Falls

  ‘Reassigned?’ Shug Davidson guessed.

  She shook her head. ‘I’m following a lead. It’s as easy to do it here as there.’

  ‘Ah, but here you’re a long way away from the glamour chase.’

  ‘The what?’

  He smiled. ‘The big picture, the juicy inquiry, the centre of everything.’

  ‘I’m at the centre of the West End,’ she told him. ‘That’s good enough for me.’ Earned herself a wink from Davidson and a round of applause from Reynolds. She smiled: she was back home.

  It had niggled at her all weekend: the way she’d been sidelined—bumped from liaison and dropped off at the twilight zone in which DI John Rebus worked. And from there to this—a tourist’s suicide from years back—seemed yet another snub.

  So she’d come to a decision: if they didn’t want her, she didn’t need them. Welcome back to the West End. She’d picked up all her notes on the way in. They sat on her desk, a desk she didn’t need to share with half a dozen other bodies. The telephone wasn’t going constantly, Bill Pryde flapping past with his clipboard and nicotine chewing-gum. She felt safe here, and here she could safely reach the conclusion that she was on another wild-goose chase.

  Now all she had to do was prove it to Gill Templer’s satisfaction.

  She was off to a flyer. She’d called the police station in Fort William and spoken to a very helpful sergeant called Donald Maclay, who remembered the case well.

  ‘The upper slope of Ben Dorchory,’ he told her. ‘The body had been there a couple of months. It’s a remote spot. A ghillie happened on the scene; could have lain there years otherwise. We followed procedure. Nothing in the way of ID on the body. Nothing in the pockets.’

  ‘Not even any money?’

  ‘We didn’t find any. Labels on the jacket, shirt and such-like didn’t tell us anything. Talked to the B and Bs and hotels, checked the missing persons records.’

  ‘What about the gun?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Did you get any prints?’

  ‘After that length of time? No, we didn’t.’

  ‘But you did check for them?’

  ‘Oh, aye.’

  Wylie was writing everything down, abbreviating most of the words. ‘Gunpowder traces?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘On the skin. He was shot in the head?’

  ‘That’s right. The pathologist didn’t find any burning or residues on the scalp.’

  ‘Isn’t that unusual?’

  ‘Not when half the head’s been blown away and the local wildlife have been feeding.’

  Wylie stopped writing. ‘I get the picture,’ she said.

  ‘I mean, this wasn’t like a body, more a scarecrow. The skin was like parchment. There’s a hellish wind blows across that hill.’

  'You didn’t treat it as suspicious?’

  ‘We went by the autopsy findings.’

  ‘Any chance you can send me the file?’

  ‘If we get a written request, sure.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She tapped her pen against the desk. ‘The gun was how far away?’

  ‘Maybe twenty feet.’

  You think an animal moved it?’

  'Yes. Either that or it was a reflex thing. Put a gun to your head and pull the trigger, there’s going to be a recoil, isn’t there?’

  ‘I’d think so.’ She paused. ‘So what happened next?’

  ‘Well, eventually we tried facial reconstruction, then issued the composite photo.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing very much. Thing was, we thought he was a lot older … early forties maybe, and the composite reflected that. God knows how the Germans got to hear of it.’

  ‘The mother and father?’

  ‘That’s right. Their son had been missing the best part of a year … maybe even a bit longer. Then we got this call from Munich, couldn’t make much sense of it. Next thing, they’d turned up at the station with a translator. We showed them the clothes and they recognised a couple of things … the jacket, and a wristwatch.’

  ‘You don’t sound convinced.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not. A year they’d been looking for him, going out of their minds. The jacket was just a plain green thing, nothing special about it. Same goes for the watch.’

  'You think they managed to convince themselves simply because they wanted to believe?’

  ‘Wanted it to be him, yes. But their son was barely twenty … experts told us we had the remains of someone twice that age. Then the bloody papers went and printed the story anyway.’

  ‘How did all the sword-and-sorcery stuff come into the picture?’

  ‘Hang on a minute, will you?’ She heard Maclay put the receiver down next to his phone. He was giving instructions to someone. ‘Just past the creels … there’s a hut Aly uses when he’s renting out his boat … ’ She imagined Fort William: quiet and coastal, with islands off to the west. Fishermen and tourists; gulls overhead and the tang of seaweed.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Maclay said.

  ‘Keeping you busy?’

  ‘Oh, it’s always hectic up this way,’ he replied with a laugh. She wished she were there with him. After they’d finished talking, she could walk down to the harbour, passing those creels … ’Where were we?’ he said.

  ‘Sword and sorcery.

  ‘First we knew about that was when they put it in the paper. The parents again, they’d been talking to some reporter.’

  Wylie held the photocopy in front of her. The headline: Did Role Game Kill in Highland Gun Mystery? The reporter’s name was Steve Holly.

  Jurgen Becker was a twenty-year-old student who lived with his parents in a suburb of Hamburg. He attended the local university, specialising in psychology. He loved role-playing games, and was part of a team who played in an inter-university league on the Internet. Fellow students said that he’d been ‘anxious and troubled’ during the week leading up to his disappearance. When he left home for that last time, he took a backpack with him. In it, to the best of his parents’ knowledge, were his passport, a couple of changes of clothes, his camera, and a portable CD player with maybe a dozen or so discs.

  The parents were professionals—the father an architect, mother a lecturer—but they’d given up work to concentrate on finding their son. The story shifted into bold type for its final paragraph: ‘Now, two grieving parents know they’ve found their son. Yet for them the mystery has only deepened. How did Jurgen come to die on a barren Scottish mountaintop? Who else was there with him? Whose was the gun … and who used it to end the young student’s life?’

  ‘The backpack and stuff, they never turned up?’ Wylie asked.

  ‘Never. But then if it wasn’t him, you would hardly expect them to.’

  She smiled. You’ve been a real help, Sergeant Maclay.’

  ‘Just put that request in writing, and I’ll let you have chapter and verse.

  ‘Thanks, I’ll do that.’ She paused. ‘We’ve got a Maclay in Edinburgh CID, works out of Craigmillar … ’

  ‘Aye, we’re cousins. Met him at a couple of weddings and funerals. Craigmillar’s where the posh folk live?’

  ‘Is that what he told you?’

  ‘Was I being fed a line?’

  ‘Come see for yourself sometime.’

  Wylie was laughing when she finished the call, had to tell Shug Davidson why. He came over to her desk. The CID room wasn’t big: four desks, doors leading off to walk-in cupboards where they kept old case files. Davidson picked up the photocopied news story, read it through.

  ‘Looks like something Holly made up all by himself;’ he commented.

  'You know him?’

  ‘Had a couple of run-ins with him. Holly’s speciality is blowing a story up.’

  She took the article from him. Sure enough, all the stuff about fantasy games and role-playing was kept ambiguous, the text peppered with conditionals: ‘may have’, ‘could be’, ‘if; as it is thought … ’

 
‘I need to speak to him,’ she stated, picking up the phone again. ‘Do you know his number?’

  ‘No, but he’s based at the paper’s Edinburgh office.’ Davidson started back towards his own desk. You’ll find it in Yellow Pages under “Leper Colonies” …'

  Steve Holly was still on his way into work when his mobile sounded. He lived in the New Town, only three streets from what he’d recently called in print ‘the tragic death flat’. Not that his own place was in the same league as Flip Balfour’s. He was at the top of an unmodernised tenement—one of few still left in the New Town. And his street didn’t have the cachet of Flip’s address. Still, he’d watched the paper value of his flat soar. Four years ago, he’d decided he wanted to live in this part of town. But even then it had seemed beyond his means, until he started reading the death notices in the city’s daily and evening papers. When he saw a New Town address, he’d head round there with an envelope marked ‘Urgent’ and addressed to ‘The Owner’. The letter inside was short. He introduced himself as someone who’d been born and raised in whichever street, but whose family had moved away and encountered bad fortune since. With both parents dead, he now wished to return to a street which held such fond memories, and should the owner ever wish to consider selling .

  And bloody hell, it had worked. An old woman—house-ridden for a decade—had died, and her niece, who was her closest living relative, had read Holly’s letter, phoning him that afternoon. He’d gone to look at the place—three bedrooms, a bit smelly and dark but he knew such things could be fixed. Nearly shot himself in the foot when the niece asked which number he’d lived at, but he’d managed to fool her well enough. Then his pitch: all the estate agents and solicitors getting their cut … better to agree a fair price between them and cut out the middle-men.

  The niece lived in the Borders, didn’t seem to know what flats in Edinburgh were fetching. She’d even thrown in a lot of the old lady’s furniture, for which he’d thanked her profusely, turfing out the lot his first weekend in residence.

  If he sold up now he’d have a hundred grand in his pocket, a nice nest egg. In fact, only this morning he’d wondered about trying something similar with the Balfours … only somehow he reckoned they’d know to the last penny what Flip’s place was worth. He stopped, halfway up the Dundas Street climb, and answered his mobile.

  ‘Steve Holly speaking.’

  ‘Mr Holly, this is Detective Sergeant Wylie, Lothian and Borders CID.’

  Wylie? He tried to place her. Of course! That brilliant press conference! Yes, DS Wylie, and what can I do for you this morning?’

  ‘It’s about a story you ran three years or so back … the German student.’

  ‘Would that be the student with the twenty-foot reach?’ he asked with a grin. He was outside a small art gallery, peered in through the window, curious about the prices first, paintings second.

  ‘That’s the one, yes.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve caught the killer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then?’

  She hesitated; he frowned in concentration. ‘Some new evidence may have come to light.’

  ‘What new evidence?’

  ‘Right now, I’m afraid I can’t divulge … '

  'Yeah, yeah. Tell me something I don’t hear every other day. Your lot always want something for nothing.’

  ‘And your lot don’t?’

  He turned away from the window, just in time to catch a green Aston revving away from the lights: not too many about, had to be the grieving father … ’What’s it got to do with Philippa Balfour?’ he asked.

  Silence on the line. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That’s not a very good answer, DS Wylie. Last time I saw you, you were attached to the Balfour case. Are you saying they’ve suddenly shifted you on to a case which isn’t even in the Lothian and Borders remit?’

  I …'

  'You’re probably not at liberty to say, right? Me, on the other hand, I can say whatever I like.’

  ‘The way you made up that sword-and-sorcery stuff?’

  ‘That wasn’t made up. I got it from the parents.’

  ‘That he liked role-playing, yes, but the idea that it was some game brought him to Scotland … ?’

  ‘Speculation based on the available evidence.’

  ‘But there was no evidence of such a game, was there?’

  ‘Highland mountains, all that Celtic myth rubbish … just the place someone like Jurgen would end up. Sent out on some quest, only there’s a gun waiting for him when he gets there.’

  'Yes, I read your story.’

  ‘And somehow it ties in with Flip Balfour, but you’re not going to tell me how?’ Holly licked his lips; he was enjoying this.

  ‘That’s right,’ Wylie said.

  ‘It must have hurt.’ His voice was almost solicitous.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When they pulled you from liaison. Not your fault, was it? We’re like bloody savages at times. They should have prepared you better. Christ, Gill Templer worked liaison for a hundred years … she should have known.’

  Another silence on the. line. Holly softened his voice. ‘And then they go and give it to a detective constable. DC Grant Hood. A shining example. Now there’s one cocky little bastard if ever I saw one. Like I say, something like that’s got to hurt. And what’s happened to you, DS Wylie? You’re stuck halfway up a Scottish mountain, scrabbling around for a reporter—one of the enemy—to put you right.’

  He thought she’d gone, but then heard something which was almost a sigh.

  Oh, you’re good, Stevie boy, he thought to himself. You’ll have the right address some day, and works of art on the walls for people to gawp at …

  ‘Detective Sergeant Wylie?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry if I hit a nerve. But, look, maybe we could meet. I think I might just have a way to help, even if only a little.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Face to face?’

  ‘No.’ The voice hardening. ‘Tell me now.’

  ‘Well …’ Holly angled his head towards the sun. ‘Say this thing you’re working on … it’s confidential, right?’ He took a breath. ‘Don’t answer that. We both know already. But say someone … a journalist, for want of a better example … got hold of this story. People would want to know how he got it, and do you know who they’d look to first?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The liaison officer, Detective Constable Grant Hood. He’s the one with the line to the media. And if a certain journalist—the one in possession of the leak—happened to … well, indicate that his source was not a thousand miles from the liaison officer … I’m sorry, it probably sounds petty to you. You probably don’t want to see DC Hood with a bit of mud on his new starched shirt, or the flak that would head the way of DCS Templer. It’s just that sometimes when I start thinking something, I need to go the whole way. Do you know what I’m saying?’

  'Yes.’

  ‘We could still have that meeting. I’m free all morning. I’ve already told you what you need to know about Mountain Boy, but we could talk anyway … ’

  Rebus had been standing in front of Ellen Wylie’s desk a full half- minute before she seemed to realise he was there. She was staring towards the paperwork in front of her, but Rebus didn’t think she was seeing it. Then Shug Davidson wandered past, slapping Rebus on the back and saying ‘Morning, John’, and Wylie looked up.

  ‘Weekend that bad, was it?’ Rebus asked.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Looking for you, though I’m beginning to wonder why I bothered.’

  She seemed to pull herself together, ran a hand over her head and muttered something approaching an apology.

  ‘So am I right, was it a bad weekend?’

  Davidson was passing again, papers in hand. ‘She was fine till ten minutes ago.’ He stopped. ‘Was it that wanker Holly?’

  ‘No,’ Wylie said.

  ‘Bet it was,’ D
avidson stated, moving off again.

  ‘Steve Holly?’ Rebus guessed.

  Wylie tapped the newspaper story. ‘I had to talk to him.’

  Rebus nodded. ‘Just watch out for him, Ellen.’

  ‘I can handle him, don’t worry.’

  He was still nodding. ‘That’s more like it. Now, do you ‘feel like doing me a favour?’

  ‘Depends what it is.’

  ‘I got the feeling this German student thing would be driving you mental … Is that why you came back to West End?’

  ‘I just thought I might get more work done here.’ She threw her pen down on the desk. ‘Looks like I was wrong.’

  ‘Well, I’m here to offer you a break. I’ve got a couple of interviews to do, and I need a partner.’

  ‘Who are you interviewing?’

  ‘David Costello and his father.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘I thought I’d already explained that.’

  ‘Charity case, am I?’

  Rebus let out a long breath. ‘Jesus, Ellen, you can be hard work sometimes.’

  She looked at her watch. ‘I have a meeting at half-eleven.’

  ‘Me too: doctor’s appointment. But this won’t take long.’ He paused. ‘Look, if you don’t want to … ’

  ‘All right,’ she said. Her shoulders were slumped. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  Too late, Rebus was having second thoughts. It was as if the fight had gone out of her. He thought he knew the reason, but knew also that there was little he could do about it.

  ‘Great,’ he said.

  Reynolds and Davidson were watching from one of the other desks. ‘Look, Shug,’ Reynolds said, ‘it’s the Dynamic Duo!’

  It seemed to take all Ellen Wylie’s effort to lift her from her chair.

  He briefed her in the car. She didn’t ask much, seemed more interested in the passing parade of pedestrians. Rebus left the Saab in hotel parking and walked into the Caledonian, Wylie a couple of steps behind.

  The ‘Caley’ was an Edinburgh institution, a red-stone monolith at the west end of Princes Street. Rebus had no idea what a room cost. He’d eaten in the restaurant once, with his wife and a couple of friends. of hers who were honeymooning in the city. The friends had insisted on putting dinner on their room tab, so Rebus had never known the final figure. He’d been uncomfortable all evening, right in the middle of a case and wanting to get back to it. Rhona knew, too, and excluded him from the conversation by concentrating on reminiscences she shared with her friends. The honeymooners holding hands between courses, and sometimes even while they ate. Rebus and Rhona almost strangers to one another, their marriage faltering …