10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  When they were eight feet from the chair, the Weasel nodded and the man stood away, revealing to Rebus the terrified figure of a kid.

  A boy.

  Nine or ten, no older.

  One black eye, nose caked with blood, both cheeks bruised and a graze on his chin. Burst lip beginning to heal, trousers torn at the knees, one shoe missing.

  And a smell, as if he’d wet himself, maybe even worse.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ Rebus asked.

  ‘This,’ the Weasel said, ‘is the little bastard who stole the car. This is the little bastard who lost his nerve at a red light and gunned through it, losing control of the pedals because he could barely reach them. This ...’ The Weasel stepped forward, planted a hand on the kid’s shoulder. ‘This is the culprit.’

  Rebus looked at the faces around him. ‘Is this your idea of a joke?’

  ‘No joke, Rebus.’

  He looked at the boy. Dried tear-tracks. Eyes bloodshot from crying. Shoulders trembling. They’d tied his arms behind him. Tied his ankles to the chair-legs.

  ‘Puh-please, mister ...’ Dry, cracked voice. ‘I ... help me, puh-please ...’

  ‘Nicked the car,’ the Weasel recited, ‘then did the hit and run, got scared, and dumped the car near where he lives. Took the cassette and the tapes. He wanted the car for a race. That’s what they do, race cars around the schemes. This little runt can start an engine in ten seconds flat.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘So ... here we all are.’

  ‘Help me ...’

  Rebus recalling the city’s graffiti: Won’t Anyone Help? The Weasel nodding towards one of his men, the man producing a pickaxe-handle.

  ‘Or the screwdriver,’ the Weasel said. ‘Or whatever you like, really. We are at your command.’ And he gave a little bow.

  Rebus could hardly speak. ‘Cut the ropes.’

  Silence in the warehouse.

  ‘Cut those fucking ropes!’

  A sniff from the Weasel. ‘You heard the man, Tony.’

  Ca-chink of a flick-knife opening. Ropes severed like cutting through butter. Rebus walked to within inches of the boy.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘J-Jordan.’

  ‘Is that your first name or your second?’

  The boy looked at him. ‘First.’

  ‘Okay, Jordan.’ Rebus leaned down. The boy flinched, but did not resist as Rebus picked him up. He weighed almost nothing. Rebus started walking with him.

  ‘What now, Rebus?’ the Weasel asked. But Rebus didn’t answer. He carried the boy to the threshold, kicked open the door, stepped out into sunshine.

  ‘I’m ... I’m really sorry.’ The boy had a hand across his eyes, unused to the light. He was starting to cry.

  ‘You know what you did?’

  Jordan nodded. ‘I’ve been ... ever since that night. I knew it was bad ...’ Now the tears came.

  ‘Did they say who I was?’

  ‘Please don’t kill me.’

  ‘I’m not going to kill you, Jordan.’

  The boy blinked, trying to clear tears from his eyes, the better to know whether he was being lied to.

  ‘I think you’ve been through enough, pal,’ Rebus said. Then added: ‘I think we both have.’

  So after everything, it had come to this. Bob Dylan: ‘Simple Twist of Fate’. Segue to Leonard Cohen: ‘Is This What You Wanted?’

  Rebus didn’t know the answer to that.

  38

  Clean and sober, he went to the hospital. An open ward this time, set hours for visitors. No more darkened vigils. No return visit by Candice, though nurses spoke of regular phone calls by someone foreign-sounding. No way of knowing where she was. Maybe out there searching for her son. It didn’t matter, so long as she was safe. So long as she was in control.

  When he reached the ward’s far end, two women rose from their chairs so he could kiss them: Rhona and Patience. He had a carrier-bag with him, magazines and grapes. Sammy was sitting up, supported by three pillows, Pa Broon propped beside her. Her hair had been washed and brushed, and she was smiling at him.

  ‘Women’s magazines,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘They should be on the top-shelf.’

  ‘I need a few fantasies to sustain me in here,’ Sammy said. Rebus beamed at her, said hello, then bent down and kissed his daughter.

  The sun was shining as they walked through The Meadows – a rare day off for both. They held hands and watched people sunbathing and playing football. He knew Rhona was excited, and thought he knew why. But he wasn’t going to spoil things with speculation.

  ‘If you had a daughter, what would you call her?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Haven’t really thought about it.’

  ‘What about a son?’

  ‘I quite like Sam.’

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘When I was a kid, I had a bear called Sam. My mum knitted it for me.’

  ‘Sam...” She tried the name out. ‘It would work both ways, wouldn’t it?’

  He stopped, circled his arms around her waist. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, it could be Samuel or Samantha. You don’t get many of those – names that work both ways.’

  ‘I suppose not. Rhona, is there ...?’

  She put a finger to his lips, then kissed him. They walked on. There didn ‘t seem to be a cloud in the whole damned sky.

  Afterword

  My fictional French village of Villefranche d’Albarede owes its existence to the real village of Oradour-sur-Glâne, which was the subject of an attack by the 3rd Company of the SS ‘Der Führer’ regiment.

  On the afternoon of Saturday 10 June 1944, 3rd Company – known as ‘Das Reich’ – entered the village and rounded up everyone. The women and children were herded into the church, while the men were split into groups and marched to various barns and other buildings around the village. Then the slaughter began.

  Some 642 victims have been accounted for, but the estimate is that up to a thousand people may have perished that day. Only fifty-three corpses were ever identified. One boy from Lorraine, having first-hand knowledge of SS atrocities, managed to flee when the troops entered the village. Five men escaped the massacre in Laudy’s barn. Wounded, they were able to crawl from the burning building and hide until the next day. One woman escaped from the church, climbing out of a window after playing dead beside the corpse of her child.

  Soldiers went from house to house, finding villagers too sick or elderly to leave their beds. These people were shot and their houses set alight. Some of the bodies were hidden in mass graves, or dumped down wells and in bread ovens.

  General Lammerding was the commanding officer. On 9 June he’d ordered the deaths of ninety-nine hostages in Tulle. He also gave the order for the Oradour massacre. Later on in the war, Lammerding was captured by the British, who refused his extradition to France. Instead, he was returned to Düsseldorf, where he ran a successful company until his death in 1971.

  In the general euphoria of the Normandy landings, the tragedy at Oradour went almost unnoticed. Eventually, in January 1953, the trial opened in Bordeaux of sixty-five men identified as having been involved in the massacre. Of these sixty-five, only twenty-one were present: seven Germans, and fourteen natives of French Alsace. None of the men was of officer rank.

  Every individual found guilty at the Bordeaux trial left court a free man. A special Act of Amnesty had been passed, in the interests of national unity. (People in Alsace were disgruntled that their countrymen had been picked out for condemnation.) Meantime, the Germans were said to have already served their terms.

  As a result, Oradour broke off all relations with the French state, a rupture which lasted seventeen years.

  In May 1983, a man stood trial in East Berlin, charged with having been a lieutenant in ‘Das Reich’ during the Oradour massacre. He admitted everything, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  In June 1996, it was reported that around 12,000 foreign volunteers to the Waffen SS are stil
l receiving pensions from the Federal German government. One of these pensioners, a former Obersturmbannführer, was a participant at Oradour ...

  Oradour still stands as a shrine. The village has been left just the way it was on that day in June 1944.

  Discussion points for The Hanging Garden

  Regarding the time frame in The Hanging Garden, the most ambitious novel in the Rebus series so far, what is the effect of his reminiscences on the time when Sammy was a child? Does the reader link them emotionally to the memories of the only female survivor of the village massacre?

  What are Rebus’s thoughts on the politics behind the German officers who were apprehended by the Allies being returned to Germany in the 1950s to live ordinary lives?

  There are several sorts of ‘war’ in The Hanging Garden – discuss how they differ from one another, and what the similarities are.

  ‘Most of the gangsters Rebus had known, they’d had a worn look, undernourished but overfed. Telford had the look of some new strain of bacteria, not yet tested or understood.’ How does the reader respond to such a comment?

  Why had Rebus been so absent in his marriage, and in Sammy’s upbringing?

  Could it be claimed that Rebus is so drawn to Candice because she makes him feel useful (as well as the fact that looks-wise she reminds him of Sammy), while Sammy remains resolutely independent in her dealings with her father? Is Rebus exploiting Candice as much as other people are, only in a different way?

  ‘Each investigation is an act of remembrance, and remembrance is never wasted. Remembrance is the only way we learn.’ Would Rebus agree with this statement from David Levy, who is assisting the Holocaust Investigation Bureau?

  Why doesn’t Rebus like Ned Farlowe?

  Rebus has had a period of sobriety: does this help him to understand how easy it might be for a man to construct another life for himself?

  Initially Rebus’s instincts tell him that Lintz and Linzstek are one and the same person, but not whether it matters. Does this change as the plot unfolds?

  Similarly to Big Ger Cafferty, Lintz has the ability to connect on a deep emotional level with Rebus. Is this a good thing as far as Rebus is concerned?

  ‘Never get personally involved: it was the golden rule. And practically every case he worked, Rebus broke it. He sometimes felt that the reason he became so involved in his cases was that he had no life of his own. He could only live through other people.’ Does this characteristic make Rebus a good policeman?

  Is Rebus selling his soul to the devil when he does a deal with Cafferty?

  Rebus thinks of himself, in some senses, as a religious man, yet he doesn’t seek solace in that way when Sammy is hurt. Why might that be?

  When Jack Morton is killed does Rebus lose his emotional ballast? And does he blame himself?

  There are lots of musical references; does it matter if the reader isn’t familiar with them? What sort of extra dimension do they add to the narrative?

  DEAD SOULS

  To my long-suffering editor, Caroline Oakley

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Part One: Lost

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  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

  Part Two: Found

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  Discussion Points

  The world is full of missing persons, and their numbers increase all the time. The space they occupy lies somewhere between what we know about the ways of being alive and what we hear about the ways of being dead. They wander there, unaccompanied and unknowable, like shadows of people.

  Andrew O’Hagan, The Missing

  Once I caught a train to Cardenden by mistake . . . When we reached Cardenden we got off and waited for the next train back to Edinburgh. I was very tired and if Cardenden had looked more promising, I think I would have simply stayed there. And if you’ve ever been to Cardenden you’ll know how bad things must have been.

  Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum

  INTRODUCTION

  Dead Souls was wholly conceived and written in Edinburgh – the first time this had happened since Rebus’s initial outing in Knots & Crosses. The intervening novels had been written during my four-year stint in London, or else in the further six years spent in rural France. Now I was back in Edinburgh . . . and worried that I would no longer be able to write about the place. This was a realistic fear, too: I had used geographical distance to help me recreate Edinburgh as a fictionalised city. How would I cope now that I could take a short stroll and see what I’d been getting wrong all those years?

  I needn’t have worried.

  Dead Souls is named after a song by Joy Division. As its title might suggest, it’s not a number you would dance to at weddings, unless you count the Addams Family among your in-laws. I was aware, of course, of Joy Division’s source material – the unfinished novel Dead Souls by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. The phrase ‘tortured genius’ might have been coined with Gogol in mind. Having published the first half of Dead Souls, he ended up burning the drafts of its second half. Later on, he started work on the book again, until his religious teacher persuaded him to renounce literature altogether. So the latest version of the second half went up in flames again, and Gogol died ten days later.

  My own book is divided into two parts, entitled ‘Lost’ and ‘Found’. Both begin with an italicised quotation from Gogol’s work, the one accompanying ‘Found’ being the last words recorded by him. The title of the book came to me early. I knew I wanted to write about MisPers – missing persons. I had become interested in them when doing research for Black & Blue. In a non-fiction work entitled The Missing (which I had read because it contained passages about the Bible John murders), journalist Andrew O’Hagan had discussed the phenomenon of loss and the hole left in the fabric of our lives when someone vanishes. Inspired by O’Hagan’s work, I’d written a seventy-page novella called Death Is Not The End (itself a Bob Dylan title, but known to me through a contemporary reworking by Nick Cave). This novella had been written at the behest of an American publisher, who then seemed to find no immediate market for it. Worried that it might never see the light of day, I decided to ‘cannibalise’ parts of the story for my next full-length novel – which is why two versions of the story exist, albeit with different outcomes.

  Okay, so I was ready to rework my novella into a novel. But another real-life story had caught my eye in the interim. On a rough housing estate in Stirling, the locals had been roused by news that a convicted paedophile was living quietly in their midst. The vigilante instinct took over, and the man was chased out. Two t
hings struck me about this. One was that it continued the theme I’d touched on in my previous novel The Hanging Garden – namely, how do we begin to measure right and wrong? The other was that Rebus’s knee-jerk reaction to news of a ‘hidden’ paedophile would be the same as that of many people of his generation, class and philosophy: he’d ‘out’ the bugger, and damn the consequences. Well, I’ve seldom shirked a challenge: I wanted to see if I could change his mind about a few things . . .

  I also wanted to take him home, back to where he grew up in central Fife. Although many of my books have had cause to send Rebus to Fife, Dead Souls is my most personal investigation of my own background. When high-school ‘flame’ Janice reminisces with Rebus, she is using my own memories and anecdotes. We learn more, too, about Rebus’s childhood, including that he was born in a pre-fab (as I was) but soon moved to a terraced house in a cul-de-sac (as I did). We find out that, like me, he drank in his home town’s Goth pub (Goth being short for Gothenburg), and that his father brought a silk scarf back from World War II (as did mine). Much of this is reflected in the names I give to Rebus’s school friends: Brian and Janice Mee. They’re ‘me’, you see, as are characteristics of many of my other creations, Rebus chief among them.

  There are plenty of in-jokes in the book, despite the sombre tone of its material. We meet Harry, ‘the rudest barman in Edinburgh’ (who, in real life, is now landlord of the Oxford Bar and can afford to be rude only to a select few of us who expect no less of him). The nightclub in the book is called Gaitano’s, after the American crime writer Nick Gaitano, who also wrote under his real name of Eugene Izzi. He’d been found dead shortly before I started work on the book, in what appeared, at least initially, to be mysterious circumstances. The headless coachman mentioned at the start of the book (and later on, as the name of a pub) is actually Major Weir, a real-life character from Edinburgh’s dark side. Weir and his sister were accused in 1678 of being warlock and witch. Both were eventually executed, despite having lived lives of exemplary piety, and with only the Major’s rambling and befuddled confession as ‘proof’.