10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (34 page)

‘I’m surprised the smell of burning toast didn’t wake you,’ she had said.

‘You’re looking at the man who slept through
Towering Inferno
,’ he had replied. And she had laughed, sitting on the bed taking dainty bites of toast with her exposed teeth, while Rebus chewed his slices slowly, thoughtfully. Luxuriously. How long had it been since he’d been brought breakfast in bed? It frightened him to think. . . .

‘Come in!’ he roared now, though no one had knocked.

Tracy had left without complaint, too. She felt all right, she said. She couldn’t stay cooped up forever, could she? He had driven her back towards Pilmuir, then had done something stupid. Given her ten pounds. It wasn’t just money, as he realised a second after handing it over. It was a bond between them, a bond he shouldn’t be making. It lay there in her hand, and he felt the temptation to snatch it back. But then she was out of the car and walking away, her body fragile as bone china, her gait determined, full of strength. Sometimes she reminded him of his daughter Sammy, other times. . . .

Other times of Gill Templer, his ex-lover.

‘Come in!’ he roared again. This time the door opened an inch, then another ten or eleven. A head looked into the room.

‘Nobody’s been knocking, sir,’ the head said nervously.

‘Is that so?’ said Rebus in his best stage voice. ‘Well, in that case I’d better just speak to you two instead. So why don’t you
come in
!’

A moment later, they shuffled through the doorway, a
bit less cocky now. Rebus pointed to the two chairs on the other side of his desk. One of them sat immediately, the other stood to attention.

‘I’d rather stand, sir,’ he said. The other one looked suddenly fearful, terrified that he had broken some rule of protocol.

‘This isn’t the bloody army,’ Rebus said to the standing one, just as the sitting one was rising. ‘So sit down!’

They both sat. Rebus rubbed his forehead, pretending a headache. Truth be told, he had almost forgotten who these constables were and why they were here.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Why do you think I’ve called you here this morning?’ Corny but effective.

‘Is it to do with the witches, sir?’

‘Witches?’ Rebus looked at the constable who had said this, and remembered the keen young man who had shown him the original pentagram. ‘That’s right, witches. And overdoses.’

They blinked at him. He sought frantically for a route into the interrogation, if interrogation this was to be. He should have thought more about it before coming in.

He should have at least remembered that it had been arranged. He saw a ten-pound note, a smile, could smell burning toast. . . . He looked at the pentagram constable’s tie.

‘What’s your name, son?’

‘Todd, sir.’

‘Todd? That’s German for dead, did you know that, Todd?’

‘Yes, sir. I did German at school up to Highers.’

Rebus nodded, pretending to be impressed. Damn, he
was
impressed. They all had Highers these days, it seemed, all these extraordinarily young-looking constables. Some had gone further: college, university. He had the feeling Holmes had been to university. He hoped he hadn’t enlisted the aid of a smart arse. . . .

Rebus pointed to the tie.

‘That looks a bit squint, Todd.’

Todd immediately looked down towards his tie, his head angled so sharply Rebus feared the neck would snap.

‘Sir?’

‘That tie. Is it your usual one?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So you haven’t broken a tie recently?’

‘Broken a tie, sir?’

‘Broken the clip,’ explained Rebus.

‘No, sir.’

‘And what’s your name, son?’ Rebus said quickly, turning to the other constable, who looked completely stunned by proceedings so far.

‘O’Rourke, sir.’

‘Irish name,’ Rebus commented.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What about your tie, O’Rourke? Is that a new tie?’

‘Not really, sir. I mean, I’ve got about half a dozen of these things kicking around.’

Rebus nodded. He picked up a pencil, examined it, set it down again. He was wasting his time.

‘I’d like to see the reports you made of finding the deceased.’

‘Yes, sir,’ they said.

‘Nothing unusual in the house, was there? I mean, when you first arrived? Nothing out of the ordinary?’

‘Only the dead man, sir,’ said O’Rourke.

‘And the painting on the wall,’ said Todd.

‘Did either of you bother to check upstairs?’

‘No, sir.’

‘The body was where, when you arrived?’

‘In the downstairs room, sir.’

‘And you didn’t go upstairs?’

Todd looked towards O’Rourke. ‘I think we shouted to see if anyone was up there. But no, we didn’t go up.’

So how could the tie clip have got upstairs?
Rebus exhaled, then cleared his throat. ‘What kind of car do you drive, Todd?’

‘Do you mean police car, sir?’

‘No I bloody well don’t!’ Rebus slapped the pencil down against the desk. ‘I mean for private use.’

Todd seemed more confused now than ever. ‘A Metro, sir.’

‘Colour?’

‘White.’

Rebus turned his gaze to O’Rourke.

‘I don’t have a car,’ O’Rourke admitted. ‘I like motorbikes. Just now I’ve got a Honda seven-fifty.’

Rebus nodded. No Ford Escorts then. Nobody hurtling away from his road at midnight.

‘Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?’ And with a smile he dismissed them, picked up the pencil again, examined its point, and very deliberately broke it against the edge of his desk.

Rebus was thinking of Charlie as he stopped his car in front of the tiny old-fashioned men’s-wear shop off George Street. He was thinking of Charlie as he grabbed the tie and paid for it. Back in the car, he thought of Charlie as he knotted the tie, started the ignition, and drove off. Heading towards lunch with some of the wealthiest businessmen in the city, all he could think of was Charlie, and how Charlie could probably still choose to be like those businessmen one day. He’d leave university, use his family connections to land a good job, and progress smoothly through to upper management in the space of a year or two. He would forget all about his infatuation with decadence, and would become decadent himself, the way only the rich and successful ever can. . . . True decadence, not the second-hand stuff of witchcraft and demonism, drugs and violence. That bruising on Ronnie’s body: could
it really have been rough trade? A sadomasochistic game gone wrong? A game played, perhaps, with the mysterious Edward, whose name Ronnie had screamed?

Or a ritual carried too far?

Had he dismissed the Satanism angle too readily? Wasn’t a policeman supposed to keep an open mind? Perhaps, but Satanism found him with his mind well and truly closed. He was a Christian, after all. He might not attend church often, detesting all the hymn-singing and the bald sermonising, but that didn’t mean he didn’t believe in that small, dark personal God of his. Everyone had a God tagging along with them. And the God of the Scots was as ominous as He came.

Midday Edinburgh seemed darker than ever, reflecting his mood perhaps. The Castle appeared to be casting a shadow across the expanse of the New Town, but that shadow did not, could not reach as high as The Eyrie. The Eyrie was the city’s most expensive restaurant, and also the most exclusive. Rumour had it that lunchtime was solidly booked twelve months in advance, while dinner entailed the small wait of eight to ten weeks. The restaurant itself was situated on the entire top floor of a Georgian hotel in the heart of the New Town, away from the city centre’s human bustle.

Not that the streets here were exactly quiet, a steady amount of through traffic pausing long enough to make parking a problem. But not to a detective. Rebus stopped his car on a double yellow line directly outside the hotel’s main door, and, despite the doorman’s warnings about wardens and fines, left it there and entered the hotel. He squeezed his stomach as the lift carried him four floors high, and was satisfied that he felt hungry. These businessmen might well bore the pants off him, and the thought of spending two hours with Farmer Watson was almost too much to bear, but he would eat well. Yes, he would eat exceedingly well.

And, given his way with the wine list, he’d bankrupt the buggers to boot.

Brian Holmes left the snack bar carrying a polystyrene cup of grey tea, and studied it, trying to remember when he had last had a cup of good tea, of real tea, of tea he had brewed himself. His life seemed to revolve around polystyrene cups and thermos flasks, unexciting sandwiches and chocolate biscuits. Blow, sip. Blow, sip. Swallow.

For this he had given up an academic career.

Which was to say that he had careered around academia for some eight months, studying History at the University of London. The first month he had spent in awe of the city itself, trying to come to terms with its size, the complexities of actually trying to live and travel and survive with dignity. The second and third months he had spent trying to come to terms with university life, with new friends, the persistent openings for discussion, argument, for inclusion in this or that group. He tested the water each time before joining in, all of them nervous as children learning to swim. By months four and five, he had become a Londoner, commuting to the University every day from his digs in Battersea. Suddenly his life had come to be ruled by numbers, by the times of trains and buses and tube connections, the times, too, of late buses and tubes which would whisk him away from coffee-bar politics towards his noisy single room again. Missing a train connection began to be agony, suffering the rush-hour tube, a season spent in hell. Months six and seven he spent isolated in Battersea, studying from his room, hardly attending lectures at all. And in month eight, May, with the sun warming his back, he left London and returned north, back to old friends and a sudden emptiness in his life that had to be filled by work.

But why in the name of God had he chosen the police?

He screwed up the now empty polystyrene cup and
threw it towards a nearby bin. It missed. So what, he thought. Then caught himself, went to the cup, stooped, picked it up, and deposited it in the bin. You’re not in London now, Brian, he told himself. An elderly woman smiled at him.

So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

A naughty world all right. Rebus had landed him in a soup of melted humanity. Pilmuir, Hiroshima of the soul; he couldn’t escape quickly enough. Fear of radiation. He had a little list with him, copied down neatly from last night’s scrawled telephone conversation, and he took this from his pocket now to examine it. The constables had been easy to locate. Rebus would have seen them by now. Then he had gone to the house in Pilmuir. In his inside pocket he had the photographs. Edinburgh Castle. Good shots, too. Unusual angles. And the girl. She looked quite pretty, he supposed. Hard to tell her age, and her face seemed tempered by hard living, but she was bonny enough in a rough and ready way. He had no idea how he would find out anything about her. All he had to go on was that name, Tracy. True, there were people he could ask. Edinburgh was his home turf, an enormous advantage in this particular line of work. He had contacts all right, old friends, friends of friends. He’d re-established contact after the London fiasco. They’d all told him not to go. They’d all been pleased to see him again so soon after their warnings, pleased because they could boast of their foresight. That had only been five years ago. . . . It seemed longer somehow.

Why had he joined the force? His first choice had been journalism. That went way back, back to his schooldays. Well, childhood dreams could come true, if only momentarily. His next stop would be the offices of the local daily. See if he could find some more unusual angles on the Castle. With any luck, he’d get a decent cup of tea, too.

He was about to walk on when he saw an estate agent’s
window across the street. He had always assumed that this particular agency would, because of its name, be expensive. But what the hell: he was a desperate man. He manoeuvred his way through the queue of unmoving traffic and stopped in front of the window of Bowyer Carew. After a minute, his shoulders slightly more hunched than before, he turned away again and stalked towards the Bridges.

‘And this is James Carew, of Bowyer Carew.’

James Carew lifted his well-upholstered bottom a millimetre off his well-upholstered chair, shook Rebus’s hand, then sat again. Throughout the introduction, his eyes had not left Rebus’s tie.

‘Finlay Andrews,’ continued Superintendent Watson, and Rebus shook another firm masonic hand. He didn’t need to know the secret pressure spots to be able to place a freemason. The grip itself told you everything, lasting as it did a little longer than normal, the extra time it took the shaker to work out whether you were of the brotherhood or not.

‘You might know Mr Andrews. He has a gaming establishment in Duke Terrace. What’s it called again?’ Watson was trying too hard: too hard to be the host, too hard to get along with these men, too hard for everyone’s comfort.

‘It’s just called Finlay’s,’ Finlay Andrews supplied, releasing his grip on Rebus.

‘Tommy McCall,’ said the final luncheon guest, making his own introduction, and giving Rebus’s hand a quick, cool shake. Rebus smiled, and sat down, joining them at the table, thankful to be sitting down at last.

‘Not Tony McCall’s brother?’ he asked conversationally.

‘That’s right.’ McCall smiled. ‘You know Tony then?’

‘Pretty well,’ said Rebus. Watson was looking bemused.
‘Inspector McCall,’ Rebus explained. Watson nodded vigorously.

‘So,’ said Carew, shifting in his seat, ‘what will you have to drink, Inspector Rebus?’

‘Not while on duty, sir,’ said Rebus, unfolding his prettily arranged napkin. He saw the look on Carew’s face and smiled. ‘Just a joke. I’ll have a gin and tonic, please.’

They all smiled. A policeman with a sense of humour: it usually surprised people. It would have surprised them even more had they known how seldom Rebus made jokes. But he felt the need to conform here, to ‘mix’, in that unhappy phrase.

There was a waiter at his shoulder.