Hide And Seek (8 page)

‘Mrs Cochrane,’ he said after the initial shock had passed.

‘Here.’ She shoved something towards him, and he could do nothing but take it from her. It was a piece of card, about ten inches by six. Rebus read it: IT IS YOUR TURN TO WASH THE STAIRS. By the time he looked up again, Mrs Cochrane’s door was already closing. He could hear her carpet slippers shuffling back towards her TV and her cat. Smelly old thing.

Rebus carried the card downstairs with him, the cold steps penetrating his stockinged soles. The cat didn’t smell too good either, he thought maliciously.

The front door was on the latch. He eased it open, trying to keep the aged mechanism as silent as possible. The car was still there. Directly opposite him as he stepped outside. But the driver had already seen him. The cigarette stub was flicked onto the road, and the engine started. Rebus moved forward on his toes. The car’s headlamps came on suddenly, their beam as full as a Stalag searchlight. Rebus paused, screwing his eyes, and the car started forward, then swerved to the left, racing downhill to the end of the street. Rebus stared after it, trying to make out the number plate, but his eyes were full of white fuzziness. It had been a Ford Escort. Of that much he was sure.

Looking down the road, he realised that the car had stopped at the junction with the main road, waiting for a space in the traffic. It was less than a hundred yards away. Rebus made up his mind. He had been a handy sprinter in his youth, good enough for the school team when they had been a man short. He ran now with a kind of drunken euphoria, and remembered the wine he had opened. His stomach turned sour at the mere thought, and he slowed. Just then he slipped, skidding on something on the pavement, and, brought up short, he saw the car slip across the junction and roar away.

Never mind. That first glimpse as he’d opened the door had been enough. He’d seen the constabulary uniform. Not the driver’s face, but the uniform for sure. A policeman, a constable, driving an Escort. Two young girls were approaching along the pavement. They giggled as they passed Rebus, and he realised that he was standing panting on the pavement, without any shoes but holding a sign telling him it was his turn to WASH THE STAIRS. When he looked down, he saw what it was he had skidded on.

‘Nothing,’ the officer whispered. It had been an anonymous tip-off. The third this month and, to be fair, the first non-starter. Dog fighting was back in vogue. Several ‘arenas’ had been found in the past three months, small dirt pits enclosed by lengths of sheet tin. Scrap yards seemed the main source of these arenas, which gave an added meaning to the term ‘scrap yard’. But tonight they were watching a piece of waste ground. Goods trains clattered past nearby, heading towards the centre of the city, but apart from that and the low hum of distant traffic, the place was dead. Yes, there was a makeshift pit all right. They’d taken a look at it in daylight, pretending to walk their own alsatian dogs, which were in fact police dogs. Pit bull terriers: that was what they used in the arenas. Brian Holmes had seen a couple of ex-combatants, their eyes maddened with pain and fear. He hadn’t stuck around for the vet with his lethal injection.

‘Hold on.’

Two men were walking, hands in pockets, across the wilderness, picking their way carefully over the uneven surface, wary of sudden craters. They seemed to know where they were headed: straight towards the shallow pit. Once there, they took a final look around. Brian Holmes stared directly back at them, knowing he could not be seen. Like the SSPCA officer, he was crouching behind thick bracken, behind him one remaining wall of what had been a building of sorts. Though there was some light over towards the pit itself, there was precious little here, and so, as with a two-way mirror, he could see without being seen.

‘Got you,’ said the SSPCA man as the two men jumped down into the pit.

‘Wait ...’ said Holmes, suddenly getting a funny feeling about all of this. The two men had begun to embrace, and their faces merged in a slow, lingering kiss as they sank down towards the ground.

‘Christ!’ exclaimed the SSPCA man.

Holmes sighed, staring down at the damp, rock-hard earth beneath his knees.

‘I don’t think pit bulls enter the equation,’ he said. ‘Or if they do, bestiality rather than brutality might be the charge.’

The SSPCA officer still held his binoculars to his eyes, horror-struck and riveted.

‘You hear stories,’ he said, ‘but you never ... well ... you know.’

‘Get to watch?’ Holmes suggested, getting slowly, painfully to his feet.

‘Hello?’ He knew John Rebus of course, had worked with him on several cases. Still, middle-of-the-night calls were something else entirely.

‘Is that you, Brian?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Have you a sheet of paper? Write this down.’ Fumbling with pad and biro, Holmes thought he could hear music playing on the line. Something he recognised. The Beatles’
White Album.
‘Ready?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Right. There was a junkie found dead in Pilmuir yesterday, or a couple of days ago now, strictly speaking. Overdose. Find out who the constables who found him were. Get them to come into my office at ten o’clock. Got that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. Now, when you’ve got the address where the body was found, I want you to pick up the keys from whoever’s got them and go to the house. Upstairs in one of the bedrooms there’s a wall covered in photographs. Some are of Edinburgh Castle. Take them with you and go to the local newspaper’s office. They’ll have files full of photographs. If you’re lucky they might even have a little old man on duty with a memory like an elephant. I want you to look for any photographs that have been published in the newspaper recently and look to have been taken from the same angle as the ones on the bedroom wall. Got that?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Holmes, scribbling furiously.

‘Good. I want to know who took the newspaper photographs. There’ll be a sticker or something on the back of each print giving a name and address.’

‘Anything else, sir?’ It came out as sarcasm, meant or not.

‘Right, sir. One question.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Why me? Why now? What’s all this in aid of?’

‘That’s three questions. I’ll answer as many of them as I can when I see you tomorrow afternoon. Be in my office at three.’

And with that, the line went dead on Brian Holmes. He stared at the drunken rows of writing on his pad, his own shorthand of a week’s worth of work, delivered to him in a matter of minutes. The duty officer was reading it over his shoulder.

‘Rather you than me,’ he said with sincerity.

Police Constables Harry Todd and Francis O’Rourke were standing outside Rebus’s office when he arrived next morning. They had been leaning against the wall, enjoying a lazy conversation, seemingly unconcerned that Rebus was twenty minutes late. He was damned if he was going to apologise. He noted with satisfaction that as he reached the top of the stairs they pulled themselves up straight and shut their mouths.

He opened the door, walked into the room, and closed the door again. Let them stew for another minute. Now they’d have something really to talk about. He had checked with the desk sergeant, and Brian Holmes wasn’t in the station. He took a slip of paper from his pocket and rang Holmes’s house. The telephone rang and rang. Holmes must be out working.

The good run was continuing.

There was mail on his desk. He flipped through it, stopping only to extract a note from Superintendent Watson. It was an invitation to lunch. Today. At twelve thirty. Hell. He was meeting Holmes at three. The lunch was with some of the businessmen who were putting up the hard cash for the drugs campaign. Hell. And it was in The Eyrie, which meant wearing a tie and a clean shirt. Rebus looked down at his shirt. It would do. But the tie would not. Hell.

The smile left his soul.

It had been too good to last. Tracy had woken him with breakfast on a tray. Orange juice, toast and honey, strong coffee. She’d gone out early, she explained, taking with her a little money she found on the shelves in the living room. She hoped he didn’t mind. She had found a comer shop open, made the purchases, come back to the flat, and made him breakfast.

‘I’m surprised the smell of burning toast didn’t wake you,’ she had said.

‘You’re looking at the man who slept through
Towering Inferno,’
he had replied. And she had laughed, sitting on the bed taking dainty bites of toast with her exposed teeth, while Rebus chewed his slices slowly, thoughtfully. Luxuriously. How long had it been since he’d been brought breakfast in bed? It frightened him to think....

‘Come in!’ he roared now, though no one had knocked.

Tracy had left without complaint, too. She felt all right, she said. She couldn’t stay cooped up forever, could she? He had driven her back towards Pilmuir, then had done something stupid. Given her ten pounds. It wasn’t just money, as he realised a second after handing it over. It was a bond between them, a bond he shouldn’t be making. It lay there in her hand, and he felt the temptation to snatch it back. But then she was out of the car and walking away, her body fragile as bone china, her gait determined, full of strength. Sometimes she reminded him of his daughter Sammy, other times....

Other times of Gill Templer, his ex-lover.

‘Come in!’ he roared again. This time the door opened an inch, then another ten or eleven. A head looked into the room.

‘Is that so?’ said Rebus in his best stage voice. ‘Well, in that case I’d better just speak to you two instead. So why don’t you
come in!’

A moment later, they shuffled through the doorway, a bit less cocky now. Rebus pointed to the two chairs on the other side of his desk. One of them sat immediately, the other stood to attention.

‘I’d rather stand, sir,’ he said. The other one looked suddenly fearful, terrified that he had broken some rule of protocol.

‘This isn’t the bloody army,’ Rebus said to the standing one, just as the sitting one was rising. ‘So sit down!’

They both sat. Rebus rubbed his forehead, pretending a headache. Truth be told, he had almost forgotten who these constables were and why they were here.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Why do you think I’ve called you here this morning?’ Corny but effective.

‘Is it to do with the witches, sir?’

‘Witches?’ Rebus looked at the constable who had said this, and remembered the keen young man who had shown him the original pentagram. ‘That’s right, witches. And overdoses.’

They blinked at him. He sought frantically for a route into the interrogation, if interrogation this was to be. He should have thought more about it before coming in.

He should have at least remembered that it had been arranged. He saw a ten-pound note, a smile, could smell burning toast.... He looked at the pentagram constable’s tie.

‘What’s your name, son?’

‘Todd, sir.’

‘Todd? That’s German for dead, did you know that, Todd?’

‘Yes, sir. I did German at school up to Highers.’

Rebus nodded, pretending to be impressed. Damn, he
was
impressed. They all had Highers these days, it seemed, all these extraordinarily young-looking constables. Some had gone further: college, university. He had the feeling Holmes had been to university. He hoped he hadn’t enlisted the aid of a smart arse....

Rebus pointed to the tie.

‘That looks a bit squint, Todd.’

Todd immediately looked down towards his tie, his head angled so sharply Rebus feared the neck would snap.

‘Sir?’

‘That tie. Is it your usual one?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So you haven’t broken a tie recently?’

‘Broken a tie, sir?’

‘Broken the clip,’ explained Rebus.

‘No, sir.’

‘And what’s your name, son?’ Rebus said quickly, turning to the other constable, who looked completely stunned by proceedings so far.

‘O’Rourke, sir.’

‘Irish name,’ Rebus commented.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What about your tie, O’Rourke? Is that a new tie?’

‘Not really, sir. I mean, I’ve got about half a dozen of these things kicking around.’

Rebus nodded. He picked up a pencil, examined it, set it down again. He was wasting his time.

‘I’d like to see the reports you made of finding the deceased.’

‘Yes, sir,’ they said.

‘Nothing unusual in the house, was there? I mean, when you first arrived? Nothing out of the ordinary?’

‘Only the dead man, sir,’ said O’Rourke.

‘And the painting on the wall,’ said Todd.

‘Did either of you bother to check upstairs?’

‘No, sir.’

‘The body was where, when you arrived?’

‘In the downstairs room, sir.’

‘And you didn’t go upstairs?’

Todd looked towards O’Rourke. ’I think we shouted to see if anyone was up there. But no, we didn’t go up.’

So how could the tie clip have got upstairs?
Rebus exhaled, then cleared his throat. ‘What kind of car do you drive, Todd?’

‘Do you mean police car, sir?’

‘No I bloody well don’t!’ Rebus slapped the pencil down against the desk. ’I mean for private use.’

Todd seemed more confused now than ever. ‘A Metro, sir.’

‘Colour?’

‘White.’

Rebus turned his gaze to O’Rourke.

‘I don’t have a car,’ O’Rourke admitted. ‘I like motorbikes. Just now I’ve got a Honda seven-fifty.’

Rebus nodded. No Ford Escorts then. Nobody hurtling away from his road at midnight.

‘Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?’ And with a smile he dismissed them, picked up the pencil again, examined its point, and very deliberately broke it against the edge of his desk.