Hide & Seek

He wasn’t worried about Tracy. Anyone with a punch like that could look after herself. There were probably kids on the street harder than half the bloody police force. Not that Tracy was a kid. He still hadn’t found out anything about her. That was supposed to be Holmes’s department, but Holmes was off on a wild dog chase in Fife. No, Tracy would be all right. Probably there had been no men chasing her. But then why come to him that night? There could be a hundred reasons. After all, she’d conned a bed, the best part of a bottle of wine, a hot bath and breakfast out of him. Not bad going that, and him supposed to be a

hardened old copper. Too old maybe. Too much the ‘copper’, not enough the police officer. Maybe.

Where to next? He already had the answer to that, legs permitting and pray God he could drive.

He parked at a distance from the house, not wanting to scare off anyone who might be there. Then he simply walked up to the door and knocked. Standing there, awaiting a response, he remembered Tracy opening that door and running into his arms, her face bruised, her eyes welling with tears. He didn’t think Charlie would be here. He didn’t think Tracy would be here. He didn’t want Tracy to be here.

The door opened. A bleary teenage boy squinted up at Rebus. His hair was lank, lifeless, falling into his eyes. ‘What is it?’

‘Is Charlie in? I’ve got a bit of business with him.’ ‘Naw. Havenae seen him the day.’ ‘All right if I wait a while?’

‘Aye.’ The boy was already closing the door on Rebus’s face. Rebus stuck a hand up against the door and peered round it.

‘I meant, wait indoors.’

The boy shrugged, and slouched back inside, leaving the door ajar. He slipped back into his sleeping bag and pulled it over his head. Just passing through, and catching up on lost sleep. Rebus supposed the boy had nothing to lose by letting a stranger into this way station. He left him to his sleep, and, after a cursory check that there was no one else in the downstairs rooms, climbed the steep staircase.

The books were still slewed like so many felled dominoes, the contents of the bag McCall had emptied still lying in a clutter on the floor. Rebus ignored these and went to the desk, where he sat, studying the pieces of paper in front of him. He had flicked on the light switch

beside the door of Charlie’s room, and now switched on the desk lamp, too. The walls were miraculously free from posters, postcards and the like. It wasn’t like a student’s room. Its identity had been left suspended, which was probably exactly the way Charlie wanted it. He didn’t want to look like a student to his drop-out friends; he didn’t want to look like a drop-out to his student friends. He wanted to be all things to all people. Chameleon, then, as well as tourist.

The essay on Magick was Rebus’s main interest, but he gave the rest of the desk a good examination while he was here. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to suggest that Charlie was pushing bad drugs around the city streets. So Rebus picked up the essay, opened it, and began to read.

Nell liked the library when it was quiet like this. During term time, a lot of the students used it as a meeting place, a sort of glorified youth club. Then, the first-floor reading room was filled with noise. Books tended to be left lying everywhere, or to go missing, to be shifted out of their proper sections. All very frustrating. But during the summer months, only the most determined of the students came in: the ones with a thesis to write, or work to catch up on, or those precious few who were passionate about their chosen fields, and who were giving up sunshine and freedom to be here, indoors, in studied silence.

She got to know their faces, and then their names. Conversations could be struck up in the deserted coffee shop, authors’ names swopped. And at lunchtime, one could sit in the gardens, or walk behind the library building onto The Meadows, where more books were being read, more faces rapt in thought.

Of course, summer was also the time for the library’s most tedious jobs. The check on stock, the rebinding of misused volumes. Reclassification, computer updating, and so on. The atmosphere more than made up for all

this. All traces of hurry and haste were gone. No more complaints about there being too few copies of this or that title, desperately needed by a class of two hundred for some overdue essay. But after the summer there would be a new intake, and with every year’s fresh intake, she felt that whole year older, and more distanced from the students. They already seemed hopelessly young to her, a glow surrounding them, reminding her of something she could never have.