The Falls by Ian Rankin Read Free Book Online

as if checking for defects. ‘Neighbours?’ he suggested.
    Rebus nodded. ‘Neighbours it is,’ he said.
    He gathered together the notes from initial interviews. Other officers had been assigned the far side of the street, leaving Rebus and three others – working teams of two – to cover the flats either side of Philippa Balfour’s. Thirty-five in total, three of them empty, leaving thirty-two. Sixteen addresses per team, maybe fifteen minutes at each … four hours total.
    Rebus’s partner for the day, DC Phyllida Hawes, had done the arithmetic for him as they climbed the steps of the first tenement. Actually, Rebus wasn’t sure you could call them ‘tenements’, not down in the New Town, with its wealth of Georgian architecture, its art galleries and antique emporia. He asked Hawes for advice.
    ‘Blocks of flats?’ she suggested, raising a smile. There were one or two flats per landing, some adorned with brass nameplates, others ceramic. A few went so low as to boast just a piece of sellotaped card or paper.
    ‘Not sure the Cockburn Association would approve,’ Hawes remarked.
    Three or four names listed on the bit of card: students, Rebus guessed, from backgrounds less generous than Philippa Balfour’s.
    The landings themselves were bright and cared for: welcome mats and tubs of flowers. Hanging baskets had been placed over banisters. The walls looked newly painted, the stairs swept. The first stairwell went like clockwork: two flats with nobody home, cards dropped through either letterbox; fifteen minutes in each of the other flats – ‘just a few back-up questions … see if you’ve thought of anything to add …’ The householders had shaken their heads, had professed themselves still shocked. Such a quiet little street.
    There was a main door flat at ground level, a much grander affair, with a black-and-white-chequered marble entrance hall, Doric columns either side. The occupier was renting it long term, worked in ‘the financial sector’. Rebus saw a pattern emerging: graphic designer; training consultant; events organiser … and now the financial sector.
    ‘Does no one have real jobs any more?’ he asked Hawes.
    ‘These are the real jobs,’ she told him. They were back on the pavement, Rebus enjoying a cigarette. He noticed her staring at it.
    ‘Want one?’
    She shook her head. ‘Three years I’ve managed so far.’
    ‘Good for you.’ Rebus looked up and down the street. ‘If this was a net curtain kind of place, they’d be twitching right now.’
    ‘If they had net curtains, you wouldn’t be able to peer in and see what you’re missing.’
    Rebus held the smoke, let it billow out through his nostrils. ‘See, when I was younger, there was always something rakish about the New Town. Kaftans and wacky baccy, parties and ne’er-do-wells.’
    ‘Not much space left for them these days,’ Hawes agreed. ‘Where do you live?’
    ‘Marchmont,’ he told her. ‘You?’
    ‘Livingston. It was all I could afford at the time.’
    ‘Bought mine years back, two wages coming in …’
    She looked at him. ‘No need to apologise.’
    ‘Prices weren’t as crazy back then, that’s all I meant.’ He was trying not to sound defensive. It was that meeting with Gill: the little joke she’d made, just to unsettle him. And the way his visit to Costello had KO’d the surveillance … Maybe it was time to talk to someone about the drinking … He flicked the stub of his cigarette on to the roadway. The surface was made of shiny rectangular stones called setts. When he’d first arrived in the city he’d made the mistake of calling them cobbles; a local had put him right.
    ‘Next call,’ he said now, ‘if we’re offered tea, we take it.’
    Hawes nodded. She was in her late thirties or early forties, hair brown and shoulder-length. Her face was freckled and fleshed-out, as though she’d never quite lost her puppy fat. Grey trouser-suit and an emerald blouse, pinned at the neck with a