Knots And Crosses (10 page)

He walked over to Big Podeen’s table, sweating, feeling older than his years.

‘That was a good breakfast, that was,’ said the hulk of a man, his eyes gleaming like a child’s.

Stevens sat down beside him.

‘What’s the word on bent coppers?’ he asked.

‘Hello, daddy.’

She was eleven, but looked and spoke and smiled older: eleven going on twenty-one. That was what living with Rhona had done to his daughter. He pecked her cheek, thinking back to Gill’s leavetaking. There was perfume around her, and a hint of make-up on her eyes.

He could kill Rhona.

‘Hello, Sammy,’ he said.

‘Mummy says that I’m to be called Samantha now that I’m growing up so quickly, but I suppose it’s all right for
you
to call me Sammy.’

‘Oh, well, mummy knows best, Samantha.’

He cast a look towards the retreating figure of his wife, her body pressed, pushed and prodded into a shape attainable only with the aid of some super-strong girdle. She was not, he was relieved to find, wearing as well as their occasional telephone conversations would have had him believe. She stepped into her car now, never looking back. It was a small and expensive model, but had a sizeable dent in one side. Rebus blessed that dent.

He recalled that, making love, he had gloried in her body, in the soft flesh – the padding, as she had called it – of her thighs and her back. Today she had looked at him with cold eyes, filled with a cloud of unknowing, and had seen in his eyes the gleam of sexual satisfaction. Then she had turned on
her heels. So it was true: she could still see into his heart. Ah, but she had failed to see into his soul. She had missed that most vital organ completely.

‘What do you want to do then?’

They were standing at the entrance to Princes Street Gardens, adjacent to the tourist haunts of Edinburgh. A few people wandered past the closed shops of a Princes Street Sunday, while others sat on benches in the gardens, feeding crumbs to the pigeons and the Canadian squirrels or else reading the heavy-printed Sunday papers. The Castle reared above them, its flag flying briskly in the all-too-typical breeze. The Gothic missile of the Scott Monument pointed religious believers in the right direction, but few of the tourists who snapped it with their expensive Japanese cameras seemed at all interested in the structure’s symbolic connotations, never mind its reality, just so long as they had some snaps of it to show off to their friends back home. These tourists spent so much time photographing things that they never actually
saw
anything, unlike the young people milling around, who were too busy enjoying life to be bothered capturing false impressions of it.

‘What do you want to do then?’

The tourist side of his capital city. They were never interested in the housing-estates around this central husk. They never ventured into Pilton or Niddrie or Oxgangs to make an arrest in a piss-drenched tenement; they were not moved by Leith’s pushers and junkies, the deft-handed corruption of the city gents, the petty thefts of a society pushed so far into materialism that stealing was the only answer to what they thought of as their needs. And they were almost certainly unaware (they were not, after all, here to read local newspapers and watch local TV) of Edinburgh’s newest media star, the child murderer the police could not catch, the murderer who was leading the forces of law and order a merry
dance without a clue or a lead or a cat in hell’s chance of finding him until he slipped up. He pitied Gill her job. He pitied himself. He pitied the city, right down to its crooks and bandits; its whores and gamblers, its perpetual losers and winners.

‘So what do you want to do?’

His daughter shrugged her shoulders.

‘I don’t know. Walk maybe? Go for a pizza? See a film?’

They walked.

John Rebus had met Rhona Phillips just after joining the police. He had suffered a nervous breakdown just prior to his joining the force (
why did you leave the Army, John
?) and had recuperated in a fishing-village on the Fife coast, though he had never told Michael of his presence in Fife during that time.

On his first holiday from police-work, his first proper
holiday
in years, the others having been spent on courses or working towards examinations, Rebus had returned to that fishing-village, and there had met Rhona. She was a schoolteacher, already with a brutally short and unhappy marriage behind her. In John Rebus she saw a strong and able husband, someone who would not flinch in a fight; someone she could care for, too, however, since his strength failed to conceal an inner fragility. She saw that he was haunted still by his years in the Army, and especially by his time in ‘special services’. He would awake crying some nights, and sometimes would weep as he made love, weeping silently, the tears falling hard and slow on her breasts. He would not speak about it much, and she had never pushed him. She was aware that he had lost a friend during his training days. She understood that much, and he appealed to the child in her and to the mother. He seemed perfect. Too, too perfect.

He was not. He should never have married. They lived
happily enough, she teaching English in Edinburgh until Samantha was born. Then, however, niggling fights and power-plays had turned into sourer, unabated periods of resentment and suspicion. Was she seeing another man, a teacher at her school? Was he seeing another woman when he claimed to be involved in his numerous double-shifts? Was she taking drugs without his knowledge? Was he taking bribes without hers? In fact, the answer to all of these suspicions was no, but that did not seem to be what was at stake in any case. Rather, something larger was looming, yet neither could perceive the inevitability of it until too late, and they would cuddle up and make things right between them over and over again, as though in some morality-tale or soap-opera. There was, they agreed, the child to think of.

The child, Samantha, had become the young woman, and Rebus felt his eyes straying appreciatively and guiltily (yet again) over her as they walked through the gardens, around the Castle, and up towards the ABC cinema on Lothian Road. She was not beautiful, for only women could be that, but she was growing towards beauty with a confident inevitability which was breathtaking in itself, and horrifying. He was, after all, her father. There had to be some feelings there. It went with the territory.

‘Do you want me to tell you about Mummy’s new boy-friend?’

‘You know damn well I do.’

She giggled; still something of the girl left in her then, and yet even a giggle seemed different in her now, seemed more controlled, more womanly.

‘He’s a poet, supposedly, but really he hasn’t had a book out or anything yet. His poems are crap, too, but Mummy won’t tell him that. She thinks the sun shines out of his you-know-where.’

Was all this ‘adult’ talk supposed to impress him? He supposed so.

‘How old is he?’ Rebus asked, flinching at his suddenly revealed vanity.

‘I don’t know. Twenty maybe.’

He stopped flinching and started to reel. Twenty. She was cradle-snatching now. My God. What effect was all this having on Sammy? On Samantha, the pretend adult? He dreaded to think, but he was no psychoanalyst; that was Rhona’s department, or once had been.

‘Honest though, Dad, he’s an
awful
poet. I’ve done better stuff than his in my essays at school. I go to the big school after the summer. It’ll be funny to go to the school where Mum works.’

‘Yes, won’t it.’ Rebus had found something niggling him. A poet, aged twenty. ‘What’s this boy’s name?’ he asked.

‘Andrew,’ she said, ‘Andrew Anderson. Doesn’t that sound funny? He’s nice really, but he’s a bit weird.’

Rebus cursed under his breath: Anderson’s son, the dreaded Anderson’s itinerant poet son was shacked up with Rebus’s wife. What an irony! He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Laughter seemed marginally more appropriate.

‘What are you laughing at, Daddy?’

‘Nothing, Samantha. I’m just happy, that’s all. What were you saying?’

‘I was saying that Mum met him at the library. We go there a lot. Mum likes the literature books, but I like books about romances and adventures. I can never understand the books Mum reads. Did you read the same books as her when you were … before you …?’

‘Yes, yes we did. But I could never understand them either, so don’t worry about it. I’m glad that you read a lot. What’s this library like?’

‘It’s really big, but a lot of tramps go there to sleep and
spend a lot of time. They get a book and sit down and just fall asleep. They smell awful!’

‘Well, you don’t need to go near them, do you? Best to let them keep themselves to themselves.’

‘Yes, Daddy.’ Her tone was slightly reproachful, warning him that he was giving fatherly advice and that such advice was unnecessary.

‘Fancy seeing a film then, do you?’

The cinema, however, was not open, so they went to an ice-cream parlour at Tollcross. Rebus watched Samantha scoop five colours of ice-cream from a Knickerbocker Glory. She was still at the stick-insect stage, eating without putting on an ounce of weight. Rebus was conscious of his sagging waistband, a stomach pampered and allowed to roam as it pleased. He sipped cappuccino (without sugar) and watched from the corner of his eye as a group of boys at another table looked towards his daughter and him, whispering and sniggering. They pushed back their hair and smoked their cigarettes as though sucking on life itself. He would have arrested them for self-afflicted growth-stunting had Sammy not been there.

Also, he envied them their cigarettes. He did not smoke when with Sammy: she did not like him smoking. Her mother also, once upon a time, had screamed at him to stop, and had hidden his cigarettes and lighter, so that he had made secret little nests of cigarettes and matches all around the house. He had smoked on regardless, laughing in victory when he sauntered into the room with another lit cigarette between his lips, Rhona screeching at him to put the bloody thing out, chasing him around the furniture, her hands flapping to knock the incendiary from his mouth.

Those had been happy times, times of loving conflict.

‘How’s school?’

‘It’s okay. Are you involved in the murder case?’

‘Yes.’ God, he could murder for a cigarette, could tear a young male head from its body.

‘Will you catch him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does he do to the girls, Daddy?’ Her eyes, trying to seem casual, examined the near-empty ice-cream glass very scrupulously.

‘He doesn’t do anything to them.’

‘Just murders them?’ Her lips were pale. Suddenly she was very much his child, his daughter, very much in need of protection. Rebus wanted to put his arms around her, to comfort her, to tell her that the big bad world was out there, not in here, that she was safe.

‘That’s right,’ he said instead.

‘I’m glad that’s all he does.’

The boys were whistling now, trying to attract her attention. Rebus felt his face growing red. On another day, any day other than this, he would march up to them and ram the law into their chilled little faces. But he was off-duty. He was enjoying an afternoon out with his daughter, the freakish result of a single grunted climax, that climax which had seen a lucky sperm, crawling through the ooze, make it all the way to the winning-post. Doubtless Rhona would already be reaching over for her book of the day, her literature. She would prise the still, spent body of her lover from her without a word being passed between them. Was her mind on her books all the time? Perhaps. And he, the lover, would feel deflated and empty, a vacant space, but suddenly as if no form of transference had taken place. That was her victory.

And then he would scream at her with a kiss. The scream of longing, of his solitary
.

Let me out. Let me out …

‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

‘Okay.’

And as they passed the table of hankering boys, their faces full of barely restrained lust, jabbering like monkeys, Samantha smiled at one of them.
She smiled at one of them
.

Rebus, sucking in fresh air, wondered what his world was coming to. He wondered whether his reason for believing in another reality behind this one might not be because the everyday was so frightening and so very sad. If this were all there was, then life was the sorriest invention of all time. He could kill those boys, and he wanted to smother his daughter, to protect her from that which she wanted – and would get. He realised that he had nothing to say to her, and that those boys did; that he had nothing in common with her save blood, while they had everything in common with her. The skies were dark as Wagnerian opera, dark as a murderer’s thoughts. Darkening like similes, while John Rebus’s world fell apart.

‘It’s time,’ she said, by his side yet so much bigger than him, so much more full of life. ‘It’s time.’

And indeed it was.

‘We better hurry,’ said Rebus, ‘it’s going to rain.’

He felt tired, and recalled that he had not slept, that he had been involved in strenuous labour throughout the short night. He took a taxi back to the flat – sod the expense – and crawled up the winding stairs to his front door. The smell of cats was overpowering. Inside his door, a letter, unstamped, awaited him. He swore out loud. The bastard was everywhere, everywhere and yet invisible. He ripped open the letter and read.

YOU’RE GETTING NOWHERE. NOWHERE. ARE YOU? SIGNED

But there was no signature, not in writing anyway. But inside the envelope, like some child’s plaything, lay the piece of knotted twine.

‘Why are you doing this, Mister Knot?’ said Rebus, fingering the twine. ‘And just what are you doing?’

Inside, the flat was like a fridge: the pilot-light had blown out again.

The media, sensing that the ‘Edinburgh Strangler’ was not about to vanish in the night, took the story by its horns and created a monster. TV crews moved into some of the better hotel rooms in the city, and the city was happy enough to have them, it being not quite the tourist season yet.