Free The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories (Rebus Collection) by Ian Rankin Page A

did you make safe a man like that? The Army had designed a weapon and that weapon had become misadjusted, its sights all wrong. You could dismantle a weapon. You could dismantle a man, too, come to that. But each and every piece was still as lethal as the whole. Rebus put aside fiction, put aside Hammett and the rest and of an evening read psychology books instead. But then they too, in their way, were fiction, weren’t they? And so, too, in time became the case that was not a case of the man who had never been.
     

 
     
     
     
     
    Being Frank
     
     
     
     
     
    It wasn’t easy, being Frank.
    That’s what everybody called him, when they weren’t calling him a dirty old tramp or a scrounger or a layabout. Frank, they called him. Only the people at the hostel and at the Social Security bothered with his full name: Francis Rossetti Hyslop. Rossetti, he seemed to remember, not after the painter but after his sister the poet, Christina. Most often, a person – a person in authority – would read that name from the piece of paper they were holding and then look up at Frank, not quite in disbelief, but certainly wondering how he’d come so low.
    He couldn’t tell them that he was climbing higher all the time. That he preferred to live out of doors. That his face was weatherbeaten, not dirty. That a plastic bag was a convenient place to keep his possessions. He just nodded and shuffled his feet instead, the shuffle which had become his trademark.
    ‘Here he comes,’ his companions would cry. ‘Here comes The Shuffler!’ Alias Frank, alias Francis Rossetti Hyslop.
    He spent much of the spring and autumn in Edinburgh. Some said he was mad, leaving in the summer months. That, after all, was when the pickings were richest. But he didn’t like to bother the tourists, and besides, summer was for travelling. He usually walked north, through Fife and into Kinross or Perthshire, setting up camp by the side of a loch or up in the hills. And when he got bored, he’d move on. He was seldom moved on by gamekeepers or the police. Some of them he knew of old, of course. But others he encountered seemed to regard him more and more as some rare species, or, as one had actually said, a ‘national monument’.
    It was true, of course. Tramp meant to walk and that’s what tramps used to do. The term ‘gentleman of the road’ used to be accurate. But the tramp was being replaced by the beggar: young, fit men who didn’t move from the city and who were unrelenting in their search for spare change. That had never been Frank’s way. He had his regulars of course, and often he only had to sit on a bench in The Meadows, a huge grassy plain bordered by tree-lined paths, and wait for the money to appear in his lap.
    That’s where he was when he heard the two men talking. It was a bright day, a lunchtime and there were few spaces to be had on the meagre supply of Meadows’ benches. Frank was sitting on one, arms folded, eyes closed, his legs stretched out in front of him with one foot crossed over the other. His three carrier bags were on the ground beside him, and his hat lay across his legs – not because he was hot especially, but because you never knew who might drop a coin in while you were dozing, or pretending to doze.
    Maybe his was the only bench free. Maybe that’s why the men sat down beside him. Well, ‘beside him’ was an exaggeration. They squeezed themselves onto the furthest edge of the bench, as far from him as possible. They couldn’t be comfortable, squashed up like that and the thought brought a moment’s smile to Frank’s face.
    But then they started to talk, not in a whisper but with voices lowered. The wind, though, swept every word into Frank’s right ear. He tried not to tense as he listened, but it was difficult. Tried not to move, but his nerves were jangling.
    ‘It’s war,’ one said. ‘A council of war.’
    War? He remembered reading in a newspaper recently about terrorists. Threats. A