A Good Hanging and other Stories (16 page)

Two sleeping bags lay on the floor, along with paperback books, an alarm clock, mugs of tea. Off the living-room was a box-room, a large walk-in cupboard. These were often used by students to make an extra room in a temporary flat and light coming from the half-open door told Rebus that this was still its function. Marie went into the room and switched off the light, before joining the two policemen.

‘It’s Pam’s room,’ she explained. ‘She said I could lie down there. I didn’t want to sleep in our ... in my room.’

‘Of course,’ Rebus said, all understanding and sympathy.

‘Of course,’ Holmes repeated. She signalled for them to sit, so they did, sinking into a sofa the consistency of marshmallow. Rebus feared he wouldn’t be able to rise again without help and struggled to keep himself upright. Marie meantime had settled, legs beneath her, with enviable poise on the room’s only chair. She placed her mug on the floor, then had a thought.

‘Would you like ...?’

A shake of the head from both men. It struck Rebus that there was something about her voice. Holmes beat him to it.

‘Are you French?’

She smiled a pale smile, then nodded towards the Detective Constable. ‘From Bordeaux. Do you know it?’

‘Only by the reputation of its wine.’

Rebus blew his nose again, though pulling the hankie from his pocket had been a struggle. Holmes took the hint and closed his mouth. ‘Now then, Miss ...?’ Rebus began.

‘Hivert, Marie Hivert.’

Rebus nodded slowly, playing with the hankie rather than trying to replace it in his pocket. ‘We’re told that you were engaged to Mr Caulfield.’

Her voice was almost a whisper. ‘Yes. Not officially, you understand. But there was - a promise.’

‘I see. And when was this promise made?’

‘Oh, I’m not sure exactly. March, April. Yes, early April I think. Springtime.’

‘And how were things between David and yourself?’ She seemed not quite to understand. ‘I mean,’ said Rebus, ‘how did David seem to you?’

She shrugged. ‘David was David. He could be -’ she raised her eyes to the ceiling, seeking words, ‘impossible, nervous, exciting, foul-tempered.’ She smiled. ‘But mostly exciting.’

‘Not suicidal?’

She gave this serious thought. ‘Oh yes, I suppose,’ she admitted. ‘Suicidal, just as actors can be. He took criticism to heart. He was a perfectionist.’

‘How long had you known him?’

‘Two years. I met him through the theatre group.’

‘And you fell in love?’

She smiled again. ‘Not at first. There was a certain ... competitiveness between us, you might say. It helped our acting. I’m not sure it helped our relationship altogether. But we survived.’ Realising what she had said, she grew silent, her eyes dimming. A hand went to her forehead as, head bowed, she tried to collect herself.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, collapsing into sobs. Holmes raised his eyebrows: someone should be here with her. Rebus shrugged back: she can handle it on her own. Holmes’ eyebrows remained raised: can she? Rebus looked back at the tiny figure, engulfed by the armchair. Could actors always tell the real world from the illusory?

We survived.
It was an interesting phrase to have used. But then she was an interesting young woman.

She went to the bathroom to splash water on her face and while she was gone Rebus took the opportunity to rise awkwardly to his feet. He looked back at the sofa.

‘Bloody thing,’ he said. Holmes just smiled.

When she returned, composed once more, Rebus asked if David Caulfield might have left a note somewhere. She shrugged. He asked if she minded them having a quick look round. She shook her head. So, never men to refuse a gift, Rebus and Holmes began looking.

The set-up was fairly straightforward. Pam slept in the box-room, while Marty Jones and Hugh Clay had sleeping-bags on the living-room floor. Marie and David Caulfield had shared the largest of the three bedrooms, with Charles and Peter Collins having a single room each. Charles Collins’ room was obsessively tidy, its narrow single bed made up for the night and on the quilt an acting-copy of ‘Scenes from a Hanging’, covered in marginalia and with several long speeches, all Caulfield’s, seemingly excised. A pencil lay on the typescript, evidence that Charles Collins was taking the critics’ view to heart himself and attempting to shorten the play as best he could.

Peter Collins’ room was much more to Rebus’s personal taste, though Holmes wrinkled his nose at the used underwear underfoot, the contents of the hastily unpacked rucksack scattered over every surface. Beside the unmade bed, next to an overflowing ashtray, lay another copy of the play. Rebus flipped through it. Closing it, his attention was caught by some doodlings on the inside cover. Crude heart shapes had been constructed around the words ‘I love Edinburgh’. His smile was quickly erased when Holmes held the ashtray towards him.

‘Not exactly Silk Cut,’ Holmes was saying. Rebus looked. The butts in the ashtrays were made up of cigarette papers wrapped around curled strips of cardboard. They were called ‘roaches’ by those who smoked dope, though he couldn’t remember why. He made a tutting sound.

‘And what were we doing in here when we found these?’ he asked. Holmes nodded, knowing the truth: they probably couldn’t charge Peter Collins even if they’d wanted to, since there was no reason for their being in his room.
We were looking for someone else’s suicide note
probably wouldn’t impress a latter-day jury.

The double room shared by Marie Hivert and David Caulfield was messiest of all. Marie helped them sift through a few of Caulfield’s things. His diary proved a dead end, since he had started it faithfully on 1st January but the entries ceased on 8th January. Rebus, having tried keeping a diary himself, knew the feeling.

But in the back of the diary were newspaper clippings, detailing Caulfield’s triumph in the previous year’s
Twelfth Night.
Marie, too, had come in for some praise as Viola, but the glory had been Malvolio’s. She wept again a little as she read through the reviews. Holmes said that he’d make another cup of coffee. Did he want her to fetch Pam from the theatre? She shook her head. She’d be all right. She promised she would.

While Marie sat on the bed and Holmes filled the kettle, Rebus wandered back into the living-room. He peered into the box-room, but saw little there to interest him. Finally, he came back to the sleeping-bags on the floor. Marie was coming back into the room as he bent to pick up the paperback book from beside one sleeping-bag. It was Tom Wolfe’s
Bonfire of the Vanities.
Rebus had a hardback copy at home, still unopened. Something fell from the back of the book, a piece of card. Rebus retrieved it from the floor. It was a photograph of Marie, standing on the Castle ramparts with the Scott Monument behind her. The wind blew her hair fiercely against her face and she was attempting to sweep the hair out of her eyes as she grinned towards the camera. Rebus handed the picture to her.

‘Your hair was longer then,’ he said.

She smiled and nodded, her eyes till moist. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That was in June. We came to look at the venue.’

He waved the book at her. ‘Who’s the Tom Wolfe fan?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s doing the rounds. I think Marty’s reading it just now.’ Rebus flipped through the book again, his eyes lingering a moment on the inside cover. ‘Tom Wolfe’s had quite a career,’ he said before placing the book, face down as it had been, beside the sleeping-bag. He pointed towards the photograph. ‘Shall I put it back?’ But she shook her head.

‘It was David’s,’ she said. ‘I think I’d like to keep it.’

Rebus smiled an avuncular smile. ‘Of course,’ he said. Then he remembered something. ‘David’s parents. Have you been in touch at all?’

She shook her head, horror growing within her. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘they’ll be devastated. David was very close to his mother and father.’

‘Well,’ said Rebus, ‘give me the details and I’ll phone them when I get back to the station.’

She frowned. ‘But I don’t ... No, sorry,’ she said, ‘all I know is that they live in Croydon.’

‘Well, never mind,’ said Rebus, knowing, in fact, that the parents had already been notified, but interested that Caulfield’s apparent fiancée should know their address only vaguely. If David Caulfield had been so close to his mother and father, wouldn’t they have been told of the engagement? And once told, wouldn’t they have wanted to meet Marie? Rebus’s knowledge of English geography wasn’t exactly Mastermind material, but he was fairly sure that Reading and Croydon weren’t at what you would call opposite ends of the country.

Interesting, all very interesting. Holmes came in carrying three mugs of coffee, but Rebus shook his head, suddenly the brisk senior officer.

‘No time for that, Holmes,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of work waiting for us back at the station.’ Then, to Marie: ‘Take care of yourself, Miss Hivert. If there’s anything we can do, don’t hesitate.’

Her smile was winning. ‘Thank you, Inspector.’ She turned to Holmes, taking a mug from him. ‘And thank you, too, constable,’ she said. The look on Holmes’ face kept Rebus grinning all the way back to the station.

IV

There the grin promptly vanished. There was a message marked URGENT from the police pathologist asking Rebus to call him. Rebus pressed the seven digits on his new-fangled telephone. The thing had a twenty-number memory and somewhere in that memory was the single-digit number that would connect him with the pathologist, but Rebus could never remember which number was which and he kept losing the sheet of paper with all the memory numbers on it.

‘It’s four,’ Holmes reminded him, just as he’d come to the end of dialling. He was throwing Holmes a kind of halfscowl when the pathologist himself answered.

‘Oh, yes, Rebus. Hello there. It’s about this hanging victim of yours. I’ve had a look at him. Manual strangulation, I’d say.’

‘Yes?’ Rebus, his thoughts on Marie Hivert, was waiting for some punch-line.

‘I don’t think you understand me, Inspector.
Manual
strangulation. From the Latin
manus,
meaning the hand. From the deep body temperature, I’d say he died between midnight and two in the morning. He was strung up on that contraption some time thereafter. Bruising around the throat is definitely consistent with thumb-pressure especially.’

‘You mean someone strangled him?’ Rebus said, really for Holmes’ benefit.

‘I
think
that’s what I’ve been telling you, yes. If I find out anything more, I’ll let you know.’

‘Are the forensics people with you?’

‘I’ve contacted the lab. They’re sending someone over with some bags, but to be honest, we started off on this one thinking it was simple suicide. We may have inadvertently destroyed the tinier scraps of evidence.’

‘Not to worry,’ Rebus said, a father-confessor now, easing guilt. ‘Just get what you can.’

He put down the receiver and stared at his Detective Constable. Or, rather, stared
through
him. Holmes knew that there were times for talking and times for silence, and that this fell into the latter category. It took Rebus a full minute to snap out of his reverie.

‘Well I’ll be buggered,’ he said. ‘We’ve been talking with a murderer this morning, Brian. A cold-blooded one at that. And we didn’t even know it. I wonder whatever happened to the famous police “nose” for a villain. Any idea?’

Holmes frowned. ‘About what happened to the famous police “nose”?’

‘No,’ cried Rebus, exasperated. ‘I mean, any idea who did it?’

Holmes shrugged, then brought the Fringe programme back out from where it had been rolled up in his jacket pocket. He started turning pages. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘there’s an Agatha Christie playing somewhere. Maybe we could get a few ideas?’

Rebus’s eyes lit up. He snatched the programme from Holmes’ hands. ‘Never mind Agatha Christie,’ he said, starting through the programme himself. ‘What we want is Shakespeare.’

‘What,
Macbeth? Hamlet? King Lear
?’

‘No, not a tragedy, a good comedy, something to cheer the soul. Ah, here we go.’ He stabbed the open page with his finger.
‘Twelfth Night.
That’s the play for us, Brian. That’s the very play for us.’

The problem, really, in the end was: which
Twelfth Night?
There were three on offer, plus another at the Festival proper. One of the Fringe versions offered an update to gangster Chicago, another played with an all-female cast and the third boasted futuristic stage-design. But Rebus wanted traditional fare, and so opted for the Festival performance. There was just one hitch: it was a complete sell-out.

Not that Rebus considered this a hitch. He waited while Holmes called his girlfriend, Nell Stapleton, and apologised to her about some evening engagement he was breaking, then the two men drove to the Lyceum, tucked in behind the Usher Hall so as to be almost invisible to the naked eye.

‘There’s a five o’clock performance,‘ Rebus explained. ‘We should just make it.’ They did. There was a slight hold-up while Rebus explained to the house manager that this really was police business and not some last-minute culture beano, and a place was found for them in a dusty corner to the rear of the stalls. The lights were dimming as they entered.

‘I haven’t been to a play in years,’ Rebus said to Holmes, excited at the prospect. Holmes, bemused, smiled back, but his superior’s eyes were already on the stage, where the curtain was rising, a guitar was playing and a man in pale pink tights lay across an ornate bench, looking as cheesed off with life as Holmes himself felt. Why did Rebus always have to work from instinct, and always alone, never letting anyone in on whatever he knew or thought he knew? Was it because he was afraid of failure? Holmes suspected it was. If you kept your ideas to yourself, you couldn’t be proved wrong. Well, Holmes had his own ideas about this case, though he was damned if he’d let Rebus in on them.

‘If music be the food of love ...’ came the voice from the stage. And that was another thing - Holmes was starving. It was odds-on the back few rows would soon find his growling stomach competition for the noises from the stage.