The Black Book Read online

  Praise for Ian Rankin

  ‘Arguably no Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott has had the commercial and critical success that Ian Rankin now enjoys. He may even be said to have invented modern Scotland, or at least modern Edinburgh, for his readers, just as Scott did in his time … Rebus lives. So does Rankin’s Edinburgh’

  Allan Massie, Spectator

  ‘Rankin captures, like no one else, that strangeness that is Scotland at the end of the twentieth century. He has always written superb crime fiction … but what he’s also pinning down is instant history’

  Literary Review

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

  Scotsman

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

  The Times

  ‘The real strength of Ian Rankin’s work … is that it’s a good deal more than a crime novel. The genre is simply the wrapper in which a complex story of human flaws and frailty is contained’

  Herald

  ‘Rankin proves himself the master of his own milieu … There cannot be a better crime novelist writing’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Arguably Scotland’s finest living writer’

  The 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

  ‘A brutal but beautifully written series … Rankin pushes the procedural form well past conventional genre limits’

  New York Times

  ‘Ian Rankin’s Inspector John Rebus is one of the most realistic creations in crime fiction … [he] builds his story layer by layer until it reaches a gripping climax. This is a terrific read’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Ian Rankin is widely, and rightly, regarded as the leading male crime writer in Britain’

  TLS

  ‘No other writer in his chosen genre is producing books as rich and comprehensive as this: Dickensian, you might say’

  Literary Review

  ‘Rebus is a masterful creation … Rankin has taken his well-earned place among the top echelon of crimewriters’

  Observer

  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

  The Black Book

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Praise for Ian Rankin

  About the Author

  By Ian Rankin

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Reading Group Notes

  Copyright

  Late on in The Black Book, I mention a town in the USA called Bar Harbor. The reference may be fleeting, but it reminds me that a lot of the plotting of my novel was actually done in North America. Nineteen ninety-two for me comprised two momentous events. In February, my son Jack was born. And three months later, almost to the day, the family Rankin headed to the USA for an unforgettable six-month stay, made possible by America’s most famous crime writer, Raymond Chandler.

  Flashback: early summer the previous year. A letter arrives at our dusty farmhouse in south-west France. We’d been living there full-time for just over a year – refugees from corporate London – and the place was beginning to take shape. I’d only nearly killed myself half a dozen times, falling off roofs, slicing into my boot with a chainsaw, electrocuting myself while rewiring the mains, and going head-over-heels in a bramble patch with a weed-whacker aiming to strip the skin off my face. But the house now had things like ceilings and a bath and rudimentary heating. The broken windows had been mended and the woodworm treated. We even had a sofa, so no longer had to haul the back seat out of the Citroën and into the living room of an evening.

  We deserved a break
.

  It came – of sorts – in the shape of that letter, telling me I’d won the Chandler-Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction. The reward was a chunk of money (courtesy of Raymond Chandler’s estate), with the stipulation that it be spent during the course of a six-month stay in the United States. This was fine with me. I showed my wife Miranda the letter, and she showed me a little strip of card and asked me if I thought the tip was a blueish sort of colour. I said I thought it was, and she said she thought she was pregnant. And so it came to pass that my short-lived dream of a drug-and-drink-fuelled orgy of classic car-driving across America was replaced with something more wholesome. In May 1992, with Jack three months old (the minimum age at which British Airways would carry him), we set out for Seattle. We had friends there, and they gave us time (and space) to get acclimatised. Eventually, with the purchase of a 1969 VW camper van, we were ready for a drive which would last for the next five months and put another 15,000 miles on the VW’s already well-worn clock.

  It was as I drove through the USA (and bits of Canada), that I started thinking of my next Rebus novel. The Black Book was the result. In it, there’s an Elvis-themed restaurant, situated near Edinburgh’s Haymarket Station. I would find the real thing, however, in a New Orleans backstreet. That place was a dive, but I liked the idea of it, and had a lot of fun thinking up menu items such as the Love Me Tenderloin. I also had the opportunity to do a lot of thinking about the series. I was sure in my mind now that it was a series, and there were changes I wanted to make. At the end of the previous Rebus novel, Strip Jack, I had burned down the fictitious police station where my hero had been based since book one. In The Black Book, I moved him to a real-life station on St Leonard’s Street. I also, for the first time, mentioned where he lived – a real street – and took him to the site of the authentic Edinburgh mortuary.

  I had also learned lessons in economy. If there was a need for a certain character type in the story, and such a character had been used in one of the previous books, then why not bring them back to life, rather than go to the trouble of inventing some brand-new personality? So it is that people like Matthew Vanderhyde and Jack Morton come back into Rebus’s life. Rebus’s brother Michael reappears, sleeping at Rebus’s flat while Rebus himself has moved in with Dr Patience Aitken. However, I also had room for a new character, a foil for Rebus: Detective Constable Siobhan Clarke. Rebus already had a sidekick of sorts in the shape of Detective Sergeant Brian Holmes, and Siobhan entered the book as just another of Rebus’s colleagues, and someone who might work well beside Holmes. By story’s end, however, and by sheer force of character, she had usurped Holmes. I had found Rebus’s perfect working partner: someone who respected him but could still be infuriated by his reluctance to stick to the rules; someone confident enough in their own abilities to be able to give as good as they got. It was not in Siobhan’s nature to remain ‘just another colleague’; she seemed to have other ideas entirely.

  Another, different kind of foil for Rebus had already announced his readiness in a previous book. Morris Gerald Cafferty – Big Ger – was Edinburgh’s premier gangster. Having existed for the length of a cameo in Tooth & Nail, Cafferty was to emerge in The Black Book as a fully formed presence, the epitome of moral and spiritual corruption. He may not enter proceedings until halfway through, but the effect is chilling. What I find most intriguing about Cafferty is the ambiguity he brings with him. He is very like Rebus in some ways, something he can acknowledge but Rebus never will. Both men are ageing fast, finding the changing landscape unsympathetic. They remind me of Cain and Abel, or two sides of the same coin.

  Or Jekyll and Hyde.

  In previous books, I had made copious use of Robert Louis Stevenson’s dark masterpiece, going so far as to use Hyde’s surname as a pun in the title of my novel Hide & Seek. However, it seems to me now that The Black Book owes a greater debt to another Scots gothic chiller: James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In that book, an innocent is cajoled and seduced and psychologically cudgelled into committing a murder. Is his tormentor the Devil, or a cruel and devious psychopath? Maybe the malevolent voice is his own, the ravings of a man possessed. The issue is never settled: it’s left to the reader to decide.

  I’ll leave readers of The Black Book to decide how closely I follow my predecessor’s course.

  One last thing: you need to know that ‘lum’ is a Scottish word for a chimney. It’ll help you get one of my favourite bad puns in the series …

  April 2005

  ‘To the wicked, all things are wicked; but to the just, all things are just and right.’

  James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

  Acknowledgements

  The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of the Chandler-Fulbright Award in the writing of this book.

  Prologue

  There were two of them in the van that early morning, lights on to combat the haar which blew in from the North Sea. It was thick and white like smoke. They drove carefully, being under strict instructions.

  ‘Why does it have to be us?’ said the driver, stifling a yawn. ‘What’s wrong with the other two?’

  The passenger was much larger than his companion. Though in his forties, he kept his hair long, cut in the shape of a German military helmet. He kept pulling at the hair on the left side of his head, straightening it out. At the moment, however, he was gripping the sides of his seat. He didn’t like the way the driver screwed shut his eyes for the duration of each too-frequent yawn. The passenger was not a conversationalist, but maybe talk would keep the driver awake.

  ‘It’s just temporary,’ he said. ‘Besides, it’s not as if it’s a daily chore.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’ The driver shut his eyes again and yawned. The van glided in towards the grass verge.

  ‘Do you want me to drive?’ asked the passenger. Then he smiled. ‘You could always kip in the back.’

  ‘Very funny. That’s another thing, Jimmy, the stink!’

  ‘Meat always smells after a while.’

  ‘Got an answer for everything, eh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are we nearly there?’

  ‘I thought you knew the way.’

  ‘On the main roads I do. But with this mist.’

  ‘If we’re hugging the coast it can’t be far.’ The passenger was also thinking: if we’re hugging the coast, then two wheels past the verge and we’re over a cliff face. It wasn’t just this that made him nervous. They’d never used the east coast before, but there was too much attention on the west coast now. So it was an untried run, and that made him nervous.

  ‘Here’s a road sign.’ They braked to peer through the haar. ‘Next right.’ The driver jolted forwards again. He signalled and pulled in through a low iron gate which was padlocked open. ‘What if it had been locked?’ he offered.

  ‘I’ve got cutters in the back.’

  ‘A bloody answer for everything.’

  They drove into a small gravelled car park. Though they could not see them, there were wooden tables and benches to one side, where Sunday families could picnic and do battle with the midges. The spot was popular for its view, an uninterrupted spread of sea and sky. When they opened their doors, they could smell and hear the sea. Gulls were already shrieking overhead.

  ‘Must be later than we thought if the birds are up.’ They readied themselves for opening the back of the van, then did so. The smell really was foul. Even the stoical passenger wrinkled his nose and tried hard not to breathe.

  ‘Quicker the better,’ he said in a rush. The body had been placed in two thick plastic fertiliser sacks, one pulled over the feet and one over the head, so that they overlapped in the middle. Tape and string had been used to join them. Inside the bags were also a number of breeze blocks, making for a heavy and awkward load. They carried the grotesque parcel low, brushing the wet grass. Their shoes were squelching by the time they passed the sign warning about the cliff face ahead. Even more
difficult was the climb over the fence, though it was rickety enough to start with.

  ‘Wouldn’t stop a bloody kid,’ the driver commented. He was peching, the saliva like glue in his mouth.

  ‘Ca’ canny,’ said the passenger. They shuffled forwards two inches at a time, until they could all too clearly make out the edge. There was no more land after that, just a vertical fall to the agitated sea. ‘Right,’ he said. Without ceremony, they heaved the thing out into space, glad immediately to be rid of it. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Man, but that air smells good.’ The driver reached into his pocket for a quarter-bottle of whisky. They were halfway back to the van when they heard a car on the road, and the crunch of tyres on gravel.

  ‘Aw, hell’s bells.’

  The headlights caught them as they reached the van.

  ‘The fuckin’ polis!’ choked the driver.

  ‘Keep the heid,’ warned the passenger. His voice was quiet, but his eyes burned ahead of him. They heard a handbrake being engaged, and the car door opened. A uniformed officer appeared. He was carrying a torch. The headlights and engine had been left on. There was no one else in the car.

  The passenger knew the score. This wasn’t a set-up. Probably the copper came here towards the end of his night shift. There’d be a flask or a blanket in the car. Coffee or a snooze before signing off for the day.