He sat back down again. There was a bottle on the floor: Talisker, a clean, honed taste. Glass beside it, so he poured, toasted the reflection in the window, leaned back and closed his eyes. He wasn’t having this room redecorated. He’d done it himself not that long back, his old friend and ally Jack Morton helping. Jack was dead now, one of too many ghosts. Rebus wondered if he’d leave them behind when he moved. Somehow he doubted it, and deep down, he would miss them anyway.
The music was all about loss and redemption. Places changing and people with them, dreams shifting ever further beyond reach. Rebus didn’t think he’d be sorry to see the back of Arden Street. It was time for a change.
4
On her way into work next morning, Siobhan thought of nothing but Quizmaster. Nobody had called her mobile, so she was thinking up another message to send him. Him or her. She knew she had to keep an open mind, but couldn’t help thinking of Quizmaster as ‘him’. ‘Stricture’, ‘Hellbank’... they seemed masculine to her. And the whole idea of some game being played by computer... it all sounded so blokeish, sad anoraks stuck in their bedrooms. Her first message — Problem. Need to talk to you. Flipside — seemed not to have worked. Today, she was going to end the pretence. She would e-mail him as herself, and explain Flip’s disappearance, asking him to get in touch. She’d kept the mobile phone beside her all night, waking every hour or so and checking to see that she hadn’t slept through a call. But no calls came. Finally, as dawn approached, she’d got dressed and gone for a walk. Her flat was just off Broughton Street, in an area undergoing rapid gentrification: not as pricey as the New Town which it neighboured, but close to the city centre. Half her street seemed to be taken up with skips, and she knew that by mid-morning builders’ vans would be struggling to find a parking space.
She broke the walk with breakfast at an early opener: beans on toast and a mug of tea so strong she feared for tannin poisoning. At the top of Calton Hill, she stopped to watch the city gearing up for another day. Down by Leith, a container ship was sitting off the coast. The Pentland Hills to the south wore their covering of low cloud like a welcoming duvet. There wasn’t much traffic yet on Princes Street: buses and taxis mostly. She liked Edinburgh best at this time of day, before routine set in. The Balmoral Hotel was one of the closest landmarks. She thought back to the party Gill Templer had hosted there... how Gill had talked of having a lot on her plate. Siobhan wondered if she’d meant the case itself or her new promotion. Thing about the promotion was, John Rebus came with it. He was Gill’s problem now rather than the Farmer’s. Word in the office was, John had already got into a spot of bother: found drunk inside the MisPer’s flat. In the past, people had warned Siobhan that she was growing too much like Rebus, picking up his faults as well as his strengths. She didn’t think that was true.
No, that wasn’t true...
Her walk downhill took her on to Waterloo Place. A right turn, she’d be home in five minutes. A left, and she could be at work in ten. She turned left on to North Bridge, kept walking.
St Leonard’s was quiet. The CID suite had a musty smelclass="underline" too many bodies each day spending too long cooped up there. She opened a couple of windows, made herself a mug of weak coffee, and sat down at her desk. When she checked, there were no messages on Flip’s computer. She decided to keep the line open while she composed her new e-mail. But after only a couple of lines, a message told her she had post. It was from Quizmaster, a simple Good morning. She hit reply and asked, How did you know I was here? The response was immediate.
That’s something Flipside wouldn’t have to ask. Who are you?
Siobhan typed so quickly, she didn’t correct her errors. I’m a police officer, baesd in Edinburgh. We’re investgating Philippa Balfour’s disappearance. She waited a full minute for his reply.
Who?
Flipside, she typed.
She never told me her real name. That’s one of the rules.
The rules of the game? Siobhan typed.
Yes. Did she live in Edinburgh?
She was a student here. Can we talk? You’ve got my mobile number.
Again, the wait seemed interminable.
I prefer this.
Okay, Siobhan typed, can you tell me about Hellbank?
You’d have to play the game. Give me a name to call you.
My name’s Siobhan Clarke. I’m a detective constable with Lothian and Borders Police.
I get the feeling that’s your real name, Siobhan. You’ve broken one of the first rules. How do you pronounce it?
Siobhan could feel the blood rising to her face. It’s not a game, Quizmaster.
But that’s exactly what it is. How do you pronounce your name?
Shi-vawn.
There was a longer pause, and she was about to re-send the message when his response came.
To answer your question, Hellbank is one level of the game.
Flipside was playing a game?
Yes. Stricture is the next level.
What sort of game? Could she have got into trouble?
Later.
Siobhan stared at the word. What do you mean?
We’ll talk later.
I need your cooperation.
Then learn patience. I could shut down right now and you’d never find me, do you accept that?
Yes. Siobhan was about ready to punch the screen.
Later.
Later, she typed.
And that was it. No further messages. He’d gone off-line, or was still there but wouldn’t respond. And all she could do was wait. Or was it? She logged on to the Internet and tried all the search engines she could find, asking them for sites related to Quizmaster and PaganOmerta. She came up with dozens of Quizmasters, but got the feeling none of them was hers. PaganOmerta was a blank, though separating the words gave her hundreds of sites, almost all of them trying to sell her a new-age religion. When she tried PaganOmerta. com there was nothing there. It was an address rather than a site. She made more coffee. The rest of the shift was drifting in. A couple of people said hello, but she wasn’t listening. She’d had another idea. She sat back down at her desk with the phone book and a copy of Yellow Pages, drew her notebook towards her and picked up a pen.
She tried computer retailers first, until finally someone directed her towards a comic shop on South Bridge. To Siobhan, comics meant things like the Beano and Dandy, though she’d once had a boyfriend whose obsession with 2000AD was at least partly responsible for their break-up. But this shop was a revelation. There were thousands of titles, along with sci-fi books, T-shirts and other merchandise. At the counter, a teenage assistant was arguing the merits of John Constantine with two schoolboys. She’d no way of knowing whether Constantine was a comic character or a writer or artist. Eventually the boys noticed her standing right behind them. They stopped being excited, turned back into awkward, gangling twelve-year-olds. Maybe they weren’t used to women listening in. She didn’t suppose they were used to women at all.