10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (398 page)

‘Yes? Can I help you?’

‘Dr Margolies, I’m Detective Inspector John Rebus.’

Margolies held up his hands. ‘You’ll forgive me for not shaking.’ The hands were blackened with soil.

‘Me too,’ Rebus said, gesturing to his arm.

‘Looks nasty. What happened?’ Not sharing his wife’s reticence. But then maybe she’d had half a lifetime of biting back questions. Rebus leaned down to rub the labrador’s head. Its heavy tail thumped the ground in appreciation.

‘Got into a fight,’ Rebus explained.

‘Line of duty, eh? We’ve met before, I think.’

‘Hannah’s competition.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Nodding slowly. ‘You wanted to speak to Ama.’

‘I did then, yes.’

‘Is this something to do with her?’ Margolies was retreating back into the greenhouse. Rebus followed, and saw that the old man was potting seedlings. It was warm in the greenhouse, despite the day being overcast. Margolies asked Rebus to close the door.

‘Keep the heat in,’ he explained.

Rebus slid the door shut. Most of the available space was taken up with work surfaces, trays of seedlings laid
along them in rows. A bag of potting compost lay open on the ground. Dr Margolies was scooping a black plastic flowerpot into it.

‘How does it feel to get away with murder?’ Rebus asked.

‘I’m sorry?’ Margolies took a seedling, pushed it into its new pot.

‘You murdered Darren Rough.’

‘Who?’

Rebus took the pot from Margolies’ fingers. ‘It’s going to be a devil trying to prove it. In fact, I don’t think it will happen. I really do think you’ve got away with it.’

Margolies met his eyes, reached to take his pot back.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘You were seen in Greenfield. You were asking about Darren Rough. Then off you drove in your white Mercedes. A white saloon car was seen in Holyrood Park around the time Darren was killed. I think he went there for sanctuary, but you found it an ideal site for a murder.’

‘These riddles, Inspector . . . Do you know who I am?’

‘I know exactly who you are. I know both your children committed suicide. I know you were part of the Shiellion set-up.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ A slight trembling in the voice now. A seedling slipped from parchment fingers.

‘Don’t worry, Harold Ince is going to keep his side of the bargain. He talked to me, but it wouldn’t be admissible, and he won’t tell anyone else. He told me you were at Shiellion that night. Ince had talked with you often, had come to know you. He’d told you what he did to the kids in his care. He
knew
you wouldn’t say anything, because the two of you were alike. He knew how useful it would be to him if a doctor, the man responsible for examining the children, were part of the whole enterprise.’ Rebus leaned close to Margolies’ ear. ‘He told me
all
of it, Dr Margolies.’

The after-hours drinking, loosening up the doctor. Then
the arrival of Ramsay Marshall with a fresh new kid, Darren Rough. Making the kid wear a blindfold so he wouldn’t recognise Margolies – this at the doctor’s insistence. Sweating and trembling . . . knowing this night changed everything . . .

And afterwards: self-loathing perhaps; or maybe just fear of exposure. He hadn’t been able to cope, had feigned ill-health, opting for early retirement.

‘But you could never loose Ince’s grip on you. He’d been blackmailing you, him and Marshall both.’ Rebus’s voice was little more than a whisper, his lips almost touching the old man’s ear. ‘Know what? I’m so fucking
glad
he’s been sucking you dry all these years.’ Rebus stood back.

‘You don’t know anything.’ Margolies’ face was blood-red. Beneath the checked shirt, he was breathing hard.

‘I can’t
prove
anything, but that’s not quite the same thing. I
know
, and that’s what matters. I think your daughter found out. The shame of it killed her. You were always the first one awake in the morning; she knew
you’d
be the one to find her. And then somehow Jim found out, and he couldn’t live with it either. How come
you
can live with it, Dr Margolies? How come you can live with the deaths of both your children, and the murder of Darren Rough?’

Margolies lifted a gardening fork, held it to Rebus’s throat. His face was squeezed into a mask of anger and frustration. Beads of perspiration dripped from his forehead. And outside, the billowing smoke seemed to be cutting them off from everything.

Margolies didn’t say anything, just made sounds from behind gritted teeth. Rebus stood there, hand in pocket.

‘What?’ he said. ‘You’re going to kill me too?’ He shook his head. ‘Think about it. Your wife’s seen me. There’s another officer waiting for me out front. How will you talk your way out of it? No, Dr Margolies, you’re not going to kill me. Like I say, I can’t prove anything I’ve just said. It’s between you and me.’ Rebus lifted the hand from his
pocket, pushed the fork aside. The black lab was watching through the door, seemed to sense all was not well. It frowned at Rebus, looking disappointed in him.

‘What do you want?’ Margolies spluttered, gripping the work-bench with both hands.

‘I want you to live the rest of your life knowing that I know.’ Rebus shrugged. ‘That’s all.’

‘You want me to kill myself?’

Rebus laughed. ‘I don’t think you’ve got it in you. You’re an old man, you’re going to die soon enough. Once you’re dead, maybe Ince and Marshall will rethink their loyalty to you. You won’t be left with any reputation at all.’

Margolies turned towards him, and now there was clear, focused hatred in his eyes.

‘Of course,’ Rebus said, ‘if any evidence does turn up, you can be assured I’ll be back here at the double. You might be celebrating the millennium, you might be getting your card from the Queen, and then you’ll see me walking through the door.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll never be very far away, Dr Margolies.’

He slid open the greenhouse door, manoeuvred his way past the dog. Walked away.

It didn’t feel like any sort of victory. Unless something turned up, there’d be no justice for Darren Rough, no public trial. But Rebus knew he’d done what he could. Mrs Margolies was in the kitchen, making no pretence of doing anything other than waiting for him to return.

‘Everything all right?’ she asked.

‘Fine, Mrs Margolies.’ He headed down the hall, making for the front door. She was right behind him.

‘Well, I just was wondering . . .’

Rebus opened the door, turned to her. ‘Why not ask your husband, Mrs Margolies?’

The wife often knows, never brings herself to ask
.

‘Just one thing, Mrs Margolies . . .?’

‘Yes?’

Your husband’s a cold-blooded murderer
. His mouth opened and closed, but no words came. He shook his head, started down the garden path.

Clarke drove him to Katherine Margolies’ house, in the Grange area of Edinburgh. It was a three-storey Georgian semi in a street half of whose homes had been turned into bed-and-breakfast establishments. The white Merc was parked in front of the gate. Rebus turned to Clarke.

‘I know,’ she said: ‘stay in the car.’

Katherine Margolies looked less than thrilled to see him.

‘What do you want?’ She seemed ready to keep him on the doorstep.

‘It’s about your husband’s suicide.’

‘What about it?’ Her face was narrow and hard, hands long and thin like butcher’s knives.

‘I think I know why he did it.’

‘And what makes you think
I’d
want to know?’

‘You already do know, Mrs Margolies.’ Rebus took a deep breath. Well, if she didn’t mind them talking like this on her doorstep . . . ‘When did he find out his father was a paedophile?’

Her eyes widened. A woman emerged from the neighbouring house, preparing to walk her Jack Russell terrier. ‘You better come in,’ Katherine Margolies said sharply, eyes darting up and down the street. After he walked in, she closed the door and stood with her back to it, arms folded.

‘Well?’ she said.

Rebus looked around. The hall had a grey marble floor veined with black lines. A stone staircase swept upwards. There were paintings on the walls: Rebus got the feeling they weren’t prints. She didn’t seem to have noticed his arm, had no interest in him that way.

‘Hannah not home?’ he asked.

‘She’s at school. Look, I don’t know what it is—’

‘Then I’ll tell you. It’s been gnawing at me, Jim’s death.
And I’ll tell you why. I’ve been there myself, standing at the top of a very high place, wondering if I’d have the guts to jump off.’

Her face softened a little.

‘Usually it was the booze doing it,’ he went on. ‘These days, I think I’ve got that under control. But I learned two things. One, you have to be incredibly brave to pull it off. Two, there’s got to be some crunch reason for you not to go on living. See, when it comes to it, going on living is the easier of the two options. I couldn’t see any reason why Jim would take his life, no reason at all. But there had to be one. That’s what got to me. There
had
to be one.’

‘And now you think you’ve found it?’ Her eyes were liquid in the cool dimness of the hall.

‘Yes.’

‘And you felt it worth sharing with me?’

He shook his head. ‘All I need from you is confirmation that I’m right.’

‘And then you’ll have contentment?’ She waited till he’d nodded. ‘And what right do you have to that, Inspector Rebus? What gives you the right to sleep easy?’

‘I never find sleep very easy, Mrs Margolies.’ It seemed to him then – and maybe it was a trick of the light – that he was seeing her at the end of a long dark tunnel, so that while she stood out clearly, everything between and around them was a blur of indistinct shading. And things were moving and gathering on the periphery: the ghosts. They were all here, providing a ready-made audience. Jack Morton, Jim Stevens, Darren Rough . . . even Jim Margolies. They felt so alive to him he could scarcely believe Katherine Margolies couldn’t make them out.

‘The night Jim died,’ Rebus went on, ‘you’d been out to dinner with friends in Royal Park Terrace. I wondered about that . . . Royal Park Terrace to The Grange.’

‘What about it?’ Looking bored now more than anything. Rebus thought it was bravado.

‘Easiest route is to cut through Holyrood Park. Is that the way you drove home?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘In your white Mercedes?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Jim stopped the car, got out . . .’

‘No.’

‘Someone saw the car.’

‘No.’

‘Because something had been making his life hell, something he’d maybe just discovered about his father . . .’

‘No.’

Rebus took a step towards her. ‘It was bucketing down that night. He wouldn’t have gone out walking. That’s your version, Mrs Margolies: in the middle of the night he got up, got dressed, and went out walking. He walked all the way to Salisbury Crags in the rain, just so he could throw himself off.’ Rebus was shaking his head. ‘My version makes more sense.’

‘Maybe to you.’

‘I’m not about to go shouting from the chimney-pots, Mrs Margolies. I just need to know that that’s how it happened. He’d been talking to one of the Shiellion victims. He found out his father was involved in the Shiellion abuse and he was afraid it would come out, afraid the shame would rebound on to him.’

She exploded. ‘Christ, you couldn’t be more wrong! It had nothing to do with that. What’s any of this got to do with Shiellion?’

Rebus collected himself. ‘You tell me.’

‘Don’t you see?’ She was crying now. ‘It was Hannah . . .’

Rebus frowned. ‘Hannah?’

‘Hannah was his sister’s name. Our Hannah was named after her. Jim did it to get back at his father.’

‘Because Dr Margolies had . . .’ Rebus couldn’t bring himself to say the word. ‘With Hannah?’

She rubbed the back of her hand across her face, smudging mascara. ‘He interfered with his own daughter. God knows whether it was just once. It might have been going on for years. When she killed herself . . .’

‘She did so knowing who’d be first to find her?’

She nodded. ‘Jim knew what had happened . . . knew why she’d done it. But of course nobody ever talks about it.’ She looked at him. ‘You just don’t, do you? Not in polite society. Instead he tried shutting it out, accepting that there was no remedy.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’ But he understood something, knew now why Jim had beaten up Darren Rough. Displaced anger: he hadn’t been hitting Rough; he’d been hitting his father.

She slid down the door until she was crouching, arms hugging her knees. Rebus lowered himself on to the bottom step of the staircase, tried to make sense of it: Joseph Margolies had abused his own daughter . . . what would have made him turn to a boy like Darren Rough? Ince’s insistence, perhaps; or simple lust and curiosity, the thought of more forbidden fruit . . .

Katherine Margolies’ voice was calm again. ‘I think Jim joined the police as another way of telling his father something, telling him he’d never forget, never forgive.’

‘But if he knew all along about his father, why did he kill himself?’

‘I’ve told you! Because of Hannah.’

‘His sister?’

She gave a wild, humourless laugh. ‘Of course not.’ Paused for breath. ‘Our daughter, Inspector. I mean Hannah, our daughter. Jim had . . . he’d been worried for some time.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’d noticed he wasn’t sleeping. I’d wake in the night and he’d be lying there in the darkness, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. One night he told me. He felt I ought to know.’

‘What was he worried about?’

‘That he was turning into his father. That there was some genetic component, something he had no control over.’

‘You mean Hannah?’

She nodded. ‘He said he tried not to have the thoughts, but they came anyway. He looked at her and no longer saw his daughter.’ Her eyes were on the pattern in the floor. ‘He saw something else, something to be desired . . .’

Finally Rebus saw it. Saw all Jim Margolies’ fears, saw the past which had haunted him and the expectation of recurrence. Saw why the man had turned to young-looking prostitutes. Saw the dread of history.
Not in polite society
. If families like the Margolies and the Petries represented polite society, Rebus wanted nothing to do with it.