The Black Book Read Online Free

with Patience in her Oxford Terrace garden flat. It represented the other side of the tracks, so to speak. Certainly, it seemed a world away from this disreputable corner of Edinburgh, one of many such corners. Rebus wondered why he was so drawn to them.
    The air outside was filled with the yeasty smell of beer-making, vying with the even stronger aromas from the city’s other much larger breweries. The Broadsword was a popular watering hole, and like most of Edinburgh’s popular pubs, it boasted a mixed clientele: students and low lifes with the occasional businessman. The bar had few pretensions; all it had in its favour were good beer and a good cellar. The weekend had already started, and Rebus was squeezed in at the bar, next to a man whose immense alsatian dog was sleeping on the floor behind the barstools. It took up the standing room of at least two adult men, but nobody was asking it to shift. Further along the bar, someone was drinking with one hand and keeping another proprietorial hand on a coatstand which Rebus assumed they’d just bought at one of the nearby secondhand shops. Everyone at the bar was drinking the same dark brew.
    Though there were half a dozen pubs within a five-minute walk of here, only the Broadsword stocked draught Gibson’s, the other pubs being tied to one or other of the big breweries. Rebus started to wonder, as the beer slipped down, what effect it would have on his metabolism once the Organ Grinder got to work. He decided against a refill, and instead made for O-Gee’s, which was what the Organ Grinder had called his shop. Rebus liked the name; it made the same sound customers made once the Grinder himself got to work – ‘Oh Jeez!’ But they were always careful not to say anything out loud. The Organ Grinder didn’t like to hear blasphemy on the massage table. It upset him, and nobody wanted to be in the hands of an upset Organ Grinder. Nobody wanted to be his monkey.
    So, there he was sitting with the Bible in his lap, waiting for his six-thirty appointment. The Bible was the only reading matter on the premises, courtesy of the Organ Grinder himself. Rebus had read it before, but didn’t mind reading it again.
    Then the front door burst open.
    ‘Where’s the girls, eh?’ This new client was not only misinformed, but also considerably drunk. There was no way the Grinder would handle drunks.
    ‘Wrong place, pal.’ Rebus was about to make mention of a couple of nearby parlours which would be certain to offer the necessary Thai assisted sauna and rub-down, but the man stopped him with a thick pointed finger.
    ‘John bloody Rebus, you son of a shite-breeks!’
    Rebus frowned, trying to place the face. His mind flipped through two decades of mug shots. The man saw Rebus’s confusion, and spread his hands wide. ‘Deek Torrance, you don’t remember?’
    Rebus shook his head. Torrance was walking determinedly forward. Rebus clenched his fists, ready for anything.
    ‘We went through parachute training together,’ said Torrance. ‘Christ, you must remember!’
    And suddenly Rebus did remember. He remembered everything, the whole black comedy of his past.
    They drank in the Broadsword, swopping stories. Deek hadn’t lasted in the Parachute Regiment. After a year he’d had enough, and not too long after that he’d bought his way out of the Army altogether.
    ‘Too restless, John, that was my problem. What was yours?’
    Rebus shook his head and drank some more beer. ‘My problem, Deek? You couldn’t put a name to it.’ But a name had been put to it, first by Mickey’s sudden appearance, and now by Deek Torrance. Ghosts, both of them, but Rebus didn’t want to be their Scrooge. He bought another round.
    ‘You always said you were going to try for the SAS,’ Torrance said.
    Rebus shrugged. ‘It didn’t work out.’
    The bar was busier than ever, and at one point Torrance was jostled by a young man trying to manoeuvre a double bass through the mêlée.
    ‘Could you