Strip Jack (7 page)

‘And its registration,’ Rebus added. ‘There are all sorts of people out there . . . terrorists . . . people with a grudge . . . plain nutters. Doesn’t do any good.’

‘Thank you, Inspector.’ The door swung open and Helen Greig entered, carrying two large mugs of tea. A far cry from the silver salver routine at the gates. She handed one to Urquhart and one to Gregor Jack, then removed a slim box from where it had been held between her arm and her side. It was a fresh box of ginger nuts. Rebus smiled.

‘Lovely, Helen, thanks,’ said Gregor Jack. He eased two biscuits from the packet.

Rebus rose to his feet. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’d better be going. Like I say, I only dropped in . . .’

‘I do appreciate it, Inspector.’ Jack had placed mug and biscuits on the floor and was now standing, too, hand held out again towards Rebus. A warm, strong and unflawed hand. ‘I meant to ask, do you live in the constituency?’

Rebus shook his head. ‘One of my colleagues does. I was staying with him last night.’

Jack raised his head slowly before nodding. The gesture could have meant anything. ‘I’ll open the gates for you,’ Ian Urquhart was saying.

‘Stay here and drink your tea,’ Helen Greig said. ‘I’ll see the Inspector out.’

‘If you like, Helen,’ Urquhart said slowly. Was there a warning in his voice? If there was, Helen Greig seemed not
to sense it. He fished in his pocket for the keys and handed them to her.

‘Right then,’ Rebus said. ‘Goodbye, Mr Jack . . . Mr Urquhart.’ He took Urquhart’s hand for a moment and squeezed it. But his attention was on the man’s left hand. Wedding ring on one finger, and a signet ring on another. Gregor Jack’s left hand sported just the one thick band of gold. Not, however, on his wedding finger, but on the finger next to it. The wedding finger was the one with the eczema . . .

And Helen Greig? A few trinket rings on both hands, but she was neither married nor engaged.

‘Goodbye.’

Helen Greig was first out of the house, but waited for him beside the car, jangling the keys in her right hand.

‘Have you worked for Mr Jack long?’

‘Long enough.’

‘Hard work, being an MP, isn’t it? I expect he needs to unwind from time to time –’

She stopped and glared at him. ‘Not you too! You’re as bad as that lot!’ She gestured with the keys towards the gates and the figures beyond. ‘I won’t hear a word said against Gregor.’ She started walking again, more briskly now.

‘He’s a good employer then?’

‘He’s not
like
an employer at all. My mother’s been ill. He gave me a bonus in the autumn so I could take her for a wee holiday down the coast.
That’s
the sort of man he is.’ There were tears in her eyes, but she forced them back. The reporters were passing cups between them, complaining about sugar or the lack of it. They didn’t seem to expect much from the approach of the two figures.

‘Talk to us, Helen.’

‘A word with Gregor and we can all go home. We’ve got families to think of, you know.’

‘I’m missing communion,’ joked one of them.

‘Yes, communion with your lunchtime pint,’ returned another.

One of the local reporters – by the accents, there weren’t many of them present – had recognized Rebus.

‘Inspector, anything to tell us?’ A few ears pricked up at that ‘Inspector’.

‘Yes,’ said Rebus, causing Helen Greig to stiffen. ‘Bugger off.’

There were smiles at this and a few groans. The gates opened and were about to close, leaving Rebus on the outside again. But he pressed his weight against the gate and leaned towards the young woman, his mouth close to her ear.

‘I forgot, I’ll have to go back in.’

‘What?’

‘I forgot, or rather Mr Jack did. He wanted me to check on his wife, in case she was taking the news badly . . .’

He waited for the notion of this to sink in. Helen Greig puckered her lips in a silent O. The notion had sunk in.

‘Only,’ Rebus went on, ‘I forgot to get the address . . .’

She stood on her toes and, so the newsmen wouldn’t hear, whispered into his ear: ‘Deer Lodge. It’s between Knockandhu and Tomnavoulin.’

Rebus nodded, and allowed her to close and lock the gates. His curiosity was not exactly dispelled. In fact, he was more curious now than when he’d gone in. Knockandhu and Tomnavoulin: the names of a couple of malt whiskies. His head told him never to drink again. His heart told him differently . . .

Damn, he’d meant to phone Patience from Holmes’ house, just to let her know he was on his way. Not that she kept him to an itinerary or anything . . . but all the same. He made for the reporter he recognized, the local lad, Chris Kemp.

‘Hello, Chris. Got a phone in your car? Mind if I make a call . . .?’

‘So,’ said Dr Patience Aitken, ‘how was your
ménage à trois
?’

‘Not bad,’ said Rebus, before kissing her loudly on the lips. ‘How was your orgy?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Shop talk and overcooked lasagne.
You didn’t manage home then?’ Rebus looked blank. ‘I tried phoning Marchmont, and you weren’t there either. Your suit looks like you slept in it.’

‘Blame the bloody cat.’

‘Lucky?’

‘He was doing the twist all over the jacket till I rescued it.’

‘The
twist
? Nothing shows a man’s true age more than his choice of dance step.’

Rebus was shedding the suit now. ‘You haven’t got any orange juice, have you?’

‘Bit of a sore head? Time to stop the drinking, John.’

‘Time to settle down, you mean.’ He pulled off his trousers. ‘All right if I take a bath?’

She was studying him. ‘You know you don’t have to ask.’

‘No, but all the same, I like to ask.’

‘Permission granted . . . as always. Did Lucky do that, too?’ She was pointing to the scratches on his wrist.

‘He’d be in the microwave if he had.’

She smiled. ‘I’ll see about the orange juice.’

Rebus watched her make for the kitchen. He attempted a dry-mouthed wolf-whistle. From nearby, one of the budgies showed him how to do it properly. Patience turned towards the budgie and smiled.

He lay down in the foaming bath and closed his eyes, breathing deeply, the way his doctor had told him to. Relaxation technique, he’d called it. He wanted Rebus to relax a bit more. High blood pressure, nothing serious, but all the same . . . Of course, there were pills he could take, beta-blockers. But the doctor was in favour of self-help. Deep relaxation. Self-hypnosis. Rebus had had half a mind to tell the doctor that his own father had been a hypnotist, that his brother still might be a professional hypnotist somewhere . . .

Deep breathing . . . emptying the mind . . . relaxing the head, the forehead, the jaw, the neck muscles, the chest, the arms. Counting backwards down to zero . . . no stress, no strain . . .

At first, Rebus had accused the doctor of penny-pinching, of not wanting to give out costly drugs. But the damned
thing seemed to work. He
could
help himself. He could help himself to Patience Aitken . . .

‘Here you go,’ she said, coming into the bathroom. She was holding a long thin glass of orange juice. ‘As squeezed by Dr Aitken.’

Rebus slipped a sudsy arm around her buttocks. ‘As squeezed by Inspector Rebus.’

She bent down and kissed him on his head. Then touched a finger to his hair. ‘You need to start using a conditioner, John. All the life’s going out of your follicles.’

‘That’s because it’s headed somewhere else.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Down, boy,’ she said. Then, before he could make a grab for her again, she fled from the bathroom. Rebus, smiling, settled further into the bath.

Deep breathing . . . emptying the mind . . .
Had
Gregor Jack been set up. If so, who by? And to what purpose? A scandal, of course. A political scandal, a front-page scandal. But the atmosphere in the Jack household had been . . . well,
strange
. Strained, certainly, but also cold and edgy, as though the worst were still to happen.

The wife . . . Elizabeth . . . something didn’t seem right there. Something seemed very odd indeed. Background, he needed more background. He needed to be
sure
. The lodge address was fixed in his mind, but from what he knew of Highland police stations little good would come of phoning on a Sunday. Background . . . He thought again of Chris Kemp, the reporter. Yes, why not? Wake up, arms, wake up, chest, neck and head. Sunday was no time to be resting. For some people, Sunday was a day of work.

Patience stuck her head round the door. ‘Quiet night in this evening?’ she suggested. ‘I’ll cook us a –’

‘Quiet night be damned,’ Rebus said, rising impressively from the water. ‘Let’s go out for a drink.’

You know me, John. I don’t
mind
a bit of sleaze, but this place is cheapskate sleaze. Don’t you think I’m worth better?’

Rebus pecked Patience’s cheek, placed their drinks on the table, and sat down beside her. ‘I got you a double,’ he said.

‘So I see.’ She picked up the glass. ‘Not much room for the tonic, is there?’

They were seated in the back room of the Horsehair public house on Broughton Street. Through the doorway could be seen the bar itself, noisy as ever. People who wanted to have a conversation seemed to place themselves like duellists a good ten paces away from the person they wanted to talk with. The result was that a lot of shouting went on, producing much crossfire and more crossed wires. It was noisy, but it was fun. The back room was quieter. It was a U-shaped arrangement of squashy seating (around the walls) and rickety chairs. The narrow lozenge-shaped tables were fixed to the floor. Rumour had it that the squashy seating had been stuffed with horsehair in the 1920s and not restuffed since. Thus the Horsehair, whose real and prosaic name had long since been discarded.

Patience poured half a small bottle of tonic water into her gin, while Rebus supped on a pint of IPA.

‘Cheers,’ she said, without enthusiasm. Then: ‘I know damned fine that there’s got to be a reason for this. I mean, a reason why we’re here. I
suppose
it’s to do with your work?’

Rebus put down the glass. ‘Yes,’ he said.

She raised her eyes to the nicotine-coloured ceiling. ‘Give me strength,’ she said.

‘It won’t take long,’ Rebus said. ‘I thought afterwards we could go somewhere . . . a bit more your style.’

‘Don’t patronize me, you pig.’

Rebus stared into his drink, thinking about that statement’s various meanings. Then he caught sight of a new customer in the bar, and waved through the doorway. A young man came forwards, smiling tiredly.

‘Don’t often see you in here, Inspector Rebus,’ he said.

‘Sit down,’ said Rebus. ‘It’s my round. Patience, let me introduce you to one of Scotland’s finest young reporters, Chris Kemp.’

Rebus got up and headed for the bar. Chris Kemp pulled over a chair and, having tested it first, eased himself on to it.
‘He must want something,’ he said to Patience, nodding towards the bar. ‘He knows I’m a sucker for a bit of flattery.’

Not that it
was
flattery. Chris Kemp had won awards for his early work on an Aberdeen evening paper, and had then moved to Glasgow, there to be voted Young Journalist of the Year, before arriving in Edinburgh, where he had spent the past year and a half ‘stirring it’ (as he said himself). Everyone knew he’d one day head south. He knew it himself. It was inescapable. There didn’t seem to be much left for him to stir in Scotland. The only problem was his student girlfriend, who wouldn’t graduate for another year and wouldn’t think of moving south before then, if ever . . .

By the time Rebus returned from the bar, Patience had been told all of this and more. There was a film over her eyes which Chris Kemp, for all his qualities, could not see. He talked, and as he talked she was thinking: Is John Rebus worth all this? Is he worth the effort I seem to have to make? She didn’t love him: that was understood. ‘Love’ was something that had happened to her a few times in her teens and twenties and even, yes, in her thirties. Always with inconclusive or atrocious results. So that nowadays it seemed to her ‘love’ could as easily spell the end of a relationship as its beginning.

She saw it in her surgery. She saw men and women (but mostly women) made ill from love, from loving too much and not being loved enough in return. They were every bit as sick as the child with earache or the pensioner suffering angina. She had pity and words for them, but no medicines.

Time heals, she might say in an unguarded moment. Yes, heals into a callus over the wound, hard and protective. Just like she felt: hard and protective. But did John Rebus need her solidity, her protection?

‘Here we are,’ he said on his return. ‘The barman’s slow tonight, sorry.’

Chris Kemp accepted the drink with a thin smile. ‘I’ve just been telling Patience . . .’

Oh God, Rebus thought as he sat down. She looks like a bucketful of ice. I shouldn’t have brought her. But if I’d said I
was popping out for the evening on my own . . . well, she’d have been the same. Get this over and done with, maybe the night can be rescued.

‘So, Chris,’ he said, interrupting the young man, ‘what’s the dirt on Gregor Jack?’

Chris Kemp seemed to think there was plenty, and the introduction of Gregor Jack into the conversation perked Patience up a bit, so that she forgot for a time that she wasn’t enjoying herself.

Rebus was interested mostly in Elizabeth Jack, but Kemp started with the MP himself, and what he had to say was interesting. Here was a different Jack, different from the public image, the received opinion, but different too from Rebus’s own ideas having met with the man. He would not, for example, have taken Jack for a drinker.

‘Terrible one for the whisky,’ Kemp was saying. ‘Probably more than half a bottle a day, more when he’s in London by all accounts.’

‘He never looks drunk.’

‘That’s because he doesn’t
get
drunk. But he drinks all the same.’

‘What else?’

There was more, plenty more. ‘He’s a smooth operator, but cunning. Deep down cunning. I wouldn’t trust him further than I can spit. I know someone who knew him at university. Says Gregor Jack never did anything in his life that wasn’t premeditated. And that goes for capturing
Mrs
Gregor Jack.’