Knots And Crosses (16 page)

‘Incident Room,’ he said. ‘Detective Sergeant Rebus speaking.’

‘Rebus? What a curious name that is.’ The voice was old but lively, certainly well-educated. ‘Rebus,’ it said again, as though jotting it down onto a piece of paper. Rebus studied the telephone.

‘And your name, sir?’

‘Oh, I’m Michael Eiser, that’s E-I-S-E-R, Professor of English Literature at the University.’

‘Oh, yes, sir?’ Rebus grabbed a pencil and jotted down the name. ‘And what can I do for you, sir?’

‘Well, Mister Rebus, it’s more a case of what I
think
I can do for you, though of course I may be mistaken.’ Rebus had a picture of the man, if this were not a hoax call: frizzy-haired, bow-tied, wearing crushed tweeds and old shoes, and waving his hands about as he spoke. ‘I’m interested in word-play, you see. In fact I’m writing a book on the subject. It’s called
Reading Exercises and Directed Exegetic Responses
. Do you see the word-play there? It’s an acrostic. The first letter of each word makes up another word –
reader
, in this case. It’s a game as old as literature itself. My book, however, concentrates on its manifestation in more recent works. Nabokov and Burgess and the like. Of course, acrostics are a small part of the overall set of ploys used by the author to entertain, direct or persuade his audience.’ Rebus tried to interrupt the man, but it was like trying to interrupt a bull. So he was forced to listen, wondering all the time if it were a crank call, if he should – strictly against procedure – simply put down the telephone. He had more important things to think about. The back of his head ached.

‘… and the point is, Mister Rebus, that I have noticed, quite by chance, a kind of pattern in this murderer’s choice of victims.’

Rebus sat down on the edge of the desk. He clasped the pencil as though trying to crush it.

‘Oh, yes?’ he said.

‘Yes. I have the names of the victims here in front of me on a piece of paper. Perhaps one would have noticed it sooner, but it was only today that I saw a report in one newspaper which grouped the poor girls together. I usually take
The Times
, you see, but I quite simply couldn’t find one this morning, so I bought another paper, and there it was. It may be nothing at all, mere coincidence, but then again it may not. I’ll leave that for you chaps to decide. I merely offer it as a proposition.’

Jack Morton, puffing smoke all around him, entered the office and, noticing Rebus, waved. Rebus jerked his head in response. Jack looked worn out. Everyone looked worn out, and here he was, fresh from a period of rest and relaxation, dealing with a lunatic on the telephone.

‘Offer what exactly, Professor Eiser?’

‘Well, don’t you see? In order, the victims’ names were Sandra Adams, Mary Andrews, Nicola Turner, and Helen Abbot.’ Jack slouched towards Rebus’s table. ‘Taken as an acrostic,’ continued the voice, ‘their names make up another name – Samantha. The murderer’s next victim perhaps? Or it may be simple coincidence, a game where no game really exists.’

Rebus slammed down the telephone, was off the desk in a second, and pulled Jack Morton around by his neck-tie. Morton gasped and his cigarette flew from his mouth.

‘Got your car outside, Jack?’

Still choking, he nodded a reply.

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. It was all true then. It was all to do with
him
. Samantha. All the clues, all the killings had been meant merely as a message to
him
. Jesus Christ. Help me, oh help me.

His daughter was to be the Strangler’s next victim.

Rhona Phillips saw the car parked outside her house, but thought nothing of it. All she wanted was to get out of the rain. She ran to the front door, Samantha following desultorily behind, and keyed open the door.

‘It’s horrible outside!’ she shouted into the living-room. She shook off her raincoat and walked through to where the TV still blared. In his chair, she saw Andy. His hands were tied behind him and his mouth was taped shut with a huge piece of sticking-plaster. The length of twine still dangled from his throat.

Rhona was about to let out the most piercing scream of her life, when a heavy object came down on the back of her head and she staggered forward towards her lover, slumping across his legs as she passed out.

‘Hello, Samantha,’ said a voice she recognised, though his face was masked so that she could not see his smile.

Morton’s car tore across town, its blue light flashing, as though it were being followed by all Hell itself. Rebus tried explaining it all as they drove, but he was too edgy to make much sense, and Jack Morton was too busy avoiding traffic to make much attempt at taking it in. They had called for assistance: one car to the school in case she were still there, and two cars to the house, with the warning that the Strangler might be there. Caution was to be exercised.

The car reached eighty-five along Queensferry Road, made an insane right turn across the oncoming traffic, and reached the bright-as-a-pin housing estate where Rhona, Samantha and Rhona’s lover now lived.

‘Turn right here,’ shouted Rebus over the engine’s roar, his mind clinging to hope. As they turned into the street they saw the two police cars already motionless in front of the house,
and Rhona’s car sitting like a potent symbol of futility in the driveway.

They wanted to give him sedatives, but he wouldn’t take any of their drugs. They wanted him to go home, but he would not take their advice. How could he go home with Rhona lying somewhere above him in the hospital? With his daughter abducted, his whole life ripped apart like a worn garment being transformed into dusters? He paced the hospital waiting-room. He was fine, he told them, fine. He knew that Gill and Anderson were somewhere along the corridor. Poor Anderson. He watched from the grime of the window as nurses walked by outside, laughing in the rain, their capes blowing about them like something out of an old Dracula movie. How could they laugh? Mist was settling over the trees, and the nurses, still laughing, unaware of the world’s suffering, faded into that mist as though some Edinburgh of the past had sucked them into its fiction, taking with them all the laughter in the world.

It was nearly dark now, the sun a memory behind the heavy fabric of the clouds. The religious painters of old must have known skies like this, must have lived with them each and every day, accepting the bruised colouring of the clouds as a mark of God’s presence, an essence of creation’s power. Rebus was no painter. His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realised that in his life he had accepted secondary experience – the experience of reading someone else’s thoughts – over real life.
Well, he was face to face with it now all right: he was back in the Paras, he was back in the SAS, his face a sketch-pad of exhaustion, his brain aching, every muscle tensed.

He caught himself beginning to abstract everything again, and slapped the wall with the palms of both hands as though ready to be frisked. Sammy was out there somewhere in the hands of a maniac, and he was composing eulogies, excuses and similes. It wasn’t enough.

In the corridor, Gill kept a watch on William Anderson. He, too, had been told to go home. A doctor had examined him for the effects of shock, and had spoken of putting Anderson to bed for the night.

‘I’m waiting right here,’ Anderson had said with quiet determination. ‘If this all has something to do with John Rebus, then I want to stay close to John Rebus. I’m all right, honestly.’ But he was not all right. He was dazed and remorseful and a bit confused about everything. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he told Gill. ‘I can’t believe that this whole thing was merely a prelude to the abduction of Rebus’s daughter. It’s fantastical. The man must be deranged. Surely John must have an inkling who’s responsible?’

Gill Templer was wondering the same thing.

‘Why hasn’t he told us?’ continued Anderson. Then, without warning or any show of ceremony, he became a father again and started to sob very quietly. ‘Andy,’ he said, ‘my Andy.’ He put his head in his hands and allowed Gill to put her arm around his crumpled shoulders.

John Rebus, watching darkness descend, thought about his marriage, his daughter. His daughter Sammy.

For those who read between the times

What was it he was blocking out? What was it that had been rejected by him all those years ago as he had walked the Fife shoreline, having his final fit of the breakdown and shutting out the past as securely as if he had been shutting the door on
a Jehovah’s Witness? It was not that easy. The unwanted caller had waited his time, deciding to break and enter into Rebus’s life again. The foot in the door. The door of perception. What good was his reading doing him now? Or his faith, slender thread that it was? Samantha. Sammy, his daughter. Dear God, let her be safe. Dear God, let her live.

John, you must know who it is

But he had shaken his head, shaken his tears onto the folds of his trousers. He did not, he did not. It was Knot. It was Cross. Names meant nothing to him any more. Knots and crosses. He had been sent knots and crosses, string and matches and a load of gobbledygook, as Jack Morton had called it. That was all. Dear God.

He went out into the corridor, and confronted Anderson, who stood before him like a piece of wreckage waiting to be loaded up and shunted away. And the two men came together in a hug, squeezing life into one another; two old enemies realising in a moment that they were on the same side after all. They hugged and they wept, draining themselves of all they had been bottling up, all those years of pounding the beat, having to appear emotionless and unflappable. It was out in the open now: they were human beings, the same as everybody else.

And finally, assured that Rhona had suffered a fractured skull only, allowed into her room for a moment to watch her breathing oxygen, Rebus had let them take him home. Rhona would live. That was something. Andy Anderson, though, was cold on a slab somewhere while doctors examined his leftovers. Poor bloody Anderson. Poor man, poor father, poor copper. It was becoming very personal now, wasn’t it? All of a sudden it had become bigger than they had imagined it ever could. It had become a grudge.

They had a description at last, though not a good one. A neighbour had seen the man carry the still form of the girl out
to the car. A pale coloured car, she had told them. A normal looking car. A normal looking man. Not too tall, his face hard. He was hurrying. She didn’t get a good look at him.

Anderson would be off the case now, and so would Rebus. Oh, it was big now. The Strangler had entered a home, had murdered there. He had gone way too far over the edge. The newspapermen and the cameras outside the hospital wanted to know all about it. Superintendent Wallace would have organised a press conference. The newspaper-readers, the voyeurs, needed to know all about it. It was big news. Edinburgh was the crime capital of Europe. The son of a Chief Inspector murdered and the daughter of a Detective Sergeant abducted, possibly murdered already.

What could he do but sit and wait for another letter? He was better off in his flat, no matter how dark and barren it seemed, no matter how like a cell. Gill promised to visit him later, after the press conference. An unmarked car would be outside his tenement as a matter of course, for who knew how personal the Strangler wanted this to become?

Meantime, unknown to Rebus, his file was being checked back at HQ, his past dusted off and examined. There had to be the Strangler in there somewhere. There had to be.

Of course there had to be. Rebus knew that he alone held the key. But it seemed locked in a drawer to which it itself was the key. He could only rattle that locked away history.

Gill Templer had telephoned Rebus’s brother, and though John would hate her for doing so, she had told Michael to come across to Edinburgh at once to be with his brother. He was Rebus’s only family after all. He sounded nervous on the phone, nervous but concerned. And now she puzzled over the matter of the acrostic. The Professor had been correct. They were trying to locate him this evening in order to interview him. Again, as a matter of course. But if the Strangler had
planned this, then surely he must have been able to get his hands on a list of people whose names would fit the bill, and how would he have done that? A civil servant perhaps? A teacher? Someone working away quietly at a computer-terminal somewhere? There were many possibilities, and they would go through them one by one. First, however, Gill was going to suggest that everyone in Edinburgh called Knott or Cross be interviewed. It was a wild card, but then everything about this case so far had been wild.

And then there was the press conference. Held, since it was convenient, in the hospital’s administration building. There was standing room only at the back of the hall. Gill Templer’s face, human but unsmiling, was becoming well known to the British public, as well known, certainly, as that of any newscaster or reporter. Tonight, however, the Superintendent would be doing the talking. She hoped he would not take long. She wanted to see Rebus. And more urgently, perhaps, she wanted to talk with his brother. Someone had to know about John’s past. He had never, apparently, spoken to any of his friends on the force about his Army years. Did the key lie there? Or in his marriage? Gill listened to the Super saying his piece. Cameras clicked and the large hall grew smoky.

And there was Jim Stevens, smiling from the corner of his mouth, as if he knew something. Gill grew nervous. His eyes were on her, though his pen worked away at its notepad. She recalled that disastrous evening they had spent together, and her much less disastrous evening with John Rebus. Why had none of the men in her life ever been uncomplicated? Perhaps because complications interested her. The case was not becoming more complex. It was becoming simpler.

Jim Stevens, half-listening to the police statement, thought of how complex this story was becoming. Rebus and Rebus,
drugs and murder, anonymous messages followed by abduction of daughter. He needed to get behind the police’s public face on this one, and knew that the best way forward lay with Gill Templer, with a little trading of knowledge. If the drugs and the abduction were linked, as they probably were, then perhaps one or other of the Rebus brothers had not been playing the game according to the set rules. Maybe Gill Templer would know.