by Ian Rankin
‘Gregor.’
The figure wheezed, the head jerking up. It came to a stop. Gregor Jack rose to his full height, arching his head to the sky. He lifted his tired arms and rested his hands on his waist, for all the world like a runner at the end of his race. One hand went instinctively to his hair, tidying it back into place. Then he bent forwards and put his hands on his knees, and the hair flopped forwards again. But his breathing was becoming steadier. Eventually he straightened up again. Rebus saw that he was smiling, showing his perfect teeth. He began shaking his head and chuckling. Rebus had heard the sound before from people who’d lost: lost everything from their freedom to a big bet or a game of five-a-side. They were laughing at circumstance.
Gregor’s laughter collapsed into a cough. He slapped at his chest, then looked at Rebus and smiled again.
Then sprang.
Rebus’s instinct was to dodge, but Jack was moving away from him. And both of them knew precisely where he was headed. As his foot touched the last inch of earth, he leapt out into the air, jumping feet first. A couple of seconds later came the sound of his body hitting the water. Rebus toed his way to the edge of the rock and looked down, but the cloud was closing in again overhead. The moonlight was lost. There was nothing to see.
Making their way back to Deer Lodge, there was no need for Knox’s torch. The flames lit up the surrounding countryside. Glowing ash landed on the trees as they made their way through the woods. Rebus ran his fingers over the back of his head. The skin was stinging. But he got the feeling shock might have set in: the pain wasn’t quite so bad as before. His ankles stung too – thistles, probably. He’d run through what had turned out to be a field full of them. There was no one near the house. Moffat and Steele were waiting by Knox’s car.
‘How good a swimmer is he?’ Rebus asked Steele.
‘Beggar?’ Steele was massaging his untethered arms. ‘Can’t swim a stroke. We all learned at school, but his mum used to give him a note excusing him.’
‘Why?’
Steele shrugged. ‘She was scared he’d catch verrucas. How’s the head, Inspector?’
‘I won’t need a haircut for a while.’
‘What about Jack?’ Moffat asked.
‘He won’t be needing one either.’
They searched for Gregor Jack’s body the following morning. Not that Rebus was there to participate. He was in hospital and feeling dirty and unshaven – except for his head.
‘If you have a problem with baldness,’ one senior doctor told him, ‘you could always wear a toupee till it grows back. Or a hat. Your scalp will be sensitive, too, so try to keep out of the sun.’
‘Sun? What sun?’
But there was sun, during his time off work there was plenty of it. He stayed indoors, stayed underground, reading book after book, emerging for brief forays to the Royal Infirmary to have his dressings changed.
‘I could do that for you,’ Patience had told him.
‘Never mix business and pleasure,’ was Rebus’s enigmatic response. In fact, there was a nurse up at the infirmary who had taken a shine to him, and he to her . . . Ach, it wouldn’t go anywhere; it was just a bit of flirting. He wouldn’t hurt Patience for the world.
Holmes visited, always with a dozen cans of something gassy. ‘Hiya, baldie,’ was the perennial greeting, even when the skinhead had become a suedehead, the suedehead longer still.
‘What’s the news?’ asked Rebus.
Apart from the fact that Gregor Jack’s body had still not been recovered, the big news was that the Farmer was off the booze after having been ‘visited by the Lord’ at some revivalist Baptist meeting.
‘It’s communion wine only from now on,’ said Holmes. ‘Mind you –’ pointing to Rebus’s head, ‘for a while there I thought maybe you were going to go Buddhist on us.’
‘I might yet,’ said Rebus. ‘I might yet.’
The media clung to the Jack story, clung to the idea that he might still be alive. Rebus wondered about that, too. More, he still wondered why Jack had killed Elizabeth. Ronald Steele could shed no light on the problem. Apparently, Jack had spoken hardly a word to him all the time he’d held him captive . . . Well, that was Steele’s story. Whatever had been said, it wasn’t going any further.
All of which left Rebus with scenarios, with guesswork. He played out the scene time after time in his head – Jack arriving at the lay-by, and arguing with Elizabeth. Maybe she’d told him she wanted a divorce. Maybe the argument was over the brothel story. Or maybe there’d been something else. All Steele would say was that when he’d left her, she’d been waiting for her husband.
‘I thought about hanging around and confronting him . . .’
‘But?’
Steele shrugged. ‘Cowardice. It’s not doing something “wrong” that’s the problem, Inspector, it’s getting caught. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘But if you had stayed . . .?’
Steele nodded. ‘I know. Maybe Liz would have told Gregor to bugger off and have stuck with me instead. Maybe they’d both still be alive.’
If Steele hadn’t fled from the lay-by . . . if Gail Jack hadn’t come north in the first place . . . What then? Rebus was in no doubt: it would have worked out some other way, not necessarily any less painful a way. Fire and ice and skeletons in the closet. He wished he could have met Elizabeth Jack, just once, even though he had the feeling they wouldn’t have got on . . .
There was one more news story. It started as another rumour, but the rumour turned out to be a leak, and the leak was followed by notification: Great London Road was to undergo a programme of repair and refurbishment.
Which means, thought Rebus, I move in with Patience. To all intents, he already had.
‘You don’t have to sell your flat,’ she told him. ‘You could always rent it.’
‘Rent it?’
‘To students. Your street’s half full of them as it is.’ This was true. You saw the migration in the morning, down towards The Meadows carrying their satchels and ring-binders and supermarket carriers; back in the late afternoon (or late night) laden with books and ideas. The notion appealed. If he rented out his flat, he could pay Patience something towards living here with her.
‘You’re on,’ he said.
He was back at work one full day when Great London Road Police Station caught fire. The building was razed to the ground.
© Rankin
ABOUT IAN RANKIN
Ian Rankin, OBE, writes a huge proportion of all the crime novels sold in the UK and has won numerous prizes, including in 2005 the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger. His work is available in over 30 languages, home sales of his books exceed one million copies a year, and several of the novels based around the character of Detective Inspector Rebus – his name meaning ‘enigmatic puzzle’ – have been successfully transferred to television.
Introduction to DI John Rebus
The first novels to feature Rebus, a flawed but resolutely humane detective, were not an overnight sensation, and success took time to arrive. But the wait became a period that allowed Ian Rankin to come of age as a writer, and to develop Rebus into a thoroughly believable, flesh-and-blood character straddling both industrial and post-industrial Scotland; a gritty yet perceptive man coping with his own demons. As Rebus struggled to keep his relationship with daughter Sammy alive following his divorce, and to cope with the imprisonment of brother Michael, while all the time trying to strike a blow for morality against a fearsome array of sinners (some justified and some not), readers began to respond in their droves. Fans admired Ian Rankin’s re-creation of a picture-postcard Edinburgh with a vicious tooth-and-claw underbelly just a heartbeat away, his believable but at the same time complex plots and, best of all, Rebus as a conflicted man trying always to solve the unsolvable, and to do the right thing.
As the series progressed, Ian Rankin refused to shy away from contentious issues such as corruption in high places, paedophilia and illegal immigration, combining his uni
que seal of tight plotting with a bleak realism, leavened with brooding humour.
In Rebus the reader is presented with a rich and constantly evolving portrait of a complex and troubled man, irrevocably tinged with the sense of being an outsider and, potentially, unable to escape being a ‘justified sinner’ himself. Rebus’s life is intricately related to his Scottish environs too, enriched by Ian Rankin’s attentive depiction of locations, and careful regard to Rebus’s favourite music, watering holes and books, as well as his often fraught relationships with colleagues and family. And so, alongside Rebus, the reader is taken on an often painful, sometimes hellish journey to the depths of human nature, always rooted in the minutiae of a very recognisable Scottish life.
The Oxford Bar – Rebus and many of the characters who appear in the novels are regulars of the Ox – as is Ian Rankin himself. The pub is now synonymous with the Rebus novels to the extent that one of the regular medical examiners called in to assist with investigations is named after the pub’s owner, John Gates.
Edinburgh plays an important role throughout the Rebus novels; a character itself, as brooding and as volatile as Rebus. The Edinburgh depicted in the novels is far short of the beautiful city that tourists in their thousands flood to visit. Hidden behind the historic buildings and elegant façades is the world that Rebus inhabits.
For general discussion
regarding the Rebus series
How does Ian Rankin reveal himself as an author interested in using fiction to ‘tell the truths the real world can’t’?
There are similarities between the lives of the author and his protagonist – for instance, both Ian Rankin and Rebus were born in Fife, lost their mothers at an early age, have children with physical problems – so is it useful therefore to think of John Rebus and Ian Rankin as each other’s alter egos?
Could it be said that Rebus is trying to make sense in a general way of the world around him, or is he seeking answers to the ‘big questions’? And is it relevant therefore that he is a believer in God and comes from a Scottish Presbyterian background? Would Rebus see confession in both the religious and the criminal sense as similar in any way?
How does Ian Rankin explore notions of Edinburgh as a character in its own right? In what way does he contrast the glossy public and seedy private faces of the city with the public and private faces of those Rebus meets? How does Ian Rankin use musical sources – the Elvis references in The Black Book, for instance, or the Rolling Stones allusions in Let It Bleed – as a means of character development through the series? What does Rebus’s own taste in music and books say about him as a person?
What do you think about Rebus as a character? If you have read several or more novels from the series, discuss how his character is developed.
If Rebus has a problem with notions of ‘pecking order’ and the idea of authority generally, what does it say about him that he chose careers in hierarchical institutions such as the Army and then the police?
How does Rebus relate to women: as lovers, flirtations, family members and colleagues?
Do the flashes of gallows humour as often shown by the pathologists but sometimes also in Rebus’s own comments increase or dissipate narrative tension? Does Rebus use black comedy for the same reasons the pathologists do?
Do Rebus’s personal vulnerabilities make him understanding of the frailties of others?
How does the characterisation of Rebus compare to other long-standing popular detectives from British authors such as Holmes, Poirot, Morse or Dalgleish? And are there more similarities or differences between them?
STRIP JACK
Operation Creeper doesn’t quite pan out as planned. When Rebus and his colleagues raid the brothel that’s masquerading as a respectable Georgian house in Edinburgh’s New Town, inside they find Gregor Jack, a popular Independent MP, and outside an unexpected and overexcited pack of national newspaper journalists baying for blood. Rebus, already conflicted about the raid, feels sorry for the charismatic Jack (who hasn’t given in to temptation, after all? And, anyway, aren’t there worse forms of prostitution than whoring?). But when Jack’s wife Elizabeth disappears only to turn up soggy and very dead, Rebus has to confront the possibility that perhaps he’s been taken in once again by a winsome public image and a firm handshake, not to mention a mutual love of whisky.
Despite the efforts of the new Chief Inspector to distract him with what appears to be a spurious case of theft, and the deepening of his own personal relationship with Dr Patience Aitken, Rebus believes that to get to the root of the scandal that is unfurling in the constituency of North and South Esk, he must endeavour to discover just who it is that wants to humiliate Jack and, more importantly, why.
But the relationships between Liz Jack, part of the influential Ferrie family, her cronies and her husband aren’t quite as anticipated, and soon Rebus discovers that Liz and her posh pals – the Pack, the ‘spokes on a bicycle wheel’ – enjoyed life in a very fast lane, one where old allegiances can count for more than the paper ties of a marriage licence.
In one of Ian Rankin’s most carefully plotted novels to date, an intricate story unfolds where chance meetings, faded dreams, broken alibis, secret liaisons and embarrassing moments from the past combine to lead back inevitably to unbreakable school ties, a language of friendship that Rebus must work hard to grasp.
Discussion points for Strip Jack
Ian Rankin calls Strip Jack one of his most Scottish works – what is the evidence for this?
Ian Rankin says that with Strip Jack his ‘long apprenticeship’ as a writer of detective fiction was nearing its end. Is this an overly harsh comment?
‘An Establishment establishment’ is how Rebus describes the brothel. Discuss the implications of this.
How many different types of politics are dealt with in Strip Jack?
How does Ian Rankin subvert a well-known quotation from Jane Austen?
Is Chief Inspector Lauderdale really oblivious to Rebus’s attempts at irony over the Case of the Lifted Literature, or is it more the case that Lauderdale is winding Rebus up? In any event, who comes out on top?
Consider the way in which Ian Rankin weaves together the serious murder case with the trivial-seeming book-theft case.
What does Rebus’s evening with Brian Holmes and Nell say about his own attitudes to socialising?
Bearing in mind Rebus’s sometimes fraught relationship with brother Michael, does he identify with Gregor’s response to his own embarrassingly behaved sibling? How sympathetic is Rebus to Gregor’s desire to distance himself from his past?
Rebus doesn’t seem to have kept in touch with many of his old friends; is this why he finds the bonds and the motivations that govern this group of tightly knit friends to be simultaneously perplexing and fascinating?
There’s more forensic evidence presented in Strip Jack than in previous Rebus books; how does Ian Rankin approach this?
Ian Rankin’s use of Scottish slang is taken to a new level. Does this cause a problem for readers unacquainted with the idiom?
Is it necessity or merely symbolic that Strip Jack ends with a fire that burns down the fictitious Great London Road Police Station?
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 1992 by Orion Books.
First published in ebook form in 2008 by Orion Books.
This updated ebook published in 2011 by Orion Books.
Copyright © John Rebus Limited 1992
Introduction copyright © John Rebus Limited 2005
The right of Ian Rankin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the copyright, designs and patents act 1988.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the pu
blisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 0768 2
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