The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories

  ‘I don’t think you understand me, Inspector. Manual strangulation. From the Latin manus, meaning the hand. From the deep body temperature, I’d say he died between midnight and two in the morning. He was strung up on that contraption some time thereafter. Bruising around the throat is definitely consistent with thumb-pressure especially.’

  ‘You mean someone strangled him?’ Rebus said, really for Holmes’s benefit.

  ‘I think that’s what I’ve been telling you, yes. If I find out anything more, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Are the forensics people with you?’

  ‘I’ve contacted the lab. They’re sending someone over with some bags, but to be honest, we started off on this one thinking it was simple suicide. We may have inadvertently destroyed the tinier scraps of evidence.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ Rebus said, a father-confessor now, easing guilt. ‘Just get what you can.’

  He put down the receiver and stared at his Detective Constable. Or, rather, stared through him. Holmes knew that there were times for talking and times for silence, and that this fell into the latter category. It took Rebus a full minute to snap out of his reverie.

  ‘Well I’ll be buggered,’ he said. ‘We’ve been talking with a murderer this morning, Brian. A cold-blooded one at that. And we didn’t even know it. I wonder whatever happened to the famous police “nose” for a villain. Any idea?’

  Holmes frowned. ‘About what happened to the famous police “nose”?’

  ‘No,’ cried Rebus, exasperated. ‘I mean, any idea who did it?’

  Holmes shrugged, then brought the Fringe programme back out from where it had been rolled up in his jacket pocket. He started turning pages. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘there’s an Agatha Christie playing somewhere. Maybe we could get a few ideas?’

  Rebus’s eyes lit up. He snatched the programme from Holmes’s hands. ‘Never mind Agatha Christie,’ he said, starting through the programme himself. ‘What we want is Shakespeare.’

  ‘What, Macbeth? Hamlet? King Lear?’

  ‘No, not a tragedy, a good comedy, something to cheer the soul. Ah, here we go.’ He stabbed the open page with his finger. ‘Twelfth Night. That’s the play for us, Brian. That’s the very play for us.’

  The problem, really, in the end was: which Twelfth Night? There were three on offer, plus another at the Festival proper. One of the Fringe versions offered an update to gangster Chicago, another played with an all-female cast and the third boasted futuristic stage-design. But Rebus wanted traditional fare, and so opted for the Festival performance. There was just one hitch: it was a complete sell-out.

  Not that Rebus considered this a hitch. He waited while Holmes called his girlfriend, Nell Stapleton, and apologised to her about some evening engagement he was breaking, then the two men drove to the Lyceum, tucked in behind the Usher Hall so as to be almost invisible to the naked eye.

  ‘There’s a five o’clock performance,’ Rebus explained. ‘We should just make it.’ They did. There was a slight hold-up while Rebus explained to the house manager that this really was police business and not some last-minute culture beano, and a place was found for them in a dusty corner to the rear of the stalls. The lights were dimming as they entered.

  ‘I haven’t been to a play in years,’ Rebus said to Holmes, excited at the prospect. Holmes, bemused, smiled back, but his superior’s eyes were already on the stage, where the curtain was rising, a guitar was playing and a man in pale pink tights lay across an ornate bench, looking as cheesed off with life as Holmes himself felt. Why did Rebus always have to work from instinct, and always alone, never letting anyone in on whatever he knew or thought he knew? Was it because he was afraid of failure? Holmes suspected it was. If you kept your ideas to yourself, you couldn’t be proved wrong. Well, Holmes had his own ideas about this case, though he was damned if he’d let Rebus in on them.

  ‘If music be the food of love …’ came the voice from the stage. And that was another thing – Holmes was starving. It was odds-on the back few rows would soon find his growling stomach competition for the noises from the stage.

  ‘Will you go hunt, my lord?’

  ‘What, Curio?’

  ‘The hart.’

  ‘Why, so I do, the noblest that I have …’

  Holmes sneaked a glance towards Rebus. To say the older man’s attention was rapt would have been understating the case. He’d give it until the end of Act One, then sneak out to the nearest chip shop. Leave Rebus to his Shakespeare; Holmes was a nationalist when it came to literature. A pity Hugh MacDiarmid had never written a play.

  In fact, Holmes went for a wander, up and down Lothian Road as far as the Caledonian Hotel to the north and Tollcross to the south. Lothian Road was Edinburgh’s fast-food centre and the variety on offer brought with it indecision. Pizza, burgers, kebabs, Chinese, baked potatoes, more burgers, more pizza and the once-ubiquitous fish and chip shop (more often now an offshoot of a kebab or burger restaurant). Undecided, he grew hungrier, and stopped for a pint of lager in a noisy barn of a pub before finally settling for a fish supper, naming himself a nationalist in cuisine as well as in writing.

  By the time he returned to the theatre, the players were coming out to take their applause. Rebus was clapping as loudly as anyone, enjoyment evident on his face. But when the curtain came down, he turned and dragged Holmes from the auditorium, back into the foyer and out onto the street.

  ‘Fish and chips, eh?’ he said. ‘Now there’s an idea.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I can smell the vinegar coming off your hands. Where’s the chippie?’

  Holmes nodded in the direction of Tollcross. They started walking. ‘So did you learn anything?’ Holmes asked. ‘From the play, I mean?’

  Rebus smiled. ‘More than I’d hoped for, Brian. If you’d been paying attention, you’d have noticed it, too. The only speech that mattered was way back in Act One. A speech made by the Fool, whose name is Feste. I wonder who played Feste in ART’s production last year? Actually, I think I can guess. Come on then, where’s this chip shop? A man could starve to death on Lothian Road looking for something even remotely edible.’

  ‘It’s just off Tollcross. It’s nothing very special.’

  ‘So long as it fills me up, Brian. We’ve got a long evening ahead of us.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Rebus nodded vigorously. ‘Hunting the heart, Brian.’ He winked towards the younger man. ‘Hunting the heart.’

  V

  The door of the Morrison Street flat was opened by Peter Collins. He looked surprised to see them.

  ‘Don’t worry, Peter,’ Rebus said, pushing past him into the hall. ‘We’re not here to put the cuffs on you for possession.’ He sniffed the air in the hall, then tutted. ‘Already? At this rate you’ll be stoned before News at Ten.’

  Peter blushed.

  ‘All right if we come in?’ Rebus asked, already sauntering down the hall towards the living-room. Holmes followed him indoors, smiling an apology. Peter closed the door behind them.

  ‘They’re mostly out,’ Peter called.

  ‘So I see,’ said Rebus, in the living-room now. ‘Hello, Marie, how are you feeling?’

  ‘Hello again, Inspector. I’m a little better.’ She was dressed, and seated primly on the chair, hands resting on her knees. Rebus looked towards the sofa, but thought better of sitting down. Instead he rested himself on the sofa’s fairly rigid arm. ‘I see you’re all getting ready to go.’ He nodded towards the two rucksacks parked against the living-room wall. The sleeping-bags from the floor had been folded away, as had books and alarm clocks.

  ‘Why bother to stay?’ Peter said. He flopped onto the sofa and pushed a hand through his hair. ‘We thought we’d drive down through the night. Be back in Reading by dawn with any luck.’

  Rebus nodded at this. ‘So the show does not go on?’

  ‘It’d be a bit bloody heartless, don’t you think?’ This from Peter Collins, with a glance towards Marie. br />
  ‘Of course,’ Rebus agreed. Holmes had stationed himself between the living-room door and the rucksacks. ‘So where is everyone?’

  Marie answered. ‘Pam and Marty have gone for a last walk around.’

  ‘And Charles is almost certainly off getting drunk somewhere,’ added Collins. ‘Rueing his failed show.’

  ‘And Hugh?’ asked Rebus. Collins shrugged.

  ‘I think,’ Marie said, ‘Hugh went off to get drunk, too.’

  ‘But for different reasons, no doubt,’ Rebus speculated.

  ‘He was David’s best friend,’ she answered quietly.

  Rebus nodded thoughtfully. ‘Actually, we just bumped into him – literally.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Mr Clay. He seems to be in the middle of a pub crawl the length of Lothian Road. We were coming out of a chip shop and came across him weaving his way to the next watering-hole.’

  ‘Oh?’ Collins didn’t sound particularly interested.

  ‘I told him where the best pubs in this neighbourhood are. He didn’t seem to know.’

  ‘That was good of you,’ Collins said, voice heavy with irony.

  ‘Nice of them all to leave you alone, isn’t it though?’

  The question hung in the air. At last, Marie spoke. ‘What do you mean?’

  But Rebus shifted on his perch and left the comment at that. ‘No,’ he said instead, ‘only I thought Mr Clay might have had a better idea of the pubs, seeing how he was here last year, and then again in June to look at the venue. But of course, as he was good enough to explain, he wasn’t here in June. There were exams. Some people had to study harder than others. Only three of you came to Edinburgh in June.’ Rebus raised a finger shiny with chip-fat. ‘Pam, who has what I’d call a definite crush on you, Peter.’ Collins smiled at this, but weakly. Rebus raised a second and then third finger. ‘And you two. Just the three of you. That, I presume, is where it started.’

  ‘What?’ The blood had drained from Marie’s face, making her somehow more beautiful than ever. Rebus shifted again, seeming to ignore her question.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter who took that photo of you, the one I found in Bonfire of the Vanities.’ He was staring at her quite evenly now. ‘What matters is that it was there. And on the inside cover someone had drawn a couple of hearts, very similar to some I happened to see on Peter’s copy of the play. It matters that on his copy of the play, Peter has also written the words “I love Edinburgh”.’ Peter Collins was ready to protest, but Rebus studiously ignored him, keeping his eyes on Marie’s, fixing her, so that there might only have been the two of them in the room.

  ‘You told me,’ he continued, ‘that you’d come to Edinburgh to check on the venue. I took that “you” to mean all of you, but Hugh Clay has put me right on that. You came without David, who was too busy studying to make the trip. And you told me something else earlier. You said your relationship with him had “survived”. Survived what? I asked myself afterwards. The answer seems pretty straightforward. Survived a brief fling, a fling that started in Edinburgh and lasted the summer.’

  Now, only now, did he turn to Peter Collins. ‘Isn’t that right, Peter?’

  Collins, his face mottled with anger, made to rise.

  ‘Sit down,’ Rebus ordered, standing himself. He walked towards the fireplace, turned and faced Collins, who looked to be disappearing into the sofa, reducing in size with the passing moments. ‘You love Edinburgh,’ he went on, ‘because that’s where your little fling with Marie started. Fair enough, these things are never anyone’s fault, are they? You managed to keep it fairly secret. The Tom Wolfe book belongs to you, though, and that photo you’d kept in it – maybe forgetting it was there – that photo might have been a giveaway, but then again it could all be very innocent, couldn’t it?

  ‘But it’s hard to keep something like that so secret when you’re part of a very small group. There were sixteen of you in ART last year; that might have made it manageable. But not when there were only seven of you. I’m not sure who else knows about it. But I am sure that David Caulfield found out.’ Rebus didn’t need to turn round to know that Marie was sobbing again. He kept staring at Peter Collins. ‘He found out, and last night, late and backstage, perhaps drunk, the two of you had a fight. Quite dramatic in its way, isn’t it? Fighting over the heroine and all that. But during the fight you just happened to strangle the life out of David Caulfield.’ He paused, waiting for a denial which didn’t come.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he continued, ‘Marie wanted to go to the police. I don’t know. But if she did, you persuaded her not to. Instead, you came up with something more dramatic. You’d make it look like suicide. And by God, what a suicide, the kind that David himself might just have attempted.’ Rebus had been moving forward without seeming to, so that now he stood directly over Peter Collins.

  ‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘very dramatic. But the note was a mistake. It was a bit too clever, you see. You thought everyone would take it as a reference to David’s success in last year’s production, but you knew yourself that there was a double meaning in it. I’ve just been to see Twelfth Night. Bloody good it was, too. You played Feste last year, didn’t you, Peter? There’s one speech of his … how does it go?’ Rebus seemed to be trying to remember. ‘Ah yes: “Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.” Yes, that’s it. And that’s when I knew for sure.’

  Peter Collins was smiling thinly. He gazed past Rebus towards Marie, his eyes full and liquid. His voice when he spoke was tender. ‘“Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage; and for turning away, let summer bear it out.”’

  ‘That’s right,’ Rebus said, nodding eagerly. ‘Summer bore it out, all right. A summer fling. That’s all. Not worth killing someone for, was it, Peter? But that didn’t stop you. And the hanging was so apt, so neat. When you recalled the Fool’s quote, you couldn’t resist putting that note in David’s pocket.’ Rebus was shaking his head. ‘More fool you, Mr Collins. More fool you.’

  Brian Holmes went home from the police station that night in sombre mood. The traffic was slow, too, with theatre-goers threading in and out between the near-stationary cars. He rolled down the driver’s-side window, trying to make the interior less stuffy, less choked, and instead let in exhaust fumes and balmy late-evening air. Why did Rebus have to be such a clever bugger so much of the time? He seemed always to go into a case at an odd angle, like someone cutting a paper shape which, apparently random, could then be folded to make an origami sculpture, intricate and recognisable.

  ‘Too clever for his own good,’ he said to himself. But what he meant was that his superior was too clever for Holmes’s own good. How was he expected to shine, to be noticed, to push forwards towards promotion, when it was always Rebus who, two steps ahead, came up with the answers? He remembered a boy at school who had always beaten Holmes in every subject save History. Yet Holmes had gone to university; the boy to work on his father’s farm. Things could change, couldn’t they? Though all he seemed to be learning from Rebus was how to keep your thoughts to yourself, how to be devious, how to, well, how to act. Though all this were true, he would still be the best understudy he possibly could be. One day, Rebus wouldn’t be there to come up with the answers, or – occasion even more to be relished – would be unable to find the answers. And when that time came, Holmes would be ready to take the stage. He felt ready right now, but then he supposed every understudy must feel that way.

  A flybill was thrown through his window by a smiling teenage girl. He heard her pass down the line of cars, yelling ‘Come and see our show!’ as she went. The small yellow sheet of paper fluttered onto the passenger seat and stayed there, face up, to haunt Holmes all the way back to Nell. Growing sombre again, it occurred to him how different things might have been if only Priestley had called the play A Detective Constable Calls instead.

  Tit for Tat

  Before he’d arrived in Edinburgh in 1970, Inspector John Rebus had fixed in his mind an image of tenem
ent life. Tenements were things out of the Gorbals in the early years of the century, places of poverty and despair, safe havens for vermin and disease. They were the enforced homes of the poorest of the working class, a class almost without a class, a sub-class. Though tenements rose high into the air, they might as well have been dug deep into the ground. They were society’s replacement for the cave.

  Of course, in the 1960s the planners had come up with something even more outrageous – the tower-block. Even cities with plenty of spare land started to construct these space-saving horrors. Perhaps the moral rehabilitation of the tenement had something to do with this new contender. Nowadays, a tenement might contain the whole of society in microcosm – the genteel spinster on the ground floor, the bachelor accountant one floor above, then the barkeeper, and above the barkeeper, always it seemed right at the top of the house, the students. This mix was feasible only because the top two floors contained flats rented out by absentee landlords. Some of these landlords might own upwards of one hundred separate flats – as was spectacularly the case in Glasgow, where the figure was even rumoured, in one or two particulars, to rise into four figures.

  But in Edinburgh, things were different. In Edinburgh, the New Town planners of the nineteenth century had come up with streets of fashionable houses, all of them, to Rebus’s latter-day eyes, looking like tenements. Some prosperous areas of the city, such as Marchmont where Rebus himself lived, boasted almost nothing but tenements. And with the price of housing what it was, even the meaner streets were seeing a kind of renaissance, stone-blasted clean by new owner-occupiers who kept the cooking-range in the living-room as an ‘original feature’.

  The streets around Easter Road were as good an example as any. The knock-on effect had reached Easter Road late. People had to decide first that they couldn’t afford Stockbridge, then that they couldn’t quite afford any of the New Town or its immediate surroundings, and at last they might arrive in Easter Road, not by chance but somehow through fate. Soon, an enterprising soul saw his or her opportunity and opened a delicatessen or a slightly upmarket café, much to the bemusement of the ‘locals’. These were quiet, accepting people for the most part, people who liked to see the tenement buildings being restored even if they couldn’t understand why anyone would pay good money for bottled French water. (After all, you were always told to steer clear of the water on foreign holidays, weren’t you?)