‘What does he mean, “more coffins”?’ Gill asked.
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’ So he told her, laid the whole thing out before her. In the musty, leatherbound sets of Dunfermline Presses and Inverness Couriers he’d found exactly what he’d known and dreaded he would find. In July 1977, a scant week before the Nairn beach coffin had been found, the body of Paula Gearing had been washed ashore four miles further along the coast. Her death could not be explained, and was put down to ‘misadventure’. In October 1972, three weeks before the finding of the coffin in Dunfermline Glen, a teenage girl had been reported missing. Caroline Farmer was a fourth-year student at Dunfermline High. She’d recently been jilted by a long-term boyfriend, and the best guess was that this had led her to leave home. Her family said they wouldn’t rest until they’d heard from her. Rebus doubted they ever had...
Gill Templer listened to his story without comment. When he’d finished, she looked at the cuttings and the notes he’d taken in the library. Finally, she looked up at him.
‘It’s thin, John.’
Rebus jumped from his seat. He needed to be moving, but the room didn’t have enough space. ‘Gill, it’s... there’s something there.’
‘A killer who leaves coffins near the scene?’ She shook her head slowly. ‘I just can’t see it. You’ve got two bodies, no signs of foul play, and two disappearances. Doesn’t exactly make a pattern.’
‘Three disappearances including Philippa Balfour.’
‘And there’s another thing: the Falls coffin turned up less than a week after she went AWOL. No pattern again.’
‘You think I’m seeing things?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Can I at least follow it through?’
‘John...’
‘Just one, maybe two more officers. Give us a few days to see if we can convince you.’
‘We’re stretched as it is.’
‘Stretched doing what? We’re whistling in the dark till she comes back, phones home or turns up dead. Give me two people.’
She shook her head slowly. ‘You can have one. And three or four days, tops. Understood?’
Rebus nodded.
‘And John? Go see the doctor, or I’m reeling you back in. Understood?’
‘Understood. Who will I be working with?’
Templer was thoughtful. ‘Who do you want?’
‘Give me Ellen Wylie.’
She stared at him. ‘Any particular reason why?’
He shrugged. ‘She’ll never make it as a TV presenter, but she’s a good cop.’
Templer was still staring. ‘Okay,’ she said at last. ‘Go ahead.’
‘And is there any chance you can keep Steve Holly away from us?’
‘I can try.’ She tapped the newspaper. ‘I’m assuming the “local expert” is Jean?’ She waited till he’d nodded, then she sighed. ‘I should have known better, bringing the two of you together...’ She started rubbing at her forehead. It was something the Farmer had done, too, whenever he got what he called his ‘Rebus heads’...
‘What exactly are we looking for?’ Ellen Wylie asked. She’d been summoned to St Leonard’s, and didn’t look thrilled at the prospect of working a two-hander with Rebus.
‘The first thing,’ he told her, ‘is to cover our backsides, and that means checking that the MisPers never turned up.’
‘Talking to the families?’ she guessed, writing a note to herself on her pad.
‘Right. As for the two bodies, we need to take another look at the PM results, see if there’s anything the pathologists could have missed.’
‘Nineteen seventy-seven and eighty-two? You think the records won’t have been ditched?’
‘I hope not. In any case, some of those pathologists have long memories.’
She made another note. ‘I’ll ask again: what are we looking for? You think there’s a possibility of proving these women and the coffins are related?’
‘I don’t know.’ But he knew what she meant: it was one thing to believe something, quite another to be able to prove it, especially in a court of law.
‘It might set my mind at rest,’ he said at last.
‘And all of this started with some coffins on Arthur’s Seat?’ He nodded, his own enthusiasm making no impact on her scepticism.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘if I’m seeing things, you’ll get your chance to tell me. But first we do a bit of digging.’
She shrugged, made a show of jotting another note on to her pad. ‘Did you ask for me, or were you given me?’
‘I asked.’
‘And DCS Templer said okay?’
Rebus nodded again. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘I don’t know.’ She gave the question serious consideration. ‘Probably not.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Then let’s get started.’
It took him the best part of two hours to type up everything he had. What he wanted was a ‘bible’ they could work from. He had dates and page references for each of the newspaper stories, and had arranged with the library for copies to be made. Wylie meantime was busy on the phone, begging favours from police stations in Glasgow, Perth, Dunfermline and Nairn. She wanted case notes if any still existed, plus pathologists’ names. Whenever she laughed, Rebus knew what had just been said to her: ‘You don’t ask for bloody much, do you?’ Hammering away at his keyboard, he listened to her work. She knew when to be coy, when to get tough, and when to flirt. Her voice never betrayed the set features of her face as repetition made her weary.
‘Thank you,’ she said for the umpteenth time, dropping the receiver into its cradle. She scribbled a note on her pad, checked the time and wrote that down too. She was thorough, all right. ‘A promise is one thing,’ she said more than once.
‘It’s better than nothing.’
‘As long as they come through.’ Then she lifted the handset again, took another deep breath, and made the next call.
Rebus was intrigued by the long gaps in the chronology: 1972, 1977, 1982, 1995. Five years, five years, thirteen years. And now, just maybe, another five-year gap. The fives made for a nice pattern, but it was immediately broken by that silence between ’82 and ’95. There were all sorts of explanations: the man, whoever he was, could have been away somewhere, maybe in prison. Who was to say the coffins had only been left dotted around Scotland? It might be worth putting out a more general search, see if any other forces had come across the phenomenon. If he’d done a stretch in prison, well, records could be checked. Thirteen years was a long one: had to be murder, most probably.
There was another possibility, of course: that he hadn’t been anywhere. That he’d gone on with his spree right here, but somehow hadn’t bothered with the coffins, or they hadn’t ever been found. A little wooden box... a dog would chew it to pulp; a kid might take it home; someone might bin it, the better to be rid of the sick joke. Rebus knew that a public appeal would be one way of finding out, but he couldn’t see Templer going for it. She would need convincing first.
‘Nothing?’ he asked as Wylie put down the phone.
‘No one’s answering. Maybe word’s gone round about the crazy cop from Edinburgh.’
Rebus crumpled a sheet of paper and tossed it overarm towards the bin. ‘I think maybe we’re getting a bit stir-crazy,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a break.’
Wylie was heading off to the baker’s for a jam doughnut. Rebus decided he’d just take a walk. The streets around St Leonard’s didn’t offer a great deal of choice. Tenements and housing schemes, or Holyrood Road with its speeding traffic and backdrop of Salisbury Crags. Rebus decided to head into the warren of narrow passages between St Leonard’s and Nicolson Street. He nipped into a newsagent’s and bought a can of Irn-Bru, sipping from it as he walked. They said the stuff was perfect for hangovers, but he was using it to fend off the craving for a proper drink, a pint and a nip, somewhere smoky with the horses on TV... The Southsider was a possibility, but he crossed the road to avoid it. There were kids playing on the pavements, Asians mostly. School was over for the day and here they were with their energy, their imagination. He wondered if maybe his own imagination was putting in some overtime today... It was the final possibility: that he was seeing connections where none existed. He got out his mobile and a scrap of paper with a number on it.