‘I don’t like it. I feel like everyone’s trying to trap me. It’s like at business parties, John’s always warning me not to give anything away, you never know who’s fishing for some info on the bank.’
‘We’re not competitors here, Mrs Balfour.’
She bowed her head a little. ‘Of course not. I apologise. It’s just...’
‘No need for apologies,’ Rebus said, getting to his feet. ‘This is your home, your rules. Wouldn’t you say?’
‘Well, when you put it like that...’ She seemed to brighten a little. All the same, Rebus reckoned that whenever Jacqueline Balfour’s husband was at home, it was his rules they played by...
Inside the house, he found two colleagues sitting comfortably in the lounge. The WPC introduced herself as Nicola Campbell. The other officer was CID based at Fettes HQ. His name was Eric Bain, more usually called ‘Brains’. Bain was seated at a desk upon which sat a land-line telephone, notebook and pen, and a recording machine, along with a mobile phone connected to a laptop. Having established that the current caller was Mr Balfour, Bain had slid the headphones back down around his neck. He was drinking strawberry yoghurt straight from the pot, and nodded a greeting at Rebus.
‘Cushy number,’ Rebus said, admiring the surroundings.
‘If you don’t mind the crushing boredom,’ Campbell admitted.
‘What’s the deal with the laptop?’
‘It connects Brains to his nerdy friends.’
Bain wagged a finger at her. ‘It’s part of the TT technology: tracking and tracing.’ Concentrating on the last vestiges of his snack, he didn’t see Campbell mouth the word ‘nerd’ at Rebus.
‘Which would be great,’ Rebus said, ‘if there was anything worth the effort.’
Bain nodded. ‘Lots of sympathy calls to start with, friends and family. Impressively low number of crackpots. Not being listed in the book probably helps.’
‘Just remember,’ Rebus warned, ‘the person we’re looking for might be a crackpot too.’
‘Probably no shortage of butters around here,’ Campbell said, crossing her legs. She was seated on one of the room’s three sofas, copies of Caledonia and Scottish Field spread out in front of her. There were other magazines on a table behind her sofa. Rebus got the feeling they belonged to the house, and that she’d read each and every one of them at least once.
‘How do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Been through the village yet? Albinos in the trees picking at banjos?’
Rebus smiled. Bain looked puzzled. ‘I didn’t see any,’ he said.
Campbell’s look said it alclass="underline" that’s because in some parallel world, you’re up in the trees with them...
‘Tell me something,’ Rebus said, ‘at the press conference, Mr Balfour mentioned his mobile phone...’
‘Shouldn’t have done that,’ Bain said, shaking his head. ‘We’d asked him not to.’
‘Not so easy to trace a mobile call?’
‘They’re more flexible than land-lines, aren’t they?’
‘But still traceable?’
‘Up to a point. Lot of dodgy mobiles out there. We could trace one to an account, only to find it’d been nicked the previous week.’
Campbell suppressed a yawn. ‘You see how it is?’ she told Rebus. ‘Thrill after thrill after thrill...’
He took his time heading back into town, aware of traffic picking up in the opposite direction. The rush hour was starting, executive cars streaming back into the countryside. He knew of people who commuted to and from Edinburgh every day now from as far afield as the Borders, Fife and Glasgow. They all said housing was to blame. A three-bedroom semi in a nice part of the city could cost £250,000 or more. For that money, you could buy a big detached place in West Lothian, or half a street in Cowdenbeath. On the other hand, Rebus had had cold callers to his flat in Marchmont. He’d had letters addressed to ‘The Occupier’ from desperate buyers. Because that was the other thing about Edinburgh: no matter how high the prices seemed to go, there were always buyers. In Marchmont it was often landlords, looking for something to add to their portfolio, or parents whose kids wanted a flat near the university. Rebus had lived in his tenement twenty-odd years, and had seen the area change. Fewer families and old people, more students and young, childless couples. The groups didn’t seem to mix. People who’d lived in Marchmont all their lives watched their children move away, unable to afford a place nearby. Rebus didn’t know anyone in his tenement now, or the ones either side of him. As far as he could tell, he was the only owner-occupier left. More worrying still, he seemed to be the oldest person there. And still the letters and offers came, and the prices kept rising.
Which was why he was moving out. Not that he’d found a place to buy yet. Maybe he’d go back into the rental market, that way he had freedom of choice: a year in a country cottage, then a year by the seaside, and a year or two above a pub... The flat was too big for him, he knew that. Nobody ever stayed in the spare bedrooms, and many nights he slept on the chair in the living room. A studio flat would be big enough for him; everything else was excess.
Volvos, BMWs, sporty Audis... they were all passing him on their way home. Rebus was wondering if he wanted to commute. From Marchmont he could walk to work. It took about fifteen minutes, the only exercise he ever got. He wouldn’t fancy the drive every day between Falls and the city. The streets had been quiet when he’d been there, but he guessed tonight the narrow main road would be lined with cars.
When he started looking for a parking space in Marchmont, however, he was reminded of another reason for moving out. In the end, he left the Saab on a yellow line, and went into the nearest shop for an evening paper, milk, rolls and bacon. He’d called into the station, asked if he was needed: he wasn’t. Back in his flat, he took a can of beer from the fridge and settled into his chair by the living-room window. The kitchen was more of a mess than usuaclass="underline" some of the hall stuff was in there while the rewiring went on. He didn’t know when the electrics had last been done. He didn’t think they’d been touched since he bought the place. After the rewiring, he had a painter booked to slap on some magnolia, freshen the place up. He’d been told not to make too many renovations: whoever bought the place would probably just do it all over again anyway. Rewiring and decorating: he’d stop at that. The Property Centre had said it was impossible to tell how much he’d get for the place. In Edinburgh, you put your home on the market for ‘offers over’, but that premium could reach thirty or forty per cent. A conservative estimate valued his Arden Street shell at £125,000 to £140,000. There was no mortgage outstanding. It was cash in the bank.
‘You could retire on that,’ Siobhan had told him. Well, maybe. He’d have to split it with his ex-wife, he supposed, even though he’d written her a cheque for her share of the place soon after they’d split up. And he could slip some money to Sammy, his daughter. Sammy was another reason for selling, or so he told himself. After her accident, she was finally out of the wheelchair but still used a pair of sticks. Two flights of tenement stairs were beyond her... not that she’d been a regular visitor even before the hit-and-run.
He didn’t have many visitors, was not a good host. When his ex, Rhona, had moved out, he’d never got round to filling the gaps she’d left. Someone had once described the flat as ‘a cave’, and there was some truth in this. It provided a form of shelter for him, and that was about all he asked of it. The students next door were playing something semi-raucous. It sounded like bad Hawkwind from twenty years before, which probably meant it was by some fashionable new band. He looked through his own collection, came up with the tape Siobhan had made, and put it on. The Mutton Birds: three songs from one of their albums. They came from New Zealand, somewhere like that, and one of the instruments had been recorded here in Edinburgh. That was about as much as she could tell him about them. The second song was ‘The Falls’.