10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus)

by Ian Rankin

  Where did the money come from for his trip to the States? Alan Archibald had done some digging, uncovering a series of muggings and break-ins in Edinburgh, unsolved, but tailing off at about the time Cary Oakes made his trip. The mystery of his niece’s murder made for a file in itself. Archibald had interviewed Oakes’s mother and half-sister (both now deceased) and the husband (still alive; living alone in sheltered accommodation in East Craigs). They hadn’t remembered anything specific about the night of the murder, couldn’t even be sure that Cary had been near the house that day or the next.

  Deirdre Campbell had been out dancing in town, ending up at a club on the corner of Rose Street – not a hundred yards from where Gaitano’s was now sited. She’d been picked by one particular man, had danced the last four or five dances with him. She’d introduced him to her friends. She had exams coming up, shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The club was for over-twenty-ones only, and Deirdre had been underage. The owner had got into trouble afterwards. His defence: ‘If she hadn’t come in here, they’d have let her in someplace else.’ Which was true: make-up, choice of clothes and hairstyle could add half a dozen years to a teenage girl. After the club, the group had headed out to Lothian Road, trying hard not to let the night die. A pizza restaurant, and then taxis. Deirdre had said she’d walk. She lived in Dalry, it would only take her twenty minutes.

  Police questioned the young man who’d been with her, the one she’d danced with. He’d asked if he could see her home, but she’d shaken her head. He lived way out at Comiston, so had accepted a ride in one of the taxis. Deirdre had started walking home.

  Only to end up murdered on a hillside. Clothing interfered with, but no sign of rape or assault. A blow to the head, then strangulation.

  Three days later, Cary Oakes had been heading out of Scotland, taking with him a rucksack and sports holdall. None of his family knew what he was up to. First they’d heard was when he’d been arrested, over two months later.

  They hadn’t bothered contacting police, registering him as missing.

  ‘He was old enough to make his mind up what he wanted to do,’ his uncle had told Alan Archibald. ‘We knew he’d taken some clothes and stuff, figured he’d just took off.’

  Archibald had used police reports and trial evidence to piece together Cary Oakes’s American travels. From New York he’d taken a bus cross-country. At his trial, Oakes stated that he did this ‘because it’s what all the pioneers did: headed west’. He spent a week in Chicago, just crisscrossing the city on foot and by means of public transport. Then, hitching rides west, he stopped at Minneapolis, where he decided he needed more money and tried his hand at mugging. A couple of minor successes, and one major setback: picked on a woman with Mace in her coat pocket and a lethal left hook. He left Minneapolis with a swollen left eye and the right bloodshot and stinging. He ate at truck stops along I-94, passing through Fargo and Billings, making it as far as Spokane before his need for dollars became desperate. He broke into a couple of houses, tried pawning his meagre findings. The brokers knew swag when they saw it, offered him a few dollars, then, when he bad-mouthed them, called his description in to the police.

  He’d taken to sleeping rough, finding like-minded individuals. Joined a little shoplifting gang. With his ‘funny accent’, he’d keep the staff busy and interested while the others went about their work undetected. Already, he was boasting that he was on the run, that he’d ‘offed’ someone back in Scotland. No details, the assertion taken for bravado. Everyone on the street hid behind a shield of lies and fantasies. They’d all tasted the good life; all fallen from a state of grace.

  In Spokane, he’d murdered Dorothy Anne Wreiss, a forty-two-year-old divorcee who taught kindergarten three days a week. She lived in a sprawling suburban tract. It was thought Oakes had spotted her at the mall, followed her home or trawled the neighbourhood until he’d spotted her station wagon parked in the drive.

  She was found in her kitchen, groceries still in their bags on the breakfast bar. Her two cats had curled up on her back and were sleeping. She’d been beaten with a rock, then strangled with a dishtowel. Her purse had been emptied, as had the jewellery box in her bedroom. Next day, Oakes had tried pawning her watch. At the trial, he’d say it had been gifted to him by one of his drifter friends, the one called Otis. But no one who’d known him had known anyone called Otis.

  He ran towards Seattle, stayed there over a week. There was one unsolved they’d tried pinning on him: man found unconscious in the car park of the King Dome. He’d been beaten around the head, his car stolen. Died in hospital of his injuries. The car turned up in Ballard, as did Cary Oakes. By now, the police forces of several states were interested in the ‘Scottish drifter’. A couple of serious assaults in Chicago; a known homosexual found dead in his car in the La Grange district of the city. A woman attacked and left for dead in a mall on the outskirts of Bloomington, Minneapolis. The death of a seventy-eight-year-old following a break-in at her home in Tacoma, Washington. Sometimes, police had physical descriptions of someone at or near the scene; sometimes all they had was an MO. No useful fingerprints, no positive IDs of Cary Oakes.

  The final killing: another homosexual, Willis Chadaran, age sixty. The attack had taken place in the master bedroom of his home in Bellevue. A heavy statuette, which Chadaran had won for his editing work on a documentary film back in 1982, was the weapon. He’d been beaten senseless with it, then finished off with the belt from his red silk yakuta. Cary Oakes’s fingerprints were found on the headboard. When arrested and presented with the fingerprint match-up, he admitted he’d been to Chadaran’s home, but denied killing him. Detectives had asked how his prints had ended up on the headboard. Oakes said he’d sneaked into the room looking for stuff to steal, maybe he’d touched it then.

  He was finally arrested at Pike Place Market. Traders had complained that he’d looked ready to swipe something. Police had asked for his ID. He’d offered his passport, with its invalid tourist visa, then made a run for it. They’d caught him, taken him in, and someone had connected him to various descriptions which had been coming in from all across the country.

  At the trial, the prosecution’s summing-up had been succinct.

  ‘This is a man for whom brutal murder has become a way of life, a commonplace. If he needs something, wants something, covets something . . . he kills for it. He sees us all as potential victims. We’re not fellow humans to him; he’s ceased to think of us in those terms, the terms by which we co-ordinate and validate our society, terms without which we cannot call ourselves civilised. His soul has shrivelled to the size of a walnut, maybe not even that big. Cary Oakes, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, has stepped outside our society, our laws, our civilisation, and he must pay the price.’

  The price being two life sentences.

  Rebus put down the file. ‘Lots of circumstantial evidence,’ he mused.

  ‘It all adds up though. More than enough to make a case.’

  Rebus nodded agreement. ‘But I can see where he found his loopholes.’ He tapped the folder, thought of the summing-up. ‘Wonder how big a soul usually is . . .’ He turned to Archibald. ‘He plays games.’

  ‘I know that. The version Jim Stevens’ paper is printing . . . Oakes is spinning them a line.’

  ‘He told me one of his victims was the same age as my daughter. Nobody in here fits with that.’

  Alan Archibald shrugged. ‘Your daughter’s mid-twenties, Deirdre was eighteen.’ He paused. ‘Maybe there are others we don’t know about.’

  Yes, thought Rebus, and maybe it had been just another lie. ‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Keep at him.’

  ‘Play along with him?’

  ‘I don’t see it that way.’

  ‘I know you don’t; that’s what worries me.’

  ‘She wasn’t your niece.’

  Rebus looked into Alan Archibald’s eyes; saw courage and grit, the vital energies which had stayed with him
all his working years, not about to be jettisoned now.

  ‘How can I help?’

  ‘What makes you think I want any help?’

  ‘Because you came back tonight. Not to talk to him, but to see me.’

  Alan Archibald smiled. ‘I know a bit about you, John. I know we’re not so very different.’

  ‘So how can I help?’

  ‘Help me make him come to Hillend.’

  ‘What good do you think it would do?’

  ‘He ran from the crime, John. Ran as far as he could from the memory of it. Take him back there, back to his first killing . . . I think it would bring it all back: the terror, the uncertainty. I think he’d start to unravel.’

  ‘Is that what we want?’ Rebus thinking: He’ll kill again . . .

  ‘It’s what I want. I just need to know if I’ll have your help.’

  Rebus rubbed his hands over the steering-wheel. ‘I’ll need to think.’

  ‘Well, don’t be too long about it. I get the feeling maybe you need this as much as I do.’

  Rebus looked at him.

  ‘We can’t always live by faith alone,’ Archibald went on. ‘Now and then, there has to be something more.’

  22

  After a further hour of conversation, Archibald left, saying he’d find himself a taxi. He’d talked about his niece, his memories of her, the way her murder had affected the family.

  ‘We disintegrated,’ he’d said. ‘So slowly, I don’t think anybody noticed. I think we felt guilty whenever we met, like we were to blame. Because when we got together, there was only one possible subject, one thing on our minds, and we didn’t want that.’

  He’d talked too about his work on the case: weeks spent in police archives; months spent piecing together Cary Oakes’s history; trips to the US.

  ‘It must all have cost a lot,’ Rebus had said.

  ‘Worth every penny, John.’

  Rebus hadn’t added that money wasn’t his point. He knew all about obsession, knew how it could rob you of everything. He’d been given a jigsaw one year as a Christmas present, back when Sammy was just a kid. He’d cleared a table and started work on it, found he worked late into the night, even though he knew the picture he was making – knew because it was right there on the box. Only he tried not to look at it, wanting to complete the puzzle without any help.

  And one piece was missing. He’d asked Rhona, questioned Sammy: had she taken it? Rhona told him maybe it wasn’t in the box to start with, but he couldn’t accept that. He’d stripped the sofa and chairs, pulled up the carpet, gone over the room inch by inch, then the rest of the flat – just in case Sammy had put it somewhere. Never found it. Even years later, he would find himself wondering if maybe it had slipped between the floorboards, or under the skirting-board . . .

  Police work could affect you like that, if you let it. Unsolved cases; questions that niggled; people you knew were the culprits but couldn’t incriminate . . . He’d had more than his fair share of those. But eventually he let them go, even if it meant drinking them into oblivion. Alan Archibald didn’t look capable of putting Cary Oakes behind him. Rebus got the feeling that even if Oakes were proved innocent, Archibald would go on believing in his guilt. It was in the nature of obsession.

  Alone with his thoughts, Rebus reached into his pocket for the quarter-bottle, drained it dry.

  Proved innocent . . . He thought of Darren Rough, shaking with fear, holed up in his locked toilet. All because Social Work had put him in a flat above a kids’ playground. And because John Rebus had placed on Rough’s shoulders the sins of others – the sins of men who had themselves abused Rough.

  Rebus rubbed at his eyes. It wasn’t unusual for him to feel a weight of guilt. He carried Jack Morton’s death with him. But something had changed. In the old days, he wouldn’t have given much thought to Darren Rough. He’d have told himself Rough deserved what he got, for being what he so evidently was. But go back further . . . back to the cop he had once been, so long ago now, and he wouldn’t have taken Rough’s story to the tabloids. Maybe Mairie Henderson was right: something’s gone bad inside you.

  He admired Alan Archibald’s persistence, but wondered what would happen if he were proved wrong. Would he still pursue Cary Oakes? Would he take things further than mere pursuit . . .? Rebus stared out at the night sky.

  It’s all pretty tricky down here, isn’t it, Big Man?

  He wondered what point the surveillance was serving. Oakes seemed to be turning it to his own advantage, coming and going as he pleased, letting them know he could do it. So that all their efforts seemed so much waste. He closed his eyes, listened to the occasional message on the police radio, his thoughts turning to Damon Mee. The boat looked like another dead end. Damon had walked out of the world, given his life the slip. Thoughts of Damon took him to Janice, and from there to his schooldays, when everything had just started to get complicated in his life.

  Alec Chisholm had disappeared one day; never found.

  Rebus had gone to the school leaving dance, with something he wanted to tell Mitch.

  Then Janice had knocked him cold, a gang had descended on Mitch, and suddenly Rebus’s whole life was decided . . .

  A noise brought him out of his reverie. He thought it had come from the back of the hotel. He decided to investigate. The car park and service entrance in darkness, but he swept his torch around. Looked up at the hotel windows. You could tell the corridors: lights still burned in those windows. One of the windows was open, curtains flapping. Rebus moved his torch in a downward arc, its beam landing on the roof of a lock-up garage, one of a row of three. They were separated from the hotel property by a wall. Rebus pulled himself up and over it. A narrow alley, puddles and rubbish underfoot. No sign of life, but footprints in the mud. He followed the path. It led him around the back of a factory unit and tenement, then up on to the busy thoroughfare of Bernard Street, where late-night cars and taxis idled at traffic lights. Where drunks stumbled their way home. One man was doing an elaborate dance and providing his own musical accompaniment. The woman with him thought he was hilarious. Can: ‘Tango Whiskyman’.

  There was no sign of Cary Oakes, no sign at all, but Rebus got the feeling he was out there. He retraced his steps, stopped at a rubbish skip parked next to one of the service doors, took the empty bottle from his pocket and tossed it in.

  Felt his head jerk forward as a blow hit him from behind. Searing pain, his eyes screwing shut. He raised a hand, half-turned. A second blow laid him out cold.

  It was pitch black, and when he moved there was a dull steel echo.

  And a smell.

  He was lying on something soft. Voices above him, then blinding light.

  ‘Dear oh dear.’

  Second voice, amused: ‘Sleeping it off, sir?’

  Rebus shielded his eyes, peered up at sheer walls. Two heads bobbing over the rim. He pulled his knees up, slithered as he tried to stand. His hands were tingling. His head pulsed with pain.

  He was . . . he knew where he was. In a rubbish skip, the one behind the hotel. Wet cardboard boxes beneath him, and Christ knew what else. Hands were helping him to his feet.

  ‘Come on then, sir. Let’s . . .’ The voice died as the torch found his face again. Two uniforms, probably from Leith cop shop. And one of them had recognised him.

  ‘DI Rebus?’

  Rebus: dishevelled, whisky on his breath, being helped from a skip. Supposedly on surveillance. He knew how it must look.

  ‘Christ, sir, what happened to you?’

  ‘Get that torch out of my face, son.’ Their faces were shadows to him, no way to tell if he knew them. He asked the time, worked out that he’d been unconscious only ten or fifteen minutes.

  ‘Call from a public box on Bernard Street,’ one of the uniforms was explaining. ‘Said there was a fight going on at the back of the hotel.’

  Rebus examined the back of his head: no blood on his palm. Hands still tingling. He rubbed at the fingers. They hurt when
he worked them. Lifted them into the torchlight. One of the uniforms whistled.

  The knuckles were grazed, bruised. A couple of the joints seemed to be swelling.

  ‘Gave him a sore one, whoever he was,’ the uniform said.

  Rebus studied the scrapes. Like he’d been punching concrete. ‘I didn’t hit anyone,’ he said. The uniforms shared a glance.

  ‘If you say so, sir.’

  ‘I suppose it’s asking too much to tell you to keep this to yourselves.’

  ‘We won’t breathe a word, sir.’

  An outright lie; it didn’t do to beg favours from uniforms.

  ‘Anything else we can do, sir?’

  Rebus started to shake his head, felt a wave of nausea as the pain slammed in. Steadied himself with a hand on the skip.

  ‘My car’s round the corner,’ he said, voice brittle.

  ‘You’ll want a shower when you get home.’

  ‘Thank you, Sherlock.’

  ‘Only trying to help,’ the uniform muttered.

  Rebus walked slowly around the building. The receptionist looked ready to call security until Rebus produced ID and asked her to buzz Oakes’s room. There was no reply.

  ‘Will there be anything else, sir?’

  Rebus was looking in his wallet. His cards were there, but the cash had gone.

  ‘Any idea where Mr Oakes is?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘I didn’t see him leave.’

  Rebus thanked her and walked over to a sofa, fell down on to it. A little later, he asked for aspirin. When she brought them, she had to shake his shoulder to wake him up.

  He headed for Patience’s: sod the surveillance. Oakes wasn’t in his room. He was out on the streets. Rebus needed clean clothes, a shower, and more painkillers. As he stumbled through the door, Patience came into the hall, blinking her eyes sleepily. He held up both hands to pacify her.