Ian Rankin - Fleshmarket Close

‘I’m not supposed to be here,’ Detective InspectorJohn Rebus said. Not that anyone was listening.

Knoxland was a housing scheme on the western edge of Edinburgh, off Rebus’s patch. He was there because the West End guys were short-handed. He was also there because his own bosses couldn’t think what to do with him. It was a rainy Monday afternoon, and nothing about the day so far boded anything but ill for the rest of the working week.

Rebus’s old police station, his happy hunting ground these past eight or so years, had seen itself reorganised. As a result, it no longer boasted a CID office, meaning Rebus and his fellow detectives had been cast adrift, shipped out to other stations. He’d ended up at Gayfield Square, just off Leith Walk: a cushy number, according to some. Gayfield Square was on the periphery of the elegant New Town, behind whose eighteenth- and nineteenth-century façades anything could be happening without those outside being any the wiser. It certainly felt a long way from Knoxland, further than the three factual miles. It was another culture, another country.

Knoxland had been built in the 1960s, apparently from papier mâché and balsa wood. Walls so thin you could hear the neighbours cutting their toenails and smell their dinner on the stove. Patches of damp bloomed on its grey concrete walls. Graffiti had turned the place into ‘Hard Knox’. Other embellishments warned the ‘Pakis’ to ‘Get Out’, while a scrawl that was probably only an hour or so old bore the legend ‘One Less’.

What shops there were had resorted to metal grilles on windows and doors, not even bothering to remove them during opening hours. The place itself was contained, hemmed in by dual carriageways to north and west. The bright-eyed developers had scooped out subways beneath the roads. Probably in their original drawings, these had been clean, well-lit spaces where neighbours would stop to chat about the weather and the new curtains in the window of number 42. In reality, they’d become no-go areas for everyone but the foolhardy and suicidal, even in daytime. Rebus was forever seeing reports of bag-snatchings and muggings.

It was probably those same bright-eyed developers who’d had the idea of naming the estate’s various high-rise blocks after Scottish writers, and appending each with the word ‘House’, serving merely to rub in that these were nothing like real houses.

Barrie House.

Stevenson House.

Scott House.

Burns House.

Reaching skywards with all the subtlety of single-digit salutes.

He looked around for somewhere to deposit his half-empty coffee cup. He’d stopped at a baker’s on Gorgie Road, knowing that the further from the city centre he drove, the less likely he would be to find anything remotely drinkable. Not a good choice: the coffee had been scalding at first, quickly turning tepid, which only served to highlight its lack of anything resembling flavour. There were no bins nearby; no bins at all, in fact. The pavements and grass verges, however, were doing their best to oblige, so Rebus added his litter to the mosaic, then straightened up and pushed his hands deep into his coat pockets. He could see his breath in the air.

‘Papers are going to have a field day with this,’ someone was muttering. There were a dozen figures shuffling around in the covered walkway between two of the high-rise blocks. The place smelled faintly of urine, human or otherwise. Plenty of dogs in the vicinity, one or two even wearing collars. They would come sniffing at the entrance to the walkway, until chased off by one of the uniforms. Crime-scene tape now blocked both ends of the passage. Kids on bikes were craning their necks for a look. Police photographers were gathering evidence, vying for space with the forensic team. They were dressed in white overalls, heads covered. An anonymous grey van was parked alongside the police cars on the muddy play area outside. Its driver had complained to Rebus that some kids had demanded money from him to keep an eye on it.

‘Bloody sharks.’

Soon, this driver would take the body to the mortuary, where the post-mortem examination would take place. But already they knew they were dealing with homicide. Multiple stab wounds, including one to the throat. The trail of blood showed that the victim had been attacked ten or twelve feet further into the passage. He’d probably tried to get away, crawling towards the light, his attacker making more lunges as he faltered and fell.

‘Nothing in the pockets except some loose change,’ another detective was saying. ‘Let’s hope someone knows who he is...’

Rebus didn’t know who he was, but he knew what he was: he was a case, a statistic. More than that, he was a story, and even now the city’s journalists would be scenting it, for all the world like a pack sensing its quarry. Knoxland was not a popular estate. It tended to attract only the desperate and those with no choice in the matter. In the past, it had been used as a dumping ground for tenants the council found hard to house elsewhere: addicts and the unhinged. More recently, immigrants had been catapulted into its dankest, least welcoming corners. Asylum-seekers, refugees. People nobody really wanted to think about or have to deal with. Looking around, Rebus realised that the poor bastards must be left feeling like mice in a maze. The difference being that in laboratories, there were few predators, while out here in the real world, they were everywhere.

They carried knives. They roamed at will. They ran the streets.

And now they had killed.

Another car drew up, a figure emerging from it. Rebus knew the face: Steve Holly, local hack for a Glasgow tabloid. Overweight and bustling, hair gelled into spikes. Before locking his car, Holly tucked his laptop under his arm, ready to bring it with him. Street-savvy, that was Steve Holly. He nodded at Rebus.

‘Got anything for me?’

Rebus shook his head, and Holly started looking around for other more likely sources. ‘Heard you’d been kicked out of St Leonard’s,’ he said, as if making conversation, eyes everywhere but on Rebus. ‘Don’t tell me they’ve dumped you out here?’

Rebus knew better than to rise to it, but Holly was beginning to enjoy himself. ‘Dumping ground just about sums this place up. School of hard knocks, eh?’ Holly started to light a cigarette, and Rebus knew he was thinking of the story he’d be writing later on: dreaming up punning sentences and scraps of twopenny philosophy.

‘Asian bloke, I heard,’ the journalist said at last, blowing smoke and offering the packet to Rebus.

‘We don’t know yet,’ Rebus admitted: his words the price of a cigarette. Holly lit it for him. ‘Tan-skinned... could be from anywhere.’

‘Anywhere except Scotland,’ Holly said with a smile. ‘Race crime though, got to be. Only a matter of time before we had one.’ Rebus knew why he stressed the ‘we’: he meant Edinburgh. Glasgow had had at least one race murder, an asylum-seeker trying to live his life on one of that city’s thick-skinned estates. Stabbed to death, just like the victim in front of them here, who, searched and studied and photographed, was now being placed in a body-bag. There was silence during the procedure: a momentary mark of respect by professionals who would thereafter get on with the job of finding the killer. The bag was lifted on to a trolley, then wheeled beneath the cordon and past Rebus and Holly.