‘Yes, Daddy.’ Her tone was slightly reproachful, warning him that he was giving fatherly advice and that such advice was unnecessary.
‘Fancy seeing a film then, do you?’
The cinema, however, was not open, so they went to an ice-cream parlour at Tollcross. Rebus watched Samantha scoop five colours of ice-cream from a Knickerbocker Glory. She was still at the stick-insect stage, eating without putting on an ounce of weight. Rebus was conscious of his sagging waistband, a stomach pampered and allowed to roam as it pleased. He sipped cappuccino (without sugar) and watched from the corner of his eye as a group of boys at another table looked towards his daughter and him, whispering and sniggering. They pushed back their hair and smoked their cigarettes as though sucking on life itself. He would have arrested them for self-afflicted growth-stunting had Sammy not been there.
their cigarettes. He did not smoke when with Sammy: she did not like him smoking. Her mother also, once upon a time, had screamed at him to stop, and had hidden his cigarettes and lighter, so that he had made secret little nests of cigarettes and matches all around the house. He had smoked on regardless, laughing in victory when he sauntered into the room with another lit cigarette between his lips, Rhona screeching at him to put the bloody thing out, chasing him around the furniture, her hands flapping to knock the incendiary from his mouth.
Those had been happy times, times of loving conflict.
‘How’s school?’
‘It’s okay. Are you involved in the murder case?’
‘Yes.’ God, he could murder for a cigarette, could tear a young male head from its body.
‘Will you catch him?’
‘Yes.’
‘What does he do to the girls, Daddy?’ Her eyes, trying to seem casual, examined the near-empty ice-cream glass very scrupulously.
‘He doesn’t do anything to them.’
‘Just murders them?’ Her lips were pale. Suddenly she was very much his child, his daughter, very much in need of protection. Rebus wanted to put his arms around her, to comfort her, to tell her that the big bad world was out there, not in here, that she was safe.
‘That’s right,’ he said instead.
‘I’m glad that’s all he does.’
The boys were whistling now, trying to attract her attention. Rebus felt his face growing red. On another day, any day other than this, he would march up to them and ram the law into their chilled little faces. But he was off-duty. He was enjoying an afternoon out with his daughter, the freakish result of a single grunted climax, that climax which had seen a lucky sperm, crawling through the ooze, make it all the way to the winning-post. Doubtless Rhona would already be reaching over for her book of the day, her literature. She would prise the still, spent body of her lover from her without a word being passed between them. Was her mind on her books all the time? Perhaps. And he, the lover, would feel deflated and empty, a vacant space, but suddenly as if no form of transference had taken place. That was her victory.
‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’
‘Okay.’
And as they passed the table of hankering boys, their faces full of barely restrained lust, jabbering like monkeys, Samantha smiled at one of them.
Rebus, sucking in fresh air, wondered what his world was coming to. He wondered whether his reason for believing in another reality behind this one might not be because the everyday was so frightening and so very sad. If this were all there was, then life was the sorriest invention of all time. He could kill those boys, and he wanted to smother his daughter, to protect her from that which she wanted — and would get. He realised that he had nothing to say to her, and that those boys did; that he had nothing in common with her save blood, while they had everything in common with her. The skies were dark as Wagnerian opera, dark as a murderer’s thoughts. Darkening like similes, while John Rebus’s world fell apart.
‘It’s time,’ she said, by his side yet so much bigger than him, so much more full of life. ‘It’s time.’
And indeed it was.
‘We better hurry,’ said Rebus, ‘it’s going to rain.’
He felt tired, and recalled that he had not slept, that he had been involved in strenuous labour throughout the short night. He took a taxi back to the flat — sod the expense — and crawled up the winding stairs to his front door. The smell of cats was overpowering. Inside his door, a letter, unstamped, awaited him. He swore out loud. The bastard was everywhere, everywhere and yet invisible. He ripped open the letter and read.
YOU’RE GETTING NOWHERE. NOWHERE. ARE YOU? SIGNED
But there was no signature, not in writing anyway. But inside the envelope, like some child’s plaything, lay the piece of knotted twine.
‘Why are you doing this, Mister Knot?’ said Rebus, fingering the twine. ‘And just what are you doing?’
Inside, the flat was like a fridge: the pilot-light had blown out again.
Part Three KNOT
13
The media, sensing that the ‘Edinburgh Strangler’ was not about to vanish in the night, took the story by its horns and created a monster. TV crews moved into some of the better hotel rooms in the city, and the city was happy enough to have them, it being not quite the tourist season yet.
Tom Jameson was as astute an editor as any, and he had a team of four reporters working on the story. He could not help noticing, however, that Jim Stevens was not on his best form. He seemed uninterested — never a good sign in a journalist. Jameson was worried. Stevens was the best he had, a household name. He would speak to him about it soon.
As the case grew along with the interest in it, John Rebus and Gill Templer became confined to communicating by telephone and via the occasional chance meeting in or around HQ. Rebus hardly saw his old station now. He was strictly a murder-case victim himself, and was told to think about nothing else during his waking hours. He thought about everything else: about Gill, about the letters, about his car’s inability to pass its MOT. And all the time he watched Anderson, father of Rhona’s lover, watched him as he grew ever more frantic for a motive, a lead, anything. It was almost a pleasure to watch the man in action.
As to the letters, Rebus had pretty much discounted his wife and daughter. A slight mark on Knot’s last missive had been checked by the forensic boys (for the price of a pint) and had turned out to be blood. Had the man nicked his finger while cutting the twine? It was yet another small mystery. Rebus’s life was full of mysteries, not the least of which was where his ten legitimate daily cigarettes went. He would open his packet of a late afternoon, count the contents, and find that he was supposed to have smoked all ten of his ration already. It was absurd; he could hardly remember smoking one of the alloted ten, never mind all of them. Yet a count of the butts in his ashtray would produce empirical evidence enough to withstand any denials on his part. Bloody strange though. It was as though he were shutting out a part of his waking life.
He was stationed in the HQ’s Incident Room at the moment, while Jack Morton, poor sod, was on door-to- door. From his vantage point he could see how Anderson was running the shambles. It was little wonder the man’s son had turned out to be less than bright. Rebus also had to deal with the many phone-calls — from those of the
