The Beat Goes On

I

It was quite some time since a scaffold had been seen in Parliament Square. Quite some time since Edinburgh had witnessed a hanging, too, though digging deeper into history the sight might have been common enough. Detective Inspector John Rebus recalled hearing some saloon-bar story of how criminals, sentenced to hang, would be given the chance to run the distance of the Royal Mile from Parliament Square to Holyrood, a baying crowd hot on their heels. If the criminal reached the Royal Park before he was caught, he would be allowed to remain there, wandering in safety so long as he did not step outside the boundary of the park itself. True or not, the tale conjured up the wonderful image of rogues and vagabonds trapped within the confines of Arthur’s Seat, Salisbury Crags and Whinny Hill. Frankly, Rebus would have preferred the noose.

‘It’s got to be a prank gone wrong, hasn’t it?’

A prank. Edinburgh was full of pranks at this time of year. It was Festival time, when young people, theatrical people, flooded into the city with their enthusiasm and their energy. You couldn’t walk ten paces without someone pressing a handbill upon you or begging you to visit their production. These were the ‘Fringe lunatics’ as Rebus had not very originally, but to his own satisfaction, termed them. They came for two or three or four weeks, mostly from London and they squeezed into damp sleeping-bags on bedsit floors throughout the city, going home much paler, much more tired and almost always the poorer. It was not unusual for the unlucky Fringe shows, those given a venue on the outskirts, those with no review to boast of, starved of publicity and inspiration, for those unfortunate shows to play to single-figure audiences, if not to an audience of a single figure.

Rebus didn’t like Festival time. The streets became clogged, there seemed a despair about all the artistic fervour and, of course, the crime rate rose. Pickpockets loved the festival. Burglars found easy pickings in the overpopulated, underprotected bedsits. And, finding their local pub taken over by the ‘Sassenachs’, the natives were inclined to throw the occasional punch or bottle or chair. Which was why Rebus avoided the city centre during the Festival, skirting around it in his car, using alleyways and half-forgotten routes. Which was why he was so annoyed at having been called here today, to Parliament Square, the heart of the Fringe, to witness a hanging.

‘Got to be a prank,’ he repeated to Detective Constable Brian Holmes. The two men were standing in front of a scaffold, upon which hung the gently swaying body of a young man. The body swayed due to the fresh breeze which was sweeping up the Royal Mile from the direction of Holyrood Park. Rebus thought of the ghosts of the royal park’s inmates. Was the wind of their making? ‘A publicity stunt gone wrong,’ he mused.

‘Apparently not, sir,’ Holmes said. He’d been having a few words with the workmen who were trying to erect a curtain of sorts around the spectacle so as to hide it from the view of the hundreds of inquisitive tourists who had gathered noisily outside the police cordon. Holmes now consulted his notebook, while Rebus, hands in pockets, strolled around the scaffold. It was of fairly ramshackle construction, which hadn’t stopped it doing its job.

‘The body was discovered at four-fifty this morning. We don’t think it had been here long. A patrol car passed this way at around four and they didn’t see anything.’

‘That doesn’t mean much,’ Rebus interrupted in a mutter.

Holmes ignored the remark. ‘The deceased belonged to a Fringe group called Ample Reading Time. They come from the University of Reading, thus the name.’

‘It also makes the acronym ART,’ Rebus commented.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Holmes. His tone told the senior officer that Holmes had already worked this out for himself. Rebus wriggled a little, as though trying to keep warm. In fact, he had a summer cold.

‘How did we discover his identity?’ They were in front of the hanging man now, standing only four or so feet below him. Early twenties, Rebus surmised. A shock of black curly hair.

‘The scaffold has a venue number pinned to it,’ Holmes was saying. ‘A student hall of residence just up the road.’

‘And that’s where the ART show’s playing?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Holmes consulted the bulky Fringe programme which he had been holding behind his notebook. ‘It’s a play of sorts called “Scenes from a Hanging”.’ The two men exchanged a look at this. ‘The blurb,’ Holmes continued, consulting the company’s entry near the front of the programme, ‘promises “thrills, spills and a live hanging on stage”.’

‘A live hanging, eh? Well, you can’t say they didn’t deliver. So, he takes the scaffold from the venue, wheels it out here — I notice it’s on wheels, presumably to make it easier to trundle on and off the stage — and in the middle of the night he hangs himself, without anyone hearing anything or seeing anything.’ Rebus sounded sceptical.

‘Well,’ said Holmes, ‘be honest, sir.’ He was pointing towards and beyond the crowd of onlookers. ‘Does anything look suspicious in Edinburgh at this time of year?’

Rebus followed the direction of the finger and saw that a twelve-foot-high man was enjoying a grandstand view of the spectacle, while somewhere to his right someone was juggling three saucepans high into the air. The stilt-man walked towards the pans, grabbed one from mid-air and set it on his head, waving down to the crowd before moving off. Rebus sighed.

‘I suppose you’re right, Brian. Just this once you may be right.’

A young DC approached, holding a folded piece of paper towards them. ‘We found this in his trousers back-pocket.’

‘Ah,’ said Rebus, ‘the suicide note.’ He plucked the sheet from the DC’s outstretched hand and read it aloud.

“‘Pity it wasn’t Twelfth Night”.’

Holmes peered at the line of type. ‘Is that it?’

‘Short but sweet,’ said Rebus. ‘Twelfth Night. A play by Shakespeare and the end of the Christmas season. I wonder which one he means?’ Rebus refolded the note and slipped it into his pocket. ‘But is it a suicide note or not? It could just be a bog-standard note, a reminder or whatever, couldn’t it? I still think this is a stunt gone wrong.’ He paused to cough. He was standing beside the cobblestone inset of the Heart of Midlothian, and like many a Scot before him, he spat for luck into the centre of the heart-shaped stones. Holmes looked away and found himself gazing into the dead man’s dulled eyes. He turned back as Rebus was fumbling with a handkerchief.

‘Maybe,’ Rebus was saying between blows, ‘we should have a word with the rest of the cast. I don’t suppose they’ll have much to keep them occupied.’ He gestured towards the scaffold. ‘Not until they get back their prop. Besides, we’ve got a job to do, haven’t we?’

II

‘Well, I say we keep going!’ the voice yelled. ‘We’ve got an important piece of work here, a play people should see. If anything, David’s death will bring audiences in. We shouldn’t be pushing them away. We shouldn’t be packing our bags and crawling back south.’

‘You sick bastard.’

Rebus and Holmes entered the makeshift auditorium as the speaker of these last three words threw himself forwards and landed a solid punch against the side of the speech-maker’s face. His glasses flew from his nose and slid along the floor, stopping an inch or two short of Rebus’s scuffed leather shoes. He stooped, picked up the spectacles and moved forward.

The room was of a size, and had an atmosphere, that would have suited a monastery’s dining-hall. It was long and narrow, with a stage constructed along its narrow face and short rows of chairs extending back into the gloom. What windows there were had been blacked-out and the hall’s only natural light came from the open door through which Rebus had just stepped, to the front left of the stage itself.

There were five of them in the room, four men and a woman. All looked to be in their mid- to late-twenties. Rebus handed over the glasses.

‘Not a bad right-hook that,’ he said to the attacker, who was looking with some amazement at his own hand, as though hardly believing it capable of such an action. ‘I’m Inspector Rebus, this is Detective Constable Holmes. And you are?’

They introduced themselves in turn. Sitting on the stage was Pam, who acted. Beside her was Peter Collins, who also acted. On a chair in front of the stage, legs and arms crossed and having obviously enjoyed tremendously the one-sided bout he had just witnessed, sat Marty Jones.

‘I don’t act,’ he said loudly. ‘I just design the set, build the bloody thing, make all the props and work the lights and the music during the play.’

‘So it’s your scaffold then?’ commented Rebus. Marty Jones looked less confident.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I made it a bit too bloody well, didn’t I?’

‘We could just as easily blame the rope manufacturer, Mr Jones,’ Rebus said quietly. His eyes moved to the man with the spectacles, who was nursing a bruised jaw.

‘Charles Collins,’ the man said sulkily. He looked towards where Peter Collins sat on the stage. ‘No relation. I’m the director. I also wrote “Scenes from a Hanging”.’

Rebus nodded. ‘How have the reviews been?’

Marty Jones snorted.

‘Not great,’ Charles Collins admitted. ‘We’ve only had four,’ he went on, knowing if he didn’t say it someone else would. ‘They weren’t exactly complimentary.’

Marty Jones snorted again. Stiffening his chin, as though to take another punch, Collins ignored him.

‘And the audiences?’ Rebus asked, interested.

‘Lousy.’ This from Pam, swinging her legs in front of her as though such news was not only quite acceptable, but somehow humorous as well.

‘Average, I’d say,’ Charles Collins corrected. ‘Going by what other companies have been telling me.’

‘That’s the problem with staging a new play, isn’t it?’ Rebus said knowledgeably, while Holmes stared at him. Rebus was standing in the midst of the group now, as though giving them a preproduction pep talk. ‘Trying to get audiences to watch new work is always a problem. They prefer the classics.’

‘That’s right,’ Charles Collins agreed enthusiastically. ‘That’s what I’ve been telling—’ with a general nod in everyone’s direction, ‘them. The classics are “safe”. That’s why we need to challenge people.’

‘To excite them,’ Rebus continued, ‘to shock them even. Isn’t that right, Mr Collins? To give them a spectacle?’

Charles Collins seemed to see where Rebus’s line, devious though it was, was leading. He shook his head.

‘Well, they got a spectacle all right,’ Rebus went on, all enthusiasm gone from his voice. ‘Thanks to Mr Jones’s scaffold, the people got a shock. Someone was hanged. I think his name’s David, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’ This from the attacker. ‘David Caulfield.’ He looked towards the writer/director. ‘Supposedly a friend of ours. Someone we’ve known for three years. Someone we never thought could...’

‘And you are?’ Rebus was brisk. He didn’t want anyone breaking down just yet, not while there were still questions that needed answers.

‘Hugh Clay.’ The young man smiled bitterly. ‘David always said it sounded like “ukulele”.’

‘And you’re an actor?’

Hugh Clay nodded.

‘And so was David Caulfield?’

Another nod. ‘I mean, we’re not really professionals. We’re students. That’s all. Students with pretensions.’

Something about Hugh Clay’s voice, its tone and its slow rhythms, had made the room darken, so that everyone seemed less animated, more reflective, remembering at last that David Caulfield was truly dead.

‘And what do you think happened to him, Hugh? I mean, how do you think he died?’

Clay seemed puzzled by the question. ‘He killed himself, didn’t he?’

‘Did he?’ Rebus shrugged. ‘We don’t know for certain. The pathologist’s report may give us a better idea.’ Rebus turned to Marty Jones, who was looking less confident all the time. ‘Mr Jones, could David have operated the scaffold by himself?’

‘That’s the way I designed it,’ Jones replied. ‘I mean, David worked it himself every night. During the hanging scene.’

Rebus pondered this. ‘And could someone else have worked the mechanism?’

Jones nodded. ‘No problem. The neck noose we used was a dummy. The real noose was attached around David’s chest, under his arms. He held a cord behind him and at the right moment he pulled the cord, the trapdoor opened and he fell about a yard. It looked pretty bloody realistic. He had to wear padding under his arms to stop bruising.’ He glanced at Charles Collins. ‘It was the best bit of the show.’

‘But,’ said Rebus, ‘the scaffold could easily be rejigged to work properly?’

Jones nodded. ‘All you’d need is a bit of rope. There’s plenty lying around backstage.’

‘And then you could hang yourself? Really hang yourself?’

Jones nodded again.

‘Or someone could hang you,’ said Pam, her eyes wide, voice soft with horror.

Rebus smiled towards her, but seemed to be thinking about something else. In fact, he wasn’t thinking of anything in particular: he was letting them stew in the silence, letting their minds and imaginations work in whatever way they would.

At last, he turned to Charles Collins. ‘Do you think David killed himself?’

Collins shrugged. ‘What else?’

‘Any particular reason why he would commit suicide?’

‘Well,’ Collins looked towards the rest of the company. ‘The show,’ he said. ‘The reviews weren’t very complimentary about David’s performance.’

‘Tell me a little about the play.’

Collins tried not to sound keen as he spoke. Tried, Rebus noticed, but failed. ‘It took me most of this year to write,’ he said. ‘What we have is a prisoner in a South American country, tried and found guilty, sentenced to death. The play opens with him standing on the scaffold, the noose around his neck. Scenes from his life are played out around him, while his own scenes are made up of soliloquies dealing with the larger questions. What I’m asking the audience to do is to ask themselves the same questions he’s asking himself on the scaffold. Only the answers are perhaps more urgent, more important for him, because they’re the last things he’ll ever know.’

Rebus broke in. The whole thing sounded dreadful. ‘And David would be on stage the entire time?’ Collins nodded. ‘And how long was that?’

‘Anywhere between two hours and two and a half—’ with a glance towards the stage, ‘depending on the cast.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Sometimes lines were forgotten, or a scene went missing.’ (Peter and Pam smiled in shared complicity.) ‘Or the pace just went.’

‘“Never have I prayed so ardently for a death to take place”, as one of the reviews put it,’ Hugh Clay supplied. ‘It was a problem of the play. It didn’t have anything to do with David.’

Charles Collins looked ready to protest. Rebus stepped in. ‘But David’s mentions weren’t exactly kind?’ he hinted.

‘No,’ Clay admitted. ‘They said he lacked the necessary gravitas whatever that means.’

‘“Too big a part for too small an actor”,’ interrupted Marty Jones, quoting again.

‘Bad notices then,’ said Rebus. ‘And David Caulfield took them to heart?’

‘David took everything to heart,’ explained Hugh Clay. ‘That was part of the problem.’

‘The other part being that the notices were true,’ sniped Charles Collins. But Clay seemed prepared for this.

‘“Overwritten and messily directed by Charles Collins”,’ he quoted. Another fight seemed to be on the cards. Rebus blew his nose noisily.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Notices were bad, audiences were poor. And you didn’t decide to remedy this situation by staging a little publicity stunt? A stunt that just happened — nobody’s fault necessarily — to go wrong?’

There were shakes of the head, eyes looked to other eyes, seemingly innocent of any such plans.

‘Besides,’ said Marty Jones, ‘you couldn’t hang yourself accidentally on that scaffold. You either had to mean to do it yourself, or else someone had to do it for you.’

More silence. An impasse seemed to have been reached. Rebus collapsed noisily into a chair. ‘All things considered,’ he said with a sigh, ‘you might have been better off sticking to Twelfth Night.’

‘That’s funny,’ Pam said.

‘What is?’

‘That’s the play we did last year,’ she explained. ‘It went down very well, didn’t it?’ She had turned to Peter Collins, who nodded agreement.

‘We got some good reviews for that,’ he said. ‘David was a brilliant Malvolio. He kept the cuttings pinned to his bedroom wall, didn’t he, Hugh?’

Hugh Clay nodded. Rebus had the distinct feeling that Peter Collins was trying to imply something, perhaps that Hugh Clay had seen more of David Caulfield’s bedroom walls than was strictly necessary.

He fumbled in his pocket, extracting the note from below the handkerchief. Brian Holmes, he noticed, was staying very much in the wings, like the minor character in a minor scene. ‘We found a note in David’s pocket,’ Rebus said without preamble. ‘Maybe your success last year explains it.’ He read it out to them. Charles Collins nodded.

‘Yes, that sounds like David all right. Harking back to past glories.’

‘You think that’s what it means?’ Rebus asked conversationally.

Collins nodded. ‘You should know, Inspector, that actors are conceited. The greater the actor, the greater the ego. And David was, I admit, on occasion a very gifted actor.’ He was speechifying again, but Rebus let him go on. Perhaps it was the only way a director could communicate with his cast.

‘It would be just like David to get depressed, suicidal even, by bad notices, and just like him to decide to stage as showy an exit as he could, something to hit the headlines. I happen to think he succeeded splendidly.’

No one seemed about to contradict him on this, not even David Caulfield’s stalwart defender, Hugh Clay. It was Pam who spoke, tears in her eyes at last.

‘I only feel sorry for Marie,’ she said.

Charles Collins nodded. ‘Yes, Marie’s come into her own in “Scenes from a Hanging”.’

‘She means,’ Hugh Clay said through gritted teeth, ‘she feels sorry for Marie because Marie’s lost David, not because Marie can no longer act in your bloody awful play.’

Rebus felt momentary bemusement, but tried not to show it. Marty Jones, however, had seen all.

‘The other member of ART,’ he explained to Rebus. ‘She’s back at the flat. She wanted to be left on her own for a bit.’

‘She’s pretty upset,’ Peter Collins agreed.

Rebus nodded slowly. ‘She and David were...?’

‘Engaged,’ Pam said, the tears falling now, Peter Collins’s arm snaking around her shoulders. ‘They were going to be married after the Fringe was finished.’

Rebus stole a glance towards Holmes, who raised his eyebrows in reply. Just like every good melodrama, the raised eyebrows said. A twist at the end of every bloody act.

III

The flat the group had rented, at what seemed to Rebus considerable expense, was a dowdy but spacious second-floor affair on Morrison Street, just off Lothian Road. Rebus had been to the block before, during the investigation of a housebreaking. That had been years ago, but the only difference in the tenement seemed to be the installation of a communal intercom at the main door. Rebus ignored the entry-phone and pushed at the heavy outside door. As he had guessed, it was unlocked anyway.

‘Bloody students,’ had been one of Rebus’s few voiced comments during the short, curving drive down the back of the Castle towards the Usher Hall and Lothian Road. But then Holmes, driving, had been a student, too, hadn’t he? So Rebus had not expanded on his theme. Now they climbed the steep winding stairwell until they arrived at the second floor. Marty Jones had told them that the name on the door was BLACK. Having robbed the students of an unreasonable rent (though no doubt the going rate), Mr and Mrs Black had departed for a month-long holiday on the proceeds. Rebus had borrowed a key from Jones and used it to let Holmes and himself in. The hall was long, narrow and darker than the stairwell. Off it were three bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and the living-room. A young woman, not quite out of her teens, came out of the kitchen carrying a mug of coffee. She was wearing a long baggy T-shirt and nothing else, and there was a sleepy, tousled look to her, accompanying the red streakiness of her eyes.

‘Oh,’ she said, startled. Rebus was quick to respond.

‘Inspector Rebus, miss. This is Detective Constable Holmes. One of your friends lent us a key. Could we have a word?’

‘About David?’ Her eyes were huge, doe-like, her face small and round. Her hair was short and fair, the body slender and brittle. Even in grief — perhaps especially in grief — she was mightily attractive, and Holmes raised his eyebrows again as she led them into the living-room.

Two sleeping bags lay on the floor, along with paperback books, an alarm clock, mugs of tea. Off the living-room was a box-room, a large walk-in cupboard. These were often used by students to make an extra room in a temporary flat and light coming from the half-open door told Rebus that this was still its function. Marie went into the room and switched off the light, before joining the two policemen.

‘It’s Pam’s room,’ she explained. ‘She said I could lie down there. I didn’t want to sleep in our... in my room.’

‘Of course,’ Rebus said, all understanding and sympathy.

‘Of course,’ Holmes repeated. She signalled for them to sit, so they did, sinking into a sofa the consistency of marshmallow. Rebus feared he wouldn’t be able to rise again without help and struggled to keep himself upright. Marie meantime had settled, legs beneath her, with enviable poise on the room’s only chair. She placed her mug on the floor, then had a thought.

‘Would you like...?’

A shake of the head from both men. It struck Rebus that there was something about her voice. Holmes beat him to it.

‘Are you French?’

She smiled a pale smile, then nodded towards the Detective Constable. ‘From Bordeaux. Do you know it?’

‘Only by the reputation of its wine.’

Rebus blew his nose again, though pulling the hankie from his pocket had been a struggle. Holmes took the hint and closed his mouth. ‘Now then, Miss...?’ Rebus began.

‘Hivert, Marie Hivert.’

Rebus nodded slowly, playing with the hankie rather than trying to replace it in his pocket. ‘We’re told that you were engaged to Mr Caulfield.’

Her voice was almost a whisper. ‘Yes. Not officially, you understand. But there was — a promise.’

‘I see. And when was this promise made?’

‘Oh, I’m not sure exactly. March, April. Yes, early April I think. Springtime.’

‘And how were things between David and yourself?’ She seemed not quite to understand. ‘I mean,’ said Rebus, ‘how did David seem to you?’

She shrugged. ‘David was David. He could be—’ she raised her eyes to the ceiling, seeking words, ‘impossible, nervous, exciting, foul-tempered.’ She smiled. ‘But mostly exciting.’

‘Not suicidal?’

She gave this serious thought. ‘Oh yes, I suppose,’ she admitted. ‘Suicidal, just as actors can be. He took criticism to heart. He was a perfectionist.’

‘How long had you known him?’

‘Two years. I met him through the theatre group.’

‘And you fell in love?’

She smiled again. ‘Not at first. There was a certain... competitiveness between us, you might say. It helped our acting. I’m not sure it helped our relationship altogether. But we survived.’ Realising what she had said, she grew silent, her eyes dimming. A hand went to her forehead as, head bowed, she tried to collect herself.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, collapsing into sobs. Holmes raised his eyebrows: someone should be here with her. Rebus shrugged back: she can handle it on her own. Holmes’s eyebrows remained raised: can she? Rebus looked back at the tiny figure, engulfed by the armchair. Could actors always tell the real world from the illusory?

We survived. It was an interesting phrase to have used. But then she was an interesting young woman.

She went to the bathroom to splash water on her face and while she was gone Rebus took the opportunity to rise awkwardly to his feet. He looked back at the sofa.

‘Bloody thing,’ he said. Holmes just smiled.

When she returned, composed once more, Rebus asked if David Caulfield might have left a note somewhere. She shrugged. He asked if she minded them having a quick look round. She shook her head. So, never men to refuse a gift, Rebus and Holmes began looking.

The set-up was fairly straightforward. Pam slept in the box-room, while Marty Jones and Hugh Clay had sleeping-bags on the living-room floor. Marie and David Caulfield had shared the largest of the three bedrooms, with Charles and Peter Collins having a single room each. Charles Collins’s room was obsessively tidy, its narrow single bed made up for the night and on the quilt an acting-copy of ‘Scenes from a Hanging’, covered in marginalia and with several long speeches, all Caulfield’s, seemingly excised. A pencil lay on the typescript, evidence that Charles Collins was taking the critics’ view to heart himself and attempting to shorten the play as best he could.

Peter Collins’s room was much more to Rebus’s personal taste, though Holmes wrinkled his nose at the used underwear underfoot, the contents of the hastily unpacked rucksack scattered over every surface. Beside the unmade bed, next to an overflowing ashtray, lay another copy of the play. Rebus flipped through it. Closing it, his attention was caught by some doodlings on the inside cover. Crude heart shapes had been constructed around the words ‘I love Edinburgh’. His smile was quickly erased when Holmes held the ashtray towards him.

‘Not exactly Silk Cut,’ Holmes was saying. Rebus looked. The butts in the ashtrays were made up of cigarette papers wrapped around curled strips of cardboard. They were called ‘roaches’ by those who smoked dope, though he couldn’t remember why. He made a tutting sound.

‘And what were we doing in here when we found these?’ he asked. Holmes nodded, knowing the truth: they probably couldn’t charge Peter Collins even if they’d wanted to, since there was no reason for their being in his room. We were looking for someone else’s suicide note probably wouldn’t impress a latter-day jury.

The double room shared by Marie Hivert and David Caulfield was messiest of all. Marie helped them sift through a few of Caulfield’s things. His diary proved a dead end, since he had started it faithfully on 1st January but the entries ceased on 8th January. Rebus, having tried keeping a diary himself, knew the feeling.

But in the back of the diary were newspaper clippings, detailing Caulfield’s triumph in the previous year’s Twelfth Night. Marie, too, had come in for some praise as Viola, but the glory had been Malvolio’s. She wept again a little as she read through the reviews. Holmes said that he’d make another cup of coffee. Did he want her to fetch Pam from the theatre? She shook her head. She’d be all right. She promised she would.

While Marie sat on the bed and Holmes filled the kettle, Rebus wandered back into the living-room. He peered into the box-room, but saw little there to interest him. Finally, he came back to the sleeping-bags on the floor. Marie was coming back into the room as he bent to pick up the paperback book from beside one sleeping-bag. It was Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Rebus had a hardback copy at home, still unopened. Something fell from the back of the book, a piece of card. Rebus retrieved it from the floor. It was a photograph of Marie, standing on the Castle ramparts with the Scott Monument behind her. The wind blew her hair fiercely against her face and she was attempting to sweep the hair out of her eyes as she grinned towards the camera. Rebus handed the picture to her.

‘Your hair was longer then,’ he said.

She smiled and nodded, her eyes still moist. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That was in June. We came to look at the venue.’

He waved the book at her. ‘Who’s the Tom Wolfe fan?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s doing the rounds. I think Marty’s reading it just now.’ Rebus flipped through the book again, his eyes lingering a moment on the inside cover. ‘Tom Wolfe’s had quite a career,’ he said before placing the book, face down as it had been, beside the sleeping-bag. He pointed towards the photograph. ‘Shall I put it back?’ But she shook her head.

‘It was David’s,’ she said. ‘I think I’d like to keep it.’

Rebus smiled an avuncular smile. ‘Of course,’ he said. Then he remembered something. ‘David’s parents. Have you been in touch at all?’

She shook her head, horror growing within her. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘they’ll be devastated. David was very close to his mother and father.’

‘Well,’ said Rebus, ‘give me the details and I’ll phone them when I get back to the station.’

She frowned. ‘But I don’t... No, sorry,’ she said, ‘all I know is that they live in Croydon.’

‘Well, never mind,’ said Rebus, knowing, in fact, that the parents had already been notified, but interested that Caulfield’s apparent fiancée should know their address only vaguely. If David Caulfield had been so close to his mother and father, wouldn’t they have been told of the engagement? And once told, wouldn’t they have wanted to meet Marie? Rebus’s knowledge of English geography wasn’t exactly Mastermind material, but he was fairly sure that Reading and Croydon weren’t at what you would call opposite ends of the country.

Interesting, all very interesting. Holmes came in carrying three mugs of coffee, but Rebus shook his head, suddenly the brisk senior officer.

‘No time for that, Holmes,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of work waiting for us back at the station.’ Then, to Marie: ‘Take care of yourself, Miss Hivert. If there’s anything we can do, don’t hesitate.’

Her smile was winning. ‘Thank you, Inspector.’ She turned to Holmes, taking a mug from him. ‘And thank you, too, constable,’ she said. The look on Holmes’s face kept Rebus grinning all the way back to the station.

IV

There the grin promptly vanished. There was a message marked URGENT from the police pathologist asking Rebus to call him. Rebus pressed the seven digits on his new-fangled telephone. The thing had a twenty-number memory and somewhere in that memory was the single-digit number that would connect him with the pathologist, but Rebus could never remember which number was which and he kept losing the sheet of paper with all the memory numbers on it.

‘It’s four,’ Holmes reminded him, just as he’d come to the end of dialling. He was throwing Holmes a kind of half-scowl when the pathologist himself answered.

‘Oh, yes, Rebus. Hello there. It’s about this hanging victim of yours. I’ve had a look at him. Manual strangulation, I’d say.’

‘Yes?’ Rebus, his thoughts on Marie Hivert, was waiting for some punch-line.

‘I don’t think you understand me, Inspector. Manual strangulation. From the Latin manus, meaning the hand. From the deep body temperature, I’d say he died between midnight and two in the morning. He was strung up on that contraption some time thereafter. Bruising around the throat is definitely consistent with thumb-pressure especially.’

‘You mean someone strangled him?’ Rebus said, really for Holmes’s benefit.

‘I think that’s what I’ve been telling you, yes. If I find out anything more, I’ll let you know.’

‘Are the forensics people with you?’

‘I’ve contacted the lab. They’re sending someone over with some bags, but to be honest, we started off on this one thinking it was simple suicide. We may have inadvertently destroyed the tinier scraps of evidence.’

‘Not to worry,’ Rebus said, a father-confessor now, easing guilt. ‘Just get what you can.’

He put down the receiver and stared at his Detective Constable. Or, rather, stared through him. Holmes knew that there were times for talking and times for silence, and that this fell into the latter category. It took Rebus a full minute to snap out of his reverie.

‘Well I’ll be buggered,’ he said. ‘We’ve been talking with a murderer this morning, Brian. A cold-blooded one at that. And we didn’t even know it. I wonder whatever happened to the famous police “nose” for a villain. Any idea?’

Holmes frowned. ‘About what happened to the famous police “nose”?’

‘No,’ cried Rebus, exasperated. ‘I mean, any idea who did it?’

Holmes shrugged, then brought the Fringe programme back out from where it had been rolled up in his jacket pocket. He started turning pages. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘there’s an Agatha Christie playing somewhere. Maybe we could get a few ideas?’

Rebus’s eyes lit up. He snatched the programme from Holmes’s hands. ‘Never mind Agatha Christie,’ he said, starting through the programme himself. ‘What we want is Shakespeare.’

‘What, Macbeth? Hamlet? King Lear?’

‘No, not a tragedy, a good comedy, something to cheer the soul. Ah, here we go.’ He stabbed the open page with his finger. ‘Twelfth Night. That’s the play for us, Brian. That’s the very play for us.’

The problem, really, in the end was: which Twelfth Night? There were three on offer, plus another at the Festival proper. One of the Fringe versions offered an update to gangster Chicago, another played with an all-female cast and the third boasted futuristic stage-design. But Rebus wanted traditional fare, and so opted for the Festival performance. There was just one hitch: it was a complete sell-out.

Not that Rebus considered this a hitch. He waited while Holmes called his girlfriend, Nell Stapleton, and apologised to her about some evening engagement he was breaking, then the two men drove to the Lyceum, tucked in behind the Usher Hall so as to be almost invisible to the naked eye.

‘There’s a five o’clock performance,’ Rebus explained. ‘We should just make it.’ They did. There was a slight hold-up while Rebus explained to the house manager that this really was police business and not some last-minute culture beano, and a place was found for them in a dusty corner to the rear of the stalls. The lights were dimming as they entered.

‘I haven’t been to a play in years,’ Rebus said to Holmes, excited at the prospect. Holmes, bemused, smiled back, but his superior’s eyes were already on the stage, where the curtain was rising, a guitar was playing and a man in pale pink tights lay across an ornate bench, looking as cheesed off with life as Holmes himself felt. Why did Rebus always have to work from instinct, and always alone, never letting anyone in on whatever he knew or thought he knew? Was it because he was afraid of failure? Holmes suspected it was. If you kept your ideas to yourself, you couldn’t be proved wrong. Well, Holmes had his own ideas about this case, though he was damned if he’d let Rebus in on them.

‘If music be the food of love...’ came the voice from the stage. And that was another thing — Holmes was starving. It was odds-on the back few rows would soon find his growling stomach competition for the noises from the stage.

‘Will you go hunt, my lord?’

‘What, Curio?’

‘The hart.’

‘Why, so I do, the noblest that I have...’

Holmes sneaked a glance towards Rebus. To say the older man’s attention was rapt would have been understating the case. He’d give it until the end of Act One, then sneak out to the nearest chip shop. Leave Rebus to his Shakespeare; Holmes was a nationalist when it came to literature. A pity Hugh MacDiarmid had never written a play.

In fact, Holmes went for a wander, up and down Lothian Road as far as the Caledonian Hotel to the north and Tollcross to the south. Lothian Road was Edinburgh’s fast-food centre and the variety on offer brought with it indecision. Pizza, burgers, kebabs, Chinese, baked potatoes, more burgers, more pizza and the once-ubiquitous fish and chip shop (more often now an offshoot of a kebab or burger restaurant). Undecided, he grew hungrier, and stopped for a pint of lager in a noisy barn of a pub before finally settling for a fish supper, naming himself a nationalist in cuisine as well as in writing.

By the time he returned to the theatre, the players were coming out to take their applause. Rebus was clapping as loudly as anyone, enjoyment evident on his face. But when the curtain came down, he turned and dragged Holmes from the auditorium, back into the foyer and out onto the street.

‘Fish and chips, eh?’ he said. ‘Now there’s an idea.’

‘How did you know?’

‘I can smell the vinegar coming off your hands. Where’s the chippie?’

Holmes nodded in the direction of Tollcross. They started walking. ‘So did you learn anything?’ Holmes asked. ‘From the play, I mean?’

Rebus smiled. ‘More than I’d hoped for, Brian. If you’d been paying attention, you’d have noticed it, too. The only speech that mattered was way back in Act One. A speech made by the Fool, whose name is Feste. I wonder who played Feste in ART’s production last year? Actually, I think I can guess. Come on then, where’s this chip shop? A man could starve to death on Lothian Road looking for something even remotely edible.’

‘It’s just off Tollcross. It’s nothing very special.’

‘So long as it fills me up, Brian. We’ve got a long evening ahead of us.’

‘Oh?’

Rebus nodded vigorously. ‘Hunting the heart, Brian.’ He winked towards the younger man. ‘Hunting the heart.’

V

The door of the Morrison Street flat was opened by Peter Collins. He looked surprised to see them.

‘Don’t worry, Peter,’ Rebus said, pushing past him into the hall. ‘We’re not here to put the cuffs on you for possession.’ He sniffed the air in the hall, then tutted. ‘Already? At this rate you’ll be stoned before News at Ten.’

Peter blushed.

‘All right if we come in?’ Rebus asked, already sauntering down the hall towards the living-room. Holmes followed him indoors, smiling an apology. Peter closed the door behind them.

‘They’re mostly out,’ Peter called.

‘So I see,’ said Rebus, in the living-room now. ‘Hello, Marie, how are you feeling?’

‘Hello again, Inspector. I’m a little better.’ She was dressed, and seated primly on the chair, hands resting on her knees. Rebus looked towards the sofa, but thought better of sitting down. Instead he rested himself on the sofa’s fairly rigid arm. ‘I see you’re all getting ready to go.’ He nodded towards the two rucksacks parked against the living-room wall. The sleeping-bags from the floor had been folded away, as had books and alarm clocks.

‘Why bother to stay?’ Peter said. He flopped onto the sofa and pushed a hand through his hair. ‘We thought we’d drive down through the night. Be back in Reading by dawn with any luck.’

Rebus nodded at this. ‘So the show does not go on?’

‘It’d be a bit bloody heartless, don’t you think?’ This from Peter Collins, with a glance towards Marie.

‘Of course,’ Rebus agreed. Holmes had stationed himself between the living-room door and the rucksacks. ‘So where is everyone?’

Marie answered. ‘Pam and Marty have gone for a last walk around.’

‘And Charles is almost certainly off getting drunk somewhere,’ added Collins. ‘Rueing his failed show.’

‘And Hugh?’ asked Rebus. Collins shrugged.

‘I think,’ Marie said, ‘Hugh went off to get drunk, too.’

‘But for different reasons, no doubt,’ Rebus speculated.

‘He was David’s best friend,’ she answered quietly.

Rebus nodded thoughtfully. ‘Actually, we just bumped into him — literally.’

‘Who?’ asked Peter.

‘Mr Clay. He seems to be in the middle of a pub crawl the length of Lothian Road. We were coming out of a chip shop and came across him weaving his way to the next watering-hole.’

‘Oh?’ Collins didn’t sound particularly interested.

‘I told him where the best pubs in this neighbourhood are. He didn’t seem to know.’

‘That was good of you,’ Collins said, voice heavy with irony.

‘Nice of them all to leave you alone, isn’t it though?’

The question hung in the air. At last, Marie spoke. ‘What do you mean?’

But Rebus shifted on his perch and left the comment at that. ‘No,’ he said instead, ‘only I thought Mr Clay might have had a better idea of the pubs, seeing how he was here last year, and then again in June to look at the venue. But of course, as he was good enough to explain, he wasn’t here in June. There were exams. Some people had to study harder than others. Only three of you came to Edinburgh in June.’ Rebus raised a finger shiny with chip-fat. ‘Pam, who has what I’d call a definite crush on you, Peter.’ Collins smiled at this, but weakly. Rebus raised a second and then third finger. ‘And you two. Just the three of you. That, I presume, is where it started.’

‘What?’ The blood had drained from Marie’s face, making her somehow more beautiful than ever. Rebus shifted again, seeming to ignore her question.

‘It doesn’t really matter who took that photo of you, the one I found in Bonfire of the Vanities.’ He was staring at her quite evenly now. ‘What matters is that it was there. And on the inside cover someone had drawn a couple of hearts, very similar to some I happened to see on Peter’s copy of the play. It matters that on his copy of the play, Peter has also written the words “I love Edinburgh”.’ Peter Collins was ready to protest, but Rebus studiously ignored him, keeping his eyes on Marie’s, fixing her, so that there might only have been the two of them in the room.

‘You told me,’ he continued, ‘that you’d come to Edinburgh to check on the venue. I took that “you” to mean all of you, but Hugh Clay has put me right on that. You came without David, who was too busy studying to make the trip. And you told me something else earlier. You said your relationship with him had “survived”. Survived what? I asked myself afterwards. The answer seems pretty straightforward. Survived a brief fling, a fling that started in Edinburgh and lasted the summer.’

Now, only now, did he turn to Peter Collins. ‘Isn’t that right, Peter?’

Collins, his face mottled with anger, made to rise.

‘Sit down,’ Rebus ordered, standing himself. He walked towards the fireplace, turned and faced Collins, who looked to be disappearing into the sofa, reducing in size with the passing moments. ‘You love Edinburgh,’ he went on, ‘because that’s where your little fling with Marie started. Fair enough, these things are never anyone’s fault, are they? You managed to keep it fairly secret. The Tom Wolfe book belongs to you, though, and that photo you’d kept in it — maybe forgetting it was there — that photo might have been a giveaway, but then again it could all be very innocent, couldn’t it?

‘But it’s hard to keep something like that so secret when you’re part of a very small group. There were sixteen of you in ART last year; that might have made it manageable. But not when there were only seven of you. I’m not sure who else knows about it. But I am sure that David Caulfield found out.’ Rebus didn’t need to turn round to know that Marie was sobbing again. He kept staring at Peter Collins. ‘He found out, and last night, late and backstage, perhaps drunk, the two of you had a fight. Quite dramatic in its way, isn’t it? Fighting over the heroine and all that. But during the fight you just happened to strangle the life out of David Caulfield.’ He paused, waiting for a denial which didn’t come.

‘Perhaps,’ he continued, ‘Marie wanted to go to the police. I don’t know. But if she did, you persuaded her not to. Instead, you came up with something more dramatic. You’d make it look like suicide. And by God, what a suicide, the kind that David himself might just have attempted.’ Rebus had been moving forward without seeming to, so that now he stood directly over Peter Collins.

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘very dramatic. But the note was a mistake. It was a bit too clever, you see. You thought everyone would take it as a reference to David’s success in last year’s production, but you knew yourself that there was a double meaning in it. I’ve just been to see Twelfth Night. Bloody good it was, too. You played Feste last year, didn’t you, Peter? There’s one speech of his... how does it go?’ Rebus seemed to be trying to remember. ‘Ah yes: “Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.” Yes, that’s it. And that’s when I knew for sure.’

Peter Collins was smiling thinly. He gazed past Rebus towards Marie, his eyes full and liquid. His voice when he spoke was tender. ‘“Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage; and for turning away, let summer bear it out.”’

‘That’s right,’ Rebus said, nodding eagerly. ‘Summer bore it out, all right. A summer fling. That’s all. Not worth killing someone for, was it, Peter? But that didn’t stop you. And the hanging was so apt, so neat. When you recalled the Fool’s quote, you couldn’t resist putting that note in David’s pocket.’ Rebus was shaking his head. ‘More fool you, Mr Collins. More fool you.’

Brian Holmes went home from the police station that night in sombre mood. The traffic was slow, too, with theatre-goers threading in and out between the near-stationary cars. He rolled down the driver’s-side window, trying to make the interior less stuffy, less choked, and instead let in exhaust fumes and balmy late-evening air. Why did Rebus have to be such a clever bugger so much of the time? He seemed always to go into a case at an odd angle, like someone cutting a paper shape which, apparently random, could then be folded to make an origami sculpture, intricate and recognisable.

‘Too clever for his own good,’ he said to himself. But what he meant was that his superior was too clever for Holmes’s own good. How was he expected to shine, to be noticed, to push forwards towards promotion, when it was always Rebus who, two steps ahead, came up with the answers? He remembered a boy at school who had always beaten Holmes in every subject save History. Yet Holmes had gone to university; the boy to work on his father’s farm. Things could change, couldn’t they? Though all he seemed to be learning from Rebus was how to keep your thoughts to yourself, how to be devious, how to, well, how to act. Though all this were true, he would still be the best understudy he possibly could be. One day, Rebus wouldn’t be there to come up with the answers, or — occasion even more to be relished — would be unable to find the answers. And when that time came, Holmes would be ready to take the stage. He felt ready right now, but then he supposed every understudy must feel that way.

A flybill was thrown through his window by a smiling teenage girl. He heard her pass down the line of cars, yelling ‘Come and see our show!’ as she went. The small yellow sheet of paper fluttered onto the passenger seat and stayed there, face up, to haunt Holmes all the way back to Nell. Growing sombre again, it occurred to him how different things might have been if only Priestley had called the play A Detective Constable Calls instead.