10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (56 page)

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Epigraph

Prologue

The Chamber of Horrors

Underground

Catching a Bite

Fibs

Churchill

Know This, Womin

The Gallery

Family

Acknowledgements

Discussion Points

I lived in London for four years, from 1986 to 1990, during which time my home was a maisonette in Tottenham, not far from the River Lea. When I left for France in the summer of 1990, some friends took on the maisonette. We kept in touch.
Tooth & Nail
was eventually published in the spring of 1992, only it wasn’t called
Tooth & Nail
; it was called
Wolfman
, the name of the serial killer who stalks the book. A few months after publication, my friends in Tottenham sent me a photo they’d taken of a subway between my old home and the river (where the first murder in the book takes place). The subway’s gloomy interior comprised white tiles, and on this surface, in six-foot-high black capitals, someone had painted the name ‘Wolfman’.

I keep the photo close at hand even now, to remind myself that there are some fans an author just doesn’t want to meet.

Ever.

It was my editor in the USA who mentioned that
Wolfman
made my story sound like a horror novel, and it was his idea to rename the book
Tooth & Nail
for the American audience. The title seemed resonant, and chimed with my first two Rebus adventures. When my current publisher Orion got hold of the rights to the book, I persuaded them that it should become
Tooth & Nail
in the UK too.

The book is set in London, the only Rebus novel so far to take place outside Scotland. Basically, I wanted Rebus to be more of an outsider than ever. In London, he’s a fish out of water. He can’t begin to comprehend the city, doesn’t even know what a bagel is, and no one around him understands his accent and dialect (to such an extent that passages from the book have become teaching aids in some Scottish primary schools). In essence, I was using Rebus to explore my own feelings about the London I had known, just at a time when I was preparing to leave the place.

From the early 1970s until May 1990, I’d kept a page-a-day diary. For whatever reason, I stopped soon after arriving in France. However, an entry for 11 March that year reads: ‘I’ve started, half-heartedly, a new Rebus novel, though I know I should plan more and research more before I really get into it. It’s going to be called
Wolfman
, if it ever gets off the ground.’ I think some of the impetus for the book came from the spectacular success of the American author Thomas Harris. I’d spent a sleepless night reading
The Silence of the Lambs
from cover to cover. The man had a huge talent and sales to match, and I wanted some of the latter. The serial killer was in vogue and there seemed an endless fascination with the psychology and pathology of evil. It was fortunate for me that my editor, Euan Cameron, was not as easily seduced by trends. I remember that when I sent him the first version of the manuscript, he told me there was far too much sex and violence in the story and asked for cuts in both departments. I’d learned a valuable lesson: that the two can be suggested without having to show either in graphic and voyeuristic detail.

During my time in London, I’d served jury duty at the Old Bailey, a bizarre and unsatisfactory experience which was to provide me with an abundance of detail and anecdotes for the Old Bailey scenes in
Tooth & Nail
. The trial I’d attended had been full of farcical moments, starting with an arresting officer called De’Ath, a prosecutor who didn’t know the difference between 180° and 360°, and a juror who said, ‘I think he done it, but I don’t want him going to prison for it’, then voted Not Guilty, leading to the prisoner escaping sentence. (The police foul-up in the book which allows Tommy Watkiss to go free actually happened during my trial, but in real life no one noticed except we jurors.)

I took lots of notes about the Old Bailey – its interior layout; security issues; the route from the courtroom to the jury room – and was stopped one day by a security guard as I left the building. He asked to see my notes, seemed horrified by them, and tore them up in front of me. I thanked him and stepped outside, where I proceeded to write them all down again as he watched helplessly through a window.

Tooth & Nail
is notable for introducing the character of Morris Gerald Cafferty – aka ‘Big Ger’ – the gangster who runs Edinburgh. In this book, he has a cameo only, but it was enough to persuade me that I could do more with him. I also started to introduce Scottish words into the text, perhaps to ensure that I wouldn’t lose them entirely. After all, living in rural south-west France, I had few opportunities to say things like ‘wersh’ (meaning sour), ‘winching’ (going steady) and ‘hoolit’ (drunk). In time, some of these words would even start to creep into the Oxford English Dictionary, with the Rebus novels cited for reference.

Crivvens.

Having said in the diary entry quoted above that ‘I should plan more and research more’, I should confess here that the lengthy list of acknowledgements at the end of
Tooth & Nail
is actually an extended joke. Each recipient is a friend of mine, and I just wanted to sneak as many of their names into the book as I could. Steve Adams and Fiona Campbell, for example, were our next-door neighbours in Tottenham, while Tiree Macgregor and Don Nichol had been literature postgrads during my own time at the University of Edinburgh. Professor J. Curt, however, deserves special mention. He’s my mate Jon Curt. I shared a flat with him for an intensely boozy year when I was a postgrad and he was finishing his MA. As well as being a student, Jon was part-time barman at the Oxford Bar. Without him, I might never have found what was to become Rebus’s favourite watering-hole. I rewarded Jon with a professorship in
Tooth & Nail
, and would later turn him into Dr Curt, pathologist and friend of Rebus in many of the later novels.

The book also contains one of my favourite one-liners in any of my novels. I won’t give the game away here, but watch out for the mention of a ‘nudist beach’ . . .

‘How many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin’

She drives home the knife.

The moment, she knows from past experience, is a very intimate one. Her hand is gripped around the knife’s cool handle and the thrust takes the blade into the throat up to the hilt until her hand meets the throat itself. Flesh upon flesh. Jacket first, or woollen jersey, cotton shirt or T-shirt, then flesh. Now rent. The knife is writhing, like an animal sniffing. Warm blood covering hilt and hand. (The other hand covers the mouth, stifling screams.) The moment is complete. A meeting. Touching. The body is hot, gaping, warm with blood. Seething inside, as insides become outsides. Boiling. The moment is coming to an end all too soon.

And still she feels hungry. It isn’t right, isn’t usual, but she does. She removes some of the clothing; in fact, removes quite a lot of it, removes more, perhaps, than is necessary. And she does what she must do, the knife squirming again. She keeps her eyes screwed tightly shut. She does not like this part. She has never liked this part, not then, not now. But especially not
then
.

Finally, she brings out her teeth and sinks them into the white stomach, until they grind together in a satisfying bite, and whispers, as she always does, the same four words.

‘It’s only a game.’

It is evening when George Flight gets the call. Sunday evening. Sunday should be his blessed relief, beef and Yorkshires, feet up in front of the television, papers falling from his lap. But he’s had a feeling all day. In the pub at lunchtime he’d felt it, a wriggling in his gut like there were worms in there, tiny blind white worms, hungry worms, worms he could not hope to satisfy. He knew what they were and they knew what they were. And then he’d won third prize in the pub raffle: a three-foot high orange and white teddy bear. Even the worms had laughed at him then and he’d known the day would end badly.

As it was doing now, the phone as insistent as last orders. Ringing with whatever bad news couldn’t wait until the morning shift. He knew what it meant of course. Hadn’t he been expecting it these past weeks? But still he was reluctant to pick up the receiver. At last he did.

‘Flight speaking.’

‘There’s been another one, sir. The Wolfman. He’s done another.’

Flight stared at the silent television. Highlights of the previous day’s rugby match. Grown men running after a funny-shaped ball as though their lives depended on it. It was only a bloody game after all. And propped up against the side of the TV that smirking prize, the teddy bear. What the hell could he do with a teddy bear?

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘just tell me where . . .’

‘After all, it
is
only a game.’

Rebus smiled and nodded at the Englishman across the table. Then he stared out of the window, pretending once more to be interested in the blur of dark scenery. If the Englishman had said it once, he had said it a dozen times. And during the trip, he had said little else. He also kept stealing precious legroom from Rebus, while his collection of empty beer cans was creeping across the table, invading Rebus’s space, pushing against the neatly folded stack of newspapers and magazines.

‘Tickets, please!’ yelled the guard from the other end of the carriage.

So, with a sigh, and for the third time since leaving Edinburgh, Rebus sought out his ticket. It was never where he thought it was. At Berwick, he’d thought it was in his shirt pocket. It was in the outer top pocket of his Harris tweed jacket. Then at Durham he’d looked for it in his jacket, only to find it beneath one of the magazines on the table. Now, ten minutes out of Peterborough, it had moved to the back pocket of his trousers. He retrieved it, and waited for the guard to make his way forward.

The Englishman’s ticket was where it had always been: half-hidden beneath a beer can. Rebus, although he knew every word almost by heart, glanced again at the back page of one of his Sunday papers. He had kept it to the top of the pile for no reason other than a sense of devilment, enjoying the thick black letters of the headline – SCOTS WHA HAE! – beneath which was printed the story of the previous day’s Calcutta Cup clash at Murrayfield. And a clash it had been: no day for weak stomachs, but a day for stout hearts and determination. The Scots had triumphed by thirteen points to ten, and now here Rebus was on a late evening Sunday train packed with disappointed English rugby supporters, heading towards London.

London. Never one of Rebus’s favourite places. Not that he was a frequent visitor. But this was not pleasure. This was strictly business, and as a representative of the Lothian and Borders Police, he was to be on best behaviour. Or, as his boss had put it so succinctly, ‘No fuck-ups, John.’

Well, he would do his best. Not that he reckoned there was much he
could
do, right or wrong. But he would do what he could. And if that meant wearing a clean shirt and tie, polished shoes and a respectable jacket, then so be it.

‘All tickets, please.’

Rebus handed over his ticket. Somewhere in the corridor up ahead, in the no-man’s-land of the buffet car between first and second class, a few voices were raised in a verse of Blake’s
Jerusalem
. The Englishman across from Rebus smiled.

‘Only a game,’ he said to the tins in front of him. ‘Only a game.’

The train pulled in to King’s Cross five minutes late. It was a quarter past eleven. Rebus was in no hurry. A hotel room had been booked for him in central London, courtesy of the Metropolitan Police. He carried a typed list of notes and directions in his jacket pocket, again sent up from London. He had not brought much luggage with him, feeling that the courtesy of the Met would extend only so far. He expected the trip to last two or three days at most, after which time even they would realise, surely, that he was not going to be of much help to them in their investigations. So: one small suitcase, one sports bag and one briefcase. The suitcase contained two suits, a change of shoes, several pairs of socks and underpants and two shirts (with matching ties). In the sports bag were a small washbag, towel, two paperback novels (one partly read), a travel alarm clock, a thirty-five millimetre camera with flashgun and film, a T-shirt, retractable umbrella, sunglasses, transistor radio, diary, Bible, a bottle containing ninety-seven paracetamol tablets and another bottle (protected by the T-shirt) containing best Islay malt whisky.

The bare essentials, in other words. The briefcase contained notepad, pens, a personal tape recorder, some blank tapes and prerecorded tapes and a thick manila file filled with photocopied sheets of Metropolitan Police paper, ten-by-eight inch colour photographs held together in a small ring-binder affair and newspaper clippings. On the front of this file was a white sticky label with one word typed upon it. The word was WOLFMAN.