10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (40 page)

‘You’ve been watching me,’ Rebus admitted.

‘I didn’t
need
to watch you. I’ve seen it all before.’

‘How often?’

‘Often enough, James.’

The words were tough, the voice was tough. Rebus had no cause to doubt the teenager. Certainly he was as dissimilar to the first boy as chalk to cheese.

‘The name’s not James,’ he said.

‘Of course it is. Everybody’s called James. Makes it easier to remember a name, even if you can’t recall the face.’

‘I see.’

The boy finished the cigarette in silence, then flicked it out of the window.

‘So what’s it to be?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Rebus sincerely. ‘A drive maybe?’

‘Fuck that.’ He paused, seeming to change his mind. ‘Okay, let’s drive to the top of Calton Hill. Take a look out over the water, eh?’

‘Fine,’ said Rebus, starting the car.

They drove up the steep and winding road to the top of the hill, where the observatory and the folly – a copy of one side of Greece’s Parthenon – sat silhouetted against the sky. They were not alone at the top. Other darkened cars had parked, facing across the Firth of Forth towards the dimly lit coast of Fife. Rebus, trying not to look too closely at the other cars, decided to park at a discreet distance from them, but the boy had other ideas.

‘Stop next to that Jag,’ he ordered. ‘What a great-looking car.’

Rebus felt his own car take the insult with as much pride as it could muster. The brakes squealed in protest as he pulled to a halt. He turned off the ignition.

‘What now?’ he asked.

‘Whatever you want,’ said the boy. ‘Cash on delivery, of course.’

‘Of course. What if we just talk?’

‘Depends on the kind of talk you want. The dirtier it is, the more it’ll cost.’

‘I was just thinking about a guy I met here once. Not so long ago. Haven’t seen him around. I was wondering what happened to him.’

The boy suddenly placed his hand on Rebus’s crotch, rubbing hard and fast against the material. Rebus stared at the hand for a full second before calmly, but with a deliberate grip, removing it. The boy grinned, leaning back in his seat.

‘What’s his name, James?’

Rebus tried to stop himself trembling. His stomach was filling with bile. ‘Ronnie,’ he said at last, clearing his throat. ‘Not too tall. Dark hair, quite short. Used to take a few pictures. You know, keen on photography.’

The boy’s eyebrows rose. ‘You’re a photographer, are you? Like to take a few snaps? I see.’ He nodded slowly. Rebus doubted that he did see, but wasn’t about to say more than was necessary. And yes, that Jag was nice. New-looking. Paintwork brightly reflective. Someone with a bit of money. And dear God why did he have an erection?

‘I think I know which Ronnie you mean now,’ said the boy. ‘I haven’t seen him around much myself.’

‘So what can you tell me about him?’

The boy was staring out of the windscreen again. ‘Great view from here, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Even at night.
Especially
at night. Amazing. I hardly ever come here in the daytime. It all looks so ordinary. You’re a copper, aren’t you?’

Rebus looked towards him, but the boy was still staring out of the windscreen, smiling, unconcerned.

‘Thought you were,’ he went on. ‘Right from the start.’

‘So why did you get in the car?’

‘Curious, I suppose. Besides,’ and now he looked towards Rebus, ‘some of my best customers are officers of the law.’

‘Well, that’s none of my concern.’

‘No? It should be. I’m underage, you know.’

‘I guessed.’

‘Yeah, well. . . .’ The boy slumped in his seat, putting his feet up on the dashboard. For a moment, Rebus thought he was about to do something, and jerked himself upright. But the boy just laughed.

‘What did you think? Think I was going to
touch
you again? Eh? No such luck, James.’

‘So what about Ronnie?’ Rebus wasn’t sure whether he wanted to punch this rather ugly little kid in the gut, or take him to a good and a caring home. But he knew, above all, that he wanted answers.

‘Give me another ciggie.’ Rebus obliged. ‘Ta. Why are you so interested in him?’

‘Because he’s dead.’

‘Happens all the time.’

‘He overdosed.’

‘Ditto.’

‘The stuff was lethal.’

The boy was silent for a moment.

‘Now that
is
bad news.’

‘Has there been any poisoned stuff going around recently?’

‘No.’ He smiled again. ‘Only good stuff. Got any on you?’ Rebus shook his head, thinking:
I do want to punch him in the gut
. ‘Pity,’ said the boy.

‘What’s your name, by the way?’

‘No names, James, and no pack drill.’ He put out his hand, palm up. ‘I need some money.’

‘I need some answers first.’

‘So give me the questions. But first, a little goodwill, eh?’ The hand was still there, expectant as any father-to-be. Rebus found a crumpled tenner in his jacket and handed it over. The boy seemed satisfied. ‘This gets you the answers to two questions.’

Rebus’s anger ignited. ‘It gets me as many answers as I want, or so help me –’

‘Rough trade? That your game?’ The boy seemed unconcerned. Maybe he’d heard it all before. Rebus wondered.

‘Is there much rough stuff goes on?’ he asked.

‘Not much.’ the boy paused. ‘But still too much.’

‘Ronnie was into it, wasn’t he?’

‘That’s your second question,’ stated the boy. ‘And the answer is, I don’t know.’

‘Don’t knows don’t count,’ said Rebus. ‘And I’ve got plenty of questions left.’

‘Okay, if that’s the way –’ The boy was reaching for the door handle, ready to walk away from it all. Rebus grabbed him by the neck and brought his head down against the dashboard, right between where both feet were still resting.

‘Jesus Christ!’ The boy checked for blood on his forehead. There was none. Rebus was pleased with himself: maximum shock, minimum visible damage. ‘You can’t –’

‘I can do anything I like, son, and that includes tipping you over the edge of the highest point in the city. Now tell me about Ronnie.’

‘I can’t tell you about Ronnie.’ There were tears in his eyes now. He rubbed at his forehead, trying to erase the hurt. ‘I didn’t know him well enough.’

‘So tell me what you
do
know.’

‘Okay, okay.’ He sniffed, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. ‘All I know is that a few friends of mine have gotten into a scene.’

‘What scene?’

‘I don’t know. Something heavy. They don’t talk about it, but the marks are there. Bruises, cuts. One of them ended up in the Infirmary for a week. Said he fell down the stairs. Christ, he looked like he fell down a whole high-rise.’

‘But nobody’s talking?’

‘There must be good money in it somewhere.’

‘Anything else?’

‘It may not be important. . . .’ The kid had broken. Rebus could hear it in his voice. He’d talk from now till judgment day. Good: Rebus didn’t have too many ears in
this part of the city. A fresh pair might make all the difference.

‘What?’ he barked, enjoying his role now.

‘Photographs. Somebody’s putting a whisper around that there’s interest in photographs. Not faked ones, either. The real McCoy.’

‘Porn shots?’

‘I suppose so. The rumours have been a bit vague. Rumours get that way when they’ve gone past being second-hand.’

‘Chinese whispers,’ said Rebus. He was thinking: this whole thing is like a game of Chinese whispers, everything at second and third remove, nothing absolutely proof positive.

‘What?’

‘Never mind. Anything else?’

The boy shook his head. Rebus reached into his pocket and, to his own surprise, found yet another tenner. Then he remembered that he’d visited a cashpoint machine somewhere during the drinking session with McCall. He handed the money over.

‘Here. And I’ll give you my name and phone number. I’m always open to bits of information, no matter how small. Sorry about your head, by the way.’

The boy took the money. ‘That’s all right. I’ve seen worse pay.’ Then he smiled.

‘Can I give you a lift?’

‘The Bridges maybe?’

‘No problem. What’s your name?’

‘James.’

‘Really?’ Rebus was smiling.

‘Yes, really.’ The boy was smiling, too. ‘Listen, there
is
one other thing.’

‘Go ahead, James.’

‘It’s just a name I’ve been hearing. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Yes?’

‘Hyde.’

Rebus frowned. ‘Hide? Hide what?’

‘No,
Hyde
. H-y-d-e.’

‘What about Hyde?’

‘I don’t know. Like I said, it’s just a name.’

Rebus gripped the steering wheel. Hyde?
Hyde?
Was that what Ronnie had been telling Tracy? Not just to hide, but to hide from some man called Hyde? Trying to think, he found himself staring at the Jag again. Or rather, staring at the profile of the man in the driver’s seat. The man with his hand up around the neck of the much younger occupant of the passenger seat. Stroking, and all the time talking in a low voice. Stroking, talking. All very innocent.

A wonder then that James Carew of Bowyer Carew Estate Agents should look so startled when, being stared at, he returned the stare and found himself eye to eye with Dectective Inspector John Rebus.

Rebus was taking all this in as Carew fumbled with his ignition key, revved up the new V
12
engine and reversed out of the car park as though Cutty Sark herself were after him.

‘He’s in a hurry,’ said James.

‘Have you seen him before?’

‘Didn’t really catch his face. Haven’t seen the car before though.’

‘No, well, it’s a new car, isn’t it?’ said Rebus, lazily starting his own.

The flat was still redolent of Tracy. She lingered in the living room and the bathroom. He saw her with a towel falling down around her head, legs tucked beneath her. . . . Bringing him breakfast: the dirty dishes were still lying beside his unmade bed. She had laughed to find that he slept on a mattress on the floor. ‘Just like in a squat,’
she had said. The flat seemed emptier now, emptier than it had felt for a while. And Rebus could do with a bath. He returned to the bathroom and turned the hot tap on. He could still feel James’s hand on his leg. . . . In the living room, he looked at a bottle of whisky for a full minute, but turned his back on it and fetched a low-alcohol lager from the fridge instead.

The bath was filling slowly. An Archimedean screw would have been more efficient. Still, it gave him time to make another telephone call to the station, to check on how they were treating Tracy. The news was not good. She was becoming irritable, refusing to eat, complaining of pains in her side. Appendicitis? More likely cold turkey. He felt a fair amount of guilt at not having gone to see her before now. Another layer of guilt wouldn’t do any harm, so he decided to put off the visit until morning. Just for a few hours he wanted to be away from it all, all the sordid tinkering with other people’s lives. His flat didn’t feel so secure any more, didn’t feel like the castle it had been only a day or two ago. And there was internal damage as well as the structural kind: he was feeling soiled in the pit of his gut, as though the city had scraped away a layer of its surface grime and force-fed him the lot.

To hell with it.

He was caught all right. He was living in the most beautiful, most civilised city in northern Europe, yet every day had to deal with its flipside, with the minor matter of its animus.
Animus
? Now there was a word he hadn’t used in a while. He wasn’t even sure now what it meant exactly; but it sounded right. He sucked from the beer bottle, holding the foam in his mouth like a child playing with toothpaste. This stuff was all foam. No substance.

All foam. Now there was another idea. He would put some foaming bath oil in the water. Bubblebath. Who the hell had given him this stuff? Oh. Yes. Gill Templer. He remembered now. Remembered the occasion, too. She had
been gently chiding him about how he never cleaned the bath. Then had presented him with this bath oil.

‘It cleans you
and
your bath,’ she had said, reading from the bottle. ‘And puts the fun back into bathtime.’

He had suggested that they test this claim together, and they had. . . . Jesus, John, you’re getting morbid again. Just because she’s gone off with some vacuum-headed disc jockey with the unlikely name of Calum McCallum. It wasn’t the end of anybody’s world. The bombs weren’t falling. There were no sirens in the sky.

Nothing but . . . Ronnie, Tracy, Charlie, James and the rest. And now Hyde. Rebus was beginning to know now the meaning of the term ‘dead beat’. He rested his naked limbs in the near-scalding water and closed his eyes.

Dead beat: Holmes yawned again, dead on his feet. For once, he had actually beaten the alarm, so that he was returning to bed with instant coffee when the radio blared into action. What a way to wake up every day. When he had a spare half hour, he’d retune the bloody thing to Radio Three or something. Except he knew Radio Three would send him straight back to sleep, whereas the voice of Calum McCallum and the grating records he played in between hoots and jingles and enthusiastic bad jokes brought him awake with a jolt, ready, teeth gritted, to face another day.

This morning, he had beaten the smug little voice. He switched the radio off.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Coffee, and time to get up.’

Nell turned her head from the pillow, squinting up at him.

‘Has it gone nine?’

‘Not quite.’

She turned back into the pillow again, moaning softly.

‘Good. Wake me up again when it does.’

‘Drink your coffee,’ he chided, touching her shoulder. Her shoulder was warm, tempting. He allowed himself a wistful smile, then turned and left the bedroom. He had gone ten paces before he paused, turned, and went back. Nell’s arms were long, tanned, and open in welcome.

Despite the breakfast he had brought her in the cell, Tracy
was furious with Rebus, and especially when he explained to her that she could leave whenever she wanted, that she wasn’t under arrest.