10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (54 page)

Rebus hadn’t needed to ask any more. It had come spilling out like beer from a tap: things bad at home, bit of fun, couldn’t tell anyone about it because he didn’t know who already knew. Even now he thought it best to keep quiet about it. Rebus had accepted the warning.

‘I’m still going ahead,’ he had said. ‘With you or without. Your choice.’

Tony McCall had agreed to help.

Rebus sat down, placed the tea on the floor, and reached into his pocket for the photograph he had lifted from the files at Hyde’s. He threw it in McCall’s direction. McCall lifted it, stared at it with fearful eyes.

‘You know,’ Rebus said, ‘Andrews was after Tommy’s
haulage company. He’d have had it, too, and at a bargain-basement price.’

‘Rotten bastard,’ McCall said, tearing the photograph methodically into smaller and smaller pieces.

‘Why did you do it, Tony?’

‘I told you, John. Tommy took me along. Just a bit of fun –’

‘No, I mean why did you break into the squat and plant that powder on Ronnie?’

‘Me?’ McCall’s eyes were wider than ever now, but the look in them was still fear rather than surprise. It was all guesswork, but Rebus knew he was guessing right.

‘Come on, Tony. Do you think Finlay Andrews is going to let any names stay secret? He’s going down, and he’s got no reason to let anyone’s head stay above water.’

McCall thought about this. He let the bits of the photograph flutter into the ashtray, then set light to them with a match. They dissolved to blackened ash, and he seemed satisfied.

‘Andrews needed a favour. It was always “favours” with him. I think he’d seen
The Godfather
too many times. Pilmuir was my beat, my territory. We’d met through Tommy, so he thought to ask me.’

‘And you were happy to oblige.’

‘Well, he had the picture, didn’t he?’

‘There must’ve been more.’

‘Well . . .’ McCall paused again, crushed the ash in the ashtray with his forefinger. A fine dust was all that was left. ‘Yes, hell, I was happy enough to do it. The guy was a junkie after all, a piece of rubbish. And he was already dead. All I had to do was place a little packet beside him, that’s all.’

‘You never questioned why?’

‘Ask no questions and all that.’ He smiled. ‘Finlay was offering me membership, you see. Membership of Hyde’s. Well, I knew what that meant. I’d be on nodding terms
with the big boys, wouldn’t I? I even started to dream about career advancement, something I hadn’t done in quite some time. Let’s face it, John, we’re tiny fish in a small pool.’

‘And Hyde was offering you the chance to play with the sharks?’

McCall smiled sadly. ‘I suppose that was it, yes.’

Rebus sighed. ‘Tony, Tony, Tony. Where would it have ended, eh?’

‘Probably with you having to call me “sir”,’ McCall answered, his voice firming up. ‘Instead of which, I suppose the trial will see me on the front of the scum sheets. Not quite the kind of fame I was looking for.’

He rose from the chair.

‘See you in court,’ he said, leaving John Rebus to his flavourless tea and his thoughts.

Rebus slept fitfully, and was awake early. He showered, but without any of his usual vocal accompaniment. He telephoned the hospital, and ascertained that Tracy was fine, and that Finlay Andrews had been patched up with the loss of very little blood. Then he drove to Great London Road, where Malcolm Lanyon was being held for questioning.

Rebus was still officially a non-person, and DS Dick and DC Cooper had been assigned to the interrogation. But Rebus wanted to be close by. He knew the answers to all their questions, knew the sorts of trick Lanyon was capable of pulling. He didn’t want the bastard getting away with it because of some technicality.

He went to the canteen first, bought a bacon roll, and, seeing Dick and Cooper seated at a table, went to join them.

‘Hello, John,’ Dick said, staring into the bottom of a stained coffee mug.

‘You lot are early birds,’ Rebus noted. ‘You must be keen.’

‘Farmer Watson wants it out of the way as soon as poss, sooner even.’

‘I’ll bet he does. Look, I’m going to be around today, if you need me to back up anything.’

‘We appreciate that, John,’ said Dick, in a voice which told Rebus his offer was as welcome as a dunce’s cap.

‘Well . . .’ Rebus began, but bit off the sentence, and ate his breakfast instead. Dick and Cooper seemed dulled by the enforced early rise. Certainly, they were not the most vivacious of table companions. Rebus finished quickly and rose to his feet.

‘Mind if I take a quick look at him?’

‘Not at all,’ said Dick. ‘We’ll be there in five minutes.’

Passing through the ground-floor reception area, Rebus almost bumped into Brian Holmes.

‘Everyone’s after the worm today,’ Rebus said. Holmes gave him a puzzled, sleepy look. ‘Never mind. I’m off to take a peek at Lanyon-alias-Hyde. Fancy a bit of voyeurism?’

Holmes didn’t answer, but fell in stride with Rebus.

‘Actually,’ Rebus said, ‘Lanyon might appreciate that image.’ Holmes gave him a more puzzled look yet. Rebus sighed. ‘Never mind.’

‘Sorry, sir, bit of a late night yesterday.’

‘Oh, yes. Thanks for that, by the way.’

‘I nearly died when I saw the bloody Farmer staring at the lot of us, him in his undertaker’s suit and us pretending to be pissed Dundonians.’

They shared a smile. Okay, the plan had been lame, conceived by Rebus during the course of his fifty-minute drive back from Calum McCallum’s cell in Fife. But it had worked. They’d got a result.

‘Yes,’ Rebus said. ‘I thought you looked a bit nervy last night.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well. you were doing your Italian army impression, weren’t you? Advancing backwards, and all that.’

Holmes stopped dead, his jaw dropping. ‘Is that the thanks I get? We put our careers on the line for you last night, all four of us. You’ve used me as your gofer – go find this, go check that – as a bit of bloody shoeleather, half the time for jobs that weren’t even official, you’ve had my girlfriend half killed –’

‘Now wait just one second –’

‘– and all to satisfy your own curiosity. Okay, so there are bad guys behind bars, that’s good, but look at the scales. You’ve got them, the rest of us have got sod all except a few bruises and no bloody soles on our shoes!’

Rebus stared at the floor, almost contrite. The air flew from his nostrils as from a Spanish bull’s.

‘I forgot,’ he said at last. ‘I meant to take that bloody suit back this morning. The shoes are ruined. It was you talking about shoeleather that reminded me.’

Then he set off again, along the corridor, towards the cells, leaving Holmes speechless in his wake.

Outside the cell, Lanyon’s name had been printed in chalk on a board. Rebus went up to the steel door and pulled aside the shutter, thinking how it reminded him of the shutter on the door of some prohibition club. Give the secret knock and the shutter opened. He peered into the cell, started, and groped for the alarm bell situated beside the door. Holmes, hearing the siren, forgot to be angry and hurt and hurried forward. Rebus was pulling at the edge of the locked door with his fingernails.

‘We’ve got to get in!’

‘It’s locked, sir.’ Holmes was afraid: his superior looked absolutely manic. ‘Here they come.’

A uniformed sergeant came at an undignified trot, keys jangling from his chain.

‘Quick!’

The lock gave, and Rebus yanked open the door. Inside, Malcolm Lanyon lay slumped on the floor, head resting against the bed. His feet were splayed like a doll’s. One hand lay on the floor, some thin nylon wire, like a fishing-line, wrapped around the knuckles, which were blackened. The line was attached to Lanyon’s neck in a loop which had embedded itself so far into the flesh that it could hardly be seen. Lanyon’s eyes bulged horribly, his swollen tongue obscene against the blood-darkened face. It was like a last macabre gesture, and Rebus watched the tongue protruding towards him, seeming to take it as a personal insult.

He knew it was way too late, but the sergeant loosened the wire anyway and laid the corpse flat on the floor. Holmes was resting his head against the cold metal door, screwing shut his eyes against the parody inside the cell.

‘He must’ve had it hidden on him,’ the sergeant said, seeking excuses for the monumental blunder, referring to the wire which he now held in his hands. ‘Jesus, what a way to go.’

Rebus was thinking: he’s cheated me, he’s cheated me. I wouldn’t have had the guts to do that, not slowly choke myself. . . . I could never do it, something inside would have stopped me. . . .

‘Who’s been in here since he was brought in?’

The sergeant stared at Rebus, uncomprehending.

‘The usual lot, I suppose. He had a few questions to answer last night when you brought him in.’

‘Yes, but
after
that?’

‘Well, he had a meal when you lot went. That’s about it.’

‘Sonofabitch,’ growled Rebus, stalking out of the cell and back along the corridor. Holmes, his face white and slick, was a few steps behind, and gaining.

‘They’re going to bury it, Brian,’ Rebus said, his voice an angry vibrato. ‘They’re going to bury it, I know they
are, and there’ll be no cross marking the spot, nothing. A junkie died of his own volition. An estate agent committed suicide. Now a lawyer tops himself in a police cell. No connection, no crime committed.’

‘But what about Andrews?’

‘Where do you think we’re headed?’

They arrived at the hospital ward in time to witness the efficiency of the staff in a case of emergency. Rebus hurried forward, pushing his way through. Finlay Andrews, lying on his bed, chest exposed, was being given oxygen while the cardiac apparatus was installed. A doctor held the pads in front of them, then pushed them slowly against Andrews’ chest. A moment later, a jolt went through the body. There was no reading from the machine. More oxygen, more electricity. . . . Rebus turned away. He’d seen the script; he knew how the film would end.

‘Well?’ said Holmes.

‘Heart attack.’ Rebus’s voice was bland. He began to walk away. ‘Let’s call it that anyway, because that’s what the record will say.’

‘So what next?’ Holmes kept pace with him. He, too, was feeling cheated. Rebus considered the question.

‘Probably the photos will disappear. The ones that matter at any rate. And who’s left to testify? Testify to what?’

‘They’ve thought of everything.’

‘Except one thing, Brian.
I
know who they are.’

Holmes stopped. ‘Will that matter?’ he called to his superior’s retreating figure. But Rebus just kept walking.

There was a scandal, but it was a small one, soon forgotten. Shuttered rooms in elegant Georgian terraces soon became light again, in a great resurrection of spirit. The deaths of Finlay Andrews and Malcolm Lanyon were
reported, and journalists sought what muck and brass they could. Yes, Finlay Andrews had been running a club which was not strictly legitimate in all of its dealings, and yes, Malcolm Lanyon had committed suicide when the authorities had begun to close in on this little empire. No, there were no details of what these ‘activities’ might have been.

The suicide of local estate agent James Carew was in no way connected to Mr Lanyon’s suicide, though it was true the two men were friends. As for Mr Lanyon’s connection with Finlay Andrews and his club, well, perhaps we would never know. It was no more than a sad coincidence that Mr Lanyon had been appointed Mr Carew’s executor. Still, there were other lawyers, weren’t there?

And so it ended, the story petering out, the rumours dying a little less slowly. Rebus was pleased when Tracy announced that Nell Stapleton had found her a job in a cafe/deli near the University Library. One evening, however, having spent some time in the Rutherford Bar, Rebus decided to opt for a takeaway Indian meal before home. In the restaurant, he saw Tracy, Holmes and Nell Stapleton at a corner table, sharing a joke with their meal. He turned and left without ordering.

Back in his flat, he sat at the kitchen table for the umpteenth time, writing a rough draft of his letter of resignation. Somehow, the words failed to put across any of his emotions adequately. He crumpled the paper and tossed it towards the bin. He had been reminded in the restaurant of just how much Hyde’s had cost in human terms, and of how little justice there had been. There was a knock at the door. He had hope in his heart as he opened it. Gill Templer stood there, smiling.

In the night, he crept through to the living room, and switched on the desk lamp. It threw light guiltily, like a constable’s torch, onto the small filing cabinet beside the
stereo. The key was hidden under a corner of the carpet, as secure a hiding place as a granny’s mattress. He opened the cabinet and lifted out a slim file, which he carried to his chair, the chair which had for so many months been his bed. There he sat, composed, remembering the day at James Carew’s flat. Back then he had been tempted to lift Carew’s private diary and keep it for himself. But he had resisted temptation. Not the night at Hyde’s though. There, alone in Andrews’ office for a moment, he had filched the photograph of Tony McCall. Tony McCall, a friend and colleague with whom, these days, he had nothing in common. Except perhaps a sense of guilt.

He opened the file and took out the photographs. He had taken them along with the one of McCall. Four photographs, lifted at random. He studied the faces again, as he did most nights when he found sleep hard to come by. Faces he recognised. Faces attached to names, and names to handshakes and voices. Important people. Influential people. He’d thought about this a lot. Indeed, he had thought about little else since that night in Hyde’s club. He brought out a metal wastepaper bin from beneath the desk, dropped the photographs into it, and lit a match, holding it over the bin, as he had done so many times before.

Ian Rankin saw
Hide & Seek
as a companion piece to
Knots & Crosses
, especially in his allusions to
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
. How does he reveal the relationship between the two books?