10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (351 page)

‘Then I suggest you take it up with your superior, Inspector.’ No hiding the irritation in the voice.

‘So you’re going to do nothing?’

‘It was your lot wanted him here in the first place!’

Silence on the line, then Rebus: ‘What did you just say?’

‘Look, I’ve nothing to add. Take it up with your Chief Superintendent. OK?’

The connection was broken. Rebus tried Watson’s office, but his secretary said he was out. He chewed on his pen, wishing plastic had a nicotine content.

It was your lot wanted him here
.

DC Siobhan Clarke was at her desk, busy on the phone. He noticed that on the wall behind her was pinned up a postcard of a sea-lion. Walking up to it, he saw someone had added a speech balloon, issuing from the creature’s mouth: ‘I’ll have a Rebus supper, thanks.’

‘Ho ho,’ he said, pulling the card from the wall. Clarke had finished her call.

‘Don’t look at me,’ she said.

He scanned the room. DC Grant Hood reading a tabloid, DS George Silvers frowning at his computer screen. Then DI Bill Pryde walked into the office, and Rebus knew he had his man. Curly fair hair, ginger moustache: a face just made for mischief. Rebus waved the card at him and watched Pryde’s face take on a look of false wounded innocence. As Rebus walked towards him, a phone began sounding.

‘That’s yours,’ Pryde said, retreating. On his way to the phone, Rebus tossed the card into a bin.

‘DI Rebus,’ he said.

‘Oh, hello. You probably won’t remember me.’ A short
laugh on the line. ‘That used to be a bit of a joke at school.’

Rebus, immune to every kind of crank, rested against the edge of the desk. ‘Why’s that?’ he asked, wondering what kind of punch-line he was walking into.

‘Because it’s my name: Mee.’ The caller spelled it for him. ‘Brian Mee.’

Inside Rebus’s head, a fuzzy photograph began to develop – mouthful of prominent teeth; freckled nose and cheeks; kitchen-stool haircut.

‘Barney Mee?’ he said.

More laughter on the line. ‘I never knew why everyone called me that.’

Rebus could have told him: after Barney Rubble in
The Flintstones
. He could have added: because you were a dense wee bastard. Instead, he asked Mee what he could do for him.

‘Well, Janice and me, we thought . . . well, it was my mum’s idea actually. She knew your dad. Both my parents knew him, only my dad passed away, like. They all drank at the Goth.’

‘Are you still in Bowhill?’

‘Never quite escaped. I work in Glenrothes though.’

The photo had become clearer: decent footballer, bit of a terrier, the hair reddish-brown. Dragging his satchel along the ground until the stitching burst. Always with some huge hard sweet in his mouth, crunching down on it, nose running.

‘So what can I do for you, Brian?’

‘It was my mum’s idea. She remembered you were in the police in Edinburgh, thought maybe you could help.’

‘With what?’

‘It’s our son. Mine and Janice’s. He’s called Damon.’

‘What’s he done?’

‘He’s vanished.’

‘Run away?’

‘More like a puff of smoke. He was in this club with his pals, see—’

‘Have you tried calling the police?’ Rebus caught himself. ‘I mean Fife Constabulary.’

‘Thing is, the club’s in Edinburgh. Police there say they looked into it, asked a few questions. See, Damon’s nineteen. They say that means he’s got a right to bugger off if he wants.’

‘They’ve got a point, Brian. People run away all the time. Girl trouble maybe.’

‘He was engaged.’

‘Maybe he got scared.’

‘Helen’s a lovely girl. Never a raised voice between them.’

‘Did he leave a note?’

‘I went through this with the police. No note, and he didn’t take any clothes or anything.’

‘You think something’s happened to him?’

‘We just want to know he’s all right . . .’ The voice fell away. ‘My mum always speaks well of your dad. He’s remembered in this town.’

And buried there, too, Rebus thought. He picked up his pen. ‘Give me a few details, Brian, and I’ll see what I can do.’

A little later, Rebus visited Grant Hood’s desk and retrieved the discarded newspaper from the bin. Turning the pages, he found the editorial section. At the bottom, in bold script, were the words ‘Do you have a story for us? Call the newsroom day or night.’ They’d printed the telephone number. Rebus jotted it into his notebook.

The silent dance resumed. Couples writhed and shuffled, threw back their heads or ran hands through their hair, eyes seeking out future partners or past loves to make jealous. The video monitor gave a greasy look to everything.

No sound, just pictures, the tape cutting from dancefloor to main bar to second bar to toilet hallway. Then the entrance foyer, exterior front and back. Exterior back was a puddled alley boasting rubbish bins and a Merc belonging to the club’s owner. The club was called Gaitano’s, nobody knew why. Some of the clientele had come up with the nickname ‘Guiser’s’, and that was the name by which Rebus knew it.

It was on Rose Street, started to get busy around ten thirty each evening. There’d been a stabbing in the back alley the previous summer, the owner complaining of blood on his Merc.

Rebus was seated in a small uncomfortable chair in a small dimly lit room. In the other chair, hand on the video’s remote, sat DC Phyllida Hawes.

‘Here we go again,’ she said. Rebus leaned forward a little. The view jumped from back alley to dancefloor. ‘Any second.’ Another cut: main bar, punters queuing three deep. She froze the picture. It wasn’t so much black and white as sepia, the colour of dead photographs. Interior light, she’d explained earlier. She moved the action along one frame at a time as Rebus moved in on the screen, bending so one knee touched the floor. His finger touched a face.

‘That’s him,’ she agreed.

On the desk was a slim file. Rebus had taken from it a photograph, which he now held to the screen.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Forward at half-speed.’

The security camera stayed with the main bar for another ten seconds, then switched to second bar and all points on the compass. When it returned to the main bar, the crush of drinkers seemed not to have moved. She froze the tape again.

‘He’s not there,’ Rebus said.

‘No chance he got served. The two ahead of him are still waiting.’

Rebus nodded. ‘He should be there.’ He touched the screen again.

‘Next to the blonde,’ Hawes said.

Yes, the blonde: spun-silver hair, dark eyes and lips. While those around her were intent on catching the eyes of the bar staff, she was looking off to one side. There were no sleeves to her dress.

Twenty seconds of footage from the foyer showed a steady stream entering the club, but no one leaving.

‘I went through the whole tape,’ Hawes said. ‘Believe me, he’s not on it.’

‘So what happened to him?’

‘Easy, he walked out, only the cameras didn’t pick him up.’

‘And left his pals gasping?’

Rebus studied the file again. Damon Mee had been out with two friends, a night in the big city. It had been Damon’s shout – two lagers and a Coke, this last for the designated driver. They’d waited for him, then gone looking. Initial reaction: he’d scored and slunk off without telling them. Maybe she’d been a dinosaur, not something to brag about. But then he hadn’t turned up at home, and his parents had started asking questions, questions no one could answer.

Simple truth: Damon Mee had, as the timer on the
camera footage showed, vanished from the world between 11.44 and 11.45 p.m. the previous Friday night.

Hawes switched off the machine. She was tall and thin and knew her job; hadn’t liked Rebus appearing at Gayfield cop shop like this; hadn’t liked the implication.

‘There’s no hint of foul play,’ she said defensively. ‘Quarter of a million MisPers every year, most turn up again in their own sweet time.’

‘Look,’ Rebus assured her, ‘I’m doing this for an old friend, that’s all. He just wants to know we’ve done all we can.’

‘What’s to do?’

Good question, and one Rebus was unable to answer right that minute. Instead, he brushed dust from the knees of his trousers and asked if he could look at the video one last time.

‘And something else,’ he said. ‘Any chance we can get a print-out?’

‘A print-out?’

‘A photo of the crush at the bar.’

‘I’m not sure. It’s not going to be much use though, is it? And we’ve decent photos of Damon as it is.’

‘It’s not him I’m interested in,’ Rebus said as the tape began to play. ‘It’s the blonde who watched him leave.’

That evening, he drove north out of Edinburgh, paid his toll at the Forth Road Bridge, and crossed into Fife. The place liked to call itself ‘the Kingdom’ and there were those who would agree that it was another country, a place with its own linguistic and cultural currency. For such a small place, it seemed almost endlessly complex, had seemed that way to Rebus even when he’d been growing up there. To outsiders the place meant coastal scenery and St Andrews, or just a stretch of motorway between Edinburgh and Dundee, but the west central Fife of Rebus’s childhood had been very different, ruled by coal mines and linoleum, dockyard and chemical plant, an
industrial landscape shaped by basic needs and producing people who were wary and inward-looking, with the blackest humour you’d ever find.

They’d built new roads since Rebus’s last visit, and knocked down a few more landmarks, but the place didn’t feel so very different from thirty-odd years before. It wasn’t such a great span of time after all, except in human terms, and maybe not even then. Entering Cardenden – Bowhill had disappeared from road-signs in the 1960s, even if locals still knew it as a village distinct from its neighbour – Rebus slowed to see if the memories would turn out sweet or sour. Then he caught sight of a Chinese takeaway and thought: both, of course.

Brian and Janice Mee’s house was easy enough to find: they were standing by the gate waiting for him. Rebus had been born in a pre-fab but brought up in a terrace much like this one. Brian Mee practically opened the car door for him, and was trying to shake his hand while Rebus was still undoing his seat-belt.

‘Let the man catch his breath!’ his wife snapped. She was still standing by the gate, arms folded. ‘How have you been, Johnny?’

And Rebus realised that Brian had married Janice Playfair, the only girl in his long and trouble-strewn life who’d ever managed to knock John Rebus unconscious.

The narrow low-ceilinged room was full to bursting – not just Rebus, Brian and Janice, but Brian’s mother and Mr and Mrs Playfair, plus a billowing three-piece suite and assorted tables and units. Introductions had to be made and Rebus guided to ‘the seat by the fire’. The room was overheated. A pot of tea was produced, and on the table by Rebus’s armchair sat enough slices of cake to feed a football crowd.

‘He’s a brainy one,’ Janice’s mother said, handing Rebus a framed photograph of Damon Mee. ‘Plenty of
certificates from school. Works hard. Saving to get married.’

The photo showed a smiling imp, not long out of school.

‘We gave the most recent pictures to the police,’ Janice explained. Rebus nodded: he’d seen them in the file. All the same, when a packet of holiday snaps was handed to him, he went through them slowly: it saved having to look at the expectant faces. He felt like a doctor, expected to produce both immediate diagnosis and remedy. The photos showed a face more careworn than in the framed print. The impish smile remained, but noticeably older: some effort had gone into it. There was something behind the eyes, disenchantment maybe. Damon’s parents were in a few of the photos.

‘We all went together,’ Brian explained. ‘The whole family.’

Beaches, a big white hotel, poolside games. ‘Where is it?’

‘Lanzarote,’ Janice said, handing him his tea. ‘Do you still take sugar?’

‘Haven’t done for years,’ Rebus said. In a couple of the pictures she was wearing her bikini: good body for her age, or any age come to that. He tried not to linger.

‘Can I take a couple of the close-ups?’ he asked. Janice looked at him. ‘Of Damon.’ She nodded and he put the other photos back in the packet.

‘We’re really grateful,’ someone said: Janice’s mum? Brian’s? Rebus couldn’t tell.

‘You said his girlfriend’s called Helen?’

Brian nodded. He’d lost some hair and put on weight, his face jowly. There was a row of cheap trophies above the mantelpiece: darts and pool, pub sports. He reckoned Brian kept in training most nights. Janice . . . Janice looked the same as ever. No, that wasn’t strictly true. She had wisps of grey in her hair. But all the same, talking to her was like stepping back into a previous age.

‘Does Helen live locally?’ he asked.

‘Practically round the corner.’

‘I’d like to talk to her.’

‘I’ll give her a bell.’ Brian got to his feet, left the room.

‘Where does Damon work?’ Rebus asked, for want of a better question.

‘Same place as his dad,’ Janice said, lighting a cigarette. Rebus raised an eyebrow: at school, she’d been anti-tobacco. She saw his look and smiled.

‘He got a job in packaging,’ her dad said. He seemed frail, chin quivering. Rebus wondered if he’d had a stroke. One side of his face looked slack. ‘He’s learning the ropes. It’ll be management soon.’

Working-class nepotism, jobs handed down from father to son. Rebus was surprised it still existed.

‘Lucky to find any work at all around here,’ Mrs Playfair added.

‘Are things bad?’

She made a tutting sound, dismissing the question.

‘Remember the old pit, John?’ Janice asked.

Of course he remembered it, and the bing and the wilderness around it. Long walks on summer evenings, stopping for kisses that seemed to last hours. Wisps of coal-smoke rising from the bing, the dross within still smouldering.

‘It’s all been levelled now, turned into parkland. They’re talking about building a mining museum.’

Mrs Playfair tutted again. ‘All it’ll do is remind us what we once had.’

‘Job creation,’ her daughter said.

‘They used to call Cowdenbeath the Chicago of Fife,’ Brian Mee’s mother added.