Authors: Ian Rankin
‘Philip, his name was. He told us to say Philip had said it was okay and we could come in.’
‘I’m sorry, gentlemen, but this is a
private
club.’ The barman was joining in now, but his presence was unwanted.
‘Talking to the lady here, pal, okay? All we want is a drink and maybe a wee flutter, isn’t that right?’
Rebus watched as two more ‘waiters’, hard young men with angular faces, came quickly down the stairs from the first floor.
‘Now look -’
‘Just a wee flutter -’
‘In town for the night — ’
‘I’m sorry — ’
‘Watch the jacket, pal -’
‘Hey! — ’
Neil McGrath struck the first blow, catching one of the heavies with a solid right to the gut, doubling the man over. People were gathering in the hallway now, leaving the bar and the restaurant untended. Rebus, still watching the fight, began to move backwards through the crowd, past the door to the bar, past the restaurant, towards the cloakroom, the toilets, the office door, and the door behind that.
‘Tony! Is that you?’ It had to happen. Tommy McCall had noticed his brother Tony as one of the apparent out-of-town drunks. Tony, his attention diverted, received a blow to the face which sent him flying back against the wall. ‘That’s my brother you’re punching!’ Tommy was in there now too, mixing it with the best of them. Constables Neil McGrath and Harry Todd were fit and healthy young men, and they were holding their own. But when they saw Superintendent Watson, they automatically froze, even though he could have no idea who they were. Each was caught with a sickening blow, which woke them to the fact that this was for real. They forgot about Watson and struck out for all they were worth.
Rebus noticed that one of the fighters was hanging back just a little, not really throwing himself into it. He stayed near the door, too, ready to flee when necessary, and he kept glancing towards the back of the hallway, where Rebus stood. Rebus waved an acknowledgment. Detective Constable Brian Holmes did not wave back. Then Rebus turned and faced the door at the end of the hallway, the door to the club’s extension. He closed his eyes, screwed up his courage, made a fist of his right hand, and brought it flying up into his own face. Not full strength, some self-protection circuit wouldn’t let him do that, but hard. He wondered how people managed to slit their wrists, then opened his watering eyes and checked his nose. There was blood smeared over his top lip, dripping from both nostrils. He let it drip, and hammered on the door.
Nothing. He hammered again. The noise of the fight was at its height now.
Come on, come on.
He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and held it below his nostrils, catching droplets of brightest crimson. The door was unlocked from within. It opened a couple of inches and eyes peered out at Rebus.
‘Yeah?’
Rebus pulled back a little so the man could see the commotion at the front door. The eyes opened wide with surprise, and the man glanced back at Rebus’s bloody face before opening the door wider. The man was hefty, not old, but with hair unnaturally thin for his age. As if to compensate for this, he had a copious moustache. Rebus remembered Tracy’s description of the man who had followed her the night she’d come to his flat. This man would fit that description.
‘We need you out here,’ Rebus said. ‘Come on.’
The man paused, thinking it over. Rebus thought he was about to close the door again, and was getting ready to kick out with all his might, but the man pulled open the door and stepped out, passing Rebus. Rebus slapped the man’s muscular back as he went.
The door was open. Rebus stepped through, sought the key, and locked it behind him. There were bolts top and bottom. He slid the top one across. Let nobody in, he was thinking, and nobody out. Then, and only then, did he look around him. He was at the top of a narrow flight of stairs, concrete, uncarpeted. Maybe Paulette had been right. Maybe the extension wasn’t finished after all. It didn’t look like it was meant to be part of Finlay’s Club though, this staircase. It was too narrow, almost furtive. Slowly, Rebus moved downwards, the heels of his hired shoes making all-too-audible sounds against the steps.
Rebus counted twenty steps, and figured that he was now below the level of the building’s lower ground floor, somewhere around cellar level or a bit below that even. Maybe planning restrictions
had
got Finlay Andrews after all. Unable to build up, he had built
down.
The door at the bottom of the stairs looked fairly solid. Again, a utilitarian-looking construction, rather than decorative. It would take a good twenty-pound hammer to break through this door. Rebus tried the handle instead. It turned, and the door opened.
Utter darkness. Rebus shuffled through the door, using what light there was from the top of the stairs to make out what he could. Which was to say, nothing. It looked like he was in some kind of storage area. Some big empty space. Then the lights came on, four rows of strip lights on the ceiling high above him. Their wattage low, they still gave enough illumination to the scene. A small boxing ring stood in the centre of the floor, surrounded by a few dozen stiff-backed chairs. This was the place then. The disc jockey had been right.
Calum McCallum had needed all the friends he could get. He had told Rebus all about the rumours he’d heard, rumours of a little club within a club, where the city’s increasingly jaded begetters of wealth could place some ‘interesting bets’. A bit out of the ordinary, McCallum had said. Yes, like betting on two rent boys, junkies paid handsomely to knock the daylights out of one another and keep quiet about it afterwards. Paid with money and drugs. There was no shortage of either now that the high rollers had spun north.
Hyde’s Club. Named after Robert Louis Stevenson’s villain, Edward Hyde, the dark side of the human soul. Hyde himself was based on the city’s Deacon Brodie, businessman by day, robber by night. Rebus could smell guilt and fear and rank expectation in this large room. Stale cigars and spilt whisky, splashes of sweat. And amongst it all moved Ronnie, and the question which still needed to be answered. Had Ronnie been paid to photograph the influential and the rich - without their knowing they were being snapped, of course? Or had he been freelancing, summoned here only as a punchbag, but stealthy enough to bring a hidden camera with him? The answer was perhaps unimportant. What mattered was that the owner of this place, the puppet-master of all these base desires, had killed Ronnie, had starved him of his fix and then given him some rat poison. Had sent one of his minions along to the squat to make sure it looked like a simple case of an overdose. So they had left the quality powder beside Ronnie. And to muddy the water, they had moved the body downstairs, leaving it in candlelight. Thinking the tableau shockingly effective. But by candlelight they hadn’t seen the pentagram on the wall, and they hadn’t meant anything by placing the body the way they had.
Rebus had made the mistake of reading too much into the situation, all along. He had blurred the picture himself, seeing connections where there were none, seeing plot and conspiracy where none existed. The real plot was so much bigger, the size of a haystack to his needle.
‘Finlay Andrews!’ The shout echoed around the room, hanging emptily in air. Rebus hauled himself up into the boxing ring and looked around at the chairs. He could almost see the gleaming, gloating faces of the spectators. The canvas floor of the ring was pockmarked with brown stains, dried blood. It didn’t end here, of course. There were also the ‘guest bedrooms’, the locked doors behind which ‘private games’ were played. Yes, he could visualise the whole Sodom, held on the third Friday of the month, judging by James Carew’s diary. Boys brought back from Calton Hill to service the clients. On a table, in bed, wherever. And Ronnie had perhaps photographed it all. But Andrews had found out that Ronnie had some insurance, some photos stashed away. He couldn’t know, of course, that they were next to useless as weapons of blackmail or evidence. All he knew was that they existed.
So Ronnie had died.
Rebus climbed out of the ring and walked past one row of chairs. At the back of the hall, lurking in shadow, were two doors. He listened outside one, then outside the other. No sounds, yet he was sure.... He was about to open the door on the left, but something, some instinct, made him choose the right-hand door instead. He paused, turned the handle, pushed.
There was a light switch just inside the door. Rebus found it, and two delicate lamps either side of the bed came on. The bed was against the side wall. There wasn’t much else in the room, apart from two large mirrors, one against the wall opposite the bed, and one above the bed. The door clicked shut behind Rebus as he walked over to the bed. Sometimes he had been accused by his superiors of having a vivid imagination. Right now, he shut his imagination out altogether. Stick to the facts, John. The fact of the bed, the fact of the mirrors. The door clicked again. He leapt forwards and yanked at the handle, but it was fast, the door locked tight.
‘Shit!’ He stood back and kicked out, hitting the belly of the door with the heel of his shoe. The door trembled, but held. His shoe did not, the heel flapping off. Great, bang went his deposit on the dress hire. Hold on though, think it through. Someone had locked the door, therefore someone was down here with him, and the only other place they could have been hiding was the other room, the room next to this. He turned again and studied the mirror opposite the bed.
‘Andrews!’ he yelled to the mirror. ‘Andrews!’
The voice was muffled by the wall, sounding distant, but still lucid.
‘Hello, Inspector Rebus. Nice to see you.’
Rebus almost smiled, but managed to hide it.
‘I wish I could say the same.’ He stared into the mirror, visualising Andrews standing directly behind it, watching him. ‘A nice idea,’ he said, making conversation, needing time to gather his strength and his thoughts. ‘People screwing in one room, while everyone else is free to watch through a two-way mirror.’
‘Free to watch?’ The voice seemed closer. ‘No, not free, Inspector. Everything costs.’
‘I suppose you set the camera up in there too, did you?’
‘Photographed and framed. Framed being quite apt under the circumstances, don’t you think?’
‘Blackmail.’ It was an observation, nothing more.
‘Favours merely. Often given without question. But a photograph can be a useful tool when favours are being withheld.’
‘That’s why James Carew committed suicide?’
‘Oh no. That was your doing really, Inspector. James told me you’d recognised him. He thought you might be able to follow your nose from him back to Hyde’s.’
‘You killed him?’
‘We killed him, John. Which is a pity. I liked James. He was a good friend.’
‘Well, you have lots of friends, don’t you?’
There was laughter now, but the voice was level, elegiac almost. ‘Yes, I suppose they’d have a job finding a judge to try me, an advocate to prosecute me, fifteen good men and true to stand as jury. They’ve all been to Hyde’s. All of them. Looking for a game with just a little more edge than those played upstairs. I got the idea from a friend in London. He runs a similar establishment, though perhaps with a less sharp edge than Hyde’s. There’s a lot of new money in Edinburgh, John. Money for all. Would you like money? Would you like a sharper edge to your life? Don’t tell me you’re happy in your little flat, with your music and your books and your bottles of wine.’ Rebus’s face showed surprise. ‘Yes, I know quite a bit about you, John. Information is
my
edge.’ Andrews’ voice fell. ‘There’s a membership available here if you want it, John. I think maybe you do want it. After all, membership has its privileges.’
Rebus leaned his head against the mirror. His voice was a near whisper.
‘Your fees are too high.’
‘What’s that?’ Andrews’ voice seemed closer than ever, his breathing almost audible. Rebus’s voice was still a whisper.
‘I said your fees are too high.’
Suddenly, he pulled back an arm, made a fist, and pushed straight through the mirror, shattering it. Another trick from his SAS training. Don’t punch at something; always punch through, even if it’s a brick wall you’re attacking. Glass splintered around him, digging into the sleeve of his jacket, seeking flesh. His fist uncurled, became a claw. Just through the mirror, he found Andrews’ throat, clamped it, and hauled the man forward. Andrews was shrieking. Glass was in his face, flakes of it in his hair, his mouth, prickling his eyes. Rebus held him close, teeth gritted.
‘I said,’ he hissed, ‘your fees are too high.’ Then he brought his other hand into a fresh new fist and placed a blow on Andrews’ chin, releasing him so that the unconscious figure fell back into the room.
Rebus pulled off the useless shoe and tapped away the shards of glass which still clung around the edges of the frame. Then, carefully, he hauled himself through into the room, went to the door, and opened it.
He saw Tracy immediately. She was standing hesitantly in the middle of the boxing ring, arms hanging by her sides.
‘Tracy?’ he said.
‘She may not hear you, Inspector Rebus. Heroin can do that, you know.’
Rebus watched as Malcolm Lanyon stepped out from the shadows. Behind him were two men. One was tall, well built for a man of his mature years. He had thick black eyebrows and a thick moustache tinged with silver. His eyes were deep-set, his whole face louring. He was the most Calvinist-looking thing Rebus had ever seen. The other man was stouter, less justified in his sinning. His hair was curly but thinning, his face scarred like a knuckle, a labourer’s face. He was leering.