Black And Blue Read online

  Praise for Ian Rankin

  ‘No one captures the noirish edge of the city as well as Rankin’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘As always, Rankin proves himself the master of his own milieu. He brings the dark underside of Edinburgh deliciously to life … Rankin’s skill lies mainly in the confident way he weaves the disparate threads into a cohesive whole’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Rankin has followed one success with another … 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

  ‘Ian Rankin is currently the biggest noise in British crime fiction, with sales of his books accounting for just over ten per cent of the UK market. And, for once, the hype and the big sales are backed up with literary talent’

  Time Out

  ‘His fiction buzzes with energy … Essentially, he is a romantic storyteller in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson … His prose is as vivid and 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

  ‘Rankin … moves dialogue with the precision of a chess-master’

  Irish Times

  ‘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

  ‘It’s the banter and energy, the immense carnival of scenes and characters, voices and moods, that sets 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: the narrative stuffed beyond good measure with a world that needs knowing’

  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

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Praise for Ian Rankin

  About the Author

  By Ian Rankin

  Introduction

  Empty Capital

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  The Whispering Rain

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Furry Boot Town

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Dead Crude

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  The Panic of Dreams

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  North of Hell

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Reading Group Notes

  Copyright

  O would, ere I had seen the day

  That treason thus could sell us,

  My auld grey head had lien in clay,

  Wi’ Bruce and loyal Wallace!

  But pith and power, till my last hour,

  I’ll mak’ this decleration;

  We’re bought and sold for English gold –

  Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.

  Robert Burns,

  ‘Fareweel to a’ Our Scottish Fame’

  If you have the Stones … to say I can rewrite history to my own specifications, you can get away with it.

  James Ellroy

  (Capitalisation the author’s own)

  Late December 1996. After six years in France, I was back living in Edinburgh, renting a house. Problem was, the owners, who lived most of the year in London, needed it for Christmas. As a result, we were temporarily homeless. We’d spent Christmas itself with my wife’s family in Belfast, and were spending New Year with friends in Cambridge. An aunt in Bradford could put us up for a few days, as could my nephew in Lincolnshire. After Bradford, we dropped in on friends near York. It was while resting at their house that I read in The Times a teaser for a book review. It went something along the lines of ‘the best crime
novel of 1997 has already been written – discover its identity next week’. My latest book was due for publication towards the end of January, so I kept my fingers crossed and bought The Times on the appointed day.

  The reviewer was Marcel Berlins; sure enough, the novel he had flagged up was Black & Blue.

  He wasn’t wrong, either – when November came round, my eighth Inspector Rebus adventure picked up the Gold Dagger Award for the best crime novel published in 1997. It went on to be shortlisted for the American equivalent, the Edgar (named after Edgar Allan Poe – I lost out to James Lee Burke), and also won Denmark’s Palle Rosenkrantz Prize. Eventually it would end up on the school syllabus in Scotland, and a lecturer at St Andrews University would publish a book-length critique of its themes.

  So what the hell is it that made Black & Blue so different from my previous efforts?

  Well, for one thing, the book looked different. My publishers, Orion, had found a spooky photo of some trees, and had added a new, bold typeface to the cover, making Black & Blue look more than a crime novel. They were also prepared to put some muscle into promoting the book, with posters and advertisements. But more than this, to my mind the book was simply bigger and better than my previous work: I felt I’d served my apprenticeship. It was as if all the previous Rebus novels had been leading to this. I would no longer confine my detective to Edinburgh and its environs. He would visit Glasgow, Aberdeen, Shetland – even an oil installation hundreds of miles out in the unforgiving North Sea. Oil would be a theme of the book, allowing me to examine Scotland’s industrial decline and reshaping. Difficult to discuss oil without bringing politics into the equation, so the book would be political too. And Rebus would swell in stature. I would put his reputation, career and life on the line. I’d have intertwined narratives, with various sub-plots dodging in and out of the main story.

  And I would do all this while using as my backdrop a series of real-life unsolved murders from thirty years before – and bringing that killer into the books as a character. Almost a decade on, I still think this an audacious ploy. And Bible John has yet to sue me for libel.

  Yet the book itself kicked off with a bottle or three of wine and a friend from Australia …

  The friend’s name was Lorna. She’d been at university with me in Edinburgh, and we’d stayed in touch. She was living in the Antipodes, working as a teacher, but made occasional trips back to Europe to visit her family. And she came to stay with us for a week at our rural hovel in south-west France. One night, after a big meal and all that wine, we settled down on the sofa and she told me a story. It was something that had happened to her brother. He’d been working on an oil platform, and had returned to Edinburgh for some R&R. Met these two guys in a pub and they said they were heading to a party. He could go with them if he liked. But when they arrived at the abandoned flat … well, he started to sober up fast. Not fast enough, though. They tied him to a chair, taped a plastic bag over his head … and walked out. Eventually he was able to rip his hands free, tear the bag open, and run gasping to the nearest police station. The cops accompanied him back to the abandoned tenement flat, but couldn’t explain what had happened. He hadn’t been robbed; the modus operandi was new to the officers; there was no motive for the assault …

  Lorna just shrugged, tipping the dregs of the bottle into her glass. ‘And that’s the story,’ she said. But I knew it wasn’t: it was only the beginning of a story. The tale gnawed away at me. I needed to know why it had happened. I needed to give the incident some closure. And if that meant composing a five-hundred-page novel around it, so be it. I had my first chapter, after all. (Though I never did find out what Lorna’s brother thought of his fictional equivalent …)

  As I was writing it, the book went through a number of working titles, including The Whispering Rain and Dead Crude (both of which became chapter titles instead). I’d managed to find time for a research trip back to Scotland, taking in Aberdeen but not Shetland. For the Shetland scenes, I had recourse to guide books. I also didn’t get to make a helicopter flight to an oil rig, but found the next best thing in an Aberdonian author called Bill Kirton, who had worked in that field and was able to furnish me with as much detail as I needed to make Rebus’s trip on a ‘paraffin budgie’ realistic. Oil companies were generous in the amount of promotional literature they sent me, perhaps slow to realise that I was unlikely to be singing their praises in what was to be, after all, a crime novel. I’d grown up in a coal-mining town, where coal itself had been referred to as ‘black diamonds’. Oil was sometimes called ‘black gold’, and to get across this sense of the importance of the industry, I decided I needed a final title with the word ‘black’ in it. Well, my previous novel, Let It Bleed, had used the title of a Rolling Stones album, and it so happened they had another called Black & Blue: black for oil; blue for the cops (the ‘boys in blue’ of popular lore). Rebus would take at least one beating in the course of the book, too, leaving him black and blue all over.

  I had my title.

  One further ingredient, however, had been missing from my work up until this point – anger. My son Kit had come into the world in July 1994. There’d been no sign of any problems during Miranda’s pregnancy. But when he was three months old, we began to wonder why he didn’t move around much. At six months, our local GP in France was concerned too, and at around the age of nine months we knew Kit had some serious problems. There were long twice-weekly drives to the nearest children’s hospital for tests, and longer drives still to the main paediatric facility in Bordeaux. My French was never as good as Miranda’s. I would drive home full of questions, frustrated by my inability to use language properly, fired up at the joke God seemed to be playing on us. And I would climb the rickety wooden ladder which took me through the trapdoor and into the cobwebbed attic of our old farmhouse. Nothing up there but a computer and some maps and photos of Edinburgh. I would sit down and try to get back into the book I was writing – the book which would eventually become Black & Blue. And suddenly I was in charge of this fictional universe. I was able to play God. Language started working for me again, and I used Rebus as my punchbag, raining physical and psychological blows down on him. As a result of which, Black & Blue became a much tougher book than my previous efforts, and left me feeling better too.

  The book also became a source of wish-fulfilment, which is why, when Greenpeace needed a band of world stature to front a gig in Aberdeen (see Chapter 13), they opted for the Dancing Pigs rather than U2 or REM. The Dancing Pigs, you see, had been my band, the band I’d sung with when I was nineteen. In real life, we broke up after about a year, with little to show for our efforts. But in this parallel world, we lit up the sky.

  As good a reason as any to write a novel.

  May 2005

  Empty Capital

  Weary with centuries

  This empty capital snorts like a great beast

  Caged in its sleep, dreaming of freedom

  But with nae belief …

  Sydney Goodsir Smith,

  ‘Kynd Kittock’s Land’

  1

  ‘Tell me again why you killed them.’

  ‘I’ve told you, it’s just this urge.’

  Rebus looked back at his notes. ‘The word you used was “compulsion”.’

  The slumped figure in the chair nodded. Bad smells came off him. ‘Urge, compulsion, same thing.’

  ‘Is it?’ Rebus stubbed out his cigarette. There were so many butts in the tin ashtray, a couple spilled over on to the metal table. ‘Let’s talk about the first victim.’

  The man opposite him groaned. His name was William Crawford Shand, known as ‘Craw’. He was forty years old, single, and lived alone in a council block in Craigmillar. He had been unemployed six years. He ran twitching fingers through dark greasy hair, seeking out and covering a large bald spot at the crown of his head.

  ‘The first victim,’ Rebus said. ‘Tell us.’

  ‘Us’ because there was another CID man in the biscuit-tin. His
name was Maclay, and Rebus didn’t know him very well. He didn’t know anyone at Craigmillar very well, not yet. Maclay was leaning against the wall, arms folded, eyes reduced to slits. He looked like a piece of machinery at rest.

  ‘I strangled her.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘A length of rope.’

  ‘Where did you get the rope?’

  ‘Bought it at some shop, I can’t remember where.’

  Three-beat pause. ‘Then what did you do?’

  ‘After she was dead?’ Shand moved a little in the chair. ‘I took her clothes off and was intimate with her.’

  ‘With a dead body?’

  ‘She was still warm.’

  Rebus got to his feet. The grating of his chair on the floor seemed to unnerve Shand. Not difficult.

  ‘Where did you kill her?’

  ‘A park.’

  ‘And where was this park?’

  ‘Near where she lived.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Polmuir Road, Aberdeen.’

  ‘And what were you doing in Aberdeen, Mr Shand?’

  He shrugged, running his fingers now along the rim of the table, leaving traces of sweat and grease.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ Rebus said. ‘The edges are sharp, you might get cut.’

  Maclay snorted. Rebus walked over towards the wall and stared at him. Maclay nodded briefly. Rebus turned back to the table.

  ‘Describe the park.’ He rested against the edge of the table, got himself another cigarette and lit it.

  ‘It was just a park. You know, trees and grass, a play park for the kids.’