Knots And Crosses tirs-1

by Ian Rankin

  At his first house, Rebus battered on the door and waited. It was opened by a rank old woman, her feet bare, a cardigan comprised of ninety-percent hole to ten-percent wool hanging around her scarp-like shoulders.

  ‘Whit is it?’

  ‘Police, madam. It’s about the murder.’

  ‘Eh? Whitever it is, I dinnae want it. Away ye get afore I ca’ for the coppers.’

  ‘The murders,’ shouted Rebus. Tm a policeman. I’ve come to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘Eh?’ She stood back a little to peer at him, and Rebus could swear that he saw the faint glow of a past intelligence in the dulled black of her pupils.

  ‘Whit murders?’ she said.

  One of those days. To improve matters, the rain began again, heavy dollops of stinging water gripping to his neck and face, seeping into his shoes. Just like that day at the old man’s grave … Only yesterday? A lot could happen in twenty-four hours, all of it to him.

  By seven o’clock, Rebus had covered six of the fourteen individuals on his list. He walked back to the operations-shoebox, his feet sore, his stomach awash with tea and craving something stronger.

  At the boggy waste ground, Jack Morton stood and stared out over the acres of clay, strewn with bricks and detritus: a child’s heaven.

  ‘What a hellish place to die in.’

  ‘She didn’t die here, Jack. Remember what forensic said.’

  ‘Well, you know what I mean.’

  Yes, Rebus knew what he meant.

  ‘By the way,’ said Morton, ‘you’re the fairy.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Rebus.

  They drank in some of Edinburgh’s seedier bars, bars the tourist never sees. They tried to shut the case out of their minds, but could not. It was like that with big murder inquiries; they got to you, physically and mentally, consuming you and making you work all the harder. There was a rush of pure adrenalin behind every murder. It kept them going past the point of no return.

  ‘I’d better be getting back to the flat,’ said Rebus.

  ‘No, have another.’

  Jack Morton weaved towards the bar, his empty glass in his hand.

  Rebus, his mind foggy, thought more about his mysterious correspondent. He suspected Rhona, though it could not be said to be her style. He suspected his daughter Sammy, perhaps taking a delayed-action revenge for her father’s dismissal of her from his life. Family and acquaintances were, initially at least, always the chief suspects. But it could be anyone, anyone who knew where he worked and where he lived. Someone in his own force was always a possibility to be feared.

  The 10,000 dollar question, as ever, was why?

  ‘Here we go, two lovely pints of beer, gratis from the management.’

  ‘I call that very public-spirited,’ said Rebus.

  ‘Or publican-spirited, eh, John?’ Morton chuckled at his joke, wiping froth from his top lip. He noticed that Rebus wasn’t laughing. ‘A penny for them,’ he said.

  ‘A serial killer,’ said Rebus. ‘It must be. In which case we’ve not seen the last of our friend’s handiwork.’

  Morton put down his glass, suddenly not very thirsty.

  ‘Those girls went to different schools,’ continued Rebus, ‘lived in different areas of the city, had different tastes, different friends, were of different religions, and were killed by the same murderer in the same way and without noticeable abuse of any kind. We’re dealing with a maniac. He could be anywhere.’

  A fight was breaking out at the bar, apparently over a game of dominoes, which had gone very badly wrong. A glass fell to the floor, followed by a hush in the bar. Then everyone seemed to calm down a little. One man was led outside by his supporters in the argument. Another remained slumped against the bar, muttering to a woman beside him.

  Morton took a gulp of beer.

  ‘Thank God we’re off duty,’ he said. Then: ‘Fancy a curry?’

  Morton finished the chicken vindaloo and threw his fork down on to the plate.

  ‘I reckon I ought to have a word with the Health Department boys,’ he said, still chewing. ‘Either that or the Trading Standards. Whatever that was, it wasn’t chicken.’

  They were in a small curry-house near Haymarket Station. Purple lighting, red flock wallpaper, a churning wall of sitar-music.

  ‘You looked as if you were enjoying it,’ said Rebus, finishing his beer.

  ‘Oh yes, I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t chicken.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing to complain about if you enjoyed it.’ Rebus sat slant-wise on his chair, his legs straight out before him, an arm along the chair’s back while he smoked his umpteenth cigarette that day.

  Morton leaned unsteadily towards his partner.

  ‘John, there’s always something to complain about, especially if you think you can get off with not paying the bill by doing so.’

  He winked at Rebus, sat back, burped, and reached into his pocket for a cigarette.

  ‘Garbage,’ he said.

  Rebus tried to count the number of cigarettes he himself had smoked that day, but his brain told him that such calculations were not to be attempted.

  ‘I wonder what our friend the murderer is up to at this exact moment?’ he said.

  ‘Finishing a curry?’ suggested Morton. ‘Trouble is, John, he could be one of these Joe Normal types, clean on the surface, married with kids, your average suburban hard-working chap, but underneath a nutter, pure and simple.’

  ‘There’s nothing simple about our man.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘But you could well be right. You mean that he’s a sort of Jekyll and Hyde, right?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Morton flicked ash onto the table-top, already splashed with curry sauce and beer. He was peering at his empty plate as though wondering where all the food had gone. ‘Jekyll and Hyde. You’ve got it in a nutshell. I’ll tell you, John, I’d lock these bastards up for a million years, a million years of solitary in a cell the size of a shoebox. That’s what I’d do.’

  Rebus was staring at the flock wallpaper. He thought back to his own days in solitary, days when the SAS were trying to crack him, days of the ultimate testing, of sighs and silence, starvation and filth. No, he wouldn’t want that again. And yet they had not beaten him, not really beaten him. The others had not been so lucky.

  Trapped in its cell, the face screaming

  Let me out Let me out

  Let me out …

  ‘John? Are you okay there? If you’re going to be sick, the toilet’s behind the kitchen. Listen, when you’re passing, do me a favour and see if you can notice what it is that they’re chopping up and throwing into the pot …’

  Rebus walked smartly to the toilet with the over-cautious gait of the tremendously drunk, yet he did not feel drunk, not that drunk. His nostrils filled with the smells of curry, disinfectant, shit. He washed his face. No, he was not going to be sick. It wasn’t too much to drink, for he had felt the same shudder at Michael’s, the same momentary horror. What was happening to him? It was as if his insides were concretizing, slowing him down, allowing the years to catch up on him. It felt a little like the nervous breakdown which he had been awaiting, yet it was no nervous breakdown. It was nothing. It had passed.

  ‘Can I give you a lift, John?’

  ‘No thanks, I’ll walk. Clear my head.’

  They parted at the door of the restaurant. An office-party, loosened neckties and strong, sickly perfume, made its way towards Haymarket Station. Haymarket was the last station into Edinburgh before the much grander Waverley. Rebus remembered that the premature withdrawal of the penis during intercourse for contraceptive reasons was often referred to as ‘getting off at Haymarket.’ Who said the people in Edinburgh were dour? A smile, a song, and a strangulation. Rebus wiped sweat from his forehead. He felt weak still, and leaned against a lamp-post. He knew vaguely what it was. It was a rejection by his whole being of the past, as though his vital organs were rejecting a donor heart. He had pushed the horror of the tra
ining so far to the back of his mind that any echo of it at all was now to be violently fought against. And yet it was in that same confinement that he had found friendship, brotherhood, camaraderie, call it what you like. And he had learned more about himself than human beings ever do. He had learned so much.

  His spirit had not been broken. He had come out of the training on top. And then had come the nervous breakdown.

  Enough. He began to walk, steadying himself with thoughts of his day off tomorrow. He would spend the day reading and sleeping and readying himself for a party, Cathy Jackson’s party.

  And the day after that, Sunday, he would be spending a rare day with his daughter. Then, perhaps, he would find out who was behind the crank letters.

  8

  The girl woke up with a dry, salty taste in her mouth. She felt sleepy and numb and wondered where she was. She had fallen asleep in his car. She had not felt sleepy before then, before he had given her a piece of his chocolate-bar. Now she was awake, but not in her bedroom at home. This room had pictures on its walls, pictures cut out of colour magazines. Some were photographs of soldiers with fierce expressions on their faces, others were of girls and women. She looked closely at some self-developing photographs grouped together on one wall. There was a picture of her there, asleep on the bed with her arms spread wide. She opened her mouth in a slight gasp.

  Outside, in the living-room, he heard her movements as he prepared the garotte.

  That night, Rebus had one of his nightmarish dreams again. A long, lingering kiss was followed by an ejaculation, both in the dream and in reality. He woke up immediately afterwards and wiped himself down. The breath of the kiss was still around him, hanging to him like an aura. He shook his head clear of it. He needed a woman. Remembering the party to come, he relaxed a little. But his lips were dry. He padded into the kitchen and found a bottle of lemonade. It was flat, but served the purpose. Then he remembered that he was still drunk, and would have a hangover if he wasn’t careful. He poured himself three glassfuls of water and forced them down.

  He was pleased to find that the pilot-light was still on. It was like a good omen. When he slipped back into bed, he even remembered to say his prayers. That would surprise the Big Man upstairs. He would note it in his muckle book: Rebus remembered me tonight. May give him a nice day tomorrow.

  Amen.

  9

  Michael Rebus loved his BMW as dearly as he loved life itself, perhaps more so. As he sped down the motorway, the traffic to his left hardly appearing to move at all, he felt that his car was life in a strange, satisfying sort of way. He pointed its nose towards the bright point of the horizon and let it forge towards that future, revving it hard, making no concessions to anyone or anything.

  That was the way he liked it; hard, fast luxury, push-button and on-hand. He drummed his fingers on the leather of the steering-wheel, toyed with the radio-cassette, eased his head back onto the padded headrest. He dreamed often of just taking off, leaving wife and children and house, just his car and him. Taking off towards that far point, never stopping except to eat and fill up the car, driving until he died. It seemed like paradise, and so he felt quite safe fantasising about it, knowing that he would never dare put paradise into practice.

  When he had first owned a car, he had wakened in the middle of the night, opening his curtains to see if it was still waiting for him outside. Sometimes he would rise at four or five in the morning and take off for a few hours, astonished at the distance he could cover so quickly, glad to be out on the silent roads with only the rabbits and the crows for company, his hand on the horn scaring fluttering clouds of birds into the air. He had never lost that initial love-affair with cars, the manumission of dreams.

  People stared at his car now. He would park it in the streets of Kirkcaldy and stand a little distance away, watching people envy that car. The younger men, full of bravado and expectancy, would peer inside, staring at leather and dials as though examining living things at the zoo. The older men, some with their wives in tow, would glance at the machine, sometimes spitting on the road afterwards, knowing that it represented everything they had wanted for themselves and failed to find. Michael Rebus had found his dream, and it was a dream he could watch any time he chose.

  In Edinburgh, however, it depended where you parked as to whether your car would attract attention. He had parked on George Street one day, only to find a Rolls-Royce cruising to a stop behind him. He had keyed the ignition again, fuming, near-spitting. He had parked eventually outside a discotheque. He knew that parking an expensive car outside a restaurant or a discotheque would mean that a few people would mistake you for the owner of the particular set-up, and that thought pleased him immensely, erasing the memory of the Rolls-Royce and infusing him with new versions of the dream.

  Stopping at traffic-lights, too, could be exciting, except when some half-arsed biker on a big machine roared to a standstill behind him or, even worse, beside him. Some of those bikes were made for initial acceleration. More than once he had been beaten mercilessly in a race from traffic-lights. He tried not to think about those times either.

  Today he parked where he had been told to park: in the car park atop Calton Hill. He could see over to Fife from his front window, and from the back he could see Princes Street laid out before him like a toy-set. The hill was quiet; it was not quite the tourist season, and it was cold. He knew that things hotted up at night: car chases, girls and boys hoping for a ride, parties at Queensferry beach. Edinburgh’s gay community would mix with those merely curious or lonely, and a couple, hand-in-hand, would now and again enter the graveyard at the bottom of the hill. When darkness fell, the east end of Princes Street became a territory all of its own, to be passed around, to be shared. But he was not about to share his car with anyone. His dream was a fragile entity.

  He watched Fife across the Firth of Forth, looking quite splendid from this distance, until the man’s car slowed and stopped beside him. Michael slid across to his passenger seat and wound down the window, just as the other man was winding down his.

  ‘Got the stuff?’ he said.

  ‘Of course,’ said the man. He checked in his mirror. Some people, a family of all things, had just come over the rise. ‘We better wait for a minute.’

  They paused, staring blankly at the scenery.

  ‘No hassles across in Fife?’ asked the man.

  ‘None.’

  ‘The word’s going round that your brother was over seeing you. Is that correct?’ The man’s eyes were hard; his whole being was hard. But the car he drove was a heap. Michael felt safe for the moment.

  ‘Yes, but it was nothing. It was just the anniversary of our dad’s death. That was all.’

  ‘He doesn’t know anything?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Do you think I’m thick or something?’

  The man’s glance silenced Michael. It was a mystery to him how this one man could invoke such fear in him. He hated these meetings.

  ‘If anything happens,’ the man was saying, ‘if anything goes wrong, you’ll be in for it. I really mean that. Keep well clear of that bastard in future.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault. He just dropped in on me. He didn’t even phone first. What could I do?’

  His hands were gripping hard to the steering-wheel, cemented there. The man checked in his mirror again.

  ‘All clear,’ he said, reaching behind him. A small package slipped through Michael’s window. He took a look inside it, brought an envelope out of his pocket, and reached for the ignition.

  ‘Be seeing you around, Mister Rebus,’ said the man, opening the envelope.

  ‘Yes,’ said Michael, thinking: not if I can help it. This work was getting a bit too hairy for him. These people seemed to know everything about his movements. He knew, however, that the fear always evaporated, to be replaced by euphoria when he had rid himself of another load, pocketing a nice profit on the deal. It was that moment when fear turned to euphoria that kept him in the game. It was like
the fastest piece of acceleration from traffic-lights that you could experience — ever.

  Jim Stevens, watching from the hill’s Victorian folly, a ridiculous, never-completed copy of a Greek temple, saw Michael Rebus leave. That much was old news to him; he was more interested in the Edinburgh connection, a man he could not trace and did not know, a man who had lost him twice before and who could doubtless lose him again. Nobody seemed to know who this mysterious figure was, and nobody particularly wanted to know. He looked like trouble. Stevens, feeling suddenly impotent and old, could do nothing other than jot down the car registration number. He thought that perhaps McGregor Campbell could do something with it, but he was wary of being found out by Rebus. He felt trapped in the middle of something which was proving altogether a knottier problem than he had suspected.

  Shivering, he tried to persuade himself that he liked it that way.

  10

  ‘Come in, come in, whoever you are.’

  Rebus’s coat, gloves, and bottle of wine were taken from him by complete strangers, and he was plunged into one of those packed, smoky, loud parties where it is easy to smile at people but near impossible to get to know anyone. He moved from the hall into the kitchen, and from there, through a connecting-door, into the living-room itself.

  The chairs, table, settee had been pushed back to the walls, and the floor was filled with writhing, whooping couples, the men tieless, their shirts sticking to them.