Ian Rankin - Knots And Crosses

‘I can understand your suspicion, Rebus. You’ve been under a lot of pressure. A hellish lot of pressure. But that’s past. You’ve not failed, you’ve passed; passed with flying colours. I think we can say that with certainty. You’ve passed, Rebus. You’re on our side now. You’ll be helping us now to try to crack Reeve here. Do you understand?’

I shook my head.

‘It’s a trick,’ I said. The officer smiled sympathetically. He’d dealt with the like of me a hundred times before.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘just come with us and everything will be made clear.’

Gordon jumped forward at my side.

‘No!’ he shouted. ‘He’s already told you that he’s not fucking well going! Now piss off out of here.’ Then to me, a hand on my shoulder: ‘Don’t listen to him, John. It’s a trick. It’s always a trick with these bastards.’ But I could see that he was worried. His eyes moved rapidly, his mouth slightly open.

And, feeling his hand on me, I knew that my decision had been made already, and Gordon seemed to sense as much.

‘I think that’s for Trooper Rebus to decide, don’t you?’ the officer was saying.

And then the man stared at me, his eyes friendly.

I didn’t need to look back at the cell, or at Gordon. I just kept thinking to myself it’s another part of the game, just another part of the game. The decision had been made a long time ago. They were not lying to me, and of course I wanted out of the cell. It was preordained. Nothing was arbitrary. I had been told that at the start of my training. I started forwards, but Gordon held onto the tatters of my shirt.

‘John,’ he said, his voice full of need, ‘don’t let me down, John. Please.’

But I pulled away from his weak grip and left the cell.

‘No! No! No!’ His cries were huge, fiery things. ‘Don’t let me down, John! Let me out! Let me out!’

And then he screamed, and I almost crumpled on the floor.

It was the scream of the mad.

After I had been cleaned up and seen by a doctor, I was taken to what they euphemistically called the debriefing-room. I’d been through hell — was still going through hell — and they were about to discuss it as though it had been nothing more than a school exercise.

There were four of them there, three captains and a psychiatrist. They told me everything then. They explained that a new, elitist group was about to be set up from within the SAS, and that its role would be the infiltration and destabilization of terrorist groups, starting with the Irish Republican Army, who were becoming more than a mere nuisance as the Irish situation deteriorated into civil war. Because of the nature of the job, only the best — the very best — would be good enough, and Reeve and I had been judged the best in our section. Therefore, we had been trapped, had been taken prisoner, and had been put through tests the like of which had never been tried in the SAS before. None of this really surprised me by now. I was thinking of the other poor bastards who were being put through this whole sick bloody thing. And all so that when we were being kneecapped, we would not let on who we were.

And then they came to Gordon.

‘Our attitude towards Trooper Reeve is rather ambivalent.’ This was the man in the white coat talking. ‘He’s a bloody fine soldier, and give him a physical job to do and he’ll do it. But he has always worked as a loner in the past, so we put the two of you together to see how you would react to sharing a cell, and, more especially, to see how Reeve would cope once his friend had been taken away from him.’

Did they know of that kiss then, or did they not?

‘I’m afraid,’ went on the doctor, ‘that the result may be negative. He’s come to depend upon you, John, hasn’t he? We are, of course, aware that you have not been dependent upon him.’

‘What about the screams from the other cells?’

‘Tape-recordings.’

I nodded, tired suddenly, uninterested.

‘The whole thing was another bloody test then?’

‘Of course it was.’ They had a little smile between them. ‘But that needn’t bother you now. What matters is that you’ve passed.’

It did worry me, though. What was it all about? I’d exchanged friendship for this informal debriefing. I’d exchanged love for these smirks. And Gordon’s screams were still in my ears. Revenge, he was crying, revenge. I laid my hands on my knees, bent forward, and started to weep.

‘You bastards,’ I said, ‘you bastards.’

And if I’d had a Browning pistol with me at that moment, I’d have put large holes into their grinning skulls.

They had me checked again, more thoroughly this time, in a military hospital. Civil war had indeed broken out in Ulster, but I stared past it towards Gordon Reeve. What had happened to him? Was he still in that stinking cell, alone because of me? Was he falling apart? I took it all on my shoulders and wept again. They had given me a box of tissues. That seemed to be the way of things.

Then I started to weep all day, sometimes uncontrollably, taking it all on, taking everything on my conscience. I suffered from nightmares. I volunteered my resignation. I demanded my resignation. It was accepted, reluctantly. I was, after all, a guinea-pig. I went to a small fishing-village in Fife and walked along the pebbled beach, recovering from my nervous breakdown and putting the whole thing out of my mind stuffing the most painful episode of my life into drawers and attics in my head, locking it all away, learning to forget.

So I forgot.

And they were good to me. They gave me some compensation money and they pulled a lot of strings when I decided that I wanted to join the police force. Oh yes, I could not complain about their attitude towards me, but I wasn’t allowed to find out about my friend, and I wasn’t ever to get in touch with them again. I was dead, I was strictly off their records.

I was a failure.

And I’m still a failure. Broken marriage. My daughter kidnapped. But it all makes sense now. The whole thing makes sense. So at least I know that Gordon is alive, if not well, and I know that he has my little girl and that he’s going to kill her.

And kill me if he can.

And to get her back, I’m going to have to kill him.

And I would do it now. God help me, I would do it now.

When John Rebus awoke from what had seemed a particularly deep and dream-troubled sleep, he found that he was not in bed. He saw that Michael was standing over him, a wary smile on his face, and that Gill was pacing to and fro, sniffing back tears.

‘What happened?’ said Rebus.

‘Nothing,’ said Michael.

Then Rebus recalled that Michael had hypnotised him.

‘Nothing?’ cried Gill. ‘You call that nothing?’

‘John,’ said Michael, ‘I didn’t realise that you felt that way about the old man and me. I’m sorry we made you feel bad.’ Michael rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder, the brother he had never known.

Gordon, Gordon Reeve. What happened to you? You’re all torn and dirty, whirling around me like grit on a wind-swept street. Like a brother. You’ve got my daughter. Where are you?

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Rebus let his head fall, screwing his eyes shut. Gill’s hand stroked his hair.

It was growing light outside. The birds were back into their untiring routine. Rebus was glad that they were calling him back into the real world. They reminded him that there might be someone out there who was feeling happy. Perhaps lovers awakening in each other’s arms, or a man who was realising that today was a holiday, or an elderly woman thanking God that she was alive to see the first hints of reawakening life.