It had taken Rebus an hour to drive to Raintown, but another forty minutes to find Dumbarton Road. He hadn’t been to the station before: Partick cop-shop had relocated in ’93. The old station, the ‘Marine’, he’d been there, but not the new place. Driving in Glasgow could be a nightmare for the uninitiated, a maze of one-way streets and ill-signposted intersections. Rebus twice had to leave his car and call in for instructions, both times queuing outside phone boxes in the rain. Only it wasn’t real rain, it was smirr, a fine spray-mist which drenched you before you knew it. It was blowing in from the west, moisture straight from the Atlantic Ocean. It was all Rebus needed first thing on a dreich Monday morning.
When he got to the station, he noticed a car in the car park, two figures inside, smoke billowing from an open window, radio playing. Reporters, had to be. They were the graveyard shift. At this point in a story, reporters divvied the hours into shifts, so they could go off and be somewhere else. Whoever was left on recce was on a promise to buzz any breaks in the story to the other journalists pronto.
When he finally pushed open the station door, there was scattered applause. He walked up to the desk.
‘Finally made it, then?’ the Duty Sergeant asked. ‘Thought we were going to have to send out search parties.’
‘Where’s CI Ancram?’
‘In a meeting. He said for you to go up and wait.’
So Rebus went upstairs, and found that the CID offices had become a sprawling Murder Room. There were photographs on the walls: Judith Cairns, Ju-Ju, in life and in death. More photos of the locus — Kelvingrove Park, a sheltered spot surrounded by bushes. A work rota had been posted — interview grind mostly, shoe-leather stuff, no big breaks expected but you had to make the effort. Officers clattered at keyboards, maybe using the SCRO computer, or even HOLMES — the major enquiry database. All murder cases — excluding those solved straight off — were put on the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System. There were dedicated teams — detectives and uniforms — who operated the system, typing in data, checking and cross-referencing. Even Rebus — no great fan of new technology — could see the advantages over the old card-index system. He stopped by a computer terminal and watched someone entering a statement. Then, looking up, he saw a face he recognised, walked up to its owner.
‘Hiya, Jack, thought you were still in Falkirk?’
DI Jack Morton turned, his eyes opening wide in disbelief. He rose from his desk, took Rebus’s hand and pumped it.
‘I am,’ he said, ‘but they’re short-handed here.’ He looked around the room. ‘Understandably.’
Rebus looked Jack Morton up and down, couldn’t believe what he saw. Last time they’d met, Jack had been a couple of stone overweight, a heavy smoker with a cough that could crack patrol-car windscreens. Now he’d shed the excess weight, and the perennial ciggie was missing from his mouth. More, his hair was professionally groomed and he was dressed in an expensive-looking suit, polished black shoes, crisp shirt and tie.
‘What happened to you?’ Rebus asked.
Morton smiled, patted his near-flat stomach. ‘Just looked at myself one day and couldn’t understand why the mirror didn’t break. Got off the booze and the cigs, joined a health club.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Life and death decisions. You can’t afford to hem and haw.’
‘You look great.’
‘Wish I could say the same, John.’
Rebus was thinking up a comeback when CI Ancram entered the room.
‘DI Rebus?’ They shook hands. The Chief Inspector didn’t seem keen to let go. His eyes were soaking up Rebus. ‘Sorry to keep you.’
Ancram was in his early fifties, and every bit as well-dressed as Jack Morton. He was bald mostly, but with Sean Connery’s style and a thick dark moustache to match.
‘Has Jack been giving you the tour?’
‘Not exactly, sir.’
‘Well, this is the Glasgow end of the Johnny Bible operation.’
‘Is this the nearest station to Kelvingrove?’
Ancram smiled. ‘Proximity to the locus was just one consideration. Judith Cairns was his third victim, by then the media had already hit on the Bible John connection. And this is where all the Bible John files are stored.’
‘Any chance I can see them?’
Ancram studied him, then shrugged. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
Rebus followed Ancram along the corridor to another suite of offices. There was a musty smell in the air, more library than cop-shop. Rebus saw why: the room was full of old cardboard boxes, box-files with spring hinges, packets of curl-edged paper bound with string. Four CID officers — two male, two female — were working their way through everything and anything to do with the original Bible John case.
‘We had this lot stashed in a storeroom,’ Ancram said. ‘You should have seen the stoor that came off when we brought them out.’ He blew on a folder, fine powder rising from it.
‘You do think there’s a connection then?’
It was a question every police officer in Scotland had asked every other police officer, for there was always the chance that the two cases, the two killers, had nothing in common, in which event hundreds of man-hours were being wasted.
‘Oh yes,’ Ancram said. Yes: it was what Rebus felt, too. ‘I mean, the modus operandi is close enough to start with, then there are the souvenirs he takes from the scene. The description of Johnny Bible may be a fluke, but I’m sure he’s copying his hero.’ Ancram looked at Rebus. ‘Aren’t you?’
Rebus nodded. He was looking at all the material, thinking how he’d like to have a few weeks with it, how he might find something no one else had spotted... It was a dream, of course, a fantasy, but on slow nights sometimes it was motivation enough. Rebus had his newspapers, but they told only as much of the story as the police had wanted made public. He walked over to a row of shelves, read the spines of the box-files: Door to Door; Taxi Firms; Hairdressers; Tailors’ Shops; Hairpiece Suppliers.
‘Hairpiece suppliers?’
Ancram smiled. ‘His short hair, they thought maybe it was a wig. They talked to hairdressers to see if anyone recognised the cut.’
‘And to tailors because of his Italian suit.’
Again Ancram stared at him.
Rebus shrugged. ‘The case interests me. What’s this?’ He pointed to a wall chart.
‘Similarities and dissimilarities between the two cases,’ Ancram said. ‘Dancehalls versus the club scene. And the descriptions: tall, skinny, shy, auburn hair, well dressed... I mean, Johnny could almost be Bible John’s son.’
‘That’s something I’ve been asking myself. Supposing Johnny Bible is basing himself on his hero, and supposing Bible John’s still out there somewhere...’
‘Bible John’s dead.’
Rebus kept his eyes on the chart. ‘But just supposing he isn’t. I mean, is he flattered? Is he pissed off? What?’
‘Don’t ask me.’
‘The Glasgow victim hadn’t been to a club,’ Rebus said.
‘Well, she wasn’t last seen in a club. But she’d been to one earlier that evening, he could have followed her from there to the concert.’
Victims one and two had been picked up by Johnny Bible in nightclubs, the nineties equivalent of a sixties dancehalclass="underline" louder, darker, more dangerous. They’d been in parties, who were able to furnish only the vaguest descriptions of the man who had walked off into the night with their friend. But victim three, Judith Cairns, had been picked up at a rock concert in a room above a pub.
‘We’ve had others too,’ Ancram was saying. ‘Three unsolveds in Glasgow in the late seventies, all three missing some personal item.’
‘Like he never went away,’ Rebus muttered.