A Good Hanging and other Stories (26 page)

‘Did she,’ he began, ‘did she have a boyfriend, Mr McKenzie?’

McKenzie got up from his chair, walked to the sideboard and poured himself another whisky. He motioned to Rebus who, still cradling a crystal inch of the stuff, shook his head. Mrs McKenzie was upstairs resting. She had been given a sedative by her doctor, an old friend of the family who had seemed in need of similar treatment himself.

But Thomas McKenzie had not needed anything. He was sticking to the old remedies, sloshing a fresh measure of malt into his glass.

‘No,’ he said, ‘no boyfriends. They’ve never really been Suzanne’s style.’

Though he would not be travelling to his office today, McKenzie had still dressed himself in a dark blue suit and tie. The drawing-room in which Rebus sat had about it the air of a commercial office, not at all homely or lived-in. He couldn’t imagine growing up in such a place.

‘What about school?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, was she happy there?’

‘Very.’ McKenzie sat down with his drink. ‘She gets good reports, good grades. She ... she
was
going to the University in October.’

Rebus watched him gulp at the whisky. Thomas McKenzie was a tough man, tough enough to make his million young and then canny enough not to lose it. He was forty-four now, but looked younger. Rebus had no idea how many shops McKenzie now owned, how many company directorships he held along with all his other holdings and interests. He was new money trying to look like old money, making his home in Stockbridge, convenient for Princes Street, rather than further out in bungalow land.

‘What was she going to study?’ Rebus stared past McKenzie towards where a family portrait sat on a long, polished sideboard. No family snapshot, but posed, a sitting for a professional photographer. Daughter gleaming in the centre, sandwiched by grinning parents. A mock-up cloudscape behind them, the clouds pearl-coloured, the sky blue.

‘Law,’ said McKenzie. ‘She had a head on her shoulders.’

Yes, a head of mousy-brown hair. And her father had found her early in the morning, already cold. McKenzie hadn’t panicked. He’d made the phone calls before waking his wife and telling her. He always rose first, always went straight to the bathroom. He had remained calm, most probably from shock. But there was a stiffness to McKenzie, too, Rebus noticed. He wondered what it would take really to rouse the man.

Something niggled. Suzanne had gone to the bathroom, run some water into the bath, lain down in it, and slashed her wrists. Fine, Rebus could accept that. Maybe she had expected to be found and rescued. Most failed suicides were cries for help, weren’t they? If you
really
wanted to kill yourself, you went somewhere quiet and secret, where you couldn’t possibly be found in time. Suzanne hadn’t done that. She had almost certainly expected her father to find her in time. Her timing had been a little awry.

Moreover, she must have known her father always rose before her mother, and therefore that he would be the first to find her. This notion interested Rebus, though no one around him seemed curious about it.

‘What about friends at school,’ Rebus went on. ‘Did Suzanne have many friends?’

‘Oh yes, lots.’

‘Anyone in particular?’

McKenzie was about to answer when the door opened and his wife walked in, pale from her drugged sleep.

‘What time is it?’ she asked, shuffling forwards.

‘It’s eleven, Shona,’ her husband said, rising to meet her. ‘You’ve only been asleep half an hour.’ They embraced one another, her arms tight around his body. Rebus felt like an intruder on their grief, but the questions still had to be asked.

‘You were about to tell me about Suzanne’s friends, Mr McKenzie.’

Husband and wife sat down together on the sofa, hands clasped.

‘Well,’ said McKenzie, ‘there were lots of them, weren’t there, Shona?’

‘Yes,’ said his wife. She really was an attractive woman. Her face had the same smooth sheen as her daughter’s. She was the sort of woman men would instinctively feel protective towards, whether protection was needed or not. ‘But I always liked Hazel best,’ she went on.

McKenzie turned to Rebus and explained. ‘Hazel Frazer, daughter of Sir Jimmy Frazer, the banker. A peach of a girl. A real peach.’ He paused, staring at his wife, and then began, softly, with dignity, to cry. She rested his head against her shoulder and stroked his hair, talking softly to him. Rebus averted his eyes and drank his whisky. Then bit his bottom lip, deep in thought. In matters of suicide, just who was the victim, who the culprit?

Suzanne’s room was a cold and comfortless affair. No posters on the walls, no teenage clutter or signs of an independent mind. There was a writing-pad on the dressing table, but it was blank. A crumpled ball of paper sat in the bottom of an otherwise empty bin beside the wardrobe. Rebus carefully unfolded the sheet. Written on it, in a fairly steady hand, was a message: ‘Told you I would.’

Rebus studied the sentence. Told whom? Her parents seemed to have no inkling their daughter was suicidal, yet the note had been meant for someone. And having written it, why had she discarded it? He turned it over. The other side, though blank was slightly tacky. Rebus sniffed the paper, but could find no smell to identify the stickiness. He carefully folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket.

In the top drawer of the dressing-table was a leather-bound diary. But Suzanne had been no diarist. Instead of the expected teenage outpourings, Rebus found only one-line reminders, every Tuesday for the past six months or so, ‘The Gentlemen’s Club - 4.00’. Curiouser and curiouser. The last entry was for the previous week, with nothing in the rest of the diary save blank pages.

The Gentlemen’s Club - what on earth could she have meant? Rebus knew of several clubs in Edinburgh, dowdy remnants of a former age, but none was called simply The Gentlemen’s Club. The diary went into his pocket along with the note.

Thomas McKenzie saw him to the door. The tie around his neck was hanging loosely now and his voice was sweet with whisky.

‘Just two last questions before I go,’ Rebus said.

‘Yes?’ said McKenzie, sighing.

‘Do you belong to a club?’

McKenzie seemed taken aback, but shrugged. ‘Several, actually. The Strathspey Health Club. The Forth Golf Club. And Finlay’s as was.’

‘Finlay’s Gentlemen’s Club?’

‘Yes, that’s right. But it’s called Thomson’s now.’

Rebus nodded. ‘Final question,’ he said. ‘What did Suzanne do on Tuesdays at four?’

‘Nothing special. I think she had some drama group at school.’

‘Thank you, Mr McKenzie. Sorry to have troubled you. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, Inspector.’

Rebus stood on the top step, breathing in lungfuls of fresh air. Too much of a good thing could be stifling. He wondered if Suzanne McKenzie had felt stifled. He still wondered why she had died. And, knowing her father would be the first to find her, why had she lain down naked in the bath? Rebus had seen suicides before - lots of them - but whether they chose the bathroom or the bedroom, they were always clothed.

‘Naked I came,’ he thought to himself, remembering the passage from the Book of Job, ‘and naked shall return.’

On his way to Hawthornden School for Girls, Rebus received a message from Detective Constable Holmes, who had returned to the station.

‘Go ahead,’ said Rebus. The radio crackled. The sky overhead was the colour of a bruise, the static in the air playing havoc with the radio’s reception.

‘I’ve just run McKenzie’s name through the computer,’ said Holmes, ‘and come up with something you might be interested in.’

Rebus smiled. Holmes was as thorough as any airport sniffer dog. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Are you going to tell me, or do I have to buy the paperback?’

There was a hurt pause before Holmes began to speak and Rebus remembered how sensitive to criticism the younger man could be. ‘It seems,’ Holmes said at last, ‘that Mr McKenzie was arrested several months back for loitering outside a school.’

‘Oh? Which school?’

‘Murrayfield Comprehensive. He wasn’t charged, but it’s on record that he was taken to Murrayfield police station and questioned.’

‘That is interesting. I’ll talk to you later.’ Rebus terminated the call. The rain had started to fall in heavy drops. He picked up the radio again and asked to be put through to Murrayfield police station. His luck was in. A colleague there remembered the whole incident.

‘We kept it quiet, of course,’ the Inspector told Rebus. ‘And McKenzie swore he’d just stopped there to call into his office. But the teachers at the school were adamant he’d parked there before, during the lunch-break. It’s not the most refined area of town after all, is it? A Daimler does tend to stand out from the crowd around there, especially when there isn’t a bride in the back of it.’

‘I take your point,’ said Rebus, smiling. ‘Anything else?’

‘Yes, one of the kids told a teacher he’d seen someone get into McKenzie’s Daimler once, but we couldn’t find any evidence of that.’

‘Vivid imaginations, these kids,’ Rebus agreed. This was all his colleague could tell him, but it was enough to muddy the water. Had Suzanne discovered her father’s secret and, ashamed, killed herself? Or perhaps her schoolfriends had found out and teased her about it? If McKenzie liked kids, there might even be a tang of incest about the whole thing. That would at least go some way towards explaining Suzanne’s nudity: she wasn’t putting on show anything her father hadn’t seen before. But what about The Gentlemen’s Club? Where did it fit in? At Hawthornden School, Rebus hoped he might find some answers.

It was the sort of school fathers sent their daughters to so that they might learn the arts of femininity and ruthlessness. The headmistress, as imposing a character as the school building itself, fed Rebus on cakes and tea before leading him to Suzanne’s form mistress, a Miss Selkirk, who had prepared more tea for him in her little private room.

Yes, she told him, Suzanne had been a very popular girl and news of her death came as quite a shock. She had run around with Hazel Frazer, the banker’s daughter. A very vivacious girl, Hazel, head of school this year, though Suzanne hadn’t been far behind in the running. A competitive pair, their marks for maths, English, languages almost identical. Suzanne the better at sciences; Hazel the better at economics and accounts. Splendid girls, the pair of them.

Biting into his fourth or fifth cake, Rebus nodded again. These women were all so commanding that he had begun to feel like a schoolboy himself. He sat with knees primly together, smiling, asking his questions almost apologetically.

‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘the name The Gentlemen’s Club means anything to you?’

Miss Selkirk thought hard. ‘Is it,’ she said at last, ‘the name of a discotheque?’

Rebus smiled. ‘I don’t think so. Why do you ask?’

‘Well, it’s just that I do seem to recall having heard it before from one of the girls, quite recently, but only in passing.’

Rebus looked disappointed.

‘I am sorry, Inspector.’ She tapped her skull. ‘This old head of mine isn’t what it used to be.’

‘That’s quite all right,’ said Rebus quietly. ‘One last thing, do you happen to know who takes the school’s drama classes?’

‘Ah,’ said Miss Selkirk, ‘that’s young Miss Phillips, the English teacher.’

Miss Phillips, who insisted that Rebus call her Jilly, was not only young but also very attractive. Waves of long auburn hair fell over her shoulders and down her back. Her eyes were dark and moist with recently shed tears. Rebus felt more awkward than ever.

‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that you run the school’s drama group.’

‘That’s right.’ Her voice was fragile as porcelain.

‘And Suzanne was in the group?’

‘Yes. She was due to play Celia in our production of
As You Like It.’

‘Oh?’

‘That’s Shakespeare, you know.’

‘Yes,’ said Rebus, ‘I do know.’

They were talking in the corridor, just outside her classroom, and through the panes of glass in the door, Rebus could see a class of fairly mature girls, healthy and from well-ordered homes, whispering together and giggling. Odd that, considering they’d just lost a friend.

‘Celia,’ he said, ‘is Duke Frederick’s daughter, isn’t she?’

‘I’m impressed, Inspector.’

‘It’s not my favourite Shakespeare play,’ Rebus explained, ‘but I remember seeing it at the Festival a few years back. Celia has a friend, doesn’t she?’

‘That’s right, Rosalind.’

‘So who was going to play Rosalind?’

‘Hazel Frazer.’

Rebus nodded slowly at this. It made sense. ‘Is Hazel in your classroom at the moment?’

‘Yes, she’s the one with the long black hair. Do you see her?’

Oh yes, Rebus could see her. She sat, calm and imperturbable, at the still centre of a sea of admirers. The other girls giggled and whispered around her, hoping to catch her attention or a few words of praise, while she sat oblivious to it all.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I see her.’

‘Would you care to speak with her, Inspector?’

He knew Hazel was aware of him, even though she averted her eyes from the door. Indeed, he knew precisely
because
she refused to look, while the other girls glanced towards the corridor from time to time, interested in this interruption to their classwork. Interested and curious. Hazel pretended to be neither, which in itself interested Rebus.

‘No,’ he said to Jilly Phillips, ‘not just now. She’s probably upset, and it wouldn’t do much good for me to go asking her questions under the circumstances. There was one thing, though.’

‘Yes, Inspector?’

‘This after-school drama group of yours, the one that meets on Tuesdays, it doesn’t happen to have a nickname, does it?’

‘Not that I know of.’ Jilly Phillips furrowed her brow. ‘But, Inspector?’

‘Yes?’

‘You’re under some kind of misapprehension. The drama group meets on Fridays, not Tuesdays. And we meet before lunch.’

Rebus drove out of the school grounds and parked by the side of the busy main road. The drama group met during school hours, so what had Suzanne done on Tuesdays after school, while her parents thought she was there? At least, McKenzie had said he’d thought that’s what she’d done on Tuesdays. Suppose he’d been lying? Then what?