10 Great Rebus Novels (John Rebus) 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 police 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 McIlvanney.’

  GQ

  ‘Rebus resurgent . . . a brilliantly meshed plot which delivers on every count on its way to a conclusion as unexpected as it is inevitable.’

  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 characters, 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

  IAN RANKIN

  10 GREAT REBUS NOVELS

  Knots & Crosses

  Hide & Seek

  Tooth & Nail

  Strip Jack

  The Black Book

  Mortal Causes

  Let it Bleed

  Black & Blue

  The Hanging Garden

  Dead Souls

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for Ian Rankin

  Title Page

  Knots & Crosses

  Hide & Seek

  Tooth & Nail

  Strip Jack

  The Black Book

  Mortal Causes

  Let it Bleed

  Black & Blue

  The Hanging Garden

  Dead Souls

  Reading Group Notes

  About the Author

  By Ian Rankin

  Copyright

  KNOTS & CROSSES

  To Miranda

  without whom

  nothing is worth finishing

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part One: ‘There are Clues Everywhere’

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two: ‘For Those Who Read Between the Times’

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Three: Knot

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Four: The Cross

  Chapter 22

  Part Five: Knots & Crosses

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Discussion Points

  INTRODUCTION

  The nineteenth of March 1985 was a big day for me. I was a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, studying the novels of Muriel Spark. My thesis, however, was proving less important to me than my own writing. I’d started with poetry, then found some minor success with short stories. A first novel had failed to find a publisher, but my second attempt had just been given the thumbs-up by a small Edinburgh-based outfit called Polygon. That novel was titled The Flood, and on 19 March I went to the Polygon offices to sign my first ever book contract. I recorded the event in my diary, where, however, it was reduced to second billing after the following: ‘It’s happened. An idea for a novel (crime thriller) which started as one situation and has blossomed into a whole plot. I’ve not written any of it yet, but it’s all there in my head, from page one to circa page 250.’

  By 22 March I was working on this new story, and two days later recorded that ‘it needs a working title; I’m going to give it Knots & Crosses’. I certainly remember sitting in a chair in my bedsit, directly in front of the gas fire, and toying with the pun of noughts/knots and crosses. Rebus, it seems to me now, entered as a fully formed character, complete with estranged wife, young daughter and fragile sanity. When I started writing, I did so on an electric typewriter, at the table by the window. I stared from that window at the tenement opposite, and decided that Rebus would live there, directly across from my own digs at 24 Arden Street, Marchmont, Edinburgh.

  By late October, I had finished the second draft of the book: ‘two hundred and ten pages of sixty per cent satisfactory prose’. I had an agent by this time, and she suggested some changes, the most substantial of which involved cutting a large part of the central flashback section. This I did, making the book leaner, but no less potent.

  Knots & Crosses is a pretty nasty book, dealing as it does with a serial killer who preys on children. I’m fairly sure I meant it to be a contemporary reworking of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Having studied Stevenson’s masterpiece as part of my thesis, I was intrigued that he chose to set the story in London. Yet it remains a very Scottish novel, based as it is (at least partially) on the real-life Edinburgh character Deacon William Brodie, who was gentleman by day, criminal by night.

  At the time, I had no interest in reading detective fiction, and no knowledge of police procedure. I also had no notion that Knots would be the first book of a series. This led me blithely to give Rebus a complex personal history and a name which was one of many in-jokes in the book (a rebus being a pictorial puzzle). In fact, rereading the book now, I find myself blushing at the number of literary puns and references (including nods to Spark, Mailer, Anthony Burgess and Thomas Pynchon). Rebus himself is too well-read, quoting from Shakespeare and passionate about Dostoevsky. He thinks like the student/novelist who created him, rather than as a real cop. The sky is described as being ‘dark as Wagnerian opera’, while the phrase ‘the manumission of dreams’ sent me
(in 2005) to a dictionary. I’m guessing it was a word I’d only just learned in 1985, and I was keen to show it off. I was a young man in love with language, striving for a voice and sometimes overreaching.

  The story is set in 1985. At that time, most of the shops on Princes Street closed on a Sunday. There was an ABC cinema (now an Odeon) on Lothian Road and a Mr Boni’s ice-cream parlour (now defunct) at Tollcross. People used telex machines, but no one had a mobile phone. And when Rebus sought out a bar, he tended to choose one with larger quarter-gill measures (since replaced by their metric equivalent). Already, Knots & Crosses feels like a historical document, written in and about an Edinburgh that no longer exists. As for the book’s hero, well, he’s changed in time as well. In this, his first outing, he listens to jazz mainly, using a Nakamichi cassette deck, probably the same one my girlfriend Miranda had bought for me. Later on, I would switch his preference to rock music. And though I’ve never really described him physically in any of the novels, here we learn that he has brown hair and green eyes (same as me). He’s also meant to be a possible suspect, which is why I make him so troubled, suffering weird flashbacks and with a spare bedroom in his flat that’s kept permanently locked.

  Some of the secondary characters in Knots would become useful to me in future books. The journalist Jim Stevens would play a role in a non-Rebus novel (Watchman) before reappearing in the series. Rebus’s brother would return, as would his fellow detective Jack Morton. And Gill Templer is still around, her relationship with Rebus coloured, even after all these years, by the events of this first novel. In later books, of course, I take Rebus into real police stations and real pubs. But the Edinburgh of Knots is altogether more fictive: Rebus’s police station is sited on a non-existent street, and bars such as the Sutherland remain figments of my imagination.

  One other thing about Rebus: he dies at the end. Not in the final draft, obviously, but that was my original plan. If I’d stuck to it, I don’t know what I’d be doing now. The book climaxes in some tunnels beneath the Central Library on George IV Bridge. There may or may not be tunnels there. However, beneath the National Library (right across the street from the Central) there are certainly tunnels – I know because we postgraduate students were given a tour of them . . . and, as Muriel Spark says, nothing is ever lost to an author.

  Since I had no idea how the police went about investigating a murder, I did what any good research student would have done: wrote to the Chief Constable. He took pity on me and directed me to Leith police station, where two wary detectives answered my questions, and added my name to their database, just in case I had some darker ulterior motive. In my duffel coat and Doc Marten boots, a Dr Who scarf wrapped around me, I probably wasn’t their idea of a novelist. Sometimes even now I look in the mirror and am forced to agree.

  Knots was finally published in London by The Bodley Head (now also defunct) on 19 March 1987, exactly two years to the day since I’d had the initial idea. The cover was a drawing of a game of noughts and crosses, played with knotted pieces of twine and crosses made from matchsticks. As for the author photo, the less said the better. By this time, I was married, living in London, and working at Middlesex Polytechnic. I went into work as usual, and saw no reviews of the book in any of the day’s newspapers. Forty-eight hours later, I headed to Edinburgh to spend some weeks at a writers’ retreat. There seemed no great fuss about the book. Sales would continue to be poor, with few reviews. I said as much in my diary: ‘Knots has had less publicity than Flood.’ So much for my fledgling career as a crime writer. I was by this time working on a London-based spy novel called Watchman, and had plans to be the next le Carré. Rebus was history, as far as I was concerned.

  But that would change.

  April 2005

  PROLOGUE

  1

  The girl screamed once, only the once.

  Even that, however, was a minor slip on his part. That might have been the end of everything, almost before it had begun. Neighbours inquisitive, the police called in to investigate. No, that would not do at all. Next time he would tie the gag a little tighter, just a little tighter, just that little bit more secure.

  Afterwards, he went to the drawer and took from it a ball of string. He used a pair of sharp nail-scissors, the kind girls always seem to use, to snip off a length of about six inches, then he put the ball of string and the scissors back into the drawer. A car revved up outside, and he went to the window, upsetting a pile of books on the floor as he did so. The car, however, had vanished, and he smiled to himself. He tied a knot in the string, not any special kind of knot, just a knot. There was an envelope lying ready on the sideboard.

  2

  It was 28th April. Wet, naturally, the grass percolating water as John Rebus walked to the grave of his father, dead five years to the day. He placed a wreath so that it lay, yellow and red, the colours of remembrance, against the still shining marble. He paused for a moment, trying to think of things to say, but there seemed nothing to say, nothing to think. He had been a good enough father and that was that. The old man wouldn’t have wanted him to waste his words in any case. So he stood there, hands respectfully behind his back, crows laughing on the walls around him, until the water seeping into his shoes told him that there was a warm car waiting for him at the cemetery gates.

  He drove quietly, hating to be back here in Fife, back where the old days had never been ‘good old days,’ where ghosts rustled in the shells of empty houses and the shutters went up every evening on a handful of desultory shops, those metal shutters that gave the vandals somewhere to write their names. How Rebus hated it all, this singular lack of an environment. It stank the way it had always done: of misuse, of disuse, of the sheer wastage of life.

  He drove the eight miles towards the open sea, to where his brother Michael still lived. The rain eased off as he approached the skull-grey coast, the car throwing up splashings of water from a thousand crevasses in the road. Why was it, he wondered, that they never seemed to fix the roads here, while in Edinburgh they worked on the surfaces so often that things were made even worse? And why, above all, had he made the maniacal decision to come all the way through to Fife, just because it was the anniversary of the old man’s death? He tried to focus his mind on something else, and found himself fantasising about his next cigarette.

  Through the rain, falling as drizzle now, Rebus saw a girl about his daughter’s age walking along the grass verge. He slowed the car, examined her in his mirror as he passed her, and stopped. He motioned for her to come to his window.

  Her short breaths were visible in the cool, still air, and her dark hair fell in rats-tails down her forehead. She looked at him apprehensively.

  ‘Where are you going, love?’

  ‘Kirkcaldy.’

  ‘Do you want a lift?’

  She shook her head, drops of water flying from her coiled hair.

  ‘My mum said I should never accept lifts from strangers.’

  ‘Well,’ said Rebus, smiling, ‘your mum is quite right. I’ve got a daughter about your age and I tell her the same thing. But it is raining, and I am a policeman, so you can trust me. You’ve still got a fair way to go, you know.’

  She looked up and down the silent road, then shook her head again.

  ‘Okay,’ said Rebus, ‘but take care. Your mum was quite right.’

  He wound his window up again and drove off, watching her in his mirror as she watched him. Clever kid. It was good to know that parents still had a little sense of responsibility left. If only the same could be said of his ex-wife. The way she had brought up their daughter was a disgrace. Michael, too, had given his daughter too long a leash. Who was to blame?

  Rebus’s brother owned a respectable house. He had followed in the old man’s footsteps and become a stage hypnotist. He seemed to be quite good at it, too, from all accounts. Rebus had never asked Michael how it was done, just as he had never shown any interest or curiosity in the old man’s act. He had observed that this still puzzled
Michael, who would drop hints and red herrings as to the authenticity of his own stage act for him to chase up if he so wished.

  But then John Rebus had too many things to chase up, and that had been the position during all of his fifteen years on the force. Fifteen years, and all he had to show were an amount of self-pity and a busted marriage with an innocent daughter hanging between them. It was more disgusting than sad. And meantime Michael was happily married with two kids and a larger house than Rebus could ever afford. He headlined at hotels, clubs, and even theatres as far away as Newcastle and Wick. Occasionally he would make six-hundred quid from a single show. Outrageous. He drove an expensive car, wore good clothes, and would never have been caught dead standing in the pissing rain in a graveyard in Fife on the dullest April day for many a year. No, Michael was too clever for that. And too stupid.

  ‘John! Christ, what’s up? I mean, it’s great to see you. Why didn’t you phone to warn me you were coming? Come on inside.’

  It was the welcome Rebus had expected: embarrassed surprise, as though it were painful to be reminded that one still had some family left alive. And Rebus had noted the use of the word ‘warn’ where ‘tell’ would have sufficed. He was a policeman. He noticed such things.

  Michael Rebus bounded through to the living-room and turned down the wailing stereo.

  ‘Come on in, John,’ he called. ‘Do you want a drink? Coffee perhaps? Or something stronger? What brings you here?’