Falls

  ‘Fucking your own goddaughter,’ Bill Pryde said disgustedly.

  ‘DI Pryde!’ Gill Templer said by way of warning. Then, to Marr: ‘I apologise for my colleague’s outburst.’

  ‘Apology accepted.’

  ‘It’s just that he has a bit more trouble hiding his revulsion and contempt than I do.’

  Marr almost smiled.

  ‘And as to whether something does or does not have “bearing” on a case is up to us to decide, wouldn’t you say, sir?’

  Colour rose to Marr’s cheeks, but he wasn’t going to take the bait. He shrugged merely, and folded his arms to let them know that, so far as he was concerned, the discussion was now at an end.

  ‘A moment of your time, DI Pryde,’ Gill said, angling her head towards the door. As they stepped out of the room, two uniforms stepped in to stand guard. Officers were already homing in, so Gill pushed Pryde through the door marked ‘Ladies’, and stood with her back against the door to deter the curious.

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  ‘Nice place,’ Pryde said, looking around. He walked over to the washbasin and fished the waste-bin out from beneath, spitting his venerable collection of gum into it and pulling two fresh sticks from their packet.

  ‘They’ve stitched something up between them’ he said at last, admiring his features in the mirror.

  Yes,’ Gill agreed. ‘We should have brought him straight here.’

  ‘Carswell’s blooper,’ Pryde said, ‘yet again.’

  Gill nodded. You think he confessed to Balfour?’

  ‘I think he probably said something. He’s had all night to come up with the right way of saying it: “John, it just happened … it was a long time ago and just the once … I’m so sorry.” Spouses say it all the time.’

  Gill almost smiled. Pryde spoke as if from experience.

  ‘And Balfour didn’t string him up by the balls?’

  Pryde shook his head slowly. ‘The more I hear about John Balfour, the less I like him. Bank’s looking like going down the toilet, house filled with account-holders … his best friend walks up and says, in so many words, that he’s been getting his end away with the daughter, and what does Balfour do? He does a deal.’

  ‘The pair of them keeping quiet, keeping the lid on it?’

  It was Pryde’s turn to nod. ‘Because the alternative is scandal, resignation, public fisticuffs and the collapse of all they hold dearest: namely, cold hard cash.’

  ‘Then we’ll be hard pushed to get anything out of him.’

  Pryde looked at her. ‘Unless we push him really hard.’

  ‘I’m not sure Mr Carswell would like that.’

  ‘With respect, DCS Templer, Mr Carswell couldn’t find his own arse if it didn’t come with a label marked “Insert tongue here.” ’

  ‘That’s not the sort of language I can countenance,’ Gill said with something approaching a grin. The pressure on the door from outside was renewed, and she yelled for whoever was there to stop it.

  ‘I’m desperate!’ a female voice called back.

  ‘Me too,’ Bill Pryde said with a wink, ‘but maybe I should head for the more rudimentary shores of the Gents’.’ As Gill nodded and began to open the door, he took a final, wistful look round. ‘Though it’ll be in my thoughts from now on, believe me. A man could get used to luxury like this …'

  Back in the interview room, Ranald Marr had the look of someone who knew he’d soon be back behind the wheel of his Maserati. Gill, unable to bear such palpable smugness, decided to play her last card.

  'Your affair with Philippa, it lasted quite a while, didn’t it?’

  ‘God, are we back to that again,’ Marr said, rolling his eyes.

  ‘Fairly common knowledge, too. Philippa told Claire Benzie all about it.’

  ‘Is that what Claire Benzie says? I seem to have been here before. That little madam would say anything to hurt Balfour’s.’

  Gill was shaking her head. ‘I don’t think so, because knowing what she did, she could have used it at any time: one call to John Balfour, and she’d have blown the whole secret wide open. She didn’t do that, Mr Marr. I can only assume it’s because Claire has some principles.’

  ‘Or she was biding her time.’

  ‘Maybe so.’

  ‘Is that what this boils down to: my word against hers?’

  ‘There’s the fact that you were keen to explain to Philippa how to erase e-mails.’

  ‘Which I’ve also explained to your officers.’

  'Yes, but now we know the real reason why you did it.’

  Marr tried staring her out, but it wasn’t going to work. He couldn’t know that Gill had interviewed more than a dozen killers in the course of her CID career. She’d been stared at by eyes filled with fire, eyes turned insane. He dropped his gaze and his shoulders slumped.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s one thing …'

  ‘We’re waiting, Mr Marr,’ Bill Pryde said, sitting as straight in his chair as a kirk elder.

  ‘I … didn’t tell the whole truth about the game Flip was involved in.

  'You haven’t told the whole truth about anything,’ Pryde interrupted, but Gill quietened him with a look. Not that it mattered; Marr hadn’t been listening.

  ‘I didn’t know it was a game,’ he was saying, ‘not back then. It was just a question … maybe a crossword clue, that’s what I thought.’

  ‘So she did bring one of the clues to you?’

  Marr nodded. ‘The mason’s dream. She thought I might know what it meant.’

  ‘And why would she think that?’

  He managed the ghost of a smile. ‘She was always overestimating me. She was … I don’t think you’ve been getting anything like the whole picture of the kind of person Flip was. I know what you saw at first: spoilt little rich kid, spending her university days gazing at a few paintings, then graduating and marrying someone with even more money.’ He was shaking his head. ‘That wasn’t Flip at all. Maybe it was one side to her, but she was complex, always capable of surprising you. Like with this puzzle thing, on the one hand I was dumbstruck when I heard about it, but on the other … in many ways it’s so much like Flip. She would take these sudden interests, passions in things. For years, she’d been going to the zoo once a week on her own, just about every week, and I only found out by chance, a few months back. I was leaving a meeting at the Posthouse Hotel and she was coming out of the zoo, practically next door.’ He looked up at them. ‘Do you see?’

  Gill wasn’t at all sure that she did, but she nodded anyway. ‘Go on,’ she said. But it was as though her words had broken the spell. Marr paused for breath, then seemed to lose some of his animation.

  ‘She was … ’ His mouth opened and closed, but soundlessly. Then he shook his head. ‘I’m tired and I want to go home. I have some things I need to talk about with Dorothy.’

  ‘Are you okay to drive?’ Gill asked.

  ‘Perfectly.’ He took a deep breath. But when he looked at her again, tears were welling in his eyes. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, ‘I’ve made such an utter balls-up, haven’t I? And I’d do it again and a gain and again if it meant I had those same moments with her.’

  ‘Rehearsing what you’re going to say to the missus?’ Pryde said coolly. Only then did Gill realise that she alone had been affected by Marr’s story. As if to stress his point, Pryde blew out something approaching a bubble, which popped with an audible clack.

  ‘My God,’ Marr said, almost with a sense of awe, ‘I hope and pray I never grow a skin as thick as yours.’

  'You’re the one shagging his pal’s daughter all these years. Compared to me, Mr Marr, you’re a fucking armadillo.’

  This time, Gill had to draw her colleague from the interview room by his arm.

  Rebus walked through St Leonard’s like the spectre at the feast. The feeling was, between Marr and Claire Benzie, they’d get something. Surely to hell they’d get something.

  ‘Not if you haven’t worked for it,’ Reb
us muttered. Not that anyone was listening. He found the coffins in his drawer, along with some paperwork and a used coffee beaker someone too lazy to find a bin had placed there. Easing himself into the Farmer’s chair, he drew the coffins out and laid them on his desk, pushing aside more paperwork to make room. He could feel a killer slipping through his fingers. Problem was, for Rebus to get a second chance would mean some new victim turning up, and he wasn’t sure he wanted that. The evidence he’d taken home, the notes pinned to his wall—he couldn’t fool himself, it didn’t amount to evidence at all. It was a jumble of coincidence and speculation, a thin gossamer pattern created almost from air, the merest flutter of breath beginning to snap its tensed threads. For all he knew, Betty-Anne Jesperson had eloped with her secret lover, while Hazel Gibbs had staggered drunkenly on the bank of White Cart Water and slipped in, knocking herself unconscious. Maybe Paula Gearing had hidden her depression well, walking into the sea of her own volition. And the schoolgirl Caroline Farmer, could she have started a new life in some English city, far from small-town Scottish teenage blues?

  So what if someone had left coffins nearby? He couldn’t even be sure it was the same person each time; only had the carpenter’s word for it. And with the autopsy evidence, there was no way to prove any crime had been committed at all … not until the Falls coffin. Another break in the pattern: Flip Balfour was the first victim who could definitely be said to have perished at the hands of an attacker.

  He held his head in his hands, felt that if he took them away it might explode. Too many ghosts, too many ifs and buts. Too much pain and grieving, loss and guilt. It was the sort of thing he’d have taken to Conor Leary once upon a night. Now, he didn’t think he had anyone to turn to …

  But it was a male voice which answered Jean’s extension. ‘Sorry,’ the man said, ‘she’s been keeping her head down lately.’

  'You’re busy over there then?’

  ‘Not particularly. Jean’s off on one of her little mystery trips.’

  ‘Oh?’

  The man laughed. ‘I don’t mean a bus tour or anything. She gets these projects going from time to time. They could set off a bomb in the building and Jean would be the last to know.’

  Rebus smiled: the man could have been talking about him. But Jean hadn’t mentioned that she was busy with anything outside her normal work. Not that it was any of his business …

  ‘So what’s she up to this time?’ he asked.

  ‘Mmm, let me see … Burke and Hare, Dr Knox and all that period.’

  ‘The Resurrectionists?’

  ‘Curious term that, don’t you think? I mean, they didn’t do much resurrecting, did they, not as any good Christian would understand it?’

  ‘True enough.’ The man was annoying Rebus; something about his manner, his tone of voice. It even annoyed him that the man was giving information away so easily. He hadn’t even asked who Rebus was. If Steve Holly ever managed to contact this guy, he’d have everything he could possibly want on Jean, probably down to her home address and phone number.

  ‘But she really seemed to be focusing on this doctor who carried out the post-mortem on Burke. What’s his name again … ?’

  Rebus remembered the portrait in Surgeons’ Hall. ‘Kennet Lovell?’ he said.

  ‘That’s right.’ The man seemed slightly put out that Rebus knew. ‘Are you helping Jean? Want me to leave her a message.’

  'You don’t happen to know where she is?’

  ‘She doesn’t always confide in me.’

  Just as well, Rebus felt like saying. Instead he told the man there was no message, and put down the phone. Devlin had told Jean about Kennet Lovell, expounding his theory that Lovell had left the coffins on Arthur’s Seat. Obviously she was following this up. All the same, he wondered why she hadn’t said anything …

  He stared at the desk opposite, the one Wylie had been using. It was piled high with documents. Narrowing his eyes, he rose from his desk and walked over, started lifting piles of paper from the top.

  Right at the bottom were the autopsy notes from Hazel Gibbs and Paula Gearing. He’d meant to send them back. In the back room of the Ox, Professor Deylin had specified that they should be returned. Quite right, too. They weren’t doing anyone any good here, and might be lost forever or mis-filed if allowed to be smothered by the paperwork generated by Flip Balfour’s murder.

  Rebus placed them on his own desk, then cleared all the extraneous paperwork on to the desk one along. The coffins went back into his bottom drawer, all except the one from Falls, which he placed in a Haddow’s carrier bag. Over at the photocopier, he lifted a sheet of A4 from the tray—it was the only place in the whole CID suite you could ever find spare paper. On it he wrote: COULD SOMEONE PLEASE SEND THESE ON AS SPECIFIED, PREFERABLY BY FRIDAY? CHEERS, J.R.

  Looking around, it struck him that although he’d followed Siobhan’s car into the car park, there was no sign of her now.

  ‘Said she was headed down Gayfield Square,’ a colleague explained.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Five minutes ago.’

  While he’d been on the phone, listening to gossip.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, sprinting out to his car.

  There was no quick route to Gayfield Square, so Rebus took a few liberties with traffic lights and junctions. Parking, he couldn’t see her car. But when he dashed indoors, she was standing right there, talking to Grant Hood, who was wearing what looked like another new suit and looking suspiciously tanned.

  ‘Been out in the sun, Grant?’ Rebus asked. ‘Thought that office of yours at the Big House didn’t have so much as a window?’

  Self-consciously, Grant put a hand to his cheek. ‘I might have caught a few rays.’ He made a show of spotting someone across the room. ‘Sorry, got to …’ And he was off.

  ‘Our Grant’s beginning to worry me,’ Rebus said.

  ‘What do you reckon: fake tan or one of those sun bed studios?’

  Rebus shook his head slowly, unable to decide. Glancing back, catching them watching him, Grant butted into another conversation, as if these were the people he’d wanted to speak to. Rebus eased himself up on to a desk.

  ‘Anything happening?’ he asked.

  ‘Ranald Marr’s already been released. All we got out of him was that Flip did ask him about that masonic clue.’

  ‘And his excuse for lying to us …?’

  She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t there, so I can’t say.’ She seemed jumpy.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ She shook her head. ‘Things to do?’ he guessed.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘What?’

  He repeated the question. She fixed her eyes on him. ‘Excuse me, she said, ‘but for an officer under suspension, aren’t you spending an awful lot of time in the office?’

  ‘Something I forgot, I came to retrieve it.’ As the words came out, he realised he had forgotten something: the Falls coffin, still in its carrier bag at St Leonard’s. ‘Is there maybe anything you’ve forgotten, Siobhan?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Forgetting to share your find with the rest of the team.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  'You did find something then? At Francis Finlay’s grave?’

  ‘John …’ Her eyes were avoiding his now. 'You’re off the case.’

  ‘Maybe so. You, on the other hand, are on the case but off your trolley.’

  'You’ve no right to say that.’ She still wasn’t looking at him.

  ‘I think I have.’

  ‘Then prove it.’

  ‘DI Rebus!’ The voice of authority: Cohn Carswell, standing twenty yards away in the doorway. ‘If you’d be so kind as to spare me a moment … ’

  Rebus looked at Siobhan. ‘To be continued,’ he said. Then he got up and left the room. Carswell was waiting for him in Gill Templer’s cramped office. Gill was there too, standing with arms folded. Carswell was already making himself comfortable behind the des
k, eyes showing dismay at the amount of clutter accumulated since his last visit.

  ‘So, DI Rebus, what can we do for you?’ he asked.

  ‘Just something I had to pick up.’

  ‘Nothing contagious, I trust.’ Carswell offered a thin smile.

  ‘That’s a good one, sir,’ Rebus said coidly.

  ‘John,’ Gill interrupted, ‘you’re supposed to be at home.’

  He nodded. ‘It’s hard though, with all these exciting developments.’ His eyes stayed on Carswell. ‘Like warning Marr he was about to be picked up, and now I hear he was allowed ten minutes with John Balfour before we interviewed him. Good calls, sir.’

  ‘Sticks and stones, Rebus,’ Carswell said.

  'You name the time and place.’

  ‘John …’ Gill Templer again. ‘I don’t think this is going to get us anywhere, do you?’

  ‘I want back on the case.

  Carswell just snorted. Rebus turned to Gill.

  ‘Siobhan’s playing a wild card. I think she’s back in touch with Quizmaster, maybe for a meet.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Call it an educated guess.’ He glanced towards Carswell. ‘And before you make some gag about intelligence not being my strong point, let me agree with you. But on this, I think I’m right.’

  ‘He’s sent another clue?’ Gill was hooked.

  ‘At the churchyard this morning.’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘One of the mourners?’

  ‘It could have been left any time. Thing is, Siobhan’s been wanting a meeting.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she’s standing around in the Inquiry Room, just biding her time.’

  Gill nodded slowly. ‘If it was a new clue, she’d be busy trying to work it out … ’

  ‘Hang on, hang on,’ Carswell broke in. ‘How do we know any of this? You saw her pick up some clue?’

  ‘The last one was leading us to a particular grave. She crouched in front of the headstone …'

  ‘And?’

  ‘And that’s when I think she picked up the clue.’

  You didn’t see her do it?’

  ‘She crouched down … ’