10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (90 page)

Yet little of our French idyll seeped into the book. Quite the opposite: it’s one of my most Scottish works, perhaps in reaction to the previous novel’s London setting. Words such as ‘brae’, ‘keech’, ‘birl’, and ‘haar’ creep in. Whisky is referred to as ‘the cratur’, while ‘ba-heid’ is used as a term of insult. Many of the words, such as ‘shoogly’ and ‘peching’, were favourites of my father: it’s possible I was thinking of him as I wrote. This was my first book since his funeral in 1990. Certainly, he was the only person I’d ever heard say, ‘If shit was gold, ye’d have a tyke at yer erse,’ words I would now give to Rebus’s own father.

To reinforce the book’s Scottishness, I suggested its original jacket design – a lion rampant flying cheekily from the Houses of Parliament. But as well as being very Scottish in its language,
Strip Jack
also seems to me a less
savage and biting book than my three previous efforts in the series. This could be due to a change in family circumstances. My wife Miranda became pregnant in 1991, and our son Jack was born in February 1992. This is why
Strip Jack
is dedicated to ‘the only Jack I’ve ever stripped’ – something which now makes my teenage son cringe, of course.

The title came from a compendium of card games. I’d been looking for something which would reflect the playfulness of
Knots & Crosses
and
Hide & Seek
, and had compiled lists of children’s and adults’ games and pastimes. The card game ‘Strip Jack Naked’ appealed to me: I could give my chief suspect in the book the surname Jack. It seemed, after all, that someone was out to strip him of his standing, his good name – maybe even his life. The three-word title seemed clumsy, however, so I shortened it to two.

Curiously, it was only in leaving Scotland that I began really to become interested in my native country’s history and politics. I started to devour books on these subjects, and would return to Edinburgh three or four times a year, usually begging a bed or sofa at a friend’s place. I would take long walks around the city, using up rolls of film in my cheap camera, and spending hours in the various libraries. Now that I was a full-time writer, I felt a fresh obligation to get the details right. For
Strip Jack
, I wrote to the University of Edinburgh’s Pathology Department, and was granted a meeting with Professor Anthony Busuttil. He became responsible for much of the forensic detail in the book (and in others in the series). When Dr Curt speaks of ‘diatoms’ and ‘washerwoman’s skin’, it is really Professor Busuttil talking. That first meeting was memorable in that the Professor momentarily mistook me
for a police officer and began discussing the case of a slashed throat. As he started to bring out the autopsy photos, my greying face told him he’d made a mistake . . .

Living and working so far from Edinburgh, I fell back on personal history and reminiscence for much of Rebus’s inner life. When he recalls picnics and holiday destinations, they are my experiences rather than his. The MP Gregor Jack, however, comes from nowhere other than my imagination. I based him on no one I knew. His circle of friends, though, is another matter. I had made close friends in high school, and not many since. The story of how ‘Suey’ got his nickname comes from a real-life event which occurred during a school trip to Germany when I was sixteen. And the ‘dyslexic bigotry’ of ‘Remember 1960’ appeared on a friend’s tenement stairwell in Easter Road.

Rebus also takes on some of my own characteristics. On one trip to Edinburgh, I’d consulted a doctor about the panic attacks I’d been suffering. Rather than medication, he’d prescribed self-hypnosis and relaxation techniques. In giving my problems to Rebus, I was using my writing as a form of therapy. Just as I had taken him to London in
Tooth & Nail
, so that he could dislike the place on my behalf, so I dumped my health problems on him too. However, I also did him the favour of placing him in a relationship with Dr Patience Aitken, who had a flat in Oxford Terrace next door to one of my high-school friends. (He would pop up in the book, actually, in the scene in the Horsehair Bar.) Patience would provide Rebus with some much-needed emotional stability . . . at least for a few books.

Reading the novel now, it seems to me that
Strip Jack
is partly a story of friendship, of ties formed at school and
never loosed. But it’s also another of my explorations of the theme of Scotland’s Jekyll and Hyde character: people hide their true selves behind a veneer of respectability. By the end, the villain of the piece has been reduced to something ape-like, bringing to mind descriptions of Mr Hyde in Stevenson’s story.

Up until the final moments of
Strip Jack
, Rebus had been based in a fictitious police station on a fictitious street. However, now that I was a full-time author, earning a living by writing about real professions, I felt I owed it to the real-life practitioners to make my books as authentic as possible. I would take Rebus out of my made-up Edinburgh and into the real one: he would work in a real cop-shop and drink in real bars.

My long apprenticeship was nearing its end.

The wonder of it was that the neighbours hadn’t complained, hadn’t even – as many of them later told the newsmen – realized. Not until that night, the night their sleep was disturbed by sudden activity in the street. Cars, vans, policemen, the static chatter of radios. Not that the noise ever got out of hand. The whole operation was directed with such speed and, yes, even good humour that there were those who slept through the excitement.

‘I want courtesy,’ Chief Superintendent ‘Farmer’ Watson had explained to his men in the briefing room that evening. ‘It may be a hoor-hoose, but it’s on the right side of town, if you take my meaning. No telling who might be in there. We might even come across our own dear Chief Constable.’

Watson grinned, to let them know he was joking. But some of the officers in the room, knowing the CC better than Watson himself apparently did, exchanged glances and wry smiles.

‘Right,’ said Watson, ‘let’s go through the plan of attack one more time . . .’

Christ, he’s loving this, thought Detective Inspector John Rebus. He’s loving every minute. And why not? This was Watson’s baby after all, and it was to be a home birth. Which was to say, Watson was going to be in charge all the way from immaculate conception to immaculate delivery.

Maybe it was a male menopause thing, this need to flex a bit of muscle. Most of the chief supers Rebus had known in his twenty years on the force had been content to push pens
over paper and wait for retirement day. But not Watson. Watson was like Channel Four: full of independent programmes of minority interest. He didn’t make waves exactly, but by Christ he splashed like hell.

And now he even seemed to have an informer, an invisible somebody who had whispered in his ear the word ‘brothel’. Sin and debauchery! Watson’s hard Presbyterian heart had been stirred to righteous indignation. He was the kind of Highland Christian who found sex within marriage just about acceptable – his son and daughter were proof – but who baulked at anything and everything else. If there was an active brothel in Edinburgh, Watson wanted it shut down with prejudice.

But then the informer had provided an address, and this caused a certain hesitation. The brothel was in one of the better streets of the New Town, quiet Georgian terraces, lined with trees and Saabs and Volvos, the houses filled with professional people: lawyers, surgeons, university professors. This was no seaman’s bawdy-house, no series of damp, dark rooms above a dockside pub. This was, as Rebus himself had offered, an Establishment establishment. Watson hadn’t seen the joke.

Watch had been kept for several days and nights, courtesy of unmarked cars and unremarkable plainclothes men. Until there could be little doubt: whatever was happening inside the shuttered rooms, it was happening after midnight and it was happening briskly. Interestingly, few of the many men arrived by car. But a watchful detective constable, taking a leak in the dead of night, discovered why. The men were parking their cars in side streets and walking the hundred yards or so to the front door of the four-storey house. Perhaps this was house policy: the slamming of after-hours car doors would arouse suspicion in the street. Or perhaps it was in the visitors’ own interests not to leave their cars in broad streetlight, where they might be recognized . . .

Registration numbers were taken and checked, as were photographs of visitors to the house. The owner of the house itself was traced. He owned half a French vineyard as well as
several properties in Edinburgh, and lived in Bordeaux the year through. His solicitor had been responsible for letting the house to a Mrs Croft, a very genteel lady in her fifties. According to the solicitor, she paid her rent promptly and in cash. Was there any problem . . .?

No problem, he was assured, but if he could keep the conversation to himself . . .

Meantime, the car owners had turned out to be businessmen, some local, but the majority visiting the city from south of the border. Heartened by this, Watson had started planning the raid. With his usual blend of wit and acumen, he chose to call it Operation Creeper.

‘Brothel creepers, you see, John.’

‘Yes sir,’ Rebus answered. ‘I used to own a pair myself. I’ve often wondered how they got the name.’

Watson shrugged. He was not a man to be sidetracked. ‘Never mind the creepers,’ he said. ‘Let’s just get the creeps.’

The house, it was reckoned, would be doing good business by midnight. One o’clock Saturday morning was chosen as the time of the raid. The warrants were ready. Every man in the team knew his place. And the solicitor had even come up with plans of the house, which had been memorized by the officers.

‘It’s a bloody warren,’ Watson had said.

‘No problem, sir, so long as we’ve got enough ferrets.’

In truth, Rebus wasn’t looking forward to this evening’s work. Brothels might be illegal, but they fulfilled a need and if they veered towards respectability, as this one certainly did, then what was the problem? He could see some of this doubt reflected in Watson’s eyes. But Watson had been enthusiastic from the first, and to pull back now was unthinkable, would seem a sign of weakness. So, with nobody really keen for it, Operation Creeper went ahead. While other, meaner streets went unpatrolled. While domestic violence took its toll. While the Water of Leith drowning still remained to be solved . . .

‘Okay, in we go.’

They left their cars and vans and marched towards the
front door. Knocked quietly. The door was opened from within, and then things began to move like a video on double-speed. Other doors were opened . . . how many doors could a house have? Knock first, then open. Yes, they were being courteous.

‘If you wouldn’t mind getting dressed, please . . .’

‘If you could just come downstairs now . . .’

‘You can put your trousers on first, sir, if you like . . .’

Then: ‘Christ, sir, come and take a look at this.’ Rebus followed the flushed, youthful face of the detective constable. ‘Here we are, sir. Feast your peepers on this lot.’

Ah yes, the punishment room. Chains and thongs and whips. A couple of full-length mirrors, a wardrobe full of gear.

‘There’s more leather here than in a bloody milking shed.’

‘You seem to know a lot about cows, son,’ Rebus said. He was just thankful the room wasn’t in use. But there were more surprises to come.

In parts, the house resembled nothing more lewd than a fancy-dress party – nurses and matrons, wimples and high heels. Except that most of the costumes revealed more than they hid. One young woman seemed to be wearing a rubber diving suit with the nipples and crotch cut away. Another looked like a cross between Heidi and Eva Braun. Watson watched the parade, righteous fury filling him. He had no doubts now: it was absolutely proper that this sort of place be closed down. Then he turned back to the conversation he was having with Mrs Croft, while Chief Inspector Lauderdale lingered only a short distance away. He had insisted on coming along, knowing his superior and fearing some almighty cock-up. Well, thought Rebus with a smile, no cock-ups in sight yet.

Mrs Croft spoke in a kind of gentrified Cockney, which became less gentrified as time went on and more couples spilled down the stairs and into the large, sofa-crammed living room. A room smelling of expensive perfume and proprietary whisky. Mrs Croft was denying everything. She was even denying that they were standing in a brothel at all.

I am not my brothel’s keeper, thought Rebus. All the same, he had to admire her performance. She was a businesswoman, she kept saying, a taxpayer, she had rights . . . and where was her solicitor?

‘I thought it was her that was doing the soliciting,’ Lauderdale muttered to Rebus: a rare moment of humour from one of the dourest buggers Rebus had ever worked with. And as such, it deserved a smile.

‘What are you grinning at? I didn’t know there was an interval. Get back to work.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Rebus waited till Lauderdale had turned away from him, the better to hear what Watson was saying, and then flicked a quick v-sign at him. Mrs Croft, though, caught the gesture and, perhaps thinking it intended at her, returned it. Lauderdale and Watson both turned towards where Rebus was standing, but by then he was already on his way . . .