Rebus 02 by Ian Rankin

Author:Ian Rankin
Language: en-us
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-21T23:00:00+00:00

The flat was still redolent of Tracy. She lingered in the living room and the bathroom. He saw her with a towel falling down around her head, legs tucked beneath her.... Bringing him breakfast: the dirty dishes were still lying beside his unmade bed. She had laughed to find that he slept on a mattress on the floor. ‘Just like in a squat,’ she had said. The flat seemed emptier now, emptier than it had felt for a while. And Rebus could do with a bath. He returned to the bathroom and turned the hot tap on. He could still feel James’s hand on his leg.... In the living room, he looked at a bottle of whisky for a full minute, but turned his back on it and fetched a low-alcohol lager from the fridge instead.

The bath was filling slowly. An Archimedean screw would have been more efficient. Still, it gave him time to make another telephone call to the station, to check on how they were treating Tracy. The news was not good. She was becoming irritable, refusing to eat, complaining of pains in her side. Appendicitis? More likely cold turkey. He felt a fair amount of guilt at not having gone to see her before now. Another layer of guilt wouldn’t do any harm, so he decided to put off the visit until morning. Just for a few hours he wanted to be away from it all, all the sordid tinkering with other people’s lives. His flat didn’t feel so secure any more, didn’t feel like the castle it had been only a day or two ago. And there was internal damage as well as the structural kind: he was feeling soiled in the pit of his gut, as though the city had scraped away a layer of its surface grime and force-fed him the lot.

To hell with it.

He was caught all right. He was living in the most beautiful, most civilised city in northern Europe, yet every day had to deal with its flipside, with the minor matter of its animus. Animus? Now there was a word he hadn’t used in a while. He wasn’t even sure now what it meant exactly; but it sounded right. He sucked from the beer bottle, holding the foam in his mouth like a child playing with toothpaste. This stuff was all foam. No substance.

All foam. Now there was another idea. He would put some foaming bath oil in the water. Bubblebath. Who the hell had given him this stuff? Oh. Yes. Gill Templer. He remembered now. Remembered the occasion, too. She had been gently chiding him about how he never cleaned the bath. Then had presented him with this bath oil.

‘It cleans you and your bath,’ she had said, reading from the bottle. ‘And puts the fun back into bathtime.’

He had suggested that they test this claim together, and they had.... Jesus, John, you’re getting morbid again. Just because she’s gone off with some vacuum-headed disc jockey with the unlikely name of Calum McCallum.

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