Beggars Banquet Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title PageCopyright Page

  Introduction

  Trip Trap - AN INSPECTOR REBUS STORYSomeone Got to Eddie

  A Deep Hole

  Natural Selection

  Facing the Music - AN INSPECTOR REBUS STORY

  Principles of Accounts

  The Only True Comedian

  Herbert in Motion

  Glimmer

  Unlucky in Love, Unlucky at Cards

  Video, Nasty

  Talk Show - AN INSPECTOR REBUS STORY

  Castle Dangerous - AN INSPECTOR REBUS STORY

  The Wider Scheme

  Unknown Pleasures

  In the Frame - AN INSPECTOR REBUS STORY

  The Confession

  The Hanged Man

  Window of Opportunity - AN INSPECTOR REBUS STORY

  The Serpent’s Back

  No Sanity Clause - AN INSPECTOR REBUS STORY FOR CHRISTMAS

  Death Is Not The EndOne

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Praise for Ian Rankin

  ‘Rankin’s ability to create a credible character, delivering convincing dialogue to complement sinister and hard-hitting plots set against vividly detailed atmosphere, is simply awesome’ Time Out

  ‘Rankin is streets ahead in the British police procedural writing field . . . our top crime writer’Independent on Sunday

  ‘His ear for dialogue is as sharp as a switchblade. This is, quite simply, crime writing of the highest order’ Daily Express

  ‘Rankin writes laconic, sophisticated, well-paced thrillers’ Scotsman

  ‘Ian Rankin bridges the gulf between the straight novel and the mystery with enviable ease’Allan Massie

  ‘First-rate crime fiction with a fierce realism’Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Rankin uses his laconic prose as a literary paint stripper, scouring away pretensions to reveal the unwholesome reality beneath’ Independent

  ‘His fiction buzzes with energy . . . Essentially, he is a romantic storyteller in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson . . . His prose is as vivid and terse as the next man’s, yet its flexibility and rhythm give it a potential for lyrical expression which is distinctively Rankin’s own’ Scotland on Sunday

  By Ian Rankin

  The Inspector Rebus series

  Knots & Crosses

  Hide & Seek

  Tooth & Nail

  Strip Jack

  The Black Book

  Mortal Causes

  Let It Bleed

  Black & Blue

  The Hanging Garden

  Death Is Not the End (novella)

  Dead Souls

  Set in Darkness

  The Falls

  Resurrection Men

  A Question of Blood

  Fleshmarket Close

  The Naming of the Dead

  Exit Music

  Other novels

  The Flood

  Watchman

  Westwind

  Writing as Jack Harvey

  Witch Hunt

  Bleeding Hearts

  Blood Hunt

  Short stories

  A Good Hanging and Other

  Stories

  Beggars Banquet

  Omnibus editions

  Rebus: The Early Years

  (Knots & Crosses, Hide &

  Seek, Tooth & Nail)

  Rebus: The St Leonard’s Years

  (Strip Jack, The Black Book,

  Mortal Causes)

  Rebus: The Lost Years

  (Let It Bleed, Black & Blue,

  The Hanging Garden)

  Rebus: Capital Crimes

  (Dead Souls, Set in Darkness,

  The Falls)

  Non-fiction

  Rebus’s Scotland

  All Ian Rankin’s titles are available on audio.

  Also available: Jackie Leven Said by Ian Rankin and Jackie Leven.

  Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel, Knots & Crosses, was published in 1987, and the Rebus books are now translated into over thirty languages and are bestsellers worldwide.Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards including the prestigious Diamond Dagger in 2005. In 2004, Ian won America’s celebrated Edgar award for Resurrection Men. He has also been shortlisted for the Anthony Awards in the USA, and won Denmark’s Palle Rosenkrantz Prize, the French Grand Prix du Roman Noir and the Deutscher Krimipreis. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Hull and the Open University.

  A contributor to BBC2’s Newsnight Review, he also presented his own TV series, Ian Rankin’s Evil Thoughts. He has received the OBE for services to literature, opting to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh. He has also recently been appointed to the rank of Deputy Lieutenant of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons. Visit his website at www.ianrankin.net.

  Beggars Banquet

  IAN RANKIN

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  An Orion paperback

  First published in Great Britain in 2002

  by Orion

  This paperback edition published in 2003

  by Orion Books Ltd,

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane,

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette Livre UK company

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Reissued 2008

  Copyright © John Rebus Limited 2002

  The right of Ian Rankin to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  More detailed copyright information

  can be found on pages 375-6.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

  in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

  permission of the copyright owner.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 4091 0772 9

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  The Orion Publishing Group’s policy is to use papers that

  are natural, renewable and recyclable products and

  made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging

  and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to

  the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  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 pol
lution, 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 . . .