10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘But I want to.’

  They took Rebus’s car for a change. But when they got to Fettes, Ancram’s office was bare, no sign of it ever having been occupied. Rebus telephoned Govan, and was put through.

  ‘Is that it finished?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll write up my report,’ Ancram said. ‘No doubt your boss will want to discuss it with you.’

  ‘What about Brian Holmes?’

  ‘It’ll all be in the report.’

  Rebus waited. ‘All of it?’

  ‘Tell me something, Rebus, are you clever or just spawny?’

  ‘Is there a difference?’

  ‘You’ve really mucked things up. If we’d gone ahead against Uncle Joe, we could have had the mole.’

  ‘You’ll have Uncle Joe instead.’ Ancram grunted a response. ‘You know who the mole is?’

  ‘I have a hunch. Lennox, you met him that day in The Lobby.’ DS Andy Lennox: freckles and ginger curls. ‘Thing is, I’ve no hard evidence.’

  Same old problem. In law, knowing was not enough. Scots law was stricter still: there must needs be corroboration.

  ‘Maybe next time, eh?’ Rebus offered, putting down the phone.

  They drove back to the flat so Jack could pick up his car, but then he had to climb the stairs with Rebus, having forgotten some of his kit.

  ‘Are you ever going to leave me alone?’ Rebus asked.

  Jack laughed. ‘Starting any minute.’

  ‘Well, while you’re here you can help me shift the stuff back into the living room.’

  It didn’t take long. The last thing Rebus did was hook the fishing-boat back on the wall.

  ‘So what now?’ Jack asked.

  ‘I suppose I could see about getting this tooth fixed. And I said I’d meet up with Gill.’

  ‘Business or pleasure?’

  ‘Strictly off-duty.’

  ‘A fiver says you end up talking shop.’

  Rebus smiled. ‘Five says you’re on. What about you?’

  ‘Ach, I thought while I’m in town I might check out the local AA, see if there’s a meeting. It’s been too long.’ Rebus nodded. ‘Want to tag along?’

  Rebus looked up, nodded. ‘Why not?’ he said.

  ‘The other thing we could do is keep on with the decorating.’

  Rebus wrinkled his nose. ‘The mood’s passed.’

  ‘You’re not going to sell?’ Rebus shook his head. ‘No cottage by the sea?’

  ‘I think I’ll settle for where I am, Jack. It seems to suit me.’

  ‘And where’s that exactly?’

  Rebus considered his answer. ‘Somewhere north of hell.’

  He got back from his Sunday walk with Gill Templer and stuck a fiver in an envelope, addressed it to Jack Morton. Gill and he had talked about the Toals and the Americans, about how they’d go down on the strength of the tape. Rebus’s word might not be enough to convict Hayden Fletcher of conspiracy to murder, but he’d have a damned good go. Fletcher was being brought south for questioning. Rebus had a busy week ahead. His telephone rang as he was tidying the living room.

  ‘John?’ the voice said. ‘It’s Brian.’

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Fine.’ But Brian’s voice was hollow. ‘I just thought I’d . . . the thing is . . . I’m putting in my papers.’ A pause. ‘Isn’t that what they say?’

  ‘Jesus, Brian . . .’

  ‘Thing is, I’ve tried to learn from you, but I’m not sure you were the right choice. A bit too intense maybe, eh? See, whatever it is you’ve got, John, I just don’t have it.’ A longer pause. ‘And I’m not sure I even want it, to be honest.’

  ‘You don’t have to be like me to be a good copper, Brian. Some would say you should strive to be what I’m not.’

  ‘Well . . . I’ve tried both sides of the fence, hell, I’ve even tried sitting on the fence. No good, any of it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Brian.’

  ‘Catch you later, eh?’

  ‘Sure thing, son. Take care.’

  He sat down in his chair, stared out of the window. A bright summer’s afternoon, a good time to go for a walk through the Meadows. Only Rebus had just come back from a walk. Did he really want another? His phone rang again and he let the machine take it. He waited for a message, but all he could hear was static crackle, background hiss. There was someone there; they hadn’t broken the connection. But they weren’t about to leave a message. Rebus placed a hand on the receiver, paused, then lifted it.

  ‘Hello?’

  He heard the other receiver being dropped into its cradle, then the hum of the open line. He stood for a moment, then replaced the receiver and walked into the kitchen, pulled open the cupboard and lifted out the newspapers and cuttings. Dumped the whole lot of them into the bin. Grabbed his jacket and took that walk.

  Afterword

  The genesis of this book was a story I heard very early in 1995, and I worked on the book all through that year, finishing a satisfactory draft just before Christmas. Then on Sunday January 29 1996, just as my editor was settling down to read the manuscript, the Sunday Times ran a story headlined ‘Bible John “living quietly in Glasgow’”, based on information contained in a book to be published by Main-stream in April. The book was Power in the Blood by Donald Simpson. Simpson claimed that he had met a man and befriended him, and that eventually this man had confessed to being Bible John. Simpson also claimed that the man had tried to kill him at one point, and that there was evidence the killer had struck outside Glasgow. Indeed, there remain many unsolved west-coast murders, plus two unsolveds from Dundee in 1979 and 1980 – both victims were found stripped and strangled.

  It may be coincidence, of course, but the same day’s Scotland on Sunday broke the story that Strathclyde Police had new evidence in the ongoing Bible John investigation. Recent developments in DNA analysis had given them a genetic fingerprint from a trace of semen left on the third victim’s tights, and police had been asking as many of the original suspects as they could find to come forward to have a blood sample taken and analysed. One such suspect, John Irvine McInnes, had committed suicide in 1980, so a member of his family had given a blood sample instead. This seems to have proved a close enough match to warrant exhuming McInnes’ body so as to carry out further tests. In early February, the body was exhumed (along with that of McInnes’ mother, whose coffin had been placed atop her son’s). For those interested in the case, the long wait began.

  As I write (June 1996), the wait is still going on. But the feeling now is that police and their scientists will fail – indeed, already have failed – to find incontrovertible proof. For some, the seed has been sown anyway – John Irvine McInnes will remain the chief suspect in their minds – and it is true that his personal history, compared alongside the psychological profile of Bible John compiled at the time, makes for fascinating reading.

  But there is real doubt, too – some of it also based on offender profiling. Would a serial killer simply cease to kill, then wait eleven years to commit suicide? One newspaper posits that Bible John ‘got a fright’ because of the investigation, and this stopped him killing again, but according to at least one expert in the field, this simply fails to fit the recognised pattern. Then there’s the eye-witness, in whom chief investigator Joe Beattie had so much faith. Irvine McInnes took part in an identity parade a matter of days after the third murder. Helen Puttock’s sister failed to pick him out. She had shared a taxi with the killer, had watched her sister dance with him, had spent hours in and out of his company. In 1996, faced with photos of John Irvine McInnes, she says the same thing – the man who killed her sister did not have McInnes’ prominent ears.

  There are other questions – would the killer have given his real first name? Would the stories he told the two sisters during the taxi ride be true or false? Would he have gone ahead and killed his third victim, knowing he was leaving a witness behind? There are many out there, including police officers and numbering people like myself, who wou
ld refuse to be convinced even by a DNA match. For us, he’s still out there, and – as the Robert Black and Frederick West cases have shown – by no means alone.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to: Chris Thomson, for permission to quote from one of his songs; Dr Jonathan Wills for his views on Shetland life and the oil industry; Don and Susan Nichol, for serendipitous help with the research; the Energy Division of the Scottish Office Industry Department; Keith Webster, Senior Public Affairs Officer, Conoco UK; Richard Grant, Senior Public Affairs Officer, BP Exploration; Andy Mitchell, Public Affairs Advisor, Amerada Hess; Mobil North Sea; Bill Kirton, for his offshore safety expertise; Andrew O’Hagan, author of The Missing; Jerry Sykes, who found the book for me; Mike Ripley, for the video material; the inebriated oil-worker Lindsey Davis and I met on a train south of Aberdeen; Colin Baxter, Trading Standards Officer extraordinaire; my researchers Linda and Iain; staff of the Caledonian Thistle Hotel, Aberdeen; Grampian Regional Council; Ronnie Mackintosh; Ian Docherty; Patrick Stoddart; and Eva Schegulla for the e-mail. Grateful thanks as ever to the staffs of the National Library of Scotland (especially the South Reading Room) and Edinburgh Central Library. I’d also like to thank the many friends and authors who got in touch when the Bible John case hit the headlines again early in 1996, either to commiserate or to offer suggestions for tweaks to the plot. My editor, Caroline Oakley, had faith throughout, and referred me to the James Ellroy quote at the start of my own book . . . Finally, a special thank you to Lorna Hepburn, who told me a story in the first place . . .

  Any ‘implags’ will be from the following: Fool’s Gold by Christopher Harvie; A Place in the Sun by Jonathan Wills; Innocent Passage: The Wreck of the Tanker Braer by Jonathan Wills and Karen Warner; Blood on the Thistle by Douglas Skelton; Bible John: Search for a Sadist by Patrick Stoddart; The Missing by Andrew O’Hagan.

  Major Weir’s quote – ‘creatures tamed by cruelty’ – is actually the title of Ron Butlin’s first poetry collection.

  Discussion points for Black & Blue

  Ian Rankin feels that Black & Blue is the book that all the previous Rebus novels had been leading to. Would you agree?

  DS Brian Holmes makes a return – how innocent is he, and does Rebus believe him?

  Black & Blue abounds with personal vendettas. Do they have parallels and patterns between them? How does Ian Rankin employ them in the structure of the story?

  Rebus is himself being hunted by the journalists; do they make him feel guilty? Does he realise that what’s happening to him is not dissimilar to how he tracks down criminals?

  DS Siobhan Clarke is now more confident, even telling jokes. In what other ways does this more mature attitude manifest itself?

  For much of the story, Bible John is more effective at hunting Johnny Bible than the police are. Why is this?

  How does Ian Rankin use the oil industry to examine Scotland’s industrial development? What does oil mean to Scotland, and to Black & Blue?

  What does Rebus think about the idea of the ‘frontier police’ who keep order on the oil platforms?

  How does Ian Rankin show Aberdeen to be a different type of city from Edinburgh?

  Ian Rankin claims that because of frustrations in his own personal life, in Black & Blue he used Rebus as his personal ‘punchbag’. Is this apparent?

  Considering the difficulties he has sustaining loving relationships with women, Rebus goes on to acknowledge that the problem lies somewhere within himself: ‘Rape was all about power; killing too, In Its way. And wasn’t power the ultimate male fantasy? And didn’t he sometimes dream of it too?’ How revealing are these comments?

  Consider the ways in which Ian Rankin might use the weather as a metaphor for what is happening in the story.

  Where does Rebus stand on the assertion that oil and politics cannot be separated?

  What is the message that Rebus receives on the streets of Aberdeen?

  Bible John makes a huge mistake and gives Rebus his business card. Should Rebus berate himself for not realising earlier the clue he’d been gifted?

  Is Bible John more concerned by physical strength or attitude? Why might that be?

  What is Rebus thinking when he finds himself crying? What do the people he’s identifying with say about him as a person?

  What are daughter Sammy’s motives for working with ex-cons?

  THE HANGING GARDEN

  For Miranda

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Book Two

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Book Three

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Afterword

  Discussion Points

  ‘If all time is eternally present

  All time is unredeemable.’

  T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’

  ‘I went to Scotland and found nothing

  there that looks like Scotland’

  Arthur Freed, Producer Brigadoon

  INTRODUCTION

  Having lived in France for six years, in the autumn of 1996 I moved back to Edinburgh with my family. I had left Scotland ten years previously, newly married and fresh from university. I was returning with two children and a full-time career as a novelist. Okay, so I wasn’t earning enough for the mortgage on a three-bedroom flat, but some of the uncertainties of the past had gone. I felt like a proper, grown-up writer, able to take on big moral themes under the guise of writing whodunits. Academe and literary circles might not take the form seriously, but I knew that the crime novel could say as much about human nature and the state of the world as any other branch of writerly endeavour. My next project was already well under way as we unpacked and started coming to terms with driving on the left (in our French-registered Peugeot). The genesis of this project had been a day-trip I’d made to a place called Oradour – a town which had, quite literally, died.

  All the six years I’d spent in France, I’d heard of this place, knew it was just over an hour’s drive away from our home in north-east Dordogne. Friends’ children went there on school trips, but I’d never made the effort. Then I remembered London. We’d lived there for four years before making the move to France. After we’d left, I’d thought with regret of all the things I hadn’t done, places I hadn’t bothered to visit. So, towards the end of our time in France, I took the drive north to Oradour.

  And was stunned.

  The town has been kept as a shrine to its victims. No one knows how many died there, the day the 3rd Company of the SS ‘Der Führer’ Regiment marched in and started rounding people up. Not far short of a thousand, the histories say. Corpses were set alight, or dropped down wells. Men, women, children: almost no one escaped the slaughter. During my time there, peering through windows into kitchens and living rooms, passing burned-out cars and the rusty carcass of the local tram, the overcast sky gave way to steady rain. I sought shelter in the church, but its roof was missing – torched by the Nazis. I got in close to one of its walls, and real
ised there were bullet-holes in the plaster all around me. This was where the women had been brought, a machine-gun pointed at them. So I headed for the small museum instead, with its displays of everyday objects: hairbrushes, pairs of spectacles . . . mementoes of the dead.

  But what really affected me about Oradour was the fact that the man responsible – the general who’d given the order for the massacre – had been captured by the Allies, but was then sent back to Germany to live out the rest of his days in industry and comfort. What sort of justice was that? There would be reasons for it, of course: probably to do with politics, with diplomacy, with secret deals and information traded. There were usually reasons for these things. I started doing some research, and along the way learned of a network called the Rat-Line (which you’ll read about in this book). I also became intrigued that the lessons of the past had not been learned. Atrocities were a daily occurrence in ex-Yugoslavia at this time. The West knew the identities of the men responsible, the men in charge – they were on our TV screens nightly, going about their butchers’ business. Yet little or nothing was being done to stop them.

  This sense of history repeating would form the basis for The Hanging Garden. Most of the book was written in France, but when I arrived in Edinburgh I knew I needed to do some final research on war criminals and how we have dealt with them in the past. So I went to the National Library on Edinburgh’s George IV Bridge – a place I’d haunted as a student, back when I’d been writing my first two novels – and did a search.

  And found something.

  Having decided, months before, that I wanted to write about Oradour, I’d scratched my head for a while. The sticking point was: how could I do so from the point of view of Detective Inspector John Rebus? The answer came eventually: I would have Rebus investigate an alleged Nazi war criminal who has been living quietly in Edinburgh for forty years or more. In this way, I could question the validity of prosecuting old men for their crimes of half a century before.