Excerpt from Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Muggings tended to be spontaneous. You were attacked on the street, maybe just after using a cash machine. The mugger didn't hang around your door waiting for you to come home. Marber's house was relatively isolated: Duddingston Village was a wealthy enclave on the edge of Edinburgh, semi-rural, with the mass of Arthur's Seat as its neighbor. The houses hid behind walls, quiet and secure. Anyone approaching Marber's home on foot would have triggered the same halogen security light. They would then have had to hide —in the undergrowth, say, or behind one of the trees. After a couple of minutes, the lamp's timer would finish its cycle and go off. But any movement would trigger the sensor once again.

The Scene of Crime officers had looked for possible hiding places, finding several. But no traces of anyone, no footprints or fibers.

Another scenario, proposed by DCS Gill Templer:

"Say the assailant was already inside the house. Heard the door being unlocked and ran towards it. Smashed the victim on the head and ran."

But the house was high-tech: alarms and sensors everywhere. There was no sign of a break-in, no indication that anything was missing. Marber's best friend, another art dealer called Cynthia Bessant, had toured the house and pronounced that she could see nothing missing or out of place, except that much of the deceased's art collection had been removed from the walls and, each painting neatly packaged in bubble wrap, was stacked against the wall in the dining room. Bessant had been unable to offer an explanation.

"Perhaps he was about to reframe them, or move them to different rooms. One does get tired of the same paintings in the same spots . . ."

She'd toured every room, paying particular attention to Marber's bedroom, not having seen inside it before. She called it his "inner sanctum."

The victim himself had never been married, and was quickly assumed by the investigating officers to have been gay.

"Eddie's sexuality," Cynthia Bessant had said, "can have no bearing on this case."

But that would be something for the inquiry to decide.

Rebus had felt himself sidelined in the investigation, working the telephones mostly. Cold calls to friends and associates. The same questions eliciting almost identical responses. The bubble-wrapped paintings had been checked for fingerprints, from which it became apparent that Marber himself had packaged them up. Still no one — neither his secretary nor his friends —could give an explanation.

Then, towards the end of one briefing, Rebus had picked up a mug of tea —someone else's tea, milky gray —and hurled it in the general direction of Gill Templer.

The briefing had started much as any other, Rebus washing down three aspirin caplets with his morning latte. The coffee came in a paper cup. It was from a concession on the corner of the Meadows. Usually his first and last decent cup of the day.

"Bit too much to drink last night?" DS Siobhan Clarke had asked. She'd run her eyes over him: same suit, shirt and tie as the day before. Probably wondering if he'd bothered to take any of it off between-times. The morning shave erratic, a lazy runover with an electric. Hair that needed washing and cutting.

She'd seen just what Rebus had wanted her to see.

"And a good morning to you too, Siobhan," he'd muttered to himself, crushing the empty beaker.

Usually he stood towards the back of the room at briefings, but today he was nearer the front. Sat there at a desk, rubbing his forehead, loosening his shoulders, as Gill Templer spelled out the day's mission. More door-to-door; more interviews; more phone calls.

His fingers were around the mug by now. He didn't know whose it was, the glaze cold to the touch —could even have been left from the day before. The room was stifling and already smelled of sweat.

Copyright © 2002 by John Rebus Limited