Falls

by Ian Rankin

  ‘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.

  ‘Gandalfs,’ they chorused.

  Gandalfs 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. Gandalfs 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. ‘Mraid 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 sales- woman 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 real
ised.

  ‘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 smelt 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. Iguoring 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 wi
re. 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.