Ian Rankin: The Falls

‘I didn’t know the lassie,’ Mrs Jardine said ruefully. ‘Maybe if I got out a bit more I’d have seen her.’

Hawes was staring out of the window. ‘You manage to keep your garden neat,’ she said. This was an understatement: the long, narrow garden, slivers of lawn and flowerbed either side of a meandering path, was immaculate.

‘My gardener,’ Mrs Jardine said.

Hawes studied the notes from the previous interview, then shook her head almost imperceptibly: Silvers and Hood hadn’t mentioned a gardener.

‘Could we have his name, Mrs Jardine?’ Rebus asked, his voice casually polite. Still, the old woman looked at him with concern. Rebus offered her a smile and one of her own drop scones. ‘It’s just that I might need a gardener myself,’ he lied.

The last thing they did was check the cellars. An ancient hot-water tank in one, nothing but mould in the other. They waved Mrs Jardine goodbye and thanked her for her hospitality.

‘All right for some,’ Grant Hood said. He was waiting for them on the pavement, collar up against the rain. ‘So far we’ve not been offered as much as the time of day.’ His partner was Distant Daniels. Rebus nodded a greeting.

‘What’s up, Tommy? Working a double shift?’

Daniels shrugged. ‘Did a swap.’ He tried to suppress a yawn. Hawes was tapping her sheaf of notes.

‘You,’ she told Hood, ‘didn’t do your job.’

‘Eh?’

‘Mrs Jardine has a gardener,’ Rebus explained.

‘We’ll be talking to the bin-men next,’ Hood said.

‘We already have,’ Hawes reminded him. ‘And been through the bins, too.’

The two of them looked to be squaring up. Rebus considered brokering the peace — he was St Leonard’s, same as Hood: he should be sticking up for him — but lit another cigarette instead. Hood’s cheeks had reddened. He was a DC, same rank as Hawes, but she had more years behind her. Sometimes you couldn’t argue with experience, which wasn’t stopping Hood from trying.

‘This isn’t helping Philippa Balfour,’ Distant Daniels said at last, stopping the confab dead.

‘Well said, son,’ Rebus added. It was true: big inquiries could blind you to the single essential truth. You became a tiny cog in the machine, and as such you made demands in order to assure yourself of your importance. The ownership of chairs became an issue, because it was an easy argument, something that could be resolved quickly either way. Unlike the case itself, the case which was growing almost exponentially, making you seem ever smaller, until you lost sight of that single essential truth — what Rebus’s mentor Lawson Geddes had called ‘the SET’ — which was that a person or persons needed your help. A crime had to be solved, the guilty brought to justice: it was good to be reminded sometimes.

They split up amicably in the end, Hood noting the gardener’s details and promising to talk to him. After which there was nothing else to do but start climbing stairs again. They’d spent the best part of half an hour at Mrs Jardine’s; already Hawes’ calculations were unravelling, proving another truism: inquiries ate up time, as if the days went into fast forward and you couldn’t show how the hours had been spent, were hard pressed to explain your exhaustion, knowing only the frustration of something left incomplete.

Two more no-one-homes, and then, on the first landing, the door was opened by a face Rebus recognised but couldn’t place.

‘It’s about Philippa Balfour’s disappearance,’ Hawes was explaining. ‘I believe two of my colleagues spoke to you earlier. This is just by way of a follow-up.’

‘Yes, of course.’ The gloss-black door opened a little wider. The man looked at Rebus and smiled. ‘You’re having trouble placing me, but I remember you.’ The smile widened. ‘You always remember the virgins, don’t you?’

As they were shown down the hall, the man introduced himself as Donald Devlin, and Rebus knew him. The first autopsy Rebus had ever attended as a CID officer, Devlin had done the cutting. He’d been Professor of Forensic Medicine at the university, and the city’s chief pathologist at the time. Sandy Gates had been his assistant. Now, Gates was Professor of Forensic Medicine, with Dr Curt as his ‘junior’. On the walls of the hallway were framed photos of Devlin receiving various prizes and awards.

‘The name’s not coming to me,’ Devlin said, gesturing for the two officers to precede him into a cluttered drawing room.

‘DI Rebus.’

‘It would have been Detective Constable back then?’ Devlin guessed. Rebus nodded.

‘Moving out, sir?’ Hawes asked, looking around her at the profusion of boxes and black bin-liners. Rebus looked too. Tottering towers of paperwork, drawers which had been wrenched from their chests and now threatened to spill mementoes across the carpet. Devlin chuckled. He was a short, portly man, probably in his mid-seventies. His grey cardigan had lost most of its shape and half its buttons, and his charcoal trousers were held up with braces. His face was puffy and red-veined, his eyes small blue dots behind a pair of metal-framed spectacles.

‘In a manner of speaking, I suppose,’ he said, pushing a few strands of hair back into some semblance of order across the expanse of his domed scalp. ‘Let’s just say that if the Grim Reaper is the ne plus ultra of removers, then I’m acting as his unpaid assistant.’

Rebus recalled that Devlin had always spoken like this, never settling for six words where a dozen would do, and tossing the odd spanner into the dictionary. It had been a nightmare trying to take notes while Devlin worked an autopsy.

‘You’re moving into a home?’ Hawes guessed. The old man chuckled again.

‘Not quite ready for the heave-ho yet, alas. No, all I’m doing is dispensing with a few unwanted items, making it easier for those family members who’ll wish to pick over the carcass of my estate after I’ve shuffled off.’

‘Saving them the trouble of throwing it all out?’

Devlin looked at Rebus. ‘A correct and concise summary of affairs,’ he noted approvingly.

Hawes had reached into a box for a leatherbound book. ‘You’re binning all of it?’

‘By no means,’ Devlin tutted. ‘The volume in your hand, for example, an early edition of Donaldson’s anatomical sketches, I intend to offer to the College of Surgeons.’

‘You still see Professor Gates?’ Rebus asked.

‘Oh, Sandy and I enjoy the occasional tincture. He’ll be retiring himself soon enough, I don’t doubt, making way for the young. We fool ourselves that this makes life cyclical, but of course it’s anything but, unless you happen to practise Buddhism.’ He smiled at what he saw as this little joke.

‘Just because you’re a Buddhist doesn’t mean you’ll come back again though, does it?’ Rebus said, delighting the old man further. Rebus was staring at a framed news report on the wall to the right of the fireplace: a murder conviction dated 1957. ‘Your first case?’ he guessed.

‘Actually, yes. A young bride bludgeoned to death by her husband. They were in the city on honeymoon.’

‘Must cheer the place up,’ Hawes commented.

‘My wife thought it macabre too,’ Devlin admitted. ‘After she died, I put it back up.’

‘Well,’ Hawes said, dropping the book back into its box and looking in vain for somewhere to sit, ‘sooner we’re finished, the sooner you can get back to your clear-out.’

‘A pragmatist: good to see.’ Devlin seemed content to let the three of them stand there, in the middle of a large and threadbare Persian carpet, almost afraid to move for fear that a domino effect would ensue.

‘Is there any order, sir?’ Rebus asked. ‘Or can we move a couple of boxes on to the floor?’