The Falls (51 page)

‘Copy the clue, do some detecting.’

He laughed. ‘You want me in even more trouble with Carswell?’

She looked down at the sheets of paper. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t thinking. Thanks for the tea.’

‘Stay and finish it.’ He watched her get to her feet.

‘I should be heading back. Lots to do.’

‘Starting with handing that clue over?’

She stared at him. ‘You know your advice is always important to me.’

‘Is that a yes or a no?’

‘Take it as a definite maybe.’

He was standing now, too. ‘Thanks for coming, Siobhan.’

She turned towards the doorway. ‘Linford’s out to get you, isn’t he? Him and Carswell both?’

‘Don’t fret over it.’

‘But Linford’s getting stronger. He’ll be Chief Inspector any day.’

‘For all you know, maybe I’m getting stronger too.’

She turned her head to study him, but didn’t say anything, didn’t need to. He followed her out into the hall, opened the door for her.

She was on the stairwell before she spoke again. ‘Know what Ellen Wylie said after that meeting with Carswell?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing at all.’ She looked at him again, one hand on the banister. ‘Strange that. I was expecting a long speech about your martyr complex …’

Back in the flat, Rebus stood in the hall, listening to her footsteps recede. Then he walked to the living-room window and stood on tiptoe, craning his neck to watch her leave the tenement, the door closing with an echo behind her. She’d come here asking for something, and he’d turned her down. How could he tell her that he didn’t want her getting hurt, the way so many people he’d let get close to him had been hurt in the past? How to tell her that she should learn her own lessons, not his, and that she’d be a better cop – as well as a better person – at the end of it?

He turned back into the room. The ghosts were faint, but visible. People he’d hurt and been hurt by, people who’d died painful, unnecessary deaths. Not for much longer. A couple more weeks and maybe he’d be free of them. He knew the phone wasn’t going to ring, nor was Ellen Wylie about to pay him a visit. They understood one another well enough to render any such contact unnecessary. Maybe one day in the future they’d sit down and talk about it. Then again, maybe she’d never speak to him again. He’d stolen the moment from her, and she had stood there and let him. Defeat once again snatched from the jaws of victory. He wondered if she’d stay in Steve Holly’s pocket … wondered just how deep and dark that pocket might be.

He walked through to the kitchen, poured Siobhan’s and the rest of his tea down the sink. An inch of malt into a clean glass and a bottle of IPA from the cupboard. Back in the living room, he sat in his chair, took pen and notebook from his pocket, and jotted down the latest clue as best he could remember it …

Jean Burchill’s morning had consisted of a series of meetings, including one heated debate on funding levels which threatened to turn violent, with one curator walking out, slamming the door after him, and another almost bursting into tears.

By lunchtime, she felt exhausted, the stuffiness of her office contributing to a thumping head. Steve Holly had left two more messages for her, and she just knew that if she sat at her desk with a sandwich, the phone would ring again. Instead, she headed outside, joining the throng of workers released from captivity for the time it took to queue at the baker’s for a filled roll or pie. The Scots had an unenviable record for heart disease and tooth decay, both the result of the national diet: saturated fats, salt and sugar. She’d wondered what it was that made Scottish people reach for the comfort foods, the chocolate, chips and fizzy drinks: was it the climate? Or could the answer lie deeper, within the nation’s character? Jean decided to buck the trend, purchased some fruit and a carton of orange juice. She was heading into town down the Bridges. It was all cheap clothes shops and takeaways, with queues of buses and lorries waiting to crawl through the traffic lights at the Tron kirk. A few beggars sat in doorways, staring at the passing parade of feet. Jean paused at the lights and looked left and right along the High Street, imagining the place in the days before Princes Street: vendors hawking their wares; ill-lit howffs where business was done; the tollbooth and the gates which were closed at nightfall, locking the city into itself … She wondered if someone from the 1770s, somehow transported to the present, would find this part of the city so very different. The lights, the cars might shock them, but not the
feel
of the place.

She paused again on North Bridge, staring eastwards towards where the new parliament site showed no signs of progress. The
Scotsman
had moved its offices down to a shiny new building in Holyrood Road, just across from the parliament. She’d been there recently for a function, standing on the large balcony to the rear, staring out at the immensity of Salisbury Crags. Behind her now, the old
Scotsman
building was being gutted: another new hotel in the making. Further down North Bridge, where it connected with Princes Street, the old Post Office HQ sat dusty and empty, its future apparently still not decided – another hotel, the rumour went. She took a right into Waterloo Place, munching on her second apple and trying not to think of crisps and Kit-Kats. She knew where she was headed: Calton cemetery. As she entered through the wrought-iron gate, she was confronted by the obelisk known as the Martyrs’ Memorial, dedicated to the memory of five men, the ‘Friends of the People’, who had dared in the 1790s to advocate parliamentary reform. This at a time when fewer than forty people in the city had the power to vote in an election. The five were sentenced to transportation: a one-way ticket to Australia. Jean looked at the apple she was eating. She’d just peeled a little sticker from it, announcing its country of origin as New Zealand. She thought of the five convicts, the lives they must have led. But there was to be no counterpart to the French Revolution in Scotland, not in the 1790s.

She was reminded of some communist leader and thinker – was it Marx himself ? – who had predicted that the revolution in western Europe would have Scotland as its starting-point. Another dream …

Jean didn’t know much about David Hume, but stood in front of his monument while she attacked her carton of juice. Philosopher and essayist … a friend had once told her that Hume’s achievement had been in making the philosophy of John Locke comprehensible, but then she didn’t know anything much about Locke either.

There were other graves: Blackwood and Constable, publishers, and one of the leaders of ‘the Disruption’, which had led to the founding of the Free Church of Scotland. Just to the east, over the cemetery wall, was a small crenellated tower. This she knew was all that remained of the old Calton Prison. She’d seen drawings of it, taken from Calton Hill opposite: friends and family of the prisoners would gather there to shout messages and greetings. Closing her eyes, she could almost replace the traffic noises with yelps and whoops, the dialogue between loved ones echoing back along Waterloo Place …

When she opened her eyes again, she saw what she’d hoped to find: Dr Kennet Lovell’s grave. The headstone had been set into the cemetery’s eastern wall, and was now cracked and soot-blackened, its edges fallen away to reveal the sandstone beneath. It was a small thing, close to the ground. ‘Dr Kennet Anderson Lovell,’ Jean read, ‘an eminent Physician of this City.’ He’d died in 1863, aged fifty-six. There were weeds rising from ground level, obscuring much of the inscription. Jean crouched down and started pulling them away, encountering a used condom which she brushed aside with a dock leaf. She knew that there were people who used Calton Hill at night, and imagined them coupling against this wall, pressing down on the bones of Dr Lovell. How would Lovell feel about that? For a moment, she formed a picture of another coupling: herself and John Rebus. Not her type at all really. In the past she’d dated researchers, university lecturers. One brief dalliance with a sculptor in the city – a married man. He’d taken her to cemeteries, his favourite places. John Rebus probably liked cemeteries, too. When they’d first met she’d seen him as a challenge and a curiosity. Even now she had to work hard not to think of him in terms of an exhibit. There were so many secrets there, so much of him that he refused to show to the world. She knew there was digging still to be done …

As she cleared the weeds, she found that Lovell had married no fewer than three times, and that each wife had passed away before him. No evidence of any children … she wondered if the offspring might be buried elsewhere. Maybe there were no children. But then hadn’t John said something about a descendant … ? As she examined the dates, she saw that the wives had died young, and another thought crossed her mind: they’d died in childbirth, perhaps.

His first wife: Beatrice,
née
Alexander. Aged twenty-nine.

His second wife: Alice,
née
Baxter. Aged thirty-three.

His third wife: Patricia,
née
Addison. Aged twenty-six.

An inscription read:
Passed over, to be met again so sweetly in the Lord’s domain
.

Jean couldn’t help thinking that it must have been some meeting, Lovell and his three wives. She had a pen in her pocket, but no notepad or paper. She looked around the cemetery, found an old envelope, torn in half. She brushed dirt and dust from it and jotted down the details.

Siobhan was back at her desk, trying to form anagrams from the letters in ‘Camus’ and ‘ME Smith’, when Eric Bain came into the office.

‘All right?’ he asked.

‘I’ll survive.’

‘That good, eh?’ He placed his briefcase on the floor, straightened up and looked around. ‘Special Branch get back to us yet?’

‘Not that I know of.’ She was scoring out letters with her pen. The M and E had no space between them. Did Quizmaster mean them to be read as ‘me’? Was he saying his name was Smith? ME was also a medical condition. She couldn’t recall what the letters stood for … remembered it being called ‘yuppie flu’ in the newspapers. Bain had walked over to the fax machine, picked up some sheets and sifted through them.

‘Ever think to check?’ he said, sliding two sheets out and putting the rest back next to the machine.

Siobhan looked up. ‘What is it?’

He was reading as he approached. ‘Bloody marvellous,’ he gasped. ‘Don’t ask me how they did it, but they did it.’

‘What?’

‘They’ve traced one of the accounts already.’

Siobhan’s chair fell back as she got to her feet, hands grabbing at the fax. As Bain relinquished it, he asked her a simple question.

‘Who’s Claire Benzie?’

‘You’re not in custody, Claire,’ Siobhan said, ‘and if you want a solicitor, that’s up to you. But I’d like your permission to make a tape recording.’

‘Sounds serious,’ Claire Benzie said. They’d picked her up at her flat in Bruntsfield, driven her to St Leonard’s. She’d been compliant, not asking questions. She was wearing jeans and a pale pink turtleneck. Her face looked scrubbed, no make-up. She sat in the interview room with arms folded while Bain fed tapes into both recording machines.

‘There’ll be a copy for you, and one for us,’ Siobhan was saying. ‘Okay?’

Benzie just shrugged.

Bain said ‘okey-dokey’ and set both tapes running, then eased himself into the chair next to Siobhan. Siobhan identified herself and Bain for the record, adding time and place of interview.

‘If you could state your full name, Claire,’ she asked.

Claire Benzie did so, adding her Bruntsfield address. Siobhan sat back for a moment, composing herself, then leaned forward again so her elbows were resting on the edge of the narrow desk.

‘Claire, do you remember when I spoke to you earlier? I was with a colleague, in Dr Curt’s office?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘I was asking you if you knew anything about the game Philippa Balfour had been playing?’

‘It’s her funeral tomorrow.’

Siobhan nodded. ‘Do you remember?’

‘Seven fins high is king,’ Benzie said. ‘I told you about it.’

‘That’s right. You said Philippa had come up to you at a bar …’

‘Yes.’

‘… and explained it to you.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t know anything about the game itself ?’

‘No. I hadn’t a clue till you told me.’

Siobhan sat back again, folded her own arms so that she was almost a mirror-image of Benzie. ‘Then how come whoever was sending Flip those messages was using your Internet account?’

Benzie stared at her. Siobhan stared back. Eric Bain scratched his nose with his thumb.

‘I want a solicitor,’ Benzie said.

Siobhan nodded slowly. ‘Interview ends, three-twelve p.m.’ Bain switched off the tapes and Siobhan asked if Claire had anyone in mind.

‘The family solicitor, I suppose,’ the student said.

‘And who’s that?’

‘My father.’ When she saw the puzzled look on Siobhan’s face, the corners of Benzie’s mouth curled upwards. ‘I mean my stepfather, DC Clarke. Don’t worry, I’m not about to summon ghosts to fight my corner …’

News had travelled, and there was a scrum in the corridor when Siobhan came out of the interview room, just as the summoned WPC was going in. Whispered questions flew.

‘Well?’

‘Did she do it?’

‘What’s she saying?’

‘Is it her?’

Siobhan ignored everyone except Gill Templer. ‘She wants a solicitor, and as chance would have it there’s one in her family.’

‘That’s handy.’

Siobhan nodded and squeezed her way into the CID office, unplugging the first free phone she came to.

‘She also wants a soft drink, Diet Pepsi for preference.’

Templer looked around, eyes fixing on George Silvers. ‘Hear that, George?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Silvers seemed reluctant to leave, until Gill shooed him out with her hands.

‘So?’ Gill was now blocking Siobhan’s path.

‘So,’ Siobhan said, ‘she’s got some explaining to do. It doesn’t make her the killer.’

‘Be nice if she was though,’ someone said.

Siobhan was remembering what Rebus had said about Claire Benzie. She met Gill Templer’s gaze. ‘Two or three years from now,’ she said, ‘if she sticks with pathology, we could end up working side by side with her. I don’t think we can afford to be heavy-handed.’ She wasn’t sure if she was copying Rebus’s words verbatim, but she knew she was pretty close. Templer was looking at her appraisingly, nodding slowly.