The Falls

4

On her way into work next morning, Siobhan thought of nothing but Quizmaster. Nobody had called her mobile, so she was thinking up another message to send him. Him or her. She knew she had to keep an open mind, but couldn’t help thinking of Quizmaster as ‘him’. ‘Stricture’, ‘Hellbank’... they seemed masculine to her. And the whole idea of some game being played by computer... it all sounded so blokeish, sad anoraks stuck in their bedrooms. Her first message — Problem. Need to talk to you. Flipside — seemed not to have worked. Today, she was going to end the pretence. She would e-mail him as herself, and explain Flip’s disappearance, asking him to get in touch. She’d kept the mobile phone beside her all night, waking every hour or so and checking to see that she hadn’t slept through a call. But no calls came. Finally, as dawn approached, she’d got dressed and gone for a walk. Her flat was just off Broughton Street, in an area undergoing rapid gentrification: not as pricey as the New Town which it neighboured, but close to the city centre. Half her street seemed to be taken up with skips, and she knew that by mid-morning builders’ vans would be struggling to find a parking space.

She broke the walk with breakfast at an early opener: beans on toast and a mug of tea so strong she feared for tannin poisoning. At the top of Calton Hill, she stopped to watch the city gearing up for another day. Down by Leith, a container ship was sitting off the coast. The Pentland Hills to the south wore their covering of low cloud like a welcoming duvet. There wasn’t much traffic yet on Princes Street: buses and taxis mostly. She liked Edinburgh best at this time of day, before routine set in. The Balmoral Hotel was one of the closest landmarks. She thought back to the party Gill Templer had hosted there... how Gill had talked of having a lot on her plate. Siobhan wondered if she’d meant the case itself or her new promotion. Thing about the promotion was, John Rebus came with it. He was Gill’s problem now rather than the Farmer’s. Word in the office was, John had already got into a spot of bother: found drunk inside the MisPer’s flat. In the past, people had warned Siobhan that she was growing too much like Rebus, picking up his faults as well as his strengths. She didn’t think that was true.

No, that wasn’t true...

Her walk downhill took her on to Waterloo Place. A right turn, she’d be home in five minutes. A left, and she could be at work in ten. She turned left on to North Bridge, kept walking.

St Leonard’s was quiet. The CID suite had a musty smell: too many bodies each day spending too long cooped up there. She opened a couple of windows, made herself a mug of weak coffee, and sat down at her desk. When she checked, there were no messages on Flip’s computer. She decided to keep the line open while she composed her new e-mail. But after only a couple of lines, a message told her she had post. It was from Quizmaster, a simple Good morning. She hit reply and asked, How did you know I was here? The response was immediate.

That’s something Flipside wouldn’t have to ask. Who are you?

Siobhan typed so quickly, she didn’t correct her errors. I’m a police officer, baesd in Edinburgh. We’re investgating Philippa Balfour’s disappearance. She waited a full minute for his reply.

Who?

Flipside, she typed.

She never told me her real name. That’s one of the rules.

The rules of the game? Siobhan typed.

Yes. Did she live in Edinburgh?

She was a student here. Can we talk? You’ve got my mobile number.

Again, the wait seemed interminable.

I prefer this.

Okay, Siobhan typed, can you tell me about Hellbank?

You’d have to play the game. Give me a name to call you.

My name’s Siobhan Clarke. I’m a detective constable with Lothian and Borders Police.

I get the feeling that’s your real name, Siobhan. You’ve broken one of the first rules. How do you pronounce it?

Siobhan could feel the blood rising to her face. It’s not a game, Quizmaster.

But that’s exactly what it is. How do you pronounce your name?

Shi-vawn.

There was a longer pause, and she was about to re-send the message when his response came.

To answer your question, Hellbank is one level of the game.

Flipside was playing a game?

Yes. Stricture is the next level.

What sort of game? Could she have got into trouble?

Later.

Siobhan stared at the word. What do you mean?

We’ll talk later.

I need your cooperation.

Then learn patience. I could shut down right now and you’d never find me, do you accept that?

Yes. Siobhan was about ready to punch the screen.

Later.

Later, she typed.

And that was it. No further messages. He’d gone off-line, or was still there but wouldn’t respond. And all she could do was wait. Or was it? She logged on to the Internet and tried all the search engines she could find, asking them for sites related to Quizmaster and PaganOmerta. She came up with dozens of Quizmasters, but got the feeling none of them was hers. PaganOmerta was a blank, though separating the words gave her hundreds of sites, almost all of them trying to sell her a new-age religion. When she tried PaganOmerta. com there was nothing there. It was an address rather than a site. She made more coffee. The rest of the shift was drifting in. A couple of people said hello, but she wasn’t listening. She’d had another idea. She sat back down at her desk with the phone book and a copy of Yellow Pages, drew her notebook towards her and picked up a pen.

She tried computer retailers first, until finally someone directed her towards a comic shop on South Bridge. To Siobhan, comics meant things like the Beano and Dandy, though she’d once had a boyfriend whose obsession with 2000AD was at least partly responsible for their break-up. But this shop was a revelation. There were thousands of titles, along with sci-fi books, T-shirts and other merchandise. At the counter, a teenage assistant was arguing the merits of John Constantine with two schoolboys. She’d no way of knowing whether Constantine was a comic character or a writer or artist. Eventually the boys noticed her standing right behind them. They stopped being excited, turned back into awkward, gangling twelve-year-olds. Maybe they weren’t used to women listening in. She didn’t suppose they were used to women at all.

‘I heard you talking,’ she said. ‘Thought maybe you could help me with something.’ None of the three said anything. The teenage assistant was rubbing at a patch of acne on his cheek. ‘You ever play games on the Internet?’

‘You mean like Dreamcast?’ She looked blank. ‘It’s Sony,’ the assistant clarified.

‘I mean games where there’s someone in charge, and they contact you by e-mail, set you challenges.’

‘Role-playing.’ One of the schoolboys nodded, looking to the others for confirmation.

‘Have you ever played one?’ Siobhan asked him.

‘No,’ he admitted. None of them had.

‘There’s a games shop about halfway down Leith Walk,’ the assistant said. ‘It’s D & D but they might be able to help.’

‘D & D?’

‘Sword and sorcery, dungeons and dragons.’

‘Does this shop have a name?’ Siobhan asked.

‘Gandalf’s,’ they chorused.

Gandalf’s was a piece of narrow frontage squeezed unpromisingly between a tattoo parlour and a chip shop. Even less promisingly, its filthy window was covered with a metal grille held in place with padlocks. But when she tried the door, it opened, setting off a set of wind chimes hanging just inside. Gandalf’s had obviously been something else — maybe a second-hand bookshop — and a change of use hadn’t been accompanied by any sort of makeover. The shelves held an assortment of board games and playing pieces — the pieces themselves looking like unpainted toy soldiers. Posters on the walls depicted cartoon Armageddons. There were instruction books, their edges curling, and in the centre of the room four chairs and a foldaway table, on which sat a playing-board. There was no sales counter and no till. A door at the back of the shop creaked open and a man in his early fifties appeared. He had a grey beard and ponytail, and a distended stomach clad in a Grateful Dead T-shirt.

‘You look official,’ he said glumly.

‘CID,’ Siobhan said, showing him her warrant card.

‘Rent’s only eight weeks late,’ he grumbled. As he shuffled towards the board, she saw that he was wearing leather open-toed sandals. Like their owner, they had a good few miles on them. He was studying the placement of pieces on the board. ‘You move anything?’ he asked suddenly.

‘No.’

‘You sure?’

‘Sure.’

He smiled. ‘Then Anthony’s fucked, pardon my French.’ He looked at his watch. ‘They’ll be here in an hour.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘The gamers. I had to shut up shop last night before they had a chance to finish. Anthony must’ve been flustered, trying to finish Will off.’

Siobhan looked at the board. She couldn’t see any grand design to the way the playing pieces were arranged. The beardie-weirdie tapped the cards laid out beside the board.

‘These are what matters,’ he said irritably.

‘Oh,’ Siobhan said. ‘Afraid I’m no expert.’

‘You wouldn’t be.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Nothing, I’m sure.’

But she was pretty sure she knew what he meant. This was a private club, males only, and every bit as exclusive as any other bastion.

‘I don’t think you can help me,’ Siobhan admitted, looking around. She was resisting the urge to scratch herself. ‘I’m interested in something slightly more high-tech.’

He bristled at this. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Role-playing by computer.’

‘Interactive?’ His eyes widened. She nodded and he checked his watch again, then shuffled past her to the door and locked it. She went on the defensive, but he merely shuffled past her again on his way to the far door. ‘Down here,’ he said, and Siobhan, feeling a bit like Alice at the mouth of the tunnel, eventually followed.

Down four or five steps, she came into a dank, windowless room, only partially lit. There were boxes piled high — more games and accessories, she guessed — plus a sink with kettle and mugs on the draining-board. But on a table in one corner sat what looked like a state-of-the-art computer, its large screen as thin as a laptop’s. She asked her guide what his name was.

‘Gandalf,’ he blithely replied.

‘I meant your real name.’

‘I know you did. But in here, that is my real name.’ He sat down at the computer and started work, talking as he moved the mouse. It took her a moment to realise that the mouse was cordless.

‘There are lots of games on the Net,’ he was saying. ‘You join a group of people to fight either against the program or against other teams. There are leagues.’ He tapped the screen. ‘See? This is a Doom league.’ He glanced at her. ‘You know what Doom is?’

‘A computer game.’

He nodded. ‘But here, you’re working in cooperation with others and against a common foe.’

Her eyes ran down the team names. ‘How anonymous is it?’ she asked.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, does each player know who his team-mate is, or who’s on the opposing team?’

He stroked his beard. ‘At most, they’d have a nom de guerre.’

Siobhan thought of Philippa, with her secret e-mail name. ‘And people can have lots of names, right?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘You can amass dozens of names. People who’ve spoken to you a hundred times... they come back under a new name, and you don’t realise you already know them.’

‘So they can lie about themselves?’

‘If you want to call it that. This is the virtual world. Nothing’s “real” as such. So people are free to invent virtual lives for themselves.’

‘A case I’m working on, there’s a game involved.’

‘Which game?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s got levels called Hellbank and Stricture. Someone called Quizmaster seems to be in charge.’

He was stroking his beard again. Since sitting at the computer, he’d donned a pair of metal-rimmed glasses. The screen was reflected in the lenses, hiding his eyes. ‘I don’t know it,’ he said at last.

‘What does it sound like to you?’

‘It sounds like SIRPS: Simple Role-Play Scenario. Quizmaster sets tasks or questions, could be to one player or dozens.’

‘You mean teams?’

He shrugged. ‘Hard to know. What’s the website?’

‘I don’t know.’

He looked at her. ‘You don’t know very much, do you?’

‘No,’ she admitted.

He sighed. ‘How serious is the case?’

‘A young woman’s gone missing. She was playing the game.’

‘And you don’t know if the two are connected?’

‘No.’

He rested his hands on his stomach. ‘I’ll ask around,’ he said. ‘See if we can track down Quizmaster for you.’

‘Even if I had an idea what the game involved...’

He nodded, and Siobhan remembered her dialogue with Quizmaster. She’d asked about Hellbank. And his reply?

You’d have to play the game...

She knew that requisitioning a laptop would take time. Even then, it wouldn’t be hooked up to the Net. So on her way back to the station she stopped off at one of the computer shops.

‘Cheapest one we do is around nine hundred quid,’ the saleswoman informed her.

Siobhan flinched. ‘And how long before I could be online?’

The saleswoman shrugged. ‘Depends on your server,’ she said.

So Siobhan thanked her and left. She knew she could always use Philippa Balfour’s computer, but she didn’t want to, for all sorts of reasons. Then she had a brainwave and got on her mobile instead. ‘Grant? It’s Siobhan. I need a favour...’

DC Grant Hood had bought his laptop for the same reason he’d bought a mini-disc player, DVD and digital camera. It was stuff, and stuff was what you bought to impress people. Sure enough, each time he brought a new gadget into St Leonard’s he was the centre of attention for five or ten minutes — or rather, the stuff was. But Siobhan had noticed that Grant was always keen to lend these bits of high-tech to anyone who asked. He didn’t use them himself, or if he did he tired of them after a few weeks. Maybe he never got past the owner’s manuals: the one with the camera had been chunkier than the apparatus itself.

So Grant had been only too happy to make a trip home, returning with the laptop. Siobhan had already explained that she would need to use it for e-mails.

‘It’s up and ready,’ Grant had told her.

‘I’ll need your e-mail address and pass name.’

‘But that means you can access my e-mails,’ he realised.

‘And tell me, Grant, how many e-mails do you get a week?’

‘Some,’ he said, sounding defensive.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll save them for you... and I promise not to peek.’

‘Then there’s the matter of my fee,’ Grant said.

She looked at him. ‘Your fee?’

‘Yet to be discussed.’ His face broke into a grin.

She folded her arms. ‘So what is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he told her. ‘I’ll have to think...’

Transaction complete, she headed back to her desk. She already had a connector which would link her mobile phone to the laptop. But first she checked Philippa’s computer: no messages, nothing from Quizmaster. Getting online with Grant’s machine took her only a few minutes. Once there, she sent a note to Quizmaster, giving him Grant’s e-mail address:

Maybe I want to play the game. Over to you. Siobhan.

Having sent the message, she left the line open. It would cost her a small fortune when her next mobile bill appeared, but she pushed that thought aside. For now, the game itself was the only lead she had. Even if she had no intention of playing, she still wanted to know more about it. She could see Grant, the other side of the room. He was talking to a couple of other officers. They kept glancing in her direction.

Let them, she thought.

Rebus was at Gayfield Square, and nothing was happening. Which was to say, the place was a flurry of activity, but all the sound and fury couldn’t hope to hide a creeping sense of desperation. The ACC himself had put in an appearance and been briefed by both Gill Templer and Bill Pryde. He’d made it plain that what they needed was ‘a swift conclusion’. Both Templer and Pryde had used the phrase a little later, which was how Rebus knew.

‘DI Rebus?’ One of the woolly-suits was standing in front of him. ‘Boss says she’d like a word.’

When he walked in, she told him to close the door. The place was cramped and smelled of other people’s sweat. Space being at a premium, Gill was sharing this space with two other detectives, working in shifts.

‘Maybe we should start commandeering the cells,’ she said, collecting up mugs from the desk and failing to find anywhere better for them. ‘Could hardly be worse than this.’

‘Don’t go to any trouble,’ Rebus said. ‘I’m not staying.’

‘That’s right, you’re not.’ She put the mugs on the floor, and almost immediately kicked one of them over. Ignoring the spill, she sat down. Rebus stayed standing, as was obligatory, there being no other chairs in the room today. ‘How did you get on in Falls?’

‘I came to a swift conclusion.’

She glared at him. ‘Which was?’

‘That it’ll make a good story for the tabloids.’

Gill nodded. ‘I saw something in the evening paper last night.’

‘The woman who found the doll — or says she did — she’s been talking.’

‘“Or says she did”?’

He just shrugged.

‘You think she might be behind it?’

Rebus slipped his hands into his pockets. ‘Who knows?’

‘Someone thinks they might. A friend of mine called Jean Burchill. I think you should talk to her.’

‘Who is she?’

‘She’s a curator at the Museum of Scotland.’

‘And she knows something about this doll?’

‘She might do.’ Gill paused. ‘According to Jean, this is far from the first.’

Rebus admitted to his guide that he’d never been inside the museum before.

‘The old museum, I used to take my daughter there when she was a kid.’

Jean Burchill tutted. ‘But this is quite another thing, Inspector. It’s all about who we are, our history and culture.’

‘No stuffed animals and totem poles?’

She smiled. ‘Not that I can think of.’ They were walking through the ground floor’s exhibit area, having left the huge whitewashed entrance hall behind. They stopped at a small lift, and Burchill turned to face him, her eyes running the length of his body. ‘Gill’s talked about you,’ she said. Then the lift doors opened and she got in, Rebus following.

‘Nothing but good, I hope.’ He tried hard for levity. Burchill just looked at him again and smiled her little smile. Despite her age, she reminded him of a schoolgirl: that mixture of the shy and the knowing, the prim and the curious.

‘Fourth floor,’ she told him, and when the lift doors opened again, they walked out into a narrow corridor filled with shadows and images of death. ‘The section on beliefs,’ she said, her voice barely audible. ‘Witchcraft and grave-robbers and burials.’ A black coach waited to take its next cargo to some Victorian graveyard, while nearby sat a large iron coffin. Rebus couldn’t help reaching out to touch it.

‘It’s a mortsafe,’ she said, then, seeing his lack of comprehension: ‘The families of the deceased would lock the coffin inside a mortsafe for the first six months to deter the resurrectionists.’

‘Meaning body-snatchers?’ Now this was a piece of history he knew. ‘Like Burke and Hare? Digging up corpses and selling them to the university?’

She peered at him like a teacher with a stubborn pupil. ‘Burke and Hare didn’t dig up anything. That’s the whole point of their story: they killed people, then sold the bodies to the anatomists.’

‘Right,’ Rebus said.

They passed funeral weeds, and photos of dead babies, and stopped at the furthest glass case.

‘Here we are,’ Burchill said. ‘The Arthur’s Seat coffins.’

Rebus looked. There were eight coffins in all. They were five or six inches long, well made, with nails studded into their lids. Inside the coffins were little wooden dolls, some wearing clothes. Rebus stared at a green and white check.

‘Hibs fan,’ he said.

‘At one time they were all dressed. But the cloth perished.’ She pointed to a photograph in the case. ‘In eighteen thirty-six, some children playing on Arthur’s Seat found the concealed mouth of a cave. Inside were seventeen little coffins, of which only these eight survive.’

‘They must have got a fright.’ Rebus was staring at the photograph, trying to place where on the massive slopes of the hill it might be.

‘Analysis of the materials suggests they were made in the eighteen thirties.’

Rebus nodded. The information was printed on a series of cards attached to the display. Newspapers of the time suggested that the dolls were used by witches casting death spells on certain individuals. Another popular theory was that they were put there by sailors as good-luck charms prior to sea voyages.

‘Sailors on Arthur’s Seat,’ Rebus mused. ‘Now there’s something you don’t see every day.’

‘Do I detect some homophobic connotation, Inspector?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s just a long way from the docks, that’s all.’

She looked at him, but his face didn’t betray anything.

Rebus was studying the coffins again. Were he a betting man, he’d see short odds on a connection between these objects and the one found in Falls. Whoever had made and placed the coffin by the waterfall knew about the museum exhibit, and had for some reason decided to copy it. Rebus looked around at the various sombre displays of mortality.

‘You put this lot together?’

She nodded.

‘Must make for a popular topic at parties.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ she said quietly. ‘When it comes down to it, aren’t we all curious about the things we fear?’

Downstairs in the old museum, they sat on a bench carved to resemble a whale’s ribcage. There were fish in a water feature nearby, kids almost reaching in to touch them, but then pulling back at the last moment, giggling and squeezing their hands: that mix again of the curious and the fearful.

At the end of the great hall, a huge clock had been erected, its complex mechanism comprising models of skeletons and gargoyles. A naked carving of a woman seemed to be wrapped in barbed wire. Rebus got the feeling there might be other scenes of torture just beyond his vision.

‘Our Millennium Clock,’ Jean Burchill explained. She checked her watch. ‘Ten minutes before it strikes again.’

‘Interesting design,’ Rebus said. ‘A clock full of suffering.’

She looked at him. ‘Not everyone notices straight away...’

Rebus just shrugged. ‘Upstairs,’ he said, ‘the display said something about the dolls connecting to Burke and Hare?’

She nodded. ‘A mock burial for the victims. We think they may have sold as many as seventeen bodies for dissection. It was a horrible crime. You see, a dissected body cannot rise up again on the day of the Last Judgment.’

‘Not without its guts spilling out,’ Rebus agreed.

She ignored him. ‘Burke and Hare were arrested and tried. Hare testified against his friend, and only William Burke went to the gallows. Guess what happened to his body afterwards?’

That was an easy one. ‘Dissection?’ Rebus guessed.

She nodded. ‘His body was taken to Old College, the same route most if not all of his victims were taken, and used by an anatomy class. This was in January eighteen twenty-nine.’

‘And the coffins date from the early eighteen thirties.’ Rebus was thoughtful. Hadn’t someone once boasted to him about owning a souvenir made from Burke’s skin? ‘What happened to the body afterwards?’ he asked.

Jean Burchill looked at him. ‘There’s a pocket-book in the museum at Surgeons’ Hall.’

‘Made from Burke’s skin?’

She nodded again. ‘I feel sorry for Burke actually. He seems to have been a genial man. An economic migrant. Poverty and chance led to his first sale. A visitor to his home died owing money. Burke knew that there was a crisis in Edinburgh, a successful medical faculty with not enough bodies to go round.’

‘Were people living long lives then?’

‘Far from it. But as I told you, a dissected corpse could not enter heaven. The only bodies available to medical students belonged to executed criminals. The Anatomy Act of eighteen thirty-two put an end to the need to rob graves...’

Her voice had died away. She seemed momentarily lost to the present as she considered Edinburgh’s blood-soaked past. Rebus was there with her. Resurrectionists and wallets made of human skin... witchcraft and hangings. Next to the coffins on the fourth floor he’d seen a variety of witch’s accoutrements: configurations of bones; shrivelled animal hearts with nails protruding.

‘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 began 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 chef’s 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.