Fleshmarket Close [antikvár]

! !'I'm not supposed to be here,' Detective Inspector John 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 nothuig about the day so far boded anything but ill for the rest of the working week.Rebus's old poUce station, his happy hunting ground these past eight or so years, had seen itself reorganised. As a result, it no longer boasted a CED 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 niunber, 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 diimer on the stove. Patches of damp bloomed on its grey concrete walls. Graffiti had turned the place kito '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'.