by Ian Rankin
He rose from the desk and studied the paperwork now pinned to the wall behind him. Duty rosters, faxes, lists of contact numbers and addresses. Two photos of the missing woman. One of them had been released to the press, and it was duplicated in a dozen news stories, clipped and displayed. Soon, if she wasn’t found safe and well, space would be at a premium on the wall, and those news stories would be discarded. They were repetitious, inaccurate, sensationalised. Rebus lingered on one phrase: the tragic boyfriend. He checked his watch: five hours until the news conference.
With Gill Templer promoted, they were down a DCI at St Leonard’s. Detective Inspector Bill Pryde wanted the job, and was trying to stamp his authority on the Balfour case. Rebus, newly arrived at the Gayfield Square incident room, could only stand and marvel. Pryde had smartened himself up—the suit looked brand new, the shirt laundered, the tie expensive. The black brogues were immaculately polished and, if Rebus wasn’t mistaken, Pryde had been to the barber’s, too. Not that there was too much to trim, but Pryde had made the effort. He’d been put in charge of assignments, which meant putting teams out on the street for the daily drudgery of doorsteppings and interviews. Neighbours were being questioned—sometimes for the second or third time—as were friends, students and university staff. Flights and ferry crossings were being checked, the official photograph faxed to train operators, bus companies and police forces outwith the Lothian and Borders area. It would be someone’s job to collate information on fresh corpses throughout Scotland, while another team would focus on hospital admissions. Then there were the city’s taxi and car hire firms … It all took time and effort. These comprised the public face of the inquiry, but behind the scenes other questions would be asked of the MisPer’s immediate family and circle of friends. Rebus doubted the background checks would amount to anything, not this time round.
At last, Pryde finished giving instructions to the group of officers around him. As they melted away, he caught sight of Rebus and gave a huge wink, rubbing his hand over his forehead as he approached.
‘Got to be careful,’ Rebus said. ‘Power corrupts, and all that.’
‘Forgive me,’ Pryde said, dropping his voice, ‘but I’m getting a real buzz.’
‘That’s because you can do it, Bill. It’s just taken the Big House twenty years to recognise the fact.’
Pryde nodded. ‘Rumour is, you turned down DCI a while back.’
Rebus snorted. ‘Rumours, Bill. Like the Fleetwood Mac album, best left unplayed.’
The room was a choreography of movement, each participant now working on his or her allotted task. Some were donning coats, picking up keys and notebooks. Others rolled their sleeves as they got comfortable at their computers or telephones. New chairs had appeared from some darkened corner of the budget. Pale-blue swivel jobs: those who’d managed to grab one were on the defensive, sliding across the floor on castors rather than getting up to walk, lest someone else snatch the prized possession in the interim.
‘We’re done with babysitting the boyfriend,’ Pryde said. ‘Orders from the new boss.’
‘I heard.’
‘Pressure from the family,’ Pryde added.
‘Won’t do any harm to the operation budget,’ Rebus commented, straightening up. ‘So is there work for me today, Bill?’
Pryde flicked through the sheets of paper on his clipboard. ‘Thirty-seven phone calls from the public,’ he said.
Rebus held up his hands. ‘Don’t look at me. Cranks and desperadoes are for the L-plates, surely?’
Pryde smiled. ‘Already allocated,’ he admitted, nodding towards where two DCs, recently promoted out of uniform, were looking dismayed at the workload. Cold calls constituted the most thankless task around. Any high-profile case threw up its share of fake confessions and false leads. Some people craved attention, even if it meant becoming a suspect in a police investigation. Rebus knew of several such offenders in Edinburgh.
‘Craw Shand?’ he guessed.
Pryde tapped the sheet of paper. ‘Three times so far, ready to admit to the murder.’
‘Bring him in,’ Rebus said. ‘It’s the only way to get rid of him.’
Pryde brought his free hand to the knot in his tie, as if checking for defects. ‘Neighbours?’ he suggested.
Rebus nodded. ‘Neighbours it is,’ he said.
He gathered together the notes from initial interviews. Other officers had been assigned the far side of the street, leaving Rebus and three others—working teams of two—to cover the flats either side of Philippa Balfour’s. Thirty-five in total, three of them empty, leaving thirty-two. Sixteen addresses per team, maybe fifteen minutes at each … four hours total.
Rebus’s partner for the day, DC Phyllida Hawes, had done the arithmetic for him as they climbed the steps of the first tenement. Actually, Rebus wasn’t sure you could call them ‘tenements’, not down in the New Town, with its wealth of Georgian architecture, its art galleries and antique emporia. He asked Hawes for advice.
‘Blocks of flats?’ she suggested, raising a smile. There were one or two flats per landing, some adorned with brass nameplates, others ceramic. A few went so low as to boast just a piece of sellotaped card or paper.
‘Not sure the Cockburn Association would approve,’ Hawes remarked.
Three or four names listed on the bit of card: students, Rebus guessed, from backgrounds less generous than Philippa Balfour’s.
The landings themselves were bright and cared for: welcome mats and tubs of flowers. Hanging baskets had been placed over banisters. The walls looked newly painted, the stairs swept. The first stairwell went like clockwork: two flats with nobody home, cards dropped through either letterbox; fifteen minutes in each of the other flats—just a few back-up questions … see if you’ve thought of anything to add … ' The householders had shaken their heads, had professed themselves still shocked. Such a quiet little street.
There was a main door flat at ground level, a much grander affair, with a black-and-white-chequered marble entrance hall, Doric columns either side. The occupier was renting it long term, worked in ‘the financial sector’. Rebus saw a pattern emerging: graphic designer; training consultant; events organiser … and now the financial sector.
‘Does no one have real jobs any more?’ he asked Hawes.
‘These are the real jobs,’ she told him. They were back on the pavement, Rebus enjoying a cigarette. He noticed her staring at it.
‘Want one?’
She shook her head. ‘Three years I’ve managed so far.’
‘Good for you.’ Rebus looked up and down the street. ‘If this was a net curtain kind of place, they’d be twitching right now.’
‘If they had net curtains, you wouldn’t be able to peer in and see what you’re missing.’
Rebus held the smoke, let it billow out through his nostrils. ‘See, when I was younger, there was always something rakish about the New Town. Kaftans and wacky baccy, parties and ne’er-do-wells.’
‘Not much space left for them these days,’ Hawes agreed. ‘Where do you live?’
‘Marchmont,’ he told her. 'You?’
‘Livingston. It was all I could afford at the time.’
‘Bought mine years back, two wages coming in … ’
She looked at him. ‘No need to apologise.’
‘Prices weren’t as crazy back then, that’s all I meant.’ He was trying not to sound defensive. It was that meeting with Gill: the little joke she’d made, just to unsettle him. And the way his visit to Costello had KO’d the surveillance . .. Maybe it was time to talk to someone about the drinking … He flicked the stub of his cigarette on to the roadway. The surface was made of shiny rectangular stones called setts. When he’d first arrived in the city he’d made the mistake of calling them cobbles; a local had put him right.
‘Next call,’ he said now, ‘if we’re offered tea, we take it.’
Hawes nodded. She was in her late thirties or early forties, hair brown and shoulder-length. Her face wa
s freckled and fleshed-out, as though she’d never quite lost her puppy fat. Grey trouser-suit and an emerald blouse, pinned at the neck with a silver Celtic brooch. Rebus could imagine her at a ceilidh, being spun during Strip the Willow, her face bearing the same concentration she brought to her work.
Below the main door flat, down a curving set of external steps, was the ‘garden flat’, so called because the garden at the back of the building came with it. At the front, the stone slabs were covered in more tubs of flowers. There were two windows, with two more at ground level—the place boasted a sub-basement. A pair of wooden doors were set into the wall opposite the entrance. They would lead into cellars beneath the pavement. Though they would have been checked before, Rebus tried opening them both, but they were locked. Hawes checked her notes.
‘Grant Hood and George Silvers got there before you,’ she said.
‘But were the doors locked or unlocked?’
‘I unlocked them,’ a voice called out. They turned to see an elderly woman standing just inside the flat’s front door. ‘Would you like the keys?’
'Yes please, madam,’ Phyllida Hawes said. When the woman had turned back into the flat, she turned to Rebus and made a T shape with the index finger of either hand. Rebus held both his thumbs up in reply.
Mrs Jardine’s flat was a chintz museum, a home for china waifs and strays. The throw which covered the back of her sofa must have taken weeks to crochet. She apologised for the array of tin cans and metal pots which all but covered the floor of her conservatory ‘never seem to get round to fixing the roof. Rebus had suggested they take their tea there: every time he turned round in the living room he feared he was about to send some ornament flying. When the rain started, however, their conversation was punctuated by drips and dollops, and the splashes from the pot nearest Rebus threatened to give him the same sort of soaking he’d have had outside.
‘I didn’t know the lassie,’ Mrs Jardine said ruefully. ‘Maybe if I got out a bit more I’d have seen her.’
Hawes was staring out of the window. 'You manage to keep your garden neat,’ she said. This was an understatement: the long narrow garden, slivers of lawn and flowerbed either side of a meandering path, was immaculate.
‘My gardener,’ Mrs Jardine said.
Hawes studied the notes from the previous interview, then shook her head almost imperceptibly: Silvers and Hood hadn’t mentioned a gardener.
‘Could we have his name, Mrs Jardine?’ Rebus asked, his voice casually polite. Still, the old woman looked at him with concern. Rebus offered her a smile and one of her own drop scones. ‘It’s just that I might need a gardener myself,’ he lied.
The last thing they did was check the cellars. An ancient hot- water tank in one, nothing but mould in the other. They waved Mrs Jardine goodbye and thanked her for her hospitality.
‘All right for some,’ Grant Hood said. He was waiting for them on the pavement, collar up against the rain. ‘So far we’ve not been offered as much as the time of day.’ His partner was Distant Daniels. Rebus nodded a greeting.
‘What’s up, Tommy? Working a double shift?’
Daniels shrugged. ‘Did a swap.’ He tried to suppress a yawn. Hawes was tapping her sheaf of notes.
‘You,’ she told Hood, ‘didn’t do your job.’
‘Eh?’
‘Mrs Jardine has a gardener,’ Rebus explained.
‘We’ll be talking to the bin-men next,’ Hood said.
‘We already have,’ Hawes reminded him. ‘And been through the bins, too.’
The two of them looked to be squaring up. Rebus considered brokering the peace—he was St Leonard’s, same as Hood: he should be sticking up for him—but lit another cigarette instead. Hood’s cheeks had reddened. He was a DC, same rank as Hawes, but she had more years behind her. Sometimes you couldn’t argue with experience, which wasn’t stopping Hood from trying.
‘This isn’t helping Philippa Balfour,’ Distant Daniels said at last, stopping the confab dead.
‘Well said, son,’ Rebus added. It was true: big inquiries could blind you to the single essential truth. You became a tiny cog in the machine, and as such you made demands in order to assure yourself of your importance. The ownership of chairs became an issue, because it was an easy argument, something that could be resolved quickly either way. Unlike the case itself, the case which was growing almost exponentially, making you seem ever smaller, until you lost sight of that single essential truth—what Rebus’s mentor Lawson Geddes had called ‘the SET’—which was that a person or persons needed your help. A crime had to be solved, the guilty brought to justice: it was good to be reminded sometimes.
They split up amicably in the end, Hood noting the gardener 5 details and promising to talk to him. After which there was nothing else to do but start climbing stairs again. They’d spent the best part of half an hour at Mrs Jardine’s; already Hawes’ calculations were unravelling, proving another truism: inquiries ate up time, as if the days went into fast forward and you couldn’t show how the hours had been spent, were hard pressed to explain your exhaustion, knowing only the frustration of something left incomplete.
Two more no-one-homes, and then, on the first landing, the door was opened by a face Rebus recognised but couldn’t place.
‘It’s about Philippa Balfour’s disappearance,’ Hawes was explaining. ‘I believe two of my colleagues spoke to you earlier. This is just by way of a follow-up.’
'Yes, of course.’ The gloss-black door opened a little wider. The man looked at Rebus and smiled. 'You’re having trouble placing me, but I remember you.’ The smile widened. 'You always remember the virgins, don’t you?’
As they were shown down the hall, the man introduced himself as Donald Devlin, and Rebus knew him. The first autopsy Rebus had ever attended as a CID officer, Devlin had done the cutting. He’d been Professor of Forensic Medicine at the university, and the city’s chief pathologist at the time. Sandy Gates had been his assistant. Now, Gates was Professor of Forensic Medicine, with Dr Curt as his 'junior’. On the walls of the hallway were framed photos of Devlin receiving various prizes and awards.
‘The name’s not coming to me,’ Devlin said, gesturing for the two officers to precede him into a cluttered drawing room.
‘DI Rebus.’
‘It would have been Detective Constable back then?’ Devlin guessed. Rebus nodded.
‘Moving out, sir?’ Hawes asked, looking around her at the profusion of boxes and black bin-liners. Rebus looked too. Tottering towers of paperwork, drawers which had been wrenched from their chests and now threatened to spill mementoes across the carpet. Devlin chuckled. He was a short, portly man, probably in his mid- seventies. His grey cardigan had lost most of its shape and half its buttons, and his charcoal trousers were held up with braces. His face was puffy and red-veined, his eyes small blue dots behind a pair of metal-framed spectacles.
‘In a manner of speaking, I suppose,’ he said, pushing a few strands of hair back into some semblance of order across the expanse of his domed scalp. ‘Let’s just say that if the Grim Reaper is the ne plus ultra of removers, then I’m acting as his unpaid assistant.’
Rebus recalled that Devlin had always spoken like this, never settling for six words where a dozen would do, and tossing the odd spanner into the dictionary. It had been a nightmare trying to take notes while Devlin worked an autopsy.
'You’re moving into a home?’ Hawes guessed. The old man chuckled again.
‘Not quite ready for the heave-ho yet, alas. No, all I’m doing is dispensing with a few unwanted items, making it easier for those family members who’ll wish to pick over the carcass of my estate after I’ve shuffled off.’
‘Saving them the trouble of throwing it all out?’
Devlin looked at Rebus. ‘A correct and concise summary of affairs,’ he noted approvingly.
Hawes had reached into a box for a leatherbound book. 'You’re binning all of it?’
‘By no means,’ Devlin tutted. ‘T
he volume in your hand, for example, an early edition of Donaldson’s anatomical sketches, I intend to offer to the College of Surgeons.’
'You still see Professor Gates?’ Rebus asked.
‘Oh, Sandy and I enjoy the occasional tincture. He’ll be retiring himself soon enough, I don’t doubt, making way for the young. We fool ourselves that this makes life cyclical, but of course it’s anything but, unless you happen to practise Buddhism.’ He smiled at what he saw as this little joke.
‘Just because you’re a Buddhist doesn’t mean you’ll come back again though, does it?’ Rebus said, delighting the old man further. Rebus was staring at a framed news report on the wall to the right of the fireplace: a murder conviction dated 1957. 'Your first case?’ he guessed.
‘Actually, yes. A young bride bludgeoned to death by her husband. They were in the city on honeymoon.’
‘Must cheer the place up,’ Hawes commented.
‘My wife thought it macabre too,’ Devlin admitted. ‘After she died, I put it back up.’
‘Well,’ Hawes said, dropping the book back into its box and looking in vain for somewhere to sit, ‘sooner we’re finished, the sooner you can get back to your clear-out.’
‘A pragmatist: good to see.’ Devlin seemed content to let the three of them stand there, in the middle of a large and threadbare Persian carpet, almost afraid to move for fear that a domino effect would ensue.
‘Is there any order, sir?’ Rebus asked. ‘Or can we move a couple of boxes on to the floor?’
‘Better to take our tete-a-tete into the dining room, I think.’
Rebus nodded and made to follow, his gaze drifting to an engraved invitation on the marble mantelpiece. It was from the Royal College of Surgeons, something to do with a dinner at Surgeons’ Hall. ‘Black/white tie and decorations’ it said along the bottom. The only decorations he had were in a box in his hall cupboard. They went up every Christmas, if he could be bothered.