by Ian Rankin
‘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.
‘DC Clarke’s got a very good point,’ she told the surrounding faces. Then she moved aside to let Siobhan past, murmuring something like ‘Well done, Siobhan’ as they were shoulder to shoulder.
Back in the interview room, Siobhan plugged the telephone into the wall and told Claire it was 9 for an outside line.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ the student said with quiet confidence.
‘Then everything’s going to be okay. We just need to find out what happened.’
Claire nodded, picked up the receiver. Siobhan gestured to Bain, and they left the room together, the WPC taking over the watch.
Out in the corridor, the scrum had melted away, but the hubbub from inside the CID office was loud and excited.
‘Say she didn’t do it.’ Siobhan spoke quietly, her words for Bain’s ears only.
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘Then how could Quizmaster be tapping into her account?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I mean, I suppose it’s possible, but it’s also highly unlikely.’
Siobhan looked at him. ‘So you think it’s her?’
He shrugged. ‘I’d like to know who the other access accounts belong to.’
‘Did Special Branch say how long it would take?’
‘Maybe later today, maybe tomorrow.’
Someone walked past, patted both of them on the shoulder, gave a thumbs-up as he bounced down the corridor.
‘They think we’ve cracked it,’ Bain said.
‘More fool them.’
‘She had the motive, you’ve said so yourself.’
Siobhan nodded. She was thinking of the Stricture clue, trying to imagine it composed by a woman. Yes, it was possible; of course it was possible. The virtual world: you could pretend to be anyone you liked, either gender, any age. The newspapers were full of stories about middle-aged paedophiles who’d infiltrated children’s chat rooms in the guise of teens and pre-teens. The very anonymity of the Net was what attracted people to it. She thought of Claire Benzie, of the long and careful planning it must have taken, the anger fermenting ever since her father’s suicide. Maybe she’d started out wanting to know Flip again, wanting to like and forgive her, but had found rising hatred instead, hatred of Flip’s easy world, her friends with fast cars, the bars and night clubs and dinner parties, the whole lifestyle enjoyed by people who’d never known pain, never lost anything in their lives that couldn’t be bought again.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, running both hands through her hair, pulling so hard that her scalp hurt. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘That’s good,’ Bain said. ‘Approach the interview with an open mind: textbook stuff.’
She smiled tiredly, squeezed his hand. ‘Thanks, Eric.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ he told her. She hoped he was right.
Maybe the Central Library was the right place for Rebus. Many of the customers today seemed to be the dispossessed, the tired, the unemployable. Some sat sleeping in the more comfortable chairs, the books on their laps mere props. One old man, toothless mouth gaping, sat at a desk near the telephone directories, his finger running ponderously down each column. Rebus had asked one of the staff about him.
‘Been coming in here for years, never reads anything else,’ he was informed.
‘He could get a job with Directory Enquiries.’
‘Or maybe that’s where he was fired from.’
Rebus acknowledged that this was a good point, and got back to his own research. So far he’d established that Albert Camus was a French novelist and thinker, the author of novels such as La Chute and La Peste. He’d won the Nobel Prize and then died while still in his forties. The librarian had done a search for him, but this was the only Camus of note to be found.
‘Unless, of course, you’re talking street names.’
‘What?’
‘Edinburgh street names.’
Sure enough, it turned out that the city boasted a Camus Road, along with Camus Avenue, Park and Place. No one seemed to know whether they were named after the French writer; Rebus reckoned the chances were pretty good. He looked up Camus in the phone book – by luck the old man wasn’t using it at the time – and found just the one. Taking a break, he thought about walking home and getting his car, maybe taking a drive out to Camus Road, but when a taxi came by he hailed it instead. Camus Road, Avenue, Park and Place turned out to be a little quartet of quiet residential streets just off Comiston Road in Fairmilehead. The taxi driver seemed bemused when Rebus told him to head back for George IV Bridge. When they hit a traffic hold-up at Greyfriars, Rebus paid the taxi off and got out. He headed straight into Sandy Bell’s pub, where the afternoon crowd hadn’t yet been swollen by workers on their way home. A pint and
a nip. The barman knew him, told a few stories. He said that when the Infirmary moved to Petty France, they’d lose half their trade. Not the doctors and nurses, but the patients.
‘Pyjamas and slippers, I’m not joking: they walk straight out the ward and in here. One guy even had the tubes hanging out his arms.’
Rebus smiled, finished his drinks. Greyfriars Kirkyard was just around the corner, so he took a wander in. He reckoned that all those Covenanting ghosts would be pretty miserable, knowing a wee dog had made the place more famous than they had. There were tours up here at night, stories of sudden chill hands clamping shoulders. He recalled that Rhona, his ex, had wanted to be married in the kirk itself. He saw graves covered with iron railings – mortsafes, protecting the deceased from the Resurrection Men. Edinburgh seemed always to have thrived on cruelty, its centuries of barbarism masked by an exterior by turns douce and strict …
Stricture … he wondered what the word had to do with the clue. He thought it meant being tied up, something along those lines, but realised that he wasn’t sure. He left the kirkyard and headed on to George IV Bridge, turning in to the library. The same librarian was still on duty.
‘Dictionaries?’ he asked. She directed him towards the shelf he needed.
‘I did that check you asked for,’ she added. ‘There are some books by a Mark Smith, but nothing by anyone called M. E. Smith.’
‘Thanks anyway.’ He started to turn away.
‘I also printed you out a list of our Camus holdings.’
He took the sheet from her. ‘That’s great. Thank you very much.’
She smiled, as if unused to compliments, then looked more hesitant as she caught the alcohol on his breath. On his way to the shelves, he noticed that the desk by the telephone directories was vacant. He wondered if that was the old guy finished for the day; maybe it was like a nine-to-five for him. He pulled out the first dictionary he found and opened it at ‘stricture’: it meant binding, closure, tightness. ‘Binding’ made him think of mummies, or someone with their hands tied, held captive …
There was a clearing of the throat behind him. The librarian was standing there.
‘Chucking-out time?’ Rebus guessed.
‘Not quite.’ She pointed back towards her desk, where another member of staff was now positioned, watching them. ‘My colleague … Kenny … he thinks maybe he knows who Mr Smith is.’
‘Mr who?’ Rebus was looking at Kenny: barely out of his teens, wearing round metal-framed glasses and a black T-shirt.
‘M. E. Smith,’ the librarian said. So Rebus walked over, nodded a greeting at Kenny.
‘He’s a singer,’ Kenny said without preamble. ‘At least, if it’s the one I’m thinking of: Mark E. Smith. And not everyone would agree with the description “singer”.’
The librarian had gone back around the desk. ‘I’ve never heard of him, I must confess,’ she said.
‘Time to widen your horizons, Bridget,’ Kenny said. Then he looked at Rebus, wondering at the detective’s wide-eyed stare.
‘Singer with The Fall?’ Rebus said quietly, almost to himself.
‘You know them?’ Kenny seemed surprised that someone Rebus’s age would have such knowledge.
‘Saw them twenty years ago. A club in Abbeyhill.’
‘Real noise merchants, eh?’ Kenny said.
Rebus nodded distractedly. Then the other librarian, Bridget, gave voice to his thoughts.
‘Funny really,’ she said. Then she pointed to the sheet of paper in Rebus’s hand. ‘Camus’ novel La Chute translates as “The Fall”. We’ve a copy in the Fiction section if you’d like one …’
Claire Benzie’s stepfather turned out to be Jack McCoist, one of the city’s more able defence solicitors. He asked for ten minutes alone with her before any interview could begin. Afterwards, Siobhan entered the room again, accompanied by Gill Templer who, much to his visible annoyance, had ousted Eric Bain.
Claire’s drink can was empty. McCoist had half a cup of lukewarm tea in front of him.
‘I don’t think we need a recording made,’ McCoist stated. ‘Let’s just talk this through, see where it takes us. Agreed?’
He looked to Gill Templer, who nodded eventually.
‘When you’re ready, DC Clarke,’ Templer said.
Siobhan tried for eye contact with Claire, but she was too busy with the Pepsi can, rolling it between her palms.
‘Claire,’ she said, ‘these clues Flip was getting, one of them came from an e-mail address which we’ve traced back to you.’
McCoist had an A4 pad out, on which he’d already written several pages of notes in handwriting so bad it was like a personal code. Now he turned to a fresh sheet.
‘Can I just ask how you came into possession of these e-mails?’
‘They … we didn’t really. Someone called Quizmaster sent Flip Balfour a message, and it came to me instead.’
‘How so?’ McCoist hadn’t looked up from his pad. All she could see of him were blue pinstriped shoulders and the top of his head, thinning black hair showing plenty of scalp.
‘Well, I was checking Ms Balfour’s computer for anything that might explain her disappearance.’
‘So this was after she’d disappeared?’ He looked up now: thick black rims to his glasses and a mouth which, when not open, was a thin line of doubt.
‘Yes,’ Siobhan admitted.
‘And this is the message you say you’ve traced back to my client’s computer?’
‘To her ISP account, yes.’ Siobhan was noticing that Claire had looked up for the first time: it was that use of “my client”. Claire was looking at her stepfather, studying him. Probably she’d never seen his professional side before.
‘ISP being the Internet service provider?’
Siobhan nodded her answer. McCoist was letting her know that he was up on the jargon.
‘Have there been subsequent messages?’
‘Yes.’
‘And do they belong to the same address?’
‘We don’t know that yet.’ Siobhan had decided he didn’t need to know more than one ISP was involved.
‘Very well.’ McCoist stabbed a full stop on the latest sheet with his pen, then sat back thoughtfully.
‘Do I get to ask Claire a question now?’ Siobhan asked.
McCoist peered at her over the top of his glasses. ‘My client would prefer to make a short statement first.’
Claire reached into the pocket of her jeans and unfolded a sheet of paper which had obviously come from the pad on the table. The writing was different from McCoist’s scrawl, but Siobhan could see scorings-out where the lawyer had suggested changes.
Claire cleared her throat. ‘About a fortnight before Flip went missing, I loaned her my laptop computer. She had some essay she was writing, and I thought it might help her. I knew she didn’t have a laptop of her own. I never got the chance to ask for it back. I was waiting until after the funeral to ask her family if it could be retrieved from her flat.’
‘Is this laptop your only computer?’ Siobhan interrupted.
Claire shook her head. ‘No, but it’s linked to an ISP, same account as my PC.’
Siobhan stared at her; still she didn’t make eye contact. ‘There was no laptop in Philippa Balfour’s flat,’ she said.
Eye contact at last. ‘Then where is it?’ Claire said.
‘I’m assuming you still have the proof of purchase, something like that?’
McCoist spoke up. ‘Are you accusing my daughter of lying?’ She wasn’t just a client any longer …
‘I’m saying maybe it’s something Claire should have told us a bit earlier.’
‘I didn’t know it was …’ Claire began to say.
‘DCS Templer,’ McCoist began haughtily, ‘I didn’t think it was Lothian and Borders Police policy to accuse potential witnesses of duplicity.’
‘Right now,’ Templer shot back, ‘your stepdaughter’s a suspect rather than a witness.’
‘Suspected of
what exactly? Running a quiz? Since when was that an offence?’
Gill didn’t have an answer for that. She glanced in Siobhan’s direction, and Siobhan thought she could read at least a few of her boss’s thoughts. He’s right … we still don’t know for sure that Quizmaster has anything to do with anything … this is your hunch I’m going with, just remember that …
McCoist knew the look between the two detectives meant something. He decided to press his point.
‘I can’t see you presenting any of this to the Procurator Fiscal. You’d be laughed back down the ranks … DCS Templer.’ Putting the stress on those three letters. He knew she was newly promoted; knew she’d yet to prove herself …
Gill had already regained her composure. ‘What we need from Claire, Mr McCoist, are some straight answers, otherwise her story’s looking thin and we’ll need to make further inquiries.’
McCoist seemed to consider this. Siobhan, meantime, was busy making a mental list. Claire Benzie had the motive all right – the role of Balfour’s Bank in her father’s suicide. With the role-playing game, she had the means, and luring Flip to Arthur’s Seat would give the opportunity. Now she suddenly invented a loaned laptop, conveniently missing … Siobhan started another list, this time for Ranald Marr, who’d warned Flip early on about how to delete e-mails. Ranald Marr with his toy soldiers, second-in-command at the bank. She still didn’t see what Marr would have gained from Flip’s death …
‘Claire,’ she said quietly, ‘those times you went to Junipers, did you ever meet Ranald Marr?’
‘I don’t see what that’s—’
But Claire interrupted her stepfather. ‘Ranald Marr, yes. I never really knew what she saw in him.’
‘Who?’
‘Flip. She had this crush on Ranald. Schoolgirl stuff, I suppose …’
‘Was it reciprocated? Did it go further than a crush?’
‘I think,’ McCoist said, ‘we’re straying somewhat from the—’
But Claire was smiling at Siobhan. ‘Not until later,’ she was saying.
‘How much later?’
‘I got the feeling she was seeing him pretty much up till she went missing …’
‘What’s all the excitement?’ Rebus asked.