10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Brave of you to let us see you in shorts.’

  But the Farmer was not to be deflected. Rebus could think of three explanations for the red veins highlighted on Watson’s face: exertion, spirits, or anger. No sign of breathlessness, so rule out the first. And when the Farmer drank whisky, it didn’t just affect his cheeks: his whole face took on a roseate glow and seemed to contract until it became puckish.

  Which left anger.

  ‘Let’s get down to it,’ Watson said, glancing at his watch. Neither man had much time. The Farmer opened the envelope and shook a packet of photographs on to his desk, then opened the packet and tossed the photos towards Rebus.

  ‘Look for yourself.’

  Rebus looked. They were the photos from Darren Rough’s camera. The Farmer reached into his drawer to pull out a file. Rebus kept looking. Zoo animals, caged and behind walls. And in some of the shots – not all of them, but a fair proportion – children. The camera had focused on these children, involved in conversations among themselves, or chewing sweets, or making faces at the animals. Rebus felt immediate relief, and looked to the Farmer for a confirmation that wasn’t there.

  ‘According to Mr Rough,’ the Farmer was saying, studying a sheet from the file, ‘the photos comprise part of a portfolio.’

  ‘I’ll bet they do.’

  ‘Of a day in the life of Edinburgh Zoo.’

  ‘Sure.’

  The Farmer cleared his throat. ‘He’s enrolled in a photography night-class. I’ve checked and it’s true. It’s also true that his project is the zoo.’

  ‘And there are kids in almost every shot.’

  ‘In fewer than half the shots, actually.’

  Rebus slid the photos across the desk. ‘Come on, sir.’

  ‘John, Darren Rough has been out of prison the best part of a year and has yet to show any sign of reoffending.’

  ‘I heard he’d gone south.’

  ‘And moved back again.’

  ‘He ran for it when he saw me.’

  The Farmer just stared the comment down. ‘There’s nothing here, John,’ he said.

  ‘A guy like Rough, he doesn’t go to the zoo for the birds and the bees, believe me.’

  ‘It wasn’t even his choice of project. His tutor assigned it.’

  ‘Yes, Rough would have preferred a play-park.’ Rebus sighed. ‘What does his lawyer say? Rough was always good at roping in a lawyer.’

  ‘Mr Rough just wants to be left in peace.’

  ‘The way he left those kids in peace?’

  The Farmer sat back. ‘Does the word “atonement” mean anything to you, John?’

  Rebus shook his head. ‘Not applicable.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Ever seen a leopard change its spots?’

  The Farmer checked his watch. ‘I know the two of you have a history.’

  ‘I wasn’t the one he made the complaint against.’

  ‘No,’ the Farmer said, ‘Jim Margolies was.’

  They left that in the air for a moment, lost in their own thoughts.

  ‘So we do nothing?’ Rebus queried at last. The word “atonement” was flitting about inside his skull. His friend the priest had been known to use it: reconciliation of God and man through Christ’s life and death. A far cry from Darren Rough. Rebus wondered what Jim Margolies had been atoning for when he’d pitched himself off Salisbury Crags . . .

  ‘His sheet’s clean.’ The Farmer reached into his desk’s deep bottom drawer, pulled out a bottle and two glasses. Malt whisky. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but I need one of these before a funeral.’

  Rebus nodded, watching the man pour. Cascading sound of mountain streams. Usquebaugh in the Gaelic. Uisge: water; beatha: life. Water of life. Beatha sounding like ‘birth’. Each drink was a birth to Rebus’s mind. But as his doctor kept telling him, each drop was a little death, too. He lifted the glass to his nose, nodded appreciation.

  ‘Another good man gone,’ the Farmer said.

  And suddenly there were ghosts swirling around the room, just on the periphery of Rebus’s vision, and chief amongst them Jack Morton. Jack, his old colleague, now three months dead. The Byrds: ‘He Was a Friend of Mine’. A friend who refused to stay buried. The Farmer followed Rebus’s eyes, but saw nothing. Drained his glass and put the bottle away again.

  ‘Little and often,’ he said. And then, as though the whisky had opened some bargain between them: ‘There are ways and means, John.’

  ‘Of what, sir?’ Jack had melted into the windowpanes.

  ‘Of coping.’ Already the whisky was working on the Farmer’s face, turning it triangular. ‘Since what happened to Jim Margolies . . . well, it’s made some of us think more about the stresses of the job.’ He paused. ‘Too many mistakes, John.’

  ‘I’m having a bad patch, that’s all.’

  ‘A bad patch has its reasons.’

  ‘Such as?’

  The Farmer left the question unanswered, knowing perhaps that Rebus was busy answering it for himself: Jack Morton’s death; Sammy in a wheelchair.

  And whisky a therapist he could afford, at least in monetary terms.

  ‘I’ll manage,’ he said at last, not even managing to convince himself.

  ‘All by yourself?’

  ‘That’s the way, isn’t it?’

  The Farmer shrugged. ‘And meantime we all live with your mistakes?’

  Mistakes: like pulling men towards Darren Rough, who wasn’t the man they wanted. Allowing the poisoner open access to the meerkats – an apple tossed into their enclosure. Luckily a keeper had walked past, picked it up before the animals could. He’d known about the scare, handed it in for testing.

  Positive for rat poison.

  Rebus’s fault.

  ‘Come on,’ the Farmer said, after a final glance at his watch, ‘let’s get moving.’

  So that once again Rebus’s speech had gone unspoken, the one about how he’d lost any sense of vocation, any feeling of optimism about the role – the very existence – of policing. About how these thoughts scared him, left him either sleepless or scarred by bad dreams. About the ghosts which had come to haunt him, even in daytime.

  About how he didn’t want to be a cop any more.

  Jim Margolies had had it all.

  Ten years younger than Rebus, he was being tipped for accelerated advancement. They were waiting for him to learn the final few lessons, after which the rank of detective inspector would have been shed like a final skin. Bright, personable, a canny strategist with an eye to internal politics. Handsome, too, keeping fit playing rugby for his old school, Boroughmuir. He came from a good background and had connections to the Edinburgh establishment, his wife charming and elegant, his young daughter an acknowledged beauty. Liked by his fellow officers, and with an enviable ratio of arrests to convictions. The family lived quietly in The Grange, attended a local church, seemed the perfect little unit in every way.

  The Farmer kept the commentary going, voice barely audible. He’d started on the drive to the church, kept it up during the service, and was closing with a graveside peroration.

  ‘He had it all, John. And then he goes and does something like that. What makes a man . . . I mean, what goes through his head? This was someone even older officers looked up to – I mean the cynical old buggers within spitting distance of their pension. They’ve seen everything in their time, but they’d never seen anyone quite like Jim Margolies.’

  Rebus and the Farmer – their station’s representatives – were towards the back of the crowd. And it was a good crowd, too. Lots of brass, alongside rugby players, churchgoers, and neighbours. Plus extended family. And standing by the open grave, the widow dressed in black, managing to look composed. She’d lifted her daughter off the ground. The daughter in a white lace dress, her hair thick and long and ringlet-blonde, face shining as she waved bye-bye to the wooden casket. With the blonde hair and white dress, she looked like an angel. Perhaps that had been the intention
. Certainly, she stood out from the crowd.

  Margolies’ parents were there, too. The father looking ex-forces, stiff-backed as a grandfather clock but with both trembling hands gripping the silver knob of a walking-stick. The mother teary-eyed, fragile, a veil falling to her wet mouth. She’d lost both her children. According to the Farmer, Jim’s sister had killed herself too, years back. History of mental instability, and she’d slashed her wrists. Rebus looked again at the parents, who had now outlived both their offspring. His mind flashed to his own daughter, wondering how scarred she was, scarred in places you couldn’t see.

  Other family members nestled close to the parents, seeking comfort or ready to offer support – Rebus couldn’t tell which.

  ‘Nice family,’ the Farmer was whispering. Rebus almost perceived a whiff of envy. ‘Hannah’s won competitions.’

  Hannah being the daughter. She was eight, Rebus learned. Blue-eyed like her father and perfect-skinned. The widow’s name was Katherine.

  ‘Dear Lord, the sheer waste.’

  Rebus thought of the Farmer’s photographs, of the way individuals met and interlaced, forming a pattern which drew in others, colours merging or taking on discernible contrasts. You made friends, married into a new family, you had children who played with the children of other parents. You went to work, met colleagues who became friends. Bit by bit your identity became subsumed, no longer an individual and yet stronger somehow as a result.

  Except it didn’t always work that way. Conflicts could arise: work perhaps, or the slow realisation that you’d made a wrong decision some time back. Rebus had seen it in his own life, had chosen profession over marriage, pushing his wife away. She’d taken their daughter with her. He felt now that he’d made the right choice for the wrong reasons, that he should have owned up to his failings from the start. His work had merely given him a reasonable excuse for bailing out.

  He wondered about Jim Margolies, who had thrown himself to his death in the dark. He wondered what had driven him to that final stark decision. No one seemed to have a clue. Rebus had come across plenty of suicides over the years, from bungled to assisted and all points in between. But there had always been some kind of explanation, some breaking point reached, some deep-seated sense of loss or failure or foreboding. Leaf Hound: ‘Drowned My Life in Fear’.

  But when it came to Jim Margolies . . . nothing clicked. There was no sense to it. His widow, parents, workmates . . . no one had been able to offer the first hint of an explanation. He’d been declared A1 fit. Things had been fine on the work front and at home. He loved his wife, his daughter. Money was not a problem.

  But something had been a problem.

  Dear Lord, the sheer waste.

  And the cruelty of it: to leave everyone not only grieving but questioning, wondering if they were somehow to blame.

  To erase your own life when life was so precious.

  Looking towards the trees, Rebus saw Jack Morton standing there, seeming as young as when the two had first met.

  Earth was being tossed down on to the coffin lid, a final futile wake-up call. The Farmer started walking away, hands clasped behind his back.

  ‘As long as I live,’ he said, ‘I’ll never understand it.’

  ‘You never know your luck,’ said Rebus.

  3

  He stood atop Salisbury Crags. There was a fierce wind blowing, and he turned up the collar of his coat. He’d been home to change out of his funeral clothes and should have been heading back for the station – he could see St Leonard’s from here – but something had made him take this detour.

  Behind and above him, a few hardy souls had achieved the summit of Arthur’s Seat. Their reward: the panoramic view, plus ears that would sting for hours. With his fear of heights, Rebus didn’t get too close to the edge. The landscape was extraordinary. It was as though God had slapped his hand down on to Holyrood Park, flattening part of it but leaving this sheer face of rock, a reminder of the city’s origins.

  Jim Margolies had jumped from here. Or a sudden gust had taken him: that was the less plausible, but more easily digested alternative. His widow had stated her belief that he’d been ‘walking, just walking’, and had lost his footing in the dark. But this raised unanswerable questions. What would take him from his bed in the middle of the night? If he had worries, why did he need to think them out at the top of Salisbury Crags, several miles from his home? He lived in The Grange, in what had been his wife’s parents’ house. It was raining that night, yet he didn’t take the car. Would a desperate man notice he was getting soaked . . .?

  Looking down, Rebus saw the site of the old brewery, where they were going to build the new Scottish parliament. The first in three hundred years, and sited next to a theme park. Nearby stood the Greenfield housing scheme, a compact maze of high-rise blocks and sheltered accommodation. He wondered why the Crags should be so much more impressive than the man-made ingenuity of high-rises, then reached into his pocket for a folded piece of paper. He checked an address, looked back down on to Greenfield, and knew he had one more detour to make.

  Greenfield’s flat-roofed tower blocks had been built in the mid-1960s and were showing their age. Dark stains bloomed on the discoloured harling. Overflow pipes dripped water on to cracked paving slabs. Rotting wood was flaking from the window surrounds. The wall of one ground-floor flat, its windows boarded up, had been painted to identify the one-time tenant as ‘Junky Scum’.

  No council planner had ever lived here. No director of housing or community architect. All the council had done was move in problem tenants and tell everyone central heating was on its way. The estate had been built on the flat bottom of a bowl of land, so that Salisbury Crags loomed monstrously over the whole. Rebus rechecked the address on the paper. He’d had dealings in Greenfield before. It was far from the worst of the city’s estates, but still had its troubles. It was early afternoon now, and the streets were quiet. Someone had left a bicycle, missing its front wheel, in the middle of the road. Further along stood a pair of shopping trolleys, nose to nose as though deep in local gossip. In the midst of the six eleven-storey blocks stood four neat rows of terraced bungalows, complete with pocket-handkerchief gardens and low wooden fences. Net curtains covered most of the windows, and above each door a burglar alarm had been secured to the wall.

  Part of the tarmac arena between the tower blocks had been given over to a play area. One boy was pulling another along on a sledge, imagining snow as the runners scraped across the ground. Rebus called out the words ‘Cragside Court’ and the boy on the sledge waved in the direction of one of the blocks. When Rebus got up close to it, he saw that a sign on the wall identifying the building had been defaced so that ‘Cragside’ read ‘Crap-site’. A window on the second floor swung open.

  ‘You needn’t bother,’ a woman’s voice boomed. ‘He’s not here.’

  Rebus stood back and angled his head upwards.

  ‘Who is it I’m supposed to be looking for?’

  ‘Trying to be smart?’

  ‘No, I just didn’t know there was a clairvoyant on the premises. Is it your husband or your boyfriend I’m after?’

  The woman stared down at him, made up her mind that she’d spoken too soon. ‘Never mind,’ she said, pulling her head back in and closing the window.

  There was an intercom system, but only the numbers of flats, no names. He pulled at the door; it was unlocked anyway. He waited a couple of minutes for the lift to come, then let it shudder its way slowly up to the fifth floor. A walkway, open to the elements, led him past the front doors of half a dozen flats until he was standing outside 5/14 Cragside Court. There was a window, but curtained with what looked like a frayed blue bedsheet. The door showed signs of abuse: failed break-ins maybe, or just people kicking at it because there was no bell or knocker. No nameplate, but that didn’t matter. Rebus knew who lived here.

  Darren Rough.

  The address was new to Rebus. When he’d helped build the case against Rough four
years before, Rough had been living in a flat on Buccleuch Street. Now he was back in Edinburgh, and Rebus was keen for him to know just how welcome he was. Besides, he had a couple of questions for Darren Rough, questions about Jim Margolies . . .

  The only problem was, he got the feeling the flat was empty. He tried one half-hearted thump at both door and window. When there was no response, he leaned down to peer through the letterbox, but found it had been blocked from inside. Either Rough didn’t want anyone looking in, or else he’d been getting unwelcome deliveries. Straightening up, Rebus turned and rested his arms on the balcony railing. He found himself staring straight down on to the kids’ playground. Kids: an estate like Greenfield would be full of kids. He turned back to study Rough’s abode. No graffiti on walls or door, nothing to identify the tenant as ‘Pervo Scum’. Down at ground level, the sledge had taken a corner too fast, throwing off its rider. A window below Rebus opened noisily.

  ‘I saw you, Billy Horman! You did that on purpose!’ The same woman, her words aimed at the boy who’d been pulling the sledge.

  ‘Never did!’ he yelled back.

  ‘You fucking did! I’ll murder you.’ Then, tone changing: ‘Are you all right, Jamie? I’ve told you before about playing with that wee bastard. Now get in here!’

  The injured boy rubbed a hand beneath his nose – as close as he was going to get to defiance – then made his way towards the tower block, glancing back at his friend. Their shared look lasted only a second or two, but it managed to convey that they were still friends, that the adult world could never break that bond.

  Rebus watched the sledge-puller, Billy Horman, shuffle away, then walked down three floors. The woman’s flat was easy to find. He could hear her shouting from thirty yards away. He wondered if she constituted a problem tenant; got the feeling few would dare to complain to her face . . .

  The door was solid, recently painted dark blue, and boasting a spy-hole. Net curtains at the window. They twitched as the woman checked who her caller was. When she opened the door, her son darted back out and along the walkway.