‘I make them,’ Bev Dodds said.
‘Do you?’ Jean sounded delighted.
Dodds put her arm out so she could take a closer look. ‘Local stones. I wash them and varnish them. I think they act a little like crystals.’
‘Positive energy?’ Jean guessed. Rebus could no longer tell if she was genuinely interested or just faking it. ‘Could I buy one, do you think?’
‘Of course,’ Dodds said delightedly. Her hair was windswept, cheeks red from the walk she’d just taken. She slid one of the bracelets from her wrist. ‘How about this? It’s one of my favourites, and just ten pounds.’
Jean paused at mention of the price, but then smiled and handed over a ten-pound note, which Dodds tucked into her pocket.
‘Ms Burchill works at the museum,’ Rebus said.
‘Really?’
‘I’m a curator.’ Jean had slipped the bracelet on to her wrist.
‘What a wonderful job. Whenever I’m in town, I try to make time for a visit.’
‘Have you heard of the Arthur’s Seat coffins?’ Rebus asked.
‘Steve told me about them,’ Dodds said. Rebus presumed she meant Steve Holly, the reporter.
‘Ms Burchill has an interest in them,’ Rebus said. ‘She’d like to see the doll you found.’
‘Of course.’ She slid open one of the drawers and brought out the coffin. Jean handled it with care, placing it on the kitchen table before examining it.
‘It’s quite well made,’ she said. ‘More like the Arthur’s Seat coffins than those others.’
‘“Others”?’ Bev Dodds asked.
‘Is it a copy of one of them?’ Rebus asked, ignoring this.
‘Not an exact copy, no,’ Jean said. ‘Different nails, and constructed slightly differently, too.’
‘By someone who’d seen the museum exhibit?’
‘It’s possible. You can buy a postcard of the coffins in the museum shop.’
Rebus looked at Jean. ‘Has anyone shown interest in the exhibit recently?’
‘How would I know that?’
‘Maybe a researcher or someone?’
She shook her head. ‘There was a doctoral student last year... but she went back to Toronto.’
‘Is there some connection here?’ Bev Dodds asked, wide-eyed. ‘Something between the museum and the abduction?’
‘We don’t know that anyone’s been abducted,’ Rebus cautioned her.
‘All the same...’
‘Ms Dodds... Bev...’ Rebus fixed her with his eyes. ‘It’s important that this conversation stays confidential.’
When she nodded understanding, Rebus knew that within minutes of them leaving, she’d be on the phone to Steve Holly. He left his tea unfinished.
‘We’d better be off.’ Jean took the hint, and placed her own cup on the draining-board. ‘That was lovely, thanks.’
‘You’re welcome. And thank you for buying the bracelet. My third sale today.’
As they walked back up the lane, two cars passed them. Day-trippers, Rebus guessed, on their way to the waterfall. And afterwards, maybe they’d stop by the pottery, asking to see the famous coffin. They’d probably buy something too...
‘What are you thinking?’ Jean asked, getting into the car and studying the bracelet, holding it up to the light.
‘Nothing,’ Rebus lied. He decided to drive through the village. The Rover and BMW stood drying in the late-afternoon sun. A young couple with two kids stood outside Bev Dodds’s cottage. The father had a video camera in his hand. Rebus gave way to four or five cars, then continued along the road to Meadowside. Three boys — maybe including the two from his previous visit — were playing football on the grass. Rebus stopped and wound down his window, calling out to them. They looked at him, but weren’t about to interrupt their game. He told Jean he’d only be a second, and got out of the car.
‘Hello there,’ he told the boys.
‘Who are you?’ The questioner was skinny, ribs protruding, and thin arms ending in bunched fists. His hair had been shorn to the scalp, and as he squinted into the light he managed to be four-feet-six of aggression and mistrust.
‘I’m the police,’ Rebus said.
‘We haven’t done nothing.’
‘Congratulations.’
The boy kicked the ball hard. It thundered into the upper thigh of one of the other players, leading the third to start laughing.
‘I was wondering if you knew anything about this spate of thefts I’ve been hearing about.’
The boy looked at him. ‘Get a grip,’ he said.
‘With pleasure, son. What’ll it be, your neck or your balls?’ The boy tried for a sneer. ‘Maybe you can tell me something about the church getting vandalised?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘No?’ Rebus sounded surprised. ‘Okay then, last shot... what about this wee coffin that’s been found?’
‘What about it?’
‘Have you seen it?’
The boy shook his head. ‘Tell him to sod off, Chick,’ one of his friends advised.
‘Chick?’ Rebus nodded, to let the boy know he was filing the information away.
‘Never saw the coffin,’ Chick said. ‘No way I’m going to knock on her door.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she’s well fucking weird.’ Chick laughed.
‘Weird how?’
Chick was losing patience. Somehow he’d been duped into having a conversation. ‘Weird like the rest of them.’
‘They’re all a bunch of tampons,’ his pal said, coming to rescue him. ‘Let’s go, Chick.’ They ran off, collecting the third boy and the ball on their way. Rebus watched for a moment, but Chick didn’t look back. As he returned to the car, he saw that Jean’s window was down.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘so I’m not the world’s best at asking questions of schoolkids.’
She smiled. ‘What did he mean about tampons?’
Rebus turned the ignition and glanced at her. ‘He meant they’re all stuck-up.’ He didn’t add the final word, didn’t need to. Jean knew exactly what he meant...
Late that Sunday night, he found himself on the pavement outside Philippa Balfour’s flat. He still had the set of keys in his pocket, but wasn’t going inside, not after what happened last time. Someone had closed the shutters in her living room and bedroom. No light was being allowed into the flat, none at all.
It was one week since her disappearance, and a reconstruction was under way. A WPC with a passing resemblance to the missing student had been dressed in clothes similar to the ones Flip might have been wearing that evening. A recently bought Versace T-shirt was missing from Flip’s wardrobe, so the WPC was wearing one just like it. She would walk out of the tenement and be photographed by the waiting newsmen. Then she’d walk briskly to the end of the street, where she’d step into a waiting taxi cab, commandeered for the purpose. She’d get out again and start climbing the hill towards the city centre. There would be photographers with her all the way, and uniformed officers stopping pedestrians and drivers, clipboards ready, questions prepared. The WPC would travel all the way to the bar on the South Side...
Two TV crews — BBC and Scottish — were readying to film the reconstruction. News programmes would show snippets of it.
It was an exercise, a way of showing that the police were doing something.
That was all.
Gill Templer, catching Rebus’s eye from the other side of the street, seemed to acknowledge as much with a shrug. Then she went back to her conversation with Assistant Chief Constable Colin Carswell. The ACC seemed to have a few points he wished to get across. Rebus didn’t doubt that the words ‘a swift conclusion’ would figure at least once. From past experience, he knew that when Gill Templer was irritated, she tended to play with a string of pearls she sometimes wore. They were around her neck now, and she had slipped a finger beneath them, running it back and forth. Rebus thought of all Bev Dodds’s bracelets, and what the kid called Chick had said: well fucking weird... Books of Wiccan in her living room, only she didn’t call it that, called it her ‘parlour’ instead. A Stones song popped into his head: ‘Spider and the Fly’, B-side to ‘Satisfaction’. He saw Bev Dodds as a spider, her parlour a web. For some reason the image, though fanciful, stuck with him...