Hide And Seek (10 page)

‘May,’ the youth explained. ‘These are the May editions.’

‘Right, thanks.’

‘Finished with June?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

The youth nodded, buckled shut two leather straps on the open end of the bound file, and heaved the whole up into his arms, shuffling out of the room. Here we go again, thought Holmes, unbuckling this latest batch of old news and space fillers.

Rebus had been wrong. There had been no old retainer to act as a computer memory, and no computer either. So it was down to hard graft and page turning, looking for photographs of familiar places, made fresh through the use of odd camera angles. Why? He didn’t know even that yet, and the thought frustrated him. He’d find out later this afternoon hopefully, when he met with Rebus. There was a shuffling sound again as the youth re-entered, arms dangling now, jaw hanging.

‘So why didn’t you do the same as your friends?’ Holmes said conversationally.

‘You mean go in for banking?’ The youth wrinkled his nose. ‘Wanted something different. I’m learning journalism. Got to start somewhere, haven’t you?’

Indeed you have, thought Holmes, turning another page. Indeed you have.

Rebus couldn’t be sure whether this, or the food itself, was the spread he meant.

‘And we covered a lot of ground,’ said Watson, ‘let’s not forget that.’

‘Indeed not,’ said McCall. ‘A very useful meeting.’

Andrews had insisted on paying the bill. A good three figures’ worth by Rebus’s hasty calculation. Andrews was studying the bill now, lingering over each item as though checking it against his own mental price list. Not only a businessman, thought Rebus unkindly, but a bloody good Scot. Then Andrews called over the brisk maitre d’ and told him quietly about one item for which they had been overcharged. The maitre d’ took Andrews’ word for it, and altered the bill there and then with his own ballpoint pen, apologising unreservedly.

The restaurant was just beginning to empty. A nice lunch hour over for all the diners. Rebus felt sudden guilt overwhelm him. He had just eaten and drunk his share of about two hundred pounds. Forty quid’s worth, in other words. Some had dined better, and were noisily, laughingly making their way out of the dining room. Old stories, cigars, red faces. McCall put an unwelcome arm around Rebus’s back, nodding towards the leavetaking.

‘If there were only fifty Tory voters left in Scotland, John, they’d all be in this room.’

‘I believe it,’ said Rebus.

Andrews, turning from the maitre d‘, had heard them. ’I thought there were only fifty Tories left up here,’ he said.

There, Rebus noted, were those quiet, confident smiles again. I have eaten ashes for bread, he thought. Ashes for bread. Cigar ash burned red all around him, and for a moment he thought he might be sick. But then McCall stumbled, and Rebus had to hold him up until he found his balance.

‘Bit too much to drink, Tommy?’ said Carew.

‘Just need a breath of air,’ said McCall. ‘John’ll help me, won’t you, John?’

‘Of course,’ said Rebus, glad of this excuse for the very thing he needed.

McCall turned back towards Carew. ‘Got your new car with you?’

Carew shook his head. ‘I left it in the garage.’

McCall, nodding, turned to Rebus. ‘The flash bugger’s just bought himself a V-Twelve Jag,’ he explained. ‘Nearly forty thousand, and I’m not talking about miles on the clock.’

One of the waiters was standing by the lift.

‘Nice to have seen you gentlemen again,’ he said, his voice as automatic as the lift doors which closed when Rebus and McCall stepped inside.

‘I must have arrested him some time,’ Rebus said,

‘because I’ve never been here before, so he can’t have seen me here before.’

‘This place is nothing,’ said McCall, screwing up his face. ‘Nothing. You want some fun, you should come to the club one night. Just say you’re a friend of Finlay’s. That’ll get you in. Great place it is.’

‘I might do that,’ said Rebus as the lift doors opened. ‘Just as soon as my cummerbund comes back from the dry cleaners.’

McCall laughed all the way out of the building.

But then that was the rumour anyway.

Not that Holmes believed rumours. Well, not always.

‘Your first name is Brian, isn’t it?’ said Rebus sitting down.

‘That’s right, sir.’

‘Good. I’ll call you Brian, and you can keep on calling me sir. That seem fair enough?’

Holmes smiled. ‘Very fair, sir.’

‘Right, any progress?’

So Holmes started at the beginning. As he spoke, he noticed that Rebus, though trying his damnedest to be attentive, was drowsy. His breath across the table was strong-smelling. Whatever he’d had for lunch had agreed with him too well. Finishing his report, he waited for Rebus to speak.

Rebus merely nodded, and was silent for some time. Collecting his thoughts? Holmes felt the need to fill the vacuum.

‘What’s the problem, sir, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘You’ve every right to ask,’ said Rebus at last. But he stopped at that.

‘Well, sir?’

‘I’m not sure, Brian. That’s the truth. Okay, here’s what I know — and I stress know, because there’s plenty I think, which isn’t quite the same thing in this case.’

‘There is a case then?’

‘You tell me, as soon as you’ve listened.’ And it was Rebus’s turn to make his ‘report’ of sorts, fixing it again in his mind as he told the story. But it was too fragmented, too speculative. He could see Holmes struggling with the pieces, trying to see the whole picture. Was there a picture there to see?

‘So you see,’ Rebus ended, ‘we’ve got a junkie full of poison, self-inflicted. Someone who supplied the poison. Bruising on the body, and the hint of a witchcraft connection. We’ve got a missing camera, a tie clip, some photographs, and a girlfriend being followed. You see my problem?’

‘Too much to go on.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So what do we do now?’

That ‘we’ caught Rebus’s attention. For the first time, he realised that he was no longer in this alone, whatever ‘this’ was. The thought cheered him a little, though the hangover was starting now, the sleepy slow thumping either side of his forehead.

‘I’m going to see a man about a coven,’ he said, sure now of the next steps. ‘And you’re going to visit Hutton’s Photographic Studios.’

‘That sounds reasonable,’ said Holmes.

‘So it bloody well should,’ said Rebus. ‘I’m the one with the brains, Brian. You’re the one with the shoeleather. Call me later on to let me know how you get on. Meantime, bugger off.’

Rebus didn’t mean to be unkind. But there had been something just too cosy and conspiratorial in the younger man’s tone towards the end, and he’d felt the need to reestablish boundaries. His own mistake, he realised as the door closed behind Holmes. His own mistake, for coming on so chattily, for telling all, for confiding, and for using Holmes’s first name. That bloody lunch had been to blame. Call me Finlay, call me James, call me Tommy.... Never mind, it would all work out. They had begun well, then less well. Things could only get worse, which was fine by Rebus. He enjoyed a measure of antagonism, of competition. They were distinct bonuses in this line of work.

He had to visit a photographer. Maybe he could get some passport shots done at the same time. Pack his bags and fly off to Canada, Australia, the States. Sod his flat hunting. Sod the police force. And sod Detective Inspector John Rebus and his witch hunt.

There, it was done.

‘If I’d known you were coming to tea, John, I’d have made it just the way you like it.’

The desk sergeant always had a smart answer, and Rebus could never think of a smarter rejoinder. He handed back the cup and walked away, feeling the sugar cloy inside him.

I’ll never touch another drop, he was thinking as he started his car. Honest to God, only the occasional glass of wine. Allow me that. But no more indulgence, and no more mixing wine and spirits. Okay? So give me a break, God, and lift this hangover. I only drank the one glass of cognac, maybe two glasses of claret, one of Chablis. One gin and tonic. It was hardly the stuff of legend, hardly a case for the detox ward.

The roads were quiet though, which was a break. Not enough of a break, but a break. So he made good time to Pilmuir, and then remembered that he didn’t know where Charlie boy lived. Charlie, the person he needed to talk to if he was going to find an address for a coven. A white coven. He wanted to double-check the witchcraft story. He wanted to double-check Charlie, too, come to that. But he didn’t want Charlie to know he was being checked.

The witchcraft thing niggled. Rebus believed in good and evil, and believed stupid people could be attracted towards the latter. He understood pagan religions well enough, had read about them in books too thick and intense for their own good. He didn’t mind people worshipping the Earth, or whatever. It all came down to the same thing in the end. What he did mind was people worshipping Evil as a force, and as more than a force: as an entity. Especially, he disliked the idea of people doing it for ‘kicks’ without knowing or caring what it was they were involved in.

People like Charlie. He remembered that book of Giger prints again. Satan, poised at the centre of a pair of scales, flanked by a naked woman left and right. The women were being penetrated by huge drills. Satan was a goat’s head in a mask....

But where would Charlie be now? He’d find out. Stop and ask. Knock on doors. Hint at retribution should information be withheld. He’d act the big bad policeman if that was what it took.

He didn’t need to do anything, as it happened. He just had to find the police constables who were loitering outside one of the boarded-up houses, not too far from where Ronnie had died. One of the constables held a radio to his mouth. The other was writing in a notebook. Rebus stopped his car, stepped out. Then remembered something, leaned back into the car and drew his keys from out of the ignition. You couldn’t be too careful around here. A second later, he actually locked his driver’s side door, too.

He knew one of the constables. It was Harry Todd, one of the men who had found Ronnie. Todd straightened when he saw Rebus, but Rebus waved this acknowledgment aside, so Todd continued with his radio conversation. Rebus concentrated on the other officer instead.

‘What’s the score here?’ The constable turned from his writing to give Rebus that suspicious, near-hostile look almost unique to the constabulary. ‘Inspector Rebus,’ Rebus explained. He was wondering where Todd’s Irish sidekick O’Rourke was.

‘Oh,’ said the constable. ‘Well ...’ He started to put away his pen. ‘We were called to a domestic, sir. In this house. A real screaming match. But by the time we got here, the man had fled. The woman is still inside. She’s got herself a black eye, nothing more. Not really your territory, sir.’

‘Is that right?’ said Rebus. ‘Well, thank you for telling me, sonny. It’s nice to be told what is and isn’t my “territory”. Thank you so much. Now, may I have your permission to enter the premises?’

The constable was blushing furiously, his cheeks an almighty red against his bloodless face and neck. No: even his
neck
was blushing now. Rebus enjoyed that. He didn’t even mind that behind the constable, but in full view of Rebus himself, Todd was smirking at this encounter.

‘Well?’ Rebus prompted.

‘Sorry, sir,’ said the constable.

‘Right,’ said Rebus, walking towards the door. But before he reached it, it was opened from the inside, and there stood Tracy, both eyes reddened from crying, one eye bruised a deep blue. She didn’t seem surprised to see Rebus standing in front of her; she seemed relieved, and threw herself at him, hugging him, her head against his chest, the tears beginning all over again.

Rebus, startled and embarrassed, returned the embrace only lightly, with a patting of his hands on her back: a father’s ‘there, there’ to a frightened child. He turned his head to look at the constables, who were pretending to have noticed nothing. Then a car drew up beside his own, and he saw Tony McCall put on his handbrake before pushing open the driver’s door, stepping out and seeing Rebus there, and the girl.

Rebus laid his hands on Tracy’s arms and pushed her away from him a little, but still retaining that contact between them. His hands, her arms. She looked at him, and began to fight against the tears. Finally, she pulled one arm away so that she could wipe her eyes. Then the other arm relaxed and Rebus’s hand fell from it, the contact broken. For now.

‘John?’ It was McCall, close behind him.

‘Yes, Tony?’

‘Why is it my patch has suddenly become your patch?’

‘Just passing,’ said Rebus.