10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  Rebus nodded, then asked: ‘Stokie?’

  Flight smiled. ‘Stoke Newington. You probably passed through it on your way from King’s Cross.’

  ‘God knows,’ said Rebus. ‘It all looked the same to me. I think my taxi driver had me down as a tourist. We took so long from King’s Cross I think we might have come via the M25.’ Rebus waited for Flight to laugh, but all he raised was a sliver of a smile. There was another pause. ‘Was this Jean Cooper single?’ Rebus asked at last.

  ‘Married.’

  ‘She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.’

  Flight nodded. ‘Separated. She lived with her sister. No kids.’

  ‘And she went drinking by herself.’

  Flight glanced towards Rebus. ‘What are you saying?’

  Rebus shrugged. ‘Nothing. It’s just that if she liked a good time, maybe that’s how she met her killer.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘At any rate, whether she knew him or not, the killer could have followed her from the pub.’

  ‘We’ll be talking to everybody who was there, don’t worry.’

  ‘Either that,’ said Rebus, thinking aloud, ‘or the killer was waiting by the river for anyone who happened along. Somebody might have seen him.’

  ‘We’ll be asking around,’ said Flight. His voice had taken on a much harder edge.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Rebus. ‘A severe case of teaching my granny to suck eggs.’

  Flight turned to him again. They were about to take a left through some hospital gates. ‘I am not your granny,’ he said. ‘And any comments you have to make are welcome. Maybe eventually you’ll come up with something I haven’t already thought of.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Rebus, ‘this couldn’t have happened in Scotland.’

  ‘Oh?’ Flight had a half-sneer on his face. ‘Why’s that then? Too civilised up there in the frozen north? I remember when you had the worst football hooligans in the world. Maybe you still do, only these days they look like butter wouldn’t melt in their underpants.’

  But Rebus was shaking his head. ‘No, it wouldn’t have happened to Jean Cooper, that’s all I meant. Our off-licences don’t open on Sunday.’

  Rebus fell silent and stared fixedly at the windscreen, keeping his thoughts to himself, thoughts which ran along a very simple plane: fuck you, too, pal. Over the years, those four words had become his mantra. Fuck you, too, pal. FYTP. It had taken the Londoner only the length of a twenty-minute car ride to show what he really thought of the Scots.

  As Rebus got out of the car, he glanced in through the rear window and saw, for the first time, the contents of the back seat. He opened his mouth to speak, but Flight raised a knowing hand.

  ‘Don’t even ask,’ he growled, slamming shut the driver’s-side door. ‘And listen, I’m sorry about what I said . . .’

  Rebus merely shrugged, but his eyebrows descended in a private and thoughtful frown. After all, there had to be some logical explanation as to why a Detective Inspector would have a huge stuffed teddy bear in the back of his car at the scene of a murder. It was just that Rebus was damned if he could think of one right this second . . .

  Mortuaries were places where the dead stopped being people and turned instead into bags of meat, offal, blood and bone. Rebus had never been sick at the scene of a crime, but the first few times he had visited a mortuary the contents of his stomach had fairly quickly been rendered up for examination.

  The mortuary technician was a gleeful little man with a livid birthmark covering a full quarter of his face. He seemed to know Dr Cousins well enough and had prepared everything for the arrival of the deceased and the usual retinue of police officers. Cousins checked the post-mortem room, while Jean Cooper’s sister was taken quietly into an ante-room, there to make the formal identification. It took only a tearful few seconds, after which she was escorted well away from the scene by consoling officers. They would take her home, but Rebus doubted if she would get any sleep. In fact, knowing how long a scrupulous pathologist could take, he was beginning to doubt that any of them would get to bed before morning.

  Eventually, the body bag was brought into the post-mortem room and the corpse of Jean Cooper placed on a slab, beneath the hum and glare of powerful strip lighting. The room was antiseptic but antique. Its tiled walls were cracking and there was a stinging aroma of chemicals. Voices were kept muffled, not so much out of respect but from a strange kind of fear. The mortuary, after all, was one vast memento mori, and what was about to happen to Jean Cooper’s body would serve to remind each and every one of them that if the body were a temple, then it was possible to loot that temple, scattering its treasures, revealing its precious secrets.

  A hand landed gently on Rebus’s shoulder, and he turned, startled, towards the man who was standing there. ‘Man’ was by way of simplification. This tall and unsmiling individual had cropped fair hair and the acne-ridden face of an adolescent. He looked about fourteen, but Rebus placed him in his mid-twenties.

  ‘You’re the Jock, aren’t you?’ There was interest in the voice, but little emotion. Rebus said nothing. FYTP. ‘Yeah, thought so. Cracked the case yet, have you?’ The grin accompanying this question was three-quarters sneer and one-quarter scowl. ‘We don’t need any help.’

  ‘Ah,’ said George Flight, ‘I see you’ve already met DC Lamb. I was just about to introduce you.’

  ‘Delighted,’ said Rebus, gazing stonily at the join-the-dots pattern of spots on Lamb’s forehead. Lamb! No surname in history, Rebus felt, had ever been less deserved, less accurate. Over by the slab, Dr Cousins cleared his throat noisily.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said to the room at large. It was little more than an indication that he was about to start work. The room fell quiet again. A microphone hung down from the ceiling to within a few feet of the slab. Cousins turned to the technician. ‘Is this thing on now?’ The technician nodded keenly from between arranging a row of clanging metallic instruments along a tray.

  Rebus knew all the instruments, had seen them all in action. The cutters and the saws and the drills. Some of them were electrical, some needed a human force to drive them home. The sounds the electrical ones made were horrible, but at least the job was over quickly; the manual tools made similarly revolting sounds that seemed to last forever. Still, there would be an interval before that particular shop of horrors. First of all there was the slow and careful business of removing the clothing and bagging it up for Forensics.

  As Rebus and the others watched, the two photographers clicked away, one taking black and white shots and the other colour, recording for posterity each stage of the process. The video cameraman had given up, however, his equipment having jammed irreparably on one of the bargain tapes. Or at least that was the story which kept him away from the mortuary.

  Finally, when the corpse was naked, Cousins pointed to a few areas meriting particular close-up shots. Then the Forensics men moved in again, armed with more lengths of sticky tape. Now that the body was unclothed, the same process as was carried out on the tow-path had to be gone through again. Not for nothing were these people known as Sellotape Men.

  Cousins wandered over towards the group where Rebus, Flight and Lamb stood.

  ‘I’d kill for a cup of tea, George.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, Philip. What about Isobel?’

  Cousins looked back towards where Isobel Penny stood, making another drawing of the corpse despite the welter of camera shots. ‘Penny,’ he called, ‘care for a cuppa?’ Her eyes opened a little and she nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘Right,’ said Flight, moving towards the door. Rebus thought the man seemed more than a little relieved to be leaving, albeit temporarily.

  ‘Nasty little chap,’ Cousins commented. Rebus wondered for a moment if he were talking about George Flight, but Cousins waved a hand towards the corpse. ‘To do this sort of thing time after time, without motive, out of some need for . . . well, pleasure, I suppose.’

  ‘There’s always
a motive, sir,’ said Rebus. ‘You just said so yourself. Pleasure, that’s his motive. But the way he kills. What he does. There’s some other motive there. It’s just that we can’t see it yet.’

  Cousins stared at him. Rebus could see a warm light in his deep eyes. ‘Well, Inspector, let us hope somebody spots whatever it is before too long. Four deaths in as many months. The man’s as constant as the moon.’

  Rebus smiled. ‘But we all know that werewolves are affected by the moon, don’t we?’

  Cousins laughed. It was deep and resonant and sounded extraordinarily out of place in this environment. Lamb wasn’t laughing, wasn’t even smiling. He was following little of this conversation, and the realisation pleased Rebus. But Lamb wasn’t going to be left out.

  ‘I reckon he’s barking mad. Hee, get it?’

  ‘Well,’ said Cousins, as though this joke was too well-worn even to merit acknowledgment, ‘must press on.’ He turned towards the slab. ‘If you’ve finished, gentlemen?’ The Forensics men nodded in unison. ‘Jewellery removed?’ They nodded again. ‘Good. Then if you are ready, I suggest we begin.’

  The beginning was never too awful. Measurements, a physical description – five feet and seven inches tall, brown hair, that sort of thing. Fingernail scrapings and clippings were deposited in yet more polythene bags. Rebus made a note to buy shares in whichever company manufactured these bags. He’d seen murder investigations go through hundreds of them.

  Slowly but determinedly, things got worse. Swabs were taken from Jean Cooper’s vagina, then Cousins got down to some serious work.

  ‘Large puncture wound to the throat. From size of wound, I’d say the knife itself had been twisted in the wound. A small knife. From the extent of the exit wound I would say the blade was about five inches long, perhaps a little less, and about an inch deep, ending in a very fine point. The skin surrounding the entry wound shows some bruising, perhaps caused by the hilt-guard or handle. This would seem to indicate that the knife was driven in with a certain amount of force.

  ‘The hands and arms show no signs of defence wounding, so the victim had no time in which to defend herself. The possibility exists that she was approached from behind. There is some colouring around the mouth and the victim’s lipstick had been slightly smeared across her right cheek. If she was approached from behind, a possible scenario would be that the attacker’s left hand closed over her mouth to stop her from screaming, thus smearing the lipstick while the attacker stabbed with the right hand. The wound to the throat shows a slight downward angle, which would indicate someone taller than the victim.’

  Cousins cleared his throat again. Well, thought Rebus, so far they could strike the mortuary attendant and one of the photographers off the possible list of suspects: everyone else in the room was five feet eight or over.

  The pause in proceedings gave the onlookers a chance to shuffle their feet, clear their own throats, and glance at each other, taking note of how pale this or that face was. Rebus was surprised at the pathologist’s ‘scenarios’: that was supposed to be their job, not his. All the pathologists Rebus had ever worked with had given the bare facts, leaving the deductions to Rebus himself. But Cousins obviously did not work that way. Perhaps he was a frustrated detective. Rebus still found it hard to believe that people came to pathology through choice.

  Tea appeared, carried in three beakers on a plastic tray by Inspector Flight. Cousins and Isobel Penny took a cup each, and Flight himself took the other. There were jealous stares from a few dry-mouthed officers. Rebus was among them.

  ‘Now,’ said Cousins between sips, ‘I’m going to examine the anal wound.’

  It just kept on getting worse. Rebus tried to concentrate on what Cousins was saying, but it wasn’t easy. The same knife had been used to make several stabs to the anus. There were friction marks on the thighs from where the tights had been roughly pulled down. Rebus looked over to Isobel Penny, but, apart from some slight heightening of the colour in her cheeks, she seemed dispassionate. A cool customer and no mistake. But then she’d probably seen worse in her time. No, no, she couldn’t possibly have seen worse than this. Could she?

  ‘The stomach is interesting,’ Cousins was saying. ‘The blouse has been torn away to expose the stomach, and there are two lines of curved indentations in the skin, enough to have bruised and broken the skin, but there is little actual marking of the skin and no blood, from which I would say that this act was perpetrated only after the stabbings. After, in fact, the victim was dead. There are a few dried stains on the stomach near these bite marks. Without prejudging, past evidence from three very similar cases showed these stains to be saline in nature – teardrops or perhaps beads of sweat. I’m now going to take a deep body temperature.’

  Rebus felt parched. He was hot, and the tiredness was seeping into his bones, lack of sleep giving everything a hallucinatory quality. There were halos around the pathologist, his assistant, and the technician. The walls seemed to be moving, and Rebus dared not concentrate on them for fear that he would lose his balance. He happened to catch Lamb’s eye and the Detective Constable gave him an ugly grin and an uglier wink.

  The body was washed now, washed for the first time, freed from a staining of light brown and black, from the pale matt covering of blood. Cousins examined it again, finding nothing new, after which another set of fingerprints was taken. Then came the internal examination.

  A deep incision was made down the front of the body. Blood samples were taken and handed to the forensics team, as were samples of urine, stomach contents, liver, body hair (eyebrows included) and tissue. The process used to make Rebus impatient. It was obvious how the victim had died, so why bother with everything else? But he had learned over the years that what you could see, the external injuries, often wasn’t as important as what you couldn’t see, the tiny secrets only a microscope or a chemical test could reveal. So he had learned patience and exercised it now, stifling a yawn every half minute or so.

  ‘Not boring you am I?’ Cousins’s voice was a polite murmur. He looked up from his work and caught Rebus’s eyes, then smiled.

  ‘Not a bit,’ said Rebus.

  ‘That’s all right then. I’m sure we’d all rather be at home tucked up in bed than in this place.’ Only the birthmarked technician seemed doubtful as to the truth of this statement. Cousins was reaching a hand into the corpse’s chest. ‘I’ll be out of here as soon as I can.’

  It wasn’t the sight of this examination, Rebus decided, that turned men pale. It was the accompanying sound effects. The tearing of flesh, as though a butcher were yanking meat from a flank. The bubbling of liquids and the soft rasping of the cutting tools. If he could somehow block up his ears, maybe everything would be bearable. But on the contrary, his ears seemed extraordinarily sensitive in this room. Next time, he’d bring plugs of cotton wool with him. Next time . . .

  The chest and abdominal organs were removed and taken to a clean slab, where a hose was used to wash them clean before Cousins dissected them. The attendant meantime was called into action, removing the brain with the help of a tiny powered circular-saw. Rebus had his eyes shut now, but the room seemed to swirl all the same. Not long to go now though. Not long, thank God. But it wasn’t just the sounds now, was it? It was the smell too, that unmistakable aroma of raw meat. It clung to the nostrils like perfume, filling the lungs, catching the back of the throat and clinging there, so that eventually it became a tang in the mouth and he found himself actually tasting it. His stomach moved momentarily, but he rubbed it gently, surreptitiously with a hand. Not surreptitiously enough.

  ‘If you’re going to throw up,’ it was Lamb again, like a succubus over his shoulder, hissing, ‘go outside.’ And then the chuckle, throaty and slow like a stalled engine. Rebus half-turned his head and gave a dangerous smile.

  Soon enough, the whole mess of matter was being put together again, and Rebus knew that by the time any grieving relatives viewed the mortal remains of Jean Cooper, the body would look
quite natural.

  As ever, by the end of the autopsy the room had been reduced to silent introspection. Each man and woman present was made of the same stuff as Jean Cooper, and now they stood, momentarily stripped of their individual personalities. They were all bodies, all animals, all collections of viscera. The only difference between them and Jean Cooper was that their hearts still pumped blood. But one day soon enough each heart would stop, and that would be an end of it, save for the possibility of a visit to this butcher’s shop, this abattoir.

  Cousins removed his rubber gloves and washed his hands thoroughly, accepted from the attendant a proffered sheaf of paper towels. ‘That’s about it then, gentlemen, until Penny can type up the notes. Murdered between nine o’clock and nine-thirty I’d guess. Same modus operandi as our so-called Wolfman. I think I’ve just examined his fourth victim. I’ll get in Anthony Morrison tomorrow, let him have a look at the teeth marks. See what he says.’

  Since everyone seemed to know except Rebus, Rebus asked, ‘Who’s Anthony Morrison?’

  Flight was first to answer. ‘A dentist.’

  ‘A dental pathologist,’ corrected Cousins. ‘And quite a good one. He’s got details of the other three murders. His analyses of the bite marks have been quite useful.’ Cousins turned to Flight for confirmation of this, but Flight’s eyes were directed towards his shoes, as if to say I wouldn’t go that far.

  ‘Well,’ said Cousins, seeming to take the silent hint, ‘at any rate, you know my findings. It’s down to your lab chaps now. There’s precious little there . . .’ Cousins nodded back towards the scooped-out husk of the corpse, ‘to help with your investigation. That being so, I think I’ll go home to bed.’

  Flight seemed to realise that Cousins was displeased with him. ‘Thank you, Philip.’ And the detective lifted a hand to rest it against the pathologist’s arm. Cousins looked at the hand, then at Flight, and smiled.

  The performance at an end, the audience began to shuffle out into the cold, still darkness of an emerging day. By Rebus’s watch, it was four thirty. He felt completely exhausted, could happily have lain down on the lawn in front of the main building and taken a nap, but Flight was walking towards him, carrying his bags.