10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Sammy?’

  ‘Don’t be fucking stupid.’ The smile disappeared again, only for a second. ‘Do you think I’d keep her here? No, but I’ve got something else that will interest you. Come on.’

  He led Rebus behind the partition. Rebus, his nerves jangling, studied Reeve’s back, the muscles covered in a layer of easy living. A librarian. A children’s librarian. And Edinburgh’s own mass murderer.

  Behind the partition were shelves and shelves of books, some piled haphazardly, others in neat rows, their spines matching.

  ‘These are all waiting to be reshelved,’ said Reeve, waving a custodial hand around him. ‘It was you that got me interested in books, John. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes, I told you stories.’ Rebus had started to think about Michael. Without him, Reeve might never have been found, might never have been suspected even. And now he Would go to jail. Poor Mickey.

  ‘Now where did I put it? I know it’s here somewhere. I put it aside to show you, if you ever found me. God knows, it’s taken you long enough. You’ve not been very bright, have you, John?’

  It was easy to forget that the man was insane, that he had killed four girls in a game and had another at his mercy. It was so easy.

  ‘No,’ said Rebus, ‘I’ve not been very bright.’

  He could feel himself tightening. The very air around him seemed to be getting thinner. Something was about to happen. He could feel it. And to stop it from happening, all he had to do was punch Reeve in the kidneys, chop him behind the neck, restrain him and bundle him out of here.

  So why didn’t he do just that? He did not know himself. All he knew was that whatever would happen would happen, and that it had been set out like the plan of a building or a game of noughts and crosses many years before. Reeve had started the game. That left Rebus in a no-win situation. But he could not leave it unfinished. There had to be this rummaging in the shelves, this find.

  ‘Ah, here it is. It’s a book I’ve been reading . . .’

  But, John Rebus realised, if Reeve had been reading it, then why was it so well hidden?

  ‘Crime and Punishment. You told me the story, do you remember?’

  ‘Yes, I remember. I told it to you more than once.’

  ‘That’s right, John, you did.’

  The book was a quality leather edition, quite old. It did not seem like a library copy. Reeve handled it as though he were handling money or diamonds. It was as though he had owned nothing so precious in all his life.

  ‘There’s one illustration in here that I want you to see, John. Do you recall what I said about old Raskolnikov?’

  ‘You said he should have shot the lot of them . . .’

  Rebus caught the under-meaning a second too late. He had misread this clue as he had misread so many of Reeve’s clues. Meantime, Gordon Reeve, his eyes shining, had opened the book and brought out a small snub-nosed revolver from its hollowed-out interior. The gun was being raised to meet Rebus’s chest when he sprang forward and butted Reeve on the nose. Planning was one thing, but sometimes dirty inspiration was needed. Blood and mucus came crashing from the suddenly broken bones. Reeve gasped, and Rebus’s hand pushed the gun-arm away from him. Reeve was screaming now, a scream from the past, from so many living nightmares. It set Rebus off balance, plunging him back into his act of betrayal. He could see the guards, the open door, and he with his back to the screams of the trapped man. The scene before him blurred, and was replaced by an explosion.

  The soft thump in his shoulder turned quickly to a spreading numbness and then to an intense pain, seeming to fill his entire body. He clutched at his jacket, feeling blood soak through the padding, through the lightweight material. Jesus Christ, so that was what it was like to be shot. He felt as though he would be sick, would faint clean away, but then he felt an onrush of something, coming up from his soul. It was the blinding force of anger. He was not about to lose this one. He saw Reeve wiping the mess from his face, trying to stop his eyes from watering, the gun still wavering before him. Rebus picked up a heavy-looking book and swiped at Reeve’s hand, sending the gun flying into a pile of books.

  And then Reeve was gone, staggering through the shelves, pulling them down after him. Rebus ran back to the desk and telephoned for help, his eyes wary for Gordon Reeve’s return. There was silence in the room. He sat down on the floor.

  Suddenly the door opened and William Anderson came through it, dressed in black like some clichéd avenging angel. Rebus smiled.

  ‘How the hell did you find me?’

  ‘I’ve been following you for quite a while.’ Anderson bent down to examine Rebus’s arm. ‘I heard the shot. I take it you’ve found our man?’

  ‘He’s still in here somewhere, unarmed. The gun’s back there.’

  Anderson tied a handkerchief around Rebus’s shoulder.

  ‘You need an ambulance, John.’ But Rebus was already rising to his feet.

  ‘Not yet. Let’s get this finished. How come I didn’t spot you trailing me?’

  Anderson allowed himself a smile. ‘It takes a very good copper to know when I’m trailing them, and you’re not very good, John. You’re just good.’

  They went behind the partition and began to move carefully further and further into the shelves. Rebus had picked up the gun. He pushed it deep into his pocket. There was no sign of Gordon Reeve.

  ‘Look.’ Anderson was pointing to a half open door at the very back of the stacks. They moved towards it, slowly still, and Rebus pushed it open. He confronted a steep iron stairwell, badly lit. It seemed to twist down into the foundations of the library. There was nowhere to go but down.

  ‘I’ve heard about this, I think,’ whispered Anderson, his whispers echoing around the deep shaft as they descended. ‘The library was built on the site of the old Sheriff Court, and the cells which used to be beneath the courthouse are still there. The library stores old books in them. A whole maze of cells and passageways, leading right under the city.’

  Smooth plaster walls gave way to ancient brickwork as they descended. Rebus could smell fungus, an old bitter smell left over from a previous age.

  ‘He could be anywhere then.’

  Anderson shrugged his shoulders. They had reached the bottom of the stairs, and found themselves in a wide passageway, clear of books. But off this passageway were alcoves – the old cells presumably – in which were stacked rows of books. There seemed no order, no pattern. They were just old books.

  ‘He could probably get out of here,’ whispered Anderson. ‘I think there are exits to places like the present-day court-house and Saint Giles Cathedral.’

  Rebus was in awe. Here was a piece of old Edinburgh, intact and undefiled. ‘It’s incredible,’ he said. ‘I never knew about this.’

  ‘There’s more. Underneath the City Chambers there are supposed to be whole streets of the old city which the builders just built right on top of. Whole streets, shops, houses, roads. Hundreds of years old.’ Anderson shook his head, realising, as was Rebus, that you could not trust your own knowledge: you could walk right over a reality without necessarily encroaching on it.

  They worked their way along the passage, thankful for the dim electric lighting on the ceiling, checking each and every cell with no success.

  ‘Who is he then?’ Anderson whispered.

  ‘He’s an old friend of mine,’ said Rebus, feeling a little dizzy. It seemed to him that there was very little oxygen down here. He was sweating profusely. He knew that it had to do with the loss of blood, and that he shouldn’t be here at all, yet he needed to be here. He remembered that there were things he should have done. He should have found out Reeve’s address from the guard and sent a police car round in case Sammy were there. Too late now.

  ‘There he is!’

  Anderson had spotted him, way ahead of them in such shadow that Rebus could not make out a shape until Reeve started to run. Anderson ran after him, with Rebus, swallowing hard, trying to keep up.

  ‘Watch
him, he’s dangerous.’ Rebus felt his words fall away from him. He had not the strength to shout. Suddenly everything was going wrong. Ahead, he saw Anderson catch up with Reeve, and saw Reeve lash out with a near-perfect roundhouse kick, learned all those years ago and not forgotten. Anderson’s head swivelled to one side as the kick landed, and he fell against the wall. Rebus had slumped to his knees, panting hard, his eyes hardly able to focus. Sleep, he needed sleep. The cold, uneven ground felt comfortable to him, as comfortable as the best bed he could want. He wavered, ready to fall. Reeve seemed to be walking towards him, while Anderson slid down the wall. Reeve seemed massive now, still in shadow, growing larger with each step until he consumed Rebus, and Rebus could see him grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘Now you,’ Reeve roared. ‘Now for you.’ Rebus knew that somewhere above them traffic was probably moving effortlessly across George IV Bridge, people were probably walking smartly home to an evening of television and family comfort, while he knelt at the feet of this nightmare, a poor forked animal at the end of the chase. It would do him no good to scream, no good to fight against it. He saw a blur of Gordon Reeve bend down in front of him, its face pushed awkwardly to one side. Rebus remembered that he had broken Reeve’s nose quite successfully.

  So did Reeve. He stood back and swung a heaving kick at John Rebus’s chin. Rebus managed to move slightly, something still working away inside him, and the blow caught him on the cheek, sending him sideways. Lying in a half-protective foetal position he heard Reeve laugh, and watched the hands as they closed around his throat. He thought of the woman and his own hands around her neck. This was justice then. So be it. And then he thought of Sammy, of Gill, of Anderson and Anderson’s murdered son, of those little girls, all dead. No, he could not let Gordon Reeve win. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be fair. He felt his tongue and eyes bulging, straining. He slipped his hand into his pocket, as Gordon Reeve whispered to him: ‘You’re glad it’s all over, aren’t you, John? You’re actually relieved.’

  And then another explosion filled the passage, hurting Rebus’s ears. The recoil from the gunshot tingled through his hand and his arm, and he caught the sweet smell again, something like the smell of toffee-apples. Reeve, startled, froze for a second, then folded like paper, falling across Rebus, smothering him. Rebus, unable to move, decided it was safe to go to sleep now . . .

  EPILOGUE

  They kicked down the door of Ian Knott’s small bungalow, a tiny, quiet suburban house, in full view of his curious neighbours, and found Samantha Rebus there, petrified, tied to a bed, her mouth taped shut, and with pictures of the dead girls for company. Everything became very professional after that, as Samantha was led weeping from the house. The driveway was hidden from the neighbouring bungalow by a tall hedge, and so nobody had seen anything of Reeve’s comings and goings. He was a quiet man, the neighbours said. He had moved into the house seven years ago, at the time when he had started work as a librarian.

  Jim Stevens was happy enough with the conclusion of the case. It made for a full week’s stories. But how could he have been so wrong about John Rebus? He couldn’t work that one out at all. Still, his drugs story had been completed too, and Michael Rebus would go to jail. There was no doubt about that.

  The London press came in search of their own versions of the truth. Stevens met one journalist in the bar of the Caledonian Hotel. The man was trying to buy Samantha Rebus’s story. He patted his pocket, assuring Jim Stevens that he had his editor’s cheque-book with him. This seemed to Stevens to be part of some larger malaise. It wasn’t just that the media could create reality and then tamper with that creation whenever they liked. There was something beneath the surface of it all, something different to the usual dirt and squalor and mess, something much more ambiguous. He didn’t like it at all, and he didn’t like what it had done to him. He talked with the London journalist about vague concepts such as justice and trust and balance. They talked for hours, drinking whisky and beer, but still the same questions remained. Edinburgh had shown itself to Jim Stevens as never before, cowering beneath the shadow of the Castle Rock in hiding from something. All the tourists saw were shadows from history, while the city itself was something else entirely. He didn’t like it, he didn’t like the job he was doing, and he didn’t like the hours. The London offers were still there. He clutched at the biggest straw and drifted south.

  Acknowledgements

  The writing of this novel was aided hugely by the help given to me by the Leith CID in Edinburgh, who were patient about my many questions and my ignorance of police procedures. And although this is a work of fiction, with all the faults of such, I was aided in my research into the Special Air Service by Tony Geraghty’s excellent book Who Dares Wins (Fontana, 1983).

  Discussion points for Knots & Crosses

  In what ways does Knots & Crosses reveal the passage of time since it was written?

  Rebus’s relationship with his brother Michael isn’t easy; is this a metaphor for the difficulties Rebus faces regarding other sorts of ‘brotherhood’, such as within the police force or the army?

  Ian Rankin refers several times to ‘practical jokes’; in Knots & Crosses how does he explore themes of jokes, games and linguistic trickery?

  Are the skills of journalist Jim Stevens mirrored by those of Rebus? Do the two men respect the similarities between them? And what do they each feel about drawing close to the ‘big fish’? Does the act of reading a crime story put the reader in a similar role to that of either detective or investigative journalist and, if so, in what way?

  What contrasts does Jim Stevens make between ‘old-fashioned’ crime, such as the ‘families’ of 1950s Glasgow gangsters, and the ‘new’ crime wave, such as drug-dealing? And which does he favour?

  What do you make of Rebus’s behaviour towards the woman he picks up at the Rio Grande Bingo Hall?

  ‘Was nothing arbitrary in this life?’ Rebus wonders. ‘No, nothing at all. Behind the seemingly irrational lay the clear golden path of the design.’ Consider how even in his debut novel Ian Rankin explores this notion.

  Are there any signs remaining that Ian Rankin toyed with the idea of killing Rebus off at the end of Knots & Crosses?

  If Ian Rankin had envisaged Knots & Crosses to be the opener for the lengthy and detailed series the Rebus books were to become, how could he have allowed his plotting to draw to a close in a more open-ended manner? And might this have made the narrative stronger ultimately?

  HIDE & SEEK

  To Michael Shaw,

  not before time

  Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  April 2005

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Discussion Points

  ‘My devil had long been caged, he came out roaring.’

  – The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

  INTRODUCTION

  A year or two after Hide & Seek was published, there was a break-in at Edinburgh’s police headquarters. Among the items rumoured to have been stolen was a list of names of men prominent in Edinburgh society. Allegations had been made that these men had been using rent boys, leaving themselves open to blackmail, and a police inquiry had been instituted. There were enough similarities between the real-life case and aspects of my novel that people would stop me in the street to ask how I’d known so much so soon. I would explain that my sources had to be protected.

  There were no sources, of course: I’d made the story up.

  I saw Hide & Seek very much as a companion piece to Knots & Crosses. Reviewers had failed to pick up on the earlier book’s use of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a template. I was determined to try once more to drag Stevenson’s story back to its natural home of Edinburgh, and to update the theme for a modern-day audience. In fact, the book’s eventual
working title was Hyde & Seek, but only after I’d ditched Dead Beat (at the behest of my agent, to whom the book was eventually dedicated). The final version of Hide & Seek opens with a quote from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and goes on to use quotes from Stevenson’s book at the start of each section. Moreover, I lifted many of the character names directly from Stevenson’s masterpiece – Enfield, Poole, Carew, Lanyon – while Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde provides Detective Inspector Rebus with his night-time reading, when he’s not busy mulling over his latest case.

  Not that I was keen for readers to get the connection or anything . . .

  Between Knots & Crosses and the events of Hide & Seek, Rebus has been promoted from detective sergeant – his one and only promotion in the series so far. Other changes have taken place. Rebus has a new sidekick called Brian Holmes (a none-too-subtle nod to another Edinburgh writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). And Edinburgh is changing, too, as new money moves in. The book was written in 1988 and 1989. By then, I was living in London, at the height of Thatcherism. Red braces and Moët were all the rage. In some wine bars, rising property values seemed to be the only currency of conversation. I’d been in London for a couple of years and was not making much of a go of it. My wife and I lived in a maisonette in Tottenham, and having failed to find full-time writing a lucrative enough proposition, I was working as a magazine journalist in Crystal Palace, entailing a three-hour commute each weekday. I seemed to be surrounded by people more successful than me, people with fat salaries or five-figure publishing deals. My situation at the time seems to me now to explain the bitter edge to much of the writing in Hide & Seek, and is reflected in Brian Holmes’s memories of his few student months in London (‘a season spent in hell’, as he himself remembers it).