In Hide & Seek, the University of Edinburgh is more than a backdrop: it brings John Rebus’s murder investigation into contact with students, psychological expertise, and the occult interests surrounding Ronnie McGrath’s death. The campus is a place of inquiry, but not of easy certainty. Rebus seeks help there while feeling judged by its intellectual world; the student Charlie, by contrast, uses university life as a chance to pursue interests and experiences beyond his sheltered upbringing. The Edinburgh University Library also carries a personal connection to the novelist’s own student years.

Setting and Academic Life

A scene with Dr Poole places Rebus within the university’s academic environment. Poole examines photographs with the composure of someone who recognizes what he is seeing, while Rebus handles an empty envelope and looks out at George Square Gardens, where students are sharing wine and leaving their textbooks aside. The contrast between the students’ relaxed afternoon and Rebus’s work sharpens his sense of being an outsider in a place devoted to study and interpretation.

That discomfort is not simply a matter of unfamiliar surroundings. Rebus feels that his movements and words are being assessed, as though the university were measuring the intelligence he might have displayed if circumstances had been different. His investigation requires him to ask for scholarly help, yet the setting also brings his own insecurity into focus. The university offers expertise that the police inquiry needs, but Rebus experiences its intellectual authority as a possible judgment on himself.

Charlie and the Student World

Poole directs Rebus toward a second-year student who has written a substantial essay on the occult and hopes to undertake a project on demonism. The student first gives only a familiar name: Charlie. The connection matters immediately to Rebus because Charlie is already known to him as a friend of Ronnie McGrath. A university interest that might otherwise look like an eccentric academic pursuit therefore becomes relevant to a death investigation.

The student setting also gives Charlie room to try out a life that differs from the one he had known at boarding school. At nineteen, he has become intensely absorbed in pinball, a pastime absent from his earlier adolescence, which had been shaped by books, music, and introspection. The novel presents his play as part of a broader hunger to catch up on what he feels he missed: at university he wants to live more expansively, rather than remain confined to the habits of his school years. This account makes the campus a site of transition as well as study, where Charlie’s occult project and his new appetite for experience coexist.

Rebus, the Library, and the Investigation

The university’s importance extends beyond the encounter with Poole and Charlie. The Edinburgh University Library is one of the investigation’s settings: Brian Holmes goes to its fifth floor. The novelist’s account of the book’s composition makes the detail personal as well as geographical, explaining that the library’s fifth floor was familiar from three years of postgraduate study. The location thus joins the fictional police inquiry to the writer’s own lived knowledge of Edinburgh.

That connection is part of a wider pattern in the novel’s use of places familiar to its author. The novelist also draws on west-central Fife, where both the novelist and Rebus grew up, and on the city in which the Rebus stories are set. The library detail belongs to this practice of giving the fictional investigation specific local bearings: the university is not an abstract institution but a place with identifiable interiors and student spaces.

Narrative Significance

The campus links forms of knowledge that do not readily settle into one another. Poole’s professional distinction—he explains that he is a lecturer in psychology rather than a psychologist—sets a precise boundary around his expertise, even as Rebus needs help interpreting the photographs. Charlie’s occult interests offer a further possible source of information, but his association with Ronnie makes that knowledge inseparable from the case’s personal and criminal circumstances. The university can direct the investigation toward people and interpretations; it cannot, by itself, resolve what happened.

The location also gives the novel a way to place Rebus among people whose confidence in academic institutions contrasts with his self-consciousness there. Students can forget their books in the gardens; Charlie can treat his university years as an opportunity to build a different life; Rebus, entering the same intellectual environment on police business, feels scrutinized. That contrast makes the University of Edinburgh both an investigative resource and a setting in which the limits of Rebus’s comfort become visible.