The Falls

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Not for me to say, sir.’

  ‘I do hope DS Wylie doesn’t get into trouble.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Not keeping a closer eye on me when I was studying the autopsy reports.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s the one that’s in trouble here.’

  ‘Uncorroborated evidence, isn’t that what we’re dealing with, Inspector? One woman’s word against mine? I’m sure I can find some plausible motive for my fight with Miss Burchill.’ He studied his hand. ‘One might almost call me the victim. And let us be honest, what else do you have? Two drownings, two missing persons, no evidence.’

  ‘Well,’ Rebus corrected him, ‘no evidence apart from this.’ He held the phone a little higher. ‘It was already on when I took it from my pocket, connected to our comms centre down in Leith.’ He put the phone to his ear. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw that uniformed officers were making their way down the steps from the bridge. ‘Did you get all that?’ he asked into the mouthpiece. Then he looked at Devlin and smiled.

  ‘We record every call, you see.’

  The animation left Devlin’s face, his shoulders slumping. Then he turned on his heels, preparing to run. But Rebus’s arm snaked out, gripping him hard by the shoulder. Devlin tried to wrestle free. One foot slipped off the walkway and he started to fall, his weight pulling Rebus with him. The two men landed heavily in the Water of Leith. It wasn’t deep, and Rebus felt his own shoulder connect with a rock. When he tried standing up, his feet sank to the ankles in mud. He was still holding on to Devlin, and as the bald head appeared from below the surface, missing its spectacles, Rebus saw again the monster who had battered Jean. He reached out his free hand to the Professor’s neck and forced him back under. Hands flew up, splashing, wrestling air. Fingers clawing at Rebus’s arm, clutching at his jacket lapel.

  He felt as calm as he ever had in his life. The water lapped around him, icy but somehow soothing, too. There were people on the bridge, staring down, and officers wading into the water nearby, and a pale lemon sun spectating from above a bruised cloud. The water seemed cleansing to him. He couldn’t feel his twisted ankle any more, couldn’t feel anything much. Jean would recover, and so would he. He’d move out of Arden Street, find somewhere else, somewhere nobody knew about … maybe near water.

  His arm was wrenched from behind: one of the uniforms.

  ‘Let go of him!’

  The cry broke the spell. Rebus released his grip, and Donald Devlin rose spluttering and choking into the daylight, watery vomit dribbling from his chin …

  They were loading Jean Burchill into the ambulance when Rebus’s mobile started ringing. One of the green-suited paramedics was explaining that they couldn’t rule out spinal or neck damage, which was why they’d strapped her to a stretcher and placed braces around her head and neck.

  Rebus was staring at Jean, trying to take in what was being said.

  ‘Shouldn’t you answer that?’ the paramedic asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your phone.’

  Rebus lifted the mobile to his ear. When he’d struggled with Devlin, it had dropped on to the walkway. It was scratched and chipped, but at least still working. ‘Hello?’

  ‘DI Rebus?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Eric Bain here.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘Quite a lot, yes.’ As the trolley slid home into the back of the ambulance, Rebus looked down at his sodden clothes. ‘Any sign of Siobhan?’

  ‘That’s why I’m calling.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing’s happened. It’s just that I can’t reach her. They think she’s in the Botanics. There are half a dozen men out there looking for her.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So there’s news about Quizmaster.’

  ‘And you’re bursting to tell someone?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’ve got the right person, Bain, I’m a bit tied up right now.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Rebus was inside the ambulance now, seated across from the trolley. Jean had her eyes closed, but when he reached for her hand, his pressure was returned.

  ‘Sorry?’ he said, having missed what Bain had just said.

  ‘Who should I tell then?’ Bain repeated.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Rebus sighed. ‘Okay, tell me what it is.’

  ‘It’s Special Branch,’ Bain said, the words streaming out. ‘One of the e-mail addresses Quizmaster was using, it traces back to Philippa Balfour’s account.’

  Rebus didn’t understand: was Bain trying to say that Flip Balfour had been Quizmaster … ?

  ‘I think it makes sense,’ Bain was saying now. ‘Taken with Claire Benzie’s account.’

  ‘I’m not getting you.’ Jean’s eyelids were fluttering. A sudden jolt of pain, Rebus guessed. He lessened the pressure on her hand.

  ‘If Benzie did lend her laptop to Philippa Balfour, we’ve got two computers in the same place, both used by Quizmaster.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And if we rule out Ms Balfour as a suspect …’

  ‘We’re left with someone who had access to both?’

  Silence for a moment, and then Bain: ‘I think the boyfriend’s back in the frame, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Rebus was having trouble concentrating. He ran the back of his hand across his forehead, feeling perspiration there.

  ‘We could always ask him …’

  ‘Siobhan’s gone to meet Quizmaster,’ Rebus said. Then he paused. ‘She’s at the Botanics, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do we know?’

  ‘Her car’s parked right outside.’

  Rebus thought for a second: Siobhan would know they were looking for her. Leaving the car in full view was too big a giveaway …

  ‘What if she’s not there?’ he said. ‘What if she’s meeting him somewhere else?’

  ‘How can we find out?’

  ‘Maybe Costello’s flat …’ He looked down at Jean. ‘Look, Bain, I really can’t do this … not right now.’

  Jean’s eye opened. She mouthed something.

  ‘Hang on, Bain,’ Rebus said. Then he lowered his head to Jean’s.

  ‘Fine …’ he heard her slur.

  She was telling him she’d be okay; that he had to help Siobhan now. Rebus turned his head, his eyes meeting those of Ellen Wylie, who was standing on the roadway, waiting for the doors to close. She nodded slowly, letting him know she’d stay with Jean.

  ‘Bain?’ he said into the mobile. ‘I’ll meet you outside Costello’s flat.’

  By the time Rebus got there, Bain had climbed the winding stairs and was standing outside Costello’s door.

  ‘I don’t think he’s home,’ Bain was saying, crouching down to look through the letter-box. A chill ran up Rebus’s spine, remembering what he’d seen when he’d peered into Devlin’s flat. Bain got to his feet again. ‘No sign of … Jesus Christ, man, what happened to you?’

  ‘Swimming lessons. I didn’t have time to change.’ Rebus looked at the door, then at Bain. ‘Together?’ he said.

  Bain stared back at him. ‘Isn’t that illegal?’

  ‘For Siobhan,’ Rebus said simply.

  They hit the door together on the count of three.

  Inside, Bain knew what he was looking for: a computer. He found two in the bedroom, both of them laptops.

  ‘Claire Benzie’s,’ Bain guessed, ‘and either his own or someone else’s.’

  The screen-saver had been activated on one computer. Bain accessed Costello’s ISP and opened the filing cabinet.

  ‘No time to try for a password,’ he said, almost to himself more than Rebus. ‘So all we can read are the old messages.’ But there were none to or from Siobhan. ‘Looks like he wipes as he goes,’ Bain said.

  ‘Or else we’re barking up the wrong tree.’ Rebus was looking around the room: unmade b
ed, books scattered across the floor. Notes for an essay on the desk next to the PC. Socks, pants and T-shirts spilled from the chest of drawers, but not from the top drawer. Rebus limped over, opened it slowly. Inside: maps and guidebooks, including one about Arthur’s Seat. A postcard of Rosslyn Chapel and another guidebook.

  ‘Right tree,’ he remarked simply. Bain got up, came to look.

  ‘Everything the well-dressed Quizmaster could need.’ Bain went to reach into the drawer, but Rebus slapped his hand away. ‘No touching.’ He tried sliding the drawer out further. Something was sticking. He took a pen from his pocket and dislodged it: an Edinburgh A–Z.

  ‘Open at the Botanics,’ Bain said, sounding relieved. If that’s where David Costello was, they’d have cornered him by now.

  But Rebus wasn’t so sure. He was examining the rest of the page. Then he looked over towards Costello’s bed. Postcards of old gravestones … a small framed photo of Costello with Flip Balfour, with another headstone just coming into the frame. They’d met at a dinner party … breakfast next morning and then a walk in Warriston Cemetery. That was what Costello had told him. Warriston Cemetery was just across the road from the Botanic Gardens. Same page of the A–Z.

  ‘I know where he is,’ Rebus said quietly. ‘I know where she’s meeting him. Come on.’ He ran from the room, hand already reaching for his mobile. The detectives who were wandering around the Botanics, they could be at Warriston in two minutes …

  ‘Hello, David.’

  He still had his funeral clothes on, including the sunglasses. He grinned as she walked towards him. He was just sitting there, legs swinging from the wall. He slid down and was suddenly standing in front of her.

  ‘You guessed,’ he said.

  ‘Sort of.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘You’re early.’

  ‘You’re earlier.’

  ‘I had to recce, see if you were lying.’

  ‘I said I’d be on my own.’

  ‘And here you are.’ He looked around again.

  ‘Plenty of escape routes,’ Siobhan said, surprised by how calm she was. ‘Is that why you chose it?’

  ‘It’s where I first realised I loved Flip.’

  ‘Loved her so much you went and killed her?’

  His face fell. ‘I didn’t know that was going to happen.’

  ‘No?’

  He shook his head. ‘Right up until the moment I had my hands round her throat … even then I don’t think I knew.’

  She drew in a deep breath. ‘But you did it anyway.’

  He nodded. ‘I suppose I did, yes.’ Looked up at her. ‘That’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it?’

  ‘I wanted to meet Quizmaster.’

  He opened his arms. ‘At your command.’

  ‘I also want to know why.’

  ‘Why?’ He framed his lips into an O. ‘How many reasons do you want? Her yah friends? Her pretensions? The way she kept teasing and picking fights, looking to break us up just so she could watch me crawling back?’

  ‘You could have walked away.’

  ‘But I loved her.’ When he laughed, it was as if acknowledging his own foolishness. ‘I kept telling her that, and you know what she told me back?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That I wasn’t the only one.’

  ‘Ranald Marr?’

  ‘That old goat, yes. Since before she left school. And still at it, even when we were together!’ He stopped, swallowed. ‘Enough motivation for you, Siobhan?’

  ‘You vented your anger on Marr by disfiguring that toy soldier, and yet Flip … Flip you had to kill?’ She felt calm, almost numb. ‘That doesn’t seem quite fair to me.’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  She looked at him. ‘But I think I do, David. You’re a coward, pure and simple. You say you didn’t know you were going to murder Flip that night – that’s a lie. You had it planned all along … and afterwards you were Mr Calm, speaking to her worried friends not much more than an hour after you’d killed her. You knew exactly what you were doing, David. You were Quizmaster.’ She paused. He was staring into the middle distance, soaking up every word. ‘Something I don’t understand … you sent Flip a message after she died?’

  He smiled. ‘That day at her flat, while Rebus was watching me and you were working on her computer … he told me something, said I was the only suspect.’

  ‘You thought you’d try throwing us off the scent?’

  ‘It was just supposed to be that one message … but when you replied, I couldn’t resist. I was as hooked as you were, Siobhan. The game had us both.’ His eyes sparkled. ‘Isn’t that something?’

  He seemed to expect an answer, so she nodded slowly. ‘Are you thinking of killing me, David?’

  He shook his head briskly, irritated by the assumption. ‘You know the answer to that,’ he spat. ‘You wouldn’t have come otherwise.’ He walked over to a low headstone and rested against it. ‘Maybe none of it would have happened,’ he said, ‘without the Professor.’

  Siobhan thought she must have misheard. ‘Which one?’

  ‘Donald Devlin. First time he saw me afterwards, he guessed I’d done it. That’s why he came up with that story, someone loitering outside. He was trying to protect me.’

  ‘Why would he do that, David?’ It felt strange using his name. She wanted to call him Quizmaster.

  ‘Because of everything we talked about … committing murder, getting away with it.’

  ‘Professor Devlin?’

  He looked at her. ‘Oh yes, he’s killed too, you know. Old bugger as good as said so, daring me to be like him … maybe he was just too good a teacher, eh?’ He ran his hands over the headstone. ‘We had these long talks on the stairwell. He wanted to know all about me, my early days, the angry days. I went to his flat once. He showed me these cuttings … people who’d disappeared or drowned. There was even one about a German student …’

  ‘That’s where you got the idea?’

  ‘Maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows where ideas come from?’ He paused. ‘I helped her, you know. She was dead impressed, all those clues … pulling her hair out until I came along …’ He laughed. ‘Flip was never much good with computers. I gave her the name Flipside, then sent the first clue.’

  ‘You turned up at the flat, told her you’d solved Hellbank …’

  Costello nodded, remembering. ‘She wasn’t going to go with me until I promised to drop her off afterwards … She’d just kicked me out again – final this time, she’d piled my clothes on a chair – and after Hellbank she was heading off for a drink with all those bloody friends of hers …’ He screwed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them and blinked, turning his head to face Siobhan. ‘Once you’re there, it’s hard to go back …’ He shrugged.

  ‘There never was a Stricture?’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘That clue was all for you, Siobhan …’

  ‘I don’t know why you kept going back to her, David, or what you thought the game would prove, but one thing I do know: you never loved her. What you wanted was to control her.’ She nodded at the truth of this.

  ‘Some people like to be controlled, Siobhan.’ His eyes were staring into hers. ‘Don’t you?’

  She thought for a moment … or tried to think. Opened her mouth and was about to speak, but a noise interrupted. He snapped his head round: two men approaching. And two more fifty yards beyond them. He turned slowly back to Siobhan.

  ‘I’m disappointed in you.’

  She was shaking her head. ‘Not my doing.’

  He leaped from the headstone, hurtled towards the wall, his hands reaching the top, feet scrabbling for purchase. The detectives were running now, one yelling, ‘Stop him!’ Siobhan just watched, rooted to the spot. Quizmaster … she’d given him her word … One of his feet had found a half-inch of ledge, pushing up …

  Siobhan threw herself at the wall, grabbed the other leg with both hands and pulled. He tried kicking her off, but she held on, one
hand reaching up towards his jacket, trying to haul him back. Then they were both flying backwards, his the only cry. His sunglasses seemed to float past her in slow motion. She was watching them when she hit the ground. He landed heavily on top of her, the air exploding from her lungs. She felt pain as her head connected with the grass. Costello was on his feet and running, but two of the officers had him, wrestled him back on to the ground. He managed to slide his head round so he was looking at Siobhan, the two of them only a couple of yards apart. Hatred filled his face, and he spat in her direction. The saliva hit her on the chin and hung there. Suddenly she didn’t have the strength to wipe it off …

  Jean was asleep, but the doctor assured Rebus she’d be fine: cuts and bruises, ‘nothing time can’t heal’.

  ‘I very much doubt that,’ he told the doctor.

  Ellen Wylie was there by the bedside. Rebus walked over and stood beside her. ‘I wanted to say thanks,’ he told her.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Helping break down Devlin’s door, for one thing. I’d never have done it on my own.’

  Her reply was a shrug. ‘How’s the ankle?’ she asked.

  ‘Ballooning nicely, thank you.’

  ‘A week or two on the sick,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe more, if I swallowed any of the Water of Leith.’

  ‘I hear Devlin took a good few gulps himself.’ She stared at him. ‘Got a good story prepared?’

  He smiled. ‘You offering to tell a lie or two on my behalf ?’

  ‘Just say the word.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘Problem is, a dozen witnesses could say otherwise.’

  ‘But will they?’

  ‘We’ll just have to wait and see,’ Rebus said.

  He limped along to A&E, where Siobhan was having a couple of stitches put into a head wound. Eric Bain was there. The conversation stopped as Rebus approached.

  ‘Eric here,’ Siobhan said, ‘was just explaining how you worked out where I’d be.’ Rebus nodded. ‘And how you gained entry to David Costello’s flat.’

  Rebus made an O with his lips.

  ‘Mr Strongarm,’ she went on, ‘kicking in a suspect’s door without authority or any sniff of a warrant.’

  ‘Technically,’ Rebus told her, ‘I was on suspension. That means I wasn’t a serving officer.’