Ian Rankin: The Falls

‘Old Hi-Ho’s popular today,’ he said, placing the telephone message on Silvers’s desk. ‘What’s the matter?’

She pointed to the bottom of the page. ‘Can you read this signature?’

‘Which one?’ There were two, at the foot of an autopsy report. Date to the side of the signatures: Monday 26 April, 1982 — Hazel Gibbs, the Glasgow ‘victim’. She’d died on the Friday night...

Typed beneath the signature were the words ‘Deputising Pathologist’. The other signature — marked ‘Chief Pathologist, City of Glasgow’ — wasn’t much clearer.

‘I’m not sure,’ Rebus said, examining the squiggle. ‘The names should be typed on the cover-sheet.’

‘That’s just it,’ Wylie said. ‘No cover-sheet.’ She turned back a few pages to confirm this. Rebus came around the desk so he was standing next to her, then bent down a little closer.

‘Maybe the pages got out of order,’ he suggested.

‘Maybe.’ She started going through them. ‘But I don’t think so.’

‘Was it missing when the files arrived?’

‘I don’t know. Professor Devlin didn’t say anything.’

‘I think the Chief Pathologist for Glasgow back then was Ewan Stewart.’

Wylie flicked back to the signatures. ‘Yep,’ she said, ‘I’ll go with that. But it’s the other one that interests me.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, maybe it’s just me, sir, but if you sort of screw your eyes shut a little and take another look, isn’t it just possible it says Donald Devlin?’

‘What?’ Rebus looked, blinked, looked again. ‘Devlin was in Edinburgh back then.’ But his voice dropped off. The word Deputising floated into view. ‘Did you look through the report before?’

‘That was Devlin’s job. I was more like a secretary, remember?’

Rebus put his hand to the back of his neck, rubbed at the knot of muscle there. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Why wouldn’t Devlin say...?’ He grabbed the phone, hit 9 and punched a local number. ‘Professor Gates, please. It’s an emergency. Detective Inspector Rebus here.’ A pause as the secretary put him through. ‘Sandy? Yes, I know I always say it’s an emergency, but this time I might not be stretching the truth. April nineteen eighty-two, we think we’ve got Donald Devlin assisting an autopsy in Glasgow. Is that possible?’ He listened again. ‘No, Sandy, eighty-two. Yes, April.’ He nodded, making eye contact with Wylie, started relaying what he was hearing. ‘Glasgow crisis... shortage of staff... gave you your first chance at being in charge here. Mm-hm, Sandy... is that your way of saying Devlin was in Glasgow in April nineteen eighty-two? Thanks, I’ll talk to you later.’ He slammed the phone down. ‘Donald Devlin was there .’

‘I don’t understand,’ Wylie said. ‘Why didn’t he say something?’

Rebus was flicking through the other report, the one from Nairn. No, neither pathologist was Donald Devlin on that occasion. All the same...

‘He didn’t want us to know,’ he said at last, answering Wylie’s question. ‘Maybe that’s why he removed the cover-sheet.’

‘But why? ’

Rebus was thinking... the way Devlin had returned to the back room of the Ox, anxious to see the autopsies consigned once more to history... the Glasgow coffin, made of balsa wood, cruder than the others, the sort of thing you might make if you didn’t have access to your usual supplier, or your usual tools... Devlin’s interest in Dr Kennet Lovell and the Arthur’s Seat coffins...

Jean!

‘I’m getting a bad feeling,’ Ellen Wylie said.

‘I’ve always been one for trusting a woman’s instincts...’ But that was just what he hadn’t done: all those times women had reacted badly to Devlin... ‘Your car or mine?’ he said.

Jean was rising to her feet. Donald Devlin still filled the doorway, his blue eyes as cold as the North Sea, pupils reduced to black pinpoints.

‘Your tools, Professor Devlin?’ she guessed.

‘Well, they’re not Kennet Lovell’s, dear lady, are they?’

Jean swallowed. ‘I think I’d better be going.’

‘I don’t think I can let you do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I think you know.’

‘Know what?’ She was looking around her, seeing nothing helpful...

‘You know that I left those coffins,’ the old man stated. ‘I can see it in your eyes. No use pretending.’

‘The first one was just after your wife died, wasn’t it? You killed that poor girl in Dunfermline.’

He raised a finger. ‘Untrue: I merely read about her disappearance and went there to leave a marker, a memento mori . There were others after that... God knows what happened to them.’ She watched him take a step forward into the room. ‘It took some time, you see, for my sense of loss to turn into something else.’ The smile trembled on his lips, which glistened with moisture. ‘Anne’s life was just... taken... after whole months of agony. That seemed so unfair: no motive, no one to be found guilty... All those bodies I’d worked on... all the ones after Anne died... eventually I wanted some suffering to go with them.’ His own hands stroked the table’s edge. ‘I should never have let slip about Kennet Lovell... a good historicist would naturally be unable to resist looking into my claim further, finding disturbing parallels between past and present, eh, Miss Burchill? And it was you... the only one who made the connection... all those coffins over all that time...’

Jean had been working hard at controlling her breathing. Now she felt strong enough not to hang on to the table. She released her grip on its edge. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘You were helping the inquiry...’

‘Hindering, rather. And who could resist the opportunity? After all, I was investigating myself , watching others do the same...’

‘You killed Philippa Balfour?’

Devlin’s face creased in disgust. ‘Not a bit of it.’

‘But you left the coffin...?’

‘Of course I didn’t!’ he snapped.

‘Then it’s been five years since you last...’ She sought the right words. ‘Last did anything.’

He’d taken another step towards her. She thought she could hear music, and realised suddenly that it was him . He was humming some tune.

‘You recognise it?’ he asked. The corners of his mouth were flecked white. ‘“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”. The organist played it at Anne’s funeral.’ He bowed his head a little and smiled. ‘Tell me, Miss Burchill: what do you do when the chariot won’t swing low enough?’

She ducked, reached into the cupboard for one of the chisels. Suddenly he had hold of her hair, pulling her back up. She screamed, hands still scrabbling for a weapon. She felt a cool wooden handle. Her head felt like it was on fire. As she lost her balance and started to fall, she stabbed the chisel into his ankle. He didn’t so much as flinch. She stabbed again, but now he was dragging her towards the door. She half rose to her feet and added her momentum to his, the pair of them colliding with the edge of the door, spinning out of the room and into the hall. The chisel had fallen from her grasp. She was on her hands and knees when the first blow came, spinning white lights across her vision. The whorls in the carpet seemed to form a pattern of question marks.

How ridiculous, she thought, that this was happening to her... She knew she had to get back on to her feet, start fighting back. He was an old man... Another blow made her flinch. She could see the chisel... only twelve feet to the front door... Devlin had her by the legs now, hauling her towards the living room... His grasp of her ankles was like a vice. Oh, Christ, she thought. Oh, Christ, oh, Christ... Her hands flailed, seeking purchase, or any instrument she could use... She screamed again. The blood was roaring in her ears; she couldn’t be sure she was making any noise at all. One of Devlin’s braces had come free, and his shirt-tail was hanging out.