Beggars Banquet (19 page)

‘I don’t make enemies, Inspector.’

Looking at her, listening to her voice, he found that easy to believe. Maybe not personal enemies . . .

‘What about the other radio stations? They can’t be too thrilled about your ratings.’

Her laughter was loud. ‘You think they’ve put out a contract on me, is that it?’

Rebus smiled and shrugged. ‘Just a thought. But yours
is
the most popular show Lowland has got, isn’t it?’

‘I think I’m still just about ahead of Hamish, yes. But then Hamish’s show is just . . . well, Hamish. My show’s all about the people themselves, the ones who call in. Human interest, you could say.’

‘And there’s plenty of interest.’

‘Suffering is always interesting, isn’t it? It appeals to the voyeur. We
do
get our fair share of crank calls. Maybe that’s why. All those lonely, slightly deranged people out there . . . listening to me. Me, pretending I’ve got all the answers.’ Her smile this time was rueful. ‘The calls recently have been getting . . . I don’t know whether to say “better” or “worse”. Worse problems, better radio.’

‘Better for your ratings, you mean?’

‘Most advertisers ignore the late-night slots. That’s common knowledge. Not a big enough audience. But it’s never been a problem on my show. We did slip back for a little while, but the figures picked up again. Up and up and up . . . Don’t ask me what sort of listeners we’re attracting. I leave all that to market research.’

Rebus finished his coffee and clasped both knees, preparing to rise. ‘I’d like to take the tape with me, is that possible?’

‘Sure.’ She ejected the tape.

‘And I’d like to have a word with . . . Sue, is it?’

She checked her watch. ‘Sue, yes, but she won’t be in for a few hours yet. Night shift, you see. Only us poor disc jockeys have to be here twenty-four hours. I exaggerate, but it feels like it sometimes.’ She patted a tray on the ledge beside the cassette player. The tray was filled with correspondence. ‘Besides, I have my fan mail to deal with.’

Rebus nodded, glanced at the cassette tape he was now holding. ‘Let me have a think about this, Miss Cook. I’ll see what we can do.’

‘OK, Inspector.’

‘Sorry I can’t be more constructive. You were quite right to contact us.’

‘I didn’t suppose there was much you could—’

‘We don’t know that yet. As I say, give me a little time to think about it.’

She rose from her chair. ‘I’ll see you out. This place is a maze, and we can’t have you stumbling in on the
Afternoon Show
, can we? You might end up doing your Laughing Policeman routine after all . . .’

‘Ah,’ said Penny Cook quietly, ‘a chance to kill two birds. Come on, let me introduce you to Gordon Prentice - he’s the station chief - and to the infamous Hamish MacDiarmid.’

Well, Rebus had no trouble deciding which man was which. Except that, when Penny did make the introductions, he was proved utterly wrong. The bearded man pumped his hand.

‘I hope you’re going to be able to help, Inspector. There are some sick minds out there.’ This was Gordon Prentice. He wore baggy brown cords and an open-necked shirt from which protruded tufts of wiry hair. Hamish MacDiarmid’s hand, when Rebus took it, was limp and cool, like something lifted from a larder. No matter how hard he tried, Rebus couldn’t match this . . . for want of a better word,
yuppie
. . . couldn’t match him to the combative voice. But then MacDiarmid spoke.

‘Sick minds is right, and stupid minds too. I don’t know which is worse, a deranged audience or an educationally subnormal one.’ He turned to Penny Cook. ‘Maybe you got the better bargain, Penelope.’ He turned back to Prentice. So that’s what a sneer looks like, Rebus thought. But MacDiarmid was speaking again. ‘Gordon, how about letting Penny and me swap shows for a day? She could sit there agreeing with every bigoted caller I get, and I could get stuck in about her social cripples. What do you think?’

Prentice chuckled and placed a hand on the shoulder of both his star DJs. ‘I’ll give it some thought, Hamish. Penny might not be too thrilled though. I think she has a soft spot for her “cripples”.’

Penny Cook certainly didn’t look ‘too thrilled’ by the time Rebus and she were out of earshot.

‘Those two,’ she hissed. ‘Sometimes they act like I’m not even there! Men . . .’ She glanced towards Rebus. ‘Present company excluded, of course.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘I shouldn’t be so hard on Gordon actually. I know I joke about being here twenty-four hours a day, but I really think he
does
spend all day and all night at the station. He’s here from early morning, but each night he comes into the studio to listen to a bit of my show. Beyond the call of duty, wouldn’t you say?’

Rebus merely shrugged.

‘I bet,’ she went on, ‘when you saw them you thought it was Hamish with the beard.’

Rebus nodded. She giggled. ‘Everybody does,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s what they seem in this place. I’ll let you into a secret. The station doesn’t keep any publicity shots of Hamish. They’re afraid it would hurt his image if everyone found out he looks like a wimp.’

‘He’s certainly not
quite
what I expected.’

She gave him an ambiguous look. ‘No, well,
you’re
not quite what
I
was expecting either.’ There was a moment’s stillness between them, broken only by some coffee commercial being broadcast from the ceiling: ‘. . . but Camelot Coffee is no myth, and mmm . . . it tastes
so
good.’ They smiled at one another and walked on.

‘. . . and mmm . . . it tastes
so
good.’

That particular advert was beginning to get to him. It careered around in his head, even when it wasn’t being broadcast. The actor’s voice was so . . . what was the word? It was like being force-fed a tablespoon of honey. Cloying, sickly, altogether too much.

‘Was Camelot a myth or is it real? Arthur and Guinevere, Merlin and Lancelot. A dream, or—’

Rebus switched off the radio. ‘It’s only a jar of bloody coffee,’ he told his radio set. Yes, he thought, a jar of coffee . . . and mmm . . . it tastes
so
good. Come to think of it, he needed coffee for the flat. He’d stop off at the corner shop, and whatever he bought it wouldn’t be Camelot.

You’re not quite what I was expecting.

Was he reading too much into that one sentence? Maybe he was. Well, put it another way then: he had a
duty
to return to Lowland Radio, a duty to talk to Sue. He wound the tape back for the umpteenth time. That ferocious voice. Sue had been surprised by its ferocity, hadn’t she? The man had seemed so quiet, so polite in their initial conversation. Rebus was stuck. Maybe the caller
would
simply get fed up. When it was a question of someone’s home being called, there were steps you could take: have someone intercept all calls, change the person’s number and keep it ex-directory. But Penny Cook needed her number to be public. She couldn’t hide, except behind the wall provided by Sue and David.

Then he had an idea. It wasn’t much of an idea, but it was better than nothing. Bill Costain at the Forensic Science Lab was keen on sound recording, tape recorders, all that sort of stuff. Maybe he could do something with Mr Anonymous. Yes, he’d call him first thing tomorrow. He sipped his coffee, then squirmed.

‘Tastes more like camel than Camelot,’ he muttered, hitting the play button.

‘I was playing in a darts match last night,’ he explained. ‘We won for a change. The amount of drink we put away, you’d think Scotland had just done the Grand Slam.’

‘Never mind,’ said Rebus, handing over the cassette tape. ‘I’ve brought you something soothing . . .’

‘Soothing’ wasn’t the word Costain himself used after listening to the tape. But he enjoyed a challenge, and the challenge Rebus had laid down was to tell him anything at all about the voice. He listened several times to the tape, and put it through some sort of analyser, the voice becoming a series of peaks and troughs.

Costain scratched his head. ‘There’s too big a difference between the voice at the beginning and the voice when hysterical.’

‘How do you mean?’ Costain always seemed able to baffle Rebus.

‘The hysterical voice is so much higher than the voice at the beginning. It’s hardly . . . natural.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I’d say one of them’s a put-on. Probably the initial voice. He’s disguising his normal tone, speaking in a lower register than usual.’

‘So can we get back to his
real
voice?’

‘You mean can we retrieve it? Yes, but the lab isn’t the best place for that. A friend of mine has a recording studio out Morningside way. I’ll give him a bell . . .’

They were in luck. The studio’s facilities were not in use that morning. Rebus drove them to Morningside and then sat back as Costain and his friend got busy at the mixing console. They slowed the hysteric part of the tape; then managed somehow to take the pitch of the voice down several tones. It began to sound more than slightly unnatural, like a Dalek or something electronic. But then they started to build it back up again, until Rebus was listening to a slow, almost lifeless vocal over the studio’s huge monitor speakers.

‘I . . . know . . . what . . . you’ve . . . done.’

Yes, there was life there now, almost a hint of personality. After this, they switched to the caller’s first utterance - ‘Not so good, Penny’ - and played around with it, heightening the pitch slightly, even speeding it up a bit.

‘That’s about as good as it gets,’ Costain said at last.

‘It’s brilliant, Bill, thanks. Can I get a copy?’

Having dropped Costain back at the lab, Rebus wormed his way back through the lunchtime traffic to Great London Road police station. He played this new tape several times, then switched from tape to radio. Christ, he’d forgotten: it was still tuned to Lowland.

‘. . . and mmm . . . it tastes
so
good.’

Rebus fairly growled as he reached for the off button. But the damage, the delirious, wonderful damage, had already been done . . .

Without asking, Rebus sat down opposite him. ‘It whiles away the time,’ he said. The tooth-tapper seemed still intent on the window. Maybe he could see his reflection there. The modern Narcissus. Another flick of the hair.

‘If you got a haircut, you wouldn’t need to keep doing that.’

This achieved a smile. Maybe he thought Rebus was trying to chat him up. Well, after all, this was known as an actors’ bar, wasn’t it? Half a glass of orange juice sat on the table, the ubiquitous ice-cube having melted away to a sliver.

‘Aye,’ Rebus mused, ‘passes the time.’

This time the eyes turned from the window and were on him. Rebus leaned forward across the table. When he spoke, he spoke quietly, confidently.

‘I know what you’ve done,’ he said, not sure even as he said it whether he were quoting or speaking for himself.

The lock of hair fell forward and stayed there. A frozen second, then another, and the man rose quickly to his feet, the chair tipping back. But Rebus, still seated, had grabbed at an arm and held it fast.

‘Let go of me!’

‘Sit down.’

‘I said let go!’

‘And I said sit down!’ Rebus pulled him back on to his chair. ‘That’s better. We’ve got a lot to talk about, you and me. We can do it here or down at the station, and by “station” I don’t mean Scotrail. OK?’

The head was bowed, the careful hair now almost completely dishevelled. It was that easy . . . Rebus found the tiniest grain of pity. ‘Do you want something else to drink?’ The head shook from side to side. ‘Not even a cup of coffee?’

Now the head looked up at him.

‘I saw the film once,’ Rebus went on. ‘Bloody awful it was, but not half as bad as the coffee. Give me Richard Harris’s singing any day.’

Now, finally, the head grinned. ‘That’s better,’ said Rebus. ‘Come on, son. It’s time, if you’ll pardon the expression, to spill the beans.’

The beans spilled . . .