Beggars Banquet (collection) Read online

  Beggars Banquet

  Ian Rankin

  Over the years, Ian Rankin has amassed an incredible portfolio of short stories. Published in crime magazines, composed for events, broadcast on radio, they all share the best qualities of his phenomenally popular Rebus novels. 10 years ago, A GOOD HANGING Ian's first short story collection demonstrated this talent and now after nearly a decade at the top of popular fiction, Ian is releasing a follow up. Ranging from the macabre ('The Hanged Man') to the unfortunate ('The Only True Comedian') right back to the sinister ('Someone Got To Eddie') they all bear the hallmark of great crime writing. Of even more interest to his many fans, Ian includes seven Inspector Rebus stories in this new collection…

  Ian Rankin

  Beggars Banquet

  Introduction

  I started off life as a short story writer. Actually, that’s not strictly true. I started as a comic-book writer, drawing stick-men cartoons with speech bubbles. I was about seven or eight, and I’d fold sheets of plain paper until I had a little booklet. Then I’d draw my stick-men. They would appear in strips about football, war, and outer space… until it was pointed out to me that I couldn’t really draw. A potentially glorious career nipped in the bud. It didn’t really bother me. By now I was ten or eleven and starting to listen to music. But being an obsessive sort of kid, it wasn’t enough just to listen – same as I’d never just been happy as a reader of comics. I did what any sensible person would do – started a band. Problem was, none of my friends shared my interest. It didn’t help that I couldn’t read music or play an instrument. I didn’t need to: the music could be stored in my head, the lyrics written down. So I invented a ‘bubblegum’ pop group called The Amoebas, whose roster included Ian Kaput (vocals), Zed ‘Killer’ Macintosh (bass) and Blue Lightning (guitar). I recall the drummer had a double-barrelled name, but forget what it was. By writing lyrics for this band, I found myself writing poetry – doggerel, admittedly, but poetry all the same, in that the lyrics scanned and had a rhyme scheme. It wasn’t such a leap, therefore, to write my first ‘proper’ poem at around the age of sixteen. The Amoebas were still around then, incidentally, but had shifted from pop to progressive rock.

  The thing about my poems was, they told stories. They were about people going to places and the consequences of their actions. I think that’s why I started writing short stories. I wrote several while still at school, aided by an English teacher called Mr Gillespie, who seemed to think I had ‘something’. At that time, in our English class we were given topics and had to construct a weekly short story. In one instance, Mr Gillespie gave us the phrase ‘Dark they were and golden-eyed’. The rest was up to us. My contribution concerned worried parents searching a busy squat for their drug-addict son. A lot of my stories were in this – ahem – vein. At home, I wrote about kids running away from their small-town existences, only to end up committing suicide in London. One longer story took place in my own school, where a poster of Mick Jagger took on devilish powers and persuaded the kids to go on a rampage. (Influenced by Lord of the Flies? Maybe more than a smidge…)

  At university, I wrote poems and short stories both. My first ‘proper’ short story, about a shipyard closure, came second in a national competition. My next, based on a real family event, won another prize. The first story of mine to appear in a collection was ‘An Afternoon’. It was about a seasoned copper patrolling a Hibs football match. (It wasn’t good enough for the collection you’re about to read, so don’t bother looking.)

  The stories collected here span a decade or more. Some first appeared on radio, others in American magazines. They comprise my first short story collection since 1992’s A Good Hanging. Not all of them are Rebus stories. There’s a good reason for this: I tend to write short stories in between books, as a way of getting the good Inspector out of my system for a while. This was certainly true of ‘A Deep Hole’, featured here and one of the collection’s most successful stories, in that it won a Dagger for Best Story of the Year, and was also shortlisted for the prestigious Anthony award. The really curious thing about ‘A Deep Hole’ is that it started life set entirely in Edinburgh. Then an editor called and asked if I had anything set in London for a book he was compiling. I tweaked ‘A Deep Hole’ and sent it off. Not a bad move, as it turned out. Another story here, ‘Herbert in Motion’, also won a Dagger for Best Short Story. Its genesis was an off-hand comment by my partner about how government ministers in Whitehall could borrow works of art from various galleries and museums. This is the beauty of the short story: all you need is a single good idea. No convolutions or sub-plots. Well, not many. Not as many as in a novel, certainly. Stories are also good ways of experimenting with narrative voice, structure and methods of economy. I’ve managed to whittle stories down from 800 words to 200 – a struggle, but useful in that I came to learn just how much it is possible to leave out. There’s no place for fat on a story: it has to be lean and fit. ‘Glimmer’ started life as a novella, until I realised I was indulging myself. Whittling away, I found the real story peering out at me. It’s still an indulgence, giving me a chance to create a mythology around one of my favourite Rolling Stones songs, but now it’s as lean as it is mean.

  A couple of the stories here – ‘The Confession’ and ‘The Hanged Man’ – started life as pieces for radio. Another, ‘Principles of Accounts’, began as a treatment for a TV drama which never came to be. Strangest of all, perhaps, is ‘The Only True Comedian’, which began as a monologue for radio. Eventually, changed out of all recognition and renamed ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’, it appeared as a short TV drama as part of Scottish Television’s ‘ Newfoundland ’ series. I think I was credited as co-writer, but when I sat down to watch the finished product, I don’t think I heard more than two lines which I’d written. The rest had been altered to suit the medium. It seemed to work: the actor picked up an award for his performance. But all told, I was much happier with my short story.

  I like short stories. I enjoy reading other people’s, as well as writing them myself. For a time, I mistakenly thought it might even be possible to make a living as a short story writer. After all, in this jump-cut, fast-paced, bite-sized urban world, short stories offer convenience – you can start and finish one on a short bus ride or train journey. You can read one in your lunch break. It might even be possible to write one in your lunch break. Look around you. The ideas are out there. Sometimes they’re close enough to touch.

  In closing, and before you begin I should thank my editor for this collection, Jon Wood. The title Beggars Banquet was his idea. A great Stones album. I hope you enjoy tucking into these morsels.

  Ian Rankin

  Edinburgh

  Trip Trap – AN INSPECTOR REBUS STORY

  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 be
cause 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.’