10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (126 page)

‘How good a swimmer is he?’ Rebus asked Steele.

‘Beggar?’ Steele was massaging his untethered arms. ‘Can’t swim a stroke. We all learned at school, but his mum used to give him a note excusing him.’

‘Why?’

Steele shrugged. ‘She was scared he’d catch verrucas. How’s the head, Inspector?’

‘I won’t need a haircut for a while.’

‘What about Jack?’ Moffat asked.

‘He won’t be needing one either.’

They searched for Gregor Jack’s body the following morning. Not that Rebus was there to participate. He was in hospital and feeling dirty and unshaven – except for his head.

‘If you have a problem with baldness,’ one senior doctor told him, ‘you could always wear a toupee till it grows back. Or a hat. Your scalp will be sensitive, too, so try to keep out of the sun.’

‘Sun? What sun?’

But there was sun, during his time off work there was plenty of it. He stayed indoors, stayed underground, reading book after book, emerging for brief forays to the Royal Infirmary to have his dressings changed.

‘I could do that for you,’ Patience had told him.

‘Never mix business and pleasure,’ was Rebus’s enigmatic response. In fact, there was a nurse up at the infirmary who had taken a shine to him, and he to her . . . Ach, it wouldn’t go anywhere; it was just a bit of flirting. He wouldn’t hurt Patience for the world.

Holmes visited, always with a dozen cans of something gassy. ‘Hiya, baldie,’ was the perennial greeting, even when the skinhead had become a suedehead, the suedehead longer still.

‘What’s the news?’ asked Rebus.

Apart from the fact that Gregor Jack’s body had still not been recovered, the big news was that the Farmer was off the booze after having been ‘visited by the Lord’ at some revivalist Baptist meeting.

‘It’s communion wine only from now on,’ said Holmes. ‘Mind you –’ pointing to Rebus’s head, ‘for a while there I thought maybe
you
were going to go Buddhist on us.’

‘I might yet,’ said Rebus. ‘I might yet.’

The media clung to the Jack story, clung to the idea that he might still be alive. Rebus wondered about that, too. More, he still wondered why Jack had killed Elizabeth. Ronald Steele could shed no light on the problem. Apparently, Jack had spoken hardly a word to him all the time he’d held him captive . . . Well, that was Steele’s story. Whatever
had
been said, it wasn’t going any further.

All of which left Rebus with scenarios, with guesswork. He played out the scene time after time in his head – Jack arriving at the lay-by, and arguing with Elizabeth. Maybe she’d told him she wanted a divorce. Maybe the argument was over the brothel story. Or maybe there’d been something else. All Steele would say was that when he’d left her, she’d been waiting for her husband.

‘I thought about hanging around and confronting him . . .’

‘But?’

Steele shrugged. ‘Cowardice. It’s not doing something “wrong” that’s the problem, Inspector, it’s getting caught. Wouldn’t you agree?’

‘But if you
had
stayed . . .?’

Steele nodded. ‘I know. Maybe Liz would have told Gregor to bugger off and have stuck with me instead. Maybe they’d both still be alive.’

If
Steele hadn’t fled from the lay-by . . .
if
Gail Jack hadn’t come north in the first place . . . What then? Rebus was in no doubt: it would have worked out some other way, not necessarily any less painful a way. Fire and ice and skeletons in the closet. He wished he could have met Elizabeth Jack, just once, even though he had the feeling they wouldn’t have got on . . .

There was one more news story. It started as another rumour, but the rumour turned out to be a leak, and the leak was followed by notification: Great London Road was to undergo a programme of repair and refurbishment.

Which means, thought Rebus, I move in with Patience. To all intents, he already had.

‘You don’t have to sell your flat,’ she told him. ‘You could always rent it.’

‘Rent it?’

‘To students. Your street’s half full of them as it is.’ This was true. You saw the migration in the morning, down towards The Meadows carrying their satchels and ring-binders and supermarket carriers; back in the late afternoon (or late night) laden with books and ideas. The notion appealed. If he rented out his flat, he could pay Patience something towards living here with her.

‘You’re on,’ he said.

He was back at work one full day when Great London Road Police Station caught fire. The building was razed to the ground.

The first thing to acknowledge is that the constituency of North and South Esk is the author’s creation. However, you don’t need to be Mungo Park to work out that there must be some correlation between North and South Esk and the real world, Edinburgh being a real place, and ‘south and east of Edinburgh’ being a vaguely definable geographical area.

In fact, North and South Esk bears
some
resemblance to the Midlothian parliamentary constituency – prior to 1983’s Boundary Commission changes – but also bites a small southernmost chunk out of the present Edinburgh Pentlands constituency and a westerly chunk out of East Lothian constituency.

Gregor Jack, too, is fiction, and bears no resemblance to any MP.

Thanks are due to the following for their inestimable help; Alex Eadie, who was until his retirement the MP for Midlothian; John Home Robertson MP; Professor Busuttil, Regius Professor of Forensic Medicine, University of Edinburgh; Lothian and Borders Police; City of Edinburgh Police; the staff of the Edinburgh Room, Edinburgh Central Library; the staff of the National Library of Scotland; staff and customers of Sandy Bell’s, the Oxford Bar, Mather’s (West End), Clark’s Bar and the Green Tree.

Discussion points for
Strip Jack

Ian Rankin calls
Strip Jack
one of his most Scottish works – what is the evidence for this?

Ian Rankin says that with
Strip Jack
his ‘long apprenticeship’ as a writer of detective fiction was nearing its end. Is this an overly harsh comment?

‘An Establishment establishment’ is how Rebus describes the brothel. Discuss the implications of this.

How many different types of politics are dealt with in
Strip Jack
?

How does Ian Rankin subvert a well-known quotation from Jane Austen?

Is Chief Inspector Lauderdale really oblivious to Rebus’s attempts at irony over the Case of the Lifted Literature, or is it more the case that Lauderdale is winding Rebus up? In any event, who comes out on top?

Consider the way in which Ian Rankin weaves together the serious murder case with the trivial-seeming book-theft case.

What does Rebus’s evening with Brian Holmes and Nell say about his own attitudes to socialising?

Bearing in mind Rebus’s sometimes fraught relationship with brother Michael, does he identify with Gregor’s response to his own embarrassingly behaved sibling? How sympathetic is Rebus to Gregor’s desire to distance himself from his past?