10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Can’t you let it rest?’ The pale eyes were glistening.

  ‘No rest for the wicked, Mr Calder,’ said Rebus. He slid off the barstool and went back into the kitchen. Siobhan was standing beside a shelf filled with basic cookery books.

  ‘Most chefs,’ she said, ‘would rather die than keep this lot out on display.’

  ‘He wasn’t any ordinary chef.’

  ‘Look at this one.’ It was a school jotter, with ruled red lines about half an inch apart and an inch-wide margin. The margins were full of doodles and sketches, mostly of food and men with large quiffs. Neatly written in a large hand inside the margins were recipes. ‘His own creations.’ She flipped to the end. ‘Oh look, here’s Jailhouse Roquefort.’ She quoted from the recipe.’ “With thanks to Inspector John Rebus for the idea.” Well, well.’ She was about to put the book back, but Rebus took it from her. He opened it at the inside cover, where he’d spotted a copious collection of doodles. Something had been written in the midst of the drawings (some of them gayly rude). But it had been scored out again with a darker pen.

  ‘Can you make that out?’

  They took the jotter to the back door and stood in the parking lot, where so recently someone had thumped Brian Holmes on the head. Siobhan started things off. ‘Looks like the first word’s “All”.’

  ‘And that’s “turn”,’ said Rebus of a later word. ‘Or maybe “turn”.’ But the rest remained beyond them. Rebus pocketed the recipe book.

  ‘Thinking of a new career, sir?’ Siobhan asked.

  Rebus pondered a suitable comeback line. ‘Shut up, Clarke,’ he said.

  Rebus dropped the jotter off at Fettes HQ, where they had people whose job it was to recover legibility from defaced and damaged writing. They were known as ‘pen pals’, the sort of boffins who liked to do really difficult crosswords.

  ‘This won’t take long,’ one of them told Rebus. ‘We’ll just put it on the machine.’

  ‘Great,’ said Rebus. ‘I’ll come back in quarter of an hour.’

  ‘Make it twenty minutes.’

  Twenty minutes was fine by Rebus. While he was here and at a loose end, he might as well pay his respects to DI Gill Templer.

  ‘Hello, Gill.’ Her office smelt of expensive perfume. He’d forgotten what kind she wore. Chanel, was it? She slipped off her glasses and blinked at him.

  ‘John, long time no see. Sit down.’

  Rebus shook his head. ‘I can’t stay, the lab’s going to have something for me in a minute. Just thought I’d see how you’re doing.’

  She nodded her answer. ‘I’m doing fine. How about you?’

  ‘Aw, not bad. You know how it is.’

  ‘How’s the doctor?’

  ‘She’s fine, aye.’ He shuffled his feet. He hadn’t expected this to be so awkward.

  ‘It’s not true she kicked you out, then?’

  ‘How the hell do you know about that?’

  Gill was smiling her lipsticked smile; a thin mouth, made for irony. ‘Come on, John, this is Edinburgh. You want to keep secrets, move somewhere bigger than a village.’

  ‘Who told you, though? How many people know?’

  ‘Well, if they know here at Fettes, they’re bound to know at St Leonard’s.’

  Christ. That meant Watson knew, Lauderdale knew, Flower knew. And none of them had said anything.

  ‘It’s only a temporary thing,’ he muttered, shuffling his feet again. ‘Patience has her nieces staying, so I moved back into my flat. Plus Michael’s there just now.’

  It was Gill Templer’s turn to look surprised. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Ten days or so.’

  ‘Is he back for good?’

  Rebus shrugged. ‘Depends, I suppose. Gill, I wouldn’t want word getting round . . .’

  ‘Of course not! I can keep a secret.’ She smiled again. ‘Remember, I’m not from Edinburgh.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Rebus. ‘I just get screwed around here.’ He checked his watch.

  ‘Are my five minutes up?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be, I’ve got plenty of work to be getting on with.’

  He turned to leave.

  ‘John? Come up and see me again sometime.’

  Rebus nodded. ‘Mae West, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Bye, Gill.’

  Halfway along her corridor, Rebus recalled that a Mae West was also the name for a life-jacket. He considered this, but shook his head. ‘My life’s complicated enough.’

  He returned to the lab.

  ‘You’re a bit early,’ he was told.

  ‘Keen’s the word you’re looking for.’

  ‘Well, speaking of words we’re looking for, come and have a peek.’ He was led to a computer console. The scribble had been OCR’d and fed into the computer, where it was now displayed on the large colour monitor. A lot of the overpenning had been ‘erased’, leaving the original message hopefully intact. The pen pal picked up a sheet of paper. ‘Here are my ideas so far.’ As he read them off, Rebus tried to see them in the message on the screen.

  ‘“Ale I did, turn on the gum”, “Ole I did man, term on the gam” . . .’ Rebus gazed up at him, and the pen pal grinned. ‘Or maybe this,’ he said. ‘“All I did was turn on the gas”.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘“All I did was turn on the gas”.’

  Rebus stared at the message on the screen. Yes, he could see it . . . well, most of it. The pen pal was talking again.

  ‘It helped that you told me he’d gassed himself. I still had that half in mind when I started working, and spotted “gas” straight off. A suicide note, maybe?’

  Rebus looked disbelieving. ‘What, scored out and surrounded by doodles on the inside cover of a jotter he tucked away on a shelf? Stick to what you know and you’ll do fine.’

  What Rebus knew was that Eddie Ringan had suffered nightmares during which he cried out the word ‘gas’. Was this scribble the remnant from one of his bad nights? But then why score it out so heavily? Rebus picked up the jotter from the OCR machine. The inside cover looked old, the stuff there going back a year or more. Some of the doodles looked more recent than the defaced message. Whenever Eddie had written this, it wasn’t last night. Which meant, presumably, that it had no direct connection to his gassing himself. Making it . . . a coincidence? Rebus didn’t believe in coincidence, but he did believe in serendipity. He turned to the pen pal, who was looking not happy at Rebus’s put-down.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Each was sure the other was being less than sincere.

  Brian Holmes was waiting for him at St Leonard’s, waiting to be welcomed back into the world.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Holmes, ‘I’m just visiting. I’ve got another week on the sick.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Rebus was glancing nervously around, wondering if anyone had told Holmes about Eddie. He knew in his heart they hadn’t, of course; if they had, Brian wouldn’t be half as chipper.

  ‘I get thumping headaches, but that apart I feel like I’ve had a holiday.’ He patted his pocket. ‘And DI Flower got up a collection. Nearly fifty quid.’

  ‘The man’s a saint,’ said Rebus. ‘I had a present I was going to bring you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A tape, the Stones’ Let it Bleed.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘Something to cheer you up after Patsy De-Cline.’

  ‘At least she can sing.’

  Rebus smiled. ‘You’re fired. Are you at your aunt’s?’

  This quietened Holmes, as Rebus had hoped it would. Bring him down slowly, then drop the real news into his lap. ‘For the meantime. Nell’s . . . well, she says she’s not quite ready yet.’

  Rebus knew the feeling; he wondered when Patience would be ready for that drink. ‘Still,’ he offered, ‘things sound a bit brighter between the two of you.’


  ‘Ach.’ Holmes sat down opposite his superior. ‘She wants me to leave the police.’

  ‘That’s a bit drastic.’

  ‘So is separation.’

  Rebus exhaled. ‘I suppose so, but all the same . . . What are you going to do?’

  ‘Think it over, what else can I do?’ He got back to his feet. ‘Listen, I’d better get going. I only came in to –’

  ‘Brian, sit down.’ Holmes, recognising Rebus’s tone, sat. ‘I’ve got some bad news about Eddie.’

  ‘Chef Eddie?’ Rebus nodded. ‘What about him?’

  ‘There’s been an accident. Well, sort of. Eddie was involved.’

  There was no mistaking Rebus’s meaning. He’d become good at this sort of speech through repetition over the years to the families of car crash victims, accidents at work, murders . . .

  ‘He’s dead?’ Holmes asked quietly. Rebus, lips pursed, nodded. ‘Christ, I was going to drop in and see him. What happened?’

  ‘We’re not sure yet. The post-mortem will probably be this afternoon.’

  Holmes was no fool; again he caught the gist. ‘Accident, suicide or murder?’

  ‘One of those last two.’

  ‘And your money’d be on murder?’

  ‘My money stays in my pocket till I’ve spoken to the tipster.’

  ‘Meaning Dr Curt?’

  Rebus nodded. ‘Till then, there’s not much we can do. Listen, let me get a car to take you home . . .’

  ‘No, no, I’ll be all right.’ He rose to his feet slowly, as though checking his bones for solidity. ‘I’ll be fine really. It’s just . . . poor Eddie. He was a friend of mine, you know?’

  ‘I know,’ said Rebus.

  After Holmes had gone, Rebus was able to reflect that he’d gotten off lightly. Brian still wasn’t operating at full throttle; partly the convalescence, partly the shock. So he hadn’t asked Rebus any difficult questions. Questions like, does Eddie’s death have anything to do with the person who nearly killed me? It was something Rebus had been wondering himself. Last night Eddie was missing, and Rebus had gone to see Cafferty. Today, first thing, Eddie was dead. Meaning one less person who could say anything about the night the Central burnt down; one less person who’d been there. But Rebus still had the gut feeling Cafferty had been surprised to learn of Holmes’ attack. So what was the answer?

  ‘I’m buggered if I know,’ John Rebus said quietly to himself. His phone rang. He picked it up and heard pub noises, then Flower’s voice.

  ‘That’s some team you’ve got there, Inspector. One gets his face mashed in, and now the other falls on her arse.’ The connection was briskly severed.

  ‘And bugger you, too, Flower,’ Rebus said, all too aware that no one was listening.

  22

  Edinburgh’s public mortuary was sited on the Cowgate, named for the route cattle would take when being brought into the city to be sold. It was a narrow canyon of a street with few businesses and only passing traffic. Way up above it were much busier streets, South Bridge for instance. They seemed so far from the Cowgate, it might as well have been underground.

  Rebus wasn’t sure the area had ever been anything other than a desperate meeting place for Edinburgh’s poorest denizens, who often seemed like cattle themselves, dull-witted from lack of sunlight and grazing on begged handouts from passers-by. The Cowgate was ripe for redevelopment these days, but who would slaughter the cattle?

  A fine setting for the understated mortuary where, when he wasn’t teaching at the University, Dr Curt plied his trade.

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ he told Rebus. ‘The Cowgate’s got a couple of fine pubs.’

  ‘And a few more you could shave a dead man with.’

  Curt chuckled. ‘Colourful, though I’m not sure the image conjured actually means anything.’

  ‘I bow to your superior knowledge. Now, what have you got on Mr Ringan?’

  ‘Ah, poor Orphan Eddie.’ Curt liked to find names for all his cadavers. Rebus got the feeling the ‘Orphan’ prefix had been used many a time before. In Eddie Ringan’s case, though, it was accurate. He had no living relations that anyone knew of, and so had been identified by Patrick Calder, and by Siobhan Clarke, since she’d been the one to find the body.

  ‘Yes, that’s the man I found,’ she had said.

  ‘Yes, that’s Edward Ringan,’ Pat Calder had said, before being led away by Toni the barman.

  Rebus now stood with Curt beside the slab on which what was left of the corpse was being tidied up by an assistant. The assistant was whistling ‘Those Were the Days’ as he scraped miscellany into a bucket of offal. Rebus was reading through a list. He’d been through it three times already, trying to take his mind off the scene around him. Curt was smoking a cigarette. At the age of fifty-five, he’d decided he might as well start, since nothing else had so far managed to kill him. Rebus might have taken a cigarette from him, but they were Player’s untipped, the smoking equivalent of paint stripper.

  Maybe because he’d perused the list so often, something clicked at last. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘we never found a suicide note.’

  ‘They don’t always leave them.’

  ‘Eddie would have. And he’d have had Elvis singing Heartbreak Hotel on a tape player beside the oven.’

  ‘Now that’s style,’ Curt said disingenuously.

  ‘And now,’ Rebus went on, ‘from this list of the contents of his pockets, I see he didn’t have any keys on him.’

  ‘No keys, eh.’ Curt was enjoying his break too much to bother trying to work it out. He knew Rebus would tell him anyway.

  ‘So,’ Rebus obliged, ‘how did he get in? Or if he did use his keys to get in, where are they now?’

  ‘Where indeed.’ The attendant frowned as Curt stubbed his cigarette into the floor.

  Rebus knew when he’d lost an audience. He put the list away. ‘So what have you got for me?’

  ‘Well, the usual tests will have to be carried out, of course.’

  ‘Of course, but in the meantime . . .?’

  ‘In the meantime, a few points of interest.’ Curt turned to the cadaver, forcing Rebus to do the same. There was a cover over the charred face, and the attendant had roughly sewn up the chest and stomach, now empty of their major organs, with thick black thread. The face had been badly burnt, but the rest of the body remained unaffected. The plump flesh was pale and shiny.

  ‘Well,’ Curt began, ‘the burns were superficial merely. The internal organs were untouched by the blast. That made things easier. I would say he probably asphyxiated through inhalation of North Sea gas.’ He turned to Rebus. ‘That “North Sea” is pure conjecture.’ Then he grinned again, a lopsided grin that meant one side of his mouth stayed closed. ‘There was evidence of alcoholic intake. We’ll have to wait for the test results to determine how much. A lot, I’d guess.’

  ‘I’ll bet his liver was a treat. He’s been putting the stuff away for years.’

  Curt seemed doubtful. He went to another table and returned with the organ itself, which had already been cross-sectioned. ‘It’s actually in pretty good shape. You said he was a spirits drinker?’

  Rebus kept his eyes out of focus. It was something you learned. ‘A bottle a day easy.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t show from this.’ Curt tossed the liver a few inches into the air. It slapped back down into his palm. He reminded Rebus of a butcher showing off to a potential buyer. ‘There was also a bump to the head and bruising and minor burns to the arms.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’d imagine these are injuries often incurred by chefs in their daily duties. Hot fat spitting, pots and pans everywhere . . .’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Rebus.

  ‘And now we come to the section of the programme Hamish has been waiting for.’ Curt nodded towards his assistant, who straightened his back in anticipation. ‘I call him Hamish,’ Curt confided, ‘because he comes from the Hebrides. Hamish here spotted something I didn’t. I’ve been putting o
ff talking about it lest he become encephalitic.’ He looked at Rebus. ‘A little pathologist’s joke.’

  ‘You’re not so small,’ said Rebus.

  ‘You need to know, Inspector, that Hamish has a fascination with teeth. Probably because his own as a child were terribly bad and he has memories of long days spent under the dentist’s drill.’

  Hamish looked as though this might actually be true.

  ‘As a result, Hamish always looks in people’s mouths, and this time he saw fit to inform me that there was some damage.’

  ‘What sort of damage?’

  ‘Scarring of the tissues lining the throat. Recent damage, too.’

  ‘Like he’d been singing too loud?’

  ‘Or screaming. But much more likely that something has been forced down his throat.’

  Rebus’s mind boggled. Curt always seemed able to do this to him. He swallowed, feeling how dry his own throat was. ‘What sort of thing?’

  Curt shrugged. ‘Hamish suggested . . . You understand, this is entirely conjecture – usually your field of expertise. Hamish suggested a pipe of some kind, something solid. I myself would add the possibility of a rubber or plastic tube.’

  Rebus coughed. ‘Not anything . . . er, organic then?’

  ‘You mean like a courgette? A banana?’

  ‘You know damned well what I mean.’

  Curt smiled and bowed his head. ‘Of course I do, I’m sorry.’ Then he shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t rule anything out. But if you’re suggesting a penis, it must have been sheathed in sandpaper.’

  Behind them, Rebus heard Hamish stifle a laugh.

  Rebus telephoned Pat Calder and asked if they might meet. Calder thought it over before agreeing.

  ‘At the Colonies?’ Rebus asked.

  ‘Make it the Cafe, I’m heading over there anyway.’

  So the Cafe it was. When Rebus arrived, the ‘convalescence’ sign had been replaced with one stating, ‘Due to bereavement, this establishment has ceased trading.’ It was signed Pat Calder.

  As Rebus entered, he heard Calder roar, ‘Do fuck off!’ It was not, however, aimed at Rebus but at a young woman in a raincoat.

  ‘Trouble, Mr Calder?’ Rebus walked into the restaurant. Calder was busy taking the mementoes down off the walls and packing them in newspaper. Rebus noticed three tea chests on the floor between the tables.