10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘To do which he must have been scared out of his wits.’

  MacAskill shrugged. ‘Still not murder. The crux is, were they trying to scare him, or kill him?’

  ‘I’ll be sure to ask them.’

  ‘It’s got a gang feel to it: drugs maybe, or a loan he’d stopped repaying, somebody he’d ripped off.’ MacAskill returned to his chair. He opened a drawer and took out a can of Irn-Bru, opened it and started to drink. He never went to the pub after work, didn’t share the whisky when the team got a result. Soft drinks only: more ammo for the like-your-loafers brigade. He asked Rebus if he wanted a can.

  ‘Not while I’m on duty, sir.’

  MacAskill stifled a burp. ‘Get a bit more background on the victim, John, let’s see if it leads anywhere. Remember to chase forensics for fingerprint ID on the carry-out, and pathology for the PM results. Did he do drugs, that’s question one in my mind. Make things easier for us if he did. Unsolved, and we don’t even know how to frame it – not the sort of case I want to drag to the new station. Understood, John?’

  ‘Unquestionably, sir.’

  He turned to go, but the boss hadn’t quite finished. ‘That trouble over . . . what was the name again?’

  ‘Spaven?’ Rebus guessed.

  ‘Spaven, yes. Quietened down yet, has it?’

  ‘Quiet as the grave,’ Rebus lied, making his exit.

  3

  That evening – a long-standing engagement – Rebus was at a rock concert at Ingliston Showground, an American headliner with a couple of biggish-name British acts supporting. Rebus was part of a team of eight, four different city stations represented, providing back-up (meaning protection) for Trading Standards sniffers. They were looking for bootleg gear – T-shirts and programmes, tapes and CDs – and had the full support of the bands’ management. This meant backstage passes, liberal use of the hospitality marquee, a lucky-bag of official merchandising. The lackey passing out the bags smiled at Rebus.

  ‘Maybe your kids or grandkids . . .’ Thrusting the bag at him. He’d bitten back a remark, passed straight to the booze tent, where he couldn’t decide between the dozens of hooch bottles, so settled for a beer, then wished he’d taken a nip of Black Bush, so eased the unopened bottle into his lucky-bag.

  They had two vans parked outside the arena, way back behind the stage, filling with counterfeiters and their merchandise. Maclay weaved back to the vans nursing a set of knuckles.

  ‘Who did you pop, Heavy?’

  Maclay shook his head, wiping sweat from his brow, a Michelangelo cherub turned bad.

  ‘Some choob was resisting,’ he said. ‘Had a suitcase with him. I punched a hole right through it. He didn’t resist after that.’

  Rebus looked into the back of a van, the one holding bodies. A couple of kids, hardening already to the system, and two regulars, old enough to know the score. They’d be fined a day’s wages, the loss of their stock just another debit. The summer was young, plenty festivals to come.

  ‘Fucking awful racket.’

  Maclay meant the music. Rebus shrugged; he’d been getting into it, thought maybe he’d take home a couple of the bootleg CDs. He offered Maclay the bottle of Black Bush. Maclay drank from it like it was lemonade. Rebus offered him a mint afterwards, and he threw it into his mouth with a nod of thanks.

  ‘Post mortem results came in this afternoon,’ the big man said.

  Rebus had meant to phone, hadn’t got round to it. ‘And?’

  Maclay crushed the mint to powder. ‘The fall killed him. Apart from that, not much.’

  The fall killed him: little chance of a straight murder conviction. ‘Toxicology?’

  ‘Still testing. Professor Gates said when they cut into the stomach, there was a strong whiff of dark rum.’

  ‘There was a bottle in the bag.’

  Maclay nodded. ‘The decedent’s tipple. Gates said no initial signs of drug use, but we’ll have to wait for the tests. I went through the phone book for Mitchisons.’

  Rebus smiled. ‘So did I.’

  ‘I know, one of the numbers I called, you’d already been on to them. No joy?’

  Rebus shook his head. ‘I got a number for T-Bird Oil in Aberdeen. Their personnel manager’s going to call me back.’

  A Trading Standards officer was coming towards them, arms laden with T-shirts and programmes. His face was red from exertion, his thin tie hanging loose at the neck. Behind him, an officer from ‘F Troop’ – Livingston Division – was escorting another prisoner.

  ‘Nearly done, Mr Baxter?’

  The Trading Standards officer dumped the T-shirts, lifted one and wiped his face with it.

  ‘That should about do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll round up my soldiers.’

  Rebus turned to Maclay. ‘I’m starving. Let’s see what they’ve laid on for the superstars.’

  There were fans trying to breach security, teenagers mostly, split half and half, boys and girls. A few had managed to inveigle their way in. They wandered around behind the barriers looking for faces they would recognise from the posters on their bedroom walls. Then when they did spot one, they’d be too awed or shy to talk.

  ‘Any kids?’ Rebus asked Maclay. They were in hospitality, nursing bottles of Beck’s taken from a coolbox Rebus hadn’t noticed first time round.

  Maclay shook his head. ‘Divorced before it became an issue, if you’ll pardon the pun. You?’

  ‘One daughter.’

  ‘Grown up?’

  ‘Sometimes I think she’s older than me.’

  ‘Kids grow up faster than in our day.’ Rebus smiled at that, Maclay a good ten years his junior.

  A girl, squealing resistance, was being hauled back to the perimeter by two burly security men.

  ‘Jimmy Cousins,’ Maclay said, pointing out one of the security bears. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘He was stationed at Leith for a while.’

  ‘Retired last year, only forty-seven. Thirty years in. Now he’s got his pension and a job. Makes you think.’

  ‘Makes me think he misses the force.’

  Maclay smiled. ‘It can turn into a habit.’

  ‘That why you divorced?’

  ‘I dare say it played a part.’

  Rebus thought of Brian Holmes, feared for him. Stress getting to the younger man, affecting work and personal life both. Rebus had been there.

  ‘You know Ted Michie?’

  Rebus nodded: the man he’d replaced at Fort Apache.

  ‘Doctors think it’s terminal. He won’t let them cut, says knives are against his religion.’

  ‘I hear he was handy with a truncheon in his day.’

  One of the support bands entered the marquee to scattered applause. Five males, mid-twenties, stripped to the waist with towels around their shoulders, high on something – maybe just from performing. Hugs and kisses from a group of girls at a table, whoops and roars.

  ‘We fucking killed them out there!’

  Rebus and Maclay drank their drinks in silence, tried not to look like promoters, succeeded.

  When they walked back outside, it was dark enough for the light-show to be worth watching. There were fireworks, too, reminding Rebus that it was the tourist season. Not long till the nightly Tattoo, fireworks you could hear from Marchmont, even with the windows closed. A camera crew, stalked by photographers, was itself stalking the main support band who were ready to go on. Maclay watched the procession.

  ‘You’re probably surprised they’re not after you,’ he said, mischief in his voice.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Rebus replied, making for the side of the stage. The passes were colour-coded. His was yellow, and it got him as far as the stage-wings, where he watched the entertainment. The sound system was a travesty, but there were monitors nearby and he concentrated on those. The crowd seemed to be having fun, bobbing up and down, a sea of disembodied heads. He thought of the Isle of Wight, of other festivals he’d missed, headliners who weren’t around any more.

  He thought of L
awson Geddes, his one-time mentor, boss, protector, his memory rippling back through two decades.

  John Rebus, mid-twenties, a detective constable, looking to put army years behind him, ghosts and nightmares. A wife and infant daughter trying to be his life. And Rebus maybe seeking out a surrogate father, finding one in Lawson Geddes, Detective Inspector, City of Edinburgh Police. Geddes was forty-five, ex-army, served in the Borneo conflict, told stories of jungle war versus The Beatles, no one back in Britain very interested in a last spasm of colonial muscle. The two men found they shared common values, common night sweats and dreams of failure. Rebus was new to CID, Geddes knew everything there was to know. It was easy to recall the first year of growing friendship, easy now to forgive the few hiccups: Geddes making a pass at Rebus’s young wife, almost succeeding; Rebus passing out at a Geddes party, waking in the dark and pissing into a dresser-drawer, thinking he’d found the toilet; a couple of fist-fights after last orders, the fists not connecting, turning into wrestling matches instead.

  Easy to forgive so much. But then they landed a murder inquiry, Leonard Spaven Geddes’ chief suspect. Geddes and Lenny Spaven had been playing cat-and-mouse for a couple of years – aggravated assault, pimping, the hijacking of a couple of cigarette lorries. Even whispers of a murder or two, gangster stuff, trimming the competition. Spaven had been in the Scots Guards same time as Geddes, maybe the bad blood started there, neither man ever said.

  Christmas 1976, a gruesome find on farmland near Swanston: a woman’s body, decapitated. The head turned up almost a week later, New Year’s Day, in another field near Currie. The weather was sub-zero. From the rate of decay, the pathologist was able to say that the head had been kept indoors for some time after being severed from the body, while the body itself had been dumped fresh. Glasgow police semi-interested, the file on Bible John still open six years on. Identification from clothing initially, a member of the public coming forward to say the description sounded like a neighbour who hadn’t been seen for a couple of weeks. The milkman had kept on delivering until he decided no one was home, that she had gone away for Christmas without telling him.

  Police forced the front door. Unopened Christmas cards on the hall carpet; a pot of soup on the stove, speckled with mould; a radio playing quietly. Relatives were found, identified the body – Elizabeth Rhind, Elsie to her friends. Thirty-five years old, divorced from a sailor in the merchant navy. She’d worked for a brewery, shorthand and typing. She’d been well liked, the outgoing type. The ex-husband, suspect one, had a steel-toecapped alibi: his ship was in Gib at the time. Lists of the victim’s friends, especially boyfriends, and a name came up: Lenny. No surname, someone Elsie had gone out with for a few weeks. Drinking companions provided a description, and Lawson Geddes recognised it: Lenny Spaven. Geddes formed his theory quickly: Lenny had zeroed in on Elsie when he learned she worked at the brewery. He was probably looking for inside gen, maybe thinking of a truck hijack or a simple break-in. Elsie refused to help, he got angry, and he killed her.

  It sounded good to Geddes, but he found it hard to convince anyone else. There was no evidence either. They couldn’t determine a time of death, leaving a twenty-four-hour margin of error, so Spaven didn’t need to provide an alibi. A search of his home and those of his friends showed no bloodstains, nothing. There were other strands they should have been following, but Geddes couldn’t stop thinking about Spaven. It nearly drove John Rebus demented. They argued loudly, more than once, stopped going for drinks together. The brass had a word with Geddes, told him he was becoming obsessed to the detriment of the inquiry. He was told to take a holiday. They even had a collection for him in the Murder Room.

  Then one night he’d come to Rebus’s door, begging a favour. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, or changed his clothes over that time. He said he’d been following Spaven, and had tracked him to a lock-up in Stockbridge. He was probably still there if they hurried. Rebus knew it was wrong; there were procedures. But Geddes was shivering, wild-eyed. All idea of search warrants and the like evaporated. Rebus insisted on driving, Geddes giving directions.

  Spaven was still in the garage. So were brown cardboard boxes, piled high: the proceeds from a South Queensferry warehouse break-in back in November. Digital clock-radios: Spaven was fitting plugs to them, preparing to hawk them around the pubs and clubs. Behind one pile of boxes, Geddes discovered a plastic carrier bag. Inside were a woman’s hat and a cream shoulder-bag, both later identified as having belonged to Elsie Rhind.

  Spaven protested his innocence from the moment Geddes lifted up the carrier bag and asked what was inside. He protested all the way through the rest of the investigation, the trial, and as he was being hauled back to the cells after being handed down a life sentence. Geddes and Rebus were in court, Geddes back to normal, beaming satisfaction, Rebus just a little uneasy. They’d had to concoct a story: an anonymous tip-off on a consignment of stolen goods, a chance find . . . It felt right and wrong at the same time. Lawson Geddes hadn’t wanted to talk about it afterwards, which was strange: usually they dissected their cases – successful or not – over a drink. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Geddes had resigned from the force, with promotion only a year or two away. Instead, he’d gone to work in his father’s off-sales business – there was always a discount waiting for serving officers – made some money, and retired at a youthful fifty-five. For the past ten years, he’d been living with his wife Etta in Lanzarote.

  Ten years ago Rebus had received a postcard. Lanzarote had ‘not much fresh water, but enough to temper a glass of whisky, and the Torres wines need no adulteration’. The landscape was almost lunar, ‘black volcanic ash, so an excuse not to garden!’, and that was about it. He hadn’t heard anything since, and Geddes hadn’t furnished his address on the island. That was OK, friendships came and went. Geddes had been a useful man to know at the time, he’d taught Rebus a lot.

  Dylan: Don’t Look Back.

  The here and now: light-show stinging Rebus’s eyes. He blinked back tears, stepped away from the stage, retreated to hospitality. Pop stars and entourage, loving the media interest. Flash-bulbs and questions. A spume of champagne. Rebus brushed flecks from his shoulder, decided it was time to find his car.

  The Spaven case should have remained closed, no matter how loudly the prisoner himself protested. But in jail, Spaven had started writing, his writings smuggled out by friends or bribed jailers. Pieces had started to see publication – fiction at first, an early story picking up first prize in some newspaper competition. When the winner’s true identity and where-abouts were revealed, the newspaper got itself a bigger news story. More writing, more publication. Then a TV drama, penned by Spaven. It won an award somewhere in Germany, another in France, it was shown in the USA, an estimated audience of twenty million worldwide. There was a follow-up. Then a novel, and then the non-fiction pieces started appearing – Spaven’s early life at first, but Rebus knew where the story would lead.

  By this time there was loud support in the media for an early release, nullified when Spaven assaulted another prisoner severely enough to cause brain damage. Spaven’s pieces from jail became more eloquent than ever – the man had been jealous of all the attention, had attempted to murder Spaven in the corridor outside his cell. Self-defence. And the crunch: Spaven would not have been placed in this invidious position were it not for a gross miscarriage of justice. The second instalment of Spaven’s autobiography ended with the Elsie Rhind case, and with mention of the two police officers who’d framed him – Lawson Geddes and John Rebus. Spaven reserved his real loathing for Geddes, Rebus just a bit-player, Geddes’ lackey. More media interest. Rebus saw it as a revenge fantasy, planned over long incarcerated years, Spaven unhinged. But whenever he read Spaven’s work, he saw powerful manipulation of the reader, and he thought back to Lawson Geddes on his doorstep that night, to the lies they told afterwards . . .

  And then Lenny Spaven died, committed suicide. Took a scalpel to his throat and open
ed it up, a gash you could fit your hand inside. More rumour: he’d been murdered by jailers before he could complete volume three of his autobiography, detailing his years and depredations in several Scottish prisons. Or jealous prisoners had been allowed access to his cell.

  Or it was suicide. He left a note, three drafts crumpled on the floor, maintaining to the end his innocence in the Elsie Rhind killing. The media started sniffing their story, Spaven’s life and death big news. And now . . . three things.

  One: the incomplete third volume of autobiography had been published – ‘heart-breaking’ according to one critic, ‘a massive achievement’ for another. It was still on the bestseller list, Spaven’s face staring out from bookshop windows all along Princes Street. Rebus tried to avoid the route.

  Two: a prisoner was released, and told reporters he was the last person to see or speak to Spaven alive. According to him, Spaven’s last words were: ‘God knows I’m innocent, but I’m so tired of saying it over and over.’ The story earned the ex-offender £750 from a newspaper; easy to see it as flannel waved at a gullible press.

  Three: a new TV series was launched, The Justice Programme, a hard-hitting look at crime, the system, and miscarriages of justice. High ratings for its first series – attractive presenter Eamonn Breen scooping women viewers – so now a second series was on the blocks, and the Spaven case – severed head, accusations, and suicide of a media darling – was to be the showcase opener.

  With Lawson Geddes out of the country, address unknown, leaving John Rebus to carry the film-can.

  Alex Harvey: ‘Framed’. Segue to Jethro Tull: ‘Living in the Past’.

  He went home by way of the Oxford Bar – a long detour, always worthwhile. The gantry and optics had a quietly hypnotic effect, the only possible explanation as to why the regulars could stand and stare at them for hours at a stretch. The barman waited for an order; Rebus did not have a ‘usual’ drink these days, variety the spice of life and all that.