Falls

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Some place this, eh?’

  He meant Edinburgh, but she considered her surroundings. ‘Ever since I was a child,’ she said, ‘I’ve felt more at peace here than anywhere else in the city. You might think my work morbid, Inspector, but fewer would be reconciled to the work you do.’

  ‘Fair shout,’ he agreed.

  ‘The coffins interest me because they are such a mystery. In a museum, we live by the rules of identification and classification. Dates and provenance may be uncertain, but we almost always know what we’re dealing with: a casket, a key, the remains of a Roman burial site.’

  ‘But with the coffins, you can’t be sure what they mean.’

  She smiled. ‘Exactly. That makes them frustrating for a curator.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ he said. ‘It’s like me with a case. If it can’t be solved, it nips my head.’

  'You keep mulling it over … coming up with new theories …'

  ‘Or new suspects, yes.’

  Now they looked at one another. ‘Maybe we’ve more in common than I thought,’ Jean Burchill said.

  ‘Maybe we have,’ he admitted.

  The clock had begun to sound, though its minute hand had yet to reach twelve. Visitors were summoned to it, the children’s mouths falling open as the various mechanisms brought the garish figures to life. Bells clanged and ominous organ music started playing. The pendulum was a polished mirror. Looking at it, Rebus caught glimpses of himself, and behind him the whole museum, each spectator captured.

  ‘Worth a closer look,’ Jean Burchill told him. They got up and IIbegan to move forwards, joining the congregation. Rebus thought he recognised wooden carvings of Hitler and Stalin. They were operating a jagged-toothed saw.

  ’There’s something else,’ Jean Burchill was saying. ‘There’ve been other dolls, other places.’

  ‘What?’ He tore his eyes away from the clock.

  ‘Best thing is if I send you what I’ve got … ’

  Rebus spent the rest of that Friday waiting for his shift to end. Photos of David Costello’s garage had been placed on one of the walls, joining the haphazard jigsaw there. His MG was a dark-blue soft-top. The forensic boffins hadn’t had permission to remove traces from the vehicle and its tyres, but that hadn’t stopped them taking a good look. The car hadn’t been washed of late. If it had been, they’d have been asking David Costello why. More photos of Philippa’s friends and acquaintances had been gathered and shown to Professor Devlin. A couple of prints of the boyfriend had been slipped in, which had caused Devlin to complain about ‘tactics beneath contempt’.

  Five days since that Sunday night, five days since she’d disappeared. The more Rebus stared at the jigsaw on the wall, the less he saw. He thought again of the Millennium Clock, which was just the opposite: the more he’d looked at it, the more he’d seen- small figures suddenly picked out from the moving whole. He saw it now as a monument to the lost and forgotten. In its way, the wall display—the photos, faxes, rotas and drawings—comprised a monument too. But eventually, whatever happened, this monument would be dismantled and relegated to some box in a storeroom somewhere, its life limited to the length of the search.

  He’d been here before: other times, other cases, not all of them solved to anyone’s satisfaction. You tried not to care, tried to maintain objectivity, just as the training seminars told you to, but it was hard. The Farmer still remembered a young boy from his first week on the force, and Rebus had his memories, too. Which was why, at day’s end, he went home, showered and changed, and sat in his chair for an hour with a glass of Laphroaig and the Rolling Stones for company: Beggars Banquet tonight, and more than one glass of Laphroaig actually. Carpets from the hall and bedrooms were rolled up either side of him. Mattresses and wardrobes, chests of drawers … the room was like a scrapyard. But there was a clear path from the door to his chair, and from his chair to the hi-fi, and that was all he needed.

  After the Stones, he still had half a glass of malt to finish, so put on another album. Bob Dylan’s Desire, and the track ‘Hurricane’, a tale of injustice and wrongful accusation. He knew it happened: sometimes wilfully, sometimes by accident. He’d worked cases where the evidence seemed to be pointing conclusively to an individual, only for someone else to come forward and confess. And in the past—the distant past—maybe one or two criminals had been ‘fitted up’, to get them off the street, or to satisfy the public’s need for a conviction. There were times when you were sure you knew who the culprit was, but were never going to be able to prove it to the Procurator Fiscal’s satisfaction. One or two cops down the years had crossed the line.

  He toasted them, catching his reflection in the living-room window. So he raised a toast to himself, too, then picked up the phone and called for a cab.

  Destination: pubs.

  In the Oxford Bar, he got talking to one of the regulars, happened to mention his trip to Falls.

  ‘I’d never heard of it before,’ he confided.

  ‘Oh aye,’ his companion stated, ‘I know Falls. Isn’t that where Wee Billy comes from?’

  Wee Billy was another regular. A search confirmed that he wasn’t in the bar as yet, but he walked in twenty minutes later, still wearing his chefs uniform from a restaurant around the corner. He wiped sweat from his eyes as he squeezed up to the bar.

  ‘That you done?’ someone asked him.

  ‘Fag break,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘Pint of lager, please, Margaret.’

  As the barmaid poured, Rebus asked for a refill and said that both drinks were on him.

  ‘Cheers, John,’ Billy said, unused to such largesse. ‘How’s tricks?’

  ‘I was out at Falls yesterday. Is it right you grew up there?’

  ‘Aye, that’s right. Haven’t been back in years, mind.’

  You didn’t know the Balfours then?’

  Billy shook his head. ‘After my time. I was already in college when they moved back. Thanks, Margaret.’ He lifted the pint. Your health, John.’

  Rebus handed the cash over and raised his own pint, watching Billy demolish half the drink in three needy gulps.

  ‘Jesus, that’s better.’

  ‘Hard shift?’ Rebus guessed.

  ‘No more so than usual. You working the Balfour case then?’

  ‘Along with every other cop in the city.’

  ‘What did you reckon to Falls?’

  ‘Not big.’

  Billy smiled, reached into his pocket for cigarette papers and tobacco. ‘Expect it’s changed a bit since I lived there.’

  ‘Were you a Meadowside boy?’

  ‘How did you know?’ Billy lit his roll-up.

  ‘A lucky guess.’

  ‘Mining stock, that’s me. Grandad worked all his days down the pit. Dad started off the same, but they made him redundant.’

  ‘I grew up in a mining town myself,’ Rebus said.

  ‘Then you’ll know what it’s like when the pits close. Meadowside was fine until then.’ Billy was staring at the optics, remembering his youth.

  ‘The place is still there,’ Rebus told him.

  ‘Oh aye, but not the same … couldn’t be the same. All the mums out scrubbing their steps, getting them whiter than white. Dads cutting the grass. Always popping into the other semis for a gossip or a loan of something.’ He paused, ordered them up a couple of refills. ‘Last I heard, Falls was all yuppies. Anything out of Meadowside’s too dear for the locals to buy. Kids grow up and move away—like I did. Anyone say anything to you about the quarry?’

  Rebus shook his head, content to listen.

  ‘This was maybe two, three years back. There was talk of opening a quarry just outside the village. Plenty of jobs, all that. But suddenly this petition appeared—not that anyone on Meadowside had signed it, or been asked to sign it, come to that. Next thing, the quarry wasn’t coming.’

  ‘The yuppies?’

  ‘Or whatever you want to call them. Plenty of clout, see. Maybe Mr Balfour had a hand in
it too, for all I know. Falls …’ He shook his head. ‘It’s not the place it was, John.’ He finished his roll-up and stubbed it into the ashtray. Then he thought of something. ‘Here, you like your music, don’t you?’

  ‘Depends what kind.’

  ‘Lou Reed. He’s coming to the Playhouse. I’ve two tickets going spare.

  ‘I'll think about it, Billy. Got time for another?’ He nodded towards the dregs in Billy’s glass.

  The chef checked his watch again. ‘Got to get back. Maybe next time, eh?’

  ‘Next time,’ Rebus agreed.

  ‘And let me know about those tickets.’

  Rebus’ nodded, watched Billy push his way back towards the door and out into the night. Lou Reed: there was a name from the past. ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, one of Rebus’s all-time favourites. And a bass-line played by the same guy who wrote ‘Grandad’ for that Dad’s Army actor. Sometimes there was such a thing as too much information.

  ‘Another, John?’ the barmaid asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I can hear the call of the wild side,’ he said, pushing off from his stool and towards the door.

  5

  Saturday he went to the football with Siobhan. Easter Road was bathed in sunshine, the players throwing long shadows across the pitch. For a while, Rebus found himself following this shadow-play rather than the game its~f: black puppet shapes, not quite human, playing something that wasn’t quite football. The ground was full, as only happened with local derbies and when Glasgow came to town. Today it was Rangers. Siobhan had a season ticket. Rebus was in the seat next to her, thanks to another season ticket-holder who couldn’t make it.

  ‘Friend of yours?’ Rebus asked her.

  ‘Bumped into him once or twice in the pub after the match.’

  ‘Nice guy?’

  ‘Nice family guy.’ She laughed. ‘When are you going to stop trying to marry me off?’

  ‘I was only asking,’ he said with a grin. He’d noticed that TV cameras were covering the game. They would concentrate on the players, the spectators a background blur or piece of half-time filler. But it was the fans who really interested Rebus. He wondered what stories they could tell, what lives they’d led. He wasn’t alone: around him other spectators seemed equally interested in the antics of the crowd rather than anything happening on the pitch. But Siobhan, knuckles white as she clenched either end of her supporter’s scarf, brought the same concentration to the game as she did to police work, yelling out advice to the players, arguing each refereeing decision with fans nearby. The man on Rebus’s other side was equally fevered. He was overweight, red-faced and sweating. To Rebus’s eyes, he seemed on the verge of a coronary. He’d mutter to himself the noise growing in intensity until there was a final defiant hurl of abuse, after which he’d look around, smile sheepishly, and begin the whole process again.

  ‘Easy… take it easy, son,’ he was now telling one of the players.

  ’Anything happening your end of the case?’ Rebus asked Siobhan.

  'Day off, John.’ Her eyes never left the pitch.

  ‘I know, I was just asking …'

  ‘Easy now … go on, son, on you go.' The sweating man was gripping the back of the seat in front of him.

  ’We can have a drink after,’ Siobhan said.

  'Try and stop me,’ Rebus told her.

  ‘That’s it, son, that’s the way!’ The voice growing the way a wave would. Rebus took out another cigarette. The day might be bright, but it wasn’t warm. The wind was whipping in from the North Sea, the gulls overhead working hard to stay airborne.

  ‘Go on now!’ the man was yelling. ‘Go on! Get right into that fat Hun bastard!’

  Then the look around, the sheepish grin. Rebus got his cigarette lit at last and offered one to the man, who shook his head.

  ‘It relieves stress, you know, the shouting.’

  ‘Might relieve yours, pal,’ Rebus said, but anything after that was drowned out as Siobhan joined a few thousand others in rising up to scream their reasoned and objective judgement concerning some infringement Rebus—along with the referee—had missed.

  Her usual pub was heaving. Even so, people were still piling in. Rebus took one look and suggested somewhere else. ‘It’s a five- minute walk, and it’s got to be quieter.’

  ‘Okay then,’ she said, but her tone was one of disappointment. The after-match drink was a time for analysis, and she knew Rebus’s abilities in this field were somewhat lacking.

  ‘And tuck that scarf away,’ he ordered. ‘Never know where you’ll bump into a blue-nose.’

  ‘Not down here,’ she said confidently. She was probably right. The police presence outside the stadium had been large and knowledgeable, channelling Hibs fans down Easter Road while the visitors from Glasgow were dispatched back up the hill towards the bus and railway stations. Siobhan followed Rebus as he cut through Lorne Street and came out on Leith Walk, where weary shoppers were struggling home. The pub he had in mind was an anonymous affair with bevelled windows and an oxblood carpet pocked with cigarette burns and blackened gum. Game-show applause crackled from the TV, while two old-timers carried out a swearing competition in the corner.

  'You sure know how to treat a lady,’ Siobhan complained.

  ‘And would the lady like a Bacardi Breezer? Maybe a Moscow Mule.’

  ‘Pint of lager,’ Siobhan said defiantly. Rebus ordered himself a pint of Eighty with a malt on the side. As they took their seats, Siobhan told him he seemed to know every bad pub in the city.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said without a trace of irony. ‘So,’ he lifted his glass, ‘what’s the news on Philippa Balfour’s computer?’

  ‘There’s a game she was playing. I don’t know much about it. It’s run by someone called Quizmaster. I’ve made contact with him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And,’ she sighed, ‘I’m waiting for him to get back to me. So far I’ve sent a dozen e-mails and no joy.’

  ‘Any other way we can track him down?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘What about the game?’

  ‘I don’t know the first thing about it,’ she admitted, attacking her drink. ‘Gill’s beginning to think it’s a dead end. She’s got me interviewing students instead.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve been to college.’

  ‘I know. If Gill’s got a flaw, it’s that she’s literal-minded.’

  ‘She speaks very highly of you,’ Rebus said archly, gaining him a punch on the arm.

  Siobhan’s face changed as she picked up her glass again. ‘She offered me the liaison post.’

  ‘I thought she might. Are you going to take it?’ He watched her shake her head. ‘Because of what happened to Ellen Wylie?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Then why?’

  She shrugged. ‘Not ready for it, maybe.’

  'You’re ready,’ he stated.

  ’It’s not real police work though, is it?’

  ‘What it is, Siobhan, is a step up.’

  She looked down at her drink. ‘I know.’

  ‘Who’s doing the job meantime?’

  ‘I think Gill is.’ She paused. ‘We’re going to find Flip’s body, aren’t we?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  She looked at him. 'You think she’s still alive?’

  ‘No,’ he said bleakly, ‘I don’t.’

  88 from the TV, while two old-timers carried out a swearing competition in the corner.

  That night he hit a few more bars, sticking close to home at first, then hailing a taxi outside Swany’s and asking to be taken to Young Street. He made to light up but the driver asked him not to, and he noticed the No Smoking signs.

  Some detective I am, he told himself. He’d spent as much time as possible away from the flat. The rewiring had come to a halt Friday at five o’clock with half the floorboards still up and runs of cable straggling everywhere. Skirting-boards had been uprooted, exposing the bare wall behind. The sparkies had left their tool
s—‘be safe enough here’, they’d quipped, knowing his profession. They’d said they might manage Saturday morning, but they hadn’t. So that was him for the weekend, stumbling over lengths of wire and every second floorboard either missing or loose. He’d eaten breakfast in a cafe, lunch in a pub, and was now harbouring lubricious thoughts of a haggis supper with a smoked sausage on the side. But first, the Oxford Bar.

  He’d asked Siobhan what her own plans were.

  ‘A hot bath and a good book,’ she’d told him. She’d been lying. He knew this because Grant Hood had told half the station he was taking her on a date, his reward for lending her his laptop. Not that Rebus had said anything to her: if she didn’t want him to know, that was fair enough. But knowing, he hadn’t bothered trying to tempt her with an Indian meal or a film. Only when they were parting outside the pub on Leith Walk had it struck him that maybe this had been bad manners on his part. Two people with no apparent plans for Saturday night: wouldn’t it have been natural for him to ask her out? Would she now be offended?

  ‘Life’s too short,’ he told himself, paying off the taxi. Heading into the pub, seeing the familiar faces, those words stayed with him. He asked Harry the barman for the phone book.

  ‘It’s over there,’ Harry answered, obliging as ever.

  Rebus flipped through but couldn’t find the number he wanted. Then he remembered she’d given him her business card. He found it in his pocket. Her home number had been added in pencil. He stepped back outdoors again and fired up his mobile. No wedding ring, he was sure of that … The phone was ringing. Saturday night, she was probably …

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Ms Burchill? It’s John Rebus here. Sorry to call you on a Saturday night.’

  ‘That’s all right. Is something the matter?’

  ‘No, no … I just wondered if maybe we could meet. It was all very mysterious, what you said about there being other dolls.’

  She laughed. You want to meet now?’

  ‘Well, I was thinking maybe tomorrow. I know it’s the day of rest and all, but we could maybe mix business with pleasure.’ He winced as the words came out. He should have thought it all through first: what he was going to say, how he was going to say it.