DC Grant Hood had bought his laptop for the same reason he’d bought a mini-disc player, DVD and digital camera. It was stuff, and stuff was what you bought to impress people. Sure enough, each time he brought a new gadget into St Leonard’s he was the centre of attention for five or ten minutes — or rather, the stuff was. But Siobhan had noticed that Grant was always keen to lend these bits of high-tech to anyone who asked. He didn’t use them himself, or if he did he tired of them after a few weeks. Maybe he never got past the owner’s manuals: the one with the camera had been chunkier than the apparatus itself.
So Grant had been only too happy to make a trip home, returning with the laptop. Siobhan had already explained that she would need to use it for e-mails.
‘It’s up and ready,’ Grant had told her.
‘I’ll need your e-mail address and pass name.’
‘But that means you can access my e-mails,’ he realised.
‘And tell me, Grant, how many e-mails do you get a week?’
‘Some,’ he said, sounding defensive.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll save them for you... and I promise not to peek.’
‘Then there’s the matter of my fee,’ Grant said.
She looked at him. ‘Your fee?’
‘Yet to be discussed.’ His face broke into a grin.
She folded her arms. ‘So what is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ he told her. ‘I’ll have to think...’
Transaction complete, she headed back to her desk. She already had a connector which would link her mobile phone to the laptop. But first she checked Philippa’s computer: no messages, nothing from Quizmaster. Getting online with Grant’s machine took her only a few minutes. Once there, she sent a note to Quizmaster, giving him Grant’s e-mail address:
Maybe I want to play the game. Over to you. Siobhan.
Having sent the message, she left the line open. It would cost her a small fortune when her next mobile bill appeared, but she pushed that thought aside. For now, the game itself was the only lead she had. Even if she had no intention of playing, she still wanted to know more about it. She could see Grant, the other side of the room. He was talking to a couple of other officers. They kept glancing in her direction.
Let them, she thought.
Rebus was at Gayfield Square, and nothing was happening. Which was to say, the place was a flurry of activity, but all the sound and fury couldn’t hope to hide a creeping sense of desperation. The ACC himself had put in an appearance and been briefed by both Gill Templer and Bill Pryde. He’d made it plain that what they needed was ‘a swift conclusion’. Both Templer and Pryde had used the phrase a little later, which was how Rebus knew.
‘DI Rebus?’ One of the woolly-suits was standing in front of him. ‘Boss says she’d like a word.’
When he walked in, she told him to close the door. The place was cramped and smelled of other people’s sweat. Space being at a premium, Gill was sharing this space with two other detectives, working in shifts.
‘Maybe we should start commandeering the cells,’ she said, collecting up mugs from the desk and failing to find anywhere better for them. ‘Could hardly be worse than this.’
‘Don’t go to any trouble,’ Rebus said. ‘I’m not staying.’
‘That’s right, you’re not.’ She put the mugs on the floor, and almost immediately kicked one of them over. Ignoring the spill, she sat down. Rebus stayed standing, as was obligatory, there being no other chairs in the room today. ‘How did you get on in Falls?’
‘I came to a swift conclusion.’
She glared at him. ‘Which was?’
‘That it’ll make a good story for the tabloids.’
Gill nodded. ‘I saw something in the evening paper last night.’
‘The woman who found the doll — or says she did — she’s been talking.’
‘“Or says she did”?’
He just shrugged.
‘You think she might be behind it?’
Rebus slipped his hands into his pockets. ‘Who knows?’
‘Someone thinks they might. A friend of mine called Jean Burchill. I think you should talk to her.’
‘Who is she?’
‘She’s a curator at the Museum of Scotland.’
‘And she knows something about this doll?’
‘She might do.’ Gill paused. ‘According to Jean, this is far from the first.’
Rebus admitted to his guide that he’d never been inside the museum before.
‘The old museum, I used to take my daughter there when she was a kid.’
Jean Burchill tutted. ‘But this is quite another thing, Inspector. It’s all about who we are, our history and culture.’
‘No stuffed animals and totem poles?’
She smiled. ‘Not that I can think of.’ They were walking through the ground floor’s exhibit area, having left the huge whitewashed entrance hall behind. They stopped at a small lift, and Burchill turned to face him, her eyes running the length of his body. ‘Gill’s talked about you,’ she said. Then the lift doors opened and she got in, Rebus following.
‘Nothing but good, I hope.’ He tried hard for levity. Burchill just looked at him again and smiled her little smile. Despite her age, she reminded him of a schoolgirclass="underline" that mixture of the shy and the knowing, the prim and the curious.
‘Fourth floor,’ she told him, and when the lift doors opened again, they walked out into a narrow corridor filled with shadows and images of death. ‘The section on beliefs,’ she said, her voice barely audible. ‘Witchcraft and grave-robbers and burials.’ A black coach waited to take its next cargo to some Victorian graveyard, while nearby sat a large iron coffin. Rebus couldn’t help reaching out to touch it.
‘It’s a mortsafe,’ she said, then, seeing his lack of comprehension: ‘The families of the deceased would lock the coffin inside a mortsafe for the first six months to deter the resurrectionists.’
‘Meaning body-snatchers?’ Now this was a piece of history he knew. ‘Like Burke and Hare? Digging up corpses and selling them to the university?’
She peered at him like a teacher with a stubborn pupil. ‘Burke and Hare didn’t dig up anything. That’s the whole point of their story: they killed people, then sold the bodies to the anatomists.’
‘Right,’ Rebus said.
They passed funeral weeds, and photos of dead babies, and stopped at the furthest glass case.
‘Here we are,’ Burchill said. ‘The Arthur’s Seat coffins.’
Rebus looked. There were eight coffins in all. They were five or six inches long, well made, with nails studded into their lids. Inside the coffins were little wooden dolls, some wearing clothes. Rebus stared at a green and white check.
‘Hibs fan,’ he said.
‘At one time they were all dressed. But the cloth perished.’ She pointed to a photograph in the case. ‘In eighteen thirty-six, some children playing on Arthur’s Seat found the concealed mouth of a cave. Inside were seventeen little coffins, of which only these eight survive.’
‘They must have got a fright.’ Rebus was staring at the photograph, trying to place where on the massive slopes of the hill it might be.
‘Analysis of the materials suggests they were made in the eighteen thirties.’
Rebus nodded. The information was printed on a series of cards attached to the display. Newspapers of the time suggested that the dolls were used by witches casting death spells on certain individuals. Another popular theory was that they were put there by sailors as good-luck charms prior to sea voyages.
‘Sailors on Arthur’s Seat,’ Rebus mused. ‘Now there’s something you don’t see every day.’