10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (393 page)

‘Been working, Jim?’ He opened the notebook, and was disappointed to see Stevens had used shorthand.

‘Why’d you go see him?’ Oakes asked, beginning to tear each page of the notebook into four.

‘See who? I was visiting an old neighbour of mine, and—’

The knife arced into Stevens’s side. He took his hands off the wheel, and the car veered towards the kerb. Oakes straightened it up.

‘Keep your foot down, Jim! If this car stops, you’re a dead man!’

Stevens examined his palm. It was wet with blood. ‘Hospital,’ he croaked, face twisted with pain.

‘You’ll get a hospital
after
I’ve had my answers! What made you go to see him?’

Stevens hunched over the wheel, taking control again. Oakes thought he was going to pass out, but it was just the pain.

‘I was checking details.’

‘That all?’ Ripping at the notebook.

‘What else would I be doing?’

‘Well, that’s why I’m asking, Jim-Bob. And if you don’t want knifing again, you’ll convince me.’ Oakes reached for the heater switch, slid it to full.

‘It’s for the book.’

‘The book?’ Oakes narrowed his eyes.

‘I don’t have enough material with just the interviews.’

‘You should have asked me first.’ Oakes was silent for a minute.

‘Where are we going?’ Stevens had one hand on the steering-wheel, one pressed to his side.

‘Turn right at the roundabout, head out of town.’

‘The Glasgow road? I need a hospital.’

Oakes wasn’t listening. ‘What did he say?’

‘What?’

‘What did he say about me?’

‘Probably what you’d expect.’

‘He’s
compos mentis
then?’

‘Pretty much.’

Oakes wound down the window, scattering the scraps of paper. When he turned round again, Stevens was scrabbling on the floor with his hand.

‘What are you doing?’ Oakes brandished the knife.

‘Paper hankies. I thought I’d a box somewhere.’

Oakes examined his handiwork. ‘Just between you and me, Jim, I don’t think paper tissues are going to do the job.’

‘I feel faint. I’ve got to stop.’

‘Keep going!’

Stevens’ eyelids looked heavy. ‘See if they’re in the back.’

‘What?’

‘The box of hankies.’

So Oakes turned in his seat, pushed his clothes around. ‘Nothing here.’

Stevens was rooting in his pockets. ‘Must be something . . .’ Eventually he found a large cotton handkerchief, eased it inside his shirt.

‘Take the airport exit,’ Oakes commanded.

‘You leaving us, Cary?’

‘Me?’ Oakes grinned. ‘When I’m just beginning to enjoy myself?’ He sneezed, spraying the windscreen with spittle.

‘Bless you,’ Stevens said. There was silence in the car for a moment, then both men laughed.

‘That’s funny,’ Oakes said, wiping an eye. ‘You blessing me.’

‘Cary, I’m losing a lot of blood.’

‘It’s all right, Jimbo. I’ve seen people bleed to death before. You’ve got hours left in you.’ He sat back in his seat. ‘So you were out there all by yourself, checking background . . .? Who knew you were going?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Not your editor?’

‘No.’

‘And John Rebus?’

Stevens snorted. ‘Why would I tell him?’

‘Because I made you mad.’ Oakes pushed out his bottom lip. ‘Sorry about that, by the way.’

‘Was it really all lies?’

‘That’s between me and my conscience, man.’

The car hit a bump and Stevens grimaced.

‘Know what they say about pain, Jim? They say it makes you see colour for the very first time. Makes everything really
vivid
.’

‘The blood certainly looks vivid.’

‘There’s nothing like it,’ Oakes said quietly, ‘not in the whole world.’

They were coming to another roundabout. Off to their left sat Ingliston Showground, unused for the most part of the year. Unused tonight.

‘Airport?’ Stevens asked.

‘No, take a left.’

So Stevens did, and found himself approaching a building site. Another new hotel was being thrown up, to complement the one at the airport exit. Around it lay farmland, the dwellings few and far between. There were no visible lights at all, not even from planes landing and taking off.

‘No hospitals near here,’ Stevens said, dread overcoming him.

‘Pull over.’

Stevens did as he was told.

‘They’ll have a doctor at the airport,’ Oakes told him. ‘I’ll need your car, but you can walk it.’

‘Better still, you could drop me off.’ Jim Stevens licked his dry lips.

‘Or better yet . . .’ Cary Oakes said. And his hand flew, and the knife went into Stevens’ side again.

And again and again, as the journalist’s words became twisted sounds, finding a new vocabulary of terror, resignation and pain.

Oakes dragged the corpse out and dumped it behind a
mound of earth. Searched in the pockets and found Stevens’ cassette recorder. There wasn’t much light, but he was able to prise it open, remove the tape. Left the recorder behind; took the tape. Little money in Stevens’ wallet: credit cards, but he wanted neither to use them nor be caught with them in his possession. He bent down again, wiped the recorder on Stevens’ jacket, getting rid of prints.

The wind was cutting through him. If he tried concealing the body, he might die of hypothermia. He raced back to the car, got into the driver’s seat and headed off. The heater wouldn’t go any higher. The blood was sticking his underpants to the seat. He could feel it against his skin. Couldn’t put his clothes on yet: had to keep them clean. Couldn’t go wandering around Edinburgh with bloodstained clothes.

Another trick from prison. Maybe his fellow inmates hadn’t been so stupid after all.

On the way back into town, he stopped in a deserted supermarket car park, threw the tape into a bin.

Then he was on his way. Knew he had at least one night before the body was found. One night when he’d have some shelter, courtesy of Jim Stevens’ car.

Anything out west was a Torphichen call, but news travelled fast. Roy Frazer drove Rebus out to the scene. The whole drive, Rebus only said one thing to the young man.

‘You screwed up about Eddie Mearn. It happens. Best to have it happen young when you can still learn from it. Otherwise you get intimations of infallibility, which translates to your colleagues as “smart-arse”.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Frazer said, frowning as though trying to memorise the advice. Then he reached into his pocket. ‘Message from DS Clarke.’ He handed over the note. Rebus unfolded the piece of paper. At first he didn’t take it in. His brain was overloaded as it was. But eventually the words hit him with the force of electricity.

I did a bit of digging. Joseph Margolies wasn’t just a doctor. He worked for the council for a time, had special responsibility for children’s homes. Don’t know if it means anything, but I get the feeling you had him down as a GP. Cheers, S
.

He read the note half a dozen times. He wasn’t sure if it
did
mean anything. But he could see definite connections beginning to appear. And connections could always be exploited . . .

The DI from Torphichen was Shug Davidson. He offered a brief smile as Rebus got out of the car.

‘They say the culprit always returns to the scene of the crime.’

‘That’s not funny, Shug.’

‘Way I hear it, you and the deceased weren’t exactly bosom buddies.’

‘Maybe towards the end,’ Rebus said. ‘Have they moved him yet?’

Davidson shook his head. Work on the construction site had stopped. There were faces at the portakabin windows. Other workers milled around outside, wearing hard hats, drinking tea from their flasks. Their gaffer was complaining that work was a fortnight behind as it was.

‘Then a few more hours isn’t going to make much of a dent, is it?’ Davidson said.

Rebus had ducked beneath the
locus
tape. The victim had been pronounced dead. They were photographing the body. Forensics had already completed taping it. Uniforms were spreading out from the
locus
, seeking clues. Davidson had the whole situation under control.

‘Any ideas?’ Davidson asked Rebus.

‘One fairly big one.’

‘Oakes?’ Rebus looked at Davidson, who smiled. ‘I read the papers too, John. Friend of a friend told me Oakes had dumped on Stevens. Next thing, Oakes is on the run after the attack on Alan Archibald.’ He broke off. ‘How is he, by the way?’

‘Doing better than this poor bugger,’ Rebus said, moving closer to the body. Professor Gates was crouched – or as Gates himself liked to say, on his ‘cuddy-hunkers’ – at Stevens’ head. He nodded a greeting towards Rebus, but carried on with his initial appraisal of the scene. One of the forensics team held out a clear plastic bag, into which Jim Stevens’ possessions were being dropped.

‘No car keys?’ Rebus asked. The forensics woman shook her head.

‘No car either,’ Davidson added.

‘Stevens drives a Vauxhall Astra.’

‘I know, John. It’s being hunted.’

‘Must have been brought here in a car. Oakes doesn’t have one.’

‘Probably lost a lot of blood en route,’ Gates said. ‘His
shirt and trousers are soaked, but there’s not that much lying beneath him.’

‘You think he was stabbed somewhere else?’

‘That would be my guess.’ Gates turned to the forensics officer. ‘Let Inspector Rebus see the machine.’

She lifted a small metal box from the bag. Rebus looked at it closely, but knew better than to touch.

‘It’s his recorder.’

‘Yes,’ Gates said. ‘And in his right-hand pocket, well away from the wounds and the blood.’

‘But there’s blood on it,’ Rebus said.

Gates nodded. ‘And no tape inside.’

‘The killer took the tape?’

‘Or it was important enough for the deceased to take time to remove it, even though by that time he’d already been stabbed and was probably entering a state of shock.’

Rebus turned to Davidson. ‘Any sign of it?’

‘That’s what they’re looking for.’ Davidson motioned towards the uniforms. ‘John, have you any idea what Stevens was up to?’

‘Last time I spoke to him, he was going to look into Oakes’s past.’

‘Wonder what he found.’

Rebus shrugged. ‘Bringing in Oakes
has
to be the priority.’

‘After his attack on you, it already was.’

Rebus stared down at the lifeless body of Jim Stevens. Stevens, who had been Rebus’s shadow for so long, and who had come back into his life only recently.

‘I’d only just started liking him,’ Rebus said. ‘That’s the funny thing.’ He looked at Davidson. ‘I get the feeling the game’s not over, Shug. Not by a long chalk.’

One of Davidson’s officers sprinted towards them. ‘Car’s been found,’ he called.

‘Where?’ Rebus was first to ask.

The officer blinked, shook his head. ‘You’re not going to like it . . .’

Jim Stevens’ Astra sat on a single yellow line on a street called St Leonard’s Bank, just round the corner from St Leonard’s cop shop. St Leonard’s Bank boasted a single row of higgledy-piggledy houses, all of them facing a wrought-iron fence behind which sat Holyrood Park and Salisbury Crags. The car was parked outside a double-fronted three-storey house painted a vivid pink. The key was in the ignition. This was what had first alerted one of the neighbours. They’d gone next door to ask if anyone there had left their keys in their car. Heading out to investigate, they’d found the doors to be unlocked. On opening the driver’s side, they’d noticed how wet and stained the seat seemed to be. Pressing fingers down into the fabric, lifting them away to find them stained viscous red . . .

‘Is he taking the piss or what?’ Roy Frazer said. A crowd from St Leonard’s had gathered, though more, it seemed, out of curiosity than from a desire to help. Rebus started shooing most of them away. He’d brought three of the forensics team with him; the rest would follow when they’d finished at the construction site. Chief Superintendent Watson came to gawp, and to make sure everything was ‘under control’.

‘It’s Shug Davidson’s call really, sir,’ Rebus informed him. ‘He’s on his way.’

The Farmer nodded. ‘Fair enough, John. But let’s get the car moved ASAP, even if only into our car park. It’s already been on Lowland Radio. Leave it much longer, we can start selling tickets.’

It was true that the crowd around the car was swelling. Rebus recognised a few faces from Greenfield. The estate was only a short walk away.

Roy Frazer was repeating his question.

‘He’s taunting us,’ Rebus answered. He went to see how the forensics team was doing.

‘Found this on the floor under the driver’s seat,’ one of them said. Inside a plastic bag he had a cassette tape,
unlabelled. There was a single bloody thumb print clearly visible on its casing.

‘I need this,’ Rebus said.

‘We need to print it.’

Rebus shook his head. ‘The print belongs to the victim.’ He was managing to smile.
You clever bugger, Jim
, he was thinking.
He didn’t get your tape
. . .

At least, that was what he hoped.

‘Something else,’ another of the team said, pointing to show Rebus a spread of tiny spots on the windscreen. ‘These are on the inside. The way the pattern is . . . it’s like someone coughed or sneezed. If it was the killer . . .’

‘Is there enough for DNA?’

‘It’s a hell of a long shot, but you never know. Don’t know if this is relevant.’ Now he pointed to a notebook on the floor of the passenger side. It had a tin spiral holding the loose-leaf pages in place. Shreds of paper clung to the spiral, showing where pages had been torn out.

Rebus patted the man’s shoulder. He didn’t like to say
It doesn’t matter. I know who killed him . . . I may even know why
. . . When he turned away, he was carrying the cassette tape in its little poly-bag, for all the world like a solemn kid who’d won a goldfish at the fair.

Because it was quieter there, Rebus used one of the interview rooms. He’d slotted the tape into one of the recorders, being careful to hold it by its edges. No point destroying trace evidence. He had a pair of Sennheiser headphones on, and spread out in front of him the contents of Cary Oakes’s file, as well as cuttings of his recent newspaper interviews. He’d telephoned Stevens’ old employer, and they were faxing over the unused portions of transcript. Every now and then, a uniform would stick his or her head round the door and hand him the latest fax sheets, so that the table became covered.