10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (7 page)

Enough. He began to walk, steadying himself with thoughts of his day off tomorrow. He would spend the day reading and sleeping and readying himself for a party, Cathy Jackson’s party.

And the day after that, Sunday, he would be spending a rare day with his daughter. Then, perhaps, he would find out who was behind the crank letters.

The girl woke up with a dry, salty taste in her mouth. She felt sleepy and numb and wondered where she was. She had fallen asleep in his car. She had not felt sleepy before then, before he had given her a piece of his chocolate-bar. Now she was awake, but not in her bedroom at home. This room had pictures on its walls, pictures cut out of colour magazines. Some were photographs of soldiers with fierce expressions on their faces, others were of girls and women. She looked closely at some self-developing photographs grouped together on one wall. There was a picture of her there, asleep on the bed with her arms spread wide. She opened her mouth in a slight gasp.

Outside, in the living-room, he heard her movements as he prepared the garotte.

That night, Rebus had one of his nightmarish dreams again. A long, lingering kiss was followed by an ejaculation, both in the dream and in reality. He woke up immediately afterwards and wiped himself down. The breath of the kiss was still around him, hanging to him like an aura. He shook his head clear of it. He needed a woman. Remembering the party to come, he relaxed a little. But his lips were dry. He padded into the kitchen and found a bottle of lemonade. It was flat, but served the purpose. Then he remembered that he was still drunk, and would have a hangover if he wasn’t careful. He poured himself three glassfuls of water and forced them down.

He was pleased to find that the pilot-light was still on. It was like a good omen. When he slipped back into bed, he even remembered to say his prayers. That would surprise the Big Man upstairs. He would note it in his muckle book: Rebus remembered me tonight. May give him a nice day tomorrow.

Amen.

Michael Rebus loved his BMW as dearly as he loved life itself, perhaps more so. As he sped down the motorway, the traffic to his left hardly appearing to move at all, he felt that his car
was
life in a strange, satisfying sort of way. He pointed its nose towards the bright point of the horizon and let it forge towards that future, revving it hard, making no concessions to anyone or anything.

That was the way he liked it; hard, fast luxury, push-button and on-hand. He drummed his fingers on the leather of the steering-wheel, toyed with the radio-cassette, eased his head back onto the padded headrest. He dreamed often of just taking off, leaving wife and children and house, just his car and him. Taking off towards that far point, never stopping except to eat and fill up the car, driving until he died. It seemed like paradise, and so he felt quite safe fantasising about it, knowing that he would never dare put paradise into practice.

When he had first owned a car, he had wakened in the middle of the night, opening his curtains to see if it was still waiting for him outside. Sometimes he would rise at four or five in the morning and take off for a few hours, astonished at the distance he could cover so quickly, glad to be out on the silent roads with only the rabbits and the crows for company, his hand on the horn scaring fluttering clouds of birds into the
air. He had never lost that initial love-affair with cars, the manumission of dreams.

People stared at his car now. He would park it in the streets of Kirkcaldy and stand a little distance away, watching people envy that car. The younger men, full of bravado and expectancy, would peer inside, staring at leather and dials as though examining living things at the zoo. The older men, some with their wives in tow, would glance at the machine, sometimes spitting on the road afterwards, knowing that it represented everything they had wanted for themselves and failed to find. Michael Rebus had found his dream, and it was a dream he could watch any time he chose.

In Edinburgh, however, it depended where you parked as to whether your car would attract attention. He had parked on George Street one day, only to find a Rolls-Royce cruising to a stop behind him. He had keyed the ignition again, fuming, near-spitting. He had parked eventually outside a discotheque. He knew that parking an expensive car outside a restaurant or a discotheque would mean that a few people would mistake you for the owner of the particular set-up, and that thought pleased him immensely, erasing the memory of the Rolls-Royce and infusing him with new versions of the dream.

Stopping at traffic-lights, too, could be exciting, except when some half-arsed biker on a big machine roared to a standstill behind him or, even worse, beside him. Some of those bikes were made for initial acceleration. More than once he had been beaten mercilessly in a race from traffic-lights. He tried not to think about those times either.

Today he parked where he had been told to park: in the car park atop Calton Hill. He could see over to Fife from his front window, and from the back he could see Princes Street laid out before him like a toy-set. The hill was quiet; it was not quite the tourist season, and it was cold. He knew that things
hotted up at night: car chases, girls and boys hoping for a ride, parties at Queensferry beach. Edinburgh’s gay community would mix with those merely curious or lonely, and a couple, hand-in-hand, would now and again enter the graveyard at the bottom of the hill. When darkness fell, the east end of Princes Street became a territory all of its own, to be passed around, to be shared. But he was not about to share his car with anyone. His dream was a fragile entity.

He watched Fife across the Firth of Forth, looking quite splendid from this distance, until the man’s car slowed and stopped beside him. Michael slid across to his passenger seat and wound down the window, just as the other man was winding down his.

‘Got the stuff?’ he said.

‘Of course,’ said the man. He checked in his mirror. Some people, a family of all things, had just come over the rise. ‘We better wait for a minute.’

They paused, staring blankly at the scenery.

‘No hassles across in Fife?’ asked the man.

‘None.’

‘The word’s going round that your brother was over seeing you. Is that correct?’ The man’s eyes were hard; his whole being was hard. But the car he drove was a heap. Michael felt safe for the moment.

‘Yes, but it was nothing. It was just the anniversary of our dad’s death. That was all.’

‘He doesn’t know anything?’

‘Absolutely not. Do you think I’m thick or something?’

The man’s glance silenced Michael. It was a mystery to him how this one man could invoke such fear in him. He hated these meetings.

‘If anything happens,’ the man was saying, ‘if
anything
goes wrong, you’ll be in for it. I really mean that. Keep well clear of that bastard in future.’

‘It wasn’t my fault. He just dropped in on me. He didn’t even phone first. What could I do?’

His hands were gripping hard to the steering-wheel, cemented there. The man checked in his mirror again.

‘All clear,’ he said, reaching behind him. A small package slipped through Michael’s window. He took a look inside it, brought an envelope out of his pocket, and reached for the ignition.

‘Be seeing you around, Mister Rebus,’ said the man, opening the envelope.

‘Yes,’ said Michael, thinking: not if I can help it. This work was getting a bit too hairy for him. These people seemed to know everything about his movements. He knew, however, that the fear always evaporated, to be replaced by euphoria when he had rid himself of another load, pocketing a nice profit on the deal. It was that moment when fear turned to euphoria that kept him in the game. It was like the fastest piece of acceleration from traffic-lights that you could experience – ever.

Jim Stevens, watching from the hill’s Victorian folly, a ridiculous, never-completed copy of a Greek temple, saw Michael Rebus leave. That much was old news to him; he was more interested in the Edinburgh connection, a man he could not trace and did not know, a man who had lost him twice before and who could doubtless lose him again. Nobody seemed to know who this mysterious figure was, and nobody particularly wanted to know. He looked like trouble. Stevens, feeling suddenly impotent and old, could do nothing other than jot down the car registration number. He thought that perhaps McGregor Campbell could do something with it, but he was wary of being found out by Rebus. He felt trapped in the middle of something which was proving altogether a knottier problem than he had suspected.

Shivering, he tried to persuade himself that he liked it that way.

‘Come in, come in, whoever you are.’

Rebus’s coat, gloves, and bottle of wine were taken from him by complete strangers, and he was plunged into one of those packed, smoky, loud parties where it is easy to smile at people but near impossible to get to know anyone. He moved from the hall into the kitchen, and from there, through a connecting-door, into the living-room itself.

The chairs, table, settee had been pushed back to the walls, and the floor was filled with writhing, whooping couples, the men tieless, their shirts sticking to them.

The party, it appeared, had started earlier than he had anticipated.

He recognized a few faces around and beneath him, stepping over two inspectors as he waded into the room. He could see that the table at the far end had bottles and plastic cups heaped upon it, and it seemed as good a vantage point as any, and safer than some.

Getting to it was the problem however, and he was reminded of some of the assault courses of his Army days.

‘Hi there!’

Cathy Jackson, doing a passable imitation of a rag-doll, reeled into his path for a second before being swept off her feet by the large – the very large – man with whom she was pretending to dance.

‘Hello,’ managed Rebus, his face twisting into a grimace
rather than a smile. He achieved the relative safety of the drinks-table and helped himself to a whisky and a chaser. That would do for starters. Then he watched as Cathy Jackson (for whom he had bathed, polished, scraped, adjusted, and sprayed) pushed her tongue into the cavernous mouth of her dancing-partner. Rebus thought that he was going to be sick. His partner for the evening had done a bunk before the evening had begun! That would teach him to be optimistic. So what did he do now? Leave quietly, or try to pull a few words of introduction out of his hat?

A stocky man, not at all a policeman, came from the kitchen, and, cigarette in mouth, approached the table with a couple of empty glasses in his hand.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said to nobody in particular, rummaging amongst the bottles, ‘this is all a bit fucking grim, isn’t it? Excuse my language.’

‘Yes, it is a bit.’

Rebus thought to himself, well, there it is, I’ve done it now, I’ve spoken to someone. The ice is broken, so I may as well leave while the going’s good.

But he did not leave. He watched as the man weaved his way quite expertly back through the dancers, the drinks as safe as tiny animals in his hands. He watched as another record pounded out of the invisible stereo system, the dancers recommenced their war-dance, and a woman, looking every inch as uncomfortable as he did, squeezed her way into the room and was pointed in the direction of Rebus’s table.

She was about his own age, a little ragged around the edges. She wore a reasonably fashionable dress, he supposed (who was he to talk about fashion? his suit looked downright funereal in the present company), and her hair had been styled recently, perhaps as recently as this afternoon. She wore a secretary’s glasses, but she was no secretary. Rebus
could see that much by looking at her, by examining the way she handled herself as she picked her way towards him.

He held a Bloody Mary, newly-prepared, towards her.

‘Is this okay for you?’ he shouted. ‘Have I guessed right or wrong?’

She gulped the drink thankfully, pausing for breath as he refilled the tumbler.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I don’t normally drink, but that was much appreciated.’

Great, Rebus thought to himself, the smile never leaving his eyes, Cathy Jackson’s out of her head (and her morals) on alcohol, and I’m landed with a TT. Oh, but that thought was unworthy of him, and did no justice to his companion. He breathed a quick prayer of contrition.

‘Would you like to dance?’ he asked, for his sins.

‘You’re kidding!’

‘I’m not. What’s wrong?’

Rebus, guilty of a streak of chauvinism, could not believe it. She was a DI. Moreover, she was Press Liaison Officer on the murder case.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s just that I’m working that case, too.’

‘Listen, John, if it keeps on like this, every policeman and policewoman in Scotland is going to be on the case. Believe me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s been another abduction. The girl’s mother reported her missing this evening.’

‘Shit. Excuse my language.’

They had danced, drunk, separated, met again, and were now old friends for the evening, it seemed. They stood in the hallway, a little way from the noise and chaos of the dance-floor. A queue for the flat’s only toilet was becoming unruly at the end of the corridor.

Rebus found himself staring past Gill Templer’s glasses, past all that glass and plastic, to the emerald-green eyes beyond. He wanted to tell her that he had never seen eyes as lovely as hers, but was afraid of being accused of cliché. She was sticking to orange juice now, but he had loosened himself up with a few more whiskies, not expecting anything special from the evening.

‘Hello, Gill.’

Rebus recognized the stocky man before them as the person he had spoken with at the drinks-table.

‘Long time no see.’

The man attempted to peck Gill Templer’s cheek, but succeeded only in falling past her and butting the wall.

‘Had a drop too much to drink, Jim?’ said Gill, coolly.

The man shrugged his shoulders. He was looking at Rebus.

‘We all have our crosses to bear, eh?’

A hand was extended towards Rebus.