Read Online The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories (Rebus Collection) by Ian Rankin - Free Book Online

hair, Mr Matthews, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m leaving the barber’s.’
     
     
    The Claymore might not have been Barnton’s most salubrious establishment, but it was as Princes Street’s Caledonian Hotel in comparison with the places Rebus visited that evening. He began with the merely seedy bars, the ones where each quiet voice seemed to contain a lifetime’s resentment, and then moved downwards, one rung of the ladder at a time. It was slow work; the bars tended to be in a ring around Edinburgh, sometimes on the outskirts or in the distant housing schemes, sometimes nearer the centre than most of the population would dare to think.
    Rebus hadn’t made many friends in his adult life, but he had his network of contacts and he was as proud of it as any grandparent would be of their extended family. They were like cousins, these contacts; mostly they knew each other, at least by reputation, but Rebus never spoke to one about another, so that the extent of the chain could only be guessed at. There were those of his colleagues who, in Major Dean’s words, added two and two, then multiplied by ten. John Rebus, it was reckoned, had as big a net of ‘snitches’ as any copper on the force bar none.
    It took four hours and an outlay of over forty pounds before Rebus started to catch a glimpse of a result. His basic question, though couched in vague and imprecise terms, was simple: have any car thieves vanished off the face of the earth since yesterday?
    One name was uttered by three very different people in three distinct parts of the city: Brian Cant. The name meant little to Rebus.
    ‘It wouldn’t,’ he was told. ‘Brian only shifted across here from the west a year or so ago. He’s got form from when he was a nipper, but he’s grown smart since then. When the Glasgow cops started sniffing, he moved operations.’ The detective listened, nodded, drank a watered-down whisky, and said little. Brian Cant grew from a name into a description, from a description into a personality. But there was something more.
    ‘You’re not the only one interested in him,’ Rebus was told in a bar in Gorgie. ‘Somebody else was asking questions a wee while back. Remember Jackie Hanson?’
    ‘He used to be CID , didn’t he?’
    ‘That’s right, but not any more …’
    Not just any old banger for Brian Cant: he specialised in ‘quality motors’. Rebus eventually got an address: a third-floor tenement flat near Powderhall race-track. A young man answered the door. His name was Jim Cant, Brian’s younger brother. Rebus saw that Jim was scared, nervous. He chipped away at the brother quickly, explaining that he was there because he thought Brian might be dead. That he knew all about Cant’s business, but that he wasn’t interested in pursuing this side of things, except insofar as it might shed light on the death. It took a little more of this, then the brother opened up.
    ‘He said he had a customer interested in a car,’ Jim Cant explained. ‘An Irishman, he said.’
    ‘How did he know the man was Irish?’
    ‘Must have been the voice. I don’t think they met. Maybe they did. The man was interested in a specific car.’
    ‘A red Jaguar?’
    ‘Yeah, convertible. Nice cars. The Irishman even knew where there was one. It seemed a cinch, that’s what Brian kept saying. A cinch.’
    ‘He didn’t think it would be hard to steal?’
    ‘Five seconds’ work, that’s what he kept saying. I thought it sounded too easy. I told him so.’ He bent over in his chair, grabbing at his knees and sinking his head between them. ‘Ach, Brian, what the hell have you done?’
    Rebus tried to comfort the young man as best he could with brandy and tea. He drank a mug of tea himself, wandering through the flat, his mind thrumming. Was he blowing things up out of all proportion? Maybe. He’d made mistakes before, not so much errors of judgement as errors of jumping the gun. But there was something about all of this …