Hide And Seek (3 page)

‘A pie then,’ begged Rebus,
‘any
thing
.
Just to wash down the beer.’

‘If it’s food you want, there’s plenty of cafes around here. This particular pub happens to sell beers, lagers and spirits. We’re not a chippie.’

‘What about crisps?’

The barman eyed him for a moment. ‘What flavour?’

‘Cheese and onion.’

‘We’ve run out.’

‘Well, ready salted then.’

‘No, they’re out too.’ The barman had cheered up again.

‘Well,’ said Rebus in growing frustration, ‘what in the name of God
have
you got?’

‘Two flavours. Curry, or egg, bacon and tomato.’

‘Egg?’
Rebus sighed. ‘All right, give me a packet of each.’

The barman stooped beneath the counter to find the smallest possible bags, past their sell-by dates if possible.

‘Any nuts?’ It was a last desperate hope. The barman looked up.

‘Dry roasted, salt and vinegar, chilli flavour,’ he said.

‘One of each then,’ said Rebus, resigned to an early death. ‘And another half of eighty-shillings.’

He was finishing this second drink when the bar door shuddered open and an instantly recognisable figure entered, his hand signalling for refreshment before he was even halfway through the door. He saw Rebus, smiled, and came to join him on one of the high stools.

‘Hello, John.’

‘Afternoon, Tony.’

Inspector Anthony McCall tried to balance his prodigious bulk on the tiny circumference of the bar stool, thought better of it, and stood instead, one shoe on the foot-rail, and both elbows on the freshly wiped surface of the bar. He stared hungrily at Rebus.

‘Give us one of your crisps.’

When the packet was offered, he pulled out a handful and stuffed them into his mouth.

‘Where were you this morning then?’ said Rebus. ‘I’d to take one of your calls.’

‘The one at Pilmuir? Ach, sorry about that, John. Heavy night last night. I had a bit of a hangover this morning.’ A pint of murky beer was placed in front of him. ‘Hair of the dog,’ he said, and took four slow gulps, reducing it to a quarter of its former size.

‘Well, I’d nothing better to do anyway,’ said Rebus, sipping at his own beer. ‘Christ, those houses down there are a mess though.’

McCall nodded thoughtfully. ‘It wasn’t always like that, John. I was born there.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, to be exact, I was born on the estate that was there before this one. It was so bad, so they said, that they levelled it and built Pilmuir instead. Bloody hell on earth it is now.’

‘Funny you should say that,’ said Rebus. ‘One of the young uniformed kids thought there might be some kind of occult tie-in.’ McCall looked up from his drink. ‘There was a black-magic painting on the wall,’ Rebus explained. ‘And candles on the floor.’

‘Like a sacrifice?’ McCall offered, chuckling. ‘My wife’s dead keen on all those horror films. Gets them out of the video library. I think she sits watching them all day when I’m out.’

‘I suppose it must go on, devil worship, witchcraft. It can’t
all
be in the imagination of the Sunday newspaper editors.’

‘I know how you might find out.’

‘How?’

‘The university,’ said McCall. Rebus frowned, disbelieving. ‘I’m serious. They’ve got some kind of department that studies ghosts and all that sort of thing. Set up with money from some dead writer.’ McCall shook his head. ‘Incredible what people will do.’

Rebus was nodding. ‘I
did
read about that, now you mention it. Arthur Koestler’s money, wasn’t it?’

McCall shrugged.

‘Arthur Daley’s more my style,’ he said, emptying his glass.

‘They said you were the man to talk to.’ The voice was young, female, full of unfocussed suspicion.

‘They were probably right. What can I do for you, miss ...?’

‘Tracy....’ The voice fell to a whisper on the last syllable of the name. She had already been tricked into revealing herself. ‘Never mind who I am!’ She had become immediately hysterical, but calmed just as quickly. ‘I’m phoning about that squat in Pilmuir, the one where they found....’ The voice trailed off again.

‘Oh yes.’ Rebus sat up and began to take notice. ‘Was it you who phoned the first time?’

‘What?’

‘To tell us that someone had died there.’

‘Yes, it was me. Poor Ronnie....’

‘Ronnie being the deceased?’ Rebus scribbled the name onto the back of one of the files from his in-tray. Beside it he wrote ‘Tracy - caller’.

‘Yes.’ Her voice had broken again, near to tears this time.

‘No.’ She paused. ‘I never knew it. I’m not sure Ronnie was even his real name. Hardly anyone uses their real name.’

‘Tracy, I’d like to talk to you about Ronnie. We can do it over the telephone, but I’d rather it was face to face. Don’t worry, you’re not in any trouble -’

‘But I
am.
That’s why I called. Ronnie told me, you see.’

‘Told you what, Tracy?’

‘Told me he’d been murdered.’

The room around Rebus seemed suddenly to vanish. There was only this disconnected voice, the telephone, and him.

‘He said that to you, Tracy?’

‘Yes.’ She was crying now, sniffing back the unseen tears. Rebus visualised a frightened little girl, just out of school, standing in a distant callbox. ‘I’ve got to hide,’ she said at last. ‘Ronnie said over and over that I should hide.’

‘Shall I bring my car and fetch you? Just tell me where you are.’

‘No!’

‘Then tell me how Ronnie was killed. You know how we found him?’

‘Lying on the floor by the window. That’s where he was.’

‘Not quite.’

‘Oh yes, that’s where he was. By the window. Lying wrapped up into a little ball. I thought he was just sleeping. But when I touched his arm he was cold.... I went to find Charlie, but he’d gone. So I just panicked.’

‘You say Ronnie was lying in a ball?’ Rebus had begun to draw pencilled circles on the back of the file.

‘Yes.’

‘And this was in the living room?’

She seemed confused. ‘What? No, not in the living room. He was upstairs, in his bedroom.’

‘I see.’ Rebus kept on drawing effortless circles. He was trying to imagine Ronnie dying, but not really dead, crawling downstairs after Tracy had fled, ending up in the living room. That might explain those bruises. But the candles.... He had been so perfectly positioned between them.... ‘And when was this?’

‘Late last night, I don’t know exactly when. I panicked. When I calmed down, I phoned for the police.’

‘What time was it when you phoned?’

She paused, thinking. ‘About seven this morning.’

‘Tracy, would you mind telling this to some other people?’

‘Why?’

‘I’ll tell you when I pick you up. Just tell me where you are.’

There was another pause while she considered this. ‘I’m back in Pilmuir,’ she said finally. ‘I’ve moved into another squat.’

‘Well,’ said Rebus, ‘you don’t want me to come down there, do you? But you must be quite close to Shore Road. What about us meeting there?’

‘Well....’

‘There’s a pub called the Dock Leaf,’ continued Rebus, giving her no time to debate. ‘Do you know it?’

‘I’ve been kicked out of it a few times.’

‘Me too. Okay, I’ll meet you outside it in an hour. All right?’

‘All right.’ She didn’t sound over-enthusiastic, and Rebus wondered if she would keep the appointment. Well, what of it? She sounded straight enough, but she might just be another casualty, making it up to draw attention to herself, to make her life seem more interesting than it was.

‘All right,’ she said, and the connection was severed.

Rebus, early for the meeting, just had time for a half in the saloon bar. The beer was cheap but bland, and everyone seemed to know if not who he was then certainly
what
he was, their voices turned down to murmurs, their eyes averted. When, at three thirty, he stepped outside, the sudden daylight made him squint.

‘Are you the policeman?’

‘That’s right, Tracy.’

She had been standing against the pub’s exterior wall. He shaded his eyes, trying to make out her face, and was surprised to find himself looking at a woman of between twenty and twenty-five. Her age was transparent in her face, though her style marked her out as the perennial rebel: cropped peroxide hair, two stud earrings in her left ear (but none in the right), tie-dye T-shirt, tight, faded denims, and red basketball boots. She was tall, as tall as Rebus. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw the tear-tracks on either cheek, the old acne scars. But there were also crow‘s-feet around her eyes, evidence of a life used to laughter. There was no laughter in those olive-green eyes though. Somewhere in Tracy’s life a wrong turning had been made, and Rebus had the idea that she was still trying to reverse back to that fork in the road.

The last time he had seen her she had been laughing. Laughing as her semblance curled from the wall of Ronnie’s bedroom. She was the girl in the photographs.

‘Is Tracy your real name?’

‘Sort of.’ They had begun to walk. She crossed the road at a zebra crossing, not bothering to check whether any cars were approaching, and Rebus followed her to a wall, where she stopped, staring out across the Forth. She wrapped her arms around herself, examining the lifting mist.

‘It’s my middle name,’ she said.

Rebus leaned his forearms against the wall. ‘How long have you known Ronnie?’

‘Three months. That’s how long I’ve been in Pilmuir.’

‘Who else lived in that house?’

She shrugged. ‘They came and went. We’d only been in there a few weeks. Sometimes I’d go downstairs in the morning, and there’d be half a dozen strangers sleeping on the floor. Nobody minded. It was like a big family.’

‘What makes you think somebody killed Ronnie?’

She turned towards him angrily, but her eyes were liquid. ‘I told you on the phone! He
told
me. He’d been off somewhere and come back with some stuff. He didn’t look right though. Usually, when he’s got a little smack, he’s like a kid at Christmas. But he wasn’t. He was scared, acting like a robot or something. He kept telling me to hide, telling me they were coming for him.’

‘Who were?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was this after he’d taken the stuff?’

‘No, that’s what’s really crazy. This was
before.
He had the packet in his hand. He pushed me out of the door.’

‘You weren’t there while he was fixing?’

‘God no. I hated that.’ Her eyes drilled into his. ‘I’m not a junkie, you know. I mean, I smoke a little, but never.... You know....’

‘Was there anything else you noticed about Ronnie?’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, the state he was in.’

‘You mean the bruises?’

‘Yes.’

‘He often came back looking like that. Never talked about it.’

‘Got in a lot of fights, I suppose. Was he short-tempered?’

‘Not with me.’

Rebus sunk his hands into his pockets. A chill wind was whipping up off the water, and he wondered whether she was warm enough. He couldn’t help noticing that her nipples were very prominent through the cotton of her T-SHIRT.

‘Would you like my jacket?’ he asked.

‘Only if your wallet’s in it,’ she said with a quick smile.

He smiled back, and offered a cigarette instead, which she accepted. He didn’t take one for himself. There were only three left out of the day’s ration, and the evening stretched ahead of him.

‘Do you know who Ronnie’s dealer was?’ he asked casually, helping her to light the cigarette. With her head tucked into his open jacket, the lighter shaking in her hand, she shook her head. Eventually, the windbreak worked, and she sucked hard at the filter.

‘I was never really sure,’ she said. ‘It was something else he didn’t talk about.’

‘What did he talk about?’

She thought about this, and smiled again. ‘Not much, now you mention it. That was what I liked about him. You always felt there was more to him than he was letting on.’

‘Such as?’

She shrugged. ‘Might have been anything, might have been nothing.’

This was harder work than Rebus had anticipated, and he really was getting cold. It was time to speed things up.

‘He was in the bedroom when you found him?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the squat was empty at the time?’

‘Yes. Earlier on, there’d been a few people there, but they’d all gone. One of them was up in Ronnie’s room, but I didn’t know him. Then there was Charlie.’

‘You mentioned him on the telephone.’

‘Yes, well, when I found Ronnie, I went looking for him. He’s usually around somewhere, in one of the other squats or in town doing a bit of begging. Christ, he’s strange.’

‘In what way?’

‘Didn’t you see what was on the living-room wall?’

‘You mean the star?’

‘Yes, that was Charlie. He painted it.’

‘He’s keen on the occult then?’

‘Mad keen.’

‘What about Ronnie?’

‘Ronnie? Jesus, no. He couldn’t even stand to watch horror films. They scared him.’

‘But he had all those horror books in his bedroom.’

‘That was Charlie, trying to get Ronnie interested. All they did was give him more nightmares. And all those did was push him into taking more smack.’

‘How did he finance his habit?’ Rebus watched a small boat come gliding through the mist. Something fell from it into the water, but he couldn’t tell what.

‘I wasn’t his accountant.’

‘Who was?’ The boat was turning in an arc, slipping further west towards Queensferry.

‘Nobody wants to know where the money comes from, that’s the truth. It makes you an accessory, doesn’t it?’

‘That depends.’ Rebus shivered.

‘Well, I didn’t want to know. If he tried to tell me, I put my hands over my ears.’

‘He’s never had a job then?’

‘I don’t know. He used to talk about being a photographer. That’s what he’d set his heart on when he left school. It was the only thing he wouldn’t pawn, even to pay for his habit.’

Rebus was lost. ‘What was?’

‘His camera. It cost him a small fortune, every penny saved out of his social security.’

Social security: now there was a phrase. But Rebus was sure there had been no camera in Ronnie’s bedroom. So add robbery to the list.

‘Tracy, I’ll need a statement.’

She was immediately suspicious. ‘What for?’

‘Just so I’ve got it on record, so we can do something about Ronnie’s death. Will you help me do that?’

It was a long time before she nodded. The boat had disappeared. There was nothing floating in the water, nothing left in its wake. Rebus put a hand on Tracy’s shoulder, but gently.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘The car’s this way.’