Read The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories (Rebus Collection) for Free Online Page A

overwhelming. Yet Rebus, feeling it to be wrong, had been forced to invent other scenarios, other motives and other means to the fairly chilling end. It wasn’t enough that Moira had died – died at the hands of someone she knew. MacFarlane had to be implicated in her murder. The killer had been out to tag them both. But it was Moira the killer hated, hated because she had broken a friendship as well as a heart.
    Rebus stood on the steps of the police station. Thomson was in a cell somewhere below his feet, somewhere below ground level. Confessing to everything. He would go to jail, while John MacFarlane, perhaps not realising his luck, had already been freed.
    The streets were busy now. Lunchtime traffic, the reliable noises of the everyday. The sun was even managing to burst from its slumber. All of which reminded Rebus that his day was over. Time, all in all he felt, for a short visit home, a shower and a change of clothes, and, God and the Devil willing, some sleep.
     

 
     
     
     
     
    The Dean Curse
     
     
     
     
     
    The locals in Barnton knew him either as ‘the Brigadier’ or as ‘that Army type who bought the West Lodge’. West Lodge was a huge but until recently neglected detached house set in a walled acre and a half of grounds and copses. Most locals were relieved that its high walls hid it from general view, the house itself being too angular, too gothic for modern tastes. Certainly, it was very large for the needs of a widower and his unsmiling daughter. Mrs MacLennan, who cleaned for the Brigadier, was pumped for information by curious neighbours, but could say only that Brigadier-General Dean had had some renovations done, that most of the house was habitable, that one room had become a library, another a billiard-room, another a study, another a makeshift gymnasium and so on. The listeners would drink this in deeply, yet it was never enough. What about the daughter? What about the Brigadier’s background? What happened to his wife?
    Shopkeepers too were asked for their thoughts. The Brigadier drove a sporty open-topped car which would pull in noisily to the side of the road to allow him to pop into this or that shop for a few things, including, each day at the same time, a bottle of something or other from the smarter of the two off-licences.
    The grocer, Bob Sladden, reckoned that Brigadier-General Dean had been born nearby, even that he had lived for a few childhood years in West Lodge and so had retired there because of its carefree connections. But Miss Dalrymple, who at ninety-three was as old as anyone in that part of Barnton, could not recall any family named Dean living at West Lodge. Could not, indeed, recall any Deans ever living in this ‘neck’ of Barnton, with the exception of Sam Dean. But when pressed about Sam Dean, she merely shook her head and said, ‘He was no good, that one, and got what he deserved. The Great War saw to him.’ Then she would nod slowly, thoughtfully, and nobody would be any further forward.
    Speculation grew wilder as no new facts came to light, and in The Claymore public bar one afternoon, a bar never patronised by the Brigadier (and who’d ever heard of an Army man not liking his drink?), a young out-of-work plasterer named Willie Barr came up with a fresh proposition.
    ‘Maybe Dean isn’t his real name.’
    But everyone around the pool table laughed at that and Willie just shrugged, readying to play his next shot. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘real name or not, I wouldn’t climb over that daughter of his to get to any of you lot.’
    Then he played a double off the cushion, but missed. Missed not because the shot was difficult or he’d had too many pints of Snakebite, but because his cue arm jerked at the noise of the explosion.
     
     
    It was a fancy car all right, a Jaguar XJS convertible, its bodywork a startling red. Nobody in Barnton could mistake it for anyone else’s car. Besides, everyone was used to it revving to its loud roadside halt, was