A Good Hanging and other Stories (23 page)

He checked the damp patch in the bathroom again, letting his hand rest against it for half a minute. Mmm: it still wasn’t completely dry. But then maybe his hands were damp from the washing he had been carrying. What the hell. Back in the bedroom, he picked up some books from the floor and stacked them against a wall, beside other columns of paperbacks and hardbacks, read and unread. One day he would get time to read them. They were like contraband: he couldn’t stop himself buying them, but then he never really did anything with them once he’d bought them. The buying was the thing, that sense of ownership. Perhaps somewhere in Britain someone had exactly the same collection of books as him, but he doubted it. The range was too eclectic, everything from secondhand rugby yearbooks to dense philosophical works. Meaningless, really; without pattern. So much of his working life was spent to a pattern, a modus operandi. A series of rules for the possible (not probable) solving of crimes. One of the rules would have it that he get through the briefcase full of work before Monday morning and, preferably, while still sober.

Bell. Bell?

Bell. Someone at his front door. Jesus, on a
Sunday?
Not on a Sunday, please, God. The wrong door: they’d got the wrong door. Give them a minute and they would realise their mistake. Bell again. Bloody hell’s bells. Right then, he would answer it.

He pulled the door open slowly, peering around it. Detective Constable Brian Holmes was standing on the tenement landing.

‘Brian?’

‘Hello, sir. Hope you don’t mind. I was in the neighbourhood and thought I’d ... you know.’

Rebus held open the door. ‘Come in.’

He led Holmes through the hall, stepping over the electric flex. Holmes stared at the flex, an alarmed look on his face.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Rebus, pausing at the threshold of the living-room. ‘I’m not going to jump in the bath with an electric fire. Just drying out a damp patch.’

‘Oh.’ Holmes sounded unconvinced. ‘Right.’

‘Sit down,’ said Rebus. ‘I’ve just opened a bottle of wine. Would you like some?’

‘Bit early for me,’ Holmes said, glancing towards Rebus’s glass.

‘Well, coffee then. I think there’s still some in the pot.’

‘No thanks, I’m fine.’

They were both seated, Rebus in his usual chair, Holmes perched on the edge of the sofa. Rebus knew why the younger officer was here, but he was damned if he would make it easy for him.

‘In the neighbourhood you say?’

‘That’s right. I was at a party last night in Mayfield. Afterwards, I stopped the night.’

‘Oh?’

Holmes smiled. ‘No such luck, I slept on the sofa.’

‘It’s still off with Nell then?’

‘I don’t know. Sometimes she ... let’s change the subject.’

He flipped one of the newspapers over so that he could study the back page. ‘Did you see the boxing last night?’

‘I don’t have a television.’

Holmes looked around the room, then smiled again. ‘Neither you do. I hadn’t noticed.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind when you come up for promotion, Constable.’ Rebus took a large gulp of wine, watching Holmes over the rim of the glass. Holmes was looking less comfortable by the second.

‘Any plans for the day?’

‘Such as?’

Holmes shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I thought maybe you had a Sunday routine. You know: clean the car, that sort of thing.’

Rebus nodded towards the briefcase on the table. ‘Paperwork. That’ll keep me busy most of the day.’

Holmes nodded, flicking through the paper until he came, as Rebus knew he would, to the piece about the nightclub bust.

‘It’s at the bottom of the page,’ Rebus said. ‘But then you know that, don’t you? You’ve already seen it.’ He rose from his chair sharply and walked to the hi-fi, turning the record over. Alto sax bloomed from the speakers. Holmes still hadn’t said anything. He was pretending to read the paper, but his eyes weren’t moving. Rebus returned to his seat.

‘Was there really a party, Brian?’

‘Yes.’ Holmes paused. ‘No.’

‘And you weren’t just passing?’

‘No. I wanted to see how you were.’

‘And how am I?’

‘You look fine.’

‘That’s because I
am
fine.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Perfectly.’

Holmes sighed and threw aside the paper. ‘I’m glad to hear it. I was worried, John. We were all a bit shaken up.’

‘I’ve killed someone before, Brian. It wasn’t the first time.’

‘Yes, but Christ, I mean ...’ Holmes got up and walked to the window, looking down on the street. A nice quiet street in a quiet part of town. Net curtains and trim front gardens, the gardens of professional people, lawful people, people who smiled at you in shops or chatted in a bus queue.

But Rebus’s mind flashed again to the dark alleyway, a distant streetlamp, the cornered drug dealer. He had thrown packets from his pockets onto the ground as he had run. Like sowing seed. Small polythene bags of drugs soft and hard. Sowing them in the soft mud, every year a new crop.

Then the blinding light. The flat steel of a knife. Not a huge knife, but how big did a knife need to be? An inch of blade would be enough. Anything more was excess. It was a very excessive knife indeed, curved, serrated edge, a commando special. The kind you could buy from a camping shop. The kind
anybody
could buy from a camping shop. A serious knife for outdoor pursuits. Rebus had the idea they called them ‘survival’ knives.

The man - not much more than a boy in reality, eighteen or nineteen - had not hesitated. He slid the knife out from the waistband of his trousers. He lunged, one swipe, two swipes. Rebus wasn’t fit, but his reactions were fast. On the third swipe, he snapped out a hand and caught the wrist, twisting it all the way. The knife fell to the ground. The dealer cried out in pain and dropped to one knee. No words had passed between the two men. There was no real need for words.

But then Rebus had realised that his opponent was not on his knees as a sign of defeat. He was scrabbling around for the knife and found it with his free hand. Rebus let go of the dead wrist and pinned the man’s left arm to his body, but the arm was strong and the blade sheared through Rebus’s trousers, cutting a red line up across his thigh. Rebus brought his knee up hard into his adversary’s crotch and felt the body go limp. He repeated the action, but the dealer wasn’t giving up. The knife was rising again. Rebus grabbed the wrist with one hand, the other going for the man’s throat. Then he felt himself being spun and pushed hard up against the wall of the alley. The wall was damp, smelling of mould. He pressed a thumb deep into the dealer’s larynx, still wrestling with the knife. His knee thudded into the man’s groin again. And then, as the strength in the knife-arm eased momentarily, Rebus yanked the wrist and pushed.

Pushed hard, driving the dealer across the alley and against the other wall. Where the man gasped, gurgled, eyes bulging. Rebus stood back and released his grasp on the wrist, the wrist which held the knife, buried up to the hilt in the young man’s stomach.

‘Oh shit,’ he whispered. ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.’

The dealer was staring in surprise at the handle of the knife. His hand fell away from it, but the knife itself stayed put. He shuffled forward, walking past Rebus, who could only stand and watch, making for the entrance to the alleyway. The tip of the knife was protruding through the back of the dealer’s jacket. He made it to the mouth of the alley before falling to his knees.

‘Sir?’

‘Mmm?’ Rebus looked up and saw that Holmes was studying him from the window. ‘What is it, Brian?’

‘Are you okay?’

‘I told you, I’m fine.’ Rebus tipped the last of the wine down his throat and placed the glass on the floor, trying to control the trembling in his hand.

‘It’s just that ... well, I’ve never — ’

‘You’ve never killed anyone.’

‘That’s right,’ Holmes came back to the sofa. ‘I haven’t.’ He sat down, hands pressed between his knees, leaning slightly forwards as he spoke. ‘What does it feel like?’

‘Feel like?’ Rebus smiled with half his mouth. ‘It doesn’t feel like anything. I don’t even think about it. That’s the best way.’

Holmes nodded slowly. Rebus was thinking: get to the point. And then Holmes came to the point.

‘Did you mean to do it?’ he asked.

Rebus had no hesitation. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t know it had happened until it did happen. We got into a clinch and somehow the knife ended up where it ended up. That’s all. That’s what I told them back at the station and that’s what I’ll tell any inquiry they shove at me. It was an accident.’

‘Yes,’ said Holmes quietly, nodding. ‘That’s what I thought.’

Accidents will happen, won’t they?

Like burning the steak. Like finishing the bottle when you’d meant to have just a couple of glasses. Like punching a dent in the bathroom wall. Accidents happened and most of them happened in the home.

Holmes refused the offer of lunch and left. Rebus sat in the chair for a while, just listening to jazz, forgetting all about the steak. He only remembered it when he went to open another bottle of wine. The corkscrew had found its way back into the cutlery drawer, and he plucked out a knife by mistake. A small sharp-bladed knife with a wooden handle. He kept this knife for steaks especially.

It was good of Holmes to look in, no matter what the motive. And it was good of him not to stay, too. Rebus needed to be alone, needed time and space enough to think. He had told Holmes he never thought about it, never thought about death. That was a lie; he thought about it all the time. This weekend he was replaying Friday night, going over the scene time and time again in his head. Trying to answer the question Holmes himself had asked: was it an accident? But every time Rebus went through it, the answer became more and more vague. The hand was holding the knife, and then Rebus was angling that hand away from himself, propelling the hand and the body behind it backward into the wall of the alley. Angling the hand ... That was the vital moment. When he grabbed the wrist so that the knife was pointing towards the dealer, what had been going through his mind then? The thought that he was saving himself? Or that he was about to kill the dealer?

Rebus shook his head. It was no clearer now than it had been at the time. The media had chalked it up yesterday as self-defence and the internal inquiry would come to the same conclusion. Could he have disarmed the young man? Probably. Would the man have killed Rebus, given the chance? Certainly. Had he lived, would he have become Prime Minister, or fascist dictator, or Messiah? Would he have seen the error of his ways, or would he have gone on dispensing the only thing he had to sell? What about his parents, his family, his friends who had known him at school, who had known him as a child: what would they be thinking now? Were the photograph albums and the paper hankies out? Pictures of the dealer as a boy, dressed up as a cowboy on his birthday, pictures of him splashing in the bath as a baby. Memories of someone John Rebus had never known.

He shook his head again. Thinking about it would do no good, but it was the only way to deal with it. And yes, he felt guilty. He felt soiled and defeated and bad. But he would stop feeling bad, and then eventually he would stop feeling anything at all. He had killed before; it might be he would kill again. You never knew until the moment itself.

And sometimes even then, you still didn’t know, and would continue not to know. Holmes mentioned Mayfield. Rebus knew of a church in Mayfield with an evening service on a Sunday. A church with a restrained congregation and a minister not overly keen on prying into one’s affairs. Maybe he would go there later. Meantime, he felt like a walk. He would walk through The Meadows and back across Bruntsfield Links, with a diversion towards the ice-cream shop near Tollcross. Maybe he’d bump into his friend Frank.

For this was Sunday, his day off, and he could do whatever he liked, couldn’t he? After all, Sunday was a day for breaking the rules. It was the only day he could afford.

Auld Lang Syne

Places Detective Inspector John Rebus did not want to be at midnight on Hogmanay: number one, the Tron in Edinburgh.

Which was perhaps, Rebus decided, why he found himself at five minutes to midnight pushing his way through the crowds which thronged the area of the Royal Mile outside the Tron Kirk. It was a bitter night, a night filled with the fumes of beer and whisky, of foam licking into the sky as another can was opened, of badly sung songs and arms around necks and stooped, drunken proclamations of undying love, proclamations which would be forgotten by morning.

Rebus had been here before, of course. He had been here the previous Hogmanay, ready to root out the eventual troublemakers, to break up fights and crunch across the shattered glass covering the setts. The best and worst of the Scots came out as another New Year approached: the togetherness, the sharpness, the hugging of life, the inability to know when to stop, so that the hug became a smothering stranglehold. These people were drowning in a sea of sentiment and sham.
Flower of‘Scotland
was struck up by a lone voice for the thousandth time, and for the thousandth time a few more voices joined in, all falling away at the end of the first chorus.

‘Gawn yirsel there, big man.’

Rebus looked around him. The usual contingent of uniformed officers was going through the annual ritual of having hands shaken by a public suddenly keen to make friends. It was the WPCs Rebus felt sorry for, as another slobbering kiss slapped into the cheek of a young female officer. The police of Edinburgh knew their duty: they always offered one sacrificial lamb to appease the multitude. There was actually an orderly queue standing in front of the WPC waiting to kiss her. She smiled and blushed. Rebus shivered and turned away. Four minutes to midnight. His nerves were like struck chords. He hated crowds. Hated drunken crowds more. Hated the fact that another year was coming to an end. He began to push through the crowd with a little more force than was necessary.

People Detective Inspector John Rebus would rather not be with at midnight on Hogmanay: number one, detectives from Glasgow CID.