The Falls (8 page)

‘But you accept that it
is
an abduction?’

‘I don’t … no, that’s not what I meant.’

The screen showed John Balfour trying to answer someone else’s question. The ranks of reporters had become a scrum.

‘Then what
did
you mean, DS Wylie?’

‘I just … I didn’t say anything about …’

And then Ellen Wylie’s voice was replaced by Gill Templer’s. The voice of authority. The reporters knew her of old, just as she knew them.

‘Steve,’ she said, ‘you know only too well that we can’t speculate on details like that. If you want to make up lies just to sell a few more papers, that’s your concern, but it’s hardly respectful to Philippa Balfour’s family and friends.’

Further questions were handled by Gill, who insisted on some calm beforehand. Although Rebus couldn’t see her, he imagined Ellen Wylie would be shrinking visibly. Siobhan was moving her feet up and down, as though all of a sudden some adrenalin had kicked in. Balfour interrupted Gill to say that he’d like to respond to a couple of the points raised. He did so, calmly and effectively, and then the conference started to break up.

‘A cool customer,’ Pryde said, before moving off to regroup his troops. It was time to get back to the real work again.

Grant Hood approached. ‘Remind me,’ he said. ‘Which station was giving the longest odds on the boyfriend?’

‘Torphichen,’ Rebus told him.

‘Then that’s where my money’s going.’ He looked to Rebus for a reaction, but didn’t get one. ‘Come on, sir,’ he went on, ‘it was written all over his face!’

Rebus thought back to his night-time meeting with Costello … the story of the eyeballs and how Costello had come up close.
Take a good long look …

Hood was shaking his head as he made to pass Rebus. The blinds had been opened, the brief interlude of sun now ended as thick grey clouds rolled back over the city. The tape of Costello’s performance would go to the psychologists. They’d be looking for a glimmer of something, a short outburst of bright illumination. He wasn’t sure they’d find it. Siobhan was standing in front of him.

‘Interesting, wasn’t it?’ she said.

‘I don’t think Wylie’s cut out for liaison,’ Rebus answered.

‘She shouldn’t have been there. A case like this for her first outing … she was as good as thrown to the lions.’

‘You didn’t enjoy it?’ he asked slyly.

She stared at him. ‘I don’t like blood sports.’ She made to move away, but hesitated. ‘What did you think, really?’

‘I thought you were right about it being interesting. Singularly interesting.’

She smiled. ‘You caught that too?’

He nodded. ‘Costello kept saying “we”, while her father used “I”.’

‘As if Flip’s mother didn’t matter.’

Rebus was thoughtful. ‘It might mean nothing more than that Mr Balfour has an inflated sense of his own importance.’ He paused. ‘Now wouldn’t that be a first in a merchant banker? How’s the computer stuff going?’

She smiled – ‘computer stuff’ just about summed up Rebus’s knowledge of hard disks and the like. ‘I got past her password.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning I can check her most recent e-mails … soon as I get back to my desk.’

‘No way to access the older ones?’

‘Already done. Of course, there’s no way of telling what’s been deleted.’ She was thoughtful. ‘At least I don’t think there is.’

‘They’re not stored somewhere on the … mainframe?’

She laughed. ‘You’re thinking of sixties spy films, computers taking up whole rooms.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t worry. You’re doing okay for someone who thinks LOL means Loyal Orange Lodge.’

They’d moved out of the office and into the corridor. ‘I’m heading back to St Leonard’s. Need a lift?’

She shook her head. ‘Got my car with me.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘It looks like we’re getting hooked up to HOLMES.’

This was one piece of new technology Rebus did know something about: the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System. It was a software system that collated information and speeded up the whole process of gathering and sifting. Its application meant that Philippa Balfour’s disappearance was now the priority case in the city.

‘Won’t it be funny if she traipses back from an unannounced shopping spree?’ Rebus mused.

‘It would be a relief,’ Siobhan said solemnly. ‘But I don’t think that’s going to happen, do you?’

‘No,’ Rebus said quietly. Then he went to find himself something to eat on the way back to base.

Back at his desk, he went through the files again, concentrating on family background. John Balfour was the third generation of a banking family. The business had started in Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square in the early 1900s. Philippa’s great-grandfather had handed the running of the bank to her grandfather in the 1940s, and he hadn’t taken a back seat until the 1980s, when John Balfour had taken over. Almost the first thing Philippa’s father had done was open a London office, concentrating his efforts there. Philippa had gone to a private school in Chelsea. The family relocated north in the late eighties after the death of John’s father, Philippa changing to a school in Edinburgh. Their home, Junipers, was a baronial mansion in sixteen acres of countryside somewhere between Gullane and Haddington. Rebus wondered how Balfour’s wife Jacqueline felt. Eleven bedrooms, five public rooms … and her husband down in London a minimum of four days each week. The Edinburgh office, still in its original premises in Charlotte Square, was run by an old friend of John Balfour’s called Ranald Marr. The two had met at university in Edinburgh, heading off together to the States for their MBAs. Rebus had called Balfour a merchant banker, but Balfour’s was really a small private bank geared to the needs of its client list, a wealthy elite requiring investment advice, portfolio management, and the kudos of a leatherbound Balfour’s chequebook.

When Balfour himself had been interviewed, the emphasis had been on the possibility of a kidnapping for profit. Not just the family phone, but those in the Edinburgh and London offices were being monitored. Mail was being intercepted in case any ransom demand arrived that way: the fewer fingerprints they had to deal with, the better. But as yet, all they’d had were a few crank notes. Another possibility was a deal gone sour: revenge the motive. But Balfour was adamant that he had no enemies. All the same, he’d denied the team access to his bank’s client base.

‘These people trust me. Without that trust, the bank’s finished.’

‘Sir, with respect, your daughter’s well-being might depend …’

‘I’m perfectly aware of that!’

After which the interview had never lost its edge of antagonism.

The bottom line: Balfour’s was conservatively estimated to be worth around a hundred and thirty million, with John Balfour’s personal wealth comprising maybe five per cent of the whole. Six and a half million reasons for a professional abduction. But wouldn’t a professional have made contact by now? Rebus wasn’t sure.

Jacqueline Balfour had been born Jacqueline Gil-Martin, her father a diplomat and landowner, the family estate a chunk of Perthshire comprising nearly nine hundred acres. The father was dead now, and the mother had moved into a cottage on the estate. The land itself was managed by Balfour’s Bank, and the main house, Laverock Lodge, had become a setting for conferences and other large gatherings. A TV drama had been filmed there apparently, though the show’s title meant nothing to Rebus. Jacqueline hadn’t bothered with university, busying herself instead with a variety of jobs, mainly as a personal assistant to some businessman or other. She’d been running the Laverock estate when she’d met John Balfour, on a trip to her father’s bank in Edinburgh. They’d married a year later, and Philippa had been born two years after that.

Just the one child. John Balfour himself was an only child, but Jacqueline had two sisters and a brother, none of them currently living in Scotland. The brother had followed in his father’s footsteps and was on a Washington posting with the Foreign Office. It struck Rebus that the Balfour dynasty was in trouble. He couldn’t see Philippa rushing to join Daddy’s bank, and wondered why the couple hadn’t tried for a son.

None of which, in all probability, was pertinent to the inquiry. All the same, it was what Rebus enjoyed about the job: constructing a web of relationships, peering into other people’s lives, wondering and questioning …

He turned to the notes on David Costello. Dublin-born and educated, the family moving just south of the city to Dalkey in the early nineties. The father, Thomas Costello, didn’t seem to have turned a day’s work in his life, his needs supplied by a trust fund set up by his father, a land developer. David’s grandfather owned several prime sites in the centre of Dublin, and made a comfortable living from them. He owned half a dozen racehorses, too, and spent all his time these days concentrating on that side of things.

David’s mother, Theresa, was something else again. Her background could at best be called lower middle class, mother a nurse, father a teacher. Theresa had gone to art school but dropped out and got a job instead, providing for the family when her mother got cancer and her father fell apart. She worked behind the counter in a department store, then moved to window-dressing, and from there to interior design – for shops at first, and then for wealthy individuals. Which was how she met Thomas Costello. By the time they married, both her parents were dead. Theresa probably didn’t need to work, but she worked anyway, building up her one-woman company until it had grown into a business with a turnover in the low millions and a workforce of five, not including herself. There were overseas clients, and the list was still growing. She was fifty-one now, and showing no signs of slacking, while her husband, a year her junior, remained the man about town. Press clippings from the Irish news showed him at racing events, garden parties and the like. In none of the photos did he appear with Theresa. Separate rooms in their Edinburgh hotel … As their son said, it was hardly a crime.

David had been late going to university, having taken a year out to travel the world. He was now in the third year of his MA degree in English Language and Literature. Rebus remembered the books in his living room: Milton, Wordsworth, Hardy …

‘Enjoying the view, John?’

Rebus opened his eyes. ‘Deep in thought, George.’

‘You weren’t dropping off, then?’

Rebus glared at him. ‘Far from it.’

As Hi-Ho Silvers moved away, Siobhan came and rested against the side of Rebus’s desk.

‘So how deep in thought were you?’

‘I was wondering if Rabbie Burns could have murdered one of his lovers.’ She just stared at him. ‘Or whether someone who reads poetry could.’

‘Don’t see why not. Didn’t some death-camp commander listen to Mozart of an evening?’

‘Now there’s a cheery thought.’

‘Always here to make your day that little bit brighter. Now what about doing me a favour?’

‘How can I refuse?’

She handed him a sheet of paper. ‘Tell me what you think that means.’

Subj: Hellbank
Date: 5/9
From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]

Did you survive Hellbank? Time running out. Stricture awaits your call
.
QuiM

Rebus looked up at her. ‘Going to give me a clue?’

She took back the sheet of paper. ‘It’s an e-mail printout. Philippa had a couple of dozen messages waiting for her, dating back to the day she went missing. All of them except this one are addressed to her other name.’

‘Her other name?’

‘ISPs—’ she paused – ‘Internet service providers will usually allow you a range of log-on names, as many as five or six.’

‘Why?’

‘So you can be … different people, I suppose. Flipside 1223 is a sort of alias. Her other e-mails all went to Flip-dot-Balfour.’

‘So what does it mean?’

Siobhan expelled air. ‘That’s what I’m wondering. Maybe it means she had a side we don’t know about. There’s not a single saved message from her or to her in the name of Flipside 1223. So either she’s been erasing them as she goes, or else this got to her by mistake.’

‘Doesn’t look like coincidence, does it, though?’ Rebus said. ‘Her nickname’s Flip.’

Siobhan was nodding. ‘Hellbank, Stricture, Pagan Omerta …’

‘Omerta’s the mafia code of silence,’ Rebus stated.

‘And Quizmaster,’ Siobhan said. ‘Signs herself or himself QuiM. Little touch of juvenile humour there.’

Rebus looked at the message again. ‘Beats me, Siobhan. What do you want to do?’

‘I’d like to track down whoever sent this, but that’s not going to be easy. Only way I can think of is to reply.’

‘Let whoever it is know that Philippa’s gone missing?’

Siobhan lowered her voice. ‘I was thinking more along the lines of
her
replying.’

Rebus was thoughtful. ‘Think it would work? What would you say?’

‘I haven’t decided.’ The way she folded her arms, Rebus knew she was going to do it anyway.

‘Run it past DCS Templer when she gets in,’ he cautioned. Siobhan nodded and made to leave, but he called her back. ‘You went to uni. Tell me, did you ever mix with the likes of Philippa Balfour?’

She snorted. ‘That’s another world. No tutorials or lectures for them. Some of them I only ever saw in the exam hall. And you know what?’

‘What?’

‘The sods always passed …’

That evening, Gill Templer hosted a celebratory gathering at the Palm Court in the Balmoral Hotel. A tuxedoed pianist was playing in the opposite corner. A bottle of champagne sat in an ice-bucket. Bowls of nibbles had been brought to the table.

‘Remember to leave space for supper,’ Gill told her guests. A table in Hadrian’s had been booked for eight-thirty. It had just gone half past seven, and the last arrival was coming through the door.

Slipping off her coat, Siobhan apologised. A waiter appeared and took the coat from her. Another waiter was already pouring champagne into her glass.

‘Cheers,’ she said, sitting down and lifting the glass. ‘And congratulations.’

Gill Templer lifted her own glass and allowed herself a smile. ‘I think I deserve it,’ she said, to enthusiastic agreement.