Free In the Nick of Time by Ian Rankin Page A

wheezing from somewhere beyond the curtain—another patient jolted into life by a coughing fit. King blinked away whatever memories he’d been replaying.
    â€œYour wife,” Rebus said. “When she called us she said there was something you wanted to say.”
    â€œThat’s what I’m doing,” King retorted, sounding irritated. “I’m telling you the story.”
    â€œAbout your days as a Mod?”
    â€œMy last time in Brighton.”
    â€œYou and your scooter?”
    â€œAnd a hundred others like me. It was a religion to us, something we were going to take to the grave.” He paused. “And we hated those Rockers almost as much as they hated us.”
    â€œRockers were bikers?” Rebus checked, receiving a slow nod of agreement from King. “Pitched battles on the seafront,” he went on. “I remember it from Quadrophenia .”
    â€œAnything and everything became your weapon. I always hada blade with me, taken from my mum’s cutlery drawer. But there were bottles, planks of wood, bricks . . .”
    Rebus knew now what was coming, and leaned in a little closer toward the bed.
    â€œSo what happened?” he prompted.
    King was thoughtful for a moment, then took a hit of oxygen before saying what needed to be said. “One of them—jeans stained with oil, three-inch turn-ups, leather jacket, and T-shirt—he starts running the wrong way, gets separated from the pack. A few of us peel off and go after him. He knows he’s not going to outrun us, so dives into a hotel just off the esplanade. Far as I remember we were laughing, like it was a game. But it wasn’t, not once we’d cornered him in one of the storerooms off the kitchen. Fists and feet to start with, but then he’s got a blade out and so have I, and I’m faster than him. The knife—my mum’s knife—was still sticking out of his chest when we ran.” King looked up at Rebus, eyes widening a little. “I left him there to die. That’s why I need you to arrest me.” His eyes were filling with liquid. “Because all the years since, I’ve never gone a day without remembering, waiting for your lot’s knock at the door. And you never came, did you? You never came . . .”
    Â·Â Â Â·Â Â Â·
    Back in his second-floor tenement flat, Rebus smoked a couple of cigarettes and dug out his vinyl copy of The Who’s Quadrophenia . He flicked through the booklet of photos and the little short story that accompanied them. Then he lifted his phone and called DI Siobhan Clarke.
    â€œWell?” she asked.
    â€œIt’s archaeology,” he told her. “Summer of sixty-four. I’m assuming it landed on my lap because someone mistook me for Old Father Time. Didn’t even happen in Edinburgh.”
    â€œWhere, then?”
    â€œBrighton. Mods and Rockers. Blood in the nostrils and amphetamines in the blood.” He exhaled cigarette smoke. “Nearly fifty years ago and a confession from a man with days left to live—always supposing he did it. Stuff the hospital is giving him, he could be telling us next he’s Keith Moon’s long-lost brother.”
    â€œSo what do you think?”
    â€œI just wish he’d asked for a priest instead.”
    â€œWorth bouncing it south?”
    â€œYou mean to Brighton?”
    â€œWant me to see if I can find a CID contact for you?”
    Rebus stubbed out the cigarette. “King did give me a couple of names, guys who were there when he stabbed the victim.”
    â€œThe victim being?”
    â€œJohnny Greene. The murder was in the papers. Frightened the life out of King and that was the end of his Mod days.”
    â€œAnd the others who were with him?”
    â€œHe never saw them again. Part of the deal he seems to have made with himself.”
    â€œFifty years he’s been living with this . . .”
    â€œLiving