Ian Rankin
The Falls
To Allan and Euan,
who set the ball rolling.
Not my accent — I didn’t lose that so much as wipe it off my shoe, as soon as I started to live in England — but rather my own temperament, the prototypically Scottish part of my character that was chippy, aggressive, mean, morbid and, despite my best endeavours, persistently deist. I was, and always would be, a lousy escapee from the unnatural history museum...
1
‘You think I killed her, don’t you?’
He sat well forward on the sofa, head slumped in towards his chest. His hair was lank, long-fringed. Both knees worked like pistons, the heels of his grubby trainers never meeting the floor.
‘You on anything, David?’ Rebus asked.
The young man looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, dark-rimmed. A lean, angular face, bristles on the unshaved chin. His name was David Costello. Not Dave or Davy: David, he’d made that clear. Names, labels, classification: all very important. The media had varied its descriptions of him. He was ‘the boyfriend’, ‘the tragic boyfriend’, ‘the missing student’s boyfriend’. He was ‘David Costello, 22’ or ‘fellow student David Costello, in his early twenties’. He ‘shared a flat with Ms Balfour’ or was ‘a frequent visitor’ to the ‘disappearance riddle flat’.
Nor was the flat just a flat. It was ‘the flat in Edinburgh’s fashionable New Town’, the ‘quarter-million flat owned by Ms Balfour’s parents’. John and Jacqueline Balfour were ‘the numbed family’, ‘the shocked banker and his wife’. Their daughter was ‘Philippa, 20, a student of art history at the University of Edinburgh’. She was ‘pretty’, ‘vivacious’, ‘carefree’, ‘full of life’.
And now she was missing.
Detective Inspector John Rebus shifted position, from in front of the marble fireplace to slightly to one side of it. David Costello’s eyes followed the move.
‘The doctor gave me some pills,’ he said, finally answering the question.
‘Did you take them?’ Rebus asked.
The young man shook his head slowly, eyes still on Rebus.
‘Don’t blame you,’ Rebus said, sliding his hands into his pockets. ‘Knock you out for a few hours, but they don’t change anything.’
It was two days since Philippa — known to friends and family as ‘Flip’ — had gone missing. Two days wasn’t long, but her disappearance was out of character. Friends had called the flat at around seven in the evening to confirm that Flip would be meeting up with them within the hour at a bar on the South Side. It was one of those small, trendy places which had sprung up around the university, catering to an economic boom and the need for dim lighting and overpriced flavoured vodkas. Rebus knew this because he’d walked past it a couple of times on his way to and from his place of work. There was an old-fashioned pub practically next door, with vodka mixers at a pound-fifty. No trendy chairs though, and serving staff who knew their way around a brawl but not a cocktail list.
Seven, seven-fifteen, she probably left the flat. Tina, Trist, Camille and Albie were already on their second round of drinks. Rebus had consulted the files to confirm those names. Trist was short for Tristram, and Albie was Albert. Trist was with Tina; Albie was with Camille. Flip should have been with David, but David, she explained on the phone, wouldn’t be joining them.
‘Another bust-up,’ she’d said, not sounding too concerned.
She’d set the flat’s alarm before leaving. That was another first for Rebus — student digs with an alarm. And she’d done the mortise lock as well as the Yale, leaving the flat secure. Down a single flight of stairs and out into the warm night air. A steep hill separated her from Princes Street. Another climb from there would take her to the Old Town, the South Side. No way she’d be walking. But records from her home telephone and mobile had failed to find a match for any taxi firm in the city. So if she’d taken one, she’d hailed it on the street.
If she’d got as far as hailing one.
‘I didn’t, you know,’ David Costello said.
‘Didn’t what, sir?’
‘Didn’t kill her.’
‘Nobody’s saying you did.’
‘No?’ He looked up again, directly into Rebus’s eyes.
‘No,’ Rebus assured him, that being his job after all.
‘The search warrant...’ Costello began.
‘It’s standard, any case of this kind,’ Rebus explained. It was, too: suspicious disappearance, you checked all the places the person might be. You went by the book: all the paperwork signed, clearance given. You searched the boyfriend’s flat. Rebus could have added: we do it because nine times out of ten, it’s someone the victim knows. Not a stranger, plucking prey from the night. It was your loved ones who killed you: spouse, lover, son or daughter. It was your uncle, your closest friend, the one person you trusted. They’d been cheating on you, or you’d cheated them. You knew something, you had something. They were jealous, spurned, needed money.
If Flip Balfour was dead, her body would turn up soon; if she was alive and didn’t want to be found, then the job would be more difficult. Her parents had appeared on TV, pleading with her to make contact. Police were at the family home, intercepting calls in case any ransom demand should arrive. Police were wandering through David Costello’s flat on the Canongate, hoping to turn up something. And police were here — in Flip Balfour’s flat. They were ‘babysitting’ David Costello — stopping the media from getting too close. This was what the young man had been told, and it was partly true.
Flip’s flat had been searched the previous day. Costello had keys, even to the alarm system. The phone call to Costello’s own flat had come at ten p.m.: Trist, asking if he’d heard from Flip, only she’d been on her way to Shapiro’s and hadn’t turned up.
‘She’s not with you, is she?’
‘I’m the last person she’d come to,’ Costello had complained.
‘Heard you’d fallen out. What is it this time?’ Trist’s voice had been slurred, ever-so-slightly amused. Costello hadn’t answered him. He’d cut the call and tried Flip’s mobile, got her answering service, left a message asking her to phone him. Police had listened to the recording, concentrating on nuance, trying to read falseness into each word or phrase. Trist had phoned Costello again at midnight. The group had been to Flip’s flat: no one home. They’d been ringing round, but none of her friends seemed to know anything. They waited until Costello himself arrived at the flat, unlocking it. No sign of Flip inside.
In their minds, she was already a Missing Person, what police called a ‘MisPer’, but they’d waited till next morning before calling Flip’s mother at the family home in East Lothian. Mrs Balfour had wasted no time, dialling 999 immediately. After receiving what she felt was short shrift from the police switchboard, she’d called her husband at his London office. John Balfour was the senior partner in a private bank, and if the Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders Police wasn’t a client, someone certainly was: within an hour, officers were on the case — orders from the Big House, meaning Force HQ in Fettes Avenue.
David Costello had unlocked the flat for the two CID men. Within, they found no signs of a disturbance, no clues as to Philippa Balfour’s whereabouts, fate, or state of mind. It was a tidy flat: stripped floors, fresh paint on the walls. (The decorator was being interviewed, too.) The drawing room was large, with twin windows rising from floor level. There were two bedrooms, one turned into a study. The designer kitchen was smaller than the pine-panelled bathroom. There was a lot of David Costello’s stuff in the bedroom. Someone had piled his clothes on a chair, then placed some books and CDs on top, crowning the structure with a wash-bag.