Beggars Banquet (collection), Page 2

‘By this angel who’s managed to put up with him all these years?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘OK, Doc, so point me to the medical evidence.’

  ‘Well, it’s a narrow staircase, pretty steep, about eleven or twelve steps, say. If you weighed around thirteen stone, and happened to slip at the top, you’d sort of be bounced off the sides as you fell, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘And you’d try to grab hold of something to stop your fall. There’s a banister on one wall. They were waiting for the council to come and fit an extra banister on the other wall.’

  ‘So you’d reach out to grab something, fair enough.’ Rebus drained the sour black coffee and studied the pile of work in his in-tray.

  ‘Well, you’d have bruising, wouldn’t you?’ said Patience Aitken. ‘Grazes on your elbows or knees, there’d be marks where you’d clawed at the walls.’

  Rebus knew that she was surmising, but could not disagree thus far. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘George Gallagher only has significant marks on his head, where he hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs, breaking his neck in the process. No real bruising or grazing to the body, no marks on the wall as far as I can see.’

  ‘So you’re saying he flew from the top landing with a fair bit of momentum, and the first thing he touched was the ground?’

  ‘That’s how it looks. Unless I’m imagining it.’

  ‘So he either jumped, or he was pushed?’

  ‘Yes.’ She paused again. ‘I know it sounds tenuous, John. And Christ knows I don’t want to accuse Grace of anything…’

  Rebus picked up a ballpoint pen from beside the telephone and scrabbled on the surface of his desk until he found the back of an envelope upon which to write.

  ‘You’re only doing your job, Patience,’ he said. ‘Give me the address and I’ll go pay my respects.’

  The door of 26 Gillan Drive opened slowly, and a man peered out at Rebus, then ushered him quickly inside, laying a soft hand on his arm.

  ‘In ye come, son. In ye come. The women are in the living-room. The kitchen’s through here.’ He nodded his head, then led Rebus through a narrow hallway past a closed door, from behind which came tearful sounds, towards a half-open door at the back of the house. Rebus had not even glanced at the stairs as they’d passed them, the stairs which had faced him at the open front door of the house. The kitchen door was now opened from within, and Rebus saw that seven or eight men had squeezed into the tiny back room. There were stale smells of cooking fat and soup, stew and fruit cake, but above them wafted a more recent smell: whisky.

  ‘Here ye are, son.’ Someone was handing him a tumbler with a good inch of amber liquid in it. Everyone else had just such a glass nestling in their hand. They all shuffled from one foot to another, awkward, hardly daring to speak. They had nodded at Rebus’s entrance, but now gave him little heed. Glasses were replenished. Rebus noticed the CoOp price label on the bottle.

  ‘You’ve just moved into Cashman Street, haven’t you?’ someone was asking someone else.

  ‘Aye, that’s right. A couple of months ago. The wife used to meet Mrs Gallagher at the shops, so we thought we’d drop in.’

  ‘See this estate, son, it was miners’ rows once upon a time. It used to be that you lived here and died here. But these days there’s that much coming and going…’

  The conversation continued at the level of a murmur. Rebus was standing with his back to the sink’s draining board, next to the back door. A figure appeared in front of him.

  ‘Have another drop, son.’ And the inch in his glass rose to an inch and a half. Rebus looked around him in vain, seeking out a relative of the deceased. But these men looked like neighbours, like the sons of neighbours, the male half of the community’s heart. Their wives, sisters, mothers would be in the living-room with Grace Gallagher. Closed curtains blocking out any light from what was left of the day: handkerchiefs and sweet sherry. The bereaved in an armchair, with someone else perched on an arm of the chair, offering a pat of the hand and well-meant words. Rebus had seen it all, seen it as a child with his own mother, and as a young man with his father, seen it with aunts and uncles, with the parents of friends and more recently with friends themselves. He wasn’t so young now. The odd contemporary was already falling victim to the Big C or an unexpected heart attack. Today was the last day of April. Two days ago, he’d gone to Fife and laid flowers on his father’s grave. Whether it was an act of remembrance or of simple contrition, he couldn’t have said…

  His guide pulled him back to the present. ‘Her daughter-in-law’s already here. Came over from Falkirk this afternoon. ’

  Rebus nodded, trying to look wise. ‘And the son?’

  Eyes looked at him. ‘Dead these past ten years. Don’t you know that?’

  There was suspicion now, and Rebus knew that he had either to reveal himself as a policeman, or else become more disingenuous still. These people, authentically mourning the loss of someone they had known, had taken him as a mourner too, had brought him in here to share with them, to be part of the remembering group.

  ‘I’m just a friend of a friend,’ he explained. ‘They asked me to look in.’

  It looked from his guide’s face, however, as though an interrogation might be about to begin. But then somebody else spoke.

  ‘Terrible crash it was. What was the name of the town again?’

  ‘Methil. He’d been working on building a rig there.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the guide knowledgeably. ‘Pay night it was. They’d been out for a few drinks, like. On their way to the dancing. Next thing…’

  ‘Aye, terrible smash it was. The lad in the back seat had to have both legs taken off.’

  Well, thought Rebus, I bet he didn’t go to any more hops. Then he winced, trying to forgive himself for thinking such a thing. His guide saw the wince and laid the hand back on his arm.

  ‘All right, son, all right.’ And they were all looking at him again, perhaps expecting tears. Rebus was growing red in the face.

  ‘I’ll just…’ he said, motioning towards the ceiling with his head.

  ‘You know where it is?’

  Rebus nodded. He’d seen all there was to see downstairs, and so knew the bathroom must lie upstairs, and upstairs was where he was heading. He closed the kitchen door behind him and breathed deeply. There was sweat beneath his shirt, and the headache was reasserting itself. That’ll teach you, Rebus, it was saying. That’ll teach you for taking a sip of whisky. That’ll teach you for making cheap jokes to yourself. Take all the aspirin you like. They’ll dissolve your stomach lining before they dissolve me.

  Rebus called his headache two seven-letter words before beginning to climb the stairs.

  He gave careful scrutiny to each stair as he climbed, and to the walls either side of each stair. The carpet itself was fairly new, with a thickish pile. The wallpaper was old, and showed a hunting scene, horse-riders and dogs with a fox panting and worried in the distance. As Patience Aitken had said, there were no scrapes or claw-marks on the paper itself. What’s more, there were no loose edges of carpet. The whole thing had been tacked down with a professional’s skill. Nothing for George Gallagher to trip over, no threads or untacked sections; and no smooth threadbare patches for him to slip on.

  He gave special attention to where the upstairs landing met the stairs. George Gallagher probably fell from here, from this height. Further down the stairs, his chances of survival would have been much greater. Yes, it was a steep and narrow staircase all right. A trip and a tumble would certainly have caused bruising. Immediate death at the foot of the stairs would doubtless have arrested much of the bruising, the blood stilling in the veins and arteries, but bruising there would have been. The post-mortem would be specific; so far Rebus was trading on speculation, and well he knew it.

  Four doors led off the landing: a large cupboard (what Rebus as a child would have called a ‘press’), filled with sheets, blankets, t
wo ancient suitcases, a black-and-white television lying on its side; a musty spare bedroom, its single bed made up ready for the visitor who never came; the bathroom, with a battery-operated razor lying on the cistern, never to be used again by its owner; and the bedroom. Nothing interested Rebus in either the spare bedroom or the bathroom, so he slipped into the main bedroom, closing the door behind him, then opening it again, since to be discovered behind a closed door would be so much more suspicious than to be found inside an open one.

  The sheets, blanket and quilt had been pulled back from the bed, and three pillows had been placed on their ends against the headboard so that one person could sit up in bed. He’d seen a breakfast tray in the kitchen, still boasting the remnants of a morning meal: cups, toast crumbs on a greasy plate, an old coffee jar now holding the remains of some home-made jam. Beside the bed stood a walking-frame. Patience Aitken had said that George Gallagher usually wouldn’t walk half a dozen steps without his walking-frame (a Zimmer she’d called it, but to Rebus Zimmer was the German for ‘room’…). Of course, if Grace were helping him, he could walk without it, leaning on her the way he’d lean his weight on a stick. Rebus visualised Grace Gallagher coaxing her husband from his bed, telling him he wouldn’t be needing his walking-frame, she’d help him down the stairs. He could lean on her…

  On the bed rested a newspaper, dotted with tacky spots of jam. It was today’s paper, and it was open at the racing pages. A blue pen had been used to ring some of the runners – Gypsy Pearl, Gazumpin, Lot ’s Wife, Castle Mallet, Blondie – five in total, enough for a super yankee. The blue pen was sitting on a bedside table, beside a glass half filled with water, some tablets (the label made out to Mr G. Gallagher), a pair of reading spectacles in their case, and a paperback cowboy novel – large print – borrowed from the local library. Rebus sat on the edge of the bed and flipped through the newspaper. His eyes came to rest on a particular page, the letters and cartoons page. At bottom right was a crossword, a completed crossword at that. The pen used to fill in the squares seemed different to that used for the racing form further on in the paper, and the hand seemed different too: more delicate, more feminine. Thin faint marks rather than the robust lines used to circle the day’s favoured horses. Rebus enjoyed the occasional crossword, and, impressed to find this one completed, was more impressed to find that the answers were those to the cryptic clues rather than the quick clues most people favoured. He began to read, until at some point in his reading his brow furrowed, and he blinked a couple of times before closing the paper, folding it twice, and rolling it into his jacket pocket. A second or two’s reflection later, he rose from the bed and walked slowly to the bedroom door, out on to the landing where, taking careful hold of the banister, he started downstairs.

  He stood in the kitchen with his whisky, pondering the situation. Faces came and went. A man would finish his drink with a sigh or a clearing of the throat.

  ‘Ay well,’ he’d say, ‘I suppose I’d better…’ And with these words, and a bow of the head, he would move out of the kitchen, timidly opening the living-room door so as to say a few words to the widow before leaving. Rebus heard Grace Gallagher’s voice, a high, wavering howl: ‘Thanks for coming. It was good of you. Cheerio.’

  The women came and went, too. Sandwiches appeared from somewhere and were shared out in the kitchen. Tongue, corned beef, salmon paste. White ‘half-pan’ bread sliced in halves. Despite his diet, Rebus ate his fill, saying nothing. Though he only half knew it, he was biding his time, not wishing to create a disturbance. He waited as the kitchen emptied. Once or twice someone had attempted to engage him in conversation, thinking they knew him from a neighbouring street or from the public bar of the local. Rebus just shook his head, the friend of a friend, and the enquiries usually ended there.

  Even his guide left, again patting Rebus’s arm and giving him a nod and a wink. It was a day for universal gestures, so Rebus winked back. Then, the kitchen vacant now, muggy with the smell of cheap cigarettes, whisky and body odour, Rebus rinsed out his glass and stood it end-up on the draining board. He walked into the hallway, paused, then knocked and pushed open the living-room door.

  As he had suspected, Grace Gallagher, as frail-looking as he’d thought, dabbing behind her fifties-style spectacles, was seated in an armchair. On the arm of the chair sat a woman in her forties, heavy-bodied but not without presence. The other chairs were vacant. Teacups sat on a dining table, alongside an unfinished plate of sandwiches, empty sherry glasses, the bottle itself, and, curiously, a pack of playing cards, laid out as though someone had broken off halfway through a game of patience.

  Opposite the television set sat another sunken armchair, looking as if it had not been sat in this whole afternoon. Rebus could guess why: the deceased’s chair, the throne to his tiny kingdom. He smiled towards the two women. Grace Gallagher only half looked towards him.

  ‘Thanks for dropping by,’ she said, her voice slightly revived from earlier. ‘It was good of you. Cheerio.’

  ‘Actually, Mrs Gallagher,’ said Rebus, stepping into the room, ‘I’m a police officer, Detective Inspector Rebus. Dr Aitken asked me to look in.’

  ‘Oh.’ Grace Gallagher looked at him now. Pretty eyes sinking into crinkly white skin. A dab of natural colour on each cheek. Her silvery hair hadn’t seen a perm in quite a while, but someone had combed it, perhaps to enable her to face the rigours of the afternoon. The daughter-in-law – or so Rebus supposed the woman on the arm of the chair to be – was rising.

  ‘Would you like me to…?’

  Rebus nodded towards her. ‘I don’t think this’ll take long. Just routine really, when there’s been an accident.’ He looked at Grace, then at the daughter-in-law. ‘Maybe if you could go into the kitchen for five minutes or so?’

  She nodded keenly, perhaps a little too keenly. Rebus hadn’t seen her all evening, and so supposed she’d felt duty bound to stay cooped up in here with her mother-in-law. She seemed to relish the prospect of movement.

  ‘I’ll pop the kettle on,’ she said, brushing past Rebus. He watched the door close, waited as she padded down the short hallway, listened until he heard water running, the sounds of dishes being tidied. Then he turned back to Grace Gallagher, took a deep breath, and walked over towards her, dragging a stiff-backed dining chair with him. This he sat on, only a foot or two from her. He could feel her growing uneasy. She writhed a little in the armchair, then tried to disguise the reaction by reaching for another paper hankie from a box on the floor beside her.

  ‘This must be a very difficult time for you, Mrs Gallagher,’ Rebus began. He wanted to keep things short and clear cut. He had no evidence, had nothing to play with but a little bit of psychology and the woman’s own state of mind. It might not be enough; he wasn’t sure whether or not he wanted it to be enough. He found himself shifting on the chair. His arm touched the newspaper in his pocket. It felt like a talisman.

  ‘Dr Aitken told me,’ he continued, ‘that you’d looked after your husband for quite a few years. It can’t have been easy.’

  ‘I’d be lying if I said that it was.’

  Rebus tried to find the requisite amount of iron in her words. Tried but failed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I believe your husband was, well, a bit difficult at times.’

  ‘I won’t deny that either. He could be a real bugger when he wanted to.’ She smiled, as if in memory of the fact. ‘But I’ll miss him. Aye, I’ll miss him.’

  ‘I’m sure you will, Mrs Gallagher.’

  He looked at her, and her eyes fixed on to his, challenging him. He cleared his throat again. ‘There’s something I’m not absolutely sure about, concerning the accident. I wonder if maybe you can help me?’

  ‘I can try.’

  Rebus smiled his appreciation. ‘It’s just this,’ he said. ‘Eleven o’clock was a bit early for your husband to be coming downstairs. What’s more, he seemed to be trying to come down without his walking-frame, which is still beside the bed.’ Rebu
s’s voice was becoming firmer, his conviction growing. ‘What’s more, he seems to have fallen with a fair amount of force.’

  She interrupted him with a snap. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean he fell straight down the stairs. He didn’t just slip and fall, or stumble and roll down them. He went flying off the top step and didn’t hit anything till he hit the ground.’ Her eyes were filling again. Hating himself, Rebus pressed on. ‘He didn’t fall, Mrs Gallagher. He was helped to the top of the stairs, and then he was helped down them with a push in the back, a pretty vigorous push at that.’ His voice grew less severe, less judgmental. ‘I’m not saying you meant to kill him. Maybe you just wanted him hospitalised, so you could have a rest from looking after him. Was that it?’

  She was blowing her nose, her small shoulders squeezed inwards towards a brittle neck. The shoulders twitched with sobs. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You think I… How could you? Why would you say anything like that? No, I don’t believe you. Get out of my house.’ But there was no power to any of her words, no real enthusiasm for the fight. Rebus reached into his pocket and brought out the newspaper.

  ‘I notice you do crosswords, Mrs Gallagher.’

  She glanced up at him, startled by this twist in the conversation. ‘What?’

  He motioned with the paper. ‘I like crosswords myself. That’s why I was interested when I saw you’d completed today’s puzzle. Very impressive. When did you do that?’

  ‘This morning,’ she said through another handkerchief. ‘In the park. I always do the crossword after I’ve bought the paper. Then I bring it home so George can look at his horses.’

  Rebus nodded, and studied the crossword again. ‘You must have been preoccupied with something this morning then,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s quite an easy one, really. I mean, easy for someone who does crosswords like this and finishes them. Where is it now?’ Rebus seemed to be searching the grid. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nineteen across. You’ve got the down solutions, so that means the answer to nineteen across must be something R something P. Now, what’s the clue?’ He looked for it, found it. ‘Here it is, Mrs Gallagher. “Perhaps deadly in part.” Four letters. Something R something P. Something deadly. Or deadly in part. And you’ve put TRIP. ‘What were you thinking about, I wonder? I mean, when you wrote that? I wonder what your mind was on?’