Strip Jack Read online

  Praise for Ian Rankin

  ‘Rankin weaves his plot with a menacing ease . . . His prose is understated, yet his canvas of Scotland’s criminal underclass has a panoramic breadth. His ear for dialogue is as sharp as a switchblade. This is, quite simply, crime writing of the highest order’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘A series that shows no signs of flagging . . . Assured, sympathetic to contemporary foibles, humanistic, this is more than just a police procedural as the character of Rebus grows in moral stature . . . Rankin is the head capo of the MacMafia’

  Time Out

  ‘Rankin has followed one success with another. Sardonic and assured, the novel has a powerful and well-paced narrative. What is striking is the way Rankin uses his laconic prose as a literary paint stripper, scouring away pretensions to reveal the unwholesome reality beneath’

  Independent

  ‘Rankin strips Edinburgh’s polite façade to its gritty skeleton’

  The Times

  ‘A teeming Ellroy-esque evocation of life at the sharp end in modern Scotland . . . Rankin is the finest Scottish crime writer to emerge since William McIvanney’

  GQ

  ‘Rebus resurgent . . . a brilliantly meshed plot which delivers on every count on its way to a conclusion as unexpected as it is inevitable. Eleventh in the series. Still making waves’

  Literary Review

  ‘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 potential for lyrical expression which is distinctly Rankin’s own’

  Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Top notch . . . the bleakness is unrelenting, but it quite suits Mr Rankin who does his best work in the dark’

  New York Times

  ‘The internal police politics and corruption in high places are both portrayed with bone-freezing accuracy. This novel should come with a wind-chill factor warning’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Detective Inspector Rebus makes the old-style detectives with their gentle or bookish backgrounds, Alleyn, Morse, Dalgliesh, look like wimps . . . Rankin is brilliant at conveying the genuine stench of seedy places on the dark side of Scotland’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘It’s the banter and energy, the immense carnival of scenes and charaters, voices and moods that set Rankin apart. His stories are like a transmission forever in the red zone, at the edge of burnout. This is crime fiction at its best’

  Washington Post

  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 and 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 and in 2009 was inducted into the CWA Hall of Fame. 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.

  By Ian Rankin

  The Inspector Rebus series

  Knots & Crosses – paperback – ebook

  Hide & Seek – paperback – ebook

  Tooth & Nail – paperback – ebook

  Strip Jack – paperback – ebook

  The Black Book – paperback – ebook

  Mortal Causes – paperback – ebook

  Let it Bleed – paperback – ebook

  Black & Blue – paperback – ebook

  The Hanging Garden – paperback – ebook

  Death Is Not The End (novella)

  Dead Souls – paperback – ebook

  Set in Darkness – paperback – ebook

  The Falls – paperback – ebook

  Resurrection Men – paperback – ebook

  A Question of Blood – paperback – ebook

  Fleshmarket Close – paperback – ebook

  The Naming of the Dead – paperback – ebook

  Exit Music – paperback – ebook

  Other Novels

  The Flood – paperback – ebook

  Watchman – paperback – ebook

  Westwind

  A Cool Head (Quickread) – paperback – ebook

  Doors Open – paperback – ebook

  The Complaints – paperback – ebook

  Writing as Jack Harvey

  Witch Hunt – paperback – ebook

  Bleeding Hearts – paperback – ebook

  Blood Hunt – paperback – ebook

  Short Stories

  A Good Hanging and Other Stories – paperback – ebook

  Beggars Banquet – paperback – ebook

  Non-Fiction

  Rebus’s Scotland – paperback

  Ian Rankin

  Strip Jack

  To the only Jack I’ve ever stripped

  He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

  Shaw, Major Barbara

  The habit of friendship is matured by constant intercourse.

  Libianus, 4th century AD, quoted in Edinburgh,

  by Charles McKean

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Dedication

  Praise for Ian Rankin

  About the Author

  By Ian Rankin

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1. The Milking Shed

  2. Scratching the Surface

  3. Treacherous Steps

  4. Tips

  5. Up the River

  6. Highland Games

  7. Duthil

  8. Spite and Malice

  9. Within Range

  10. Brothel Creepers

  11. Old School Ties

  12. Escort Service

  13. Hot-Head

  Reading Group Notes

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  The first thing to acknowledge is that the constituency of North and South Esk is the author’s creation. However, you don’t need to be Mungo Park to work out that there must be some correlation between North and South Esk and the real world, Edinburgh being a real place, and ‘south and east of Edinburgh’ being a vaguely definable geographical area.

  In fact, North and South Esk bears some resemblance to the Midlothian parliamentary constituency – prior to 1983’s Boundary Commission changes – but also bites a small southernmost chunk out of the present Edinburgh Pentlands constituency and a westerly chunk out of East Lothian constituency.

  Gregor Jack, too, is fiction, and bears no resemblance to any MP.

  Thanks are due to the following for their inestimable help; Alex Eadie, who was until his retirement the MP for Midlothian; John Home Robertson MP; Professor Busuttil, Regius Professor of Forensic Medicine, University of Edinburgh; Lothian and Borders Police; City of Edinburgh Police; the staff of the Edinburgh Room, Edinburgh Central
Library; the staff of the National Library of Scotland; staff and customers of Sandy Bell’s, the Oxford Bar, Mather’s (West End), Clark’s Bar and the Green Tree.

  Strip Jack was the first of the Rebus novels to be written entirely in the rundown French farmhouse which I’d moved to with my wife in 1990. Our first couple of years there, we put most of our effort into doing the place up: rewiring, putting up ceilings, and trying to cultivate the acre of brambled wilderness around us. The attic became my office. It was accessed by a rickety wooden ladder and a trapdoor. The floor was so badly warped that any pens placed on the desk would roll off with frightening speed. The decor consisted of bus maps of central Edinburgh, postcards of the city’s monuments, and a list of police regions in Scotland.

  Yet little of our French idyll seeped into the book. Quite the opposite: it’s one of my most Scottish works, perhaps in reaction to the previous novel’s London setting. Words such as ‘brae’, ‘keech’, ‘birl’, and ‘haar’ creep in. Whisky is referred to as ‘the cratur’, while ‘ba-heid’ is used as a term of insult. Many of the words, such as ‘shoogly’ and ‘peching’, were favourites of my father: it’s possible I was thinking of him as I wrote. This was my first book since his funeral in 1990. Certainly, he was the only person I’d ever heard say, ‘If shit was gold, ye’d have a tyke at yer erse,’ words I would now give to Rebus’s own father.

  To reinforce the book’s Scottishness, I suggested its original jacket design – a lion rampant flying cheekily from the Houses of Parliament. But as well as being very Scottish in its language, Strip Jack also seems to me a less savage and biting book than my three previous efforts in the series. This could be due to a change in family circumstances. My wife Miranda became pregnant in 1991, and our son Jack was born in February 1992. This is why Strip Jack is dedicated to ‘the only Jack I’ve ever stripped’ – something which now makes my teenage son cringe, of course.

  The title came from a compendium of card games. I’d been looking for something which would reflect the playfulness of Knots & Crosses and Hide & Seek, and had compiled lists of children’s and adults’ games and pastimes. The card game ‘Strip Jack Naked’ appealed to me: I could give my chief suspect in the book the surname Jack. It seemed, after all, that someone was out to strip him of his standing, his good name – maybe even his life. The three-word title seemed clumsy, however, so I shortened it to two.

  Curiously, it was only in leaving Scotland that I began really to become interested in my native country’s history and politics. I started to devour books on these subjects, and would return to Edinburgh three or four times a year, usually begging a bed or sofa at a friend’s place. I would take long walks around the city, using up rolls of film in my cheap camera, and spending hours in the various libraries. Now that I was a full-time writer, I felt a fresh obligation to get the details right. For Strip Jack, I wrote to the University of Edinburgh’s Pathology Department, and was granted a meeting with Professor Anthony Busuttil. He became responsible for much of the forensic detail in the book (and in others in the series). When Dr Curt speaks of ‘diatoms’ and ‘washerwoman’s skin’, it is really Professor Busuttil talking. That first meeting was memorable in that the Professor momentarily mistook me for a police officer and began discussing the case of a slashed throat. As he started to bring out the autopsy photos, my greying face told him he’d made a mistake . . .

  Living and working so far from Edinburgh, I fell back on personal history and reminiscence for much of Rebus’s inner life. When he recalls picnics and holiday destinations, they are my experiences rather than his. The MP Gregor Jack, however, comes from nowhere other than my imagination. I based him on no one I knew. His circle of friends, though, is another matter. I had made close friends in high school, and not many since. The story of how ‘Suey’ got his nickname comes from a real-life event which occurred during a school trip to Germany when I was sixteen. And the ‘dyslexic bigotry’ of ‘Remember 1960’ appeared on a friend’s tenement stairwell in Easter Road.

  Rebus also takes on some of my own characteristics. On one trip to Edinburgh, I’d consulted a doctor about the panic attacks I’d been suffering. Rather than medication, he’d prescribed self-hypnosis and relaxation techniques. In giving my problems to Rebus, I was using my writing as a form of therapy. Just as I had taken him to London in Tooth & Nail, so that he could dislike the place on my behalf, so I dumped my health problems on him too. However, I also did him the favour of placing him in a relationship with Dr Patience Aitken, who had a flat in Oxford Terrace next door to one of my high-school friends. (He would pop up in the book, actually, in the scene in the Horsehair Bar.) Patience would provide Rebus with some much-needed emotional stability . . . at least for a few books.

  Reading the novel now, it seems to me that Strip Jack is partly a story of friendship, of ties formed at school and never loosed. But it’s also another of my explorations of the theme of Scotland’s Jekyll and Hyde character: people hide their true selves behind a veneer of respectability. By the end, the villain of the piece has been reduced to something ape-like, bringing to mind descriptions of Mr Hyde in Stevenson’s story.

  Up until the final moments of Strip Jack, Rebus had been based in a fictitious police station on a fictitious street. However, now that I was a full-time author, earning a living by writing about real professions, I felt I owed it to the real-life practitioners to make my books as authentic as possible. I would take Rebus out of my made-up Edinburgh and into the real one: he would work in a real cop-shop and drink in real bars.

  My long apprenticeship was nearing its end.

  April 2005

  1

  The Milking Shed

  The wonder of it was that the neighbours hadn’t complained, hadn’t even – as many of them later told the newsmen – realized. Not until that night, the night their sleep was disturbed by sudden activity in the street. Cars, vans, policemen, the static chatter of radios. Not that the noise ever got out of hand. The whole operation was directed with such speed and, yes, even good humour that there were those who slept through the excitement.

  ‘I want courtesy,’ Chief Superintendent ‘Farmer’ Watson had explained to his men in the briefing room that evening. ‘It may be a hoor-hoose, but it’s on the right side of town, if you take my meaning. No telling who might be in there. We might even come across our own dear Chief Constable.’

  Watson grinned, to let them know he was joking. But some of the officers in the room, knowing the CC better than Watson himself apparently did, exchanged glances and wry smiles.

  ‘Right,’ said Watson, ‘let’s go through the plan of attack one more time . . .’

  Christ, he’s loving this, thought Detective Inspector John Rebus. He’s loving every minute. And why not? This was Watson’s baby after all, and it was to be a home birth. Which was to say, Watson was going to be in charge all the way from immaculate conception to immaculate delivery.

  Maybe it was a male menopause thing, this need to flex a bit of muscle. Most of the chief supers Rebus had known in his twenty years on the force had been content to push pens over paper and wait for retirement day. But not Watson. Watson was like Channel Four: full of independent programmes of minority interest. He didn’t make waves exactly, but by Christ he splashed like hell.

  And now he even seemed to have an informer, an invisible somebody who had whispered in his ear the word ‘brothel’. Sin and debauchery! Watson’s hard Presbyterian heart had been stirred to righteous indignation. He was the kind of Highland Christian who found sex within marriage just about acceptable – his son and daughter were proof – but who baulked at anything and everything else. If there was an active brothel in Edinburgh, Watson wanted it shut down with prejudice.

  But then the informer had provided an address, and this caused a certain hesitation. The brothel was in one of the better streets of the New Town, quiet Georgian terraces, lined with trees and Saabs and Volvos, the houses filled with professional people: lawyers, surgeons,
university professors. This was no seaman’s bawdy-house, no series of damp, dark rooms above a dockside pub. This was, as Rebus himself had offered, an Establishment establishment. Watson hadn’t seen the joke.

  Watch had been kept for several days and nights, courtesy of unmarked cars and unremarkable plainclothes men. Until there could be little doubt: whatever was happening inside the shuttered rooms, it was happening after midnight and it was happening briskly. Interestingly, few of the many men arrived by car. But a watchful detective constable, taking a leak in the dead of night, discovered why. The men were parking their cars in side streets and walking the hundred yards or so to the front door of the four-storey house. Perhaps this was house policy: the slamming of after-hours car doors would arouse suspicion in the street. Or perhaps it was in the visitors’ own interests not to leave their cars in broad streetlight, where they might be recognized . . .

  Registration numbers were taken and checked, as were photographs of visitors to the house. The owner of the house itself was traced. He owned half a French vineyard as well as several properties in Edinburgh, and lived in Bordeaux the year through. His solicitor had been responsible for letting the house to a Mrs Croft, a very genteel lady in her fifties. According to the solicitor, she paid her rent promptly and in cash. Was there any problem . . .?