Then she spoke, quite calmly.

  ‘Myra’s a good lass. It was terrible when Billy died. She’s been like a daughter to me ever since.’ Another pause, then her eyes met Rebus’s again. He was thinking of his own mother, of how old she’d be today had she lived. Much the same age as this woman in front of him. He took another deep breath, but stayed silent, waiting.

  ‘You know, son,’ she said, ‘if you look after an invalid, people think you’re a martyr. I was a martyr all right, but only because I put up with him for forty years.’ Her eyes strayed to the empty armchair, and focused on it as though her husband were sitting there and hearing the truth for the very first time. ‘He was a sweet talker back then, and he had all the right moves. None of that once Billy came along. None of that ever again.’ Her voice, which had been growing softer, now began hardening again. ‘They shut the pit, so he got work at the bottle factory. Then they shut that, and all he could get was part-time chalking up the winners at the bookie’s. A man gets gey bitter, Inspector. But he didn’t have to take it out on me, did he?’ She moved her eyes from the chair to Rebus. ‘Will they lock me up?’ She didn’t sound particularly interested in his answer.

  ‘That’s not for me to say, Grace. Juries decide that sort of thing.’

  She smiled. ‘I thought I’d done the crossword in record time. Trust me to get one wrong.’ And she shook her head slowly, the smile falling from her face as the tears came again, and her mouth opened in a near-silent bawl.

  The door swung open, the daughter-in-law entering with a tray full of crockery.

  ‘There now,�
�� she called. ‘We can all have a nice cup of—’ She saw the look on Grace Gallagher’s face, and she froze.

  ‘What have you done?’ she cried accusingly. Rebus stood up.

  ‘Mrs Gallagher,’ he said to her, ‘I’m afraid I’ve got a bit of bad news …’

  She had known of course. The daughter-in-law had known. Not that Grace had said anything, but there had been a special bond between them. Myra’s parting words to Rebus’s retreating back had been a vicious ‘That bugger deserved all he got!’ Net curtains had twitched; faces had appeared at darkened windows. Her words had echoed along the street and up into the smoky night air.

  Maybe she was right at that. Rebus couldn’t judge. All he could be was fair. So why was it that he felt so guilty? So ashamed? He could have shrugged it off, could have reported back to Patience that there was no substance to her fears. Grace Gallagher had suffered; would continue to suffer. Wasn’t that enough? OK, so the law demanded more, but without Rebus there was no case, was there?

  He felt right, felt vindicated, and at the same time felt a complete and utter bastard. More than that, he felt as though he’d just sentenced his own mother. He stopped at a late-night store and stocked up on beer and cigarettes. As an afterthought, he bought six assorted packets of crisps and a couple of bars of chocolate. This was no time to diet. Back home, he could conduct his own post-mortem, could hold his own private wake. On his way out of the shop, he bought the final edition of the evening paper, and was reminded that this was 30 April. Tomorrow morning, before dawn, crowds of people would climb up Arthur’s Seat and, at the hill’s summit, would celebrate the rising of the sun and the coming of May. Some would dab their faces with dew, the old story being that it would make them more beautiful, more handsome. What exactly was it they were celebrating, all the hungover students and the druids and the curious? Rebus wasn’t sure any more. Perhaps he had never known in the first place.

  Later that night, much later, as he lay along his sofa, the hi-fi blaring some jazz music from the sixties, his eye caught the day’s racing results on the paper’s back page. Gypsy Pearl had come home first at three-to-one. In the very next race, Gazumpin had won at seven-to-two on. Two races further on, Lot’s Wife had triumphed at a starting price of eight-to-one. At another meeting, Castle Mallet had won the two thirty. Two-to-one joint favourite. That left only Blondie. Rebus tried to focus his eyes, and finally found the horse, its name misprinted to read ‘Bloodie’. Though three-to-one favourite, it had come home third in a field of thirteen.

  Rebus stared at the misspelling, wondering what had been going through the typist’s mind when he or she had made that one small but no doubt meaningful slip …

  Castle Dangerous

  Sir Walter Scott was dead.

  He’d been found at the top of his namesake’s monument in Princes Street Gardens, dead of a heart attack and with a new and powerful pair of binoculars hanging around his slender, mottled neck.

  Sir Walter had been one of Edinburgh’s most revered QCs until his retirement a year ago. Detective Inspector John Rebus, climbing the hundreds (surely it must be hundreds) of spiralling steps up to the top of the Scott Monument, paused for a moment to recall one or two of his run-ins with Sir Walter, both in and out of the courtrooms on the Royal Mile. He had been a formidable character, shrewd, devious and subtle. Law to him had been a challenge rather than an obligation. To John Rebus, it was just a day’s work.

  Rebus ached as he reached the last incline. The steps here were narrower than ever, the spiral tighter. Room for one person only, really. At the height of its summer popularity, with a throng of tourists squeezing through it like toothpaste from a tube, Rebus reckoned the Scott Monument might be very scary indeed.

  He breathed hard and loud, bursting through the small doorway at the top, and stood there for a moment, catching his breath. The panorama before him was, quite simply, the best view in Edinburgh. The castle close behind him, the New Town spread out in front of him, sloping down towards the Firth of Forth, with Fife, Rebus’s birthplace, visible in the distance. Calton Hill … Leith … Arthur’s Seat … and round to the castle again. It was breathtaking, or would have been had the breath not already been taken from him by the climb.

  The parapet upon which he stood was incredibly narrow; again, there was hardly room enough to squeeze past someone. How crowded did it get in the summer? Dangerously crowded? It seemed dangerously crowded just now, with only four people up here. He looked over the edge upon the sheer drop to the gardens below, where a massing of tourists, growing restless at being barred from the monument, stared up at him. Rebus shivered.

  Not that it was cold. It was early June. Spring was finally late-blooming into summer, but that cold wind never left the city, that wind which never seemed to be warmed by the sun. It bit into Rebus now, reminding him that he lived in a northern climate. He looked down and saw Sir Walter’s slumped body, reminding him why he was here.

  ‘I thought we were going to have another corpse on our hands there for a minute.’ The speaker was Detective Sergeant Brian Holmes. He had been in conversation with the police doctor, who himself was crouching over the corpse.

  ‘Just getting my breath back,’ Rebus explained.

  ‘You should take up squash.’

  ‘It’s squashed enough up here.’ The wind was nipping Rebus’s ears. He began to wish he hadn’t had that haircut at the weekend. ‘What have we got?’

  ‘Heart attack. The doctor reckons he was due for one anyway. A climb like that in an excited state. One of the witnesses says he just doubled over. Didn’t cry out, didn’t seem in pain …’

  ‘Old mortality, eh?’ Rebus looked wistfully at the corpse. ‘But why do you say he was excited?’

  Holmes grinned. ‘Think I’d bring you up here for the good of your health? Here.’ He handed a polythene bag to Rebus. Inside the bag was a badly typed note. ‘It was found in the binocular case.’

  Rebus read the note through its clear polythene window: GO TO TOP OF SCOTT MONUMENT. TUESDAY MIDDAY. I’LL BE THERE. LOOK FOR THE GUN.

  ‘The gun?’ Rebus asked, frowning.

  There was a sudden explosion. Rebus started, but Holmes just looked at his watch, then corrected its hands. One o’clock. The noise had come from the blank charge fired every day from the castle walls at precisely one o’clock.

  ‘The gun,’ Rebus repeated, except now it was a statement. Sir Walter’s binoculars were lying beside him. Rebus lifted them – ‘He wouldn’t mind, would he?’ – and fixed them on the castle. Tourists could be seen walking around. Some peered over the walls. A few fixed their own binoculars on Rebus. One, an elderly Asian, grinned and waved. Rebus lowered the binoculars. He examined them. ‘These look brand new.’

  ‘Bought for the purpose, I’d say, sir.’

  ‘But what exactly was the purpose, Brian? What was he supposed to be looking at?’ Rebus waited for an answer. None was forthcoming. ‘Whatever it was,’ Rebus went on, ‘it as good as killed him. I suggest we take a look for ourselves.’

  ‘Where, sir?’

  Rebus nodded towards the castle. ‘Over there, Brian. Come on.’

  ‘Er, Inspector …?’ Rebus looked towards the doctor, who was upright now, but pointing downwards with one finger. ‘How are we going to get him down?’

  Rebus stared at Sir Walter. Yes, he could see the problem. It would be hard graft taking him all the way back down the spiral stairs. What’s more, damage to the body would be unavoidable. He supposed they could always use a winch and lower him straight to the ground … Well, it was a job for ambulancemen or undertakers, not the police. Rebus patted the doctor’s shoulder.

  ‘You’re in charge, Doc,’ he said, exiting through the door before the doctor could summon up a protest. Holmes shrugged apologetically, smiled, and followed Rebus into the dark. The doctor looked at the body, then over the edge, then back to the body again. He reached into his pocket for a mint, popped it into his mouth, and began to crunch on it. Then he,
too, made for the door.

  Splendour was falling on the castle walls. Wrong poet, Rebus mused, but right image. He tried to recall if he’d ever read any Scott, but drew a blank. He thought he might have picked up Waverley once. As a colleague at the time had said, ‘Imagine calling a book after the station.’ Rebus hadn’t bothered to explain; and hadn’t read the book either, or if he had it had left no impression …

  He stood now on the ramparts, looking across to the Gothic exaggeration of the Scott Monument. A cannon was almost immediately behind him. Anyone wanting to be seen from the top of the monument would probably have been standing right on this spot. People did not linger here though. They might wander along the walls, take a few photographs, or pose for a few, but they would not stand in the one spot for longer than a minute or two.

  Which meant, of course, that if someone had been standing here longer, they would be conspicuous. The problem was twofold: first, conspicuous to whom? Everyone else would be in motion, would not notice that someone was lingering. Second, all the potential witnesses would by now have gone their separate ways, in tour buses or on foot, down the Royal Mile or on to Princes Street, along George the Fourth Bridge to look at Greyfriars Bobby … The people milling around just now represented a fresh intake, new water flowing down the same old stream.

  Someone wanted to be seen by Sir Walter, and Sir Walter wanted to see him – hence the binoculars. No conversation was needed, just the sighting. Why? Rebus couldn’t think of a single reason. He turned away from the wall and saw Holmes approaching. Meeting his eyes, Holmes shrugged his shoulders.