10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Madness comes from the head, not the blood, not the heart.’ Kilpatrick rested against a box. ‘You think you can trust Abernethy, John? Well, good luck to you. I’m waiting.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Your next gimmick.’ He smiled. ‘If you wanted to make a case against me, we wouldn’t be meeting like this. You know as well as I do that a filing mistake and an innocent photograph don’t make a case. They don’t make anything.’

  ‘You could be kicked off the force.’

  ‘With my record? No, I might retire early, say on health grounds, but no one’s going to sack me. It doesn’t happen that way, I thought two experienced officers would know that. Now answer me this, Inspector Rebus, you set up an illicit surveillance: how much trouble can that get you in? With your record of insubordination and bucking the rules, we could kick you off the force for not wiping your arse properly.’ He rose from the box and walked to the edge of the lorry, then dropped to the ground and turned towards them. ‘You haven’t proved anything to me. If you want to try your act with someone else, be my guests.’

  ‘You cold bastard,’ Abernethy said. He made it sound like a compliment. He walked to the edge of the lorry and faced Kilpatrick, then slowly began to pull his shirt out from his trousers. He lifted it up, showing bare flesh and sticking plasters and wires. He was miked up. Kilpatrick stared back at him.

  ‘Anything to add, sir?’ Abernethy said. Kilpatrick turned and walked away. Abernethy turned to Rebus. ‘Quiet all of a sudden, isn’t it?’

  Rebus leapt from the lorry and walked briskly to the door. Kilpatrick was getting into his car, but stopped when he saw him.

  ‘Three murders so far,’ Rebus said. ‘Including a police officer, one of your own. That’s a madness of the blood.’

  ‘That wasn’t me,’ Kilpatrick said quietly.

  ‘Yes, it was,’ Rebus said. ‘There’d be none of it without you.’

  ‘I don’t know how they got to Calumn Smylie.’

  ‘They hack into computers. Your secretary uses one.’

  Kilpatrick nodded. ‘And there’s a file on the operation in the computer.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Look, Rebus . . .’ But Kilpatrick stopped himself. He shook his head again and got into the car, shutting the door.

  Rebus bent down to the driver’s-side window, and waited for Kilpatrick to wind it down.

  ‘Abernethy’s told me what it’s about, why the loyalists are suddenly arming themselves. It’s Harland and Wolff.’ This being a shipyard, one of the biggest employers in the province, its workforce predominantly Protestant. ‘They think it’s going to be wound up, don’t they? The loyalists are taking it as a symbol. If the British government lets Harland and Wolff go to the wall, then it’s washing its hands of the Ulster Protestants. Basically, it’s pulling out.’ Hard to know whether Kilpatrick was listening. He was staring through the windscreen, hands on the steering wheel. ‘At which point,’ Rebus went on anyway, ‘the loyalists are set to explode. You’re arming them for civil war. But worse than that, you’ve armed Davey Soutar. He’s a walking anti-personnel mine.’

  Kilpatrick’s voice was hard, unfeeling. ‘Soutar’s not my problem.’

  ‘Frankie Bothwell can’t help. Maybe he could control Soutar once upon a time, but not now.’

  ‘There’s only one person Soutar respects,’ Kilpatrick said quietly, ‘Alan Fowler.’

  ‘The UVF man?’

  Kilpatrick had started the engine.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Rebus. As Kilpatrick moved off, Rebus kept a grip of the window-frame. Kilpatrick turned to him.

  ‘Nine tonight,’ he said. ‘At the Gar-B.’

  Then he sped out of the compound.

  Abernethy was just behind Rebus.

  ‘What was he telling you?’ he asked.

  ‘Nine o’clock at the Gar-B.’

  ‘Sounds like a nice little trap to me.’

  ‘Not if we take the cavalry.’

  ‘John,’ Abernethy said with a grin, ‘I’ve got all the cavalry we’ll need.’

  Rebus turned to face him. ‘You’ve been playing me like a pinball machine, haven’t you? That first time we met, all that stuff you told me about computers being the future of crime. You knew back then.’

  Abernethy shrugged. He pulled up his shirt again and started to pull off the wires. ‘All I did was point you in the general direction. Look at the way I got on your tits that first time. That’s how I knew I could trust you. I nettled you and you let it show. You’d nothing to hide.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Yes, I knew, I’ve known for a long time. Proving it was the bugger.’ Abernethy looked at the compound gates. ‘But Kilpatrick’s got enemies, remember that, not just you and me any more.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  But Abernethy just winked and tapped his nose. ‘Enemies,’ he said.

  Rebus had pulled Siobhan Clarke off the Moncur surveillance and put her on to Frankie Bothwell. But Frankie Bothwell had disappeared. She apologised, but Rebus only shrugged. Holmes had kept with Clyde Moncur, but Moncur and his wife were off on some bus tour, a two-day trip to the Highlands. Moncur could always get off the bus and double back, but Rebus discontinued the tail anyway.

  ‘You seem a bit glum, sir,’ Siobhan Clarke told him. Maybe she was right. The world seemed upside down. He’d seen bad cops before, of course he had. But he had never before seen anything like Kilpatrick’s lack of an explanation or a decent defence. It was as if he didn’t feel he needed one, as if he’d just been doing the right thing; in the wrong way perhaps, but the right thing all the same.

  Abernethy had told him how deep the suspicions went, how long they’d been accumulating. But it was hard to investigate a policeman who, on the surface, seemed to be doing nearly everything right. Investigation required co-operation, and the co-operation wasn’t there. Until Rebus had come along.

  At the Gar-B lock-ups, outside the blocks of flats, police and Army experts were opening doors, just in case the stolen cache was inside one of the garages. Door to door inquiries were going on, trying to pin down Davey’s friends, trying to get someone to talk or to admit they were hiding him. Meantime, Jamesie MacMurray was already being charged. But they were minnows, their flesh not enough to merit the hook. Kilpatrick, too, had disappeared. Rebus had phoned Ormiston and found that the CI hadn’t returned to his office, and no one answered at his home.

  Holmes and Clarke returned from the warrant search of Soutar’s home, Holmes toting a plain cardboard box, obviously not empty. Holmes put the box on Rebus’s desk.

  ‘Let’s start,’ Holmes said, ‘with a jar of acid, carefully concealed under Soutar’s bed.’

  ‘His mother says he never lets her in to clean his room,’ Clarke explained. ‘He’s got a padlock on the door to prove it. We had to break the lock. His mum wasn’t best pleased.’

  ‘She’s a lovely woman, isn’t she?’ said Rebus. ‘Did you meet the dad?’

  ‘He was at the bookie’s.’

  ‘Lucky for you. What else have you got?’

  ‘Typhoid probably,’ Holmes complained. ‘The place was like a Calcutta rubbish tip.’

  Clarke dipped in and pulled out a few small polythene bags; everything in the box had been wrapped first and labelled. ‘We’ve got knives, most of them illegal, one still with what looks like dried blood on it.’ Some of it Calumn Smylie’s blood, Rebus didn’t doubt. She dipped in again. ‘Mogadon tablets, about a hundred of them, and some unopened cans of cola and beer.’

  ‘The Can Gang?’

  Clarke nodded. ‘Looks like it. There are wallets, credit cards . . . it’ll take us two minutes to check. Oh, and we found this little booklet.’ She held it up for him. It was poorly Xeroxed, with its A4-sized sheets folded in half and stapled. Rebus read the title.

  ‘The Total Anarchy Primer. Wonder who gave him this?’

  ‘Looks like it’s been translated from another language, maybe German. Some of the words they couldn’t find the English for, so they’ve l
eft them in the original.’

  ‘Some primer.’

  ‘It tells you how to make bombs,’ said Clarke, ‘in case you were wondering. Mostly fertiliser bombs, but there’s a section on timers and detonators, just in case you found yourself with any plastique.’

  ‘The perfect Christmas gift. Are they checking the bedroom for traces?’

  Holmes nodded. ‘They were at it when we left.’

  Rebus nodded. A special forensic unit had been sent in to test for traces of explosive materials. The same unit had been working at the MacMurray lock-up. They knew now that the garage had held a quantity of plastic explosive, probably Semtex. But they couldn’t say how much. Usually, as one of the team had explained, Semtex was quite difficult to prove, being colourless and fairly scentless. But it looked like Soutar had been playing with his toys, unwrapping at least one of the packages the better to have a look at it. Traces had been left on the surface of the workbench.

  ‘Were there detonators in the cache?’ Rebus asked. ‘That’s the question.’

  Holmes and Clarke looked at one another.

  ‘A rhetorical one,’ Rebus added.

  29

  The city was definitely coming out to play.

  It was the start of September, and therefore the beginning of that slow slide into chill autumn and long dark winter. The Festival was winding down for another year, and everyone was celebrating. It was on days like this that the city, so often submerged like Atlantis or some subaqua Brigadoon, bubbled to the surface. The buildings seemed less dour and the people smiled, as though cloud and rain were unknowns.

  Rebus might have been driving through a thunderstorm for all the notice he took. He was a hunter, and hunters didn’t smile. Abernethy had just admitted being Marie’s anonymous caller, the one who’d put her on to Calumn Smylie.

  ‘You knew you were putting his life in danger?’ Rebus asked.

  ‘Maybe I thought I was saving it.’

  ‘How did you know about Mairie anyway? I mean, how did you know to contact her?’

  Abernethy just smiled.

  ‘You sent me that stuff about Clyde Moncur, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You could have warned me what I was getting into.’

  ‘You were more effective the way you were.’

  ‘I’ve been a walking punch-bag.’

  ‘But you’re still here.’

  ‘I bet you’d lose a lot of sleep if I wasn’t.’

  The sun had finally given up. The street lights were on. There were a lot of people on the streets tonight. Hogmanay apart, it was the city’s biggest night of the year. The traffic was all headed into town, where most of the parking spaces had been grabbed hours ago.

  ‘Families,’ Rebus explained, ‘on their way to the fireworks.’

  ‘I thought we were on our way to the fireworks,’ Abernethy said, smiling again.

  ‘We are,’ said Rebus quietly.

  There were never signposts to places like the Gar-B, the inference being that if you wanted to go there, you must already know the place. People didn’t just visit on a whim. Rebus took the slip-road past the gable end – ENJOY YOUR VISIT TO THE GAR-B – and turned into the access road.

  ‘Nine o’clock, he said.’

  Abernethy checked his watch. ‘Nine it is.’

  But Rebus wasn’t listening. He was watching a van roaring towards them. The road was barely wide enough for two vehicles, and the van driver didn’t seem to be paying much attention. He was crouched down, eyes on his wing mirror. Rebus slammed on the brakes and the horn and whipped the steering wheel around. The rust bucket slew sideways like it was on ice. That was the problem with bald tyres.

  ‘Out!’ Rebus called. Abernethy didn’t need telling twice. The driver had finally seen them. The van was skidding to an uncertain stop. It hit the driver’s side door, shuddered, and was still. Rebus pulled open the van door and hauled out Jim Hay. He’d heard of people looking white as a sheet, white as a ghost, but Jim Hay looked whiter than that. Rebus held him upright.

  ‘He’s gone off his fucking head!’ Hay yelled.

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘Soutar.’ Hay was looking behind him, back down the road which curled snake-like into the Gar-B. ‘I’m only the delivery man, not this . . . not this.’

  Dusting himself off, Abernethy joined them. He’d lost the knees out of his denims.

  ‘You deliver the stuff,’ Rebus was saying to Hay, ‘the explosives, the arms?’

  Hay nodded.

  Yes, the perfect delivery man, in his little theatre van, all boxes and props, costumes and sets, guns and grenades. Delivered east coast to west, where another connection would be made, another switch.

  ‘Hold him,’ Rebus ordered. Abernethy looked like he didn’t understand. ‘Hold him!’

  Then Rebus let Jim Hay go, got into the van, and reversed it out of his car’s bodywork and back into the Gar-B. When he reached the car park, he turned the van and bumped it at speed onto the grass, heading for the youth centre.

  There was nobody about, not a soul. The door-to-door had been wound up for the day, having yielded nothing. The Gar-B simply didn’t speak to the ‘polis’. It was a rule of life, like remembering to breathe. Rebus was breathing hard. The garages he passed had been searched and declared safe, though one of them had contained a suspicious number of TV sets, videos, and camcorders, and another showed evidence of sniffed glue and smoked crack.

  No neighbours were out discussing the day’s events. There was even silence at the community centre. He doubted the Gar-B tribe were the kind to be attracted to a firework display . . . not normally.

  The doors were open, so Rebus walked in. A bright trail of blood led in an arc across the floor from the stage to the far wall. Kilpatrick was slumped against the wall, almost but not quite sitting up. He’d removed his necktie halfway across the room, maybe to help him breathe. He was still alive, but he’d lost maybe a pint of blood already. When Rebus crouched down beside him, Kilpatrick clutched at him with wet red fingers, leaving a bloody handprint on Rebus’s shirt. His other hand was protecting his own stomach, source of the wound.

  ‘I tried to stop him,’ he whispered.

  Rebus looked around him. ‘Was the stuff hidden here?’

  ‘Under the stage.’

  Rebus looked at the small stage, a stage he’d sat on and stood on.

  ‘Hay’s gone to fetch an ambulance,’ Kilpatrick said.

  ‘He was running like a rabbit,’ Rebus said.

  Kilpatrick forced a smile. ‘I thought he might.’ He licked his lips. They were cracked, edged with white like missed toothpaste. ‘They’ve gone with him.’

  ‘Who? His gang?’

  ‘They’ll follow Davey Soutar to hell. He made those phone calls. He told me so. Just before he did this.’ Kilpatrick tried to look down at his stomach. The effort was almost too much for him.

  Rebus stood up. Blood flushed around his system, making him dizzy. ‘The Fireworks? He’s going to blow up the Fireworks?’ He ran out of the hall and into the nearest tower block. The first front door he came to, he kicked it in. It took him three good hits. Then he marched into the living room, where two terrified pensioners were watching TV.

  ‘Where’s your phone?’

  ‘We dinnae have one,’ the man eventually said.

  Rebus walked back out and kicked in the next door. Same procedure. This time the single mother with the two shrieking kids did have a phone. She hurled abuse at Rebus as he pressed the buttons.

  ‘I’m the police,’ he told her. It made her angrier still. She quietened, though, when she heard Rebus order an ambulance. She was shushing the kids as he made his second call.

  ‘It’s DI Rebus here,’ he said. ‘Davey Soutar and his gang are on their way to Princes Street with a load of high explosives. We need that area sealed.’

  He half-smiled an apology as he left the flat and half-ran back to the van. Still nobody had come to investigate, to see what
all the noise and the fuss were. Like Edinburghers of old, they could become invisible to trouble. In olden times, they’d hidden in the catacombs below the Castle and the High Street. Now they just shut their windows and turned up the TV. They were Rebus’s employers, whose taxes paid his salary. They were the people he was paid to protect. He felt like telling them all to go to hell.

  When he got back to his car, Abernethy was standing there with Jim Hay, not a clue what to do with him. Rebus yanked the steering wheel and pulled the van onto the grass.

  ‘An ambulance is on its way,’ he said, trying to pull open his car door. It groaned like something in a scrapyard crusher, but eventually gave, and he squeezed through the gap into his seat, brushing aside the glass chippings.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Abernethy asked.

  ‘Stay here with him,’ Rebus said, starting the car and reversing back up the access road.

  The Glenlivet Fireworks: every year there was a firework display from the Castle ramparts, accompanied by a chamber orchestra in Princes Street Gardens’ bandstand and watched by crowds in the Gardens and packed into Princes Street itself. The concert usually started around ten-fifteen, ten-thirty. It was now ten o’clock on a balmy dry evening. The area would be full to bursting.

  Wild Davey Soutar. He and his kind detested the Festival. It took away from them their Edinburgh and propped something else in its place, a façade of culture which they didn’t need and couldn’t understand. There was no underclass in Edinburgh, they’d all been pushed out into schemes on the city boundaries. Isolated, exiled, they had every right to resent the city centre with its tourist traps and temporary playtime.

  Not that that’s why Soutar was doing it. Rebus thought Soutar had some simpler reasons. He was showing off, he was showing even his elders in The Shield that they couldn’t control him, that he was the boss. He was, in fact, quite mad.

  ‘Make a run for it, Davey,’ Rebus said to himself. ‘Get a grip. Use your sense. Just . . .’ But he couldn’t think of the words.

  He didn’t often drive fast; dangerously . . . almost never. It was car smashes that did it, being on the scene at car smashes. You saw heads so messed up you didn’t know which side was the face until it opened its mouth to scream.