Hide And Seek Read online

  Praise for Ian Rankin

  ‘As always, Rankin proves himself the master of his own milieu. He brings the dark underside of Edinburgh deliciously to life … Rankin’s skill lies mainly in the confident way he weaves the disparate threads into a cohesive whole’

  Daily Mail

  ‘His novels flow as smoothly as the flooded Forth, and come peppered with three-dimensional characters who actually react to and are changed by events around them … This is Rankin at his raw-edged, page-turning best … With Rankin, you can practically smell the fag-smoke and whisky fumes’

  Time Out

  ‘A first-rate thriller’

  Yorkshire Evening Post

  ‘The internal police politics and corruption in high places are both portrayed with bone-freezing accuracy. This novel should come with a wind-chill factor warning’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Real life and fiction blur in this cynical, bleak tale. You’ll love every second of it’

  Daily Mirror

  ‘No other writer in his chosen genre is producing books as rich and comprehensive as this: Dickensian, you might say’

  Literary Review

  ‘Rebus is a masterful creation … Rankin has taken his well-earned place among the top echelon of crimewriters’

  Observer

  ‘Rankin writes laconic, sophisticated, well-paced thrillers’

  Scotsman

  ‘First-rate plotting, dialogue and characterisations’

  Literary Review

  Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, was published in 1987, and the Rebus books are now translated into over thirty languages and are bestsellers worldwide.

  Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards including the prestigious Diamond Dagger in 2005 and in 2009 was inducted into the CWA Hall of Fame. In 2004, Ian won America’s celebrated Edgar award for Resurrection Men. He has also been shortlisted for the Anthony Awards in the USA, and won Denmark’s Palle Rosenkrantz Prize, the French Grand Prix du Roman Noir and the Deutscher Krimipreis. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Hull and the Open University.

  A contributor to BBC2’s Newsnight Review, he also presented his own TV series, Ian Rankin’s Evil Thoughts. He has received the OBE for services to literature, opting to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh. He has also recently been appointed to the rank of Deputy Lieutenant of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons. Visit his website at www.ianrankin.net.

  By Ian Rankin

  The Inspector Rebus series

  Knots & Crosses – paperback – ebook

  Hide & Seek – paperback – ebook

  Tooth & Nail – paperback – ebook

  Strip Jack – paperback – ebook

  The Black Book – paperback – ebook

  Mortal Causes – paperback – ebook

  Let it Bleed – paperback – ebook

  Black & Blue – paperback – ebook

  The Hanging Garden – paperback – ebook

  Death Is Not The End (novella)

  Dead Souls – paperback – ebook

  Set in Darkness – paperback – ebook

  The Falls – paperback – ebook

  Resurrection Men – paperback – ebook

  A Question of Blood – paperback – ebook

  Fleshmarket Close – paperback – ebook

  The Naming of the Dead – paperback – ebook

  Exit Music – paperback – ebook

  Other Novels

  The Flood – paperback – ebook

  Watchman – paperback – ebook

  Westwind

  A Cool Head (Quickread) – paperback – ebook

  Doors Open – paperback – ebook

  The Complaints – paperback – ebook

  Writing as Jack Harvey

  Witch Hunt – paperback – ebook

  Bleeding Hearts – paperback – ebook

  Blood Hunt – paperback – ebook

  Short Stories

  A Good Hanging and Other Stories – paperback – ebook

  Beggars Banquet – paperback – ebook

  Non-Fiction

  Rebus’s Scotland – paperback

  Ian Rankin

  Hide & Seek

  To Michael Shaw,

  not before time

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Dedication

  Praise for Ian Rankin

  About the Author

  By Ian Rankin

  Introduction

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Reading Group Notes

  Copyright

  ‘My devil had long been caged, he came out roaring.’

  – The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

  A year or two after Hide & Seek was published, there was a break-in at Edinburgh’s police headquarters. Among the items rumoured to have been stolen was a list of names of men prominent in Edinburgh society. Allegations had been made that these men had been using rent boys, leaving themselves open to blackmail, and a police inquiry had been instituted. There were enough similarities between the real-life case and aspects of my novel that people would stop me in the street to ask how I’d known so much so soon. I would explain that my sources had to be protected.

  There were no sources, of course: I’d made the story up.

  I saw Hide & Seek very much as a companion piece to Knots & Crosses. Reviewers had failed to pick up on the earlier book’s use of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a template. I was determined to try once more to drag Stevenson’s story back to its natural home of Edinburgh, and to update the theme for a modern-day audience. In fact, the book’s eventual working title was Hyde & Seek, but only after I’d ditched Dead Beat (at the behest of my agent, to whom the book was eventually dedicated). The final version of Hide & Seek opens with a quote from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and goes on to use quotes from Stevenson’s book at the start of each section. Moreover, I lifted many of the character names directly from Stevenson’s masterpiece – Enfield, Poole, Carew, Lanyon – while Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde provides Detective Inspector Rebus with his night-time reading, when he’s not busy mulling over his latest case.

  Not that I was keen for readers to get the connection or anything …

  Between Knots & Crosses and the events of Hide & Seek, Rebus has been promoted from detective sergeant – his one and only promotion in the series so far. Other changes have taken place. Rebus has a new sidekick called Brian Holmes (a none-too-subtle nod to another Edinburgh writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). And Edinburgh is changing, too, as new money moves in. The book was written in 1988 and 1989. By then, I was living in London, at the height of Thatcherism. Red braces and Moët were all the rage. In some wine bars, rising property values seemed to be the only currency of conversation. I’d been in London for a couple of years and was not making much of a go of it. My wife and I lived in a maisonette in Tottenham, and having failed to find full-time writing a lucrative enough proposition, I was working as a magazine journalist in Crystal Palace, entailing a three-hour commute each weekday. I seemed to be surrounded by people more successful than me, people with fat salaries or five-figure publishing deals. My situation at the time seems to me now to explain the bitter edge to much of the writing in Hide & Seek, and is reflected
in Brian Holmes’s memories of his few student months in London (‘a season spent in hell’, as he himself remembers it).

  The novel did not come hard on the heels of Knots & Crosses: there had been two other novels in between. One was a spy adventure, Watchman; the other, Westwind, my attempt at a techno-thriller. The latter, however, was struggling to find a publisher of any kind, while the former had sold a scant 500 copies in hardcover. Hide & Seek was actually begun in the summer of 1988, but failed to make much headway. My job got in the way, as did attempts to turn my first novel, The Flood, into a useable screenplay, and various frustrating efforts to get work as a script-writer on The Bill. I was also reviewing books most weeks for a new broadsheet called Scotland on Sunday.

  One other reason why I may have held back on a second Rebus novel: plans had been afoot to film the first one, with Leslie Grantham (Dirty Den in EastEnders) as Rebus. This plan eventually fell through in January 1989. My guess had been that Grantham would want the action of Knots & Crosses relocated to London. Now that he would not be taking Rebus to the screen, I felt free to write a second Edinburgh-based adventure for my character. The final draft of the book was completed in May.

  It’s a less overwrought work than its predecessor, the prose leaner, though the Rebus we meet is still not the fully formed character of later books. For one thing, he’s still too well-read, quoting from Walt Whitman – someone I’d studied at university but of whom Rebus couldn’t really be expected to have had knowledge. He also quotes from the Romantic poets, and listens to Radio Three in his car. On his hi-fi at home, there’s jazz, but also the Beatles’ White Album (I’d soon have him preferring the Stones). My own time as a hi-fi journalist is reflected in the expensive Linn turntable owned by one character, while a scene inside the library at the University of Edinburgh takes Holmes to the fifth floor, which I’d haunted during my three years as a postgraduate student.

  There are other literary references in the book: to James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and to the poet George MacBeth, who had shared a writers’ retreat with me a couple of years before. A character from The Flood pops up in the first few pages, and Rebus and Holmes also visit west-central Fife where both the Inspector and I grew up. It’s noticeable to me now that Rebus in particular is not as cynical about his old hunting-ground as he was when paying his respects in Knots & Crosses. Maybe enough of my spleen had been vented. London was the enemy now; London, and the harsh materialism I seemed to have found there.

  Besides, I had many happy memories of my childhood, memories rekindled by the death of my father in February 1990, while I was in the midst of proofreading Hide & Seek. By the time the book was ready for publication, Miranda and I had decidedly had enough of London and Mrs Thatcher. We were making plans to live in France, praying that my writing would start earning enough to turn the dream into a reality. And once we’d left Tottenham behind, I’d be able to put some of my own feelings about the capital into words, by taking John Rebus to London on a case.

  A case that would become Tooth & Nail.

  April 2005

  ‘Hide!’

  He was shrieking now, frantic, his face drained of all colour. She was at the top of the stairs, and he stumbled towards her, grabbing her by the arms, propelling her downstairs with unfocussed force, so that she feared they would both fall. She cried out.

  ‘Ronnie! Hide from who?’

  ‘Hide!’ he shrieked again. ‘Hide! They’re coming! They’re coming!’

  He had pushed her all the way to the front door now. She’d seen him pretty strung out before, but never this bad. A fix would help him, she knew it would. And she knew, too, that he had the makings upstairs in his bedroom. The sweat trickled from his chilled rat’s-tails of hair. Only two minutes ago, the most important decision in her life had been whether or not to dare a trip to the squat’s seething lavatory. But now.…

  ‘They’re coming,’ he repeated, his voice a whisper now. ‘Hide.’

  ‘Ronnie,’ she said, ‘you’re scaring me.’

  He stared at her, his eyes seeming almost to recognise her. Then he looked away again, into a distance all of his own. The word was a snakelike hiss.

  ‘Hide.’ And with that he yanked open the door. It was raining outside, and she hesitated. But then fear took her, and she made to cross the threshold. But his hand grabbed at her arm, pulling her back inside. He embraced her, his sweat sea-salty, his body throbbing. His mouth was close to her ear, his breath hot.

  ‘They’ve murdered me,’ he said. Then with sudden ferocity he pushed her again, and this time she was outside, and the door was slamming shut, leaving him alone in the house. Alone with himself. She stood on the garden path, staring at the door, trying to decide whether to knock or not.

  It wouldn’t make any difference. She knew that. So instead she started to cry. Her head slipped forward in a rare show of self-pity and she wept for a full minute, before, breathing hard three times, she turned and walked quickly down the garden path (such as it was). Someone would take her in. Someone would comfort her and take away the fear and dry her clothes.

  Someone always did.

  John Rebus stared hard at the dish in front of him, oblivious to the conversation around the table, the background music, the flickering candles. He didn’t really care about house prices in Barnton, or the latest delicatessen to be opened in the Grassmarket. He didn’t much want to speak to the other guests – a female lecturer to his right, a male bookseller to his left – about … well, whatever they’d just been discussing. Yes, it was the perfect dinner party, the conversation as tangy as the starter course, and he was glad Rian had invited him. Of course he was. But the more he stared at the half lobster on his plate, the more an unfocussed despair grew within him. What had he in common with these people? Would they laugh if he told the story of the police alsatian and the severed head? No, they would not. They would smile politely, then bow their heads towards their plates, acknowledging that he was … well, different from them.

  ‘Vegetables, John?’

  It was Rian’s voice, warning him that he was not ‘taking part’, was not ‘conversing’ or even looking interested. He accepted the large oval dish with a smile, but avoided her eyes.

  She was a nice girl. Quite a stunner in an individual sort of way. Bright red hair, cut short and pageboyish. Eyes deep, striking green. Lips thin but promising. Oh yes, he liked her. He wouldn’t have accepted her invitation otherwise. He fished about in the dish for a piece of broccoli that wouldn’t break into a thousand pieces as he tried to manoeuvre it onto his plate.

  ‘Gorgeous food, Rian,’ said the bookseller, and Rian smiled, accepting the remark, her face reddening slightly. That was all it took, John. That was all you had to say to make this girl happy. But in his mouth he knew it would come out sounding sarcastic. His tone of voice was not something he could suddenly throw off like a piece of clothing. It was a part of him, nurtured over a course of years. So when the lecturer agreed with the bookseller, all John Rebus did was smile and nod, the smile too fixed, the nod going on a second or two too long, so that they were all looking at him again. The piece of broccoli snapped into two neat halves above his plate and splattered onto the tablecloth.

  ‘Shite!’ he said, knowing as the word escaped his lips that it was not quite appropriate, not quite the right word for the occasion. Well, what was he, a man or a thesaurus?

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Couldn’t be helped,’ said Rian. My God, her voice was cold.

  It was the perfect end to a perfect weekend. He’d gone shopping on Saturday, ostensibly for a suit to wear tonight. But had baulked at the prices, and bought some books instead, one of which was intended as a gift to Rian: Doctor Zhivago. But then he’d decided he’d like to read it himself first, and so had brought flowers and chocolates instead, forgetting her aversion to lilies (had he known in the first place?) and the diet she was in the throes of starting. Damn. And to cap it all, he’d tried a new chur
ch this morning, another Church of Scotland offering, not too far from his flat. The last one he’d tried had seemed unbearably cold, promising nothing but sin and repentance, but this latest church had been the oppressive opposite: all love and joy and what was there to forgive anyway? So he’d sung the hymns, then buggered off, leaving the minister with a handshake at the door and a promise of future attendance.

  ‘More wine, John?’

  This was the bookseller, proffering the bottle he’d brought himself. It wasn’t a bad little wine, actually, but the bookseller had talked about it with such unremitting pride that Rebus felt obliged to decline. The man frowned, but then was cheered to find this refusal left all the more for himself. He replenished his glass with vigour.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said.

  The conversation returned to how busy Edinburgh seemed these days. Here was something with which Rebus could agree. This being the end of May, the tourists were almost in season. But there was more to it than that. If anyone had told him five years ago that in 1989 people would be emigrating north from the south of England to the Lothians, he’d have laughed out loud. Now it was fact, and a fit topic for the dinner table.

  Later, much later, the couple having departed, Rebus helped Rian with the dishes.

  ‘What was wrong with you?’ she said, but all he could think about was the minister’s handshake, that confident grip which bespoke assurances of an afterlife.