Authors: Ian Rankin
‘Someone thinks they might. A friend of mine called Jean Burchill. I think you should talk to her.’
‘Who is she?’
‘She’s a curator at the Museum of Scotland.’
‘And she knows something about this doll?’
‘She might do.’ Gill paused. ‘According to Jean, this is far from the first.’
Rebus admitted to his guide that he’d never been inside the museum before.
‘The old museum, I used to take my daughter there when she was a kid.’
Jean Burchill tutted. ‘But this is quite another thing, Inspector. It’s all about who we are, our history and culture.’
‘No stuffed animals and totem poles?’
She smiled. ‘Not that I can think of.’ They were walking through the ground floor’s exhibit area, having left the huge whitewashed entrance hall behind. They stopped at a small lift, and Burchill turned to face him, her eyes running the length of his body. ‘Gill’s talked about you,’ she said. Then the lift doors opened and she got in, Rebus following.
‘Nothing but good, I hope.’ He tried hard for levity. Burchill just looked at him again and smiled her little smile. Despite her age, she reminded him of a schoolgirl: that mixture of the shy and the knowing, the prim and the curious.
‘Fourth floor,’ she told him, and when the lift doors opened again, they walked out into a narrow corridor filled with shadows and images of death. ‘The section on beliefs,’ she said, her voice barely audible. ‘Witchcraft and grave-robbers and burials.’ A black coach waited to take its next cargo to some Victorian graveyard, while nearby sat a large iron coffin. Rebus couldn’t help reaching out to touch it.
‘It’s a mortsafe,’ she said, then, seeing his lack of comprehension: ‘The families of the deceased would lock the coffin inside a mortsafe for the first six months to deter the resurrectionists.’
‘Meaning body-snatchers?’ Now this was a piece of history he knew. ‘Like Burke and Hare? Digging up corpses and selling them to the university?’
She peered at him like a teacher with a stubborn pupil. ‘Burke and Hare didn’t dig up anything. That’s the whole point of their story: they killed people, then sold the bodies to the anatomists.’
‘Right,’ Rebus said.
They passed funeral weeds, and photos of dead babies, and stopped at the furthest glass case.
‘Here we are,’ Burchill said. ‘The Arthur’s Seat coffins.’
Rebus looked. There were eight coffins in all. They were five or six inches long, well made, with nails studded into their lids. Inside the coffins were little wooden dolls, some wearing clothes. Rebus stared at a green and white check.
‘Hibs fan,’ he said.
‘At one time they were all dressed. But the cloth perished.’ She pointed to a photograph in the case. ‘In eighteen thirty-six, some children playing on Arthur’s Seat found the concealed mouth of a cave. Inside were seventeen little coffins, of which only these eight survive.’
‘They must have got a fright.’ Rebus was staring at the photograph, trying to place where on the massive slopes of the hill it might be.
‘Analysis of the materials suggests they were made in the eighteen thirties.’
Rebus nodded. The information was printed on a series of cards attached to the display. Newspapers of the time suggested that the dolls were used by witches casting death spells on certain individuals. Another popular theory was that they were put there by sailors as good-luck charms prior to sea voyages.
‘Sailors on Arthur’s Seat,’ Rebus mused. ‘Now there’s something you don’t see every day.’
‘Do I detect some homophobic connotation, Inspector?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s just a long way from the docks, that’s all.’
She looked at him, but his face didn’t betray anything.
Rebus was studying the coffins again. Were he a betting man, he’d see short odds on a connection between these objects and the one found in Falls. Whoever had made and placed the coffin by the waterfall knew about the museum exhibit, and had for some reason decided to copy it. Rebus looked around at the various sombre displays of mortality.
‘You put this lot together?’
She nodded.
‘Must make for a popular topic at parties.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ she said quietly. ‘When it comes down to it, aren’t we all curious about the things we fear?’
Downstairs in the old museum, they sat on a bench carved to resemble a whale’s ribcage. There were fish in a water feature nearby, kids almost reaching in to touch them, but then pulling back at the last moment, giggling and squeezing their hands: that mix again of the curious and the fearful.
At the end of the great hall, a huge clock had been erected, its complex mechanism comprising models of skeletons and gargoyles. A naked carving of a woman seemed to be wrapped in barbed wire. Rebus got the feeling there might be other scenes of torture just beyond his vision.
‘Our Millennium Clock,’ Jean Burchill explained. She checked her watch. ‘Ten minutes before it strikes again.’
‘Interesting design,’ Rebus said. ‘A clock full of suffering.’
She looked at him. ‘Not everyone notices straight away …’
Rebus just shrugged. ‘Upstairs,’ he said, ‘the display said something about the dolls connecting to Burke and Hare?’
She nodded. ‘A mock burial for the victims. We think they may have sold as many as seventeen bodies for dissection. It was a horrible crime. You see, a dissected body cannot rise up again on the day of the Last Judgment.’
‘Not without its guts spilling out,’ Rebus agreed.
She ignored him. ‘Burke and Hare were arrested and tried. Hare testified against his friend, and only William Burke went to the gallows. Guess what happened to his body afterwards?’
That was an easy one. ‘Dissection?’ Rebus guessed.
She nodded. ‘His body was taken to Old College, the same route most if not all of his victims were taken, and used by an anatomy class. This was in January eighteen twenty-nine.’
‘And the coffins date from the early eighteen thirties.’ Rebus was thoughtful. Hadn’t someone once boasted to him about owning a souvenir made from Burke’s skin? ‘What happened to the body afterwards?’ he asked.
Jean Burchill looked at him. ‘There’s a pocket-book in the museum at Surgeons’ Hall.’
‘Made from Burke’s skin?’
She nodded again. ‘I feel sorry for Burke actually. He seems to have been a genial man. An economic migrant. Poverty and chance led to his first sale. A visitor to his home died owing money. Burke knew that there was a crisis in Edinburgh, a successful medical faculty with not enough bodies to go round.’
‘Were people living long lives then?’
‘Far from it. But as I told you, a dissected corpse could not enter heaven. The only bodies available to medical students belonged to executed criminals. The Anatomy Act of eighteen thirty-two put an end to the need to rob graves …’
Her voice had died away. She seemed momentarily lost to the present as she considered Edinburgh’s blood-soaked past. Rebus was there with her. Resurrectionists and wallets made of human skin … witchcraft and hangings. Next to the coffins on the fourth floor he’d seen a variety of witch’s accoutrements: configurations of bones; shrivelled animal hearts with nails protruding.
‘Some place this, eh?’
He meant Edinburgh, but she considered her surroundings. ‘Ever since I was a child,’ she said, ‘I’ve felt more at peace here than anywhere else in the city. You might think my work morbid, Inspector, but fewer would be reconciled to the work
you
do.’
‘Fair shout,’ he agreed.
‘The coffins interest me because they
are
such a mystery. In a museum, we live by the rules of identification and classification. Dates and provenance may be uncertain, but we almost always know what we’re dealing with: a casket, a key, the remains of a Roman burial site.’
‘But with the coffins, you can’t be sure what they mean.’
She smiled. ‘Exactly. That makes them frustrating for a curator.’
‘I know the feeling,’ he said. ‘It’s like me with a case. If it can’t be solved, it nips my head.’
‘You keep mulling it over … coming up with new theories …’
‘Or new suspects, yes.’
Now they looked at one another. ‘Maybe we’ve more in common than I thought,’ Jean Burchill said.
‘Maybe we have,’ he admitted.
The clock had begun to sound, though its minute hand had yet to reach twelve. Visitors were summoned to it, the children’s mouths falling open as the various mechanisms brought the garish figures to life. Bells clanged and ominous organ music started playing. The pendulum was a polished mirror. Looking at it, Rebus caught glimpses of himself, and behind him the whole museum, each spectator captured.
‘Worth a closer look,’ Jean Burchill told him. They got up and began to move forwards, joining the congregation. Rebus thought he recognised wooden carvings of Hitler and Stalin. They were operating a jagged-toothed saw.
‘There’s something else,’ Jean Burchill was saying. ‘There’ve been other dolls, other places.’
‘What?’ He tore his eyes away from the clock.
‘Best thing is if I send you what I’ve got …’
Rebus spent the rest of that Friday waiting for his shift to end. Photos of David Costello’s garage had been placed on one of the walls, joining the haphazard jigsaw there. His MG was a dark blue soft-top. The forensic boffins hadn’t had permission to remove traces from the vehicle and its tyres, but that hadn’t stopped them taking a good look. The car hadn’t been washed of late. If it had been, they’d have been asking David Costello why. More photos of Philippa’s friends and acquaintances had been gathered and shown to Professor Devlin. A couple of prints of the boyfriend had been slipped in, which had caused Devlin to complain about ‘tactics beneath contempt’.
Five days since that Sunday night, five days since she’d disappeared. The more Rebus stared at the jigsaw on the wall, the less he saw. He thought again of the Millennium Clock, which was just the opposite: the more he’d looked at it, the more he’d seen – small figures suddenly picked out from the moving whole. He saw it now as a monument to the lost and forgotten. In its way, the wall display – the photos, faxes, rotas and drawings – comprised a monument too. But eventually, whatever happened, this monument would be dismantled and relegated to some box in a storeroom somewhere, its life limited to the length of the search.
He’d been here before: other times, other cases, not all of them solved to anyone’s satisfaction. You tried not to care, tried to maintain objectivity, just as the training seminars told you to, but it was hard. The Farmer still remembered a young boy from his first week on the force, and Rebus had his memories, too. Which was why, at day’s end, he went home, showered and changed, and sat in his chair for an hour with a glass of Laphroaig and the Rolling Stones for company:
Beggars Banquet
tonight, and more than one glass of Laphroaig actually. Carpets from the hall and bedrooms were rolled up either side of him. Mattresses and wardrobes, chests of drawers … the room was like a scrapyard. But there was a clear path from the door to his chair, and from his chair to the hi-fi, and that was all he needed.
After the Stones, he still had half a glass of malt to finish, so put on another album. Bob Dylan’s
Desire
, and the track ‘Hurricane’, a tale of injustice and wrongful accusation. He knew it happened: sometimes wilfully, sometimes by accident. He’d worked cases where the evidence seemed to be pointing conclusively to an individual, only for someone else to come forward and confess. And in the past – the distant past – maybe one or two criminals had been ‘fitted up’, to get them off the street, or to satisfy the public’s need for a conviction. There were times when you were sure you knew who the culprit was, but were never going to be able to prove it to the Procurator Fiscal’s satisfaction. One or two cops down the years had crossed the line.
He toasted them, catching his reflection in the living-room window. So he raised a toast to himself, too, then picked up the phone and called for a cab.
Destination: pubs.
In the Oxford Bar, he got talking to one of the regulars, happened to mention his trip to Falls.
‘I’d never heard of it before,’ he confided.
‘Oh aye,’ his companion stated, ‘I know Falls. Isn’t that where Wee Billy comes from?’
Wee Billy was another regular. A search confirmed that he wasn’t in the bar as yet, but he walked in twenty minutes later, still wearing his chef’s uniform from a restaurant around the corner. He wiped sweat from his eyes as he squeezed up to the bar.
‘That you done?’ someone asked him.
‘Fag break,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘Pint of lager, please, Margaret.’
As the barmaid poured, Rebus asked for a refill and said that both drinks were on him.
‘Cheers, John,’ Billy said, unused to such largesse. ‘How’s tricks?’
‘I was out at Falls yesterday. Is it right you grew up there?’
‘Aye, that’s right. Haven’t been back in years, mind.’
‘You didn’t know the Balfours then?’
Billy shook his head. ‘After my time. I was already in college when they moved back. Thanks, Margaret.’ He lifted the pint. ‘Your health, John.’
Rebus handed the cash over and raised his own pint, watching Billy demolish half the drink in three needy gulps.
‘Jesus, that’s better.’
‘Hard shift?’ Rebus guessed.
‘No more so than usual. You working the Balfour case then?’
‘Along with every other cop in the city.’
‘What did you reckon to Falls?’
‘Not big.’
Billy smiled, reached into his pocket for cigarette papers and tobacco. ‘Expect it’s changed a bit since I lived there.’
‘Were you a Meadowside boy?’
‘How did you know?’ Billy lit his roll-up.
‘A lucky guess.’
‘Mining stock, that’s me. Grandad worked all his days down the pit. Dad started off the same, but they made him redundant.’
‘I grew up in a mining town myself,’ Rebus said.
‘Then you’ll know what it’s like when the pits close. Meadowside was fine until then.’ Billy was staring at the optics, remembering his youth.
‘The place is still there,’ Rebus told him.