10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (277 page)

When they got outside, Rebus asked him, ‘How close were you in there?’

‘To what?’

‘Ordering a
real
drink.’

‘As close as I ever get.’

Rebus leaned on the roof of the car, waiting for Jack to unlock it. ‘Sorry I did that to you,’ he said quietly.

‘What?’

‘Brought you here.’

‘I should have the willpower to go into a pub without drinking.’

Rebus nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

And he had a little smile to himself. Jack would be OK. Jack wouldn’t shop him. The man had lost too much self-respect already.

‘There’s a spare room,’ Rebus said, getting into the car, ‘but no sheets or anything. We’ll make up the sofa if that’s OK.’

‘That’ll be fine,’ Jack said.

Fine for Jack, yes, but not so fine for Rebus. It meant he’d have to sleep in his bed. No more nights half-dressed on the chair by the window. No more Stones at two a.m. He knew he had to get busy, had to finish this as fast as he could, one way or another.

Beginning tomorrow.

As they left the Ox, Rebus decided on a detour, directed Jack down towards Leith, let him drive them around for a bit, then pointed to a darkened shop doorway.

‘That was her pitch,’ he said.

‘Whose?’ Jack stopped the car. The street was lifeless, the working girls busy elsewhere.

‘Angie Riddell’s. I knew her, Jack. I mean, I’d met her a couple of times. First time, it was business, I was pulling her in. But then I came down here looking for her.’ He looked at Jack, expecting a jokey comment, but Jack’s face was serious. He was listening. ‘We sat and talked. Next thing I knew, she was dead. It’s different when you know someone. You remember their eyes. I don’t mean the colour or anything, I mean all the things their eyes told you about them.’ He sat in silence for a moment. ‘Whoever killed her, he couldn’t have been looking at her eyes.’

‘John, we’re not priests, you know. I mean, this is a
job
, right? You have to be able to lay it aside sometimes.’

‘Is that what you do, Jack? Home after a shift, and suddenly everything’s OK? Doesn’t matter what you’ve seen out there, your home is your castle, eh?’

Jack shrugged, hands rubbing the steering-wheel. ‘It’s not my life, John.’

‘Good for you, pal.’ He looked towards the doorway again, expecting to see something of her there, the trace of a shadow, something left behind. But all he saw was darkness.

‘Get me home,’ he told Jack, closing his eyes with both thumbs.

The Fairmount Hotel was situated in Glasgow’s west end, just off the main traffic routes. From the outside, it was an unassuming slab of concrete. Inside, it was a middle-management sort of place, its main business taking place during the week. Bible John booked for the Sunday night only.

News of the Upstart’s latest victim had broken on Sunday morning, too late for coverage in the quality press. Instead, he caught the hourly news bulletins on the radio in his room, tuning between half a dozen stations, and watched what TV news he could, making notes between times. The Teletext flashes were brief paragraphs. Almost all he knew was that the victim, a married woman in her late twenties, had been found near the harbour in Aberdeen.

Aberdeen again. It was all fitting together. At the same time, if it was the Upstart, he was breaking his pattern – his first married victim, and perhaps his oldest. Which might mean that the pattern had never been there in the first place. It didn’t of necessity negate an existing pattern; it just meant that that pattern had yet to be established.

Which was what Bible John was counting on.

Meantime, he opened the UPSTART file on his laptop and read the notes on the third victim. Judith Cairns, known to her friends as Ju-Ju. Twenty-one years old, shared a rented flat in Hillhead, just across Kelvingrove Park – he could almost see Hillhead from his window. Although she was registered unemployed, Judith Cairns had worked the black economy – some bar work at lunchtimes; a chip shop in the evenings; and weekend mornings as a chambermaid at the Fairmount Hotel. Which was, Bible John was guessing, how the Upstart had come to meet her. A travelling man frequented hotels: he should know. He wondered how close he was to the Upstart – not physically, but mentally. He
didn’t want to feel close in any way to this brash pretender, this usurper. He wanted to feel unique.

He paced his room, wanting to be back in Aberdeen while the latest inquiry unfolded, but he had work here in Glasgow, work he could not accomplish until the middle of the night. He stared out of the window, imagining Judith Cairns crossing Kelvingrove Park: she must have done it dozens of times. And one time she did it with the Upstart. Once was all he needed.

During the course of the afternoon and evening, more news filtered down of the latest victim. She was now being described as a ‘successful twenty-seven-year-old company director’. The word
businessman
was like a shriek in Bible John’s head. Not a lorry driver or any other profession; a simple businessman. The Upstart. He sat down at his computer and scrolled back to his notes on the first victim, the student at Robert Gordon’s University, studying geology. He needed to know more about her, but couldn’t think which route to take. And now there was a fourth victim to occupy him. Perhaps study of number four would mean he wouldn’t need the first cull to complete his picture. Tonight might point the way.

He went out late for a walk. It was very pleasant, balmy night air, not much traffic about. Glasgow wasn’t such a bad place: he’d been to cities in the States that could eat it for brunch. He remembered the city of his youth, stories of razor gangs and bare-knuckle bouts. Glasgow had a violent history, but that didn’t tell the full story. It could be a beautiful city, too, a city for photographers and artists. A place for lovers . . .

I didn’t want to kill them
. He would like to be able to tell Glasgow that, but of course it would be a lie. At the time . . . at the last moment . . . all he’d wanted in the world was their death. He had read interviews with killers, sat through trial testimony a couple of times, too, wanting someone to explain his feelings to him. No one came close. It was impossible either to describe or to understand.

There were many who especially didn’t understand his choice of third victim. It felt pre-ordained, he could have told them. It didn’t matter about the witness in the taxi. Nothing mattered, it had all been decided by some higher power.

Or some lower one.

Or merely by some collision of chemicals in his brain, by a genetic mismatch.

And afterwards, there’d been his uncle’s offer of a job in the States, so he could afford to leave Glasgow. Leave the whole life behind him and create a new one, a new identity . . . as if marriage and a career could ever take the place of what he’d left behind . . .

He bought the next morning’s edition of the
Herald
at a street corner and retired to a bar to devour it. He drank orange juice and sat in a corner. No one paid him any attention. There were more details about the Upstart’s latest victim. She worked in corporate presentations, which meant putting together packages for industry: videos, displays, speech-writing, trade stands . . . He studied the photo again. She’d worked in Aberdeen, and there was really only one industry in Aberdeen. Oil. He didn’t recognise her, felt sure they’d never met. All the same, he wondered why the Upstart had chosen
her
: could he be sending Bible John a message? Impossible: it would mean he knew who Bible John was. Nobody knew. Nobody.

It was midnight when he returned to the hotel. Reception was deserted. He went up to his room, dozed for a couple of hours, and had the alarm wake him at half past two. He took the carpeted stairs down to reception, which was still deserted. Breaking into the office took thirty seconds. He closed the door after him and sat down in darkness at the computer. It was switched on and in screen saver mode. He nudged the mouse to activate the screen, then got to work. He searched back six weeks from the date of Judith Cairns’s murder, checking room registrations and payment methods. He was looking for accounts charged to companies based in or near
Aberdeen. His feeling was that the Upstart hadn’t come to this hotel looking for a victim, but had been here on business, and had found her by chance. He was looking for the elusive pattern to start emerging.

Fifteen minutes later, he had a list of twenty companies, and of the individuals who had paid with a company credit card. For now, that was all he needed, but he was left with a dilemma: delete the files from the computer, or leave them? With the information deleted, he would have every chance of beating the police to the Upstart. Yes, but someone from the hotel staff would notice, and would be curious. They might contact the police. There would probably be back-ups on floppy. He would actually be helping the police, alerting them to his presence . . . No, leave well alone. Do no more than is necessary. The maxim had served him well in the past.

Back in his room, he pored over the list in his notebook. It would be easy to check where each company was based, what it did – work for later. He had a meeting in Edinburgh tomorrow, and would use the trip to do something about John Rebus. He checked Teletext one last time before retiring for the night. After turning off the lights, he opened the curtains, then lay down on the bed. There were stars in the sky, a few of them bright enough to be visible through the streetlight. Dead, a lot of them, or so the astronomers said. So many dead things around, what difference would another one make?

None at all. Not one jot.

They took Jack’s car to Howdenhall, Rebus sitting in the back, calling Jack his ‘chauffeur’. It was a gloss-black Peugeot 405, three years old, turbo version; Rebus disregarded the No Smoking sticker and lit up, but kept the window open beside him. Jack didn’t say anything, didn’t even look in the rearview. Rebus hadn’t slept well in the bed; night sweats, the sheets like a straitjacket. Chase dreams waking him every hour or so, sending him shooting out of bed to stand naked and trembling in the middle of the floor.

Jack for his part had complained first thing of a stiff neck. His second complaint: the kitchen, bare fridge and all. He couldn’t go out to the shops, not without Rebus, so they’d made straight for the car.

‘I’m gutting,’ he complained.

‘So stop and we’ll eat something.’

They stopped at a bakery in Liberton: sausage rolls, beakers of coffee, a couple of macaroon cakes. Sat eating them in the car, parked double yellow by a bus stop. Buses rattled them as they passed, hinting they should shift. There were messages on the backs of some of them: Please Give Way to This Bus.

‘I don’t mind the buses,’ Jack said. ‘It’s their drivers I object to. Half of them couldn’t pass the time of day, never mind a PSV test.’

Rebus’s comment: ‘It’s not buses that have the choke-hold on this place.’

‘You’re cheery this morning.’

‘Jack, just shut your gub and drive.’

They were ready for him at Howdenhall. The team last night at his flat had taken away all his shoes, so the forensic bods could check for footprints and fail to match them against any left at the scene of Johnny Bible’s murders. First thing Rebus had to do this morning was remove the shoes he was wearing. They gave him plastic overshoes to wear, and said his own would be returned to him before he left. The overshoes were too big, uncomfortable – his feet slid around inside them, and he had to curl his toes to keep them from slipping off.

They decided against a saliva test – it was the least reliable – but plucked hairs from his head.

‘Could you graft them on to my temples when you’re finished?’

The woman with the tweezers smiled, went about her business. She explained that she had to get the roots – PCR analysis wouldn’t work on shed hair. There was a test available in some places, but . . .

‘But?’

She didn’t answer, but Rebus knew what she’d meant: but they were just going through the motions with him. Neither Ancram nor anyone else was expecting the expensive tests to yield any positive result. The only result would be a nettled, unsettled Rebus. That’s what the whole thing was about. Forensics knew it; Rebus knew it.

Blood sample – the need for a warrant had been waived – and fingerprints next, plus they wanted some strands and threads from his clothes. I’m going on the computer, Rebus thought. For all that I’m not guilty, I’ll still be a suspect in the eyes of history. Anyone digging the files out in twenty years’ time will see that a policeman was interviewed, and gave samples . . . It was a grim feeling. And once they had his DNA on record . . . well, that was him on the register. The Scottish DNA database was just beginning to be compiled. Rebus started to wish he’d insisted on a warrant.

Throughout each process Jack Morton stood by, averting
his face. And afterwards, Rebus got his shoes back. It felt like the forensic science staff were staring at him; maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. Pete Hewitt wandered past – he hadn’t been present at the fingerprinting – and made a crack about the biter bit. Jack grabbed Rebus’s arm, stopped him from swinging. Hewitt shuffled off double quick.

‘We’re due at Fettes,’ Jack reminded Rebus.

‘I’m ready.’

Jack looked at him. ‘Maybe we’ll stop off somewhere first, get another coffee.’

Rebus smiled. ‘Afraid I’ll take a swing at Ancram?’

‘If you do, bear in mind he’s a southpaw.’

‘Inspector, do you have any objections to this interview being recorded?’

‘What happens to the recording?’

‘It’ll be dated and timed, copies made: one for you. Transcripts ditto.’

‘No objections.’

Ancram nodded to Jack Morton, who set the machine running. They were in an office on the third floor of Fettes. It was cramped, and looked like it had hastily been vacated by a disgruntled tenant. There was a wastepaper-bin by the desk, waiting to be emptied. Paper-clips littered the floor. The walls still bore marks where Sellotaped pictures had been yanked down. Ancram sat behind the scratched desk, the Spaven casenotes piled to one side. He was wearing a formal dark-blue pinstripe with pale blue shirt and tie, and looked like he’d been for a haircut first thing. There were two pens in front of him on the desk – a blue fine-nib Bic with yellow casing, and an expensive-looking lacquered rollerball. His buffed and filed nails tapped against a clean pad of A4 paper. A typed list of notes, queries and points to be raised sat to the right of the pad.