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

"Up at the cop school, are you?"

Rebus nodded.

"Bit old for recruits."

Rebus glanced at the man. He was tall, completely bald, his head shining. Gray mustache, eyes which seemed to be retracting into the skull. He was drinking a bottle of beer with what looked like a dark rum in the glass next to it.

"Force is desperate these days," Rebus explained. "Next thing, they'll be press-ganging."

The man smiled. "I think you're having me on."

Rebus shrugged. "We're here on a refresher course," he admitted.

"Teaching old dogs new tricks, eh?" The man lifted his beer.

"Get you one?" Rebus offered. The man shook his head. So Rebus paid the barman and, deciding against a tray, hoisted three of the pints, making a triangle of them between his hands. Went to the table, came back for the last two, including his own. Thinking: best not leave it too late to phone Jean. He didn't want her to hear him drunk. Not that he was planning on getting drunk, but you could never tell . . .

"This you celebrating the end of the course?" the man asked.

"Just the beginning," Rebus told him.



St. Leonard's police station was midevening quiet. There were prisoners in the holding cells waiting for next morning's court appearance and two teenagers being booked for shoplifting. Upstairs, the CID offices were almost empty. The Marber inquiry had wound down for the day, and only Siobhan Clarke was left, in front of a computer, staring at a screen saver in the form of a banner message: WHAT WILL SIOBHAN DO WITHOUT HER SUGAR DADDY? She didn't know who had written it: one of the team, having a bit of a laugh. She surmised it referred to John Rebus, but couldn't quite work out the meaning. Did the author know what a sugar daddy was? Or did it just mean that Rebus looked after her, watched out for her? She was annoyed to find herself so irritated by the message.

She went into the screen-saver options and clicked on "banner," erased the present message and replaced it with one of her own: I KNOW WHO YOU ARE, SUCKER. Then she checked a couple of other terminals, but their screen savers were asteroids and wavy lines. When the phone on her desk started ringing, she considered not answering. Probably another crank wanting to confess, or ready with spurious information. A respectable middle-aged gent had called yesterday and accused his upstairs neighbors of the crime. Turned out they were students, played their music too loud and too often. The man had been warned that wasting police time was a serious matter.

"Mind you," one of the uniforms had commented afterwards, "if I'd to listen to Slipknot all day, I'd probably do worse."

Siobhan sat down in front of her computer, lifted the receiver.

"CID, DS Clarke speaking."

"One thing they teach at Tulliallan," the voice said, "is the importance of the quick pickup."

She smiled. "I prefer to be wooed."

"A quick pickup," Rebus explained, "means picking up the phone within half a dozen rings."

"How did you know I was here?"

"I didn't. Tried your flat first, got the answering machine."

"And somehow sensed I wasn't out on the town?" She settled back in her chair. "Sounds like you're in a bar."

"In beautiful downtown Kincardine."

"And yet you've dragged yourself from your pint to call me?"

"I called Jean first. Had a spare twenty-pence piece . . ."

"I'm flattered. A whole twenty pee?" She listened to him snort.

"So...how's it going?" he asked.

"Never mind that, how's Tulliallan?"

"As some of the teachers would say, we have a new tricks-old dog interface scenario."

She laughed. "They don't talk like that, do they?"

"Some of them do. We're being taught crime management and victim empathy response."

Copyright © 2002 by John Rebus Limited