The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories (Rebus Collection) (26 page)

‘Just as well you’ve got a sense of humour,’ he said. ‘You’ll need it after the match on Saturday.’

‘And you will need your Scottish stoicism.’

‘Save it for the half-time entertainment, eh?’ said Rebus, but with good enough humour. ‘The sooner we get this wrapped up, the more time we’ll have left for sightseeing.’

Cluzeau seemed about to argue, but Rebus held up a hand. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘you’ll want to see these sights. Only the locals know the
very
best pubs in Edinburgh.’

Holmes went to investigate the skip and Rebus spoke in whispers with Lesley Jameson – when he wasn’t fending off demands from the detainees. What had seemed to most of them something unusual and thrilling at first, a story to be repeated across the dining-table, had now become merely tiresome. Though they had asked to make phone calls, Rebus couldn’t help overhearing some of those conversations. They weren’t warning of a late arrival or cancelling an appointment: they were spreading the news.

‘Look, Inspector, I’m really tired of being kept here.’

Rebus turned from Lesley Jameson to the talker. His voice lacked emotion. ‘You’re not being kept here.’

‘What?’

‘Who said you were? Only
Ms
Davies as I understand. You’re free to leave whenever you want.’

There was hesitation at this. To leave and taste freedom again? Or to stay, so as not to miss anything? Muttered dialogues took place and eventually one or two of the guests did leave. They simply walked out, closing the door behind them.

‘Does that mean we can go?’

Rebus nodded. Another woman left, then another, then a couple.

‘I hope you’re not thinking of kicking me out,’ Lesley Jameson warned. She wanted desperately to be a journalist, and to do it the hard way,
sans
nepotism. Rebus shook his head.

‘Just keep talking,’ he said.

Cluzeau was in conversation with Serena Davies. When Rebus approached them, she was studying the Frenchman’s strong-looking hands. Rebus waved his own nail-bitten paw around the gallery.

‘Do you,’ he asked, ‘have any trouble getting people to pose for all these paintings?’

She shook her head. ‘No, not really. It’s funny you should ask, Monsieur Cluzeau was just saying—’

‘Yes, I’ll bet he was. But Monsieur Cluzeau—’ testing the words, not finding them risible any more, ‘has a wife and family.’

Serena Davies laughed; a deep growl which seemed to run all the way up and down the Frenchman’s spine. At last, she let go his hand. ‘I thought we were talking about modelling, Inspector.’

‘We were,’ said Rebus drily, ‘but I’m not sure Mrs Cluzeau would see it like that …’

‘Inspector …?’ It was Maureen Beck. ‘Everyone seems to be leaving. Do I take it we’re free to go?’

Rebus was suddenly businesslike. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to stay behind a little longer.’ He glanced towards the group – Ginny Elyot, Moira Fowler, Margaret Grieve – ‘all of you, please. This won’t take long.’

‘That’s what my husband says,’ commented Moira Fowler, raising a glass of water to her lips. She placed a tablet on her tongue and washed it down.

Rebus looked to Lesley Jameson, then winked. ‘Fasten your seatbelt,’ he told her. ‘It’s going to be a bumpy ride.’

The gallery was now fast emptying and Holmes, having battled against the tide on the stairwell, entered the room on unsteady legs, his eyes seeking out Rebus.

‘Jeez!’ he cried. ‘I thought you’d decided to bugger off after all. What’s up? Where’s everyone going?’

‘Anything in the skip?’ But Holmes shrugged: nothing. ‘I’ve sent everyone home,’ Rebus explained.

‘Everyone except us,’ Maureen Beck said sniffily.

‘Well,’ said Rebus, facing the four women, ‘that’s because nobody but
you
knows anything about the statue.’

The women themselves said nothing at this, but Cluzeau gave a small gasp – perhaps to save them the trouble. Serena Davies, however, had replaced her growl with a lump of ice.

‘You mean one of
them
stole my work?’

Rebus shook his head. ‘No, that’s not what I mean. One person couldn’t have done it. There had to be an accomplice.’ He nodded towards Moira Fowler. ‘
Ms
Fowler, why don’t you take DC Holmes down to your car? He can carry the statue back upstairs.’

‘Moira!’ Another change of tone, this time from ice to fire. For a second, Rebus thought Serena Davies might be about to make a lunge at the thief. Perhaps Moira Fowler thought so too, for she moved without further prompting towards the door.

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘if you like.’

Holmes watched her pass him on her way to the stairwell.

‘Go on then, Brian,’ ordered Rebus. Holmes seemed undecided. He knew he was going to miss the story. What’s more, he didn’t fancy lugging the bloody thing up a flight of stairs.

‘
Vite!
’ cried Rebus, another word of French suddenly coming back to him. Holmes moved on tired legs towards the door. Up the stairs, down the stairs, up the stairs. It would, he couldn’t help thinking, make good training for the Scottish pack.

Serena Davies had put her hand to her brow. Clank-a-clank-clank went the bracelets. ‘I can’t believe it of Moira. Such treachery.’

‘Hah!’ This from Ginny Elyot, her eyes burning. ‘Treachery? You’re a good one to speak. Getting Jim to “model” for you. Neither of you telling her about it. What the hell do you think she thought when she found out?’

Jim being, as Rebus knew from Lesley, Moira Fowler’s husband. He kept his eyes on Ginny.

‘And you, too,
Ms
Elyot. How did you feel when you found out about … David, is it?’

She nodded. Her hand went towards her hair again, but she caught herself, and gripped one hand in the other. ‘Yes, David,’ she said quietly. ‘That statue’s got David’s eyes, his hair.’ She wasn’t looking at Rebus. He didn’t feel she was even replying to his question.

She was remembering.

‘And Gerry’s nose and jawline. I’d recognise them anywhere.’ This from Margaret Grieve, she of the significant other. ‘But Gerry can’t keep secrets, not from me.’

Maureen Beck, who had been nodding throughout, never taking her moist eyes off the artist, was next. Her husband too, Robert, the architect, had modelled for Serena Davies. On the quiet, of course. It had to be on the quiet: no knowing what passions might be aroused otherwise. Even in a city like Edinburgh, even in women as seemingly self-possessed and cool-headed as these. Perhaps it had all been very innocent. Perhaps.

‘He’s got Robert’s figure,’ Maureen Beck was saying. ‘Down to the scar on his chest from that riding accident.’

A crime of passion, just as Cluzeau had predicted. And after Rebus telling him that there was no such thing as passion in the city. But there was; and there were secrets too. Locked within these paintings, fine so long as they were abstract, so long as they weren’t modelled from life. But for all that ‘Monstrous Trumpet’ was, in Serena Davies’s words, a ‘composite’, its creation still cut deep. For each of the four women, there was something recognisable there, something modelled from life, from husband or lover. Something which burned and humiliated.

Unable to stand the thought of public display, of visitors walking into the gallery and saying ‘Good God, doesn’t that statue look like …?’ Unable to face the thought of this, and of the ridicule (the detailed penis, the tongue, and that sticking-plaster) they had come together with a plan. A clumsy, almost unworkable plan, but the only plan they had.

The statue had gone into Margaret Grieve’s roomy bag, at which point Ginny Elyot had raised the alarm – hysterically so, attracting all the guests towards that one room, unaware as they pressed forwards that they were passing Margaret Grieve discreetly moving the other way. The bag had been passed to Maureen Beck, who had then slipped upstairs to the toilet. She had opened the window and dropped the statue down into the skip, from where Moira Fowler had retrieved it, carrying it out to her own car. Beck had returned, to find Serena Davies stopping people from leaving; a minute or two later, Moira Fowler had arrived.

She now walked in, followed by a red-faced Holmes, the statue cradled in his arms. Serena Davies, however, appeared not to notice. She had her eyes trained on the parquet floor and, again, she was being studied by Cluzeau. ‘What a creature,’ he had said of her. What a creature indeed. The four thieves would certainly be in accord in calling her ‘creature’.

Who knows, thought Rebus, they might even be in
bon accord
.

The artist was neither temperamental nor stupid enough to insist on pressing charges and she bent to Rebus’s suggestion that the piece be withdrawn from the show. The pressure thereafter was on Lesley Jameson not to release the story to her father’s paper. Female solidarity won in the end, but it was a narrow victory.

Not much female solidarity elsewhere, thought Rebus. He made up a few mock headlines, the sort that would have pleased Dr Curt. Feminist Artist’s Roll Models; Serena’s Harem of Husbands; The Anti-Knox Knocking Shop. All as he sat squeezed into a corner of the Sutherland Bar. Somewhere along the route, Cluzeau – now insisting that Rebus call him Jean-Pierre – had found half a dozen French fans, in town for the rugby and already in their cups. Then a couple of the Scottish fans had tagged along too and now there were about a dozen of them, standing at the bar and singing French rugby songs. Any minute now someone would tip an ice-bucket onto their heads. He prayed it wouldn’t be Brian Holmes, who, shirt-tail out and tie hanging loose, was singing as lustily as anyone, despite the language barrier – or even, perhaps, because of it.

Childish, of course. But then that was men for you. Simple pleasures and simple crimes. Male revenge was simple almost to the point of being infantile: you went up to the bastard and you stuck your fist into his face or kneed him in the nuts. But the revenge of the female. Ah, that was recondite stuff. He wondered if it was finished now, or would Serena Davies face more plots, plots more subtle, or better executed, or more savage? He didn’t really want to think about it. Didn’t want to think about the hate in the four women’s voices, or the gleam in their eyes. He drank to forget. That was why men joined the Foreign Legion too, wasn’t it? To forget. Or was it?

He was buggered if he could remember. But something else niggled too. The women had laid claim to a lover’s jawline, a husband’s figure. But whose, he couldn’t help wondering, was the penis?

Someone was tugging at his arm, pulling him up. The glasses flew from the table and suddenly he was being hugged by Jean-Pierre.

‘John, my friend, John, tell me who this man Peter Zealous is that everyone is talking to me about?’

‘It’s Sellers,’ Rebus corrected. To tell or not to tell? He opened his mouth. There was the machine-gun sound of things spilling onto the bar behind him. Small, solid things. Next thing he knew, it was dark and his head was very cold and very wet.

‘I’ll get you for this, Brian,’ he said, removing the ice-bucket from his head. ‘So help me I will.’

Talk Show

Lowland Radio was a young but successful station broadcasting to lowland Scotland. It was said that the station owed its success to two very different personalities. One was the DJ on the midmorning slot, an abrasive and aggressive Shetland Islander, called Hamish MacDiarmid. MacDiarmid hosted a phone-in, supposedly concerning the day’s headlines, but in fact these were of relatively minor importance. People did not listen to the phone-in for opinion and comment: they listened for the attacks MacDiarmid made on just about every caller. There were occasional fierce interchanges, interchanges the DJ nearly always won by dint of severing the connection with anyone more intelligent, better informed, or more rational than himself.

Rebus knew that there were men in his own station who would try to take a break between ten-forty-five and eleven-fifteen just to listen. The people who phoned the show knew what they’d get, of course: that was part of the fun. Rebus wondered if they were masochists, but in fact he knew they probably saw themselves as challengers. If they could best MacDiarmid, they would have ‘won’. And so MacDiarmid himself became like some raging bull, entering the ring every morning for another joust with the picadors. So far he’d been goaded but not wounded, but who knew how long the luck would last …?

The other ‘personality’ – always supposing personality could be applied to someone so ethereal – was Penny Cook, the softly spoken, seductive voice on the station’s late-night slot. Five nights a week, on her show
What’s Cookin’
, she offered a mix of sedative music, soothing talk, and calming advice to those who took part in her own phone-in segment. These were very different people from those who chose to confront Hamish MacDiarmid. They were quietly worried about their lives, insecure, timid; they had home problems, work problems, personal problems. They were the kind of people, Rebus mused, who got sand kicked in their faces. MacDiarmid’s callers, on the other hand, were probably the ones doing the kicking …

Perhaps it said something about the lowlands of Scotland that Penny Cook’s show was said to be the more popular of the two. Again, people at the station talked about it with the fervour usually reserved for TV programmes.

‘Did you hear yon guy with the bend in his tackle … ?’

‘That woman who said her husband didn’t satisfy her …’

‘I felt sorry for that hooker though, wantin’ out o’ the game …’

And so on. Rebus had listened to the show himself a few times, slumped on his chair after closing-time. But never for more than a few minutes; like a bedtime story, a few minutes of Penny Cook sent John Rebus straight to the land of Nod. He’d wondered what she looked like. Husky, comfortable, come-to-bed: the picture of her he’d built up was all images, but none of them exactly physical. Sometimes she sounded blonde and tiny, sometimes statuesque with flowing raven hair. His picture of Hamish MacDiarmid was much more vivid: bright red beard, caber-tossing biceps and a kilt.

Well, the truth would out. Rebus stood in the cramped reception area of Lowland Radio and waited for the girl on the switchboard to finish her call. On the wall behind her, a sign said
WELCOME
:. That colon was important. This seemed to be Lowland Radio’s way of greeting the personalities who’d come to the station, perhaps to give interviews. Today, below the
WELCOME
:, written in felt tip were the names
JEZ JENKS
and
CANDY BARR
. Neither name meant anything to Rebus, though they probably would to his daughter. The receptionist had finished her call.

‘Have you come for some stickers?’

‘Stickers?’

‘Car-stickers,’ she explained. ‘Only we’re all out of them. Just temporary, we’ll be getting more next week if you’d like to call back.’

‘No, thanks anyway. I’m Inspector Rebus. I think Miss Cook’s expecting me.’

‘Oh, sorry.’ The receptionist giggled. ‘I’ll see if she’s around. It was Inspector …?’

‘Rebus.’

She scribbled the name on a pad and returned to her switchboard. ‘An Inspector Reeves to see you, Penny …’

Rebus turned to another wall and cast an eye over Lowland Radio’s small display of awards. Well, there was stiff competition these days, he supposed. And not much advertising revenue to go round. Another local station had countered the challenge posed by Hamish MacDiarmid, hiring what they called ‘The Ranter’, an anonymous individual who dished out insult upon insult to anyone foolish enough to call his show.

It all seemed a long way from the Light Programme, a long way from glowing valves and Home Counties diction. Was it true that the BBC announcers used to wear dinner jackets?
DJ
s in
DJ
s, Rebus thought to himself and laughed.

‘I’m glad somebody’s cheerful.’ It was Penny Cook’s voice; she was standing right behind him. Slowly he turned to be confronted by a buxom lady in her early forties – only a year or two younger than Rebus himself. She had permed light brown hair and wore round glasses – the kind popularised by John Lennon on one hand and the NHS on the other.

‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘I’m never what people expect.’ She held out a hand, which Rebus shook. Not only did Penny Cook sound unthreatening, she
looked
unthreatening.

All the more mysterious then that someone, some anonymous caller, should be threatening her life …

They walked down a corridor towards a sturdy-looking door, to the side of which had been attached a push-button array.

‘Security,’ she said, pressing four digits before pulling open the door. ‘You never know what a lunatic might do given access to the airwaves.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Rebus, ‘I’ve heard Hamish MacDiarmid.’

She laughed. He didn’t think he’d heard her laugh before. ‘Is Penny Cook your real name?’ he asked, thinking the ice sufficiently broken between them.

‘Afraid so. I was born in Nairn. To be honest, I don’t think my parents had heard of Penicuik. They just liked the name Penelope.’

They were passing studios and offices. Loudspeakers placed in the ceiling of the corridor relayed the station’s afternoon show.

‘Ever been inside a radio station before, Inspector?’

‘No, never.’

‘I’ll show you around if you like.’

‘If you can spare the time …’

‘No problem.’ They were approaching one studio outside which a middle-aged man was in quiet conversation with a spiky-headed teenager. The teenager looked sullen and in need of a wash. Rebus wondered if he were the man’s son. If so, a lesson in parental control was definitely needed.

‘Hi, Norman,’ Penny Cook said in passing. The man smiled towards her. The teenager remained sullen: a controlled pose, Rebus decided. Further along, having passed through another combination-lock door, Penny herself cleared things up.

‘Norman’s one of our producers.’

‘And the kid with him?’

‘Kid?’ She smiled wryly. ‘That was Jez Jenks, the singer with Leftover Lunch. He probably makes more a day than you and I make in a good year.’

Rebus couldn’t remember ever having a ‘good year’ – the curse of the honest copper. A question came to him.

‘And Candy Barr?’

She laughed at this. ‘I thought my own name took some beating. Mind you, I don’t suppose it’s her real name. She’s an actress or a comedienne or something. From across the water, of course.’

‘Doesn’t sound like an Irish name,’ Rebus said as Penny Cook held open her office door.

‘I wouldn’t make jokes around here, Inspector,’ she said. ‘You’ll probably find yourself being signed up for a spot on one of our shows.’

‘The Laughing Policeman?’ Rebus suggested. But then they were in the office, the door was closed, and the atmosphere cooled appropriately. This was business, after all. Serious business. She sat at her desk. Rebus sat down on the chair across from her.

‘Do you want a coffee or anything, Inspector?’

‘No thanks. So, when did these calls start, Miss Cook?’

‘About a month ago. The first time he tried it, he actually got through to me on-air. That takes some doing. The calls are filtered through two people before they get to me. Efficient people, too. They can usually tell a crank caller from the real thing.’

‘How does the system work? Somebody calls in … then what?’

‘Sue or David takes the call. They ask a few questions. Basically, they want to know the person’s name, and what it is they want to talk to me about. Then they take a telephone number, tell the caller to stay by his or her telephone, and if we want to put the person on-air, they phone the caller back and prepare them.’

‘Fairly rigorous then.’

‘Oh yes. And even supposing the odd crank does get through, we’ve got a three-second delay on them when they’re on-air. If they start cussing or raving, we cut the call before it goes out over the ether.’

‘And is that what happened with this guy?’

‘Pretty much.’ She shook a cassette box at him. ‘I’ve got the tape here. Do you want to hear?’

‘Please.’

She started to load a cassette player on the ledge behind her. There were no windows in the office. From the number of steps they’d descended to get there, Rebus reckoned this whole floor of the building was located beneath ground-level.

‘So you got a phone number for this guy?’

‘Only it turned out to be a phone box in some housing scheme. We didn’t know that at the time. We never usually take calls from phone boxes. But it was one of those ones that use the phone cards. No beeps, so nobody could tell.’ She had loaded the tape to her satisfaction, but was now waiting for it to rewind. ‘After he tried getting through again, we phoned his number. It rang and rang, and then some old girl picked it up. She explained where the box was. That was when we knew he’d tricked us.’ The tape thumped to a stop. She hit the play button, and sat down again. There was a hiss as the tape began, and then her voice filled the room. She smiled in embarrassment, as if to say: yes, it’s a pose, this husky, sultry, late-night me. But it’s a living …

‘And now we’ve got Peter on line one. Peter, you’re through to Penny Cook. How are things with you this evening?’

‘Not so good, Penny.’

She interrupted the tape for a moment: ‘This is where we cut him off.’

The man’s voice had been sleepy, almost tranquillised. Now it erupted. ‘I know what you’re up to! I know what’s going on!’ The tape went dead. She leaned back in her chair and switched off the machine.

‘It makes me shiver every time I hear it. That anger … such a sudden change in the voice. Brr.’ She reached into her drawer and brought out cigarettes and a lighter. Rebus accepted a cigarette from her.

‘Thanks,’ he said. Then: ‘The name’ll be false, of course, but did he give a surname?’

‘A surname, an address, even a profession. He said he lived in Edinburgh, but we looked up the street name in the
A to Z
and it doesn’t exist. From now on, we check that addresses are real before we call back. His surname was Gemmell. He even spelt it out for Sue. She couldn’t believe he was a crank, he sounded so genuine.’

‘What did he tell her his problem was?’

‘Drinking too much … how it was affecting his work. I like that sort of problem. The advice is straightforward, and it can be helping a lot of people too scared to phone in.’

‘What did he say his job was?’

‘Bank executive. He gave Sue the bank’s name and everything,
and he kept saying it wasn’t to be broadcast.’ She smiled, shook her head. ‘I mean, this nut really was
good
.’

Rebus nodded. ‘He seems to have known the set-up pretty well.’

‘You mean he got to the safe without triggering any of the alarms?’ She smiled still. ‘Oh yes, he’s a real pro.’

‘And the calls have persisted?’

‘Most nights. We’ve got him tagged now though. He’s tried using different accents … dialects … always a different name and job. But he hasn’t managed to beat the system again. When he knows he’s been found out, he does that whole routine again. “I know what you’ve done.” Blah, blah. We put the phone down on him before he can get started.’

‘And what
have
you done, Miss Cook?’

‘Absolutely nothing, Inspector. Not that I know of.’

Rebus nodded slowly. ‘Can I hear the tape again?’

‘Sure.’ She wound it back, and they listened together. Then she excused herself – ‘to powder my nose’ – and Rebus listened twice more. When she returned, she was carrying two plastic beakers of coffee.

‘Thought I might tempt you,’ she said. ‘Milk, no sugar … I hope that’s all right.’

‘Thank you, yes, that’s just the job.’

‘So, Inspector, what do you think?’

He sipped the lukewarm liquid. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you’ve got an anonymous phone-caller.’