Ian Rankin: Knots And Crosses

He knew the dangers, too. The ground he walked upon was always likely to fall away beneath his feet, letting him slip into Leith docks of a dark and silent morning, finding him trussed and gagged in some motorway ditch outside Perth. He didn’t mind all that. It was no more than a passing thought, brought on by tiredness and a need to lift his emotions out of the rather tawdry, unglamorous world of Edinburgh’s dope scene, a scene carried out in the sprawling housing-schemes and after-hours drinking holes more than in the glittery discotheques and chintzy rooms of the New Town.

What he disliked, really disliked, was that the people ultimately behind it all were so silent and so secretive and so alien to it all. He liked his criminals to be involved, to live the life and stick close to the lifestyle. He liked the Glasgow gangsters of the 1950s and ’60s, who lived in the Gorbals and operated from the Gorbals and loaned illicit money to neighbours, and who would slash those same neighbours eventually, when the need arose. It was like a family affair. Not like this, not at all like this. This was other, and he hated it for that reason.

His talk with Campbell had been interesting though, interesting for other reasons. Rebus sounded a fishy character. So was his brother. They might be in it together. If the police were involved in all of this, then his task would be all the harder, and all the more satisfying for that.

Now what he needed was a break, a nice break in the investigation. It couldn’t be far off. He was supposed to have a nose for that sort of thing.

At one-thirty they took a break. There was a small canteen in the building, open even at this ungodly hour. Outside, the majority of the day’s petty crime was being committed, but inside it was warm and cosy, and there was hot food to be had and endless cups of coffee for the vigilant policemen.

‘This is a complete shambles,’ said Morton, pouring coffee back from his saucer into the cup. ‘Anderson hasn’t a clue what he’s up to.’

‘Give me a cigarette, will you? I’m out.’ Rebus patted his pockets convincingly.

‘Christ, John,’ said Morton, wheezing an old man’s cough and passing across the cigarettes, ‘the day you give up smoking is the day I change my underwear.’

Jack Morton was not an old man, despite the excesses that were leading him quickly and inexorably towards that early fate. He was thirty-five, six years younger than Rebus. He, too, had a broken marriage behind him, the four children now resident with their grandmother while their mother was off on a suspiciously long vacation with her present lover. Misery, he had told Rebus, surrounded the whole bloody set-up, and Rebus had agreed with him, having a daughter who troubled his own conscience.

Morton had been a policeman for two decades, and unlike Rebus had started at the extreme bottom of the heap, pulling himself up to his present rank through sheer hard slog alone.

He had given Rebus his life story when the two of them had gone off for a day’s fly-fishing near Berwick. It had been a glorious day, both of them landing fine catches, and over the course of the day they had become friends. Rebus, however, had not deigned to tell his own life story to Morton. It felt, to Jack Morton, as if the man were in a little prison-cell of his own construction. He seemed especially tight-lipped about his years in the Army. Morton knew that the Army could occasionally do that to a man, and he respected Rebus’s silence. Perhaps there were a few skeletons in that particular closet. He knew all about those himself; some of his most noteworthy arrests had not exactly been conducted along ‘correct procedural lines’.

Nowadays, Morton did not concern himself with headlines and high-profile arrests. He got on with the job, collected his salary, thought now and then of his pension and the fishing-years to come, and drank his wife and children out of his conscience.

‘This is a nice canteen,’ said Rebus, smoking, struggling to start a conversation.

‘Yes, it is. I’m in here now and again. I know one of the guys who work in the computer room. Comes in handy, you know, having one of those terminal-operators in your pocket. They can track down a car, a name, an address quicker than you can blink. It only costs the occasional drink.’

‘Get them to sort out this lot of ours then.’

‘Give them time, John. Then all the files will be on computer. And a little while after that, they’ll find that they don’t need the work-horses like us any more. There’ll just be a couple of DIs and a desk console.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Rebus.

‘It’s progress, John. Where would we be without it? We’d still be out there with our pipes and our guess-work and our magnifying glasses.’

‘I suppose you’re right, Jack. But remember what the Super says: “Give me a dozen good men every time, and send your machines back to their makers.”’

Rebus looked around him as he spoke. He saw that one of the two women from the briefing room had settled at a table by herself.

‘And besides,’ said Rebus, ‘there’ll always be a place for people like us, Jack. Society couldn’t do without us. Computers can never have inspired guesses. That’s where we’ve got them beat hands down.’

‘Maybe, I don’t know. Still, we better be getting back, eh?’ Morton looked at his watch, drained his cup, and pushed back his chair.

‘You go on ahead, Jack. I’ll be with you in a minute. I want to check out an inspired guess.’

‘Mind if I join you?’

Rebus, a fresh cup of coffee in his hand, pulled out the chair from opposite the woman officer, who had her head buried in the day’s newspaper. He noted the garish headline on the front page. Someone had slipped out a little information to the local media.

‘Not at all,’ she said, not looking up.

Rebus smiled to himself and sat down. He began to sip the powdery, instant murk.

‘Busy?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Shouldn’t you be? Your friend left a few minutes ago.’

Sharp then, very sharp. Very, very sharp indeed. Rebus began to feel a mite uneasy. He disliked ballcrushers, and here were all the outward signs of one.

‘Yes, he did, didn’t he? But then he’s a glutton for punishment. We’re working on the Modus Operandi files. I’d do anything to defer that particular pleasure.’

She looked up at last, bitten by the potential insult.

‘That’s what I am, is it? A delaying tactic?’

Rebus smiled and shrugged.

‘What else?’ he said.

It was her turn to smile now. She closed the paper and folded it twice, placing it before her on the formica-topped table. She tapped the headline.

‘Looks like we’re in the news,’ she said.

Rebus turned the paper towards him.

EDINBURGH ABDUCTIONS — NOW IT’S MURDER!

‘A terrible bloody case,’ he offered. ‘Just terrible. And the newspapers don’t make it any better.’

‘Yes, well, we’ll have the PM results in a couple of hours, and then we just might have something to go on.’

‘I hope so. Just so long as I can put away those bloody files.’

‘I thought policemen,’ stressing the latter part of the word, ‘got their kicks from reading that stuff?’

Rebus spread his hands before him, a gesture he seemed to have picked up from Michael.

‘You have us to a T. How long have you been in the force?’

Rebus took her to be thirty, give or take two years. She had thick, short brown hair, and a long, straight ski-slope of a nose. There were no rings on her fingers, but these days that told him nothing.

‘Long enough,’ she said.

‘I think I knew you would say that.’

She was smiling still: no ballcrusher then.