10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  ‘He’s a brainy one,’ Janice’s mother said, handing Rebus a framed photograph of Damon Mee. ‘Plenty of certificates from school. Works hard. Saving to get married.’

  The photo showed a smiling imp, not long out of school.

  ‘We gave the most recent pictures to the police,’ Janice explained. Rebus nodded: he’d seen them in the file. All the same, when a packet of holiday snaps was handed to him, he went through them slowly: it saved having to look at the expectant faces. He felt like a doctor, expected to produce both immediate diagnosis and remedy. The photos showed a face more careworn than in the framed print. The impish smile remained, but noticeably older: some effort had gone into it. There was something behind the eyes, disenchantment maybe. Damon’s parents were in a few of the photos.

  ‘We all went together,’ Brian explained. ‘The whole family.’

  Beaches, a big white hotel, poolside games. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Lanzarote,’ Janice said, handing him his tea. ‘Do you still take sugar?’

  ‘Haven’t done for years,’ Rebus said. In a couple of the pictures she was wearing her bikini: good body for her age, or any age come to that. He tried not to linger.

  ‘Can I take a couple of the close-ups?’ he asked. Janice looked at him. ‘Of Damon.’ She nodded and he put the other photos back in the packet.

  ‘We’re really grateful,’ someone said: Janice’s mum? Brian’s? Rebus couldn’t tell.

  ‘You said his girlfriend’s called Helen?’

  Brian nodded. He’d lost some hair and put on weight, his face jowly. There was a row of cheap trophies above the mantelpiece: darts and pool, pub sports. He reckoned Brian kept in training most nights. Janice . . . Janice looked the same as ever. No, that wasn’t strictly true. She had wisps of grey in her hair. But all the same, talking to her was like stepping back into a previous age.

  ‘Does Helen live locally?’ he asked.

  ‘Practically round the corner.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to her.’

  ‘I’ll give her a bell.’ Brian got to his feet, left the room.

  ‘Where does Damon work?’ Rebus asked, for want of a better question.

  ‘Same place as his dad,’ Janice said, lighting a cigarette. Rebus raised an eyebrow: at school, she’d been anti-tobacco. She saw his look and smiled.

  ‘He got a job in packaging,’ her dad said. He seemed frail, chin quivering. Rebus wondered if he’d had a stroke. One side of his face looked slack. ‘He’s learning the ropes. It’ll be management soon.’

  Working-class nepotism, jobs handed down from father to son. Rebus was surprised it still existed.

  ‘Lucky to find any work at all around here,’ Mrs Playfair added.

  ‘Are things bad?’

  She made a tutting sound, dismissing the question.

  ‘Remember the old pit, John?’ Janice asked.

  Of course he remembered it, and the bing and the wilderness around it. Long walks on summer evenings, stopping for kisses that seemed to last hours. Wisps of coal-smoke rising from the bing, the dross within still smouldering.

  ‘It’s all been levelled now, turned into parkland. They’re talking about building a mining museum.’

  Mrs Playfair tutted again. ‘All it’ll do is remind us what we once had.’

  ‘Job creation,’ her daughter said.

  ‘They used to call Cowdenbeath the Chicago of Fife,’ Brian Mee’s mother added.

  ‘The Blue Brazil,’ Mr Playfair said, giving a croaking laugh. He meant Cowdenbeath football club, the nickname a self-imposed piece of irony. They called themselves the Blue Brazil because they were rubbish.

  ‘Helen’ll be here in a minute,’ Brian said, coming back in.

  ‘Are you not eating any cake, Inspector?’ added Mrs Playfair.

  On the drive back to Edinburgh, Rebus thought back to his chat with Helen Cousins. She hadn’t been able to add much to Rebus’s picture of Damon, and hadn’t been there the night he’d vanished. She’d been out with friends. It was a Friday ritual: Damon went out with ‘the lads’, she went out with ‘the girls’. He’d spoken with one of Damon’s companions; the other had been out. He’d learned nothing helpful.

  As he crossed the Forth Road Bridge, he thought about the symbol Fife had decided upon for its ‘Welcome to Fife’ signs: the Forth Rail Bridge. Not an identity so much as an admission of failure, recognition that Fife was for many people a conduit or mere adjunct to Edinburgh.

  Helen Cousins had worn black eyeliner and crimson lipstick and would never be pretty. Acne had carved cruel lines into her sallow face. Her hair had been dyed black and fell to a gelled fringe. When asked what she thought had happened to Damon, she’d just shrugged and folded her arms, crossing one leg over the other in a refusal to take any blame he might be trying to foist on her.

  Joey, who’d been at Guiser’s that night, had been similarly reticent.

  ‘Just a night out,’ he’d said. ‘Nothing unusual about it.’

  ‘And nothing different about Damon?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Was he maybe preoccupied? Did he look nervous?’

  A shrug: the apparent extent of Joey’s concern for his friend . . .

  Rebus knew he was headed home, meaning Patience’s flat. But as he stop-started between the lights on Queens-ferry Road, he thought maybe he’d go to the Oxford Bar. Not for a drink, maybe just for a cola or a coffee, and some company. He’d drink a soft drink and listen to the gossip.

  So he drove past Oxford Terrace, stopped at the foot of Castle Street. Walked up the slope towards the Ox. Edinburgh Castle was just over the rise. The best view you could get of it was from a burger place on Princes Street. He pushed open the door to the pub, feeling heat and smelling smoke. He didn’t need cigarettes in the Ox: breathing was like killing a ten-pack. Coke or a coffee, he was having trouble making up his mind. Harry was on duty tonight. He lifted an empty pint glass and waved it in Rebus’s direction.

  ‘Aye, OK then,’ Rebus said, like it was the easiest decision he’d ever made.

  He got in at quarter to midnight. Patience was watching TV. She didn’t say much about his drinking these days: silence every bit as effective as lectures had ever been. But she wrinkled her nose at the cigarette smoke clinging to his clothes, so he dumped them in the washing basket and took a shower. She was in bed by the time he got out. There was a fresh glass of water his side of the bed.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, draining it with two paracetamol.

  ‘How was your day?’ she asked: automatic question, automatic response.

  ‘Not so bad. Yours?’

  A sleepy grunt in reply. She had her eyes closed. There were things Rebus wanted to say, questions he’d like to ask. What are we doing here? Do you want me out? He thought maybe Patience had the same questions or similar. Somehow they never got asked; fear of the answers, perhaps, and what those answers would mean. Who in the world relished failure?

  ‘I went to a funeral,’ he told her. ‘A guy I knew.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I didn’t really know him that well.’

  ‘What did he die of?’ Head still on the pillow, eyes closed.

  ‘A fall.’

  ‘Accident?’

  She was drifting away from him. He spoke anyway. ‘His widow, she’d dressed their daughter to look like an angel. One way of dealing with it, I suppose.’ He paused, listening to Patience’s breathing grow regular. ‘I went to Fife tonight, back to the old town. Friends I haven’t seen in years.’ He looked at her. ‘An old flame, someone I could have ended up married to.’ Touched her hair. ‘No Edinburgh, no Dr Patience Aitken.’ His eyes turned towards the window. No Sammy . . . maybe no job in the police either.

  No ghosts.

  When she was asleep, he went back through to the living room and plugged headphones into the hi-fi. He’d added a record deck to her CD system. In a bag under the bookshelf he found his last purchases from Backbeat Record
s: Light of Darkness and Writing on the Wall, two Scottish bands he vaguely remembered from times past. As he sat to listen, he wondered why it was he was only ever happy on rewind. He thought back to times when he’d been happy, realising that at the time he hadn’t felt happy: it was only in retrospect that it dawned on him. Why was that? He sat back with eyes closed. Incredible String Band: ‘The Half-Remarkable Question’. Segue to Brian Eno: ‘Everything Merges with the Night’. He saw Janice Playfair the way she’d been the night she’d laid him out, the night that had changed everything. And he saw Alec Chisholm, who’d walked away from school one day and never been seen again. He didn’t have Alec’s face, just a vague outline and a way of standing, of composing himself. Alec the brainy one, the one who was going to go far.

  Only nobody’d expected him to go the way he did.

  Without opening his eyes, Rebus knew Jack Morton was seated in the chair across from him. Could Jack hear the music? He never spoke, so it was hard to know if sounds meant anything to him. He was waiting for the track called ‘Bogeyman’; listening and waiting . . .

  It was nearly dawn when, on her way back from the toilet, Patience removed the headphones from his sleeping form and threw a blanket over him.

  6

  There were three men in the room, all in uniform, all wanting to hit Cary Oakes. He could see it in their eyes, in the way they stood half-tensed, cheekbones working at wads of gum. He made a sudden movement, but only stretching his legs out, shifting his weight on the chair, arching his head back so it caught the full glare of the sun, streaming through the high window. Bathed in heat and light, he felt the smile stretch across his face. His mother had always told him, ‘Your face shines when you smile, Cary.’ Crazy old woman, even back then. She’d had one of those double sinks in the kitchen, with a mangle you could fix between them. Wash the clothes in one sink, then through the mangle into the other. He’d stuck the tips of his fingers against the rollers once, started cranking the handle until it hurt.

  Three prison guards: that’s what they reckoned Cary Oakes was worth. Three guards, and chains for his legs and arms.

  ‘Hey, guys,’ he said, pointing his chin at them. ‘Take your best shot.’

  ‘Can it, Oakes.’

  Cary Oakes grinned again. He’d forced a reaction: of such small victories were his days made. The guard who’d spoken, the one with the tag identifying him as SAUNDERS, did tend towards the excitable. Oakes narrowed his eyes and imagined the moustached face pressed against a mangle, imagined the strength needed to force that face all the way through. Oakes rubbed his stomach; not so much as an ounce of flab there, despite the food they tried to serve him. He stuck to vegetables and fruit, water and juices. Had to keep the brain in gear. A lot of the other prisoners, they’d slipped into neutral, engines revving but heading nowhere. A stretch of confinement could do that to you, make you start believing things that weren’t true. Oakes kept up with events, had magazine and newspaper subscriptions, watched current affairs on TV and avoided everything else, except maybe a little sport. But even sport was a kind of novocaine. Instead of watching the screen, he watched the other faces, saw them heavy-lidded, no need to concentrate, like babies being spoon-fed contentment, bellies and brains filled to capacity with warmed-over gunk.

  He started whistling a Beatles song: ‘Good Day, Sunshine’, wondering if any of the guards would know it. Potential for another reaction. But then the door opened and his attorney came in. His fifth lawyer in sixteen years, not a bad average, batting .300. This lawyer was young – mid-twenties – and wore blue blazers with cream slacks, a combination which made him look like a kid trying on his dad’s clothes. The blazers had brass-effect buttons and intricate designs on the breast pocket.

  ‘Ahoy, shipmate!’ Oakes cried, not shifting in his chair.

  His lawyer sat down opposite him at the table. Oakes put his hands behind his head, rattling the chains.

  ‘Any chance of removing those from my client?’ the lawyer asked.

  ‘For your own protection, sir.’ The stock response.

  Oakes used both hands to scratch his shaved head. ‘Know those divers and spacemen? Use weighted boots, necessary tool of the trade. I reckon when I lose these chains, I’m going to float up to the ceiling. I can make my living in freak shows: the human fly, see him scale the walls. Man, imagine the possibilities. I can float up to second-floor windows and watch all the ladies getting ready for bed.’ He turned his head to the guards. ‘Any of you guys married?’

  The lawyer was ignoring this. He had his job to do, opening the briefcase and lifting out the paperwork. Wherever lawyers went, paper went with them. Lots of paper. Oakes tried not to look interested.

  ‘Mr Oakes,’ the lawyer said, ‘it’s just a matter of detail now.’

  ‘I’ve always enjoyed detail.’

  ‘Some papers that have to be signed by various officials.’

  ‘See, guys,’ Oakes called to the guards, ‘I told you no prison could hold Cary Oakes! OK, so it’s taken me fifteen years, but, hey, nobody’s perfect.’ He laughed, turning to his lawyer. ‘So how long should all these . . . details take?’

  ‘Days rather than weeks.’

  Inside, Oakes’s heart was pumping. His ears were hissing with the intensity of it, the swell of apprehension and anticipation. Days . . .

  ‘But I haven’t finished painting my cell. I want it left pretty for the next tenant.’

  Finally the attorney smiled, and Oakes knew him in that instant: working his way up in Daddy’s practice; reviled by his elders, mistrusted by his peers. Was he spying on them, reporting back to the old man? How could he prove himself? If he joined them for drinks on a Friday night, loosening his tie and mussing up his hair, they felt uncomfortable. If he kept his distance, he was a cold fish. And what about the father? The old man couldn’t have anyone accusing him of nepotism, the boy had to learn the hard way. Give him the shitty-stick cases, the no-hopers, the ones that left you needing a shower and change of clothes. Make him prove himself. Long hours of thankless toil, a shining example to everyone else in the firm.

  All this discerned from a single smile, the smile of a half-shy, self-conscious drone who dreamt of being King Bee, who perhaps even harboured little fantasies of patricide and succession.

  ‘You’ll be deported, of course,’ the prince was saying now.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were in this country illegally, Mr Oakes.’

  ‘I’ve been here nearly half my life.’

  ‘Nevertheless . . .’

  Nevertheless . . . His mother’s word. Every time he had an excuse prepared, some story to explain the situation, she’d listen in silence, then take a deep breath, and it was like he could see the word forming in the air that issued from her mouth. During his trial, he’d rehearsed little conversations with her.

  ‘Mother, I’ve been a good son, haven’t I?’

  ‘Nevertheless . . .’

  ‘Nevertheless, I killed two people.’

  ‘Really, Cary? You’re sure it was only two . . .?’

  He sat up in his chair. ‘So let them deport me, I’ll come straight back.’

  ‘It won’t be so easy. I can’t see you securing a tourist visa this time, Mr Oakes.’

  ‘I don’t need one. You’re behind the times.’

  ‘Your name will be on record . . .’

  ‘I’ll walk across from Canada or Mexico.’

  The lawyer shifted in his seat. He didn’t like to hear this.

  ‘I have to come back and see my pals,’ nodding towards the guards. ‘They’ll miss me when I’m gone. And so will their wives.’

  ‘Fuck you, slime.’ Saunders again.

  Oakes beamed at his lawyer. ‘Isn’t that nice? We have nicknames for each other.’

  ‘I don’t think any of this is very helpful, Mr Oakes.’

  ‘Hey, I’m the model prisoner. That’s the way it works, right? I learned a fast lesson: use the same system they used to put you where y
ou are. Read up on the law, go back over everything, know the questions to ask, the objections that should have been made at the original trial. The lawyer they had representing me, I’ll tell you, he couldn’t have presented a school prize, never mind my case.’ He smiled again. ‘You’re better than him. You’re going to be all right. Remember that next time your pop is chewing you out. Just say to yourself: I’m better than that, I’m going to be all right.’ He winked. ‘No charge for my time, son.’

  Son: as if he was fifty rather than thirty-eight. As if the knowledge of the ages was his for the dispensing.

  ‘So I get a free flight back to London?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ The lawyer looked through his notes. ‘You’re from Lothian originally?’ Pronouncing it loathing.

  ‘As in Edinburgh, Scotland.’

  ‘Well, you might end up back there.’

  Cary Oakes rubbed at his chin. Edinburgh might do for a while. He had unfinished business in Edinburgh. Was going to leave it till the heat had died down, but nevertheless . . . He leaned forward over the table.

  ‘How many murders did they pin on me?’

  The lawyer blinked, sat there with palms flat on the table. ‘Two,’ he said at last.

  ‘How many did they start with?’

  ‘I believe it was five.’

  ‘Six actually.’ Oakes nodded slowly. ‘But who’s counting, eh?’ A chuckle. ‘They ever catch anyone for the others?’

  The lawyer shook his head. There were beads of perspiration at his temples. He’d be making a detour home for a shower and fresh clothes.

  Cary Oakes sat back again and angled his face into the sun, turning his head so every part felt the warmth. ‘Two’s not much of a tally, is it, in the scheme of things? You kill your old man, you’ll only be one behind.’