10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (370 page)

‘I don’t mean board games.’

‘What then?’ Oakes’ eyes were heavy-lidded.

‘Well, you’re playing a game right now.’

‘Am I?’

‘Bar-room raconteur. A couple too many, telling stories to anyone who’ll listen.’ He nodded towards the barmen, who’d moved to the far end to wash glasses. ‘Just another piece of play-acting.’

‘You could go on TV with this stuff. No, I mean it. You’re
so
shrewd. Guess you have to be in your profession.’

‘Is Jim Stevens falling for it?’

‘For what?’

‘The stories you’re telling him. How much of the truth are you giving him?’

Oakes narrowed his eyes. ‘How much truth do you think he can take? If I went into details, think his newspaper would publish them?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘People can only take so much truth, John.’ He leaned towards Rebus. ‘Want me to tell
you
about it, John? Want me to tell you how many I really did kill?’

‘Tell me about Deirdre Campbell.’

Oakes sat back, took a sip of his drink. ‘Alan Archibald thinks I killed her.’

‘And did you?’ Rebus tried to keep the question casual. Lifted his glass to his lips.

‘Does it matter?’ Oakes smiled. ‘It matters to Alan, doesn’t it? Why else would he have come running when I called?’

‘He wants the truth – all of it.’

‘Maybe you’re right. And what do you want, John? What brought
you
running in here? Shall I tell you?’ He made himself comfortable on the stool. ‘The morning shift saw me coming back. I wasn’t sure he was awake: arms folded, head over on one shoulder. I thought he’d nodded
off.’ He tutted. ‘I’m not sure his heart’s in it. The job, I mean, police work. He looks the type who’s coasting to retirement.’

Which just about summed up Bill Pryde; not that Rebus was about to admit it.

‘I think you have problems with your job, too, but not in the same way.’

‘Taught yourself psychology along with the chess?’

‘When there were no new books to read, I started reading people.’

‘You killed Deirdre Campbell, didn’t you?’

Oakes put a finger to his lips. Then: ‘Did
you
kill Gordon Reeve?’

Gordon Reeve: another ghost; a case from years back . . . Jim Stevens had been shooting his mouth off.

‘Tell me,’ Rebus said, ‘do you trade with Stevens? You tell him a story, he has to tell you one?’

‘I’m just interested in you.’

‘Then you’ll know I killed Gordon Reeve.’

‘Did you mean to?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure about that? You stabbed a drug-dealer . . . he died.’

‘Self-defence.’

‘Yes, but did you want him dead?’

‘Let’s talk about you, Oakes. What made you pick Deirdre Campbell?’

Oakes gave another wry smile. Rebus wanted to rip his lips from his face. ‘See, John? See how easy it is to play the game? Stories, that’s all they are. Way back in the past, things we’d like to think we can forget.’ He slipped off the stool. ‘I’m going to my room now. A nice hot bath, I think, then maybe one of the in-room movies. I might call down for a sandwich later. Would you like something sent out to the car?’

‘I don’t know, what’s the menu like?’

‘No menu, you just order what you like.’

‘Then I’ll have your head on a plate, no garnish required.’

Cary Oakes was laughing as he left the bar.

There was someone in the car.

Rebus started forward, saw they were in the passenger seat. As he got close, he saw it was Alan Archibald. Rebus opened the driver’s-side door and got in.

‘Car wasn’t locked,’ Archibald said.

‘No.’

‘Didn’t think you’d mind.’

Rebus shrugged, lit a cigarette.

‘Have you been talking to him?’ Archibald needed no confirmation. ‘What did he say?’

‘He’s playing a game with you, Alan. That’s all it is to him.’

‘He told you that?’

‘He didn’t need to. It’s what he does. Stevens, you, me . . . we’re how he gets his kicks.’

‘You’re wrong there, John. I’ve seen how he gets his kicks.’ He leaned down to the floor, brought out a green folder. ‘Thought you might like something to read.’

Alan Archibald’s file on Cary Dennis Oakes.

Cary Oakes had travelled to the USA on a tourist visa. His biography prior to this time was sketchy: a father who’d died when he was young; a mother who’d had psychological problems. Cary had been born in Nairn, where his father had worked as a green-keeper at one of the local golf courses, and his mother as a maid at a hotel in the town. Rebus knew Nairn as a windswept coastal resort, the kind of destination that had lost out as cheap foreign holidays had prospered.

When Oakes’s father had died following a stroke, the mother had experienced a breakdown. Her employers had let her go, and she’d headed south with her son, finally stopping in Edinburgh, where she had a half-sister. They’d
never been particularly close, but there was no one else, no other family, so mother and son had been squeezed into a room in the house in Gilmerton. Soon afterwards, Cary had started running away. His school had notified his mother that his attendance was irregular at best. There were nights and weekends when he just didn’t bother going home at all. His mother was beyond caring, and her half-sister preferred him out of the house anyway, since her husband had taken a furious dislike to the boy.

Where did the money come from for his trip to the States? Alan Archibald had done some digging, uncovering a series of muggings and break-ins in Edinburgh, unsolved, but tailing off at about the time Cary Oakes made his trip. The mystery of his niece’s murder made for a file in itself. Archibald had interviewed Oakes’s mother and half-sister (both now deceased) and the husband (still alive; living alone in sheltered accommodation in East Craigs). They hadn’t remembered anything specific about the night of the murder, couldn’t even be sure that Cary had been near the house that day or the next.

Deirdre Campbell had been out dancing in town, ending up at a club on the corner of Rose Street – not a hundred yards from where Gaitano’s was now sited. She’d been picked by one particular man, had danced the last four or five dances with him. She’d introduced him to her friends. She had exams coming up, shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The club was for over-twenty-ones only, and Deirdre had been underage. The owner had got into trouble afterwards. His defence: ‘If she hadn’t come in here, they’d have let her in someplace else.’ Which was true: make-up, choice of clothes and hairstyle could add half a dozen years to a teenage girl. After the club, the group had headed out to Lothian Road, trying hard not to let the night die. A pizza restaurant, and then taxis. Deirdre had said she’d walk. She lived in Dalry, it would only take her twenty minutes.

Police questioned the young man who’d been with her,
the one she’d danced with. He’d asked if he could see her home, but she’d shaken her head. He lived way out at Comiston, so had accepted a ride in one of the taxis. Deirdre had started walking home.

Only to end up murdered on a hillside. Clothing interfered with, but no sign of rape or assault. A blow to the head, then strangulation.

Three days later, Cary Oakes had been heading out of Scotland, taking with him a rucksack and sports holdall. None of his family knew what he was up to. First they’d heard was when he’d been arrested, over two months later.

They hadn’t bothered contacting police, registering him as missing.

‘He was old enough to make his mind up what he wanted to do,’ his uncle had told Alan Archibald. ‘We knew he’d taken some clothes and stuff, figured he’d just took off.’

Archibald had used police reports and trial evidence to piece together Cary Oakes’s American travels. From New York he’d taken a bus cross-country. At his trial, Oakes stated that he did this ‘because it’s what all the pioneers did: headed west’. He spent a week in Chicago, just crisscrossing the city on foot and by means of public transport. Then, hitching rides west, he stopped at Minneapolis, where he decided he needed more money and tried his hand at mugging. A couple of minor successes, and one major setback: picked on a woman with Mace in her coat pocket and a lethal left hook. He left Minneapolis with a swollen left eye and the right bloodshot and stinging. He ate at truck stops along I-94, passing through Fargo and Billings, making it as far as Spokane before his need for dollars became desperate. He broke into a couple of houses, tried pawning his meagre findings. The brokers knew swag when they saw it, offered him a few dollars, then, when he bad-mouthed them, called his description in to the police.

He’d taken to sleeping rough, finding like-minded individuals. Joined a little shoplifting gang. With his ‘funny accent’, he’d keep the staff busy and interested while the others went about their work undetected. Already, he was boasting that he was on the run, that he’d ‘offed’ someone back in Scotland. No details, the assertion taken for bravado. Everyone on the street hid behind a shield of lies and fantasies. They’d all tasted the good life; all fallen from a state of grace.

In Spokane, he’d murdered Dorothy Anne Wreiss, a forty-two-year-old divorcee who taught kindergarten three days a week. She lived in a sprawling suburban tract. It was thought Oakes had spotted her at the mall, followed her home or trawled the neighbourhood until he’d spotted her station wagon parked in the drive.

She was found in her kitchen, groceries still in their bags on the breakfast bar. Her two cats had curled up on her back and were sleeping. She’d been beaten with a rock, then strangled with a dishtowel. Her purse had been emptied, as had the jewellery box in her bedroom. Next day, Oakes had tried pawning her watch. At the trial, he’d say it had been gifted to him by one of his drifter friends, the one called Otis. But no one who’d known him had known anyone called Otis.

He ran towards Seattle, stayed there over a week. There was one unsolved they’d tried pinning on him: man found unconscious in the car park of the King Dome. He’d been beaten around the head, his car stolen. Died in hospital of his injuries. The car turned up in Ballard, as did Cary Oakes. By now, the police forces of several states were interested in the ‘Scottish drifter’. A couple of serious assaults in Chicago; a known homosexual found dead in his car in the La Grange district of the city. A woman attacked and left for dead in a mall on the outskirts of Bloomington, Minneapolis. The death of a seventy-eight-year-old following a break-in at her home in Tacoma, Washington. Sometimes, police had physical descriptions
of someone at or near the scene; sometimes all they had was an MO. No useful fingerprints, no positive IDs of Cary Oakes.

The final killing: another homosexual, Willis Chadaran, age sixty. The attack had taken place in the master bedroom of his home in Bellevue. A heavy statuette, which Chadaran had won for his editing work on a documentary film back in 1982, was the weapon. He’d been beaten senseless with it, then finished off with the belt from his red silk
yakuta
. Cary Oakes’s fingerprints were found on the headboard. When arrested and presented with the fingerprint match-up, he admitted he’d been to Chadaran’s home, but denied killing him. Detectives had asked how his prints had ended up on the headboard. Oakes said he’d sneaked into the room looking for stuff to steal, maybe he’d touched it then.

He was finally arrested at Pike Place Market. Traders had complained that he’d looked ready to swipe something. Police had asked for his ID. He’d offered his passport, with its invalid tourist visa, then made a run for it. They’d caught him, taken him in, and someone had connected him to various descriptions which had been coming in from all across the country.

At the trial, the prosecution’s summing-up had been succinct.

‘This is a man for whom brutal murder has become a way of life, a commonplace. If he needs something, wants something, covets something . . . he kills for it. He sees us all as potential victims. We’re not fellow humans to him; he’s ceased to think of us in those terms, the terms by which we co-ordinate and validate our society, terms without which we cannot call ourselves
civilised
. His soul has shrivelled to the size of a walnut, maybe not even that big. Cary Oakes, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, has stepped outside our society, our laws, our civilisation, and he must pay the price.’

The price being two life sentences.

Rebus put down the file. ‘Lots of circumstantial evidence,’ he mused.

‘It all adds up though. More than enough to make a case.’

Rebus nodded agreement. ‘But I can see where he found his loopholes.’ He tapped the folder, thought of the summing-up. ‘Wonder how big a soul usually is . . .’ He turned to Archibald. ‘He plays games.’

‘I know that. The version Jim Stevens’ paper is printing . . . Oakes is spinning them a line.’

‘He told me one of his victims was the same age as my daughter. Nobody in here fits with that.’

Alan Archibald shrugged. ‘Your daughter’s mid-twenties, Deirdre was eighteen.’ He paused. ‘Maybe there are others we don’t know about.’

Yes, thought Rebus, and maybe it had been just another lie. ‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked.

‘Keep at him.’

‘Play along with him?’

‘I don’t see it that way.’

‘I know you don’t; that’s what worries me.’

‘She wasn’t
your
niece.’

Rebus looked into Alan Archibald’s eyes; saw courage and grit, the vital energies which had stayed with him all his working years, not about to be jettisoned now.

‘How can I help?’

‘What makes you think I want any help?’

‘Because you came back tonight. Not to talk to him, but to see me.’

Alan Archibald smiled. ‘I know a bit about you, John. I know we’re not so very different.’

‘So how can I help?’

‘Help me make him come to Hillend.’

‘What good do you think it would do?’

‘He ran from the crime, John. Ran as far as he could from the memory of it. Take him back there, back to his
first
killing . . . I think it would bring it all back: the terror, the uncertainty. I think he’d start to unravel.’

‘Is that what we want?’ Rebus thinking:
He’ll kill again
. . .