“My devil had long been caged, he came out roaring.”

“My devil had long been caged, he came out roaring.” is the epigraph used to open Hide & Seek. Borrowed from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, it gives the novel a frame of restraint giving way to violence: something kept contained returns with force. The evidence establishes the epigraph’s prominence, but does not settle which character it describes.

The Epigraph and Its Ambiguity

The quotation’s image of a caged devil coming free invites readers to consider both concealed wrongdoing and the return of a darker impulse. The novel’s reading notes make that ambiguity explicit by asking whether the line refers more to the murderer or to Rebus. They pose the alternatives without supplying an answer, so the epigraph remains an interpretive prompt rather than a definitive identification.

The Novel and Its Source

A year or two after Hide & Seek appeared, a break-in at Edinburgh’s police headquarters prompted rumours that a list of prominent men had been stolen. Allegations that the men had used rent boys had led to a police inquiry, and people noticed similarities between the case and aspects of Rankin’s novel. When asked how he had known so much so soon, Rankin joked that his sources had to be protected; he later clarified that there had been no sources and that he had made the story up.

Retrospective Significance

The later account distinguishes resemblance from reporting: the real inquiry made the novel seem prescient, but Rankin explicitly denied basing it on inside information. Read beside the opening epigraph, that clarification preserves the book’s atmosphere of hidden secrets while grounding its apparent connection to real events in coincidence, not a concealed source.