Hide & Seek

Dectective Constable Brian Holmes was drinking tea. He had turned this into something of a ritual, holding the cup to his face and blowing on it, then sipping. Blowing then sipping. Swallowing. Then releasing a steamy breath of air. He was chilled tonight, as cold as any tramp on any park bench bed. He didn’t even have a newspaper, and the tea tasted revolting. It had come out of one or other of the thermos flasks, piping hot and smelling of plastic. The milk wasn’t of the freshest, but at least the brew was warming. Not warming enough to touch his toes, supposing he still had toes.

‘Anything happening?’ he hissed towards the SSPCA officer, who held binoculars to his eyes as though to hide his embarrassment.

‘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.

Ian Rankin - Rebus 02 - Hide An

‘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.

He was talking with the night duty officer when the message came through. Inspector Rebus wanted a word.

‘Rebus? What does he want?’ Brian Holmes checked his watch. It was two fifteen a.m. Rebus was at home, and he had been told to phone him there. He used the duty officer’s telephone.

‘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.