10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (86 page)

Rebus knew he had to keep Chambers talking. By keeping him talking, he was keeping Lisa alive. But the traffic had stalled. Red lights ahead. The BMW only a few cars in front, prevented from jumping the lights by another car directly in front of it. Could he . . .? Should he even be thinking of it? The judge was still gripping Rebus’s headrest, staring out towards the gleaming black car, the car that was so close to them. So close . . . and so stationary.

‘Well?’ It was Chambers’s voice. ‘Do you pull over, Inspector, or do I kill her?’

Rebus was staring hard at Chambers’s car. He could see that Lisa was leaning away from Chambers, as though making to escape. But Chambers was gripping her with his left arm, his right presumably resting on the steering-wheel. So the man’s attention would be focussed on the passenger side of the car, leaving the driver’s side unguarded.

Rebus made up his mind and quietly opened his door, slipping out onto the reassuringly solid surface of the road. Horns were sounding around him. He paid them no heed. The lights were still at red. He began to move forward, crouching, but moving quickly. Chambers’s driver’s-side mirror! If Chambers looked into it, he’d have a clear view of Rebus’s approach. Make it fast, John, make it.

Amber.

Shit!

Green.

He had reached the BMW, had gripped the doorhandle. Chambers looked out at him, a stunned expression on his face. And then the car in front moved off, and Chambers gunned the engine, the car accelerating forwards, tearing itself free of Rebus.

Shit! Car horns all around. Angry. Angry drivers rolling down their windows and yelling at him as he ran back to the Jaguar. Started the car, moved off. The judge’s hand patted his shoulder.

‘Good try, my boy. Good try.’

And Chambers’s laughter on the car-phone. ‘Hope I didn’t hurt you, Inspector.’ Rebus examined his hand, flexed it painfully. The fingers had nearly been pulled out of their joints. His little finger was swelling already. A break? Perhaps.

‘So,’ said Chambers, ‘for the last time I make you an offer you can hardly refuse. Stop the car, or I kill Dr Frazer.’

‘She’s not a doctor, Chambers. She’s just a student.’ He swallowed: now Lisa knew that he knew. Not that it mattered one way or the other, not now. He took a deep breath. ‘Kill her,’ he said. Behind him, the judge gasped, but Rebus shook his head, reassuring him.

‘What did you say?’ asked Chambers.

‘I said kill her. I’m not really bothered. She’s led me a merry little dance this past week. It’s her own fault she’s in this deep. And after you’ve killed her, I’ll take great pleasure in killing you, Mr Chambers.’

He heard Lisa’s faint voice again. ‘God, John, please no!’ And then Chambers, seeming to grow calmer as Rebus grew more excited: ‘As you wish, Inspector. As you wish.’ The voice was as cold as a mortuary floor, any vestige of humanity gone. Perhaps partly it was Rebus’s fault, taunting him with newspaper stories, with fabrications. But Chambers hadn’t picked on Rebus: he had picked on Lisa. Had Rebus arrived a minute later at the Old Bailey, she would be on her way to certain death. As it was, nothing was certain.

Nothing but the fact of Malcolm Chambers’s madness.

‘He’s turning onto Monmouth Street,’ said the judge, his voice level. He had grasped the fact of Chambers’s guilt, the horror of what had happened and what might still happen.

Rebus heard a flapping sound overhead, and glanced up towards where a helicopter was shadowing the chase. A police helicopter. He could hear sirens, too. So, it seemed, could Chambers. The BMW spurted ahead, slashing the side of another car as it squeezed into a space. The injured car stopped dead. Rebus braked, pulled on the steering-wheel, but still clipped it with his driver’s-side bumper, the headlamp shattering.

‘Sorry about that.’

‘Never mind the car,’ said the judge. ‘Just don’t let him get away.’

‘He won’t get away,’ said Rebus, with sudden confidence. Now where the hell had that come from? The moment he thought about it, it disappeared again, leaving behind a quivering vapour.

They were on St Martin’s Lane now. People mingling, pre-theatre or after work. The busy West End. Yet the traffic ahead had thinned for no apparent reason and the crowds gawped as first the BMW, then the Jaguar sped past.

As they approached Trafalgar Square Rebus saw, to right and left, police officers in luminous yellow jackets holding up the traffic in the side-streets. Now why would they do that? Unless . . .

Road block! One entrance to the Square left open, all exits blocked, the Square itself kept empty for their arrival. In a moment they’d have him. God bless you, George Flight.

Rebus picked up the handset, his voice a snarl, specks of saliva dotting the windscreen as he spoke.

‘Stop the car, Chambers. There’s no place to go.’

Silence. They were skidding into Trafalgar Square now, traffic blaring in queues all around them, held back by the gloved, raised hand of authority. Rebus was buzzing again. The whole West End of London, brought to a standstill so that he might race a Jaguar against a BMW. He could think of friends who’d give whole limbs to be in his place. Yet he had a job to do. That was the bottom line. It was just another job to be cleared up. He might as well have been following teenage Cortina thieves through the streets of some Edinburgh housing-scheme.

But he wasn’t.

They’d done one full circuit around Nelson’s Column. Canada House, South Africa House and the National Gallery were just blurs. The judge was being thrown against the door behind Rebus.

‘Hang on,’ Rebus called.

‘To what, pray?’

And Rebus laughed. He roared with laughter. Then he realised the line was still open to Chambers’s BMW. He laughed even harder, picking up the handset, his knuckles white against the steering-wheel, left arm aching.

‘Having fun, Chambers?’ he yelled. ‘Like the TV programme used to say, there’s no hiding place!’

And then the BMW gave a jolt, and Rebus heard Chambers gasp.

‘You bitch!’ Another jolt, and sounds of a struggle. Lisa was retaliating, now that Chambers was intent on this speeding circuit without end.

‘No!’

‘Get off!’

‘I’ll –’

And a piercing scream, two piercing screams, both high-pitched, feminine in their intensity, and the black car didn’t take the next bend, flew straight for the pavement, mounted it and bounced into a bus shelter, crumpling the metal structure and driving on into the walls of the National Gallery itself.

‘Lisa!’ Rebus cried. He brought the Jaguar to a sudden, pivoting stop. The driver’s door of the BMW creaked open and Chambers stumbled out, slouching off in a half-run, clutching something in his right hand, one leg damaged. Rebus struggled with his own door, finally finding the handle. He ran to the BMW and peered in. Lisa was slumped in the passenger seat, a seatbelt passing in a diagonal across her body. She was groaning, but there were no signs of blood. Whiplash. Nothing more serious than whiplash. She opened her eyes.

‘John?’

‘You’re going to be all right, Lisa. Just hang on. Somebody will be here.’ Indeed, the police cars were closing in, uniforms running into the Square. Rebus looked up from the car, seeking Chambers.

‘There!’ The judge was out of the Jaguar and pointing with a rigid arm, pointing upwards. Rebus followed the line to the steps of the National Gallery. Chambers had reached the top step.

‘Chambers!’ Rebus yelled. ‘Chambers!’

But the body disappeared from view. Rebus started towards the steps, finding his own legs to be less than solid. As though rubber instead of bone and cartilage were keeping him upright. He climbed the steps and entered the building by its nearest door – the exit door. A woman in a staff uniform was lying on the ground in the foyer, a man standing over her. The man gestured towards the gallery’s interior.

‘He ran inside!’

And where Malcolm Chambers went, Rebus would surely follow.

He ran and he ran and he ran.

The way he used to run from his father, running and climbing the steps to the attic, hoping to hide. But always caught in the end. Even if he hid all day and half of the night, eventually the hunger, the thirst, would force him back downstairs, to where they were waiting.

His leg hurts. And he’s cut. His face is stinging. The warm blood is trickling down his chin, down his neck. And he’s running.

It wasn’t all bad, his childhood. He remembers his mother delicately snipping away at his father’s nosehairs. ‘Long nosehairs are so unbecoming in a man.’ It wasn’t his fault, was it, any of it? It was theirs. They’d wanted a daughter; they’d never wanted a son. His mother had dressed him in pink, in girls’ colours and girls’ clothes. Then had painted him, painted him with long blonde curls, imagining him into her paintings, into her landscapes. A little girl running by a riverbank. Running with bows in her hair. Running.

Past one guard, past two. Lunging at them. The alarm is ringing somewhere. Maybe it’s just his imagination. All these paintings. Where have all these paintings come from? Through one door, turn right, through another.

They kept him at home. The schools couldn’t teach him the way they could. Home taught. Home made. His father, some nights, drunk, would knock over his mother’s canvases and dance on them. ‘Art! Fuck art!’ He’d do his little dance with a chuckle in his throat and all the time his mother would sit with her face in her hands and cry, then run to her room and bolt shut the door. Those were the nights when his father would stumble through to
his
bedroom. Just for a cuddle. Sweet alcoholic breath. Just for a cuddle. And then more than a cuddle, so very much more. ‘Open wide, just like the dentist tells you.’ Christ, it hurt so much. A probing finger . . . tongue . . . the wrenching open . . . And even worse was the noise, the dull grunting, the loud nasal breathing. And then the sham, pretending it had been just a game, that was all. And to prove it, his father would bend down and take a big soft bite out of his stomach, growling like a bear. Blowing a raspberry on the bare flesh. And then a laugh. ‘You see, it was only a game, wasn’t it?’

No, never a game. Never. Running. To the attic. To the garden, to squeeze behind the shed, where the stinging nettles were. Even their bite was not so bad as his father’s. Had his mother known? Of course she had known. Once, when he had tried to tell her in a whispered moment, she had refused to listen. ‘No, not your father, you’re making it up, Malcolm.’ But her paintings had grown more violent: the fields now were purple and black, the water blood-red. The figures on the riverbank had grown skeletal, painted stark white like ghosts.

He’d hidden it all so well for so long. But then she’d come back to him. And now he was mostly ‘she’, consumed by her, and by her need for . . . Not revenge, it couldn’t really be called revenge. Something deeper than revenge, some huge and hungry need without a name, without a form. Only a function. Oh yes, a function.

This way and that. The people in the gallery make way for him. The alarm is ringing still. There’s a hissing in his head like a child’s rattle. Sss-sss-sss. Sss-sss-sss. These paintings he is running past, they’re laughable.
Long nosehairs Johnny
. None mimicked real life, and less so the life beneath. None could ape the grim caveman thoughts of every human being on the planet. But then he pushes open another door and it’s all so very different. A room of darkness and shadowplay, of skulls and frowning bloodless faces. Yes, this is how it is. Velázquez, El Greco, the Spanish painters. Skull and shadow. Ah, Velázquez.

Why couldn’t his mother have painted like this? When they died.
(Together, in bed. A gas leak. The police said the child was lucky to be alive. Lucky his own bedroom window had been open a couple of inches.)
When they had died, all he’d taken with him from the house had been her paintings, every single one of them.

‘Only a game.’

‘Long nosehairs, Johnny.’ Snipping with the scissors, his father asleep. He’d pleaded with his eyes, pleaded with her to stick the point of the scissors into his father’s fleshy noiseless throat. She’d been so gentle. Snip. So kind and gentle. Snip.
The child was lucky
.

What could they know?

Rebus walked up the stairs and through the bookshop. Other officers were close behind him. He motioned for them to spread out. There would be no escape. But he also warned them to keep their distance.

Malcolm Chambers was
his
.

The first gallery was large, with red walls. A guard pointed through the doorway on the right and Rebus strode towards it. By the side of the doorway, a painting showed a headless corpse, spouting blood. The painting mirrored Rebus’s thoughts so well that he smiled grimly. There were spots of rust-coloured blood on the orange carpet. But even without these, he would have had no difficulty following Chambers’s trail. The tourists and attendants stood back from him, pointing, showing him the way. The alarm bell was bright and sharp, focusing his mind. His legs had become solid once again and his heart pumped blood so loudly he wondered if others could hear it.

He took a right, from a small corner room into another large gallery, at the far end of which stood a set of hefty wooden and glass doors. Near them another attendant stood nursing a wounded arm. There was a bloody handprint on one door. Rebus stopped and looked through into the room itself.

In the furthest corner, slouched on the floor, sat the Wolfman. Directly above him on the wall was a painting of a monastic figure, the face cowled and in shadow. The figure looked to be praying to heaven. The figure was holding a skull. A smear of blood ran down and past the skull.

Rebus pushed open the door and walked into the room. Next to this painting was another, of the Virgin Mary with stars around what was left of her head. A large hole had been punched through her face. The figure beneath the paintings was still and silent. Rebus took a few paces forward. He glanced to his left and saw that on the opposite wall were portraits of unhappy looking noblemen. They had every right to be unhappy. Slashes in each canvas almost ripped their heads from their bodies. He was close now. Close enough to see that the painting next to Malcolm Chambers was a Velázquez, ‘The Immaculate Conception’. Rebus smiled again. Immaculate indeed.