10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  Scared because he was getting old.

  There, it was out. He was growing old. He had a sixteen-year-old daughter and she was old enough to leave school and get a job, to have sex, to get married. Not old enough to go into pubs, but that wouldn’t stop her. Not old enough for street-wise eighteen-year-olds like Kenny Watkiss. But grown-up all the same; grown-up without him, and now he too was old.

  And by God he felt it.

  He plunged his left hand deep into his pocket, his right hand still wrapped around the handle of the carrier-bag, and turned from the pub. There was a bus stop near where the taxi had dropped him. He’d go where the bus would take him. The skateboarders were coming along the path in front of him. One of them seemed very proficient, weaving without losing balance. As the boy approached, he suddenly flipped the board up so that it spun in the air in front of him. Both hands neatly grabbed the board by its running-tail and swung the board itself in a backward arc. Too late, Rebus saw the manoeuvre for what it was. He tried to duck but the heavy wooden board hit the side of his head with a sharp crack.

  He staggered, dropped to his knees. They were on him immediately, seven or eight of them, hands gouging into his pockets.

  ‘Fuckin’ split my board, man. Lookatit. Fuckin’ six inch split.’

  A training shoe caught Rebus on the chin and sent him flying. He was concentrating on not losing consciousness, so much so that he forgot to fight or to scream or to defend himself. Then a loud voice:

  ‘Oi! What the fuck d’you think you’re up to?’

  And they ran, rolling their boards until they had gained enough speed, the hard wheels crackling on the tarmac as they fled. Like a posse in an old western, Rebus thought with a smile. Like a posse.

  ‘You all right, mate? Come on, let’s get you up.’

  The man helped Rebus to his feet. When his eyes regained their powers of focus, he saw blood on the man’s lip, smeared across his chin. The man noticed him looking.

  ‘My bird,’ he said, his breath rich with alcohol. ‘She fuckin’ clocked me, didn’t she? Got me a good one, too. Couple of loose teeth. Still, they was rotten anyway, probably saved me a fortune at the dentist’s.’ He laughed. ‘Come on, let’s get you into the Cock. A couple of brandies’ll see you right.’

  ‘Took my money,’ Rebus said. He was clutching the carrier-bag to him like a shield.

  ‘Never mind that,’ said his Samaritan.

  They were kind to him. They sat him down at a table, and every now and again a drink would appear, and someone would say ‘That one’s from Bill’, or ‘That one’s from Tessa’, or ‘That one’s from Jackie’, or ‘That one’s from . . .’

  They were kind to him. They collected a fiver so he could get a taxi back to his hotel. He explained that he was a tourist, down here for a bit of sightseeing. He’d managed to get lost, had jumped off a bus and ended up here. And they, kind souls, believed him.

  They didn’t bother phoning the police.

  ‘Those bastards,’ they spat. ‘Waste of time. Wouldn’t turn up till tomorrow morning and then they’d do nothing. It’s the cops round here that are behind half the crimes, believe me.’

  And he did. He did believe them. And another drink arrived, another brandy in a small schooner.

  ‘All the best, eh?’

  And they were playing cards and dominoes, a lively crowd, a regular crowd. The TV blared – a musical quiz show – and the jukebox sang and the one-armed bandit bleeped and buzzed and spat out an occasional win. He thanked God Sammy and Kenny weren’t here. How would it have looked to them? He dreaded to think.

  At one point he excused himself and went to the toilet. There was a jagged triangle of mirror nailed to one wall. The side of his head, jaw and ear, were red and would probably bruise. The jaw would ache for some time. Where the shoe had connected, there was already a red and purple welt. Nothing more. Nothing worse. No knives or razor blades. No massed assault. It had been a clean, professional hit. The way that kid had flipped the board, caught it and swung it. Professional. An absolute pro. If Rebus ever caught him, he would congratulate him on one of the sweetest moves he had ever seen.

  Then he’d kick the little bastard’s teeth so far down his throat they’d bite his small intestine.

  He reached down the front of his trousers and drew out his wallet. The warning from Laine and the knowledge that he was on uncharted ground, had been enough to persuade Rebus that he should hide his wallet. Not to save him from muggers, no. So that no one would find his ID. It was bad enough being a stranger in this place, but being a copper. . . . So he had hidden the wallet, ID and all, down the front of his underpants, tucked into the elasticated waistband. He slipped it back there now. After all, he was not yet clear of Churchill Estate. The night might turn out to be a long one.

  He pulled open the door and headed back to his table. The brandy was working. His head was numb, his limbs pleasantly flexible.

  ‘You all right there, Jock?’

  He hates that name, absolutely loathes it, but he smiles nevertheless. ‘I’m all right. Oh yes, I’m quite all right.’

  ‘Great. By the way, this one’s from Harry at the bar.’

  After she has posted the letter, she feels a lot better. She does some work, but soon begins to twitch inside. It’s like feeding a habit now. But it’s also an art form. Art? Fuck art. So unbecoming in a man. So art unbecoming fuck in a man. So fuck a man in unbecoming art. They used to quarrel, squabble, argue all the time. No, that’s not true. She remembers it that way but it wasn’t that way. For a while it was, but then they just stopped communicating altogether. Her mother. Her father. Mother, strong, domineering, determined to be a great painter, a great watercolourist. Every day busy at an easel, ignoring her child who needed her, who would creep into the studio and sit quietly in a corner, crouched, trying not to be noticed. If noticed, she would be sent out of the room fiercely, red hot tears streaming down her face.

  ‘I never wanted you!’ her mother would screech. ‘You were an accident! Why can’t you be a proper little girl?’

  Run, run, run. Out of the studio and down the stairs, through the morning room, and out of the doors. Father, quiet, innocuous, cultured, civilised father. Reading the newspapers in the back garden, one trousered leg crossed over the other as he reclined in his deckchair.

  ‘And how’s my little sweet this morning?’

  ‘Mummy shouted at me.’

  ‘Did she? I’m sure she didn’t mean anything. She’s a bit crochety when she’s painting, isn’t she? Come and sit here on my lap, you can help me read the news.’

  Nobody visited, nobody came. No family, no friends. At first she went to school, but then they kept her at home, educating her themselves. It was all the rage with a certain section of a certain class. Her father had been left money by a great aunt. Enough money for a comfortable life, enough to keep the wolf from the door. He pretended to be a scholar. But then his painstakingly researched essays started to be rejected and he saw himself for what he was. The arguments grew worse. Grew physical.

  ‘Just leave me alone will you? My art’s what matters to me, not you.’

  ‘Art? Fuck art!’

  ‘How dare you!’

  A dull, solid thump. A blow of some kind. From anywhere in the house she could hear them, anywhere but the attic. But she daren’t go to the attic. That was where . . . Well, she just couldn’t.

  ‘I’m a boy,’ she whispered to herself, hiding beneath her bed. ‘I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m a boy.’

  ‘Sweetness, where are you?’ His voice, all sugar and summery. Like a slide-projector show. Like an afternoon car-ride.

  They said the Wolfman was homosexual. It wasn’t true. They said they’d caught him. She almost whooped when she read it. Wrote them a letter and posted it. See what they’d make of that! Let them find her, she didn’t care. He and she didn’t care. But he cared that she was taking over his mind as well as his body.

  Sweetness . . . Oranges and lemon
s say the bells of . . .

  So unbecoming in a man. Long nosehairs, her mother had been talking about Daddy’s nosehairs. Long nosehairs, Johnny, are so unbecoming in a man. Why did she remember that utterance above all others? Long. Nose. Hairs. So. Unbecoming. In. A. Man. Johnny.

  Daddy’s name: Johnny.

  Her father, who had sworn at her mother. Fuck art. Fuck was the dirtiest word there was. At school it had been whispered, a magic word, a word to conjure up demons and secrets.

  And she’s on the streets now, although she knows that really she should do something about the Butcher’s Gallery. It needs cleaning badly. There are torn canvases everywhere. Torn and spattered. It doesn’t matter: nobody visits. No family, no friends.

  So she finds another one. This one’s stupid. ‘As long as you’re not the Wolfman,’ she says with a laugh. The Wolfman laughs too. He? She? It doesn’t matter now. He and she are one and the same. The wound has healed. He feels whole, feels complete. It is not a good feeling. It is a bad feeling. But it can be forgotten for a moment.

  Back in his house.

  ‘Some gaff you’ve got here,’ she says. He smiles, takes her coat and hangs it up. ‘Bit of a smell though. You haven’t got a gas leak, have you?’

  No, not a gas leak. But a leak, yes. He slips his hand into his pocket, checks that the teeth are there. Of course they are, they’re always there when he needs them. To bite with. The way he was bitten.

  ‘Only a game, sweet.’

  Only a game. Bitten in fun. On the stomach. Bitten. Not hard, more like blowing a raspberry. But that didn’t stop it hurting. He touches his gut. It still hurts, even now.

  ‘Where do you want me, love?’

  ‘In here will do,’ he says, taking out the key and beginning to unlock the door. The mirror was a bad idea. The last one had seen what was happening behind her, had almost screamed. The mirror has been taken down. The door is unlocked.

  ‘Keep it locked, do you? What you got in there, the crown jewels?’

  And the Wolfman, showing teeth, smiles.

  Know This, Womin

  He woke up in his hotel room, which was something in itself, bearing in mind that he had no idea how he’d got there. He was lying on his bed, fully clothed, his hands pressed between his legs. Beside him lay the carrier-bag full of books. It was seven o’clock and by the quality of the light streaming in through the uncurtained window, it was morning rather than evening. So far so good. The bad news was that his head seared with two kinds of pain, bad when he opened his eyes, unbearable when he closed them. With eyes closed, the world spun at an awkward tilt. With eyes opened, it merely floated on a different plane.

  He groaned, attempted to unglue his furred tongue from the roof of his mouth. Staggered to the sink and ran the cold tap for some moments, then splashed his face and cupped his hand, lapping water from it the way a mongrel might. The water was sweet, chlorinated. He tried not to think of kidneys . . . seven sets of kidneys. Knelt by the toilet-pan and retched. The big white telephone receiver to God. What was the score? Seven brandies, six dark rums – he’d lost count after that. He squeezed an inch-long strip of toothpaste onto his brush and scrubbed at his teeth and gums. Then, only then, did he have the courage to examine himself in the wall-mirror.

  There were two kinds of pain. One from the hangover, the other from the mugging. He’d lost twenty quid, maybe thirty. But the loss to his pride was above price. He held in his head a good description of a couple of the gang and especially the leader. This morning, he would give what he knew to the local station. His message would be clear: seek out and destroy. Who was he kidding? They’d rather protect their own villains than help an intruder from north of the border. Our man from north of the border. Jockland. Jock. But to let the gang get away with it was worse. What the hell.

  He rubbed his jaw. It felt worse than it looked. There was a pale mustard bruise down one cheek and a graze on his chin. Good thing training shoes were all the rage. In the early 70s it would have been a steel-capped Airwear boot and he would not have been so chipper.

  He was running out of clean clothes. Today, he would have either to buy some new bits and pieces or else find himself a laundrette. He had come to London intending to stay no more than two or three days. He’d thought that after that the Met would come to see that he could add nothing to the case. But instead here he was, coming up with possible leads, making himself useful, getting beaten up, turning into an over-protective father, having a holiday romance with a psychology lecturer.

  He thought about Lisa, about the way the secretary at University College had acted. Something jarred about the whole incident. Lisa, who slept so soundly, the sleep of a clear conscience. What was that smell? That smell creeping into his room? The smell of cooking fat mingled with toast and coffee. The smell of breakfast. Somewhere downstairs they were busy perspiring over the griddles, breaking eggs to sizzle beside thick sausages and grey-pink bacon. The thought sent Rebus’s stomach on a tiny rollercoaster ride. He was hungry, but the thought of fried food repelled him. He felt his just-cleaned mouth turning sour.

  When had he last eaten? A sandwich on the way to Lisa’s. Two packets of crisps in the Fighting Cock. Christ, yes, he was hungry. He dressed quickly, making a mental note of what needed buying – shirt, pants, socks – and headed down to the dining-room clutching three paracetamol tablets in his hand. A fistful of dullers.

  They weren’t quite ready to start serving, but when he announced that he needed only cereal and fruit juice, the waitress (a different face each day) relented and showed him to a table set for one.

  He ate two small packets of cereal. A cereal killer. Smiled grimly and went to the trestle table to help himself to more juice. Lots more juice. It had a funny artificial smell to it, and a taste best described as ‘wersh’. But it was cold and wet and the vitamin C would help his head. The waitress brought him two daily papers. Neither contained anything of interest. Flight had not yet used Rebus’s idea of the detailed description. Maybe Flight had passed it on to Cath Farraday. Would she sit on it out of spite? After all, she hadn’t been too happy about his last little stunt, had she? Maybe she was holding back on this one, just to show him that she could. Well, sod them. He didn’t see anyone coming up with better ideas, with any ideas at all, come to that. Nobody wanted to make a mistake; they’d all rather sit on their hands than be seen to get it wrong. Jesus Christ.

  When the first customer proper of the morning ordered bacon, eggs and tomatoes, Rebus finished his orange juice and left the restaurant.

  In the Murder Room, he sat at one of the typewriters and prepared detailed descriptions of the gang members. His typing had never been proficient at the best of times, but today’s hangover was compounded by an electronic typewriter of infernal complexity. He couldn’t get the thing to set a reasonable line length, the tabs appeared not to work and every time he pressed a wrong key the thing bleeped at him.

  ‘Bleep yourself,’ he said, trying again to set it for single space typing.

  Eventually, he had a typed description. It looked like the work of a ten-year-old, but it would have to do. He took the sheets of paper through to his office. There was a note from Flight on his desk.

  ‘John, I wish you wouldn’t keep disappearing. I’ve run a check on missing persons. Five women have been reported missing north of the river in the past forty-eight hours. Two of these could be explicable, but the other three look more serious. Maybe you’re right, the Wolfman’s getting hungrier. No feedback from the press stories yet though. See you when you’ve finished shagging the Prof.’

  It was signed simply ‘GF’. How did Flight know where he’d been yesterday afternoon? An inspired guess, or something more cunning and devious? It didn’t really matter. What mattered were the missing women. If Rebus’s hunch were true, then the Wolfman was losing some of his previous control and that meant that sometime soon he was bound to make a mistake. They need only goad him a little more. The Jan Crawford story might just
do that particular trick. Rebus had to sell the idea to Flight – and to Farraday. They had to be made to see that it was the right move at the right time. Three missing women. That would bring the count to seven. Seven murders. There was no telling where it would stop. He rubbed at his head again. The hangover was returning with a steel-tipped vengeance.

  ‘John?’

  She was standing in the doorway, trembling, her eyes wide.

  ‘Lisa?’ He rose slowly to his feet. ‘Lisa, what is it? What’s wrong?’

  She stumbled towards him. There were tears in her eyes and her hair was slick with sweat. ‘Thank God,’ she said, clinging to him. ‘I thought I’d never . . . I didn’t know what to do, where to go. Your hotel said you’d already left. The Sergeant on the desk downstairs let me come up. He recognised me from the photo in the papers. My photo.’ And then the tears came: hot, scalding, and loud. Rebus patted her on the back, trying to calm her, wanting to know just what the hell had happened.

  ‘Lisa,’ he said quietly, ‘just tell me about it.’ He manoeuvred her onto a chair, with his hand rubbing soothingly at her neck. Every bit of her seemed damp with perspiration.

  She pulled her bag onto her lap, opened it, and drew from one of the three compartments a small envelope, which she handed silently to Rebus.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘I got it this morning,’ she said, ‘addressed to me by name and sent to my home.’