My favourite fictional detective, Inspector John Rebus, is the policeman many Scots would have liked to have been. Rebus is the glorious creation of Ian Rankin brought memorably to life by Ken Stott in a series of television adaptations. As I slowly got to know this irascible Edinburgh copper with the big heart I, like many other Rebus aficionados, began to imagine what he might look like.
Most of us who love these books fancy we knew the character of Rebus. In the course of several adventures, Rankin gently pencilled in some fleeting details of Rebus’s life prior to his immortalisation in print. This was a sharp and clever man who yet seemed to be permanently two goals down at half-time. He carried with him a degree of emotional scar tissue, the source of which might only be guessed at. Because of this, perhaps, Rebus developed a lifelong aversion to sharing his feelings or displaying his emotions.
How many times over the course of his career at Lothian and Borders Police did we despair when Rebus seemed about to be on the verge of some long overdue concupiscence only to blow it with an ill-chosen aside or by turning up pished at the lady’s apartment? We all knew he ought to have been running the station and yet we were glad that his rebellious spirit and refusal to compromise had seen him passed over in favour of supercilious lickspittles. If he had been a woman he might have resembled Jamie Lee Curtis’s Ophelia in Trading Places.
We imagined he might be tall, or at least not small, and that, though physically robust, he might have looked crumpled owing to decades of ordering whiskies and half pints at the Oxford and a persistent nicotine habit. But when Ken Stott shuffled into his on-screen shoes we knew what he looked like: he looked like Ken Stott and that was an end to the matter.
Some of us from the west coast also hoped that, in one of his adventures, his real birthplace would be revealed as Glasgow because, well… he just seemed to be one of us. But when we heard Stott deploying that peculiar east coast accent in which some sentences pitch and fade in unexpected places we knew he could only have been a Fifer living in the Shortbread City.
During an appearance at the Edinburgh Book festival last week, Rankin revealed that he and several of his fellow Scottish crime writers had been invited to have lunch with Chief Constable Phil Gormley, the head of Police Scotland. It seems that Rankin and his confreres in crime were aghast at having to redraw parts of their protagonists’ characters owing to the massive structural changes implicit in the creation of a single police force from eight regional police authorities.
According to Rankin, Gormley told the gathering of authors: “Well, look, this has been done for the right reasons and I’m sure you can find a way round it.” And so, in an Edinburgh festival spirit of conviviality, I offer this to Ian Rankin, lest he be grappling with how to make Rebus more relevant in the bright new dawn of Police Scotland...
Detective Chief Superintendent Gill Templer was in a foul mood and no wonder. She had just left a depressing meeting with Gormley during which the chief had expressed dissatisfaction with what he perceived was a dilatory attitude to stop and searches.
She beckoned in Rebus for what she knew would be an unsatisfactory conversation. “Look John, I hate this stop-and-search malarkey too, but can you not just play the game?”
“Play the game,” spat Rebus. “People are being raped, murdered and assaulted every day and meanwhile every gangster in Edinburgh is filling his boots with tram kickbacks and dodgy contracts for those five-storey public toilets the council is putting up at the end of Princes Street.”
DCS Templer was not impressed. “I just wish you would keep your thoughts to yourself, John. Was it really such a good idea to tell Stephen House at his leaving-do that if you’d known he was so keen on searching people you’d have bought him a torch as a parting gift… for the purposes of sticking it up his jacksey sideways?”
“It was only meant as a joke,” said Rebus sheepishly.
“Well, it reflected badly on the rest of us and didn’t go down very well.”
“It didn’t go up very well either, ma’am.”
DSC Templer’s reserves of benevolence towards Rebus were usually bountiful. They both knew that, in a fairer world, he would be running the show. And there was always that crazy, crazy night at Fingers Piano Bar that had ended with a fully-clothed encounter in the jacksey ladies convenience as an Elvis impersonator sang It’s Now or Never.
“I’ve had enough of this, John,” she said. “I want you to spend the rest of the day at your computer inputting the details of every teenage boy in Pilton you’ve searched in the last week.”
“With all due respect, ma’am, that new computer system has just revealed the identities of all our undercover detectives and blown their cover. We’re trying to reach them before…”
His look said it all. Donaldson, a young father of three, had turned up behind the Banana Flats minus his head and two hands. Years of painstaking work investigating abuses of MSPs’ second-homes’ allowances down the drain. Fraser, who had been investigating links between the Chinese mafia and Edinburgh Zoo was found – what remained of him anyway – in the giant panda enclosure.
DCS Templer knew fine well that the new £60m computer system, part of a deal that was concluded in the locker-room of Muirfield golf club, was a disaster waiting to happen. But she knew never to ask about those monthly Muirfield get-togethers of the Magic Circle.
Rebus was desperate to phone his good pal, Ronald McKay of the Scotsman, but after that clumsy phone-bugging operation, another plot hatched drunkenly at Muirfield, he just couldn’t face his old friend. Next week he would be getting his Taser and small-arms training and he never felt so close to jacking it all in.
He cut a forlorn figure as he trudged down Leith Walk, cursing the government for turning his beloved force into someone’s secret police.
