Knots And Crosses (5 page)

What he disliked, really disliked, was that the people ultimately behind it all were so silent and so secretive and so alien to it all. He liked his criminals to be involved, to live the life and stick close to the lifestyle. He liked the Glasgow gangsters of the 1950s and ’60s, who lived in the Gorbals and operated from the Gorbals and loaned illicit money to neighbours, and who would slash those same neighbours eventually, when the need arose. It was like a family affair. Not like this, not at all like this. This was other, and he hated it for that reason.

His talk with Campbell had been interesting though, interesting for other reasons. Rebus sounded a fishy character. So was his brother. They might be in it together. If the police were involved in all of this, then his task would be all the harder, and all the more satisfying for that.

Now what he needed was a break, a nice break in the investigation. It couldn’t be far off. He was supposed to have a nose for that sort of thing.

At one-thirty they took a break. There was a small canteen in the building, open even at this ungodly hour. Outside, the majority of the day’s petty crime was being committed, but inside it was warm and cosy, and there was hot food to be had and endless cups of coffee for the vigilant policemen.

‘This is a complete shambles,’ said Morton, pouring coffee back from his saucer into the cup. ‘Anderson hasn’t a clue what he’s up to.’

‘Give me a cigarette, will you? I’m out.’ Rebus patted his pockets convincingly.

‘Christ, John,’ said Morton, wheezing an old man’s cough and passing across the cigarettes, ‘the day you give up smoking is the day I change my underwear.’

Jack Morton was not an old man, despite the excesses that were leading him quickly and inexorably towards that early fate. He was thirty-five, six years younger than Rebus. He, too, had a broken marriage behind him, the four children now resident with their grandmother while their mother was off on a suspiciously long vacation with her present lover. Misery, he had told Rebus, surrounded the whole bloody set-up, and Rebus had agreed with him, having a daughter who troubled his own conscience.

Morton had been a policeman for two decades, and unlike Rebus had started at the extreme bottom of the heap, pulling himself up to his present rank through sheer hard slog alone.
He had given Rebus his life story when the two of them had gone off for a day’s fly-fishing near Berwick. It had been a glorious day, both of them landing fine catches, and over the course of the day they had become friends. Rebus, however, had not deigned to tell his own life story to Morton. It felt, to Jack Morton, as if the man were in a little prison-cell of his own construction. He seemed especially tight-lipped about his years in the Army. Morton knew that the Army could occasionally do that to a man, and he respected Rebus’s silence. Perhaps there were a few skeletons in that particular closet. He knew all about those himself; some of his most noteworthy arrests had not exactly been conducted along ‘correct procedural lines’.

Nowadays, Morton did not concern himself with headlines and high-profile arrests. He got on with the job, collected his salary, thought now and then of his pension and the fishing-years to come, and drank his wife and children out of his conscience.

‘This is a nice canteen,’ said Rebus, smoking, struggling to start a conversation.

‘Yes, it is. I’m in here now and again. I know one of the guys who work in the computer room. Comes in handy, you know, having one of those terminal-operators in your pocket. They can track down a car, a name, an address quicker than you can blink. It only costs the occasional drink.’

‘Get them to sort out this lot of ours then.’

‘Give them time, John. Then
all
the files will be on computer. And a little while after that, they’ll find that they don’t need the work-horses like us any more. There’ll just be a couple of DIs and a desk console.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Rebus.

‘It’s progress, John. Where would we be without it? We’d still be out there with our pipes and our guess-work and our magnifying glasses.’

‘I suppose you’re right, Jack. But remember what the Super says: “Give me a dozen good men every time, and send your machines back to their makers.”’

Rebus looked around him as he spoke. He saw that one of the two women from the briefing room had settled at a table by herself.

‘And besides,’ said Rebus, ‘there’ll always be a place for people like us, Jack. Society couldn’t do without us. Computers can never have inspired guesses. That’s where we’ve got them beat hands down.’

‘Maybe, I don’t know. Still, we better be getting back, eh?’ Morton looked at his watch, drained his cup, and pushed back his chair.

‘You go on ahead, Jack. I’ll be with you in a minute. I want to check out an inspired guess.’

‘Mind if I join you?’

Rebus, a fresh cup of coffee in his hand, pulled out the chair from opposite the woman officer, who had her head buried in the day’s newspaper. He noted the garish headline on the front page. Someone had slipped out a little information to the local media.

‘Not at all,’ she said, not looking up.

Rebus smiled to himself and sat down. He began to sip the powdery, instant murk.

‘Busy?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Shouldn’t you be? Your friend left a few minutes ago.’

Sharp then, very sharp. Very, very sharp indeed. Rebus began to feel a mite uneasy. He disliked ballcrushers, and here were all the outward signs of one.

‘Yes, he did, didn’t he? But then he’s a glutton for punishment. We’re working on the Modus Operandi files. I’d do anything to defer that particular pleasure.’

She looked up at last, bitten by the potential insult.

‘That’s what I am, is it? A delaying tactic?’

Rebus smiled and shrugged.

‘What else?’ he said.

It was her turn to smile now. She closed the paper and folded it twice, placing it before her on the formica-topped table. She tapped the headline.

‘Looks like we’re in the news,’ she said.

Rebus turned the paper towards him.

EDINBURGH ABDUCTIONS – NOW IT’S MURDER!

‘A terrible bloody case,’ he offered. ‘Just terrible. And the newspapers don’t make it any better.’

‘Yes, well, we’ll have the PM results in a couple of hours, and then we just might have something to go on.’

‘I hope so. Just so long as I can put away those bloody files.’

‘I thought policemen,’ stressing the latter part of the word, ‘got their kicks from reading that stuff?’

Rebus spread his hands before him, a gesture he seemed to have picked up from Michael.

‘You have us to a T. How long have you been in the force?’

Rebus took her to be thirty, give or take two years. She had thick, short brown hair, and a long, straight ski-slope of a nose. There were no rings on her fingers, but these days that told him nothing.

‘Long enough,’ she said.

‘I think I knew you would say that.’

She was smiling still: no ballcrusher then.

‘Then you’re cleverer than I took you for,’ she said.

‘You’d be surprised.’

He was growing tired, realising that the game was going nowhere. It was all midfield, a friendly rather than a cup-tie. He checked his watch conspicuously.

‘Time I was getting back,’ he said.

She picked up her newspaper.

‘Are you doing anything this weekend?’ she asked.

John Rebus sat down again.

He left the station at four o’clock. The birds were doing their best to persuade everyone that it was dawn, but no one seemed fooled. It was dark still, and the air was chilled.

He decided to leave his car and walk home, a distance of two miles. He needed it, needed to feel the cool, damp air, the expectancy of a morning shower. He breathed deep, trying to relax, to forget, but his mind was too full of those files, and little pieces of recollected fact and figure, pieces of horror no bigger than a paragraph, haunted his walk.

To indecently assault an eight-week old baby girl. The babysitter who had calmly admitted to the assault saying that she had done it ‘for a kick’.

To rape a grandmother in front of her two grandchildren, then give the kids some sweets from a jar before leaving. The act premeditated; committed by a bachelor of fifty.

To burn with cigarettes the name of a street gang onto the breasts of a twelve-year old, leaving her for dead in a burning hut. Never caught.

And now the crux: to abduct two girls and then strangle them
without
having sexually abused them. That, Anderson had posited only thirty minutes before, was a perversion in itself, and in a funny way Rebus knew what he meant. It made the deaths even more arbitrary, more pointless – and more shocking.

Well, at least they were not dealing with a sex-offender; not
right away. Which only, Rebus was forced to agree, made their task that much more difficult, for now they were confronted with something like a ‘serial killer’, striking at random and without clues, aiming at the record books rather than at any idea of ‘kicks’. The question now was would he stop at two? It seemed unlikely.

Strangulation. It was a fearful way to go, wrestling, kicking your way towards oblivion, panic, the fretful sucking for air, and the killer behind you most likely, so that you faced the fear of something totally anonymous, a death without knowledge of who or why. Rebus had been taught methods of killing in the SAS. He knew what it felt like to have the garotte tighten on your neck, trusting to the opponent’s prevailing sanity. A fearful way to go.

Edinburgh slept on, as it had slept on for hundreds of years. There were ghosts in the cobbled alleys and on the twisting stairways of the Old Town tenements, but they were Enlightenment ghosts, articulate and deferential. They were not about to leap from the darkness with a length of twine ready in their hands. Rebus paused and looked around him. Besides, it was morning now and any godfearing spirit would be tucked up in bed, as he, John Rebus, flesh and blood, would be soon.

Near his flat, he passed a little grocery shop outside which were stacked crates of milk and morning rolls. The owner had complained in private to Rebus about petty and occasional thefts, but would not submit a complaint proper. The shop was as dead as the street, the solitude of the moment disturbed only by the distant rumble of a taxi on cobblestones and the persistence of the dawn chorus. Rebus looked around him, examining the many curtained windows. Then, swiftly, he tore six rolls from a layer and stuffed them into his pockets, walking away a little too briskly. A moment later he hesitated, then walked on tiptoe back to the shop, the criminal
returning to the scene of the crime, the dog to its vomit. Rebus had never actually seen dogs doing that, but he had it on the authority of Saint Peter.

Looking round again, he lifted a pint of milk out of its crate and made his getaway, whistling silently to himself.

Nothing in the world tasted as good for breakfast as stolen rolls with some butter and jam and a mug of milky coffee. Nothing tasted better than a venial sin.

He sniffed the stairwell of his tenement, catching the faint odour of tom-cats, a persistent menace. He held his breath as he climbed the two flights of stairs, fumbling in his pocket beneath the squashed rolls, trying to liberate his door-key.

The interior of the flat felt damp and smelt damp. He checked the central heating and, sure enough, the pilot-light had gone out again. He cursed as he relit it, turning the heat up all the way, and went through to the living-room.

There were still spaces on the book-case, the wall-unit, the mantelpiece where Rhona’s ornaments had once stood, but many of the gaps had already been filled by new mementoes of his own: bills, unanswered letters, old ring-pulls from tins of cheap beer, the occasional unread book. Rebus collected unread books. Once upon a time, he had actually read the books that he bought, but these days he seemed to have so little time. Also, he was more discriminating now than he had been then, back in the old days when he would read a book to its bitter end whether he liked it or not. These days, a book he disliked was unlikely to last ten pages of his concentration.

These were the books that lay around his living-room. His books for reading tended to congregate in the bedroom, lying in co-ordinated rows on the floor like patients in a doctor’s waiting-room. One of these days he would take a holiday, would rent a cottage in the Highlands or on the Fife coast, and would take with him all of these waiting-to-be-read-or-reread books, all of that knowledge that could be his for the
breaking open of a cover. His favourite book, a book he turned to at least once a year, was
Crime and Punishment
. If only, he thought, modern murderers would exhibit some show of conscience more often. But no, modern killers bragged of their crimes to their friends, then played pool in their local pub, chalking their cues with poise and certainty, knowing which balls would drop in which order …

While a police-car slept nearby, its occupants unable to do anything save curse the mountains of rules and regulations and rue the deep chasms of crime. It was everywhere, crime. It was the life-force and the blood and the balls of life: to cheat, to edge; to take that body-swerve at authority, to kill. The higher up you climbed into crime, the more subtly you began to move back towards legitimacy, until a handful of lawyers only could crack open your system, and they were always affordable, always on hand to be bribed. Dostoevsky had known all that, clever old bastard. He had felt the stick burning from both ends.

But poor old Dostoevsky was dead and had not been invited to a party this weekend, while he, John Rebus, had. Often he declined invitations, because to accept meant that he had to dust off his brogues, iron a shirt, brush down his best suit, take a bath, and splash on some cologne. He had also to be affable, to drink and be merry, to talk to strangers with whom he had no inclination to talk and with whom he was not being paid to talk. In other words, he resented having to play the part of a normal human animal. But he had accepted the invitation given to him by Cathy Jackson in the Waverley Road canteen. Of course he had.