Rebus is good, but not as sharp as he once was

Cig 1

Auld Reekie . . . Edinburgh . . . brewers’ town, stinking of beer, whisky, tweeness, gentility, hypocrisy, corruption . . .

DS Rebus awoke with a start, his hand still clutching a can of lager. He’d been asleep in his chair, as usual. He rarely went to bed. Bed was for sober people. The phone was still ringing, so stumbling over LP sleeves, full ashtrays and empty bottles, he picked up the receiver, greasy from last night’s fry-up.

‘It’s Siobhan,’ his colleague DI Clarke announced herself. ‘A new case has popped up.’ Rebus massaged his brow with an Irn-Bru can and grunted.

‘An old case, I mean,’ Siobhan corrected herself. ‘Thirty years old. But linked, possibly, to a new one, with some nasty masonic business thrown in.’

‘So when do the fun and games begin?’ asked Rebus.

Most popular

Brendan O’Neill

The moment in the ‘grooming gangs’ debate that shamed Jess Phillips

‘Right after a page of smart-arse but amusing dialogue,’ retorted Siobhan, hanging up and biting into a tuna sandwich.

Cig 2

‘There’s going to be an awful lot of delving into the past in this story,’ Rebus’s boss warned him.

‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Rebus, ‘I have already detected some ingeniously woven threads involving murder, police corruption, the Scottish referendum, drugs and more.’

‘Aye, and the main part neatly bookended by an example of your own uncompromising ways.’

Rebus suppressed a smile at the thought of his brutal but surely justified handling of a very old case.

Cig 3

Siobhan met Rebus for an update at the Cambridge. He hauled a barrel of Laphroaig beside their table and took a wee nip, while she sipped a crab-apple smoothie she’d smuggled in.

‘So what’s new?’ she asked.

Rebus took a deep breath. ‘A guy from down south is involved in this story, a businessman with violent tendencies, but at least not upper-class like that moron Timothy Balliol-Eton.