The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories (Rebus Collection) (28 page)

Without asking, Rebus sat down opposite him. ‘It whiles away the time,’ he said. The tooth-tapper seemed still intent on the window. Maybe he could see his reflection there. The modern Narcissus. Another flick of the hair.

‘If you got a haircut, you wouldn’t need to keep doing that.’

This achieved a smile. Maybe he thought Rebus was trying to chat him up. Well, after all, this was known as an actors’ bar, wasn’t it? Half a glass of orange juice sat on the table, the ubiquitous ice-cube having melted away to a sliver.

‘Aye,’ Rebus mused, ‘passes the time.’

This time the eyes turned from the window and were on him. Rebus leaned forward across the table. When he spoke, he spoke quietly, confidently.

‘I know what you’ve done,’ he said, not sure even as he said it whether he were quoting or speaking for himself.

The lock of hair fell forward and stayed there. A frozen second, then another, and the man rose quickly to his feet, the chair tipping back. But Rebus, still seated, had grabbed at an arm and held it fast.

‘Let go of me!’

‘Sit down.’

‘I said let go!’

‘And I said sit down!’ Rebus pulled him back on to his chair. ‘That’s better. We’ve got a lot to talk about, you and me. We can do it here or down at the station, and by “station” I don’t mean Scotrail. OK?’

The head was bowed, the careful hair now almost completely dishevelled. It was that easy … Rebus found the tiniest grain of pity. ‘Do you want something else to drink?’ The head shook from side to side. ‘Not even a cup of coffee?’

Now the head looked up at him.

‘I saw the film once,’ Rebus went on. ‘Bloody awful it was, but not half as bad as the coffee. Give me Richard Harris’s singing any day.’

Now, finally, the head grinned. ‘That’s better,’ said Rebus. ‘Come on, son. It’s time, if you’ll pardon the expression, to spill the beans.’

The beans spilled …

Rebus was there that night for
What’s Cookin’
. It surprised him that Penny Cook herself, who sounded so calm on the air, was, before the programme, a complete bundle of nerves. She slipped a small yellow tablet on to her tongue and washed it down with a beaker of water.

‘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 didn’t, but what she said was tabloid news by morning, and Lowland Radio’s licence was withdrawn not long after that. Rebus went back to Radio Three for when he was driving, and no radio at all in his flat. Hamish MacDiarmid, as far as he could ascertain, went back to a croft somewhere, but Penny Cook stuck around, going freelance and doing some journalism as well as the odd radio programme.

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.

Trip Trap

Blame it on patience.

Patience, coincidence, or fate. Whatever, Grace Gallagher came downstairs that morning and found herself sitting at the dining table with a cup of strong brown tea (there was just enough milk in the fridge for one other cup), staring at the pack of cards. She sucked cigarette smoke into her lungs, feeling her heart beat the faster for it. This cigarette she enjoyed. George did not allow her to smoke in his presence, and in his presence she was for the best part of each and every day. The smoke upset him, he said. It tasted his mouth, so that food took on a funny flavour. It irritated his nostrils, made him sneeze and cough. Made him giddy. George had written the book on hypochondria.

So the house became a no-smoking zone when George was up and about. Which was precisely why Grace relished this small moment by herself, a moment lasting from seven fifteen until seven forty-five. For the forty years of their married life, Grace had always managed to wake up thirty clear minutes before her husband. She would sit at the table with a cigarette and tea until his feet forced a creak from the bedroom floorboard on his side of the bed. That floorboard had creaked from the day they’d moved into 26 Gillan Drive, thirty-odd years ago. George had promised to fix it; now he wasn’t even fit to fix himself tea and toast.

Grace finished the cigarette and stared at the pack of cards. They’d played whist and rummy the previous evening, playing for stakes of a penny a game. And she’d lost as usual. George hated losing, defeat bringing on a sulk which could last the whole of the following day, so to make her life a little easier Grace now allowed him to win, purposely throwing away useful cards, frittering her trumps. George would sometimes notice and mock her for her stupidity. But more often he just clapped his hands together after another win, his puffy fingers stroking the winnings from the table top.

Grace now found herself opening the pack, shuffling, and laying out the cards for a hand of patience, a hand which she won without effort. She shuffled again, played again, won again. This, it seemed, was her morning. She tried a third game, and again the cards fell right, until four neat piles stared back at her, black on red on black on red, all the way from king to ace. She was halfway through a fourth hand, and confident of success, when the floorboard creaked, her name was called, and the day – her real day – began. She made tea (that was the end of the milk) and toast, and took it to George in bed. He’d been to the bathroom, and slipped slowly back between the sheets.

‘Leg’s giving me gyp today,’ he said. Grace was silent, having no new replies to add to this statement. She placed his tray on the bed and pulled open the curtains. The room was stuffy, but even in summer he didn’t like the windows open. He blamed the pollution, the acid rain, the exhaust fumes. They played merry hell with his lungs, making him wheezy, breathless. Grace peered out on to the street. Across the road, houses just like hers seemed already to be wilting from the day’s ordinariness. Yet inside her, despite everything, despite the sour smell of the room, the heavy breath of her unshaven husband, the slurping of tea, the grey heat of the morning, Grace could feel something extraordinary. Hadn’t she won at patience? Won time and time again? Paths seemed to be opening up in front of her.

‘I’ll go fetch you your paper,’ she said.

George Gallagher liked to study racing form. He would pore over the newspaper, sneering at the tipsters’ choices, and would come up with a ‘super yankee’ – five horses which, should they all romp home as winners, would make them their fortune. Grace would take his betting slip to the bookie’s on the High Street, would hand across the stake money – less than £1.50 per day – and would go home to listen on the radio as horse after horse failed in its mission, the tipsters’ choices meantime bringing in a fair return. But George had what he called ‘inside knowledge’, and besides, the tipsters were all crooked, weren’t they? You couldn’t trust them. Grace was a bloody fool if she thought she could. Often a choice of George’s would come in second or third, but despite her efforts he refused to back any horse each way. All or nothing, that’s what he wanted.

‘You never win big by betting that way.’

Grace’s smile was like a nail file:
we never win at all.

George wondered sometimes why it took his wife so long to fetch the paper. After all, the shop was ten minutes’ walk away at most, yet Grace would usually be out of the house for the best part of an hour. But there was always the story of a neighbour met, gossip exchanged, a queue in the shop, or the paper not having arrived, entailing a longer walk to the newsagent’s further down the road …

In fact, Grace took the newspaper to Lossie Park, where, weather permitting, she sat on one of the benches and, taking a ballpoint pen (free with a woman’s magazine, refilled twice since) from her handbag, proceeded to attempt the newspaper’s crossword. At first, she’d filled in the ‘quick’ clues, but had grown more confident with the years so that she now did the ‘cryptic’, often finishing it, sometimes failing for want of one or two answers, which she would ponder over the rest of the day. George, his eyes fixed on the sports pages, never noticed that she’d been busy at the crossword. He got his news, so he said, from the TV and the radio, though in fact Grace had noticed that he normally slept through the television news, and seldom listened to the radio.

If the weather was dreich, Grace would sit on a sheltered bench, where one day a year or so back she had been joined by a gentleman of similar years (which was to say, eight or nine years younger than George). He was a local, a widower, and his name was Jim Malcolm. They talked, but spent most of the time just watching the park itself, studying mothers with prams, boys with their dogs, games of football, lovers’ tiffs, and, even at that early hour, the occasional drunk. Every day they met at one bench or another, seeming to happen upon one another by accident, never seeing one another at any other time of the day, or any other location, other than those truly accidental meetings in a shop or on the pavement.

And then, a few weeks back, springtime, standing in the butcher’s shop, Grace had overheard the news of Jim Malcolm’s death. When her turn came to be served, Grace asked for half a pound of steak mince, instead of the usual ‘economy’ stuff. The butcher raised an eyebrow.

‘Something to celebrate, Mrs Gallagher?’

‘Not really,’ Grace had said quietly. That night, George had eaten the expensive mince without comment.

Today she completed the crossword in record time. It wasn’t that the clues seemed easier than usual; it was more that her brain seemed to be working faster than ever before, catching that inference or this anagram. Anything, she decided, was possible on a day like this. Simply anything. The sun was appearing from behind a bank of cloud. She closed the newspaper, folded it into her bag alongside the pen, and stood up. She’d been in the park barely ten minutes. If she returned home so quickly, George might ask questions. So instead she walked a slow circuit of the playing fields, her thoughts on patience, and crosswords and creaking floorboards, and much more besides.

Blame it on Patience.

Detective Inspector John Rebus had known Dr Patience Aitken for several years, and not once during their working relationship had he been able to refuse her a favour. Patience seemed to Rebus the kind of woman his parents, if still alive, would have been trying to marry him off to, were he still single. Which, in a sense, he was, being divorced. On finding he
was
divorced, Patience had invited Rebus round to her surprisingly large house for what she had called ‘dinner’. Halfway through a home-baked fruit pie, Patience had admitted to Rebus that she was wearing no underwear. Homely but smouldering: that was Patience. Who could deny such a woman a favour? Not John Rebus. And so it was that he found himself this evening standing on the doorstep of 26 Gillan Drive, and about to intrude on private grief.

Not that there was anything very private about a death, not in this part of Scotland, or in any part of Scotland come to that. Curtains twitched at neighbouring windows, people spoke in lowered voices across the divide of a garden fence, and fewer televisions than usual blared out the ubiquitous advertising jingles and even more ubiquitous game show applause.

Gillan Drive was part of an anonymous working-class district on the south-eastern outskirts of Edinburgh. The district had fallen on hard times, but there was still the smell of pride in the air. Gardens were kept tidy, the tiny lawns clipped like army haircuts, and the cars parked tight against the kerbs were old – W and X registrations predominated – but polished, showing no signs of rust. Rebus took it all in in a moment. In a neighbourhood like this, grief was for sharing. Everybody wanted their cut. Still something stopped him lifting the door knocker and letting it fall. Patience Aitken had been vague, wary, ambivalent: that was why she was asking him for a favour, and not for his professional help.

‘I mean,’ she had said over the telephone, ‘I’ve been treating George Gallagher on and off – more
on
than off – for years. I think about the only complaints I’ve ever not known him to think he had are beri-beri and elephantiasis, and then only because you never read about them in the “Doc’s Page” of the
Sunday Post
.’

Rebus smiled. GPs throughout Scotland feared their Monday morning surgeries, when people would suddenly appear in droves suffering from complaints read about the previous morning in the
Post
. No wonder people called the paper an ‘institution’ …

‘And all the while,’ Patience Aitken was saying, ‘Grace has been by his bedside. Always patient with him, always looking after him. The woman’s been an angel.’

‘So what’s the problem?’ Rebus nursed not only the telephone, but a headache and a mug of black coffee as well. (Black coffee because he was dieting; a headache for not unconnected reasons.)

‘The problem is that George fell downstairs this morning. He’s dead.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

There was a silence at the other end of the line.

‘I take it,’ Rebus said, ‘that you don’t share my feelings.’

‘George Gallagher was a cantankerous old man, grown from a bitter younger man and most probably a fairly unsociable teenager. I don’t think I ever heard him utter a civil word, never mind a “please” or a “thank you”.’

‘Fine,’ said Rebus, ‘so let’s celebrate his demise.’

Silence again.

Rebus sighed and rubbed his temples. ‘Out with it,’ he ordered.

‘He’s supposed to have fallen downstairs,’ Patience Aitken explained. ‘He did go downstairs in the afternoon, sometimes to watch racing on the telly, sometimes just to stare at a different set of walls from the bedroom. But he fell at around eleven o’clock, which is a bit early for him …’

‘And you think he was pushed?’ Rebus tried not to sound cynical.

Her reply was blunt. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘By this angel who’s managed to put up with him all these years?’

‘That’s right.’

‘OK, Doc, so point me to the medical evidence.’

‘Well, it’s a narrow staircase, pretty steep, about eleven or twelve steps, say. If you weighed around thirteen stone, and happened to slip at the top, you’d sort of be bounced off the sides as you fell, wouldn’t you?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And you’d try to grab hold of something to stop your fall. There’s a banister on one wall. They were waiting for the council to come and fit an extra banister on the other wall.’

‘So you’d reach out to grab something, fair enough.’ Rebus drained the sour black coffee and studied the pile of work in his in-tray.

‘Well, you’d have bruising, wouldn’t you?’ said Patience Aitken. ‘Grazes on your elbows or knees, there’d be marks where you’d clawed at the walls.’

Rebus knew that she was surmising, but could not disagree thus far. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘George Gallagher only has significant marks on his head, where he hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs, breaking his neck in the process. No real bruising or grazing to the body, no marks on the wall as far as I can see.’

‘So you’re saying he flew from the top landing with a fair bit of momentum, and the first thing he touched was the ground?’

‘That’s how it looks. Unless I’m imagining it.’

‘So he either jumped, or he was pushed?’

‘Yes.’ She paused again. ‘I know it sounds tenuous, John. And Christ knows I don’t want to accuse Grace of anything …’

Rebus picked up a ballpoint pen from beside the telephone and scrabbled on the surface of his desk until he found the back of an envelope upon which to write.

‘You’re only doing your job, Patience,’ he said. ‘Give me the address and I’ll go pay my respects.’

The door of 26 Gillan Drive opened slowly, and a man peered out at Rebus, then ushered him quickly inside, laying a soft hand on his arm.