10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (17 page)

There was a ring at the door. He did not answer. They would go away, and he would be alone again with his grief, his impotent anger, and his undusted possessions. The bell rang again, more persistently this time. Cursing, he went to the door and pulled it open. Michael was standing there.

‘John,’ he said, ‘I came as soon as I could.’

‘Mickey, what are you doing here?’ He ushered his brother into the flat.

‘Somebody phoned me. She told me all about it. Terrible news, John. Just terrible.’ He placed a hand on Rebus’s shoulder. Rebus, tingling, realised how long it had been since he had felt the touch of a human being, a sympathetic, brotherly touch. ‘I was confronted by two gorillas outside. They seem to have you under close watch here.’

‘Procedure,’ said Rebus.

Procedure maybe, but Michael knew how guilty he must have looked when they had pounced on him. He had wondered at the phone-call, wondered about the possibility of a trap. So he had listened to the local radio news. There had been an abduction, a killing. It was true. So he had driven over, into this lion’s den, knowing that he should stay well away from his brother, knowing that they would kill him if they found out, and wondering whether the abduction could have anything to do with his own situation. Was this a warning to both brothers? He could not say. But when those two gorillas had approached him in the shadows of the tenement stairs, he had thought the game all over. Firstly, they had been gangsters, out to get him. Then, they had been police officers, about to arrest him. But no, they were ‘procedure’.

‘You say it was a woman who called you? Did you catch her name? No, never mind, I know who it was anyway.’

They sat in the living-room. Michael, removing his sheepskin jacket, brought a bottle of whisky out of one of the pockets.

‘Would this help?’ he said.

‘It won’t do any harm.’

Rebus went to fetch glasses from the kitchen, while Michael inspected the living-room.

‘This is a nice place,’ he called.

‘Well, it’s a bit big for my needs,’ said Rebus. A choking sound came from the kitchen. Michael walked through to discover his big brother leaning into the sink, weeping grimly but quietly.

‘John,’ said Michael, hugging Rebus, ‘it’s okay. It’s going to be okay.’ He felt guilt well up inside him.

Rebus was fumbling for a handkerchief and, having found it, gave his nose a good blow and wiped his eyes.

‘That’s easy for you to say,’ he sniffed, trying out a smile, ‘you’re a heathen.’

They drank half of the whisky, sitting back in their chairs, silently contemplating the shadowy ceiling above. Rebus’s eyes were red-rimmed, and his eye-lashes stung. He sniffed occasionally, rubbing at his nose with the back of his hand. To Michael, it was like being boys again, but with the roles reversed for a moment. Not that they had been that close, but sentiment would always win over reality. Certainly he remembered John fighting one or two of his playground battles for him. Guilt welled up again. He shivered slightly. He had to get out of this game, but perhaps already he was in too deep, and if he had brought John unknowingly into the game too . . . That did not bear thinking about. He had to see the Man, had to explain things to him. But how? He had no telephone number or address. It was always the Man who called him, never the other way round. It was farcical now that he thought about it. Like a nightmare.

‘Did you enjoy the show the other night?’

Rebus forced himself to think back to it, to the perfumed and lonely woman, to his fingers around her throat, the scene which had signalled the beginning of his end.

‘Yes, it was interesting.’ He had fallen asleep had he not? Never mind.

Silence again, the broken sounds of traffic outside, a few shouts from distant drunks.

‘They say it’s someone with a grudge against me,’ he said finally.

‘Oh? And is it?’

‘I don’t know. It looks like it.’

‘But surely you would
know
?’

Rebus shook his head.

‘That’s the trouble, Mickey. I can’t remember.’

Michael sat up in his chair.

‘You can’t remember what exactly?’

‘Something. I don’t know. Just something. If I knew what,
I
would
remember, wouldn’t I? But there’s a gap. I know there is. I know that there’s something I should remember.’

‘Something from your past?’ Michael was keening now. Perhaps this had nothing at all to do with himself. Perhaps it was all to do with something else, someone else. He grew hopeful.

‘From the past, yes. But I can’t remember.’ Rebus rubbed his forehead as though it were a crystal ball. Michael was fumbling in his pocket.

‘I can help you to remember, John.’

‘How?’

‘Like this.’ Michael was holding, between thumb and forefinger, a silver coin. ‘You remember what I told you, John. I take my patients back into past lives every day. It should be easy enough to take you back into your
real
past.’

It was John Rebus’s turn to sit up. He shook away the whisky fumes.

‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘What do I do?’ But inside part of him was saying:
you don’t want this, you don’t want to know
.

He wanted to know.

Michael came over to his chair.

‘Lie back in the chair. Get comfortable. Don’t touch any more of that whisky. But remember, not everyone is susceptible to hypnotism. Don’t force yourself. Don’t try too hard. If it’s going to come, it’ll come whether you will it or not. Just relax, John, relax.’

The doorbell rang.

‘Ignore it,’ said Rebus, but Michael had already left the room. There were voices in the hall, and when Michael reappeared he was followed into the room by Gill.

‘The telephone caller, it seems,’ said Michael.

‘How are you, John?’ Her face was angled into a portrait of concern.

‘Fine, Gill. Listen, this is my brother Michael. The
hypnotist. He’s going to put me under – that’s what you called it, wasn’t it, Mickey? – to remove whatever block there might be in my memory. Maybe you should be ready to take some notes or something.’

Gill looked from one brother to the other, feeling a little out of things. An interesting pair of brothers. That’s what Jim Stevens had said. She had been working for sixteen hours, and now this. But she smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

‘Can a girl get a drink first?’

It was John Rebus’s turn to smile. ‘Help yourself,’ he said. ‘There’s whisky or whisky and water or water. Come on, Mickey. Let’s get on with this. Sammy’s out there somewhere. There might still be time.’

Michael spread his legs a little, leaning down over Rebus. He seemed to be about to consume his brother, his eyes close to Rebus’s eyes, his mouth working in a mirror-image. That’s what it looked like to Gill, pouring whisky into a tumbler. Michael held up the coin, trying to find the angle of the room’s single low-wattage bulb. Finally, the glint was reflected in John’s retina, the pupils expanding and contracting. Michael felt sure that his brother would be amenable. He certainly hoped so.

‘Listen carefully, John. Listen to my voice. Watch the coin, John. Watch it shine and spin. See it spinning. Can you see it spinning, John? Now relax, just listen to me. And watch the spin, watch it glow.’

For a moment it seemed that Rebus would not go under. Perhaps it was the familial tie that was making him immune to the voice, to its suggestive power. But then Michael saw the eyes change a little, imperceptibly to the uninitiated. But he was initiated. His father had taught him well. His brother was in the limbo world now, caught in the coin’s light, transported to wherever Michael wanted him to go. Under his power. As ever, Michael felt a little shiver run through him: this was
power, power total and irreducible. He could do anything with his patients, anything.

‘Michael,’ whispered Gill, ‘ask him why he left the Army.’

Michael swallowed, lining his throat with saliva. Yes, that was a good question. One he had wanted to ask John himself.

‘John?’ he said. ‘John? Why did you leave the Army, John? What happened, John? Why did you leave the Army? Tell us.’

And slowly, as though learning to use words strange or unknown to him, Rebus began to tell his story. Gill rushed to her bag for a pen and a notepad. Michael sipped his whisky.

They listened.

I had been in the Parachute Regiment since the age of eighteen. But then I decided to try for the Special Air Service. Why did I do that? Why will any soldier take a cut in pay to join the SAS? I can’t answer that. All I know now is that I found myself in Herefordshire, at the SAS’s training camp. I called it The Cross because I’d been told that they would try to crucify me, and there, along with the other volunteers, I went through hell, marching, training, testing, pushing. They took us to the breaking point. They taught us to be lethal.

At that time there were rumours of an imminent civil war in Ulster, of the SAS being used to root out insurrectionists. The day came for us to be badged. We were given new berets and cap-badges. We were in the SAS. But there was more. Gordon Reeve and myself were called into the Boss’s office and told that we had been judged the two best trainees of the batch. There was a two-year training period in front of us before we could become regulars, but great things were predicted for us.

Later, Reeve spoke to me as we left the building.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard a few of the rumours. I’ve heard the officers talking. They’ve got plans for us, Johnny.
Plans
. Mark my words.’

Weeks later, we were put on a survival course, hunted by other regiments, who if they captured us would stop at nothing to prise from us information about our mission. We had to trap and hunt our food, lying low and travelling across bleak moorland by night. We seemed destined to go through these tests together, though on this occasion we were working with two others.

‘They’ve got something special lined up for us,’ Reeve kept saying. ‘I can feel it in my bones.’

Lying in our bivouac, we had just slipped into our sleeping-bags for a two-hour nap when our guard put his nose into the shelter.

‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ he said, and then there were lights and guns everywhere, and we were half-beaten into unconsciousness as the shelter was ripped open. Foreign tongues clacked at us, their faces masked behind the torches. A rifle-butt to the kidneys told me that this was for real.
For real
.

The cell into which I was thrown was real enough, too. The cell into which I was thrown was smeared with blood, faeces, and other things. It contained a stinking mattress and a cockroach. That was all. I lay down on the damp mattress and tried to sleep, for I knew that sleep would be the first thing to be stripped from us all.

The bright lights of the cell came on suddenly and stayed on, burning into my skull. Then the noises started, noises of a beating and a questioning taking place in the cell next to me.

‘Leave him alone, you bastards! I’ll tear your fucking heads off!’

I slammed at the wall with fists and boots, and the noises stopped. A cell door slammed shut, a body was dragged past my metal door, there was silence. I knew my time would come.

I waited there, waited for hours and days, hungry, thirsty, and every time I closed my eyes a sound like that of a blaring radio caught between stations would sound from the walls and the ceiling. I lay with my hands over my ears.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

I was supposed to crack now, and if I cracked I would have failed everything, all the months of training. So I sang tunes loudly to myself. I scraped my nails across the walls of the cell, walls wet with fungus, and scratched my name there as an anagram: BRUSE. I played games in my head, thought up crossword-puzzle clues and little linguistic tricks. I turned survival into a game. A game, a game, a game. I had to keep reminding myself that, no matter how bad things seemed to be getting, this was all a game.

And I thought of Reeve, who had warned me of this. Big plans indeed. Reeve was the nearest thing I had to a friend in the unit. I wondered if it had been his body dragged across the floor outside my cell. I prayed for him.

And one day they sent me food and a mug of brown water. The food looked as though it had been scooped straight from the mud-crawl and pushed through the little hole which had suddenly appeared in my door and just as suddenly vanished. I willed this cold swill into becoming a steak with two veg, and then placed a spoonful of it in my mouth. Immediately, I spat it out again. The water tasted of iron. I made a show of wiping my chin on my sleeve. I felt sure I was being watched.

‘My compliments to the chef,’ I called.

Next thing I knew, I was falling over into sleep.

I was in the air. There could be no doubt of that. I was in a helicopter, the air blowing into my face. I came round slowly, and opened my eyes on darkness. My head was in some kind of sack, and my arms were tied behind my back. I felt the helicopter swoop and rise and swoop again.

‘Awake are you?’ A butt prodded me.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Now give me the name of your regiment and the
details of your mission. We’re not going to fuck around with you, sonny. So you better do it now.’

‘Get stuffed.’

‘I hope you can swim, sonny. I hope you get the
chance
to swim. We’re about two-hundred feet above the Irish Sea, and we’re about to push you out of this fucking chopper with your hands still tied. You’ll hit that water as though it was fucking concrete, do you know that? It may kill you or it may stun you. The fish will eat you alive, sonny. And your corpse will never be found, not out here. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

It was an official and businesslike voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Now, the name of your regiment, and the details of your mission.’

‘Get stuffed.’ I tried to sound calm. I’d be another accident statistic, killed on training, no questions asked. I’d hit that sea like a light-bulb hitting a wall.

‘Get stuffed,’ I said again, intoning to myself: it’s only a game, it’s only a game.