10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (59 page)

‘I don’t know anything about serial killers,’ Rebus had protested to his boss.

‘Well then, it seems like you’ll be in good company, doesn’t it?’

And now look at him, standing on a stretch of ground in north-east London, a cup of unspeakably bad tea nursed in both hands, his stomach churning, nerves buzzing, his bags looking as lonely and out of place as he felt. Here to help solve the insoluble,
our man from north of the border
. Whose idea had it been to bring him here? No police force in the country liked to admit failure; yet by lugging Rebus down here the Met was doing precisely that.

Laine had gone and Flight seemed a little more relaxed. He even found time to smile reassuringly across to Rebus before giving orders to two men who, Rebus knew, would be from a funeral parlour. The men went back to their vehicle and returned with a large folded piece of plastic. They crossed the cordon and stopped at the body, laying the plastic out beside it. It was a translucent bag, over six feet long with a zip running from head to toe. Dr Cousins was in close attendance as the two men opened the bag and lifted the body into it, closing the zipper. One photographer had decided to shoot off a few more flash photographs of the spot where the body had lain, while the attendants carried the corpse back through the cordon and up to their vehicle.

Rebus noticed that the crowd of onlookers had disappeared, and only a few curious souls remained. One of them, a young man, was carrying a crash helmet and wore a shiny black leather jacket with shinier silver zips. A very tired constable was trying to move him on.

Rebus felt like an onlooker himself and thought of all the TV dramas and films he’d seen, with detectives swarming over the murder site in minute one (destroying any forensic evidence in the process) and solving the murder by minute fifty-nine or eighty-nine. Laughable, really. Police work was just that: work. Relentless, routine, dull, frustrating, and above all time-consuming. He checked his watch. It was exactly 2 am. His hotel was back in central London, tucked somewhere behind Piccadilly Circus. It would take another thirty to forty minutes to get back there, always supposing a spare patrol car was available.

‘Coming?’

It was Flight, standing a few yards in front of him.

‘Might as well,’ said Rebus, knowing exactly what Flight was talking about, or more accurately
where
he was talking about.

Flight smiled. ‘I’ll give you this, Inspector Rebus, you don’t give up.’

‘The famous tenacity of the Scots,’ said Rebus, quoting from one of Sunday’s newspaper rugby reports. Flight actually laughed. It didn’t last long, but it made Rebus feel glad that he’d come here tonight. The ice hadn’t been broken completely perhaps, but an important chunk had been chipped away from one corner of the berg.

‘Come on then. I’ve got my car. I’ll get one of the drivers to put your bags in his boot. The lock’s stuck on mine. Somebody tried to crowbar it open a few weeks back.’ He glanced towards Rebus, a rare moment of eye contact. ‘Nowhere is safe these days,’ he said. ‘Nowhere.’

There was already a lot of commotion up at road level. Voices and the slamming shut of car doors. Some officers would stay behind, of course, guarding the site. And a few might be going back to the warmth of the station or – luxury hardly to be imagined! – their own beds. But a few of the cars would be following the funeral van, following it all the way to the mortuary.

Rebus travelled in the front of Flight’s own car. Both men spent the journey in desperate pursuit of a conversational opening and as a result said very little until they were near their destination.

‘Do we know who she was?’ asked Rebus.

‘Jean Cooper,’ said Flight. ‘We found ID in her handbag.’

‘Any reason for her to be on that path?’

‘She was going home from work. She worked in an off-licence nearby. Her sister tells us she finished work at seven.’

‘When was the body found?’

‘Quarter to ten.’

‘That’s a fair gap.’

‘We’ve got witnesses who saw her in the Dog and Duck. That’s a pub near where she works. She used to go in there for a drink some evenings. The barmaid reckons she left at nine or thereabouts.’

Rebus stared out of the windscreen. The roads were still fairly busy considering the time of night and they passed groups of youthful and raucous pedestrians.

‘There’s a club in Stokie,’ Flight explained. ‘Very popular, but the buses have stopped by the time it comes out so everyone walks home.’

Rebus nodded, then asked: ‘Stokie?’

Flight smiled. ‘Stoke Newington. You probably passed through it on your way from King’s Cross.’

‘God knows,’ said Rebus. ‘It all looked the same to me. I think my taxi driver had me down as a tourist. We took so long from King’s Cross I think we might have come via the M25.’ Rebus waited for Flight to laugh, but all he raised was a sliver of a smile. There was another pause. ‘Was this Jean Cooper single?’ Rebus asked at last.

‘Married.’

‘She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.’

Flight nodded. ‘Separated. She lived with her sister. No kids.’

‘And she went drinking by herself.’

Flight glanced towards Rebus. ‘What are you saying?’

Rebus shrugged. ‘Nothing. It’s just that if she liked a good time, maybe that’s how she met her killer.’

‘It’s possible.’

‘At any rate, whether she knew him or not, the killer could have followed her from the pub.’

‘We’ll be talking to everybody who was there, don’t worry.’

‘Either that,’ said Rebus, thinking aloud, ‘or the killer was waiting by the river for anyone who happened along. Somebody might have seen him.’

‘We’ll be asking around,’ said Flight. His voice had taken on a much harder edge.

‘Sorry,’ said Rebus. ‘A severe case of teaching my granny to suck eggs.’

Flight turned to him again. They were about to take a left through some hospital gates. ‘I am not your granny,’ he said. ‘And any comments you have to make are welcome. Maybe eventually you’ll come up with something I haven’t already thought of.’

‘Of course,’ said Rebus, ‘this couldn’t have happened in Scotland.’

‘Oh?’ Flight had a half-sneer on his face. ‘Why’s that then? Too civilised up there in the frozen north? I remember when you had the worst football hooligans in the world. Maybe you still do, only these days they look like butter wouldn’t melt in their underpants.’

But Rebus was shaking his head. ‘No, it wouldn’t have happened to Jean Cooper, that’s all I meant. Our off-licences don’t open on Sunday.’

Rebus fell silent and stared fixedly at the windscreen, keeping his thoughts to himself, thoughts which ran along a very simple plane: fuck you, too, pal. Over the years, those four words had become his mantra. Fuck you, too, pal. FYTP. It had taken the Londoner only the length of a twenty-minute car ride to show what he really thought of the Scots.

As Rebus got out of the car, he glanced in through the rear window and saw, for the first time, the contents of the back seat. He opened his mouth to speak, but Flight raised a knowing hand.

‘Don’t even ask,’ he growled, slamming shut the driver’s-side door. ‘And listen, I’m sorry about what I said . . .’

Rebus merely shrugged, but his eyebrows descended in a private and thoughtful frown. After all, there had to be
some
logical explanation as to why a Detective Inspector would have a huge stuffed teddy bear in the back of his car at the scene of a murder. It was just that Rebus was damned if he could think of one right this second . . .

Mortuaries were places where the dead stopped being people and turned instead into bags of meat, offal, blood and bone. Rebus had never been sick at the scene of a crime, but the first few times he had visited a mortuary the contents of his stomach had fairly quickly been rendered up for examination.

The mortuary technician was a gleeful little man with a livid birthmark covering a full quarter of his face. He seemed to know Dr Cousins well enough and had prepared everything for the arrival of the deceased and the usual retinue of police officers. Cousins checked the post-mortem room, while Jean Cooper’s sister was taken quietly into an ante-room, there to make the formal identification. It took only a tearful few seconds, after which she was escorted well away from the scene by consoling officers. They would take her home, but Rebus doubted if she would get any sleep. In fact, knowing how long a scrupulous pathologist could take, he was beginning to doubt that any of them would get to bed before morning.

Eventually, the body bag was brought into the post-mortem room and the corpse of Jean Cooper placed on a slab, beneath the hum and glare of powerful strip lighting. The room was antiseptic but antique. Its tiled walls were cracking and there was a stinging aroma of chemicals. Voices were kept muffled, not so much out of respect but from a strange kind of fear. The mortuary, after all, was one vast memento mori, and what was about to happen to Jean Cooper’s body would serve to remind each and every one of them that if the body were a temple, then it was possible to loot that temple, scattering its treasures, revealing its precious secrets.

A hand landed gently on Rebus’s shoulder, and he turned, startled, towards the man who was standing there. ‘Man’ was by way of simplification. This tall and unsmiling individual had cropped fair hair and the acne-ridden face of an adolescent. He looked about fourteen, but Rebus placed him in his mid-twenties.

‘You’re the Jock, aren’t you?’ There was interest in the voice, but little emotion. Rebus said nothing. FYTP. ‘Yeah, thought so. Cracked the case yet, have you?’ The grin accompanying this question was three-quarters sneer and one-quarter scowl. ‘We don’t
need
any help.’

‘Ah,’ said George Flight, ‘I see you’ve already met DC Lamb. I was just about to introduce you.’

‘Delighted,’ said Rebus, gazing stonily at the join-the-dots pattern of spots on Lamb’s forehead. Lamb! No surname in history, Rebus felt, had ever been less deserved, less accurate. Over by the slab, Dr Cousins cleared his throat noisily.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said to the room at large. It was little more than an indication that he was about to start work. The room fell quiet again. A microphone hung down from the ceiling to within a few feet of the slab. Cousins turned to the technician. ‘Is this thing on now?’ The technician nodded keenly from between arranging a row of clanging metallic instruments along a tray.

Rebus knew all the instruments, had seen them all in action. The cutters and the saws and the drills. Some of them were electrical, some needed a human force to drive them home. The sounds the electrical ones made were horrible, but at least the job was over quickly; the manual tools made similarly revolting sounds that seemed to last forever. Still, there would be an interval before that particular shop of horrors. First of all there was the slow and careful business of removing the clothing and bagging it up for Forensics.

As Rebus and the others watched, the two photographers clicked away, one taking black and white shots and the other colour, recording for posterity each stage of the process. The video cameraman had given up, however, his equipment having jammed irreparably on one of the bargain tapes. Or at least that was the story which kept him away from the mortuary.

Finally, when the corpse was naked, Cousins pointed to a few areas meriting particular close-up shots. Then the Forensics men moved in again, armed with more lengths of sticky tape. Now that the body was unclothed, the same process as was carried out on the tow-path had to be gone through again. Not for nothing were these people known as Sellotape Men.

Cousins wandered over towards the group where Rebus, Flight and Lamb stood.

‘I’d kill for a cup of tea, George.’

‘I’ll see what I can do, Philip. What about Isobel?’

Cousins looked back towards where Isobel Penny stood, making another drawing of the corpse despite the welter of camera shots. ‘Penny,’ he called, ‘care for a cuppa?’ Her eyes opened a little and she nodded enthusiastically.

‘Right,’ said Flight, moving towards the door. Rebus thought the man seemed more than a little relieved to be leaving, albeit temporarily.

‘Nasty little chap,’ Cousins commented. Rebus wondered for a moment if he were talking about George Flight, but Cousins waved a hand towards the corpse. ‘To do this sort of thing time after time, without motive, out of some need for . . . well, pleasure, I suppose.’

‘There’s always a motive, sir,’ said Rebus. ‘You just said so yourself. Pleasure, that’s his motive. But the way he kills. What he does. There’s some other motive there. It’s just that we can’t see it yet.’

Cousins stared at him. Rebus could see a warm light in his deep eyes. ‘Well, Inspector, let us hope
somebody
spots whatever it is before too long. Four deaths in as many months. The man’s as constant as the moon.’

Rebus smiled. ‘But we all know that werewolves are affected by the moon, don’t we?’

Cousins laughed. It was deep and resonant and sounded extraordinarily out of place in this environment. Lamb wasn’t laughing, wasn’t even smiling. He was following little of this conversation, and the realisation pleased Rebus. But Lamb wasn’t going to be left out.

‘I reckon he’s barking mad. Hee, get it?’

‘Well,’ said Cousins, as though this joke was too well-worn even to merit acknowledgment, ‘must press on.’ He turned towards the slab. ‘If you’ve finished, gentlemen?’ The Forensics men nodded in unison. ‘Jewellery removed?’ They nodded again. ‘Good. Then if you are ready, I suggest we begin.’

The beginning was never too awful. Measurements, a physical description – five feet and seven inches tall, brown hair, that sort of thing. Fingernail scrapings and clippings were deposited in yet more polythene bags. Rebus made a note to buy shares in whichever company manufactured these bags. He’d seen murder investigations go through hundreds of them.

Slowly but determinedly, things got worse. Swabs were taken from Jean Cooper’s vagina, then Cousins got down to some serious work.

‘Large puncture wound to the throat. From size of wound, I’d say the knife itself had been twisted in the wound. A small knife. From the extent of the exit wound I would say the blade was about five inches long, perhaps a little less, and about an inch deep, ending in a very fine point. The skin surrounding the entry wound shows some bruising, perhaps caused by the hilt-guard or handle. This would seem to indicate that the knife was driven in with a certain amount of force.