Out in the corridor, the scrum had melted away, but the hubbub from inside the CID office was loud and excited.
‘Say she didn’t do it.’ Siobhan spoke quietly, her words for Bain’s ears only.
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘Then how could Quizmaster be tapping into her account?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I mean, I suppose it’s possible, but it’s also highly unlikely.’
Siobhan looked at him. ‘So you think it’s her?’
He shrugged. ‘I’d like to know who the other access accounts belong to.’
‘Did Special Branch say how long it would take?’
‘Maybe later today, maybe tomorrow.’
Someone walked past, patted both of them on the shoulder, gave a thumbs-up as he bounced down the corridor.
‘They think we’ve cracked it,’ Bain said.
‘More fool them.’
‘She had the motive, you’ve said so yourself.’
Siobhan nodded. She was thinking of the Stricture clue, trying to imagine it composed by a woman. Yes, it was possible; of course it was possible. The virtual world: you could pretend to be anyone you liked, either gender, any age. The newspapers were full of stories about middle-aged paedophiles who’d infiltrated children’s chat rooms in the guise of teens and pre-teens. The very anonymity of the Net was what attracted people to it. She thought of Claire Benzie, of the long and careful planning it must have taken, the anger fermenting ever since her father’s suicide. Maybe she’d started out wanting to know Flip again, wanting to like and forgive her, but had found rising hatred instead, hatred of Flip’s easy world, her friends with fast cars, the bars and night clubs and dinner parties, the whole lifestyle enjoyed by people who’d never known pain, never lost anything in their lives that couldn’t be bought again.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, running both hands through her hair, pulling so hard that her scalp hurt. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘That’s good,’ Bain said. ‘Approach the interview with an open mind: textbook stuff.’
She smiled tiredly, squeezed his hand. ‘Thanks, Eric.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ he told her. She hoped he was right.
Maybe the Central Library was the right place for Rebus. Many of the customers today seemed to be the dispossessed, the tired, the unemployable. Some sat sleeping in the more comfortable chairs, the books on their laps mere props. One old man, toothless mouth gaping, sat at a desk near the telephone directories, his finger running ponderously down each column. Rebus had asked one of the staff about him.
‘Been coming in here for years, never reads anything else,’ he was informed.
‘He could get a job with Directory Enquiries.’
‘Or maybe that’s where he was fired from.’
Rebus acknowledged that this was a good point, and got back to his own research. So far he’d established that Albert Camus was a French novelist and thinker, the author of novels such as La Chute and La Peste. He’d won the Nobel Prize and then died while still in his forties. The librarian had done a search for him, but this was the only Camus of note to be found.
‘Unless, of course, you’re talking street names.’
‘What?’
‘Edinburgh street names.’
Sure enough, it turned out that the city boasted a Camus Road, along with Camus Avenue, Park and Place. No one seemed to know whether they were named after the French writer; Rebus reckoned the chances were pretty good. He looked up Camus in the phone book — by luck the old man wasn’t using it at the time — and found just the one. Taking a break, he thought about walking home and getting his car, maybe taking a drive out to Camus Road, but when a taxi came by he hailed it instead. Camus Road, Avenue, Park and Place turned out to be a little quartet of quiet residential streets just off Comiston Road in Fairmilehead. The taxi driver seemed bemused when Rebus told him to head back for George IV Bridge. When they hit a traffic hold-up at Greyfriars, Rebus paid the taxi off and got out. He headed straight into Sandy Bell’s pub, where the afternoon crowd hadn’t yet been swollen by workers on their way home. A pint and a nip. The barman knew him, told a few stories. He said that when the Infirmary moved to Petty France, they’d lose half their trade. Not the doctors and nurses, but the patients.
‘Pyjamas and slippers, I’m not joking: they walk straight out the ward and in here. One guy even had the tubes hanging out his arms.’
Rebus smiled, finished his drinks. Greyfriars Kirkyard was just around the corner, so he took a wander in. He reckoned that all those Covenanting ghosts would be pretty miserable, knowing a wee dog had made the place more famous than they had. There were tours up here at night, stories of sudden chill hands clamping shoulders. He recalled that Rhona, his ex, had wanted to be married in the kirk itself. He saw graves covered with iron railings — mortsafes, protecting the deceased from the Resurrection Men. Edinburgh seemed always to have thrived on cruelty, its centuries of barbarism masked by an exterior by turns douce and strict...
Stricture... he wondered what the word had to do with the clue. He thought it meant being tied up, something along those lines, but realised that he wasn’t sure. He left the kirkyard and headed on to George IV Bridge, turning in to the library. The same librarian was still on duty.
‘Dictionaries?’ he asked. She directed him towards the shelf he needed.
‘I did that check you asked for,’ she added. ‘There are some books by a Mark Smith, but nothing by anyone called M. E. Smith.’
‘Thanks anyway.’ He started to turn away.
‘I also printed you out a list of our Camus holdings.’
He took the sheet from her. ‘That’s great. Thank you very much.’
She smiled, as if unused to compliments, then looked more hesitant as she caught the alcohol on his breath. On his way to the shelves, he noticed that the desk by the telephone directories was vacant. He wondered if that was the old guy finished for the day; maybe it was like a nine-to-five for him. He pulled out the first dictionary he found and opened it at ‘stricture’: it meant binding, closure, tightness. ‘Binding’ made him think of mummies, or someone with their hands tied, held captive...
There was a clearing of the throat behind him. The librarian was standing there.
‘Chucking-out time?’ Rebus guessed.
‘Not quite.’ She pointed back towards her desk, where another member of staff was now positioned, watching them. ‘My colleague... Kenny... he thinks maybe he knows who Mr Smith is.’
‘Mr who?’ Rebus was looking at Kenny: barely out of his teens, wearing round metal-framed glasses and a black T-shirt.
‘M. E. Smith,’ the librarian said. So Rebus walked over, nodded a greeting at Kenny.
‘He’s a singer,’ Kenny said without preamble. ‘At least, if it’s the one I’m thinking of: Mark E. Smith. And not everyone would agree with the description “singer”.’
The librarian had gone back around the desk. ‘I’ve never heard of him, I must confess,’ she said.
‘Time to widen your horizons, Bridget,’ Kenny said. Then he looked at Rebus, wondering at the detective’s wide-eyed stare.
‘Singer with The Fall?’ Rebus said quietly, almost to himself.
‘You know them?’ Kenny seemed surprised that someone Rebus’s age would have such knowledge.
‘Saw them twenty years ago. A club in Abbeyhill.’
‘Real noise merchants, eh?’ Kenny said.
Rebus nodded distractedly. Then the other librarian, Bridget, gave voice to his thoughts.
‘Funny really,’ she said. Then she pointed to the sheet of paper in Rebus’s hand. ‘Camus’ novel La Chute translates as “The Fall”. We’ve a copy in the Fiction section if you’d like one...’