Ian Rankin - Rather Be the Devil

Rebus placed his knife and fork on the empty plate, then leaned back in his chair, studying the other diners in the restaurant.

‘Someone was murdered here, you know,’ he announced.

‘And they say romance is dead.’ Deborah Quant paused over her steak. Rebus had been about to comment that she carved it with the same care she took when using her scalpel on a cadaver. But then the murder had popped into his head and he’d considered it the better conversational gambit.

‘Sorry,’ he apologised, taking a sip of red wine. They sold beer here — he had seen waiters delivering it to a few of the tables — but he was trying to cut down.

A new start — it was why they were dining out in the first place, celebrating a week without cigarettes.

Seven whole days.

A hundred and sixty-eight hours.

(She didn’t need to know about the one he’d begged from a smoker outside an office block three days back. It had made him feel queasy anyway.)

‘You can taste the food better, can’t you?’ she asked now, not for the first time.

‘Oh aye,’ he acknowledged, stifling a cough.

She seemed to have given up on the steak and was dabbing her mouth with her napkin. They were in the Galvin Brasserie Deluxe, which was attached to the Caledonian Hotel — though these days it was really the Waldorf Astoria Caledonian. But those who’d grown up in Edinburgh knew it as the Caledonian, or ‘the Caley’. In the bar before dinner, Rebus had reeled off a few stories — the railway station next door, dismantled in the sixties; the time Roy Rogers had steered his horse Trigger up the main staircase for a photographer. Quant had listened dutifully, before telling him he could undo the top button of his shirt. He had been running a finger around the inside of the collar, trying to stretch the material a little.

‘You notice things,’ he had commented.

‘Cutting out cigarettes can add a few pounds.’

‘Really?’ he’d answered, scooping up more peanuts from the bowl.

Now she had caught a waiter’s eye and their plates were being removed. The offer of dessert menus was dismissed. ‘We’ll just have coffee — decaf if you’ve got it.’

‘Two decafs?’ The waiter was looking at Rebus for guidance.

‘Absolutely,’ Rebus confirmed.

Quant pushed a lock of red hair away from one eye and smiled across the table. ‘You’re doing fine,’ she said.

‘Thanks, Mum.’

Another smile. ‘Go on then, tell me about this murder.’

He reached for his glass but started coughing again. ‘Just need to...’ signalling towards the toilets. He pushed the chair back and got up, rubbing at his chest with his hand. Once inside the gents, he made for a sink, leaning over it, hacking some of the gunk up from his lungs. There were the usual flecks of blood. Nothing to panic about, he’d been assured. More coughing, more mucus. COPD, they called it. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. When told, Deborah Quant had formed her lips into a thin line.

‘Not so surprising, is it?’

And the very next day she had brought him a glass specimen jar of indeterminate age. Its contents: a section of lung, showing the bronchial tubes.

‘Just so you know,’ she’d said, pointing out what he’d already been shown on a computer screen. She had left the jar with him.

‘On loan or to keep?’

‘For as long as you need it, John.’

He was rinsing the sink when he heard the door behind him open.

‘Did you leave your inhaler at home?’ He turned towards her. She was leaning against the door, one foot crossed over the other, arms folded, head cocked.

‘Is nowhere safe?’ he muttered.

Her pale blue eyes scanned the room. ‘Nothing here I haven’t seen before. You feeling okay?’

‘Never better.’ He splashed water on his face and dabbed it with a towel.

‘Next step is an exercise programme.’

‘Starting tonight?’

Her smile widened. ‘If you promise not to die on me.’

‘We’re going to drink our delicious caffeine-free refreshments first, though, right?’

‘Plus you’re going to woo me with a story.’

‘The murder, you mean? It happened right upstairs in one of the bedrooms. A banker’s wife who enjoyed the odd dalliance.’

‘Killed by her lover?’

‘That was one theory.’

She brushed invisible crumbs from the lapels of his jacket. ‘Will it take long to tell?’

‘Depends how abridged you want it.’

She considered for a moment. ‘The length of a taxi ride back to my flat or yours.’

‘Just the best bits then.’

There was a throat-clearing from the other side of the door, another diner unsure of the protocol. He muttered an apology as he squeezed past, deciding on the safety of one of the stalls. Rebus and Quant were smiling as they returned to their table, where two decaffeinated coffees sat waiting.

Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke had been at home with a good book and the remains of a ready meal when the call came, the caller a friend called Tess who worked in the control room at Bilston Glen.

‘Wouldn’t normally bother you, Siobhan, but when I got the victim’s name...’

So Clarke was in her Vauxhall Astra, on her way to the Royal Infirmary. The hospital sat on the southern edge of the city, plenty of space in the car park at this hour. She showed her ID at the Accident and Emergency desk and was shown where to go. She passed cubicle after cubicle, and if the curtains were closed, she popped her head around each. An old woman, her skin almost translucent, gave a beaming smile from her trolley. There were hopeful looks from others, too — patients and family members. A drunk youth, blood still dripping from his head, was being calmed by a couple of male nurses. A middle-aged woman was retching into a cardboard bowl. A teenage girl moaned softly and regularly, knees drawn up to her chest.

She recognised his mother first. Gail McKie was leaning over her son’s trolley, stroking his hair and his forehead. Darryl Christie’s closed eyes were puffy and bruised, his nose swollen and with dried blood caking the nostrils. A foam head brace had been rigged up, with further support around the neck. He was dressed in a suit, the shirt unbuttoned all the way to the waistband. There were contusions on his chest and stomach, but he was breathing. He was connected by a clip on one finger to a machine recording his vital signs.

Gail McKie turned towards the new arrival. She was wearing too much make-up and tears had left streaks down her face. Her hair was dyed straw-blonde, piled atop her head. Jewellery jangled on both wrists.

‘I know you,’ she stated. ‘You’re police.’

‘Sorry to hear about your son,’ Clarke said, drawing a little closer. ‘He’s all right, though?’

‘Look at him!’ The voice rising. ‘Look what the bastards done to him! First Annette and now this...’

Annette: just a kid when she’d been murdered, her killer caught and jailed, though not lasting long before he too was killed, stabbed through the heart by an inmate who — best guess — had been put up to it by Annette’s brother Darryl.

‘Do you know what happened?’ Clarke asked.

‘He was lying in the driveway. I heard the car, wondered what was taking so long. The security lights had gone on and then off again, and no sign of him, his supper waiting on the stove.’

‘You were the one who found him?’

‘On the ground next to his car. Minute he got out, they must have jumped him.’

‘You didn’t see anything?’

Christie’s mother was shaking her head slowly, her attention fixed on her son.