Volvos, BMWs, sporty Audis … they were all passing him on their way home. Rebus was wondering if he wanted to commute. From Marchmont he could walk to work. It took about fifteen minutes, the only exercise he ever got. He wouldn’t fancy the drive every day between Falls and the city. The streets had been quiet when he’d been there, but he guessed tonight the narrow main road would be lined with cars.
When he started looking for a parking space in Marchmont, however, he was reminded of another reason for moving out. In the end, he left the Saab on a yellow line, and went into the nearest shop for an evening paper, milk, rolls and bacon. He’d called into the station, asked if he was needed: he wasn’t. Back in his flat, he took a can of beer from the fridge and settled into his chair by the living-room window. The kitchen was more of a mess than usual: some of the hall stuff was in there while the rewiring went on. He didn’t know when the electrics had last been done. He didn’t think they’d been touched since he bought the place. After the rewiring, he had a painter booked to slap on some magnolia, freshen the place up. He’d been told not to make too many renovations: whoever bought the place would probably just do it all over again anyway. Rewiring and decorating: he’d stop at that. The Property Centre had said it was impossible to tell how much he’d get for the place. In Edinburgh, you put your home on the market for ‘offers over’, but that premium could reach thirty or forty per cent. A conservative estimate valued his Arden Street shell at £125,000 to £140,000. There was no mortgage outstanding. It was cash in the bank.
‘You could retire on that,’ Siobhan had told him. Well, maybe. He’d have to split it with his ex-wife, he supposed, even though he’d written her a cheque for her share of the place soon after they’d split up. And he could slip some money to Sammy, his daughter. Sammy was another reason for selling, or so he told himself. After her accident, she was finally out of the wheelchair but still used a pair of sticks. Two flights of tenement stairs were beyond her … not that she’d been a regular visitor even before the hit-and-run.
He didn’t have many visitors, was not a good host. When his ex, Rhona, had moved out, he’d never got round to filling the gaps she’d left. Someone had once described the flat as ‘a cave’, and there was some truth in this. It provided a form of shelter for him, and that was about all he asked of it. The students next door were playing something semi-raucous. It sounded like bad Hawkwind from twenty years before, which probably meant it was by some fashionable new band. He looked through his own collection, came up with the tape Siobhan had made, and put it on. The Mutton Birds: three songs from one of their albums. They came from New Zealand, somewhere like that, and one of the instruments had been recorded here in Edinburgh. That was about as much as she could tell him about them. The second song was ‘The Falls’.
He sat back down again. There was a bottle on the floor: Talisker, a clean, honed taste. Glass beside it, so he poured, toasted the reflection in the window, leaned back and closed his eyes. He wasn’t having this room redecorated. He’d done it himself not that long back, his old friend and ally Jack Morton helping. Jack was dead now, one of too many ghosts. Rebus wondered if he’d leave them behind when he moved. Somehow he doubted it, and deep down, he would miss them anyway.
The music was all about loss and redemption. Places changing and people with them, dreams shifting ever further beyond reach. Rebus didn’t think he’d be sorry to see the back of Arden Street. It was time for a change.
4
On her way into work next morning, Siobhan thought of nothing but Quizmaster. Nobody had called her mobile, so she was thinking up another message to send him. Him or her. She knew she had to keep an open mind, but couldn’t help thinking of Quizmaster as ‘him’. ‘Stricture’, ‘Hellbank’ … they seemed masculine to her. And the whole idea of some game being played by computer … it all sounded so blokeish, sad anoraks stuck in their bedrooms. Her first message – Problem. Need to talk to you. Flipside – seemed not to have worked. Today, she was going to end the pretence. She would e-mail him as herself, and explain Flip’s disappearance, asking him to get in touch. She’d kept the mobile phone beside her all night, waking every hour or so and checking to see that she hadn’t slept through a call. But no calls came. Finally, as dawn approached, she’d got dressed and gone for a walk. Her flat was just off Broughton Street, in an area undergoing rapid gentrification: not as pricey as the New Town which it neighboured, but close to the city centre. Half her street seemed to be taken up with skips, and she knew that by mid-morning builders’ vans would be struggling to find a parking space.
She broke the walk with breakfast at an early opener: beans on toast and a mug of tea so strong she feared for tannin poisoning. At the top of Calton Hill, she stopped to watch the city gearing up for another day. Down by Leith, a container ship was sitting off the coast. The Pentland Hills to the south wore their covering of low cloud like a welcoming duvet. There wasn’t much traffic yet on Princes Street: buses and taxis mostly. She liked Edinburgh best at this time of day, before routine set in. The Balmoral Hotel was one of the closest landmarks. She thought back to the party Gill Templer had hosted there … how Gill had talked of having a lot on her plate. Siobhan wondered if she’d meant the case itself or her new promotion. Thing about the promotion was, John Rebus came with it. He was Gill’s problem now rather than the Farmer’s. Word in the office was, John had already got into a spot of bother: found drunk inside the MisPer’s flat. In the past, people had warned Siobhan that she was growing too much like Rebus, picking up his faults as well as his strengths. She didn’t think that was true.
No, that wasn’t true …
Her walk downhill took her on to Waterloo Place. A right turn, she’d be home in five minutes. A left, and she could be at work in ten. She turned left on to North Bridge, kept walking.
St Leonard’s was quiet. The CID suite had a musty smell: too many bodies each day spending too long cooped up there. She opened a couple of windows, made herself a mug of weak coffee, and sat down at her desk. When she checked, there were no messages on Flip’s computer. She decided to keep the line open while she composed her new e-mail. But after only a couple of lines, a message told her she had post. It was from Quizmaster, a simple Good morning. She hit reply and asked, How did you know I was here? The response was immediate.
That’s something Flipside wouldn’t have to ask. Who are you?
Siobhan typed so quickly, she didn’t correct her errors. I’m a police officer, baesd in Edinburgh. We’re investgating Philippa Balfour’s disappearance. She waited a full minute for his reply.
Who?
Flipside, she typed.
She never told me her real name. That’s one of the rules.
The rules of the game? Siobhan typed.
Yes. Did she live in Edinburgh?
She was a student here. Can we talk? You’ve got my mobile number.
Again, the wait seemed interminable.
I prefer this.
Okay, Siobhan typed, can you tell me about Hellbank?
You’d have to play the game. Give me a name to call you.
My name’s Siobhan Clarke. I’m a detective constable with Lothian and Borders Police.
I get the feeling that’s your real name, Siobhan. You’ve broken one of the first rules. How do you pronounce it?
Siobhan could feel the blood rising to her face. It’s not a game, Quizmaster.
But that’s exactly what it is. How do you pronounce your name?
Shi-vawn.
There was a longer pause, and she was about to re-send the message when his response came.
To answer your question, Hellbank is one level of the game.
Flipside was playing a game?
Yes. Stricture is the next level.
What sort of game? Could she have got into trouble?
Later.
Siobhan stared at the word. What do you mean?
We’ll talk later.
I need your cooperation.
Then learn patience. I could shut down right now and you’d never find me, do you accept that?
Yes. Siobhan was about ready to punch the screen.
Later.
Later, she typed.
And that was it. No further messages. He’d gone off-line, or was still there but wouldn’t respond. And all she could do was wait. Or was it? She logged on to the Internet and tried all the search engines she could find, asking them for sites related to Quizmaster and PaganOmerta. She came up with dozens of Quizmasters, but got the feeling none of them was hers. PaganOmerta was a blank, though separating the words gave her hundreds of sites, almost all of them trying to sell her a new-age religion. When she tried PaganOmerta. com there was nothing there. It was an address rather than a site. She made more coffee. The rest of the shift was drifting in. A couple of people said hello, but she wasn’t listening. She’d had another idea. She sat back down at her desk with the phone book and a copy of Yellow Pages, drew her notebook towards her and picked up a pen.
She tried computer retailers first, until finally someone directed her towards a comic shop on South Bridge. To Siobhan, comics meant things like the Beano and Dandy, though she’d once had a boyfriend whose obsession with 2000AD was at least partly responsible for their break-up. But this shop was a revelation. There were thousands of titles, along with sci-fi books, T-shirts and other merchandise. At the counter, a teenage assistant was arguing the merits of John Constantine with two schoolboys. She’d no way of knowing whether Constantine was a comic character or a writer or artist. Eventually the boys noticed her standing right behind them. They stopped being excited, turned back into awkward, gangling twelve-year-olds. Maybe they weren’t used to women listening in. She didn’t suppose they were used to women at all.
‘I heard you talking,’ she said. ‘Thought maybe you could help me with something.’ None of the three said anything. The teenage assistant was rubbing at a patch of acne on his cheek. ‘You ever play games on the Internet?’
‘You mean like Dreamcast?’ She looked blank. ‘It’s Sony,’ the assistant clarified.
‘I mean games where there’s someone in charge, and they contact you by e-mail, set you challenges.’
‘Role-playing.’ One of the schoolboys nodded, looking to the others for confirmation.
‘Have you ever played one?’ Siobhan asked him.
‘No,’ he admitted. None of them had.
‘There’s a games shop about halfway down Leith Walk,’ the assistant said. ‘It’s D & D but they might be able to help.’
‘D & D?’
‘Sword and sorcery, dungeons and dragons.’
‘Does this shop have a name?’ Siobhan asked.
‘Gandalf’s,’ they chorused.
*
Gandalf’s was a piece of narrow frontage squeezed unpromisingly between a tattoo parlour and a chip shop. Even less promisingly, its filthy window was covered with a metal grille held in place with padlocks. But when she tried the door, it opened, setting off a set of wind chimes hanging just inside. Gandalf’s had obviously been something else – maybe a second-hand bookshop – and a change of use hadn’t been accompanied by any sort of makeover. The shelves held an assortment of board games and playing pieces – the pieces themselves looking like unpainted toy soldiers. Posters on the walls depicted cartoon Armageddons. There were instruction books, their edges curling, and in the centre of the room four chairs and a foldaway table, on which sat a playing-board. There was no sales counter and no till. A door at the back of the shop creaked open and a man in his early fifties appeared. He had a grey beard and ponytail, and a distended stomach clad in a Grateful Dead T-shirt.
‘You look official,’ he said glumly.
‘CID,’ Siobhan said, showing him her warrant card.
‘Rent’s only eight weeks late,’ he grumbled. As he shuffled towards the board, she saw that he was wearing leather open-toed sandals. Like their owner, they had a good few miles on them. He was studying the placement of pieces on the board. ‘You move anything?’ he asked suddenly.
‘No.’
‘You sure?’
‘Sure.’
He smiled. ‘Then Anthony’s fucked, pardon my French.’ He looked at his watch. ‘They’ll be here in an hour.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘The gamers. I had to shut up shop last night before they had a chance to finish. Anthony must’ve been flustered, trying to finish Will off.’
Siobhan looked at the board. She couldn’t see any grand design to the way the playing pieces were arranged. The beardie-weirdie tapped the cards laid out beside the board.
‘These are what matters,’ he said irritably.
‘Oh,’ Siobhan said. ‘Afraid I’m no expert.’
‘You wouldn’t be.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing, I’m sure.’
But she was pretty sure she knew what he meant. This was a private club, males only, and every bit as exclusive as any other bastion.
‘I don’t think you can help me,’ Siobhan admitted, looking around. She was resisting the urge to scratch herself. ‘I’m interested in something slightly more high-tech.’
He bristled at this. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Role-playing by computer.’
‘Interactive?’ His eyes widened. She nodded and he checked his watch again, then shuffled past her to the door and locked it. She went on the defensive, but he merely shuffled past her again on his way to the far door. ‘Down here,’ he said, and Siobhan, feeling a bit like Alice at the mouth of the tunnel, eventually followed.
Down four or five steps, she came into a dank, windowless room, only partially lit. There were boxes piled high – more games and accessories, she guessed – plus a sink with kettle and mugs on the draining-board. But on a table in one corner sat what looked like a state-of-the-art computer, its large screen as thin as a laptop’s. She asked her guide what his name was.
‘Gandalf,’ he blithely replied.
‘I meant your real name.’
‘I know you did. But in here, that is my real name.’ He sat down at the computer and started work, talking as he moved the mouse. It took her a moment to realise that the mouse was cordless.
‘There are lots of games on the Net,’ he was saying. ‘You join a group of people to fight either against the program or against other teams. There are leagues.’ He tapped the screen. ‘See? This is a Doom league.’ He glanced at her. ‘You know what Doom is?’
‘A computer game.’
He nodded. ‘But here, you’re working in cooperation with others and against a common foe.’
Her eyes ran down the team names. ‘How anonymous is it?’ she asked.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean, does each player know who his team-mate is, or who’s on the opposing team?’
He stroked his beard. ‘At most, they’d have a nom de guerre.’
Siobhan thought of Philippa, with her secret e-mail name. ‘And people can have lots of names, right?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘You can amass dozens of names. People who’ve spoken to you a hundred times … they come back under a new name, and you don’t realise you already know them.’
‘So they can lie about themselves?’
‘If you want to call it that. This is the virtual world. Nothing’s “real” as such. So people are free to invent virtual lives for themselves.’
‘A case I’m working on, there’s a game involved.’
‘Which game?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s got levels called Hellbank and Stricture. Someone called Quizmaster seems to be in charge.’
He was stroking his beard again. Since sitting at the computer, he’d donned a pair of metal-rimmed glasses. The screen was reflected in the lenses, hiding his eyes. ‘I don’t know it,’ he said at last.
‘What does it sound like to you?’
‘It sounds like SIRPS: Simple Role-Play Scenario. Quizmaster sets tasks or questions,
could be to one player or dozens.’
‘You mean teams?’
He shrugged. ‘Hard to know. What’s the website?’
‘I don’t know.’
He looked at her. ‘You don’t know very much, do you?’
‘No,’ she admitted.
He sighed. ‘How serious is the case?’
‘A young woman’s gone missing. She was playing the game.’
‘And you don’t know if the two are connected?’
‘No.’
He rested his hands on his stomach. ‘I’ll ask around,’ he said. ‘See if we can track down Quizmaster for you.’
‘Even if I had an idea what the game involved …’
He nodded, and Siobhan remembered her dialogue with Quizmaster. She’d asked about Hellbank. And his reply?
You’d have to play the game …
She knew that requisitioning a laptop would take time. Even then, it wouldn’t be hooked up to the Net. So on her way back to the station she stopped off at one of the computer shops.
‘Cheapest one we do is around nine hundred quid,’ the saleswoman informed her.
Siobhan flinched. ‘And how long before I could be online?’
The saleswoman shrugged. ‘Depends on your server,’ she said.
So Siobhan thanked her and left. She knew she could always use Philippa Balfour’s computer, but she didn’t want to, for all sorts of reasons. Then she had a brainwave and got on her mobile instead. ‘Grant? It’s Siobhan. I need a favour …’
DC Grant Hood had bought his laptop for the same reason he’d bought a mini-disc player, DVD and digital camera. It was stuff, and stuff was what you bought to impress people. Sure enough, each time he brought a new gadget into St Leonard’s he was the centre of attention for five or ten minutes – or rather, the stuff was. But Siobhan had noticed that Grant was always keen to lend these bits of high-tech to anyone who asked. He didn’t use them himself, or if he did he tired of them after a few weeks. Maybe he never got past the owner’s manuals: the one with the camera had been chunkier than the apparatus itself.