Beggars Banquet

‘I wonder…’ Rebus said quietly.

‘Sir?’

‘Maybe you were asking the wrong question at the gate, Brian. Yes, the right idea but the wrong question. Come on, let’s go back and ask again. We’ll see how eagle-eyed our friends really are.’

They passed the photographer – his badge called him Larry rather than Lawrence – just as the shutter clicked.

‘Great,’ he said to nobody in particular. ‘Just one more, sweetheart.’ As he wound the film, Rebus paused and stood beside him, then made a square from the thumb and forefinger of both hands and peered through it towards the woman Diana, as though assessing the composition of the picture. Larry caught the gesture.

‘You a professional?’ he asked, his tone just short of awe.

‘Only in a ma

Rebus went alone to the home of Sir Walter Scott, just off the Corstorphine Road near the zoo. As he stepped out of his car, he could have sworn he detected a faint wafting of animal dung. There was another car in the driveway, one which, with a sinking heart, he recognised. As he walked up to the front door of the house, he saw that the curtains were closed in the upstairs windows, while downstairs, painted wooden shutters had been pulled across to block out the daylight.

The door was opened by Superintendent ‘Farmer’ Watson.

‘I thought that was your car, sir,’ Rebus said as Watson ushered him into the hall. When he spoke, the superintendent’s voice was a whispered growl.

‘He’s still up there, you know.’

‘Who?’

‘Sir Walter, of course!’ Flecks of saliva burst from the corners of Watson’s mouth. Rebus thought it judicious to show not even the mildest amusement.

‘I left the doctor in charge.’

‘Dr Jameson couldn’t organise a brewery visit. What the hell did you think you were doing?’

‘I had… have an investigation on my hands, sir. I thought I could be more usefully employed than playing undertaker.’

‘He’s stiff now, you know,’ Watson said, his anger having diminished. He didn’t exactly know why it was that he could never stay angry with Rebus; there was something about the man. ‘They don’t think they can get him down the stairs. They’ve tried twice, but he got stuck both times.’

Rebus pursed his lips, the only way he could prevent them spreading into a wide grin. Watson saw this and saw, too, that the situation was not without a trace of humour.

‘Is that why you’re here, sir? Placating the widow?’

‘No, I’m here on a personal level. Sir Walter and Lady Scott were friends of mine. That is, Sir Walter was, and Lady Scott still is.’

Rebus nodded slowly. Christ, he was thinking, the poor bugger’s only been dead a couple of hours and here’s old Farmer Watson already trying to… But no, surely not. Watson was many things, but not callous, not like that. Rebus rebuked himself silently, and in so doing missed most of what Watson was saying.

‘-in here.’

And a door from the hallway was being opened. Rebus was being shown into a spacious living-room – or were they called drawing-rooms in houses like this? Walking across to where Lady Scott sat by the fireside was like walking across a dance hall.

‘This is Inspector Rebus,’ Watson was saying. ‘One of my men.’

Lady Scott looked up from her handkerchief. ‘How do you do?’ She offered him a delicate hand, which he lightly touched with his own, in place of his usual firm handshake. Lady Scott was in her mid fifties, a well-preserved monument of neat lines and precise movements. Rebus had seen her accompanying her husband to various functions in the city, had come across her photograph in the paper when he had received his knighthood. He saw, too, from the corner of his eye, the way Watson looked at her, a mixture of pity and something more than pity, as though he wanted at the same time to pat her hand and hug her to him.

Who would want Sir Walter dead? That was, in a sense, what he had come here to ask. Still the question itself was valid. Rebus could think of adversaries – those Scott had crossed in his professional life, those he had helped put behind bars, those, perhaps, who resented everything from his title to the bright blue socks that had become something of a trademark after he admitted on a radio show that he wore no other colour on his feet…

‘Lady Scott, I’m sorry to intrude on you at a time like this. I know it’s difficult, but there are a couple of questions…’

‘Please, ask your questions.’ She gestured for him to sit on the sofa – the sofa on which Farmer Watson had already made himself comfortable. Rebus sat down awkwardly. This whole business was awkward. He knew the chess player’s motto: if in doubt, play a pawn. Or as the Scots themselves would say, ca’ ca

‘We found a note in Sir Walter’s binocular case.’

‘He didn’t own a pair of binoculars.’ Her voice was firm.

‘He probably bought them this morning. Did he say where he was going?’

‘No, just out. I was upstairs. He called that he was “popping out for an hour or two”, and that was all.’

‘What note?’ This from Watson. What note indeed. Rebus wondered why Lady Scott hadn’t asked the same thing.

‘A typed note, telling Sir Walter to be at the top of the Scott Monument at midday.’ Rebus paused, his attention wholly on Sir Walter’s widow. ‘There have been others, haven’t there? Other notes?’

She nodded slowly. ‘Yes. I found them by accident. I wasn’t prying, I’m not like that. I was in Walter’s office – he always called it that, his “office”, never his study – looking for something, an old newspaper I think. Yes, there was an article I wanted to reread, and I’d searched high and low for the blessed paper. I was looking in Walter’s office, and I found some… letters.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘He’d kept them quiet from me. Well, I suppose he had his reasons. I never said anything to him about finding them.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I used to think sometimes that the unsaid was what kept our marriage alive. That may seem cruel. Now he’s gone, I wish we’d told one another more…’

She dabbed at a liquid eye with the corner of her handkerchief, wrapped as it was around one finger, her free hand twisting and twisting the corners. To Rebus, it looked as if she were using it as a tourniquet.

‘Do you know where these other notes are?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. Walter may have moved them.’

‘Shall we see?’

The office was untidy in the best legal tradition: any available flat surface, including the carpet, seemed to be fair game for stacks of brown folders tied with ribbon, huge bulging manilla envelopes, magazines and newspapers, books and learned journals. Two walls consisted entirely of bookcases, from floor to near the ornate but flaking ceiling. One bookcase, glass-fronted, contained what Rebus reckoned must be the collected works of the other Sir Walter Scott. The glass doors looked as though they hadn’t been opened in a decade; the books themselves might never have been read. Still, it was a nice touch – to have one’s study so thoroughly infiltrated by one’s namesake.

‘Ah, they’re still here.’ Lady Scott had slid a concertina-style folder out from beneath a pile of similar such files. ‘Shall we take them back through to the morning-room?’ She looked around her. ‘I don’t like it in here… not now.’

Her Edinburgh accent, with its drawn vowels, had turned ‘morning’ into ‘mourning’. Either that, thought Rebus, or she’d said ‘mourning-room’ in the first place. He would have liked to have stayed a little longer in Sir Walter’s office, but was compelled to follow. Back in her chair, Lady Scott untied the ribbon around the file and let it fall open. The file itself was made up of a dozen or more compartments, but only one seemed to contain any paperwork. She pulled out the letters and handed them to Watson, who glanced through them wordlessly before handing them to Rebus.