Knots And Crosses

1

On the steps of the Great London Road police station in Edinburgh, John Rebus lit his last legitimate cigarette of the day before pushing open the imposing door and stepping inside.

The station was old, its floor dark and marbled. It had about it the fading grandeur of a dead aristocracy. It had character.

Rebus waved to the duty sergeant, who was tearing old pictures from the notice-board and pinning up new ones in their place. He climbed the great curving staircase to his office. Campbell was just leaving.

‘Hello, John.’

McGregor Campbell, a Detective Sergeant like Rebus, was donning coat and hat.

‘What’s the word, Mac? Is it going to be a busy night?’ Rebus began checking the messages on his desk.

‘I don’t know about that, John, but I can tell you that it’s been pandemonium in here today. There’s a letter there for you from the man himself.’

‘Oh yes?’ Rebus seemed preoccupied with another letter which he had just opened.

‘Yes, John. Brace yourself. I think you’re going to be transferred to that abduction case. Good luck to you. Well, I’m off to the pub. I want to catch the boxing on the BBC. I should be in time.’ Campbell checked his watch. ‘Yes, plenty of time. Is anything wrong, John?’

Rebus waved the now empty envelope at him.

‘Who brought this in, Mac?’

‘I haven’t the faintest, John. What is it?’

‘Another crank letter.’

‘Oh yes?’ Campbell sidled over to Rebus’s shoulder. He examined the typed note. ‘Looks like the same bloke, doesn’t it?’

‘Clever of you to notice that, Mac, seeing as it’s the exact same message.’

‘What about the string?’

‘Oh, it’s here too.’ Rebus lifted a small piece of string from his desk. There was a simple knot tied in its middle.

‘Queer bloody business.’ Campbell walked to the doorway. ‘See you tomorrow, John.’

‘Yes, yes, see you, Mac.’ Rebus paused until his friend had made his exit. ‘Oh, Mac!’ Campbell came back into the doorway.

‘Yes?’

‘Maxwell won the big fight,’ said Rebus, smiling.

‘God, you’re a bastard, Rebus.’ Gritting his teeth, Campbell stalked out of the station.

‘One of the old school,’ Rebus said to himself. ‘Now, what possible enemies could I have?’

He studied the letter again, then checked the envelope. It was blank, save for his own name, unevenly typed. The note had been handed in, just like the other one. It was a queer bloody business right enough.

He walked back downstairs and headed for the desk.

‘Jimmy?’

‘Yes, John.’

‘Have you seen this?’ He showed the envelope to the desk sergeant.

‘That?’ The sergeant wrinkled not only his brow but, it seemed to Rebus, his whole face. Only forty years in the force could do that to a man, forty years of questions and puzzles and crosses to bear. ‘It must have been put through the door, John. I found it myself on the floor just there.’ He pointed vaguely in the direction of the station’s front door. ‘Is anything up?’

‘Oh no, it’s nothing really. Thanks, Jimmy.’

But Rebus knew that he would be niggled all night by the arrival of this note, only days after he had received the first anonymous message. He studied the two letters at his desk. The work of an old typewriter, probably portable. The letter S about a millimetre higher than the other letters. The paper cheap, no water-mark. The piece of string, tied in the middle, cut with a sharp knife or scissors. The message. The same typewritten message:

THERE ARE CLUES EVERYWHERE.

Fair enough; perhaps there were. It was the work of a crank, a kind of practical joke. But why him? It made no sense. Then the phone rang.

‘Detective Sergeant Rebus?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Rebus, it’s Chief Inspector Anderson here. Have you received my note?’

Anderson. Bloody Anderson. That was all he needed. From one crank to another.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Rebus, holding the receiver under his chin and tearing open the letter on his desk.

‘Good. Can you be here in twenty minutes? The briefing will be in the Waverley Road Incident Room.’

‘I’ll be there, sir.’

The phone went dead on Rebus as he read. It was true then, it was official. He was being transferred to the abduction case. God, what a life. He pushed the messages, envelopes and string into his jacket pocket, looking around the office in frustration. Who was kidding who? It would take an act of God to get him to Waverley Road inside of half an hour. And when was he supposed to get round to finishing all his work? He had three cases coming to court and another dozen or so crying out for some paperwork before his memory of them faded entirely. That would be nice, actually, nice to just erase the lot of them. Wipe-out. He closed his eyes. He opened them again. The paperwork was still there, large as life. Useless. Always incomplete. No sooner had he finished with a case than another two or three appeared in its place. What was the name of that creature? The Hydra, was it? That was what he was fighting. Every time he cut off a head, more popped into his in-tray. Coming back from a holiday was a nightmare.

And now they were giving him rocks to push up hills as well.

He looked to the ceiling.

‘With God’s grace,’ he whispered. Then he headed out to his car.

2

The Sutherland Bar was a popular watering-hole. It contained no jukebox, no video machines, no bandits. The decor was spartan, and the TV usually flickered and jumped. Ladies had not been welcome until well into the 1960s. There had, it seemed, been something to hide: the best pint of draught beer in Edinburgh. McGregor Campbell supped from his heavy glass, his eyes intent on the television set above the bar.

‘Who wins?’ asked a voice beside him.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, turning to the voice. ‘Oh, hello, Jim.’

A stocky man was sitting beside him, money in hand, waiting to be served. His eyes, too, were on the TV.

‘Looks like a cracker of a fight,’ he said. ‘I fancy Mailer to win.’

Mac Campbell had an idea.

‘No, I reckon Maxwell will walk it, win by a mile. Fancy a bet?’

The stocky man fished into his pocket for his cigarettes, eyeing the policeman.

‘How much?’ he asked.

‘A fiver?’ said Campbell.

‘You’re on. Tom, give me a pint over here, please. Do you want one yourself, Mac?’

‘Same again, thanks.’

They sat in silence for a while, supping the beer and watching the fight. A few muffled roars went up occasionally from behind them as a punch landed or was dodged.

‘It’s looking good for your man if it goes the distance,’ said Campbell, ordering more drinks.

‘Aye. But let’s wait and see, eh? How’s work, by the way?’

‘Fine, how’s yours?’

‘A pure bloody slog at the moment, if you must ask.’ Some ash dropped onto his tie as he talked, the cigarette never leaving his mouth, though it wobbled precariously from time to time. ‘A pure slog.’

‘Are you still chasing up that drugs story?’

‘Not really. I’ve landed on this kidnapping thing.’

‘Oh? So has Rebus. You’d better not get into his hair.’

‘Newspapermen get in everybody’s hair, Mac. It goes with the etcetera.’

Mac Campbell, though wary of Jim Stevens, was grateful for a friendship, however tenuous and strained it had sometimes been, which had given him some information useful to his career. Stevens kept much of the juiciest tidbits to himself, of course. That’s what ‘exclusives’ were made of. But he was always willing to trade, and it seemed to Campbell that the most innocuous pieces of gossip and information often seemed adequate for Stevens’ needs. He was a kind of magpie, collecting everything without prejudice, storing much more of it than, surely, he would ever use. But with reporters you never could tell. Certainly, Campbell was happier with Stevens as a friend than as an enemy.

‘So what’s happening about your drugs dossier?’

Jim Stevens shrugged his creased shoulders.

‘There’s nothing in there just now that could be of much use to you boys anyway. I’m not about to let the whole thing drop though, if that’s what you mean. No, that’s too big a nest of vipers to be allowed to go free. I’ll still be keeping my eyes open.’

A bell rang for the last round of the fight. Two sweating, dog-tired bodies converged on one another, becoming a single knot of limbs.

‘Still looks good for Mailer,’ said Campbell, an uneasy feeling coming over him. It couldn’t be true. Rebus wouldn’t have done that to him. Suddenly, Maxwell, the heavier and slower-moving of the two fighters, was hit by a blow to the face and staggered back. The bar erupted, sensing blood and victory. Campbell stared into his glass. Maxwell was taking a standing count. It was all over. A sensation in the final seconds of the contest, according to the commentator.

Jim Stevens held out his hand.

I’ll kill bloody Rebus, thought Campbell. So help me, I’ll kill him.

Later, over drinks bought with Campbell’s money, Jim Stevens asked about Rebus.

‘So it looks as if I’ll be meeting him at last?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. He’s not exactly friendly with Anderson, so he may well get the shitty end of the stick, sitting at a desk all day. But then John Rebus isn’t exactly friendly with anybody.’

‘Oh?’

‘Ach, he’s not that bad, I suppose, but he’s not the easiest of men to like.’ Campbell, ducking from his friend’s interrogative eyes, studied the reporter’s tie. The recent layer of cigarette-ash had merely formed a veil over much older stains. Egg, perhaps, fat, alcohol. The scruffiest reporters were always the sharp ones, and Stevens was sharp, as sharp as ten years on the local newspaper could make a man. It was said that he had turned down jobs with London papers, just because he liked to live in Edinburgh. And what he liked best about his job was the opportunity it gave him to uncover the city’s murkier depths, the crime, the corruption, the gangs and the drugs. He was a better detective than anyone Campbell knew, and, because of that very fact perhaps, the high-ups in the police both disliked and distrusted him. That seemed proof enough that he was doing his job well. Campbell watched as a little beer escaped from Stevens’ glass and dripped onto his trousers.

‘This Rebus,’ said Stevens, wiping his mouth, ‘he’s the brother of the hypnotist, isn’t he?’

‘Must be. I’ve never asked him, but there can’t be too many people about with a name like that, can there?’

‘That’s what I was thinking.’ He nodded to himself as though confirming something of great importance.

‘So what?’

‘Oh, nothing. Just something. And he’s not a popular man, you say?’

‘I didn’t say that exactly. I feel sorry for him really. The poor bugger has a lot on his plate. He’s even started getting crank letters.’

‘Crank letters?’ Smoke enveloped Stevens for a moment as he puffed on another cigarette. Between the two men lay a thin blue pub-haze.

‘I shouldn’t have told you that. That was strictly off the record.’

Stevens nodded.

‘Absolutely. No, it’s just that I was interested. That sort of thing does happen though, doesn’t it?’

‘Not often. And not nearly as queer as the ones he’s getting. I mean, they’re not abusive or anything. They’re just … queer.’

‘Go on. How so?’

‘Well, there’s a bit of string in each one, tied into a knot, and there’s a message that reads something like “clues are everywhere”.’

‘Bloody hell. That is strange. They’re a strange family. One a bloody hypnotist and the other getting anonymous notes. He was in the Army, wasn’t he?’

‘John was, yes. How did you know?’

‘I know everything, Mac. That’s the job.’

‘Another funny thing is that he won’t speak about it.’

The reporter looked interested again. When he was interested in something, his shoulders shivered slightly. He stared at the television.

‘Won’t speak about the Army?’

‘Not a word. I’ve asked him about it a couple of times.’

‘Like I said, Mac, it’s a funny family that one. Drink up, I’ve got lots of your money left to spend.’

‘You’re a bastard, Jim.’

‘Born and bred,’ said the reporter, smiling for only the second time that evening.

3

‘Gentlemen, and, of course, ladies, thank you for being so quick to gather here. This will remain the centre of operations during the inquiry. Now, as you all know …’

Detective Chief Superintendent Wallace froze in mid-speech as the Inquiry Room door pushed itself open abruptly and John Rebus, all eyes turned towards him, entered the room. He looked about in embarrassment, smiled a hopeful but wasted apology towards the senior officer, and sat himself down on a chair nearest to the door.

‘As I was saying,’ continued the superintendent.

Rebus, rubbing at his forehead, studied the roomful of officers. He knew what the old boy would be saying, and right now the last thing he needed was a pep-talk of the old school. The room was packed. Many of them looked tired, as if they’d been on the case for a while. The fresher, more attentive faces belonged to the new boys, some of them brought in from stations outwith the city. Two or three had notebooks and pencils at the ready, almost as if they were back in the school classroom. And at the front of the group, legs crossed, sat two women, peering up at Wallace, who was in full flight now, parading before the blackboard like some Shakespearean hero in a bad school play.

‘Two deaths, then. Yes, deaths I’m afraid.’ The room shivered expectantly. ‘The body of Sandra Adams, aged eleven, was found on a piece of waste ground adjacent to Haymarket Station at six o’clock this evening, and that of Mary Andrews at six-fifty on an allotment in the Oxgangs district. There are officers at both locations, and at the end of this briefing more of you will be selected to join them.’

Rebus was noticing that the usual pecking-order was in play: inspectors near the front of the room, sergeants and the rest to the back. Even in the midst of murder, there is a pecking-order. The British Disease. And he was at the bottom of the pile, because he had arrived late. Another black mark against him on someone’s mental sheet.

He had always been one of the top men while he had been in the Army. He had been a Para. He had trained for the SAS and come out top of his class. He had been chosen for a crack Special Assignments group. He had his medal and his commendations. It had been a good time, and yet it had been the worst of times, too, a time of stress and deprivation, of deceit and brutality. And when he had left, the police had been reluctant to take him. He understood now that it was something to do with the pressure applied by the Army to get him the job that he wanted. Some people resented that, and they had thrown down banana skins ever since for him to slide on. But he had sidestepped their traps, had performed the job, and had grudgingly been given his commendations here also. But there was precious little promotion, and that had caused him to say a few things out of line, a few things that were always to be held against him. And then he had cuffed an unruly bastard one night in the cells. God forgive him, he had simply lost his head for a minute. There had been more trouble over that. Ah, but it was not a nice world this, not a nice world at all. It was an Old Testament land that he found himself in, a land of barbarity and retribution.

‘We will, of course, have more information for you to work on come tomorrow, after the post-mortems. But for the moment I think that will do. I’m going to hand you over to Chief Inspector Anderson, who will assign you to your tasks for the present.’

Rebus noticed that Jack Morton had nodded off in the corner and, if left unattended, would begin snoring soon. Rebus smiled, but the smile was short-lived, killed by a voice at the front of the room, the voice of Anderson. This was all Rebus needed. Anderson, the man at the centre of his out-of-line remarks. It felt for one sickening moment like predestination. Anderson was in charge. Anderson was doling out their tasks. Rebus reminded himself to stop praying. Perhaps if he stopped praying, God would take the hint and stop being such a bastard to one of his few believers on this near-godforsaken planet.

‘Gemmill and Hartley will be assigned to door-to-door.’

Well, thank God he’d not been landed with that one. There was only one thing worse than door-to-door …

‘And for an initial check on the MO files, Detective Sergeants Morton and Rebus.’

… and that was it.

Thank you, God, oh, thank you. That’s just what I wanted to do with my evening: read through the case histories of all the bloody perverts and sex-offenders in east central Scotland. You must really hate my guts. Am I Job or something? Is that it?

But there was no ethereal voice to be heard, no voice at all save that of the satanic, leering Anderson, whose fingers slowly turned the pages of the roster, his lips moist and full, his wife a known adulteress and his son — of all things — an itinerant poet. Rebus heaped curse after curse upon the shoulders of that priggish, stick-thin superior officer, then kicked Jack Morton’s leg and brought him snorting and chaffing into consciousness.

One of those nights.

4

‘One of those nights,’ said Jack Morton. He sucked luxuriously on his short, tipped cigarette, coughed loudly, brought his handkerchief from his pocket and deposited something into it from his mouth. He studied the contents of the handkerchief. ‘Ah ha, some vital new evidence,’ he said. All the same, he looked rather worried.

Rebus smiled. ‘Time to stop smoking, Jack,’ he said.

They were seated together at a desk upon which were piled about a hundred and fifty files on known sex-offenders in central Scotland. A smart young secretary, doubtless relishing the overtime that came with a murder inquiry, kept bringing more files into the office, and Rebus stared at her in mock outrage every time she entered. He was hoping to scare her away, and if she came back again, the outrage would become real.

‘No, John, it’s these tipped bastards. I can’t take to them, really I can’t. Sod that bloody doctor.’

So saying, Morton took the cigarette from his lips, broke off the filter, and replaced the cigarette, now ridiculously short, between thin, bloodless lips.

‘That’s better. That’s more like a fag.’

Rebus had always found two things remarkable. One was that he liked, and in return was liked by, Jack Morton. The other was that Morton could pull so hard on a cigarette and yet release so little smoke. Where did all that smoke go? He could not figure it out.

‘I see you’re abstaining this evening, John.’

‘Limiting myself to ten a day, Jack.’

Morton shook his head.

‘Ten, twenty, thirty a day. Take it from me, John, it makes no difference in the end. What it comes down to is this: you either stop or you don’t, and if you can’t stop, then you’re as well smoking as many as you like. That’s been proven. I read about it in a magazine.’

‘Aye, but we all know the magazines you read, Jack.’

Morton chuckled, gave another tremendous cough, and searched for his handkerchief.

‘What a bloody job,’ said Rebus, picking up the first of the files.

The two men sat in silence for twenty minutes, flicking through the facts and fantasies of rapists, exhibitionists, pederasts, paedophiles, and procurers. Rebus felt his mouth filling with silt. It was as if he saw himself there, time after time after time, the self that lurked behind his everyday consciousness. His Mister Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh-born. He felt ashamed of his occasional erection: doubtless Jack Morton had one too. It came with the territory, as did the revulsion, the loathing and the fascination.

Around them, the station whirled in the business of the night. Men in shirtsleeves walked purposefully past their open door, the door of their assigned office, cut off from everyone else so that no one would be contaminated by their thoughts. Rebus paused for a moment to reflect that his own office back in Great London Road was in need of much of this equipment: the modern desk (unwobbly, with drawers that could be opened easily), the filing-cabinets (ditto), the drinks-dispenser just outside. There were carpets even, rather than his own liver-red linoleum with its curled, dangerous edges. It was a very palatable environment this in which to track down the odd pervert or killer.

‘What exactly are we looking for, Jack?’

Morton snorted, threw down a slender brown file, looked at Rebus, shrugged his shoulders, and lit a cigarette.

‘Garbage,’ he said, picking up another folder, and whether or not it was meant as an answer Rebus was never to know.

‘Detective Sergeant Rebus?’

A young constable, acne on his throat, cleanly-shaven, stood at the open door.

‘Yes.’

‘Message from the Chief, sir.’

He handed Rebus a folded piece of blue notepaper.

‘Good news?’ asked Morton.

‘Oh, the best news, Jack, the very best news. Our boss sends us the following fraternal message: “Any leads from the files?” End of message.’

‘Will there be any reply, sir?’ asked the constable.

Rebus crumpled the note and tossed it into a new aluminium bin.

‘Yes, son, there will be,’ he said, ‘but I very much doubt whether you’d want to deliver it.’

Jack Morton, wiping ash from his tie, laughed.

It was one of those nights. Jim Stevens, walking home at long last, had not found anything interesting since his conversation with Mac Campbell all of four hours ago. He had told Mac then that he was not about to drop his own investigation into Edinburgh’s burgeoning drugs racket, and that had been the whole truth. It was becoming a private obsession, and though his boss might move him on to a murder case, still he would follow up his old investigation in his free, spare and private time, time found late at night when the presses were rolling, time spent in lower and lower dives further and further out of town. For he was close, he knew, to a big fish, and yet not close enough to be able to enlist the help of the forces of law and order. He wanted the story to be watertight before he called for the cavalry.

He knew the dangers, too. The ground he walked upon was always likely to fall away beneath his feet, letting him slip into Leith docks of a dark and silent morning, finding him trussed and gagged in some motorway ditch outside Perth. He didn’t mind all that. It was no more than a passing thought, brought on by tiredness and a need to lift his emotions out of the rather tawdry, unglamorous world of Edinburgh’s dope scene, a scene carried out in the sprawling housing-schemes and after-hours drinking holes more than in the glittery discotheques and chintzy rooms of the New Town.

What he disliked, really disliked, was that the people ultimately behind it all were so silent and so secretive and so alien to it all. He liked his criminals to be involved, to live the life and stick close to the lifestyle. He liked the Glasgow gangsters of the 1950s and ’60s, who lived in the Gorbals and operated from the Gorbals and loaned illicit money to neighbours, and who would slash those same neighbours eventually, when the need arose. It was like a family affair. Not like this, not at all like this. This was other, and he hated it for that reason.

His talk with Campbell had been interesting though, interesting for other reasons. Rebus sounded a fishy character. So was his brother. They might be in it together. If the police were involved in all of this, then his task would be all the harder, and all the more satisfying for that.

Now what he needed was a break, a nice break in the investigation. It couldn’t be far off. He was supposed to have a nose for that sort of thing.

5

At one-thirty they took a break. There was a small canteen in the building, open even at this ungodly hour. Outside, the majority of the day’s petty crime was being committed, but inside it was warm and cosy, and there was hot food to be had and endless cups of coffee for the vigilant policemen.

‘This is a complete shambles,’ said Morton, pouring coffee back from his saucer into the cup. ‘Anderson hasn’t a clue what he’s up to.’

‘Give me a cigarette, will you? I’m out.’ Rebus patted his pockets convincingly.

‘Christ, John,’ said Morton, wheezing an old man’s cough and passing across the cigarettes, ‘the day you give up smoking is the day I change my underwear.’

Jack Morton was not an old man, despite the excesses that were leading him quickly and inexorably towards that early fate. He was thirty-five, six years younger than Rebus. He, too, had a broken marriage behind him, the four children now resident with their grandmother while their mother was off on a suspiciously long vacation with her present lover. Misery, he had told Rebus, surrounded the whole bloody set-up, and Rebus had agreed with him, having a daughter who troubled his own conscience.

Morton had been a policeman for two decades, and unlike Rebus had started at the extreme bottom of the heap, pulling himself up to his present rank through sheer hard slog alone.

He had given Rebus his life story when the two of them had gone off for a day’s fly-fishing near Berwick. It had been a glorious day, both of them landing fine catches, and over the course of the day they had become friends. Rebus, however, had not deigned to tell his own life story to Morton. It felt, to Jack Morton, as if the man were in a little prison-cell of his own construction. He seemed especially tight-lipped about his years in the Army. Morton knew that the Army could occasionally do that to a man, and he respected Rebus’s silence. Perhaps there were a few skeletons in that particular closet. He knew all about those himself; some of his most noteworthy arrests had not exactly been conducted along ‘correct procedural lines’.

Nowadays, Morton did not concern himself with headlines and high-profile arrests. He got on with the job, collected his salary, thought now and then of his pension and the fishing-years to come, and drank his wife and children out of his conscience.

‘This is a nice canteen,’ said Rebus, smoking, struggling to start a conversation.

‘Yes, it is. I’m in here now and again. I know one of the guys who work in the computer room. Comes in handy, you know, having one of those terminal-operators in your pocket. They can track down a car, a name, an address quicker than you can blink. It only costs the occasional drink.’

‘Get them to sort out this lot of ours then.’

‘Give them time, John. Then all the files will be on computer. And a little while after that, they’ll find that they don’t need the work-horses like us any more. There’ll just be a couple of DIs and a desk console.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Rebus.

‘It’s progress, John. Where would we be without it? We’d still be out there with our pipes and our guess-work and our magnifying glasses.’

‘I suppose you’re right, Jack. But remember what the Super says: “Give me a dozen good men every time, and send your machines back to their makers.”’

Rebus looked around him as he spoke. He saw that one of the two women from the briefing room had settled at a table by herself.

‘And besides,’ said Rebus, ‘there’ll always be a place for people like us, Jack. Society couldn’t do without us. Computers can never have inspired guesses. That’s where we’ve got them beat hands down.’

‘Maybe, I don’t know. Still, we better be getting back, eh?’ Morton looked at his watch, drained his cup, and pushed back his chair.

‘You go on ahead, Jack. I’ll be with you in a minute. I want to check out an inspired guess.’

‘Mind if I join you?’

Rebus, a fresh cup of coffee in his hand, pulled out the chair from opposite the woman officer, who had her head buried in the day’s newspaper. He noted the garish headline on the front page. Someone had slipped out a little information to the local media.

‘Not at all,’ she said, not looking up.

Rebus smiled to himself and sat down. He began to sip the powdery, instant murk.

‘Busy?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Shouldn’t you be? Your friend left a few minutes ago.’

Sharp then, very sharp. Very, very sharp indeed. Rebus began to feel a mite uneasy. He disliked ballcrushers, and here were all the outward signs of one.

‘Yes, he did, didn’t he? But then he’s a glutton for punishment. We’re working on the Modus Operandi files. I’d do anything to defer that particular pleasure.’

She looked up at last, bitten by the potential insult.

‘That’s what I am, is it? A delaying tactic?’

Rebus smiled and shrugged.

‘What else?’ he said.

It was her turn to smile now. She closed the paper and folded it twice, placing it before her on the formica-topped table. She tapped the headline.

‘Looks like we’re in the news,’ she said.

Rebus turned the paper towards him.

EDINBURGH ABDUCTIONS — NOW IT’S MURDER!

‘A terrible bloody case,’ he offered. ‘Just terrible. And the newspapers don’t make it any better.’

‘Yes, well, we’ll have the PM results in a couple of hours, and then we just might have something to go on.’

‘I hope so. Just so long as I can put away those bloody files.’

‘I thought policemen,’ stressing the latter part of the word, ‘got their kicks from reading that stuff?’

Rebus spread his hands before him, a gesture he seemed to have picked up from Michael.

‘You have us to a T. How long have you been in the force?’

Rebus took her to be thirty, give or take two years. She had thick, short brown hair, and a long, straight ski-slope of a nose. There were no rings on her fingers, but these days that told him nothing.

‘Long enough,’ she said.

‘I think I knew you would say that.’

She was smiling still: no ballcrusher then.

‘Then you’re cleverer than I took you for,’ she said.

‘You’d be surprised.’

He was growing tired, realising that the game was going nowhere. It was all midfield, a friendly rather than a cup-tie. He checked his watch conspicuously.

‘Time I was getting back,’ he said.

She picked up her newspaper.

‘Are you doing anything this weekend?’ she asked.

John Rebus sat down again.

6

He left the station at four o’clock. The birds were doing their best to persuade everyone that it was dawn, but no one seemed fooled. It was dark still, and the air was chilled.

He decided to leave his car and walk home, a distance of two miles. He needed it, needed to feel the cool, damp air, the expectancy of a morning shower. He breathed deep, trying to relax, to forget, but his mind was too full of those files, and little pieces of recollected fact and figure, pieces of horror no bigger than a paragraph, haunted his walk.

To indecently assault an eight-week old baby girl. The babysitter who had calmly admitted to the assault saying that she had done it ‘for a kick’.

To rape a grandmother in front of her two grandchildren, then give the kids some sweets from a jar before leaving. The act premeditated; committed by a bachelor of fifty.

To burn with cigarettes the name of a street gang onto the breasts of a twelve-year old, leaving her for dead in a burning hut. Never caught.

And now the crux: to abduct two girls and then strangle them without having sexually abused them. That, Anderson had posited only thirty minutes before, was a perversion in itself, and in a funny way Rebus knew what he meant. It made the deaths even more arbitrary, more pointless — and more shocking.

Well, at least they were not dealing with a sex-offender; not right away. Which only, Rebus was forced to agree, made their task that much more difficult, for now they were confronted with something like a ‘serial killer’, striking at random and without clues, aiming at the record books rather than at any idea of ‘kicks’. The question now was would he stop at two? It seemed unlikely.

Strangulation. It was a fearful way to go, wrestling, kicking your way towards oblivion, panic, the fretful sucking for air, and the killer behind you most likely, so that you faced the fear of something totally anonymous, a death without knowledge of who or why. Rebus had been taught methods of killing in the SAS. He knew what it felt like to have the garotte tighten on your neck, trusting to the opponent’s prevailing sanity. A fearful way to go.

Edinburgh slept on, as it had slept on for hundreds of years. There were ghosts in the cobbled alleys and on the twisting stairways of the Old Town tenements, but they were Enlightenment ghosts, articulate and deferential. They were not about to leap from the darkness with a length of twine ready in their hands. Rebus paused and looked around him. Besides, it was morning now and any godfearing spirit would be tucked up in bed, as he, John Rebus, flesh and blood, would be soon.

Near his flat, he passed a little grocery shop outside which were stacked crates of milk and morning rolls. The owner had complained in private to Rebus about petty and occasional thefts, but would not submit a complaint proper. The shop was as dead as the street, the solitude of the moment disturbed only by the distant rumble of a taxi on cobblestones and the persistence of the dawn chorus. Rebus looked around him, examining the many curtained windows. Then, swiftly, he tore six rolls from a layer and stuffed them into his pockets, walking away a little too briskly. A moment later he hesitated, then walked on tiptoe back to the shop, the criminal returning to the scene of the crime, the dog to its vomit. Rebus had never actually seen dogs doing that, but he had it on the authority of Saint Peter.

Looking round again, he lifted a pint of milk out of its crate and made his getaway, whistling silently to himself.

Nothing in the world tasted as good for breakfast as stolen rolls with some butter and jam and a mug of milky coffee. Nothing tasted better than a venial sin.

He sniffed the stairwell of his tenement, catching the faint odour of tom-cats, a persistent menace. He held his breath as he climbed the two flights of stairs, fumbling in his pocket beneath the squashed rolls, trying to liberate his door-key.

The interior of the flat felt damp and smelt damp. He checked the central heating and, sure enough, the pilot-light had gone out again. He cursed as he relit it, turning the heat up all the way, and went through to the living-room.

There were still spaces on the book-case, the wall-unit, the mantelpiece where Rhona’s ornaments had once stood, but many of the gaps had already been filled by new mementoes of his own: bills, unanswered letters, old ring-pulls from tins of cheap beer, the occasional unread book. Rebus collected unread books. Once upon a time, he had actually read the books that he bought, but these days he seemed to have so little time. Also, he was more discriminating now than he had been then, back in the old days when he would read a book to its bitter end whether he liked it or not. These days, a book he disliked was unlikely to last ten pages of his concentration.

These were the books that lay around his living-room. His books for reading tended to congregate in the bedroom, lying in co-ordinated rows on the floor like patients in a doctor’s waiting-room. One of these days he would take a holiday, would rent a cottage in the Highlands or on the Fife coast, and would take with him all of these waiting-to-be-read-or-reread books, all of that knowledge that could be his for the breaking open of a cover. His favourite book, a book he turned to at least once a year, was Crime and Punishment. If only, he thought, modern murderers would exhibit some show of conscience more often. But no, modern killers bragged of their crimes to their friends, then played pool in their local pub, chalking their cues with poise and certainty, knowing which balls would drop in which order …

While a police-car slept nearby, its occupants unable to do anything save curse the mountains of rules and regulations and rue the deep chasms of crime. It was everywhere, crime. It was the life-force and the blood and the balls of life: to cheat, to edge; to take that body-swerve at authority, to kill. The higher up you climbed into crime, the more subtly you began to move back towards legitimacy, until a handful of lawyers only could crack open your system, and they were always affordable, always on hand to be bribed. Dostoevsky had known all that, clever old bastard. He had felt the stick burning from both ends.

But poor old Dostoevsky was dead and had not been invited to a party this weekend, while he, John Rebus, had. Often he declined invitations, because to accept meant that he had to dust off his brogues, iron a shirt, brush down his best suit, take a bath, and splash on some cologne. He had also to be affable, to drink and be merry, to talk to strangers with whom he had no inclination to talk and with whom he was not being paid to talk. In other words, he resented having to play the part of a normal human animal. But he had accepted the invitation given to him by Cathy Jackson in the Waverley Road canteen. Of course he had.

And he whistled at the thought of it, wandering through to the kitchen to make some breakfast, which he then took through to his bedroom. This was a ritual after a night duty. He stripped, climbed into bed, balanced the plate of rolls on his chest, and held a book to his nose. It was not a very good book. It was about a kidnapping. Rhona had taken away the bed proper, but had left him the mattress, so it was easy for him to reach down for his mug of coffee, easy for him to discard one book and find another.

He fell asleep soon enough, the lamp still burning, as cars began to pass by his window.

His alarm did the trick for a change, pulling him off the mattress as a magnet attracts filings. He had kicked off the duvet, and was drenched in sweat. He felt suffocated, and remembered suddenly that the central heating was still boiling away like a steamship. On his way to switching off the thermostat, he stooped at the front door to pick up the day’s mail. One of the letters was unstamped and unfranked. It bore only his name in typescript across the front. Rebus’s stomach squeezed hard on the paste of rolls and butter. He ripped the envelope open, pulling out the single sheet of paper.

FOR THOSE WHO READ BETWEEN THE TIMES.

So now the lunatic knew where he lived. Checking in the envelope, laconic now and expecting to find the knotted string, he found instead two matchsticks, tied together with thread into the shape of a cross.