The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories (Rebus Collection) (60 page)

In the photo showing the procession into the cemetery, Cropper was central. There was a woman next to him, identified as his wife. She wore black, her eyes to the ground, her husband gripping her arm. She was skinny and slight, in contrast to the man she’d married. Rebus leaned in a little further towards the screen, then wound the film back to the previous photo. Twenty minutes later, he was still looking.

Albert Simms seemed surprised to see him.

Simms had just finished one of his brewery tours. Rebus was sitting at a table in the sample room, nursing the best part of a pint of
IPA
. It had been a busy tour: eight guests in all. They offered Rebus half-smiles and glances but kept their distance. Simms poured them their drinks but then seemed in a hurry for them to finish, ushering them from the room. It was five minutes before he returned. Rebus was behind the pumps, topping up his glass.

‘No mention of Johnny Watt’s ghost,’ Rebus commented.

‘No.’ Simms was tidying the vests and hard-hats into a plastic storage container.

‘Do you want a drink? My shout.’

Simms thought about it, then nodded. He approached the bar and eased himself on to one of the stools. There was a blue folder lying nearby, but he tried his best to ignore it.

‘Always amazes me,’ Rebus said, ‘the way we humans hang on to things – records, I mean. Chitties and receipts and old photographs. Brewery’s got quite a collection. Same goes for the libraries and the medical college.’ He handed over Simms’s drink. The man made no attempt to pick it up.

‘Joseph Cropper’s wife never had a daughter,’ Rebus began to explain. ‘I got that from Joseph’s grandson, your current boss. He showed me the archives. So much stuff there …’ He paused. ‘When Johnny Watt died, how long had you been working here, Albie?’

‘Not long.’

Rebus nodded and opened the folder, showing Simms the photo from the
Scotsman
, the one of the brewery workers in the yard. He tapped a particular face. A young man, seated on a corner of the wagon, legs dangling, shoulders hunched. ‘You’ve not really changed, you know. How old were you? Fifteen?’

‘You sound as if you know.’ Simms had taken the photocopy from Rebus and was studying it.

‘The police keep records too, Albie. We never throw anything away. Bit of trouble in your youth – nicking stuff; fights. Brandishing a razor on one particular occasion – you did a bit of juvenile time for that. Was that when Joseph Cropper met you? He was the charitable type, according to his grandson. Liked to visit prisons, talk to the men and the juveniles. You were about to be released; he offered you a job. But there were strings attached, weren’t there?’

‘Were there?’ Simms tossed the sheet of paper on to the bar, picked up the glass and drank from it.

‘I think so,’ Rebus said. ‘In fact, I’d go so far as to say I know so.’ He rubbed a hand down his cheek. ‘Be a bugger to prove, mind, but I don’t think I need to do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you want to be caught. You’re an old man now, maybe only a short while left, but it’s been plaguing you. How many years is it, Albie? How long have you been seeing Johnny Watt’s ghost?’

Albert Simms wiped foam from his top lip with his knuckles, but didn’t say anything.

‘I’ve been to take a look at your house,’ Rebus continued. ‘Nice place. Semi-detached; quiet street off Colinton Road. Didn’t take much searching to come up with the transaction. You bought it new a couple of months after Johnny Watt died. No mortgage. I mean, houses were maybe more affordable back then, but on wages like yours? I’ve seen your pay slips, Albie – they’re in the company files too. So where did the money come from?’

‘Go on then – tell me.’

‘Joseph Cropper didn’t have a daughter. You told me he did because you knew fine well it would jar if I ever did any digging. I’d start to wonder why you told that particular lie. He had a wife, though, younger than him.’ Rebus showed Simms a copy of the photo from the cemetery. ‘See how her husband’s keeping a grip on her? She’s either about to faint or he’s just letting everyone know who the boss is. To be honest, my money would be on both. You can’t see her face, but there’s a photo she sat for in a studio …’ He slid it from the folder.

‘Very pretty, I think you’ll agree. This came from Douglas Cropper, by the way. Families keep a lot of stuff too, don’t they? She’d been at school with Johnny Watt. Johnny, with his eye for the ladies. Joseph Cropper couldn’t have his wife causing a scandal, could he? Her in her late teens, him in his early thirties …’ Rebus leaned across the bar a little, so that his face was close to that of the man with the sagging shoulders and face.

‘Could he?’ he repeated.

‘You can’t prove anything, you said as much yourself.’

‘But you wanted someone to find out. When you found out I was a cop, you zeroed in on me. You wanted to whet my appetite, because you needed to be found out, Albie. That’s at the heart of this, always has been. Guilt gnawing away at you down the decades.’

‘Not down the decades – just these past few years.’ Simms took a deep breath. ‘It was only meant to be the frighteners. I was a tough kid but I wasn’t big. Johnny was big and fast, and that bit older. I just wanted him on the ground while I gave him the warning.’ Simms’s eyes were growing glassy.

‘You hit him too hard,’ Rebus commented. ‘Did you push him in or did he fall?’

‘He fell. Even then, I didn’t know he was dead. The boss … when he heard …’ Simms sniffed and swallowed hard. ‘That was the both of us, locked together … We couldn’t tell. They were still hanging people back then.’

‘They hanged a man at Perth jail in ’48,’ Rebus acknowledged. ‘I read it in the
Scotsman
.’

Simms managed a weak smile. ‘I knew you were the man, soon as I saw you. The kind who likes a mystery. Do you do crosswords?’

‘Can’t abide them.’ Rebus paused for a mouthful of
IPA
. ‘The money was to hush you up?’

‘I told him he didn’t need to – working for him, that was what I wanted. He said the money would get me a clean start anywhere in the world.’ Simms shook his head slowly. ‘I bought the house instead. He didn’t like that, but he was stuck with it – what was he going to do?’

‘The two of you never talked about it again?’

‘What was there to talk about?’

‘Did Cropper’s wife ever suspect?’

‘Why should she? Post-mortem was what we had to fear. Once they’d declared it an accident, that was that.’

Rebus sat in silence, waiting until Albert Simms made eye contact, then asked a question of his own. ‘So what are we going to do, Albie?’

Albert Simms exhaled noisily. ‘I suppose you’ll be taking me in.’

‘Can’t do that,’ Rebus said. ‘I’m retired. It’s up to you. Next natural step. I think you’ve already done the hard part.’

Simms thought for a moment, then nodded slowly. ‘No more ghosts,’ he said quietly, almost to himself, as he stared up at the ceiling of the sample room.

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Rebus said.

‘Been here long?’ Siobhan Clarke asked as she entered the Oxford Bar.

‘What else am I going to do?’ Rebus replied. ‘Now I’m on the scrapheap. What about you – hard day at the office?’

‘Do you really want to hear about it?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I know what you’re like. Soon as you get a whiff of a case – mine or anyone else’s – you’ll want to have a go at it yourself.’

‘Maybe I’m a changed man, Siobhan.’

‘Aye, right.’ She rolled her eyes and told the landlord she’d have a gin and tonic.

‘Double?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’ She looked at Rebus. ‘Same again? Then you can make me jealous by telling me stories of your life of leisure.’

‘Maybe I’ll do that,’ said Rebus, raising his pint glass and draining it to the very last drop.

Rankin on Rebus

I

‘Male hero (a policeman?)’

That was my first note to myself, dated 15 March 1985, about the character who would eventually become Detective Inspector John Rebus. I was twenty-four years old and a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh. I was living in a shared apartment with two other – female – postgrads in Arden Street. I’d been in the city six and a half years, and still I couldn’t fathom the place. My doctoral thesis was concentrating on the novelist Muriel Spark, and through her I was beginning to investigate the Edinburgh of the imagination. In Spark’s most celebrated work,
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, Miss Brodie is a descendant of William Brodie, a real historical character. William Brodie was a deacon of the city, a councillor, cabinet-maker and a man who lived a double life. Respectable and industrious by day, by night he led a masked gang into the homes of his victims, robbing them of their valuables. Brodie was trying to fund his lavish lifestyle (including a couple of demanding mistresses), and had diversified into lock fitting, meaning he had little trouble gaining unlawful entry. When caught and found guilty, he was hanged on a scaffold he had helped to modernise as part of his daily profession.

Deacon Brodie provided the template for another great character from Scottish literature – Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Henry Jekyll. Muriel Spark was a huge fan of Stevenson, and my research took me to
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
. The idea of the doppelganger had been explored before, however, in James Hogg’s
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
. . . so I had to read that book, too. At the same time, I was becoming fascinated by contemporary literary theory, enjoying the ‘game playing’ aspect of storytelling. Eventually, I would name my own fictional detective after a type of picture puzzle, and the mystery in his first adventure would be solved with the help of a professor of semiotics.

That’s the problem with
Knots and Crosses
(and one reason I find it hard to read the book these days) – it is so obviously written by a literature student. Rebus reads too many books and even quotes from Walt Whitman – a writer whose works he really shouldn’t have known. He is overly literate, perhaps because I didn’t quite
know
him. I was twenty-four and knew little enough of life outside the confines of academia. I certainly didn’t know what it would be like to work as a cop. The plot of
Knots and Crosses
demanded that Rebus be a seasoned pro, so I made him forty years old. He’s separated from his wife and has a young daughter. Really, this guy was unlike me in so many ways, and our one resemblance – that love of literature – made him less than realistic.

It seems to me now that I wasn’t interested in Rebus as a person – he was a way of telling a story about Edinburgh, and of updating the doppelganger tradition.
Knots and Crosses
was self-consciously based on
Jekyll and Hyde
, just as a later Rebus novel,
The Black Book
, would use
Justified Sinner
as its starting point. The thing is, I’d always been a bit of an outsider/doppelganger, always tried to present several faces to the world. I’d grown up in a fairly tough neighbourhood – a town of 7,000 inhabitants, which had existed only as a hamlet and a couple of farms until coal was discovered at the start of the twentieth century. That’s when my grandfather shifted the family east from the Lanarkshire coalfields. Houses were constructed quickly – and cheaply – to house the new labour force. There wasn’t even time to think up names for the streets, so they just got numbers instead. My dad, the youngest of seven, didn’t work down the mines, but all his brothers did. By the time I came along, however, the coal was running out. The klaxon which signalled the start of each new shift fell silent one day, and that was that. Not that I took much of this in, being too busy living a completely separate life inside my own head.

There was another world in there – a fantastical world filled with spaceships and soldiers and constant thrilling adventure. In winter, I’d pretend that my bed was an Arctic encampment – which wasn’t so far from the truth. There was heating only in the living-room downstairs, and in the winter months I’d wake up to a thin film of ice on the insides of my windows. But even that ice seemed strange and wonderful to my young imagination. I’d be under the thick blankets with a torch and a good supply of comic books – British and American. Soon, I was even making my own versions, folding sheets of paper and slitting the edges to make little eight-page booklets, which I would cover with doodles and drawings – more spaceships, more soldiers. I think I remember showing one of my creations to my mum, who seemed bemused. Maybe she’d spotted something I hadn’t – an absolute lack of artistic ability.

Not that this mattered, because by the age of twelve I was moving from comic books to music. I’d started buying chart singles and reading pop magazines. I was decorating the walls of my room with posters. A friend’s older brother opened my ears to Frank Zappa, Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin. My mother agreed to buy me a Hendrix album for my birthday, although this meant a terrifying sortie to the ‘hippy’ record shop in nearby Kirkcaldy. As with comic books, however, I wasn’t interested in being a mere bystander – I wanted a band of my own, and created on paper what was impossible in real life. My alter-ego was vocalist Ian Kaput, and he was joined by guitarist Blue Lightning and bassist Zed ‘Killer’ Macintosh (plus a drummer with a double-barrelled name, but I forget now what it was). The group was called the Amoebas. They started off playing three-minute pop hits, but eventually graduated to progressive rock. Their masterpiece lasted twenty-six minutes and was called ‘Continuous Repercussions’ – and I was with them all the way, writing their lyrics, designing their record-sleeves, planning their world tours and TV appearances. I’d make up a top ten – albums and singles – each week, which entailed the creation of another nine groups . . . and so it went.

I’m conscious now that what I was doing was ‘playing God’, re-imagining my world and making it more exciting and evocative than the reality. It’s what all writers do, and already I was starting to feel like a writer. My parents weren’t great readers, and there were few books in the house, but I was drawn to stories. I would haunt the town’s library, and soon started borrowing ‘adult’ titles, meaning books whose films I wasn’t old enough to see at the cinema. Age thirteen, I was reading Mario Puzo’s
The Godfather
and Anthony Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange
. By fourteen it was
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. I also came across Ernest Tidyman’s
Shaft
books (and would eventually give Rebus the forename John as a nod to ‘black private dick’ John Shaft). I checked the TV schedules to see if there were any programmes about books, and would watch them, deciding that I really needed to read this guy Solzhenitsyn (I ended up struggling through volume two of
The Gulag Archipelago
). Later on I would fail to finish Dante’s
Inferno
but be thrilled by Ian McEwan’s first book of short stories.

My best subject at high school was English. I always enjoyed writing essays (which were in effect short stories). One was called ‘Paradox’ and concerned a man who seemed to be President of the
USA
but later turned out to be an inmate in an insane asylum. My teacher liked it but wondered why I’d chosen that particular title. It was the name of a Hawkwind song, I told him, and I just liked the sound and look of the word.

‘And no, sir, I’ve no idea what it means
…
’

For another essay, we were given the phrase ‘Dark they were and golden-eyed’ and told to use it as our starting point. I wrote about two parents searching a house filled with drug addicts, seeking their errant son.

Words were a passion of mine. I would do crosswords, and flick through the dictionary, noting interesting new words (including, after the exchange noted above, ‘paradox’). And those song lyrics for the Amoebas had become poems, one of which I entered for a national competition. It was called ‘Euthanasia’ (another of those great-sounding words) and was runner-up. When my success was noted in the local newspaper, my parents learned for the first time that I was writing poetry. I hadn’t dared tell anyone until then. (Later, I would learn that Muriel Spark’s first publication had also been a prize-winning school poem
…
)

I’d always been a successful chameleon, playing the part of fitting in. I hung around the street corners with the tough kids. I played football (badly) and had a bicycle. But when a rumble started, I’d be on the periphery of the action, taking it all in without getting involved. When I went home, I’d head for my bedroom and write poems about the fights, the booze, the first sexual fumblings, and then my notebook would go back underneath my bed, hidden from view.

II

Okay, so I’m seventeen now, and I want nothing more than to be an accountant.

See, nobody in my family has been to university, but it seems I’m brainy and it’s expected I’ll go. And if you’re working class, you go to university to escape your roots – to get a good career. Doctor, lawyer, dentist, architect . . . I had an uncle in England, and he owned his own house (unlike my parents) and had a flash car (neither of my parents could even drive). Our summer holidays were spent at seaside resorts in Scotland and England, or in a cramped caravan twenty miles north of my hometown. My uncle always seemed to have a tan from foreign holidays. He was the most successful man I knew, and I wanted the same for myself.

Problem was, I wasn’t very good at Economics. And I was growing to be ever more in thrall to books and to writing. I’d cranked out a couple of ‘novels’ (probably twenty pages long, scribbled on jotters stolen from my school). The first was about a teenager who feels misunderstood, so runs away from home and ends up in London, where he is ground down by life before eventually committing suicide. The second was a retelling of
Lord of the Flies
, set in my own high school. It was starting to dawn on me: why the hell was I thinking of going to university to study a subject I had no real interest in? I broke the news to my parents and watched their shoulders sag. They were in their late-fifties by this point, not too far from retirement. What, they asked, would I do with a degree in English? It was a fair question.

‘Teach,’ was all I could think to reply.

I started looking at possible universities. St Andrews was the closest, but I liked reading modern American and British novels, and ‘modern’ at St Andrews meant John Milton. I knew this because I’d asked. Edinburgh, however, had a course in US Literature, so I applied there and was eventually accepted.

How well did I know the city? Hardly at all. I’d lived all my life about twenty miles north, but the family seldom ventured that far. I remember being taken to see a stage version of
Peter Pan
, and my mother once took me to the castle and a children’s museum. In my last couple of years at high school, I’d made occasional Saturday-afternoon forays with friends. But we would always stick to the same route, taking in all the available record shops, one radical bookshop (where porn – under the guise of ‘art books’ – could be perused), and a couple of pubs where the bar staff had decided we weren’t underage enough to pose a problem. Arriving in the city in October 1978 as a student was terrifying and exciting. The university had been unable to provide me with accommodation, so I was sharing a room with a school pal in a motel on the outskirts. I was quick to join the Poetry Society and Film Society; quick, too, to discover new pubs, live music venues, and strip bars. I’d also joined a
punk
group (as singer and lyricist), so had found a new outlet for my stanzas. And I was on the receiving end of a slew of rejection letters from magazines and newspapers.

The Poetry Society held weekly meetings. Hormonally charged young men (all the poets seemed to be male, the audience fifty–fifty) would recite odes of love lost, love unrequited, love from afar. My poems were a bit different. A typical opening might be:

Mutated machine-guns patrolling the subways

While glue-sniffing kids hang themselves in lift-shafts
…

I had another poem called ‘Strappado’ (a form of torture) and yet another telling the moving story of a husband who strangles his young wife on their honeymoon. Where was this stuff coming from? Why was I writing lyrics about addicts and killers and crucifixion? I can’t find anything in my early life to justify this apparent interest in the bizarre and the demonic. I even had an alter ego, a drifter called Kejan, who cropped up in several poems and who would usually be drinking absinthe in Paris or traversing the stews of Alexandria: