The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories

  One name was uttered by three very different people in three distinct parts of the city: Brian Cant. The name meant little to Rebus.

  ‘It wouldn’t,’ he was told. ‘Brian only shifted across here from the west a year or so ago. He’s got form from when he was a nipper, but he’s grown smart since then. When the Glasgow cops started sniffing, he moved operations.’ The detective listened, nodded, drank a watered-down whisky, and said little. Brian Cant grew from a name into a description, from a description into a personality. But there was something more.

  ‘You’re not the only one interested in him,’ Rebus was told in a bar in Gorgie. ‘Somebody else was asking questions a wee while back. Remember Jackie Hanson?’

  ‘He used to be CID, didn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right, but not any more …’

  Not just any old banger for Brian Cant: he specialised in ‘quality motors’. Rebus eventually got an address: a third-floor tenement flat near Powderhall race-track. A young man answered the door. His name was Jim Cant, Brian’s younger brother. Rebus saw that Jim was scared, nervous. He chipped away at the brother quickly, explaining that he was there because he thought Brian might be dead. That he knew all about Cant’s business, but that he wasn’t interested in pursuing this side of things, except insofar as it might shed light on the death. It took a little more of this, then the brother opened up.

  ‘He said he had a customer interested in a car,’ Jim Cant explained. ‘An Irishman, he said.’

  ‘How did he know the man was Irish?’

  ‘Must have been the voice. I don’t think they met. Maybe they did. The man was interested in a specific car.’

  ‘A red Jaguar?’

  ‘Yeah, convertible. Nice cars. The Irishman even knew where there was one. It seemed a cinch, that’s what Brian kept saying. A cinch.’

  ‘He didn’t think it would be hard to steal?’

  ‘Five seconds’ work, that’s what he kept saying. I thought it sounded too easy. I told him so.’ He bent over in his chair, grabbing at his knees and sinking his head between them. ‘Ach, Brian, what the hell have you done?’

  Rebus tried to comfort the young man as best he could with brandy and tea. He drank a mug of tea himself, wandering through the flat, his mind thrumming. Was he blowing things up out of all proportion? Maybe. He’d made mistakes before, not so much errors of judgement as errors of jumping the gun. But there was something about all of this … Something.

  ‘Do you have a photo of Brian?’ he asked as he was leaving. ‘A recent one would be best.’ Jim Cant handed him a holiday snap.

  ‘We went to Crete last summer,’ he explained. ‘It was magic.’ Then, holding the door open for Rebus: ‘Don’t I have to identify him or something?’

  Rebus thought of the scrapings which were all that remained of what may or may not have been Brian Cant. He shook his head. ‘I’ll let you know,’ he said. ‘If we need you, we’ll let you know.’

  The next day was Sunday, day of rest. Rebus rested in his car, parked fifty yards or so along the road from the gates to West Lodge. He put his radio on, folded his arms and sank down into the driver’s seat. This was more like it. The Hollywood private eye on a stakeout. Only in the movies, a stakeout could be whittled away to a few minutes’ footage. Here, it was measured in a slow ticking of seconds … minutes … quarter hours.

  Eventually, the gates opened and a figure hurried out, fairly trotting along the pavement as though released from bondage. Jacqueline Dean was wearing a denim jacket, short black skirt and thick black tights. A beret sat awkwardly on her cropped dark hair and she pressed the palm of her hand to it from time to time to stop it sliding off altogether. Rebus locked his car before following her. He kept to the other side of the road, wary not so much from fear that she might spot him but because C13 might have put a tail on her, too.

  She stopped at the local newsagent’s first and came out heavy-laden with Sunday papers. Rebus, making to cross the road, a Sunday-morning stroller, studied her face. What was the expression he’d thought of the first time he’d seen her? Yes, moping. There was still something of that in her liquid eyes, the dark shadows beneath. She was making for the corner shop now. Doubtless she would appear with rolls or bacon or butter or milk. All the things Rebus seemed to find himself short of on a Sunday, no matter how hard he planned.

  He felt in his jacket pockets, but found nothing of comfort there, just the photograph of Brian Cant. The window of the corner shop, untouched by the blast, contained a dozen or so personal ads, felt-tipped onto plain white postcards. He glanced at these, and past them, through the window itself to where Jacqueline was making her purchases. Milk and rolls: elementary, my dear Conan Doyle. Waiting for her change, she half-turned her head towards the window. Rebus concentrated on the postcards. ‘Candy, Masseuse’ vied for attention with ‘Pram and carry-cot for sale’, ‘Babysitting considered’, and ‘Lada, seldom used’. Rebus was smiling, almost despite himself, when the door of the shop tinkled open.

  ‘Jacqueline?’ he said. She turned towards him. He was holding open his ID. ‘Mind if I have a word, Miss Dean?’

  Major Dean was pouring himself a glass of Irish whiskey when the drawing-room door opened.

  ‘Mind if I come in?’ Rebus’s words were directed not at Dean but at Matthews, who was seated in a chair by the window, one leg crossed over the other, hands gripping the arm-rests. He looked like a nervous businessman on an airplane, trying not to let his neighbour see his fear.

  ‘Inspector Rebus,’ he said tonelessly. ‘I thought I could feel my scalp tingle.’

  Rebus was already in the room. He closed the door behind him. Dean gestured with the decanter, but Rebus shook his head.

  ‘How did you get in?’ Matthews asked.

  ‘Miss Dean was good enough to escort me through the gate. You’ve changed the guard detail again. She told them I was a friend of the family.’

  Matthews nodded. ‘And are you, Inspector? Are you a friend of the family?’

  ‘That depends on what you mean by friendship.’

  Dean had seated himself on the edge of his chair, steadying the glass with both hands. He didn’t seem quite the figure he had been on the day of the explosion. A reaction, Rebus didn’t doubt. There had been a quiet euphoria on the day; now came the aftershock.

  ‘Where’s Jacqui?’ Dean asked, having paused with the glass to his lips.

  ‘Upstairs,’ Rebus explained. ‘I thought it would be better if she didn’t hear this.’

  Matthews’ fingers plucked at the arm-rests. ‘How much does she know?’

  ‘Not much. Not yet. Maybe she’ll work it out for herself.’

  ‘So, Inspector, we come to the reason why you’re here.’

  ‘I’m here,’ Rebus began, ‘as part of a murder inquiry. I thought that’s why you were here, too, Mr Matthews. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’re here to cover up rather than bring to light.’

  Matthews’ smile was momentary. But he said nothing.

  ‘I didn’t go looking for the culprits,’ Rebus went on. ‘As you said, Mr Matthews, that was your department. But I did wonder who the victim was. The accidental victim, as I thought. A young car thief called Brian Cant, that would be my guess. He stole cars to order. A client asked him for a red open-top Jag, even told him where he might find one. The client told him about Major Dean. Very specifically about Major Dean, right down to the fact that every day he’d nip into the wine-shop on the main street.’ Rebus turned to Dean. ‘A bottle of Irish a day, is it, sir?’

  Dean merely shrugged and drained his glass.

  ‘Anyway, that’s what your daughter told me. So all Brian Cant had to do was wait near the wine-shop. You’d get out of your car, leave it running, and while you were in the shop he could drive the car away. Only it bothered me that the client – Cant’s brother tells me he spoke with an Irish accent – knew so much, making it easy for Cant. What was stopping this person from stealing the car himself ?’

  ?
??And the answer came to you?’ Matthews suggested, his voice thick with irony.

  Rebus chose to avoid his tone. He was still watching Dean. ‘Not straight away, not even then. But when I came to the house, I couldn’t help noticing that Miss Dean seemed a bit strange. Like she was waiting for a phone call from someone and that someone had let her down. It’s easy to be specific now, but at the time it just struck me as odd. I asked her about it this morning and she admitted it’s because she’s been jilted. A man she’d been seeing, and seeing regularly, had suddenly stopped calling. I asked her about him, but she couldn’t be very helpful. They never went to his flat, for example. He drove a flashy car and had plenty of money, but she was vague about what he did for a living.’

  Rebus took a photograph from his pocket and tossed it into Dean’s lap. Dean froze, as though it were some hair-trigger grenade.

  ‘I showed her a photograph of Brian Cant. Yes, that was the name of her boyfriend – Brian Cant. So you see, it was small wonder she hadn’t heard from him.’

  Matthews rose from the chair and stood before the window itself, but nothing he saw there seemed to please him, so he turned back into the room. Dean had found the courage to lift the photograph from his leg and place it on the floor. He got up too, and made for the decanter.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Matthews hissed, but Dean poured regardless.

  Rebus’s voice was level. ‘I always thought it was a bit of a coincidence, the car being stolen only seconds before exploding. But then the IRA use remote control devices, don’t they? So that someone in the vicinity could have triggered the bomb any time they liked. No need for all these long-term timers and what have you. I was in the SAS once myself.’

  Matthews raised an eyebrow. ‘Nobody told me that,’ he said, sounding impressed for the first time.

  ‘So much for Intelligence, eh?’ Rebus answered. ‘Speaking of which, you told me that Major Dean here was in Intelligence. I think I’d go further. Covert operations, that sort of thing? Counter-intelligence, subversion?’

  ‘Now you’re speculating, Inspector.’

  Rebus shrugged. ‘It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that someone had been spying on Brian Cant, an ex-policeman called Jackie Hanson. He’s a private detective these days. He won’t say anything about his clients, of course, but I think I can put two and two together without multiplying the result. He was working for you, Major Dean, because you were interested in Brian Cant. Jacqueline was serious about him, wasn’t she? So much so that she might have forsaken university. She tells me they were even talking of moving in together. You didn’t want her to leave. When you found out what Cant did for a … a living, I suppose you’d call it, you came up with a plan.’ Rebus was enjoying himself now, but tried to keep the pleasure out of his voice.

  ‘You contacted Cant,’ he went on, ‘putting on an Irish accent. Your Irish accent is probably pretty good, isn’t it, Major? It would need to be, working in counter-intelligence. You told him all about a car – your car. You offered him a lot of money if he’d steal it for you and you told him precisely when and where he might find it. Cant was greedy. He didn’t think twice.’ Rebus noticed that he was sitting very comfortably in his own chair, whereas Dean looked … the word that sprang to mind was ‘rogue’. Matthews, too, was sparking internally, though his surface was all metal sheen, cold bodywork.

  ‘You’d know how to make a bomb, that goes without saying. Wouldn’t you, Major? Know thine enemy and all that. Like I say, I was in the SAS myself. What’s more, you’d know how to make an IRA device, or one that looked like the work of the IRA. The remote was in your pocket. You went into the shop, bought your whiskey, and when you heard the car being driven off, you simply pressed the button.’

  ‘Jacqueline.’ Dean’s voice was little more than a whisper. ‘Jacqueline.’ He rose to his feet, walked softly to the door and left the room. He appeared to have heard little or nothing of Rebus’s speech. Rebus felt a pang of disappointment and looked towards Matthews, who merely shrugged.

  ‘You cannot, of course, prove any of this, Inspector.’

  ‘If I put my mind to it I can.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve no doubt, no doubt.’ Matthews paused. ‘But will you?’

  ‘He’s mad, you’ve got to see that.’

  ‘Mad? Well, he’s unstable. Ever since his wife …’

  ‘No reason for him to murder Brian Cant.’ Rebus helped himself to a whisky now, his legs curiously shaky. ‘How long have you known?’

  Matthews shrugged again. ‘He tried a similar trick in Germany, apparently. It didn’t work that time. So what do we do now? Arrest him? He’d be unfit to plead.’

  ‘However it happens,’ Rebus said, ‘he’s got to be made safe.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Matthews was nodding agreement. He came to the sideboard. ‘A hospital, somewhere he can be treated. He was a good soldier in his day. I’ve read his record. A good soldier. Don’t worry, Inspector Rebus, he’ll be “made safe” as you put it. He’ll be taken care of.’ A hand landed on Rebus’s forearm. ‘Trust me.’

  Rebus trusted Matthews – about as far as he could spit into a Lothian Road headwind. He had a word with a reporter friend, but the man wouldn’t touch the story. He passed Rebus on to an investigative journalist who did some ferreting, but there was little or nothing to be found. Rebus didn’t know Dean’s real name. He didn’t know Matthews’ first name or rank or even, to be honest, that he had been C13 at all. He might have been Army, or have inhabited that indefinite smear of operations somewhere between Army, Secret Service and Special Branch.

  By the next day, Dean and his daughter had left West Lodge and a fortnight later it appeared in the window of an estate agent on George Street. The asking price seemed surprisingly low, if your tastes veered towards The Munsters. But the house would stay in the window for a long time to come.

  Dean haunted Rebus’s dreams for a few nights, no more. But how did you make safe a man like that? The Army had designed a weapon and that weapon had become misadjusted, its sights all wrong. You could dismantle a weapon. You could dismantle a man, too, come to that. But each and every piece was still as lethal as the whole. Rebus put aside fiction, put aside Hammett and the rest and of an evening read psychology books instead. But then they too, in their way, were fiction, weren’t they? And so, too, in time became the case that was not a case of the man who had never been.

  Being Frank

  It wasn’t easy, being Frank.

  That’s what everybody called him, when they weren’t calling him a dirty old tramp or a scrounger or a layabout. Frank, they called him. Only the people at the hostel and at the Social Security bothered with his full name: Francis Rossetti Hyslop. Rossetti, he seemed to remember, not after the painter but after his sister the poet, Christina. Most often, a person – a person in authority – would read that name from the piece of paper they were holding and then look up at Frank, not quite in disbelief, but certainly wondering how he’d come so low.

  He couldn’t tell them that he was climbing higher all the time. That he preferred to live out of doors. That his face was weatherbeaten, not dirty. That a plastic bag was a convenient place to keep his possessions. He just nodded and shuffled his feet instead, the shuffle which had become his trademark.

  ‘Here he comes,’ his companions would cry. ‘Here comes The Shuffler!’ Alias Frank, alias Francis Rossetti Hyslop.

  He spent much of the spring and autumn in Edinburgh. Some said he was mad, leaving in the summer months. That, after all, was when the pickings were richest. But he didn’t like to bother the tourists, and besides, summer was for travelling. He usually walked north, through Fife and into Kinross or Perthshire, setting up camp by the side of a loch or up in the hills. And when he got bored, he’d move on. He was seldom moved on by gamekeepers or the police. Some of them he knew of old, of course. But others he encountered seemed to regard him more and more as some rare species, or, as one had actually said, a ‘national monument’.

/>   It was true, of course. Tramp meant to walk and that’s what tramps used to do. The term ‘gentleman of the road’ used to be accurate. But the tramp was being replaced by the beggar: young, fit men who didn’t move from the city and who were unrelenting in their search for spare change. That had never been Frank’s way. He had his regulars of course, and often he only had to sit on a bench in The Meadows, a huge grassy plain bordered by tree-lined paths, and wait for the money to appear in his lap.

  That’s where he was when he heard the two men talking. It was a bright day, a lunchtime and there were few spaces to be had on the meagre supply of Meadows’ benches. Frank was sitting on one, arms folded, eyes closed, his legs stretched out in front of him with one foot crossed over the other. His three carrier bags were on the ground beside him, and his hat lay across his legs – not because he was hot especially, but because you never knew who might drop a coin in while you were dozing, or pretending to doze.

  Maybe his was the only bench free. Maybe that’s why the men sat down beside him. Well, ‘beside him’ was an exaggeration. They squeezed themselves onto the furthest edge of the bench, as far from him as possible. They couldn’t be comfortable, squashed up like that and the thought brought a moment’s smile to Frank’s face.

  But then they started to talk, not in a whisper but with voices lowered. The wind, though, swept every word into Frank’s right ear. He tried not to tense as he listened, but it was difficult. Tried not to move, but his nerves were jangling.

  ‘It’s war,’ one said. ‘A council of war.’

  War? He remembered reading in a newspaper recently about terrorists. Threats. A politician had said something about vigilance. Or was it vigilantes? A council of war: it sounded ominous. Maybe they were teasing him, trying to scare him from the bench so that they could have it for themselves. But he didn’t think so. They were speaking in undertones; they didn’t think he could hear. Or maybe they simply knew that it didn’t matter whether an old tramp heard them or not. Who would believe him?