10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) (38 page)

Holmes was at the door now, not about to linger.

‘Yes, well, I’d better let you get on,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ said Hutton, as though coming out of a dream. ‘Right.’

‘Thanks for all your help.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Bye, Arnold,’ Holmes called, then pulled the door shut behind him and was gone.

‘Back to work,’ said Hutton. He stared at the photographs on the floor. ‘Give me a hand with these, Arnold.’

‘You’re the boss.’

As they began to scoop the photos back into the drawer, Hutton commented, ‘Nice enough bloke for a copper.’

‘Yes,’ said Arnold, standing naked with his hands full of paper. ‘He didn’t look like one of the dirty raincoat brigade, did he?’

And though Hutton asked him what he meant, Arnold just shrugged. It wasn’t his business after all. It was a shame though, the policeman being interested in women. A waste of a good-looking man.

Holmes stood outside for a minute. For some reason, he was trembling, as though a small motor had stuck somewhere inside him. He touched a hand to his chest. Slight heart murmur, nothing more. Everybody got them, didn’t they? He felt as though he had just committed some petty crime, which he supposed, really, he had. He had taken someone’s property away without their knowledge or consent. Wasn’t that theft? As a child, he had stolen from shops, always throwing away whatever he stole. Ach, all kids did it, didn’t they? . . . Didn’t they?

He brought from his pocket the gains from this latest pilfering. The photograph was curled now, but he straightened it between his hands. A woman, pushing a pram past him, glanced at the photograph then hurried on, throwing back a disgusted look towards him. It’s all right, madam, I’m a police officer. He smiled at the thought, then studied the nude shot again. It was mildly salacious, nothing more. A young woman, stretched out on what appeared to be silk or satin. Photographed from above, as she lay spreadeagled on this sheet. Her mouth open in an amateur’s pout, eyes narrowed to slits of fake
ecstasy. All this was common enough. More interesting though was the model’s identity.

For Holmes was sure it was the girl Tracy, the one whose photograph he already had from the squat. The one whose background he was trying to ascertain. The girlfriend of the deceased. Posed for the camera, uncovered, not at all shy, and enjoying herself.

What was it that kept bringing him back to this house? Rebus wasn’t sure. He turned his torch onto Charlie’s wall painting again, trying to make sense of the mind that had created it. But why did he want to try to understand a piece of jetsam like Charlie anyway? Perhaps because of the nagging feeling that he was absolutely integral to the case.

‘What case?’

There, he had actually, finally said it aloud. What case? There was no ‘case’, not in the sense in which any criminal court would understand the term. There were personalities, misdeeds, questions without answers. Illegalities, even. But there was no case. That was the frustrating thing. If there were only a case, only something structured enough, tangible enough for him to hold on to, some casenotes which he could
physically
hold up and say, look, here it is. But there was nothing like that. It was all as insubstantial as candle wax. But candle wax left its mark, didn’t it? And nothing ever vanished, not totally. Instead, things altered shape, substance, meaning. A five-pointed star within two concentric circles was nothing in itself. To Rebus it looked like nothing so much as a tin sheriff’s badge he’d had as a boy. Lawman of the Texas tin badge state, cap-firing six-gun in his plastic holster.

To others it was evil itself.

He turned his back on it, remembering how proudly he had worn that badge, and went upstairs. Here was where the tie clip had lain. Past it, he entered Ronnie’s bedroom
and walked over to the window, peering out through a chink in the boards covering the glass. The car had drawn up now, not too far from his own. The car that had followed him from the station. The car he had recognised at once as the Ford Escort which had waited outside his flat, the one which had roared away. Now it was here, parked next to the burnt-out Cortina. It was here. Its driver was here. The car itself was empty.

He heard the floorboard creak just the once, and knew that the man was behind him.

‘You must know this place pretty well,’ he said. ‘You managed to miss most of the noisy ones.’

He turned from the window and shone his torch onto the face of a young man with short dark hair. The man shielded his eyes from the beam, and Rebus angled the light down onto the man’s body.

It was dressed in a police constable’s uniform.

‘You must be Neil,’ said Rebus calmly. ‘Or do you prefer Neilly?’

He levelled the torch at the floor. There was enough light for him to see and be seen by. The young man nodded.

‘Neil’s fine. Only my friends call me Neilly.’

‘And I’m not your friend,’ Rebus said, nodding acquiescence. ‘Ronnie was though, wasn’t he?’

‘He was more than that, Inspector Rebus,’ said the constable, moving into the room. ‘He was my brother.’

There was nowhere in Ronnie’s bedroom for them to sit, but that didn’t matter, since neither could have sat still for more than a second or two anyway. They were filled with energy: Neil needing to tell his story, Rebus needing to be told. Rebus chose in front of the window as his territory, and paced backwards and forwards without seeming to, his head down, stopping from time to time to lend more concentration to Neil’s words. Neil stayed by the door,
swinging the handle to and fro, listening for that moment before the whole door creaked, and then pulling or pushing the door through that slow, rending sound. The torch served the scene well, casting unruly shadows over the walls, making silhouettes of each man’s profile, the talker and the listener.

‘Sure, I knew what he was up to,’ Neil said. ‘He may have been older than me, but I always knew him better than he knew me. I mean, I knew how his mind worked.’

‘So you knew he was a junkie?’

‘I knew he took drugs. He started when we were at school. He was caught once, almost expelled. They let him back in after three months, so he could do his exams. He passed the lot of them. That’s more than I did.’

Yes, Rebus thought, admiration could make you turn a blind eye. . . .

‘He ran away after the exams. We didn’t hear anything from him for months. My mum and dad almost went crazy. Then they just shut him out completely, switched off. It was like he didn’t exist. I wasn’t supposed to mention him in the house.’

‘But he got in touch with you?’

‘Yes. Wrote a letter to me care of a pal of mine. Clever move that. So I got the letter without Mum and Dad knowing. He told me he had come to Edinburgh. That he liked it better than Stirling. That he had a job and a girlfriend. That was it, no address or phone number.’

‘Did he write often?’

‘Now and then. He lied a lot, made things seem better than they were. Said he couldn’t come back to Stirling until he had a Porsche and a flat, so he could prove something to Mum and Dad. Then he stopped writing. I left school and joined the police.’

‘And came to Edinburgh.’

‘Not straight away, but yes, eventually.’

‘Specifically to find him?’

Neil smiled.

‘Not a bit of it. I was forgetting him, too. I had my own life to think about.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I caught him one night, out on my regular beat.’

‘What beat
is
that exactly?’

‘I’m based out at Musselburgh.’

‘Musselburgh? Not exactly walking distance of here, is it? So what do you mean “caught him”?’

‘Well, not caught, since he wasn’t really doing anything. But he was high as a kite, and he’d been bashed up a bit.’

‘Did he tell you what he’d been doing?’

‘No. I could guess though.’

‘What?’

‘Acting as a punchbag for some of the rough traders around Calton Hill.’

‘Funny, someone else mentioned that.’

‘It happens. Quick money for people who don’t give a shit.’

‘And Ronnie didn’t give a shit?’

‘Sometimes he did. Other times. . . . I don’t know, maybe I didn’t know his mind as well as I thought.’

‘So you started to visit him?’

‘I had to help him home that first night. I came back the next day. He was surprised to see me, didn’t even remember that I’d helped him home the previous night.’

‘Did you try to get him off drugs?’

Neil was silent. The door creaked on its hinges.

‘At the beginning I did,’ he said at last. ‘But he seemed to be in control. That sounds stupid, I know, after what I’ve said about finding him in such a state that first night, but it was
his
choice, after all, as he kept reminding me.’

‘What did he think of having a brother in the force?’

‘He thought it was funny. Mind you, I never came round here with my uniform on.’

‘Not till tonight.’

‘That’s right. Anyway, yes, I visited a few times. We stayed up here mostly. He didn’t want the others to see me. He was afraid they’d smell pork.’

It was Rebus’s turn to smile. ‘You didn’t happen to follow Tracy, did you?’

‘Who’s Tracy?’

‘Ronnie’s girlfriend. She turned up at my flat last night. Some men had been following her.’

Neil shook his head. ‘Wasn’t me.’

‘But you
were
at my flat last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you were here the night Ronnie died.’ It was blunt, but necessarily so. Neil stopped playing with the door handle, was silent this time for twenty or thirty seconds, then took a deep breath.

‘For a while I was, yes.’

‘You left this behind.’ Rebus held out the shiny clip, but Neil couldn’t quite make it out in the torchlight. Not that he needed to see it to know what it was.

‘My tie clip? I wondered about that. My tie had broken that day, it was in my pocket.’

Rebus made no attempt to hand over the clip. Instead, he put it back in his pocket. Neil just nodded, understanding.

‘Why did you start following me?’

‘I wanted to talk to you. I just couldn’t pluck up the courage.’

‘You didn’t want news of Ronnie’s death getting back to your parents?’

‘Yes. I thought maybe you wouldn’t be able to trace his identity, but you did. I don’t know what it’ll do to my mum and dad. I think at worst it’ll make them happy, because they’ll know they were right all along, right not to give him a second’s thought.’

‘And at best?’

‘Best?’ Neil stared through the gloom, searching out Rebus’s eyes. ‘There’s no best.’

‘I suppose not,’ said Rebus. ‘But they’ve still got to be told.’

‘I know. I’ve always known.’

‘Then why follow me?’

‘Because now you’re closer to Ronnie than I am. I don’t know why you’re so interested in him, but you are. And that interests me. I want you to find whoever sold him that poison.’

‘I intend to, son, don’t worry.’

‘And I want to help.’

‘That’s the first stupid thing you’ve said, which isn’t bad going for a PC. Truth is, Neil, you’d be the biggest bloody nuisance I could ask for. I’ve got all the help I need for now.’

‘Too many cooks, eh?’

‘Something like that.’ Rebus decided that the confession was ending, that there was little left to be said. He came away from the window and walked to the door, stopping in front of Neil. ‘You’ve already been a bigger nuisance than I needed. It’s not pork I can smell off you, it’s fish. Herrings, to be precise. And guess what colour they are.’

‘What?’

‘Red, son, red.’

There was a noise from downstairs, pressure on floorboards, better than an infra-red alarm anyday. Rebus turned off the torch.

‘Stay here,’ he whispered. Then he went to the top of the stairs. ‘Who’s there?’ A shadow appeared below him. He switched on the torch, and shone it into Tony McCall’s squinting face.

‘Christ, Tony.’ Rebus started downstairs. ‘What a fright.’

‘I knew I’d find you here,’ said McCall. ‘I just knew it.’ His voice was nasal, and Rebus reckoned that since the
time they’d parted some three hours before, McCall had kept on drinking. He stopped on the staircase, then turned and headed back up.

‘Where are you going now?’ called McCall.

‘Just shutting the door,’ said Rebus, closing the bedroom door, leaving Neil inside. ‘Don’t want the ghosts to catch cold, do we?’

McCall was chuckling as Rebus headed downstairs again.

‘Thought we might have a wee snifter,’ he said. ‘And none of that bloody alcohol-free stuff you were quaffing before.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Rebus, expertly manoeuvring McCall out of the front door. ‘Let’s do that.’ And he locked the door behind him, figuring that Ronnie’s brother would know of the many easy ways in and out of the house. Everybody else seemed to know them, after all.

Everybody.

‘Where’ll it be?’ said Rebus. ‘I hope you didn’t drive here, Tony.’

‘Got a patrol car to drop me off.’

‘Fine. We’ll take my car then.’

‘We could drive down to Leith.’

‘No, I fancy something more central. There are a few good pubs in Regent Road.’

‘By Calton Hill?’ McCall was amazed. ‘Christ, John, I can think of better places to go for a drink.’

‘I can’t,’ said Rebus. ‘Come on.’

Nell Stapleton was Holmes’s girlfriend. Holmes had always preferred tall women, tracing the fixation back to his mother who had been five foot ten. Nell was nearly three quarters of an inch taller than Holmes’s mother, but he still loved her.

Nell was more intelligent than Holmes. Or, as he liked to think, they were more intelligent than one another in
different ways. Nell could crack the
Guardian
cryptic crossword in under quarter of an hour on a good day. But she had trouble with arithmetic and remembering names: both strengths possessed by Holmes. People said they looked good together in public, looked comfortable with one another, which was probably true. They felt good together, too, living as they did by several simple rules: no talk of marriage, no thoughts of children, no hinting at living together, and definitely no cheating.

Nell worked as a librarian at Edinburgh University, a vocation Holmes found handy. Today, for example, he had asked her to find him some books on the occult. She had done even better, locating a thesis or two which he could read on the premises if he wished. She also had a printed bibliography of relevant materials, which she handed to him in the pub when they met that evening.