Beggars Banquet (20 page)

‘Don’t ask,’ she said, cutting off the obvious question. Sue and David were stationed by their telephones in the production room; which was separated from Penny’s studio by a large glass window. Her producer did his best to calm things down. Though not yet out of his thirties, he looked to be an old pro at this. Rebus wondered if he shouldn’t have his own counselling show . . .

Rebus chatted with Sue for ten minutes or so, and watched as the production team went through its paces. Really, it was a two-man operation - producer and engineer. There was a last-minute panic when Penny’s microphone started to play up, but the engineer was swift to replace it. By five minutes to eleven, the hysteria seemed over. Everyone was calm now, or was so tense it didn’t show. Like troops just before a battle, Rebus was thinking. Penny had a couple of questions about the running order of the night’s musical pieces. She held a conversation with her producer, communicating via mikes and headphones, but looking at one another through the window.

Then she turned her eyes towards Rebus, winked at him, and crossed her fingers. He crossed his fingers back at her.

‘Two minutes everyone . . .’

At the top of the hour there was news, and straight after the news . . .

A tape played. The show’s theme music. Penny leaned towards her microphone, which hung like an anglepoise over her desk. The music faded.

‘Hello again. This is Penny Cook, and this is
What’s Cookin’
. I’ll be with you until three o’clock, so if you’ve got a problem, I’m just a phone call away. And if you want to ring me the number as ever is . . .’

It was extraordinary, and Rebus could only marvel at it. Her eyes were closed, and she looked so brittle that a shiver might turn her to powder. Yet that voice . . . so controlled . . . no, not controlled; rather, it was as though it were apart from her, as though it possessed a life of its own, a personality . . . Rebus looked at the studio clock. Four hours of this, five nights a week? All in all, he thought, he’d rather be a policeman.

The show was running like clockwork. Calls were taken by the two operators, details scribbled down. There was discussion with the producer about suitable candidates, and during the musical interludes or the commercials -‘. . . and mmm . . . it tastes
so
good’ - the producer would relay details about the callers to Penny.

‘Let’s go with that one,’ she might say. Or: ‘I can’t deal with that, not tonight.’ Usually, her word was the last, though the producer might demur.

‘I don’t know, it’s quite a while since we covered adultery . . .’

Rebus watched. Rebus listened. But most of all, Rebus waited . . .

‘OK, Penny,’ the producer told her, ‘it’s line two next. His name’s Michael.’

She nodded. ‘Can somebody get me a coffee?’

‘Sure.’

‘And next,’ she said, ‘I think we’ve got Michael on line two. Hello, Michael?’

It was quarter to midnight. As usual, the door of the production room opened and Gordon Prentice stepped into the room. He had nods and smiles for everyone, and seemed especially pleased to see Rebus.

‘Inspector,’ he said shaking Rebus’s hand. ‘I see you take your work seriously, coming here at this hour.’ He patted the producer’s shoulder. ‘How’s the show tonight?’

‘Been a bit tame so far, but this looks interesting.’

Penny’s eyes were on the dimly lit production room. But her voice was all for Michael.

‘And what do you do for a living, Michael?’

The caller’s voice crackled out of the loudspeakers. ‘I’m an actor, Penny.’

‘Really? And are you working just now?’

‘No, I’m what we call “resting”.’

‘Ah well, they say there’s no rest for the wicked. I suppose that must mean you
haven’t
been wicked.’

Gordon Prentice, running his fingers through his beard, smiled at this, turning to Rebus to see how he was enjoying himself. Rebus smiled back.

‘On the contrary,’ the voice was saying. ‘I’ve been really quite wicked. And I’m ashamed of it.’

‘And what is it you’re so ashamed of, Michael?’

‘I’ve been telephoning you anonymously, Penny. Threatening you. I’m sorry. You see, I thought you knew about it. But the policeman tells me you don’t. I’m sorry.’

Prentice wasn’t smiling now. His eyes had opened wide in disbelief.

‘Knew about what, Michael?’ Her eyes were staring at the window. Light bounced off her spectacles, sending flashes like laser beams into the production room.

‘Knew about the fix. When the ratings were going down, the station head, Gordon Prentice, started rigging the shows, yours and Hamish MacDiarmid’s. MacDiarmid might even be in on it.’

‘What do you mean, rigging?’

‘Kill it!’ shouted Prentice. ‘Kill transmission! He’s raving mad! Cut the line someone. Here, I’ll do it—’

But Rebus had come up behind Prentice and now locked his own arms around Prentice’s. ‘I think you’d better listen,’ he warned.

‘Out of work actors,’ Michael was saying, the way he’d told Rebus earlier in the day. ‘Prentice put together a . . . you could call it a cast, I suppose. Half a dozen people. They phone in using different voices, always with a controversial point to make or some nice juicy problem. One of them told me at a party one night. I didn’t believe her until I started listening for myself. An actor can tell that sort of thing, when a voice isn’t quite right, when something’s an act rather than for real.’

Prentice was struggling, but couldn’t break Rebus’s hold. ‘Lies!’ he yelled. ‘Complete rubbish! Let go of me, you—’

Penny Cook’s eyes were on Prentice now, and on no one but Prentice.

‘So what you’re saying, Michael, if I understand you, is that Gordon Prentice is rigging our phone-ins so as to boost audience figures?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Michael, thank you for your call.’

It was Rebus who spoke, and he spoke to the producer.

‘That’ll do.’

The producer nodded through the glass to Penny Cook, then flipped a switch. Music could be heard over the loudspeakers. The producer started to fade the piece out. Penny spoke into her microphone.

‘A slightly longer musical interlude there, but I hope you enjoyed it. We’ll be going back to your calls very shortly, but first we’ve got some commercials.’

She slipped off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose.

‘A private performance,’ Rebus explained to Prentice. ‘For our benefit only. The listeners were hearing something else.’ Rebus felt Prentice’s body soften, the shoulders slump. He was caught, and knew it for sure. Rebus relaxed his hold on the man: he wouldn’t try anything now.

The Camelot Coffee ad was playing. It had been easy really. Recognising the voice on the commercial as that of the phone caller, Rebus had contacted the ad agency involved, who had given him the name and address of the actor concerned: Michael Barrie, presently resting and to be found most days in a certain city-centre wine bar . . .

Barrie knew he was in trouble, but Rebus was sure it could be smoothed out. But as for Gordon Prentice . . . ah, that was different altogether.

‘The station’s ruined!’ he wailed. ‘You must know that!’ He pleaded with the producer, the engineer, but especially with the hate-filled eyes of Penny Cook who, behind glass, could not even hear him. ‘Once this gets out, you’ll
all
be out of a job! All of you! That’s why I—’

‘Back on in five seconds, Penny,’ said the producer, as though it was just another night on
What’s Cookin’
. Penny Cook nodded, resting her glasses back on her nose. The stuffing looked to have been knocked out of her. With one final baleful glance towards Prentice, she turned to her microphone.

‘Welcome back. A change of direction now, because I’d like to say a few words to you about the head of Lowland Radio, Gordon Prentice. I hope you’ll bear with me for a minute or two. It shouldn’t take much longer than that . . .’

It was very late one night when the knock came at Rebus’s door. He opened it to find Penny standing there. She pretended surprise at seeing him.

‘Oh, hello,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you lived here. Only, I’ve run out of coffee and I was wondering . . .’

Laughing, Rebus led her inside. ‘I can let you have the best part of a jar of Camelot,’ he said. ‘Or alternatively we could get drunk and go to bed . . .’

They got drunk.

He’d been found at the top of his namesake’s monument in Princes Street Gardens, dead of a heart attack and with a new and powerful pair of binoculars hanging around his slender, mottled neck.

Sir Walter had been one of Edinburgh’s most revered QCs until his retirement a year ago. Detective Inspector John Rebus, climbing the hundreds (surely it must be hundreds) of spiralling steps up to the top of the Scott Monument, paused for a moment to recall one or two of his run-ins with Sir Walter, both in and out of the courtrooms on the Royal Mile. He had been a formidable character, shrewd, devious and subtle. Law to him had been a challenge rather than an obligation. To John Rebus, it was just a day’s work.

Rebus ached as he reached the last incline. The steps here were narrower than ever, the spiral tighter. Room for one person only, really. At the height of its summer popularity, with a throng of tourists squeezing through it like toothpaste from a tube, Rebus reckoned the Scott Monument might be very scary indeed.

He breathed hard and loud, bursting through the small doorway at the top, and stood there for a moment, catching his breath. The panorama before him was, quite simply, the best view in Edinburgh. The castle close behind him, the New Town spread out in front of him, sloping down towards the Firth of Forth, with Fife, Rebus’s birthplace, visible in the distance. Calton Hill . . . Leith . . . Arthur’s Seat . . . and round to the castle again. It was breathtaking, or would have been had the breath not already been taken from him by the climb.

The parapet upon which he stood was incredibly narrow; again, there was hardly room enough to squeeze past someone. How crowded did it get in the summer? Dangerously crowded? It seemed dangerously crowded just now, with only four people up here. He looked over the edge upon the sheer drop to the gardens below, where a massing of tourists, growing restless at being barred from the monument, stared up at him. Rebus shivered.

Not that it was cold. It was early June. Spring was finally late-blooming into summer, but that cold wind never left the city, that wind which never seemed to be warmed by the sun. It bit into Rebus now, reminding him that he lived in a northern climate. He looked down and saw Sir Walter’s slumped body, reminding him why he was here.

‘I thought we were going to have another corpse on our hands there for a minute.’ The speaker was Detective Sergeant Brian Holmes. He had been in conversation with the police doctor, who himself was crouching over the corpse.

‘Just getting my breath back,’ Rebus explained.

‘You should take up squash.’

‘It’s squashed enough up here.’ The wind was nipping Rebus’s ears. He began to wish he hadn’t had that haircut at the weekend. ‘What have we got?’

‘Heart attack. The doctor reckons he was due for one anyway. A climb like that in an excited state. One of the witnesses says he just doubled over. Didn’t cry out, didn’t seem in pain . . .’

‘Old mortality, eh?’ Rebus looked wistfully at the corpse. ‘But why do you say he was excited?’

Holmes grinned. ‘Think I’d bring you up here for the good of your health? Here.’ He handed a polythene bag to Rebus. Inside the bag was a badly typed note. ‘It was found in the binocular case.’

Rebus read the note through its clear polythene window: GO TO TOP OF SCOTT MONUMENT. TUESDAY MIDDAY. I’LL BE THERE. LOOK FOR THE GUN.

‘The gun?’ Rebus asked, frowning.

There was a sudden explosion. Rebus started, but Holmes just looked at his watch, then corrected its hands. One o’clock. The noise had come from the blank charge fired every day from the castle walls at precisely one o’clock.

‘The gun,’ Rebus repeated, except now it was a statement. Sir Walter’s binoculars were lying beside him. Rebus lifted them - ‘He wouldn’t mind, would he?’ - and fixed them on the castle. Tourists could be seen walking around. Some peered over the walls. A few fixed their own binoculars on Rebus. One, an elderly Asian, grinned and waved. Rebus lowered the binoculars. He examined them. ‘These look brand new.’

‘Bought for the purpose, I’d say, sir.’

‘But what exactly
was
the purpose, Brian? What was he supposed to be looking at?’ Rebus waited for an answer. None was forthcoming. ‘Whatever it was,’ Rebus went on, ‘it as good as killed him. I suggest we take a look for ourselves.’

‘Where, sir?’

Rebus nodded towards the castle. ‘Over there, Brian. Come on.’

‘Er, Inspector . . . ?’ Rebus looked towards the doctor, who was upright now, but pointing downwards with one finger. ‘How are we going to get him down?’

Rebus stared at Sir Walter. Yes, he could see the problem. It would be hard graft taking him all the way back down the spiral stairs. What’s more, damage to the body would be unavoidable. He supposed they could always use a winch and lower him straight to the ground . . . Well, it was a job for ambulancemen or undertakers, not the police. Rebus patted the doctor’s shoulder.

‘You’re in charge, Doc,’ he said, exiting through the door before the doctor could summon up a protest. Holmes shrugged apologetically, smiled, and followed Rebus into the dark. The doctor looked at the body, then over the edge, then back to the body again. He reached into his pocket for a mint, popped it into his mouth, and began to crunch on it. Then he, too, made for the door.