by Ian Rankin
‘So tell me when the other notes arrived.’
‘I can’t remember.’
She bent over him, her eyes huge behind her glasses. She said calmly, ‘Are you hiding anything from me?’
‘No!’
The whole ward turned to his cry, and he felt his cheeks flush.
‘No,’ he whispered, ‘I’m not hiding anything. At least . . .’ But how could he be sure? All those years of arrests, of charge-sheets, of forgettings, so many enemies made. But none would torment him like this, surely. Surely.
With pen, paper, and a lot of thought on his part, they went over the arrival of each note: dates, contents, style of delivery. Gill took off her glasses, rubbing between her eyes, sighing.
‘It’s just too big a coincidence, John.’
And he knew that she was right, way down inside him. He knew that nothing was ever what it seemed, that nothing was arbitrary. ‘Gill,’ he said at last, pulling at the bedcover, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’
In the car she goaded him, spurred him on. Who could it be? What was the connection? Why?
‘What is this?’ he roared at her. ‘Am I a suspect now or something?’
She studied his eyes, trying to pierce them, trying to bite right into the truth behind them. Oh, she was a detective at heart, and a good detective trusts nobody. She gazed at him as though he were a scolded schoolboy, with secrets still to spill, with sins to confess. Confess.
Gill knew that all this was only a hunch, insupportable. Yet she could feel something there, something perhaps behind those burning eyes. Stranger things had happened during her time on the force. Stranger things were always happening. Truth was always stranger than fiction, and nobody was ever wholly innocent. Those guilty looks when you questioned somebody, anybody. Everyone had something to hide. Mostly, though, it was small time, and covered by the intervening years. You would need Thought Police to get at those kinds of crime. But if John . . . If John Rebus proved to be part of this whole caboodle, then that . . . That was too absurd to think about.
‘Of course you’re not a suspect, John,’ she said. ‘But it could be important, couldn’t it?’
‘We’ll let Anderson decide,’ he said, falling silent, but shaking.
It was then that Gill had the thought: what if he sent the letters to himself?
18
He felt his arms ache and, looking down, saw that the girl had stopped struggling. There came that point, that sudden, blissful point, when it was useless to go on living, and when the mind and body came to accept that such was the case. That was a beautiful, peaceful moment, the most relaxed moment of one’s life. He had, many years ago, tried to commit suicide, savouring that very moment. But they had done things to him in hospital and in the clinic afterwards. They had given him back the will to live, and now he was repaying them, repaying all of them. He saw this irony in his life and chuckled, peeling the tape from Helen Abbot’s mouth, using the little scissors to snip away her bonds. He brought out a neat little camera from his trouser pocket and took another instant snap of her, a memento mori of sorts. If they ever caught him, they’d kick the shit out of him for this, but they would never be able to brand him a sex-killer. Sex had nothing to do with it; these girls were pawns, fated by their christenings. The next and last one was the one that really mattered, and he would do that one today if possible. He chuckled again. This was a better game than noughts and crosses. He was a winner at both.
19
Chief Inspector William Anderson loved the feel of the chase, the battle between instinct and plodding detection. He liked to feel, too, that he had the support of his Division behind him. Dispenser of orders, of wisdom, of strategies, he was in his element.
He would rather have caught the Strangler already – that went without saying. He was no sadist. The law had to be upheld. All the same, the longer an investigation like this went on, the greater became the feel of nearing the kill, and to relish that extended moment was one of the great perks of responsibility.
The Strangler was making an occasional slip, and that was what mattered to Anderson at this stage. The blue Ford Escort, and now the interesting theory that the killer had been or was still an Army man, suggested by the tying of a knot in the garotte. Snippets like that would culminate eventually in a name, an address, an arrest. And at that moment, Anderson would lead his officers physically as well as spiritually. There would be another interview on the television, another rather flattering photograph in the press (he was quite photogenic). Oh yes, victory would be sweet. Unless, of course, the Strangler vanished in the night as so many before him had done. That possibility was not to be considered; it made his legs turn into paper.
He did not dislike Rebus, not exactly. The man was a reasonable enough copper, a bit loud in his methods perhaps. And he understood that Rebus’s personal life had experienced an upheaval. Indeed, he had been told that Rebus’s ex-wife was the woman with whom his own son was co-habiting. He tried not to think about it. When Andy had slammed the front door on his leaving, he had walked right out of his father’s life. How could anyone these days spend their time writing poetry? It was ludicrous. And then moving in with Rebus’s wife . . . No, he did not dislike Rebus, but watching Rebus come towards him with that pretty Liaison Officer, Anderson felt his stomach cough, as though his insides suddenly wanted to become his outsides. He leaned back on the edge of a vacant desk. The officer assigned to it had gone off for a break.
‘Nice to have you back, John. Feeling fit?’
Anderson had shot out his hand, and Rebus, stunned, was forced to take it and return the grip. ‘I’m fine, sir,’ he said.
‘Sir,’ interrupted Gill Templer, ‘can we speak to you for a minute? There’s been a new development.’
‘The mere hint of a development, sir,’ corrected Rebus, staring at Gill.
Anderson looked from one to the other.
‘You’d better come into my office then.’
Gill explained the situation as she saw it to Anderson, and he, wise and safe behind his desk, listened, glancing occasionally towards Rebus, who smiled apologetically at him. Sorry to be wasting your time, Rebus’s smile said.
‘Well, Rebus?’ said Anderson when Gill had finished. ‘What do you say to all this? Could someone have a reason for informing you of their plans? I mean, could the Strangler know you?’
Rebus shrugged his shoulders, smiling, smiling, smiling.
Jack Morton, sitting in his car, jotted down some remarks on his report-sheet. Saw suspect. Interviewed same. Casual, helpful. Another dead end, he wanted to say. Another dead fucking end. A parking warden was looking at him, trying to scare him as she neared his car. He sighed, putting down the pen and paper and reaching for his ID. One of those days.
Rhona Phillips wore her raincoat, it being the end of May, and the rain slashing through the skyline as though painted upon an artist’s canvas. She kissed her curly-headed poet-lover goodbye, as he watched afternoon TV, and left the house, feeling for the car-keys in her handbag. She picked Sammy up from school these days, though the school was only a mile and a quarter away. She also went with her to the library at lunchtimes, not allowing her any escape. With that maniac still on the loose, she was taking no chances. She rushed to her car, got in, and slammed shut the door. Edinburgh rain was like a judgement. It soaked into the bones, into the structures of the buildings, into the memories of the tourists. It lingered for days, splashing up from puddles by the roadside, breaking up marriages, chilling, killing, omnipresent. The typical postcard home from an Edinburgh boarding-house: ‘Edinburgh is lovely. The people rather reserved. Saw the Castle yesterday, and the Scott Monument. It’s a very small city, almost a town really. You could fit it inside New York and never notice it. Weather could be better.’
Weather could be better. The art of euphemism. Shitty, shitty rain. It was so typical when she had a free day. Typical, too, that Andy and she should have argued. And now he was sulking in his chair, legs tucked
beneath him. One of those days. And she had reports to write out this evening. Thank God the exams had started. The kids seemed more subdued at school these days, the older ones gripped by exam-fever or exam-apathy, and the younger ones seeing their ineluctable future mapped out for them in the faces of their doomed superiors. It was an interesting time of year. Soon the fear would be Sammy’s, called Samantha to her face now that she was so nearly a woman. There were other fears there, too, for a parent. The fear of adolescence, of experiment.
As she reversed the car out of the driveway, he watched her from his Escort. Perfect. He had about fifteen minutes to wait. When her car had disappeared, he drove his car to the front of the house and stopped. He examined the windows of the house. Her man would be in there alone. He left his car and walked to the front door.
Back in the Incident Room after the inconclusive meeting, Rebus could not know that Anderson was arranging to have him put under surveillance. The Incident Room looked like an incident itself. Paper covered every surface, a small computer was crammed into a spare corner, charts and rotas and the rest covered every available inch of wall-space.
‘I’ve got a briefing,’ said Gill. ‘I’ll see you later. Listen, John, I do think there’s a link. Call it female intuition, call it a detective’s “nose”, call it what you like, but take me seriously. Think it over. Think about possible grudges. Please.’
He nodded, then watched her leave, making for her own office in her own part of the building. Rebus wasn’t sure which desk was his any more. He surveyed the room. It all seemed different somehow, as though a few of the desks had been changed around or put together. A telephone rang on the desk next to him. And though there were officers and telephonists nearby, he picked it up himself, making an attempt to get back into the investigation. He prayed that he was not himself the investigation. He prayed, forgetting what prayer was.
‘Incident Room,’ he said. ‘Detective Sergeant Rebus speaking.’
‘Rebus? What a curious name that is.’ The voice was old but lively, certainly well-educated. ‘Rebus,’ it said again, as though jotting it down onto a piece of paper. Rebus studied the telephone.
‘And your name, sir?’
‘Oh, I’m Michael Eiser, that’s E-I-S-E-R, Professor of English Literature at the University.’
‘Oh, yes, sir?’ Rebus grabbed a pencil and jotted down the name. ‘And what can I do for you, sir?’
‘Well, Mister Rebus, it’s more a case of what I think I can do for you, though of course I may be mistaken.’ Rebus had a picture of the man, if this were not a hoax call: frizzy-haired, bow-tied, wearing crushed tweeds and old shoes, and waving his hands about as he spoke. ‘I’m interested in word-play, you see. In fact I’m writing a book on the subject. It’s called Reading Exercises and Directed Exegetic Responses. Do you see the word-play there? It’s an acrostic. The first letter of each word makes up another word – reader, in this case. It’s a game as old as literature itself. My book, however, concentrates on its manifestation in more recent works. Nabokov and Burgess and the like. Of course, acrostics are a small part of the overall set of ploys used by the author to entertain, direct or persuade his audience.’ Rebus tried to interrupt the man, but it was like trying to interrupt a bull. So he was forced to listen, wondering all the time if it were a crank call, if he should – strictly against procedure – simply put down the telephone. He had more important things to think about. The back of his head ached.
‘. . . and the point is, Mister Rebus, that I have noticed, quite by chance, a kind of pattern in this murderer’s choice of victims.’
Rebus sat down on the edge of the desk. He clasped the pencil as though trying to crush it.
‘Oh, yes?’ he said.
‘Yes. I have the names of the victims here in front of me on a piece of paper. Perhaps one would have noticed it sooner, but it was only today that I saw a report in one newspaper which grouped the poor girls together. I usually take The Times, you see, but I quite simply couldn’t find one this morning, so I bought another paper, and there it was. It may be nothing at all, mere coincidence, but then again it may not. I’ll leave that for you chaps to decide. I merely offer it as a proposition.’
Jack Morton, puffing smoke all around him, entered the office and, noticing Rebus, waved. Rebus jerked his head in response. Jack looked worn out. Everyone looked worn out, and here he was, fresh from a period of rest and relaxation, dealing with a lunatic on the telephone.
‘Offer what exactly, Professor Eiser?’
‘Well, don’t you see? In order, the victims’ names were Sandra Adams, Mary Andrews, Nicola Turner, and Helen Abbot.’ Jack slouched towards Rebus’s table. ‘Taken as an acrostic,’ continued the voice, ‘their names make up another name – Samantha. The murderer’s next victim perhaps? Or it may be simple coincidence, a game where no game really exists.’
Rebus slammed down the telephone, was off the desk in a second, and pulled Jack Morton around by his neck-tie. Morton gasped and his cigarette flew from his mouth.
‘Got your car outside, Jack?’
Still choking, he nodded a reply.
Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. It was all true then. It was all to do with him. Samantha. All the clues, all the killings had been meant merely as a message to him. Jesus Christ. Help me, oh help me.
His daughter was to be the Strangler’s next victim.
Rhona Phillips saw the car parked outside her house, but thought nothing of it. All she wanted was to get out of the rain. She ran to the front door, Samantha following desultorily behind, and keyed open the door.
‘It’s horrible outside!’ she shouted into the living-room. She shook off her raincoat and walked through to where the TV still blared. In his chair, she saw Andy. His hands were tied behind him and his mouth was taped shut with a huge piece of sticking-plaster. The length of twine still dangled from his throat.
Rhona was about to let out the most piercing scream of her life, when a heavy object came down on the back of her head and she staggered forward towards her lover, slumping across his legs as she passed out.
‘Hello, Samantha,’ said a voice she recognised, though his face was masked so that she could not see his smile.
Morton’s car tore across town, its blue light flashing, as though it were being followed by all Hell itself. Rebus tried explaining it all as they drove, but he was too edgy to make much sense, and Jack Morton was too busy avoiding traffic to make much attempt at taking it in. They had called for assistance: one car to the school in case she were still there, and two cars to the house, with the warning that the Strangler might be there. Caution was to be exercised.
The car reached eighty-five along Queensferry Road, made an insane right turn across the oncoming traffic, and reached the bright-as-a-pin housing estate where Rhona, Samantha and Rhona’s lover now lived.
‘Turn right here,’ shouted Rebus over the engine’s roar, his mind clinging to hope. As they turned into the street they saw the two police cars already motionless in front of the house, and Rhona’s car sitting like a potent symbol of futility in the driveway.
20
They wanted to give him sedatives, but he wouldn’t take any of their drugs. They wanted him to go home, but he would not take their advice. How could he go home with Rhona lying somewhere above him in the hospital? With his daughter abducted, his whole life ripped apart like a worn garment being transformed into dusters? He paced the hospital waiting-room. He was fine, he told them, fine. He knew that Gill and Anderson were somewhere along the corridor. Poor Anderson. He watched from the grime of the window as nurses walked by outside, laughing in the rain, their capes blowing about them like something out of an old Dracula movie. How could they laugh? Mist was settling over the trees, and the nurses, still laughing, unaware of the world’s suffering, faded into that mist as though some Edinburgh of the past had sucked them into its fiction, taking with them all the laughter in the world.
It was nearly dark now, the sun a memory behi
nd the heavy fabric of the clouds. The religious painters of old must have known skies like this, must have lived with them each and every day, accepting the bruised colouring of the clouds as a mark of God’s presence, an essence of creation’s power. Rebus was no painter. His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realised that in his life he had accepted secondary experience – the experience of reading someone else’s thoughts – over real life. Well, he was face to face with it now all right: he was back in the Paras, he was back in the SAS, his face a sketch-pad of exhaustion, his brain aching, every muscle tensed.
He caught himself beginning to abstract everything again, and slapped the wall with the palms of both hands as though ready to be frisked. Sammy was out there somewhere in the hands of a maniac, and he was composing eulogies, excuses and similes. It wasn’t enough.
In the corridor, Gill kept a watch on William Anderson. He, too, had been told to go home. A doctor had examined him for the effects of shock, and had spoken of putting Anderson to bed for the night.
‘I’m waiting right here,’ Anderson had said with quiet determination. ‘If this all has something to do with John Rebus, then I want to stay close to John Rebus. I’m all right, honestly.’ But he was not all right. He was dazed and remorseful and a bit confused about everything. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he told Gill. ‘I can’t believe that this whole thing was merely a prelude to the abduction of Rebus’s daughter. It’s fantastical. The man must be deranged. Surely John must have an inkling who’s responsible?’
Gill Templer was wondering the same thing.
‘Why hasn’t he told us?’ continued Anderson. Then, without warning or any show of ceremony, he became a father again and started to sob very quietly. ‘Andy,’ he said, ‘my Andy.’ He put his head in his hands and allowed Gill to put her arm around his crumpled shoulders.
