The Falls Read online

  Praise for Ian Rankin

  ‘Rankin’s ability to create a credible character, delivering convincing dialogue to complement sinister and hard-hitting plots set against vividly detailed atmosphere, is simply awesome’

  Time Out

  ‘Rankin is streets ahead in the British police procedural writing field … our top crime writer’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘His ear for dialogue is as sharp as a switchblade. This is, quite simply, crime writing of the highest order’

  Daily Express

  ‘Rankin writes laconic, sophisticated, well-paced thrillers’

  Scotsman

  ‘Ian Rankin bridges the gulf between the straight novel and the mystery with enviable ease’

  Allan Massie

  ‘First-rate crime fiction with a fierce realism’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Rankin uses his laconic prose as a literary paint stripper, scouring away pretensions to reveal the unwholesome reality beneath’

  Independent

  ‘His fiction buzzes with energy … Essentially, he is a romantic storyteller in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson … His prose is as vivid and terse as the next man’s, yet its flexibility and rhythm give it a potential for lyrical expression which is distinctively Rankin’s own’

  Scotland on Sunday

  Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, was published in 1987, and the Rebus books are now translated into over thirty languages and are bestsellers worldwide.

  Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards including the prestigious Diamond Dagger in 2005 and in 2009 was inducted into the CWA Hall of Fame. In 2004, Ian won America’s celebrated Edgar award for Resurrection Men. He has also been shortlisted for the Anthony Awards in the USA, and won Denmark’s Palle Rosenkrantz Prize, the French Grand Prix du Roman Noir and the Deutscher Krimipreis. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Hull and the Open University.

  A contributor to BBC2’s Newsnight Review, he also presented his own TV series, Ian Rankin’s Evil Thoughts. He has received the OBE for services to literature, opting to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh. He has also recently been appointed to the rank of Deputy Lieutenant of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons. Visit his website at www.ianrankin.net.

  By Ian Rankin

  The Inspector Rebus series

  Knots & Crosses – paperback – ebook

  Hide & Seek – paperback – ebook

  Tooth & Nail – paperback – ebook

  Strip Jack – paperback – ebook

  The Black Book – paperback – ebook

  Mortal Causes – paperback – ebook

  Let it Bleed – paperback – ebook

  Black & Blue – paperback – ebook

  The Hanging Garden – paperback – ebook

  Death Is Not The End (novella)

  Dead Souls – paperback – ebook

  Set in Darkness – paperback – ebook

  The Falls – paperback – ebook

  Resurrection Men – paperback – ebook

  A Question of Blood – paperback – ebook

  Fleshmarket Close – paperback – ebook

  The Naming of the Dead – paperback – ebook

  Exit Music – paperback – ebook

  Other Novels

  The Flood – paperback – ebook

  Watchman – paperback – ebook

  Westwind

  A Cool Head (Quickread) – paperback – ebook

  Doors Open – paperback – ebook

  The Complaints – paperback – ebook

  Writing as Jack Harvey

  Witch Hunt – paperback – ebook

  Bleeding Hearts – paperback – ebook

  Blood Hunt – paperback – ebook

  Short Stories

  A Good Hanging and Other Stories – paperback – ebook

  Beggars Banquet – paperback – ebook

  Non-Fiction

  Rebus’s Scotland – paperback

  Ian Rankin

  The Falls

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Dedication

  Praise for Ian Rankin

  About the Author

  By Ian Rankin

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Afterword

  Reading Group Notes

  Copyright

  To Allan and Euan,

  who set the ball rolling.

  Not my accent – I didn’t lose that so much as wipe it off my shoe, as soon as I started to live in England – but rather my own temperament, the prototypically Scottish part of my character that was chippy, aggressive, mean, morbid and, despite my best endeavours, persistently deist. I was, and always would be, a lousy escapee from the unnatural history museum …

  Philip Kerr, ‘The Unnatural History Museum’

  Whenever I’m on tour, I’m always on the lookout for local music and bands I haven’t heard of. On my first trip to New Zealand, I was sitting watching TV in my Auckland hotel room and liked the snippets of music I heard on an advert for the latest album by the Mutton Birds. I didn’t know the Mutton Birds, but they seemed to be popular in New Zealand. At tour’s end, I found myself with an hour to kill at the airport and some spare currency. I bought the album at a CD booth, and listened to it back in Edinburgh. There are plenty of great songs on Rain, Steam and Speed, but one – ‘The Falls’ – really got to me. It was slow and haunting and mythic. The lyrics were all about invention: how we invent the world by means of our insatiable curiosity. I loved the song’s refrain – ‘There must be a story behind all that …’

  There must be a story.

  I was still recovering from jet lag when the French TV crew hit town. They were in Edinburgh to make a documentary about the Scottish parliament, and wanted to talk to a few of the doubters. I never did find out how they got my name, but it’s true that I was sceptical about the costings, the site chosen for the building, and the need for another layer of bureaucracy. (I’m more sanguine these days.) I’d agreed to meet them at the recently opened Museum of Scotland on Chambers Street. There was a spot on the lower ground floor that would provide the perfect backdrop to our conversation. As we walked into the building, a member of staff sauntered over. He’d recognised me, and had something he wanted to say.

  ‘You should take a look at the little dolls, Mr Rankin.’

  I asked him which little dolls he meant. He winked, and told me to take the lift to the fourth floor. Plenty of people over the years have come up to me with their excited notions of plots for my next book. I’ve found precious few of them to be helpful or viable, but I was intrigued by these ‘little dolls’… which is how I made the acquaintance of the Arthur’s Seat coffins. They’re tucked away at the back of the fourth floor, in a section dedicated to religious belief and the afterlife. As soon as I saw them, I knew they would make a great story, especially as no one had come up with an incontrovertible interpretation of their meaning. In other words, there was a story to tell about them. Maybe fiction could provide a
sense of closure which so far had been lacking from their history.

  There must be a story behind all that …

  My books have always been attempts to explain aspects of Scotland to both outsiders and natives. I like using ‘hidden’ stories – Mary King’s Close (Mortal Causes), cannibalism (Set in Darkness) – as my starting points. There are things you can say in fiction which can’t always be contained by history books. It’s true also that I take real-life unsolved crimes (such as the Bible John murders in Black & Blue) and extrapolate from them to say something about the world we’ve made for ourselves. Maybe that’s why I became so intrigued, soon after my experience with the Arthur’s Seat coffins, by the story of Emmanuel Caillet, a young Frenchman whose body had been found on a Scottish mountainside. No one could explain why he’d come so far from home in order to kill himself, or even why he would kill himself. One theory – no wilder than many of the others – had it that he was involved in an Internet role-playing game, and that this had led to his murder. The perils we face when going online have been well documented, of course. Cyberspace is the perfect haunt of creeps, charlatans and hunters. It’s a place full of shape-shifters.

  Moreover, it’s a place beyond Rebus’s ken.

  I knew that by using role-playing as the basis for a plot, I would be taking Rebus into new territory, to a place where he would feel utterly lost. In other words, it was a way of allowing Siobhan to show her mettle. This would be her case, an opportunity for her to prove she’s as capable a detective as her mentor, but with a different set of skills. Meantime, I would give Rebus a quest of his own, but with physical clues – the dolls – rather than hi-tech ones.

  The Falls is as much Siobhan’s book as Rebus’s. They share pretty well equal ‘screen time’, and are together only infrequently. Perhaps the point I was trying to make is that Siobhan doesn’t need Rebus any more. She’s happy to work with him, but as equals. I also promote Gill Templer (apart from Rebus, the only character to have survived from book one of the series), and retire ‘Farmer’ Watson.

  Rebus himself seems to feel that the tectonic plates are shifting, that younger officers are moving into positions of responsibility while he remains a dinosaur. He can share his worries with Bobby Hogan, a colleague from the ‘old school’, but not with Morris Gerald Cafferty. I decided that Cafferty, criminal Edinburgh’s Mr Big, would be sidelined in The Falls. In past books, he had proven to be a useful foil: someone Rebus felt close to, but not in a good way. Cafferty tempts and teases Rebus, helps him out where no help is wished for. The two men are too alike not to have some respect for each other; but at any moment one of them is quite capable of destroying the other also. Cafferty could have been useful to me in The Falls, but I left him out as a favour to a mentor of mine, Allan Massie. Allan was writer-in-residence for a time at Edinburgh University, and helped me with my early short stories. He also introduced me to Euan Cameron, an editor in London who would eventually publish Knots & Crosses. I acknowledged my debt to both in the dedication page to The Falls, and alluded to another ‘series’ writer, Anthony Powell, when I stated that Allan and Euan had ‘set the ball rolling’.

  So why is Cafferty missing? Well, in a newspaper review of one of my previous Rebus novels, Allan Massie had stated a dislike of Cafferty – this Cafferty-less book is the result.

  You see, sometimes I do listen to my critics.

  May 2005

  1

  ‘You think I killed her, don’t you?’

  He sat well forward on the sofa, head slumped in towards his chest. His hair was lank, long-fringed. Both knees worked like pistons, the heels of his grubby trainers never meeting the floor.

  ‘You on anything, David?’ Rebus asked.

  The young man looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, dark-rimmed. A lean, angular face, bristles on the unshaved chin. His name was David Costello. Not Dave or Davy: David, he’d made that clear. Names, labels, classification: all very important. The media had varied its descriptions of him. He was ‘the boyfriend’, ‘the tragic boyfriend’, ‘the missing student’s boyfriend’. He was ‘David Costello, 22’ or ‘fellow student David Costello, in his early twenties’. He ‘shared a flat with Ms Balfour’ or was ‘a frequent visitor’ to the ‘disappearance riddle flat’.

  Nor was the flat just a flat. It was ‘the flat in Edinburgh’s fashionable New Town’, the ‘quarter-million flat owned by Ms Balfour’s parents’. John and Jacqueline Balfour were ‘the numbed family’, ‘the shocked banker and his wife’. Their daughter was ‘Philippa, 20, a student of art history at the University of Edinburgh’. She was ‘pretty’, ‘vivacious’, ‘carefree’, ‘full of life’.

  And now she was missing.

  Detective Inspector John Rebus shifted position, from in front of the marble fireplace to slightly to one side of it. David Costello’s eyes followed the move.

  ‘The doctor gave me some pills,’ he said, finally answering the question.

  ‘Did you take them?’ Rebus asked.

  The young man shook his head slowly, eyes still on Rebus.

  ‘Don’t blame you,’ Rebus said, sliding his hands into his pockets. ‘Knock you out for a few hours, but they don’t change anything.’

  It was two days since Philippa – known to friends and family as ‘Flip’ – had gone missing. Two days wasn’t long, but her disappearance was out of character. Friends had called the flat at around seven in the evening to confirm that Flip would be meeting up with them within the hour at a bar on the South Side. It was one of those small, trendy places which had sprung up around the university, catering to an economic boom and the need for dim lighting and overpriced flavoured vodkas. Rebus knew this because he’d walked past it a couple of times on his way to and from his place of work. There was an old-fashioned pub practically next door, with vodka mixers at a pound-fifty. No trendy chairs though, and serving staff who knew their way around a brawl but not a cocktail list.

  Seven, seven-fifteen, she probably left the flat. Tina, Trist, Camille and Albie were already on their second round of drinks. Rebus had consulted the files to confirm those names. Trist was short for Tristram, and Albie was Albert. Trist was with Tina; Albie was with Camille. Flip should have been with David, but David, she explained on the phone, wouldn’t be joining them.

  ‘Another bust-up,’ she’d said, not sounding too concerned.

  She’d set the flat’s alarm before leaving. That was another first for Rebus – student digs with an alarm. And she’d done the mortise lock as well as the Yale, leaving the flat secure. Down a single flight of stairs and out into the warm night air. A steep hill separated her from Princes Street. Another climb from there would take her to the Old Town, the South Side. No way she’d be walking. But records from her home telephone and mobile had failed to find a match for any taxi firm in the city. So if she’d taken one, she’d hailed it on the street.

  If she’d got as far as hailing one.

  ‘I didn’t, you know,’ David Costello said.

  ‘Didn’t what, sir?’

  ‘Didn’t kill her.’

  ‘Nobody’s saying you did.’

  ‘No?’ He looked up again, directly into Rebus’s eyes.

  ‘No,’ Rebus assured him, that being his job after all.

  ‘The search warrant …’ Costello began.

  ‘It’s standard, any case of this kind,’ Rebus explained. It was, too: suspicious disappearance, you checked all the places the person might be. You went by the book: all the paperwork signed, clearance given. You searched the boyfriend’s flat. Rebus could have added: we do it because nine times out of ten, it’s someone the victim knows. Not a stranger, plucking prey from the night. It was your loved ones who killed you: spouse, lover, son or daughter. It was your uncle, your closest friend, the one person you trusted. They’d been cheating on you, or you’d cheated them. You knew something, you had something. They were jealous, spurned, needed money.

  If Flip Balfour was dead, her body would turn up soon; if
she was alive and didn’t want to be found, then the job would be more difficult. Her parents had appeared on TV, pleading with her to make contact. Police were at the family home, intercepting calls in case any ransom demand should arrive. Police were wandering through David Costello’s flat on the Canongate, hoping to turn up something. And police were here – in Flip Balfour’s flat. They were ‘babysitting’ David Costello – stopping the media from getting too close. This was what the young man had been told, and it was partly true.

  Flip’s flat had been searched the previous day. Costello had keys, even to the alarm system. The phone call to Costello’s own flat had come at ten p.m.: Trist, asking if he’d heard from Flip, only she’d been on her way to Shapiro’s and hadn’t turned up.

  ‘She’s not with you, is she?’

  ‘I’m the last person she’d come to,’ Costello had complained.

  ‘Heard you’d fallen out. What is it this time?’ Trist’s voice had been slurred, ever-so-slightly amused. Costello hadn’t answered him. He’d cut the call and tried Flip’s mobile, got her answering service, left a message asking her to phone him. Police had listened to the recording, concentrating on nuance, trying to read falseness into each word or phrase. Trist had phoned Costello again at midnight. The group had been to Flip’s flat: no one home. They’d been ringing round, but none of her friends seemed to know anything. They waited until Costello himself arrived at the flat, unlocking it. No sign of Flip inside.