Hide & Seek

Rebus was thinking of Charlie as he stopped his car in front of the tiny old-fashioned men’s-wear shop off George Street. He was thinking of Charlie as he grabbed the tie and paid for it. Back in the car, he thought of Charlie as he knotted the tie, started the ignition, and drove off. Heading towards lunch with some of the wealthiest businessmen in the city, all he could think of was Charlie, and how Charlie could probably still choose to be like those businessmen one day. He’d leave university, use his family connections to land a good job, and progress smoothly through to upper management in the space of a year or two. He would forget all about his infatuation with decadence, and would become decadent himself, the way only the rich and successful ever can. .. . True decadence, not the second-hand stuff of witchcraft and demonism, drugs and violence. That bruising on Ronnie’s body: could

it really have been rough trade? A sadomasochistic game gone wrong? A game played, perhaps, with the mysterious Edward, whose name Ronnie had screamed?

Or a ritual carried too far?

Had he dismissed the Satanism angle too readily? Wasn’t a policeman supposed to keep an open mind? Perhaps, but Satanism found him with his mind well and truly closed. He was a Christian, after all. He might not attend church often, detesting all the hymn-singing and the bald sermonising, but that didn’t mean he didn’t believe in that small, dark personal God of his. Everyone had a God tagging along with them. And the God of the Scots was as ominous as He came.

Midday Edinburgh seemed darker than ever, reflecting his mood perhaps. The Castle appeared to be casting a shadow across the expanse of the New Town, but that shadow did not, could not reach as high as The Eyrie. The Eyrie was the city’s most expensive restaurant, and also the most exclusive. Rumour had it that lunchtime was solidly booked twelve months in advance, while dinner entailed the small wait of eight to ten weeks. The restaurant itself was situated on the entire top floor of a Georgian hotel in the heart of the New Town, away from the city centre’s human bustle.

Not that the streets here were exactly quiet, a steady amount of through traffic pausing long enough to make parking a problem. But not to a detective. Rebus stopped his car on a double yellow line directly outside the hotel’s main door, and, despite the doorman’s warnings about wardens and fines, left it there and entered the hotel. He squeezed his stomach as the lift carried him four floors high, and was satisfied that he felt hungry. These businessmen might well bore the pants off him, and the thought of spending two hours with Farmer Watson was almost too much to bear, but he would eat well. Yes, he would eat exceedingly well.

And, given his way with the wine list, he’d bankrupt the buggers to boot.

Brian Holmes left the snack bar carrying a polystyrene cup of grey tea, and studied it, trying to remember when he had last had a cup of good tea, of real tea, of tea he had brewed himself. His life seemed to revolve around polystyrene cups and thermos flasks, unexciting sandwiches and chocolate biscuits. Blow, sip. Blow, sip. Swallow.

For this he had given up an academic career.

Which was to say that he had careered around academia for some eight months, studying History at the University of London. The first month he had spent in awe of the city itself, trying to come to terms with its size, the complexities of actually trying to live and travel and survive with dignity. The second and third months he had spent trying to come to terms with university life, with new friends, the persistent openings for discussion, argument, for inclusion in this or that group. He tested the water each time before joining in, all of them nervous as children learning to swim. By months four and five, he had become a Londoner, commuting to the University every day from his digs in Battersea. Suddenly his life had come to be ruled by numbers, by the times of trains and buses and tube connections, the times, too, of late buses and tubes which would whisk him away from coffee-bar politics towards his noisy single room again. Missing a train connection began to be agony, suffering the rush-hour tube, a season spent in hell. Months six and seven he spent isolated in Battersea, studying from his room, hardly attending lectures at all. And in month eight, May, with the sun warming his back, he left London and returned north, back to old friends and a sudden emptiness in his life that had to be filled by work.

But why in the name of God had he chosen the police?

He screwed up the now empty polystyrene cup and

threw it towards a nearby bin. It missed. So what, he thought. Then caught himself, went to the cup, stooped, picked it up, and deposited it in the bin. You’re not in London now, Brian, he told himself. An elderly woman smiled at him.

So shines a good deed in a naughty world.