Let It Bleed by Ian Rankin

how much she got done in the hour. He watched her needles work, then went back to the letter he was writing. It wasn’t an easy letter to write; he’d been trying for over a week now. It wasn’t the sort of thing he could trust to dictation, and so far all he’d managed were his address at the top and the date beneath.
    The school was quiet, the corridors well lit, the radiators burning away. The caretaker was busy somewhere, as were four cleaners. When the cleaners and the councillor had gone home, the caretaker would lock up for the night. One of the cleaners was a lot younger than the others, and had a tidy body on her. He wondered if she lived in his ward. He looked at the clock on the wall again. Twenty minutes to go.
    He heard something slam, and looked over to the classroom door. A short man was standing there, looking deathly cold in a thin bomber-style jacket and shabby trousers. He had his hands deep in his jacket pockets and didn’t look inclined to remove them.
    ‘You the councillor?’ the man asked.
    Councillor Gillespie stood up and smiled. Then the man turned to Helena Profitt. ‘So who are you?’
    ‘My ward secretary,’ Tom Gillespie explained. HelenaProfitt and the man seemed to be studying one another. ‘Can I help you?’
    ‘Aye, you can,’ the man said. Then he unzipped his jacket and drew out a sawn-off shotgun.
    ‘You,’ he said to Miss Profitt, ‘get the fuck out.’ He pointed the weapon at the councillor. ‘You stay.’
    Helena Profitt ran screaming from the classroom and nearly knocked over the cleaners. A pail of dirty water clattered to the wooden floor.
    ‘I’ve just polished thon!’
    ‘A gun, he’s got a gun!’
    The cleaners stared at her. A sound like a tyre exploding came from the classroom. Miss Profitt, who had fallen to her knees, was joined by the other women.
    ‘What in Christ was that?’
    ‘She said a gun.’
    And now there was a figure in the doorway. It was the councillor, almost in control of his legs. He looked for all the world like one of the paintings on the classroom wall, only it wasn’t paint that spattered his face and his hair.
    Rebus stood in the classroom and looked at the paintings. Some of them were pretty good. The colours weren’t always right, but the shapes were identifiable. Blue house, yellow sun, brown horse in a green field, and a red sky speckled with grey …
    Oh.
    The room had been cordoned off by the simple act of placing two chairs in the doorway. The body was still there, spreadeagled on the floor in front of the teacher’s desk. Dr Curt was examining it.
    ‘This seems to be your week for messy ones,’ he told Rebus.
    It was messy all right. There wasn’t much left of thehead except for the lower jaw and chin. Stick a shotgun in your gub and heave-ho with both barrels and you couldn’t expect to win Mr Glamorous Suicide. You wouldn’t even make the last sixteen.
    Rebus stood beside the teacher’s desk. There was a pad of lined paper on it. Scribbled on the top sheet was the message, ‘Mr Hamilton – allotment allocation’, alongside an address and telephone number. Blood had soaked through the paper. Rebus peeled off this first sheet. The sheet below was obviously the start of a letter. Gillespie had got as far as the word ‘Dear’.
    ‘Well,’ Curt got to his feet, ‘he’s dead, and if you were to ask for my considered opinion, I’d say he used that.’ He nodded towards the shotgun, which lay a couple of feet from the body. ‘And now he’s gone to the other place.’
    ‘It’s just a shot away,’ said Rebus.
    Curt looked at him. ‘Is the photographer on his way?’
    ‘Trouble getting his car to start.’
    ‘Well, tell him I want plenty of head shots – pun unavoidable. I gather we’ve a witness?’
    ‘Councillor Gillespie.’
    ‘I don’t know him.’
    ‘He’s councillor for my ward.’
    Dr Curt was pulling on thin latex gloves. It was time to search the body. Initially, they were looking for ID.