10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  Oh Jesus, she’d attacked a policeman’s wife!

  She wasn’t sure now, wasn’t sure at all. Why had she come? Could she go through with it now? She walked with one family out of the ward, then rested against the wall in the corridor outside. Could she? Yes, if her nerve held. Yes, she could.

  She was pretending to examine a drinks vending machine when Holmes sauntered through the swinging ward doors and walked slowly down the corridor away from her. She waited a full two minutes, counting up to one hundred and twenty. He wasn’t coming back. He hadn’t forgotten anything. Tracy turned from the vending machine and made for the swing doors.

  For her, visiting time was just beginning.

  She hadn’t even reached the bed when a young nurse stopped her.

  ‘Visiting hour’s finished now,’ the nurse said.

  Tracy tried to smile, tried to look normal; it wasn’t easy for her, but lying was.

  ‘I just lost my watch. I think I left it at my sister’s bed.’ She nodded in Nell’s direction. Nell, hearing the conversation, had turned towards her. Her eyes opened wide as she recognised Tracy.

  ‘Well, be as quick as you can, eh?’ said the nurse, moving away. Tracy smiled at the nurse, and watched her push through the swing doors. Now there were only the patients in their beds, a sudden silence, and her. She approached Nell’s bed.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. She looked at the chart attached to the end of the iron bedstead. ‘Nell Stapleton,’ she read.

  ‘What do you want?’ Nell’s eyes showed no fear. Her voice was thin, coming from the back of her throat, her nose having no part in the process.

  ‘I want to tell you something,’ Tracy said. She came close to Nell, and crouched on the floor, so that she would be barely visible from the doors of the ward. She thought this made her look as though she were searching for a lost watch.

  ‘Yes?’

  Tracy smiled, finding Nell’s imperfect voice amusing. She sounded like a puppet on a children’s programme. The smile vanished quickly, and she blushed, remembering that the reason she was here was because she was responsible for this woman being here at all. The plasters across the nose, the bruising under the eyes: all her doing.

  ‘I came to say I’m sorry. That’s all, really. Just, I’m sorry.’

  Nell’s eyes were unblinking.

  ‘And,’ Tracy continued, ‘well . . . nothing.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Nell, but it was too much for her. She’d done most of the talking while Brian Holmes had been in, and her mouth was dry. She turned and reached for the jug of water on the small cupboard beside the bed.

  ‘Here, I’ll do that.’ Tracy poured water into a plastic beaker, and handed it to Nell, who sipped, coating the inside of her mouth. ‘Nice flowers,’ said Tracy.

  ‘From my boyfriend,’ said Nell, between sips.

  ‘Yes, I saw him leaving. He’s a policeman, isn’t he? I know he is, because I’m a friend of Inspector Rebus’s.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘You do?’ Tracy seemed shocked. ‘So you know who I am?’

  ‘I know your name’s Tracy, if that’s what you mean.’

  Tracy bit her bottom lip. Her face reddened again.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ Nell said.

  ‘Oh no.’ Tracy tried to sound nonchalant. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I was going to ask . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ Tracy seemed keen for a change of subject.

  ‘What were you going to do in the library?’

  This wasn’t quite to Tracy’s liking. She thought about it, shrugged, and said: ‘I was going to find Ronnie’s photographs.’

  ‘Ronnie’s photographs?’ Nell perked up. What little Brian had said during visiting hour had been limited to the progress of Ronnie McGrath’s case, and especially the discovery of some pictures at the dead boy’s house. What was Tracy talking about?

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Ronnie hid them in the library.’

  ‘What were they exactly? I mean, why did he need to hide them?’

  Tracy shrugged. ‘All he told me was that they were his life insurance policy. That’s exactly what he said, “life insurance policy”.’

  ‘And where exactly did he hide them?’

  ‘On the fifth floor, he said. Inside a bound volume of something called the Edinburgh Review. I think it’s a magazine.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Nell, smiling, ‘it is.’

  Brian Holmes was made light-headed by Nell’s telephone call. His first reaction, however, was pure shock, and he chastised her for being out of bed.

  ‘I’m still in bed,’ she said, her voice becoming indistinct in her excitement. ‘They brought the payphone to my bedside. Now listen. . . .’

  Thirty minutes later, he was being shown down an aisle on the fifth floor of Edinburgh University Library. The member of staff checked complicated decimal numbers exhibited at each stack, until, satisfied, she led him down one darkened row of large bound titles. At the end of the aisle, seated at a study desk by a large window, a student stared disinterestedly towards Holmes, a pencil crunching in his mouth. Holmes smiled sympathetically towards the student, who stared right through him.

  ‘Here we are,’ said the librarian. ‘Edinburgh Review and New Edinburgh Review. It becomes “New” in 1969, as you can see. Of course, we keep the earlier editions in a closed environment. If you want those years specifically, it will take a little time –’

  ‘No, these are fine, really. These are just what I need. Thank you.’

  The librarian bowed slightly, accepting his thanks. ‘You will remember us all to Nell, won’t you?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll be talking to her later today. I won’t forget.’

  With another bow, the librarian turned and walked back to the end of the stack. She paused there, and pressed a switch. Strip lighting flickered above Holmes, and stayed on. He smiled his thanks, but she was gone, her rubber heels squeaking briskly towards the lift.

  Holmes looked at the spines of the bound volumes. The collection was not complete, which meant that someone had borrowed some of the years. A stupid place to hide something. He picked up 1971–72, held its spine by the forefingers of both his right and left hands, and rocked it. No scraps of paper, no photographs were shaken free. He put the volume back on the shelf and selected its neighbour, shook it, then replaced it.

  The student at the study desk was no longer looking through him. He was looking at him, and doing so as if Holmes were mad. Another volume yielded nothing, then another. Holmes began to fear the worst. He’d been hoping for something with which to surprise Rebus, something to tie up all the loose ends. He’d tried contacting the Inspector, but Rebus wasn’t to be found, wasn’t anywhere. He had vanished.

  The photos made more noise than he’d expected as they slid from the sheaves and hit the polished floor, hit it with their glossy edges, producing a sharp crack. He bent and began to gather them up, while the student looked on in fascination. From what he could see of the images strewn across the floor, Holmes already felt disappointment curdling his elation. They were copies of the boxing match pictures, nothing more. There were no new prints, no revelations, no surprises.

  Damn Ronnie McGrath for giving him hope. All they were was life insurance. On a life already forfeit.

  He waited for the lift, but it was busy elsewhere, so he took the stairs, winding downwards steeply, and found himself on the ground floor, but in a part of the library he didn’t know, a sort of antiquarian bookshop corridor, narrow, with mouldering books stacked up against both walls. He squeezed through, feeling a sudden chill he couldn’t place, and found himself opening a door onto the main concourse. The librarian who had shown him around was back behind her desk. She saw him, and waved frantically. He obeyed the command and hurried forward. She picked up a telephone and pressed a button.

  ‘Call for you,’ she said, stretching across the desktop to hand him the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’ He was quizzical: who t
he hell knew he was here?

  ‘Brian, where in God’s name have you been?’ It was Rebus, of course. ‘I’ve been trying to find you everywhere. I’m at the hospital.’

  Holmes’s heart deflated within his chest. ‘Nell?’ he said, so dramatically that even the librarian’s head shot up.

  ‘What?’ growled Rebus. ‘No, no, Nell’s fine. It’s just that she told me where to find you. I’m phoning from the hospital, and it’s costing me a fortune.’ In confirmation, the pips came, and were followed by the chankling of coins in a slot. The connection was re-established.

  ‘Nell’s okay,’ Brian told the librarian. She nodded, relieved, and turned back to her work.

  ‘Of course she is,’ said Rebus, having caught the words. ‘Now listen, there are a few things I want you to do. Have you got a pen and paper?’

  Brian found them on the desk. He smiled, remembering the first telephone conversation he’d ever had with John Rebus, so similar to this, a few things to be done. Christ, so much had been done since. . . .

  ‘Got that?’

  Holmes started. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘My mind was elsewhere. Could you repeat that?’

  There was an audible sound of mixed anger and excitement from the receiver. Then Rebus started again, and this time Brian Holmes heard every word.

  Tracy couldn’t say why it was that she’d visited Nell Stapleton, or why she’d told Nell what she had. She felt some kind of bond, not merely because of what she’d done. There was something about Nell Stapleton, something wise and kind, something Tracy had lacked in her life until now. Maybe that’s why she was finding it so hard to leave the hospital. She had walked the corridors, drunk two cups of coffee in a cafe across the road from the main building, wandered in and out of Casualty, X-Ray, even some clinic for diabetics. She’d tried to leave, had walked as far as the city’s art college before turning round and retreading the two hundred paces to the hospital.

  And she was entering the side gates when the men grabbed her.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘If you’ll just come with us, miss.’

  They sounded like security men, policemen even, so she didn’t resist. Maybe Nell Stapleton’s boyfriend wanted to see her, to give her a good kicking. She didn’t care. They were taking her towards the hospital entrance, so she didn’t resist. Not until it was too late.

  At the last moment, they stopped short, turned her, and pushed her into the back of an ambulance.

  ‘What’s –! Hey, come on!’ The doors were closing, locking, leaving her alone in the hot, dim interior. She thumped on the doors, but the vehicle was already moving off. As it pulled away, she was thrown against the doors, then back onto the floor. When she had recovered herself, she saw that the ambulance was an old one, no longer used for its original purpose. Its insides had been gutted, making it merely a van. The windows had been boarded over, and a metal panel separated her from the driver. She clawed her way to this panel and began hitting it with her fists, teeth gritted, yelling from time to time as she remembered that the two men who had grabbed her at the gates were the same two men who’d been following her that day on Princes Street, that day she’d run to John Rebus.

  ‘Oh God,’ she murmured, ‘oh God, oh God.’

  They’d found her at last.

  The evening was sticky with heat, the streets quiet for a Saturday.

  Rebus rang the doorbell and waited. While he waited, he looked to left and right. An immaculate double row of Georgian houses, stone frontages dulled black through time and car fumes. Some of the houses had been turned into offices for Writers to the Signet, chartered accountants, and small, anonymous finance businesses. But a few – a precious few – were still very comfortable and well-appointed homes for the wealthy and the industrious. Rebus had been to this street before, a long time ago now in his earliest CID days, investigating the death of a young girl. He didn’t remember much about the case now. He was too busy getting ready for the evening’s pleasures.

  He tugged at the black bow tie around his throat. The whole outfit, dinner jacket, shirt, bow tie and patent shoes, had been hired earlier in the day from a shop on George Street. He felt like an idiot, but had to admit that, examining himself in his bathroom mirror, he looked pretty sharp. He wouldn’t be too out of place in an establishment like Finlay’s of Duke Terrace.

  The door was opened by a beaming woman, young, dressed exquisitely, and greeting him as though wondering why he didn’t come more often.

  ‘Good evening,’ she said. ‘Will you come in?’

  He would, he did. The entrance hall was subtle. Cream paint, deep pile carpeting, a scattering of chairs which might have been designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, high backs and looking extraordinarily uncomfortable to sit in.

  ‘I see you’re admiring our chairs,’ the woman said.

  ‘Yes,’ Rebus answered, returning her smile. ‘The name’s Rebus, by the way. John Rebus.’

  ‘Ah yes. Finlay told me you were expected. Well, as this is your first visit, would you like me to show you around?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But first, a drink, and the first drink is always on the house.’

  Rebus tried not to be nosey, but he was a policeman after all, and not being nosey would have gone against all that he held most dear. So he asked a few questions of his hostess, whose name was Paulette, and pointed to this and that part of the gaming club, being shown the direction of the cellars (‘Finlay has their contents insured for quarter of a million’), kitchen (‘our chef is worth his weight in Beluga’), and guest bedrooms (‘the judges are the worst, there are one or two who always end up sleeping here, too drunk to go home’). The lower ground floor housed the cellars and kitchen, while the ground floor comprised a quiet bar area, and the small restaurant, with cloakrooms and an office. On the first floor, up the carpeted staircase and past the collection of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Scottish paintings by the likes of Jacob More and David Allan, was the main gaming area: roulette, blackjack, a few other tables for card games, and one table given over to dice. The players were businessmen, their bets discreet, nobody losing big or winning big. They held their chips close to them.

  Paulette pointed out two closed rooms.

  ‘Private rooms, for private games.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Poker mainly. The serious players book them once a month or so. The games can go on all night.’

  ‘Just like in the movies.’

  ‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘Just like the movies.’

  The second floor consisted of the three guest bedrooms, again locked, and Finlay Andrews’ own private suite.

  ‘Off limits, of course,’ Paulette said.

  ‘Of course,’ Rebus concurred, as they started downstairs again.

  So this was it: Finlay’s Club. Tonight was quiet. He had seen only two or three faces he recognised: an advocate, who did not acknowledge him, though they’d clashed before in court, a television presenter, whose dark tan looked fake, and Farmer Watson.

  ‘Hello there, John.’ Watson, stuffed into suit and dress shirt, looked like nothing more than a copper out of uniform. He was in the bar when Paulette and Rebus went back in, his hand closed around a glass of orange juice, trying to look comfortable but instead looking distinctly out of place.

  ‘Sir.’ Rebus had not for one moment imagined that Watson, despite the threat he had made earlier, would turn up here. He introduced Paulette, who apologised for not being around to greet him at the door.

  Watson waved aside her apology, revolving his glass. ‘I was well enough taken care of,’ he said. They sat at a vacant table. The chairs here were comfortable and well padded, and Rebus felt himself relax. Watson, however, was looking around keenly.

  ‘Finlay not here?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s somewhere around,’ said Paulette. ‘Finlay’s always around.’

  Funny, thought Rebus, that they hadn’t bumped into him on their tour.

  ‘What’s the p
lace like then, John?’ Watson asked.

  ‘Impressive,’ Rebus answered, accepting Paulette’s smile like praise from a teacher to a doting pupil. ‘Very impressive. It’s much bigger than you’d think. Wait till you see upstairs.’

  ‘And there’s the extension, too,’ said Watson.

  ‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten.’ Rebus turned to Paulette.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘We’re building out from the back of the premises.’

  ‘Building?’ said Watson. ‘I thought it was a fait accompli?’

  ‘Oh no.’ She smiled again. ‘Finlay is very particular. The flooring wasn’t quite right, so he had the workmen rip it all up and start again. Now we’re waiting on some marble arriving from Italy.’

  ‘That must be costing a few bob,’ Watson said, nodding to himself.

  Rebus wondered about the extension. Towards the back of the ground floor, past toilets, cloakroom, offices, walk-in cupboards, there must be another door, ostensibly the door to the back garden. But now the door to the extension, perhaps.

  ‘Another drink, John?’ Watson was already on his feet, pointing at Rebus’s empty glass.

  ‘Gin and fresh orange, please,’ he said, handing over the glass.

  ‘And for you, Paulette?’

  ‘No, really.’ She was rising from the chair. ‘Work to do. Now that you’ve seen a bit of the club, I’d better get back to door duties. If you want to play upstairs, the office can supply chips. A few of the games accept cash, but not the most interesting ones.’

  Another smile, and she was gone in a flurry of silk and a glimpse of black nylon. Watson saw Rebus watching her leave.

  ‘At ease, Inspector,’ he said, laughing to himself as he headed for the bar where the barman explained that if he wanted drinks, he only had to signal, and an order would be taken at the gentlemen’s table and brought to them directly. Watson slumped back into his chair again.

  ‘This is the life, eh, John?’

  ‘Yes, sir. What’s happening back at base?’