10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (9 page)

He had to mop up the bathroom floor afterwards, empirical evidence that Archimedes’ displacement of water had been
proved once again. The bath-water had flowed like milk and honey, and Rebus had nearly drowned.

Still, he felt better now.

‘Lord, I am a poor sinner,’ he whispered, as Gill dressed. She looked stern and efficient when she opened the front-door, almost as if she had been on a twenty-minute official visit.

‘Can we fix a date?’ he suggested.

‘We can,’ she replied, looking through her bag. Rebus was curious to know why women always did that, especially in films and thrillers, after they had been sleeping with a man. Did women suspect their sleeping partners of rifling their purses?

‘But it might be difficult,’ she continued, ‘the case going the way it is. Let’s just promise to keep in touch, okay?’

‘Okay.’

He hoped that she took note of the dismay in his voice, the disappointment of the small boy at having his request denied.

They pecked a final kiss, mouths brittle by now, and then she was gone. Her scent remained, however, and he breathed it in deeply as he prepared for the day ahead. He found a shirt and a pair of trousers that didn’t reek of tobacco, and these he put on slowly, admiring himself in the bathroom mirror, the soles of his feet damp, while he hummed a hymn.

Sometimes it was good to be alive. Sometimes.

Jim Stevens poured another three aspirin into his mouth and drank his orange juice. The ignominy of it, being seen in a Leith bar sucking on fruit juice, yet the idea of drinking even a half-pint of the rich, frothing beer made him feel nauseous. He had drunk far too much at that party; too much too quickly, and in too many combinations.

Leith was trying to improve itself. Someone somewhere had decided to give it a bit of a dust and a wash. It boasted French-style cafés and wine bars, studio flats, delicatessen. But it was still Leith, still the old port, an echo of its roaring, bustling past when Bordeaux wines would be unloaded by the gallon and sold on the streets from a horse and cart. If Leith retained nothing else, it would retain a port’s mentality, and a port’s traditional drinking dens.

‘By Christ,’ roared a voice behind him, ‘the man drinks everything in doubles, even his soft drinks!’

A heavy fist, twice the dimensions of his own, landed on Stevens’ back. The swarthy figure landed on a stool beside him. The hand stayed firmly where it was.

‘Hello, Podeen,’ said Stevens. He was starting to sweat in the heavy atmosphere of the saloon, and his heart was pounding: terminal hangover symptoms; he could smell the alcohol squeezing itself out of his pores.

‘Lordy, James me boy, what the hell’s that you’re supping?
Barman, get this man a whisky quick. He’s wasting away on kiddies’ juice!’

With a roar, Podeen took his hand off the reporter’s back just long enough to relieve the pressure, before bringing it back down again in a stinging back-slap. Stevens felt his insides shudder rebelliously.

‘Anything I can do for you today?’ said Podeen, his voice much lower.

Big Podeen had been a sailor for twenty years, with the scars and nicks of a thousand ports on his body. How he made his money these days, Stevens did not wish to know. He did some bouncing for pubs on Lothian Road and dubious drinking-dens around Leith, but that would be the tip of his earnings iceberg. Podeen’s fingers were so encrusted with dirt that he might have carved out the black economy single-handedly from the rotten, fertile soil beneath him.

‘Not really, Big Man. No, I’m just mulling things over.’

‘Get me a breakfast, will you? Double helpings of everything.’

The barman, almost saluting, went off to give the order.

‘See,’ said Podeen, ‘you’re not the only man who orders everything in doubles, eh, Jimmy?’

The hand was lifted from Stevens’ back again. He grimaced, waiting for the slap, but the arm flopped onto the bar beside him instead. He sighed, audibly.

‘Rough night last night was it, Jimmy?’

‘I wish I could remember.’

He had fallen asleep in one of the bedrooms, very late in the evening. Then a couple had come in, and they had lifted him into the bathroom, depositing him in the bath. There he had slept for two hours, maybe three. He had awakened with a terrific stiffness in his neck, back, and legs. He had drunk some coffee, but not enough, never enough.

And had walked in the chilled morning air, chatting in a
newsagent’s shop with some taxi-drivers, sitting in the porter’s cubby-hole of one of the big hotels on Princes Street, supping sweet tea and talking football with the bleary nightporter. But he had known he would end up down here, for this was his morning off, and he was back on the drugs case, his own little baby.

‘Is there much stuff around at the moment, Big?’

‘Oh, now, that depends what you’re looking for, Jimmy. Word’s out that you’re getting to be a bit too nosy in every department. Best if you were sticking to the safe drugs. Keep away from the big stuff.’

‘Is this a timely warning or a threat or what?’ Stevens wasn’t in the mood to be threatened, not when he had a Sunday morning hangover to sort out.

‘It’s a
friendly
warning, a warning from a friend.’

‘Who’s the friend, Big?’

‘Me, you silly sod. Don’t be so suspicious all the time. Listen, there’s a little cannabis around, but that’s about it. Nobody brings the stuff into Leith any more. They land it on the Fife coast, or up by Dundee. Places the Customs men have all but disappeared from. And that’s the truth.’

‘I know, Big, I know. But there
is
a delivery going on around here. I’ve seen it. I don’t know what it is. Whether it’s big stuff or not. But I’ve seen a handover. Very recently.’

‘How recent?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘Where?’

‘Calton Hill.’

Big Podeen shook his head.

‘Then it’s nothing at all to do with anyone or anything I know, Jimmy.’

Stevens knew the Big Man, knew him well. He gave out good information, but it was only what was given to him by people who wanted Stevens to get to know about something.
So the heroin boys would come across, via Big, with information about cannabis dealing. If Stevens took the story up, chances were the cannabis dealers would be caught. And that left the territory and the demand to the heroin boys. It was clever stuff, ploy and counter-ploy. The stakes were high, too. But Stevens was a clever player himself. He knew that there was a tacit understanding that he was never to aim for the really big players, for that would mean aiming for the city’s businessmen and bureaucrats, the titled landowners, the New Town’s Mercedes owners.

And that would never be allowed. So he was fed tidbits, enough to keep the presses rolling, the tongues wagging about what a terrible place Edinburgh was becoming. Always a little, never the lot. Stevens understood all that. He had been playing the game so long he hardly knew sometimes what side he was on. In the end, it hardly mattered.

‘You don’t know about it?’

‘Nothing, Jimmy. But I’ll nose around. See what’s doing. Listen, though, there’s a new bar opened up by the Mackay showroom. Know the one I mean?’

Stevens nodded.

‘Well,’ went on Podeen, ‘it’s a bar at the front, but it’s a brothel at the back. There’s a wee cracker of a barmaid does her stuff of an afternoon, if you’re interested.’

Stevens smiled. So a new boy was trying to move in, and the old boys, Podeen’s ultimate employers, didn’t like it. And so he, Jim Stevens, was being given enough information to close down the new boy if he liked. There was a nice headline-catcher in it certainly, but it was a one-day wonder.

Why didn’t they just telephone the police anonymously? He thought he knew the answer to that one, though once it had puzzled him: they were playing the game by its old-fashioned rules, which meant no snitching, no grassing to the enemy. He was left to play the part of messenger-boy, but a
messenger-boy with power built into the system. Just a little power, but more power than lay in doing things along the straight and narrow.

‘Thanks, Big. I’ll bear that in mind.’

The food arrived then, great piles of curled, shining bacon, two soft, near-transparent eggs, mushrooms, fried bread, beans. Stevens kept his eyes to the bar, suddenly interested in one of the beer-mats, damp still from Saturday night.

‘I’m going across to my table to eat this, okay, Jimmy?’

Stevens could not believe his good luck.

‘Oh, fine, Big Man, fine.’

‘Cheers, then.’

And with that he was left alone, only the ghost of a smell remaining. He noticed that the barman was standing opposite him. His hand, shiny with grease, was held out.

‘Two pounds sixty,’ he said.

Stevens sighed. Put that one down to experience, he thought to himself as he paid, or to the hangover. The party had been worth it, however, for he had met John Rebus. And Rebus was friendly with Gill Templer. It was all becoming just a little confusing. But interesting too. Rebus was certainly interesting, though physically he did not resemble his brother in the slightest. The man had looked honest enough, but how did you tell a bent copper from the outside? It was the inside that was rotten. So, Rebus was seeing Gill Templer. He remembered the night they had spent together, and shuddered. That, surely, had been his nadir.

He lit a cigarette, his second of the day. His head was still clotted, but his stomach felt a little more composed. He might even be getting hungry. Rebus looked a tough nut, but not as tough as he would have been ten years ago. At this moment he was probably in bed with Gill Templer. The bastard. The lucky bastard. His stomach turned a tiny somersault of chilled jealousy. The cigarette felt good. It poured life and strength
back into him, or seemed to. Yet he knew that it was scooping him out, too, tearing his guts to shreds of darkened meat. The hell with it. He smoked because without cigarettes he couldn’t think. And he was thinking now.

‘Hey, give me a double here will you?’

The barman came over.

‘Orange juice again?’

Stevens looked at him disbelievingly.

‘Don’t be daft,’ he said – ‘whisky, Grouse if that’s what’s in the Grouse bottle.’

‘We don’t play those sorts of game here.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

He drank the whisky and felt better. Then he began to feel worse again. He went to the toilet, but the smell in there made him feel even worse. He held himself over the sink and brought up a few bubbles of liquid, retching loudly but emptily. He had to get off the booze. He had to get off the ciggies. They were killing him, yet they were the only things keeping him alive.

He walked over to Big Podeen’s table, sweating, feeling older than his years.

‘That was a good breakfast, that was,’ said the hulk of a man, his eyes gleaming like a child’s.

Stevens sat down beside him.

‘What’s the word on bent coppers?’ he asked.

‘Hello, daddy.’

She was eleven, but looked and spoke and smiled older: eleven going on twenty-one. That was what living with Rhona had done to his daughter. He pecked her cheek, thinking back to Gill’s leavetaking. There was perfume around her, and a hint of make-up on her eyes.

He could kill Rhona.

‘Hello, Sammy,’ he said.

‘Mummy says that I’m to be called Samantha now that I’m growing up so quickly, but I suppose it’s all right for
you
to call me Sammy.’

‘Oh, well, mummy knows best, Samantha.’

He cast a look towards the retreating figure of his wife, her body pressed, pushed and prodded into a shape attainable only with the aid of some super-strong girdle. She was not, he was relieved to find, wearing as well as their occasional telephone conversations would have had him believe. She stepped into her car now, never looking back. It was a small and expensive model, but had a sizeable dent in one side. Rebus blessed that dent.

He recalled that, making love, he had gloried in her body, in the soft flesh – the padding, as she had called it – of her thighs and her back. Today she had looked at him with cold eyes, filled with a cloud of unknowing, and had seen in his eyes the gleam of sexual satisfaction. Then she had turned on
her heels. So it was true: she could still see into his heart. Ah, but she had failed to see into his soul. She had missed that most vital organ completely.

‘What do you want to do then?’

They were standing at the entrance to Princes Street Gardens, adjacent to the tourist haunts of Edinburgh. A few people wandered past the closed shops of a Princes Street Sunday, while others sat on benches in the gardens, feeding crumbs to the pigeons and the Canadian squirrels or else reading the heavy-printed Sunday papers. The Castle reared above them, its flag flying briskly in the all-too-typical breeze. The Gothic missile of the Scott Monument pointed religious believers in the right direction, but few of the tourists who snapped it with their expensive Japanese cameras seemed at all interested in the structure’s symbolic connotations, never mind its reality, just so long as they had some snaps of it to show off to their friends back home. These tourists spent so much time photographing things that they never actually
saw
anything, unlike the young people milling around, who were too busy enjoying life to be bothered capturing false impressions of it.

‘What do you want to do then?’

The tourist side of his capital city. They were never interested in the housing-estates around this central husk. They never ventured into Pilton or Niddrie or Oxgangs to make an arrest in a piss-drenched tenement; they were not moved by Leith’s pushers and junkies, the deft-handed corruption of the city gents, the petty thefts of a society pushed so far into materialism that stealing was the only answer to what they thought of as their needs. And they were almost certainly unaware (they were not, after all, here to read local newspapers and watch local TV) of Edinburgh’s newest media star, the child murderer the police could not catch, the murderer who was leading the forces of law and order a merry
dance without a clue or a lead or a cat in hell’s chance of finding him until he slipped up. He pitied Gill her job. He pitied himself. He pitied the city, right down to its crooks and bandits; its whores and gamblers, its perpetual losers and winners.