Ian Rankin: The Falls

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 again 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,’ Rebus 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 Devlin 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.