10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (381 page)

‘Schooldays, Brian,’ Rebus agreed. He watched something brighten behind Brian Mee’s eyes, then die again.

Rebus brushed his teeth in the kitchen – didn’t want to intrude upstairs, not with Brian readying for bed. He laid the blankets out on the sofa. Sat there with the lights out, then got up and went to the window. Peered through the curtains. Outside, the street-lamps cast a faint orange glow. The street itself was empty. He crept into the hall, opened the front door quietly, leaving it on the latch. Five minutes outside told him Cary Oakes wasn’t in the vicinity. He headed back indoors, needed the toilet. The kitchen sink seemed inappropriate, so he listened at the foot of the stairs then headed up. He knew the bathroom door, went in and did his business. One bedroom door was closed, the other slightly open. The open door had a football scarf pinned to it, and half a dozen used concert tickets from a few years before. Rebus pushed his head around the door: saw the outlines of posters, a wardrobe and chest of drawers. Saw the window with the curtains
drawn. Saw the single bed, and Janice sleeping in it, her breathing regular.

Crept downstairs again feeling like a housebreaker.

Next morning after breakfast, he had a meeting with Damon’s friends.

They came round to the house, while Janice and Brian were out shopping. Joey Haldane was tall and skinny with closely cropped bleached hair and dark bushy eyebrows. He wore all denim – jeans, shirt, jacket – with black Dr Marten shoes. Rebus noticed that his mouth hung open most of the time, as though he had trouble breathing through his nose.

Pete Mathieson was as tall as Joey but a lot broader, the kind of son a farmer would be proud of (and probably exploit). He wore red jogging pants and a blue sweatshirt, Nike trainers with the soles almost rubbed away. They sat on the sofa. Rebus’s sheets and pillow had disappeared upstairs before breakfast, while he’d been soaking in the bath.

‘Thanks for coming,’ Rebus began. Instead of one of the overstuffed armchairs, he was seated on a straight-backed dining chair, planted in the middle of the room. Below him, the boys sank into the sofa. He’d turned his chair so he could straddle it, leaning his arms on its back.

‘I know we’ve talked before, Joey, but I’ve got a couple of back-up questions. So-called because when I think someone’s not playing straight with me, it tends to get my back up.’

Joey wet his lips with his tongue, Pete twitched a shoulder, angled his head and tried to look bored.

‘See,’ Rebus went on, ‘I was told the three of you had gone just that once to Edinburgh for your night out. But
now I think I know differently. I think you’d been there before. I think maybe it was a regular thing, which makes me wonder why you’d lie. What is it you’re trying to hide? Remember, this is a missing person investigation. No way you’re not going to be found out.’

‘We haven’t done nothing.’ This from Joey, his voice a hoarse local accent, the sound of carpentry work.

‘Know what a double negative is, Joey?’

‘Should I?’ Holding Rebus’s stare for the briefest of moments.

‘If you say you haven’t done nothing, it means you’ve done
something
.’

‘I’ve told you, we haven’t done nothing.’

‘You haven’t lied about that night? You hadn’t been to Edinburgh for a night out before . . .?’

‘We’d been before,’ Pete Mathieson said.

‘Hello there, Pete,’ Rebus said. ‘Thought you’d lost the power of speech for a minute there.’

‘Pete,’ Joey spat, ‘for fuck’s—’

Mathieson gave his friend a look, but when he spoke it was for Rebus’s benefit.

‘We’d been before.’

‘To Guiser’s?’

‘And other places – pubs, clubs.’

‘How often?’

‘Four, five nights.’

‘Without telling your girlfriends?’

‘They thought we were down Kirkcaldy, same as always.’

‘Why not tell them?’

‘That would have spoiled it,’ Joey said, folding his arms. Rebus thought he knew what he meant. It was only an adventure if it was furtive. Men liked to have their little secrets and tell their little lies. They liked a sense of the illicit. All the same, he got the feeling it went further. It was the way Joey was leaning back in the sofa, crossing one ankle over the other. He was thinking of something,
something about the nights out, and the thought was making him feel good . . .

‘Was it just you that was cheating, Joey, or was it all of you?’

Joey’s face grew darker. He turned to his friend.

‘I never said nothing!’ Pete blurted out.

‘He didn’t need to, Joey,’ Rebus said. ‘It’s written on your face.’

Joey wriggled in his seat, less comfortable by the second. Eventually he sat forward, arms on knees. ‘If Alice finds out she’ll kill me.’

So much for the thrill of the illicit.

‘Your secret’s safe with me, Joey. I just need to know what happened that night.’

Joey glanced towards Pete, as though giving him permission to do the talking.

‘Joey met a girl,’ Pete began. ‘Three weeks before. So every time we went across, he hooked up with her.’

‘You weren’t in Guiser’s?’

Joey shook his head. ‘Went back to her flat for an hour.’

‘The plan was,’ Pete explained, ‘we’d all meet up later at Guiser’s.’

‘You weren’t there either?’

Pete shook his head. ‘We were in a pub beforehand, I got chatting to this lassie. I think Damon was a bit bored.’

‘More likely jealous,’ Joey added.

‘So he headed off to Guiser’s on his own?’ Rebus asked.

‘By the time I got there,’ Pete said, ‘there was no sign of him.’

‘So he wasn’t at the bar for a round of drinks? You made that up so nobody would know you were busy elsewhere?’ He was looking at Joey.

‘That’s about it,’ Pete answered. ‘Didn’t think it made any difference.’

Rebus was thoughtful. ‘What about Damon? Did he ever hook up with anyone?’

‘Never seemed to get lucky.’

‘It wasn’t because he was thinking of Helen?’

Joey shook his head. ‘He was just useless with birds.’

And he’d gone off to Guiser’s on his own . . . thinking what? Thinking about how of the three, he was the only one who couldn’t pick up a girl for the night. Thinking he was ‘useless’. Yet somehow he’d ended up sharing a taxi with the mystery blonde . . .

‘Does it matter?’ Pete asked.

‘It might. I’ll have to think about it.’ It mattered because Damon had been there alone. It mattered because now Rebus had no idea what had happened to him between leaving Pete in the pub and standing at the bar in Guiser’s waiting to be served, with a blonde at his shoulder. They might have met en route. Something might have happened. And Rebus couldn’t know. Just when the picture should have been becoming clearer, it had been torn apart.

When Janice and Brian started bringing bags in from the car, Rebus dismissed Pete and Joey. Something else they’d said: Damon wouldn’t have minded finding a girl for the night. What did that say about his relationship with Helen?

‘All right, John?’ Janice said, smiling.

‘Fine,’ he replied.

After lunch, Brian invited him to the pub. It was a regular thing – Saturday afternoon, football commentary on the radio or TV. A few drinks with the lads. But Rebus declined. He had the excuse that Janice had offered to take a walk around the town with him. Rebus didn’t want to be out drinking with Brian, a time when bonds could be made or tightened, secrets could dribble out ‘in confidence’. Now that he’d seen Janice sleeping in a separate room, Rebus felt he knew things he shouldn’t.

Of course, she might be sleeping there because of Damon, because she missed him. But Rebus didn’t think that was it.

So Brian went off to the pub, and Janice and Rebus went walking. Rain was falling, but lightly. She wore a red duffel coat with a hood. She offered Rebus an umbrella, but he declined, explaining that ever since he’d seen someone almost get their eye taken out with one on Princes Street, he’d regarded them as offensive weapons.

‘Where we’re walking won’t be quite so crowded,’ she told him.

And it was true. The streets were empty. Locals went to Kirkcaldy or Edinburgh for their shopping. When Rebus had been young his family hadn’t owned a car. The shops on the main street had catered for all their needs. The needs these days seemed to be videos and takeaway food. The Goth was indeed closed, its windows boarded up, reminding Rebus of Darren Rough’s flat. The flats on Craigside Road had been demolished, new houses replacing them. Some of them were owned by the local housing association, the others were private.

‘Nobody owned their own house when we were growing up,’ Janice stated. Then she laughed. ‘I must sound about seventy-eight.’

‘The good old days,’ Rebus agreed. ‘Places do change, though.’

‘Yes.’

‘And people are allowed to change too.’

She looked at him, but didn’t ask what he meant. Maybe she already knew.

They climbed up to The Craigs, a high ridge of wilderness above Auchterderran, and walked along it until they could see the old school.

‘Not that it’s used as a school any more,’ Janice explained. ‘Kids these days go to Lochgelly. Remember the school badge?’

‘I remember it.’ Auchterderran Secondary School: ASS. Kids from other schools used to bray at them, poking fun.

‘Why do you keep looking round?’ she asked. ‘Think someone’s following us?’

‘No.’

‘Brian’s not like that, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘No, no, nothing—’

‘Sometimes I wish he was.’ She strode ahead of him. He took his time catching up.

They walked back into town past the Auld Hoose pub. Cardenden as it now was had at one time been four distinct parishes known as the ABCD – Auchterderran, Bowhill, Cardenden and Dundonald. When they’d been going out together, Rebus had lived in Bowhill, Janice in Dundonald. He would take this route walking her home, going the longest way round they could think of. Crossing the River Ore at the old humpbacked bridge – now long replaced by a tarmac road. Sometimes, in summer, say, cutting through the park, crossing the river further up at one of the wide-diameter pipes. Those pipes had provided a test for the local kids. Rebus had known boys freeze halfway across, until their parents had to be fetched. He’d known one boy pee in his trousers with fear, but keep on moving his feet inch by inch along the pipe, while the river surged below him. Others took the crossing at a canter, hands in their pockets, needing no help with balancing.

Rebus had been one of the cautious ones.

The same pipe ran the length of the park before disappearing into the undergrowth beyond. You could follow it all the way to the bing – the hill-sized mound of dross and coal-shavings which the local colliery had deposited. Fires started on the bing could smoulder for months, wisps of smoke rising from the surface as from a volcano. In time, trees and grass had grown on the slopes, so that more than ever the bing came to resemble a natural hill. But if you climbed to the top, there was a plateau, an alien landscape, wired off for safety’s sake. It was like a small loch, its surface oily, thick-looking, and black. Nobody knew what it was, but they respected it – kept
their distance and threw stones, watching them sink slowly from view as they were sucked beneath the surface.

Boys and girls went into the wild areas behind the park and found secret places, flattened areas of fields which they could call their own. And that had been Janice and Johnny, too, once upon a time . . .

The Kinks: ‘Young and Innocent Days’.

Now, the place had changed. The bing had gone, the whole area landscaped. The colliery had been demolished. Cardenden had grown up around coal, hurried streets constructed in the twenties and thirties to house the incoming miners. These streets hadn’t even been given names, just numbers. Rebus’s family had moved into 13th Street. Relocation had taken the family to a pre-fab in Cardenden, and from there to a terraced house in a cul-de-sac in Bowhill. But by the time Rebus had been at secondary school, the coal was proving difficult to mine: fractured strata, so that a face might yield low tonnage. The colliery had become uneconomic. The daily siren signalling the change of shifts had been silenced. School-friends of Rebus, boys whose fathers and grandfathers had been miners, were left wondering what to do.

And Rebus too had been asking himself questions. But with Mitch’s help he’d come to a decision. They’d both join the army. It had seemed so simple back then . . .

‘Is Mickey still around?’ Janice asked.

‘Lives in Kirkcaldy.’

‘He was a pest, your wee brother. Remember him charging into the bedroom? Or opening the bowley-hole all of a sudden so he could catch us?’

Rebus laughed.
Bowley-hole
: a word he hadn’t heard in years. The serving-hatch between kitchen and living room. He could see Mickey now. He’d be up on the worktop in the kitchen, trying to spy on Rebus and Janice while they were alone in the living room.

Rebus looked around again. He didn’t think Cary Oakes was in town. A place this size, where everyone
knew everyone, it was hard to hide. He’d already had a couple of people come up and say hello, like they’d seen him just the other day, rather than a dozen or more years ago. And Janice had been stopped by half a dozen people – neighbours or the plain curious – and asked about Damon. It was hard to escape him: every wall, lamp-post and window seemed to have his picture stuck to it.

‘I was here a few years back,’ he told Janice. ‘Hutchy’s betting shop.’

‘You were after Tommy Greenwood?’

He nodded. ‘And I bumped into Cranny.’ Their old nickname for Heather Cranston.

‘She’s still around. So’s her son.’

Rebus sought the name. ‘Shug?’

‘That’s it,’ Janice said. ‘If you’re lucky, you might see Heather tonight.’

‘Oh?’

‘She often comes to the karaoke.’

Rebus asked Janice if they could turn back. ‘I want to see the cemetery,’ he explained. And backtracking, he might have added, as he’d learned in the army, was a good way to find if you were being followed. So they headed back through Bowhill, and up the cemetery brae. He was thinking of all the stories buried in the graveyard: mining tragedies; a girl found drowned in the Ore; a holiday car crash which had wiped out a family. Then there was Johnny Thomson, Celtic goalkeeper, fatally injured during an Old Firm derby, only in his twenties when he died.