Ian Rankin - Beggars Banquet

‘Ah,’ said Penny Cook quietly, ‘a chance to kill two birds. Come on, let me introduce you to Gordon Prentice – he’s the station chief – and to the infamous Hamish MacDiarmid.’

Well, Rebus had no trouble deciding which man was which. Except that, when Penny did make the introductions, he was proved utterly wrong. The bearded man pumped his hand.

‘I hope you’re going to be able to help, Inspector. There are some sick minds out there.’ This was Gordon Prentice. He wore baggy brown cords and an open-necked shirt from which protruded tufts of wiry hair. Hamish MacDiarmid’s hand, when Rebus took it, was limp and cool, like something lifted from a larder. No matter how hard he tried, Rebus couldn’t match this… for want of a better word, yuppie… couldn’t match him to the combative voice. But then MacDiarmid spoke.

‘Sick minds is right, and stupid minds too. I don’t know which is worse, a deranged audience or an educationally subnormal one.’ He turned to Penny Cook. ‘Maybe you got the better bargain, Penelope.’ He turned back to Prentice. So that’s what a sneer looks like, Rebus thought. But MacDiarmid was speaking again. ‘Gordon, how about letting Penny and me swap shows for a day? She could sit there agreeing with every bigoted caller I get, and I could get stuck in about her social cripples. What do you think?’

Prentice chuckled and placed a hand on the shoulder of both his star DJs. ‘I’ll give it some thought, Hamish. Penny might not be too thrilled though. I think she has a soft spot for her “cripples”.’

Penny Cook certainly didn’t look ‘too thrilled’ by the time Rebus and she were out of earshot.

‘Those two,’ she hissed. ‘Sometimes they act like I’m not even there! Men…’ She glanced towards Rebus. ‘Present company excluded, of course.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘I shouldn’t be so hard on Gordon actually. I know I joke about being here twenty-four hours a day, but I really think he does spend all day and all night at the station. He’s here from early morning, but each night he comes into the studio to listen to a bit of my show. Beyond the call of duty, wouldn’t you say?’

Rebus merely shrugged.

‘I bet,’ she went on, ‘when you saw them you thought it was Hamish with the beard.’

Rebus nodded. She giggled. ‘Everybody does,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s what they seem in this place. I’ll let you into a secret. The station doesn’t keep any publicity shots of Hamish. They’re afraid it would hurt his image if everyone found out he looks like a wimp.’

‘He’s certainly not quite what I expected.’

She gave him an ambiguous look. ‘No, well, you’re not quite what I was expecting either.’ There was a moment’s stillness between them, broken only by some coffee commercial being broadcast from the ceiling: ‘… but Camelot Coffee is no myth, and mmm… it tastes so good.’ They smiled at one another and walked on.

Driving back into Edinburgh, Rebus listened, despite himself, to the drivel on Lowland Radio. Advertising was tight, he knew that. Maybe that was why he seemed to hear the same dozen or so adverts over and over again. Lots of airtime to fill and so few advertisers to fill it…

‘… and mmm… it tastes so good.’

That particular advert was beginning to get to him. It careered around in his head, even when it wasn’t being broadcast. The actor’s voice was so… what was the word? It was like being force-fed a tablespoon of honey. Cloying, sickly, altogether too much.

‘Was Camelot a myth or is it real? Arthur and Guinevere, Merlin and Lancelot. A dream, or-’

Rebus switched off the radio. ‘It’s only a jar of bloody coffee,’ he told his radio set. Yes, he thought, a jar of coffee… and mmm… it tastes so good. Come to think of it, he needed coffee for the flat. He’d stop off at the corner shop, and whatever he bought it wouldn’t be Camelot.

But, as a promotional gimmick, there was a fifty-pence refund on Camelot, so Rebus did buy it, and sat at home that evening drinking the vile stuff and listening to Penny Cook’s tape. Tomorrow evening, he was thinking, he might go along to the station to catch her show live. He had an excuse after all: he wanted to speak with Sue, the telephonist. That was the excuse; the truth was that he was intrigued by Penny Cook herself.

You’re not quite what I was expecting.

Was he reading too much into that one sentence? Maybe he was. Well, put it another way then: he had a duty to return to Lowland Radio, a duty to talk to Sue. He wound the tape back for the umpteenth time. That ferocious voice. Sue had been surprised by its ferocity, hadn’t she? The man had seemed so quiet, so polite in their initial conversation. Rebus was stuck. Maybe the caller would simply get fed up. When it was a question of someone’s home being called, there were steps you could take: have someone intercept all calls, change the person’s number and keep it ex-directory. But Penny Cook needed her number to be public. She couldn’t hide, except behind the wall provided by Sue and David.

Then he had an idea. It wasn’t much of an idea, but it was better than nothing. Bill Costain at the Forensic Science Lab was keen on sound recording, tape recorders, all that sort of stuff. Maybe he could do something with Mr Anonymous. Yes, he’d call him first thing tomorrow. He sipped his coffee, then squirmed.

‘Tastes more like camel than Camelot,’ he muttered, hitting the play button.

The morning was bright and clear, but Bill Costain was dull and overcast.

‘I was playing in a darts match last night,’ he explained. ‘We won for a change. The amount of drink we put away, you’d think Scotland had just done the Grand Slam.’

‘Never mind,’ said Rebus, handing over the cassette tape. ‘I’ve brought you something soothing…’

‘Soothing’ wasn’t the word Costain himself used after listening to the tape. But he enjoyed a challenge, and the challenge Rebus had laid down was to tell him anything at all about the voice. He listened several times to the tape, and put it through some sort of analyser, the voice becoming a series of peaks and troughs.

Costain scratched his head. ‘There’s too big a difference between the voice at the beginning and the voice when hysterical.’

‘How do you mean?’ Costain always seemed able to baffle Rebus.

‘The hysterical voice is so much higher than the voice at the beginning. It’s hardly… natural.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I’d say one of them’s a put-on. Probably the initial voice. He’s disguising his normal tone, speaking in a lower register than usual.’

‘So can we get back to his real voice?’

‘You mean can we retrieve it? Yes, but the lab isn’t the best place for that. A friend of mine has a recording studio out Morningside way. I’ll give him a bell…’

They were in luck. The studio’s facilities were not in use that morning. Rebus drove them to Morningside and then sat back as Costain and his friend got busy at the mixing console. They slowed the hysteric part of the tape; then managed somehow to take the pitch of the voice down several tones. It began to sound more than slightly unnatural, like a Dalek or something electronic. But then they started to build it back up again, until Rebus was listening to a slow, almost lifeless vocal over the studio’s huge monitor speakers.

‘I… know… what… you’ve… done.’

Yes, there was life there now, almost a hint of personality. After this, they switched to the caller’s first utterance – ‘Not so good, Penny’ – and played around with it, heightening the pitch slightly, even speeding it up a bit.

‘That’s about as good as it gets,’ Costain said at last.