10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (361 page)

Back at the flat, Jamie took the paper into Cal’s bedroom.

‘About fucking time, wee man.’ Cal lying in bed, portable telly on. The room smelled stale. Jamie sometimes tried to hold his breath. Cal had a mug of tea on the floor beside his ashtray.

‘Switch the channel, will you?’

The TV was on a chest of drawers at the bottom of the bed. It didn’t have a remote. Cal had just brought it home one night, said he won it in a bet at the pub. There was a little square beside the panel of buttons. It said ‘Remote Sensor’. So Jamie knew there should be a remote with it. He had to jump over a pile of Cal’s clothes on the floor to get to the TV. Pressed the button for Channel 4. You got some dolls on the breakfast show – Cal had taught him the word: dolls.

Jamie leapt back over the clothes and fled the room, letting out a huge exhalation in the hallway. Twenty-five seconds: not even near his record for breath-holding. His mum was buttering rolls at the kitchen table. She handed him one. He got himself a mug of milk and sat down. He’d told his mum that because of cutbacks, his school didn’t
start till half past nine. Either she’d believed him, or hadn’t been up to arguing. She looked tired, his mum, looked like she needed a treat. But he knew looks could deceive: she could go from tired to mental in two seconds flat. He’d seen her do it with one of the old hoors from upstairs who’d come to complain about the noise. Pure mental. Same thing with the old guy who’d complained of the ball landing in his garden.

‘Next time I’ll put a garden fork through it, so help me.’

‘Do that,’ Jamie’s mum had said, ‘and I’ll take your fucking fork and stick it through your balls.’ Right up close to him, growing huge as he seemed to shrink.

Jamie had a lot of respect for his mum. Last time she’d clipped him, it had been because he’d tried calling her Van. Cal called her Van, but that was all right because he was grown up, same as she was. Jamie couldn’t wait to grow up.

With a mug of tea in her hand, his mum went through her morning ritual: trying to remember where she’d put her cigarettes.

‘Maybe Cal’s got them,’ Jamie suggested.

‘Finish what’s in your mouth before you speak.’ She yelled towards Cal’s room, got a yelled denial back. In the living room, she pulled cushions off the sofa and chair, kicked the pile of car and music magazines sitting on the floor. Found half a packet on top of the hi-fi. The top of the flip-pack was missing. Cal used them for his ‘special roll-ups’. His mum pulled out a cigarette, but most of it was missing too. She sighed heavily, stuck it in her mouth anyway and lit it with the lighter she found inside the packet.

She didn’t have any pockets, so put the cigarettes on the arm of her chair. She was wearing silver-grey shell-suit bottoms with a purple zip-up jogging top. The top was old, the lettering on its back – SPORTING NATION – cracked and peeling. Jamie wondered if Sporting Nation meant Scotland.

Roll and milk finished, he slid off his chair. He had plans for today: Princes Street maybe, or a bus out to The Gyle. On his own, or with anyone he could round up. Problem with The Gyle was, it was in the middle of nowhere. There was a games arcade on Lothian Road, he liked it there, but there were other regulars who were better than him at the games, and even if he didn’t want to play against them, they’d stand and watch him on his machine, then tell him what mistakes he was making and say they could do better with their wrists in plaster.

Just as well
, he knew he should tell them,
because the way you’re going, your whole body’s going to end up in plaster
. But he never did: most of them were bigger than him. And they didn’t know Cal, so he was no use as a threat. Which was why Jamie didn’t go in there so much any more . . .

Cal’s bedroom door flew open and he stalked into the kitchen. He had his jeans on, but had forgotten to zip them up or buckle his belt. No shoes or socks, no T-shirt. He had nicks and bruises on his chest and arms. You could see the muscles moving beneath his skin. He flung the paper on to the table and slapped a hand down on it.

‘Look at this,’ he hissed, face pink with anger. ‘Just take a look at this.’

Jamie looked: double-page story. SEX OFFENDER WITH PLAYGROUND VIEW. There were photos. One showed a block of flats, an arrow pointing to one of the storeys. The other showed a patch of tarmac and a couple of kids playing.

‘That’s here,’ he said, amazed. He’d never seen Greenfield in the papers before, never seen photos of the place. His mum came over.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Fucking pervert living right under our noses,’ Cal spat. ‘Nobody told us.’ He stabbed the paper. ‘Says so right here. Nobody bothered to tell us.’

Van studied the story. ‘There’s no picture of him.’

‘No, but they as good as point at the bastard’s door.’

She remembered something. ‘Cops came round the other day. I thought they were looking for you.’

‘What did they want?’

‘Just the one of them. Asked if I knew somebody called . . .’ She squeezed shut her eyes. ‘Darren something-or-other.’

‘Darren Rough,’ Jamie said. Cal stared at him.

‘You know him?’

Jamie didn’t know what answer would please Cal. He shrugged. ‘Seen him around the place.’

‘How do you know his name?’ Eyes burning into him.

‘He . . . I don’t know.’

‘He what?’ Cal was facing him now, fists bunched. ‘Which flat’s he in?’ Jamie started to tell him, but Cal snatched the neck of his shirt. ‘Better still, show me.’

But as they walked along the landing to Darren Rough’s flat, they saw that others had the same idea. A group of seven or eight residents stood outside Rough’s door. Most of them had the morning paper with them, rolled up and brandished like a weapon. Cal was disappointed they weren’t the first.

‘Is he no’ in?’

‘No’ answering anyway.’

Cal kicked at the door, saw from the looks around him that they were impressed. Stood back and shouldered the door, kicked it again. Two locks: Yale and mortice. No way to see inside: letterbox was blocked up; a sheet pinned across the window. Everyone was talking about it.

‘Wake up, ya bastardin’ pervert!’ Cal Brady shouted at the window. ‘Come and meet your fan club!’ There were smiles around him.

‘Maybe he works shifts,’ someone offered. Cal couldn’t think of a smart remark to make back. He thumped on the window instead, then went back to kicking the door. A few more residents arrived, but more began to drift away. Soon there were just a couple of kids, plus Cal and Jamie.

‘Jamie,’ Cal said, ‘go get me a spray can. Try under my bed.’

Jamie already knew there were a couple of cans under there. ‘Blue or black?’ he asked, before he realised what he’d done.

But Cal didn’t notice. He was busy staring at the door. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. Jamie went off to fetch the can. His mum was outside, arms folded, talking with a couple of women from the landing. Jamie trotted past them.

‘Well?’ his mum said.

‘Nobody’s in.’

She turned back to her friends. ‘Could be anywhere. Scum like that, there’s no telling.’

‘What we need’s a petition,’ one of the women said.

‘Aye, get the council to rehouse him.’

‘Think they’ll listen to us?’ Van said. ‘Direct action, that’s what we want. Our problem, we deal with it, never mind what anyone else says.’

‘People’s Republic of Greenfield,’ another woman offered.

‘I’m serious, Michele,’ Van said, ‘deadly serious.’ Behind her, Jamie disappeared into the flat.

‘Mum and me, we seemed to move around a lot in the early days.’

Cary Oakes was in a chair by his bedroom window, feet up on the table in front of him. Jim Stevens sat on a corner of the bed, holding the tape recorder at arm’s length.

‘Places? Dates?’

Oakes looked at him. ‘I don’t remember the names of towns, people we stayed with. When you’re a kid, that sort of thing doesn’t matter, does it? I had my own life, my own little fantasy world. I’d be a soldier or a fighter pilot. Scotland would be full of aliens, and I’d be out to get them, a vigilante sort of scenario.’ He gazed out of the window. ‘Because we moved so much, I never really made any friends. Not close friends.’ He saw that Stevens was about to interrupt. ‘Again, I can’t give any names. I remember coming to Edinburgh, though.’ He paused, stretched to rub his thumb across the toe of one shoe, removing a trace of dirt. ‘Yes, Edinburgh sticks in my mind. We stayed with family. My aunt and her husband. Don’t remember which part of town they lived in. There was a park nearby. I went there a lot. Maybe we could get a picture of me there.’

Stevens nodded. ‘If you can remember where it is.’

Oakes smiled. ‘Any park would do, wouldn’t it? We’d just pretend. That’s what I did in that park. It was my universe.
Mine
. I could do whatever the hell I liked there. I was God.’

‘So what did you do?’ Stevens was thinking: this is easy, fluid. Oakes was either a born storyteller or else . . . or else
he’d been rehearsing. But something had jarred, something about family:
my aunt and her husband
. A strange way of putting it.

‘What did I do? I played games, same as every other kid. I had an imagination, I’ll tell you that. When you’re a kid, nobody minds if you run around shooting up the world, know what I’m saying? In your head, you can kill whole populations. I’ll bet there isn’t one damned person on this planet hasn’t thought about murdering someone at
some
time. I’ll bet you have.’

‘I’ll show you my collection of voodoo dolls.’

Oakes smiled. ‘My mum, she did her best for me.’ He paused. ‘I’m sure of that.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She died, man.’ His eyes bored into the reporter’s. ‘But then everybody dies.’

‘You played these games by yourself?’

Oakes shook his head. ‘The other kids got to know me. I joined a gang, rose through the ranks.’

‘See much action?’

Oakes shrugged. ‘There were a few fights. Mostly we just played football and glowered at strangers. Offed a few of the neighbourhood cats too.’

‘How?’

‘Sprayed them with lighter fluid, torched them.’ Oakes’s eyes fixed on Stevens. ‘Typical start to your basic serial killer. I read about it in jail. Loner who torches animals.’

‘But you weren’t alone, you were with your gang.’

Oakes smiled again. ‘But I was the one with the lighter, Jim. And that made all the difference.’

When they took a break, Stevens returned to his own room. Two sachets of coffee into a cup of boiling water. He’d been wakened at four that morning by the telephone. His boss had worked a miracle, and Stevens found himself speaking to a Seattle journalist who’d followed the Oakes case all the way along. The journalist, Matt Lewin,
confirmed that Oakes had attended regular Sunday services in the Walla Walla penitentiary.

‘A lot of them do, doesn’t mean they’ve seen the light.’

Now Stevens lay back on the bed and sipped his coffee. He wanted to track down Oakes’s teenage gang. It would be good background, another insight into Cary Oakes. If they ran the story, maybe someone from the gang would read it and come forward. Then Stevens could interview them for the book. He’d asked Matt Lewin if any American publishers would be interested.

‘Not when he’s not one of ours. We like home-grown product. Besides, Jim, serial killers went out of fashion a while back.’

Stevens was hoping for a fashion revival. The book deal would be his gold watch, a little retirement gift to himself. He knew he should do some research, try to check the stories Oakes had been telling. But he felt so tired, and his boss had told him: get the story first, confirm it later. He finished his coffee and reached for a cigarette. Swung his legs off the bed.

Showtime.

Janice Mee took a break, ate at the restaurant at the top of John Lewis’s. From one window, the view was of Calton Hill. They’d climbed it with Damon one day, back when he was seven or eight. She had photos of the trip in one of her albums: Calton Hill, the Castle, Museum of Childhood . . . There were dozens of albums. She kept them in the bottom of the wardrobe. She’d taken them out recently, brought the whole lot downstairs so she could go through them, reviving memories of holiday camps and days at the seaside, birthday parties and sports days. From one of the restaurant’s other windows, she had a good view of the Fife coastline. She couldn’t see as far inland as her home town. There were times in the course of her life when she’d contemplated a move: south to Edinburgh, north to Dundee. But there was something comfortable about the
place where you were born, where your family and friends were. Her parents and grandparents had been born in Fife, the history of the place inextricably linked to her own. Her mother had been a little girl at the time of the General Strike, but remembered them putting up barricades around Lochgelly. Her father had clung to a lamp-post to watch Johnny Thomson’s funeral. The way a family stretched back in time could be measured. But that sense of history misled you into thinking the future would be the same. As Janice was finding out, the thread of continuity could be snapped at any point along the way.

She ate the roll, filled with prawn mayonnaise, without any pleasure or sense of taste. She knew she’d drunk her coffee only because the cup was empty. One pale prawn sat on the rim of the plate, where it had fallen from the roll. She left it where it was and got up from the table.

Outside the St James’ Centre she crossed Princes Street and headed for Waverley Station. A line of taxi cabs snaked from the underground concourse back up on to Waverley Bridge. The drivers sat behind their wheels, some reading or eating or listening to their radios. Others staring into space or sharing news with fellow drivers. She started at the back of the queue and worked her way forwards. John Rebus had given her some names. One of them was Henry Wilson. The drivers all seemed to know him, called him ‘The Lumberjack’. They put out a call to him. Meantime, she showed them her pictures of Damon and explained that he’d been picked up on George Street.

‘Anyone with him, love?’ one driver asked.

‘A woman . . . short blonde hair.’