‘What do you want?’ Her voice had grown chilly.

‘When I brought Jean Burchill here – there she is in the car, and she’s fine by the way, thanks for asking – when I brought her here, you said you often went to the Museum.’

‘Yes?’ She was staring over his shoulder, but averted her gaze when Jean’s eyes met hers.

‘Yet you’d never come across the Arthur’s Seat coffins.’ Rebus affected a frown. ‘It should have clicked with me right there.’ He stared at her, but she didn’t say anything. He watched her neck redden, watched her turn the coffin in her hands. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘brought you some extra business, eh? But I’ll tell you one thing …’

Her eyes were liquid; she brought them up to meet his. ‘What?’ she asked, voice cracking.

He pointed a finger at her. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t tag you sooner. I might have said something to Donald Devlin. And then you’d look like Jean back there, if not a damned sight worse.’

He turned away, headed back to the car. On the way, he unhooked the ‘Pottery’ sign and tossed it into the gutter. She was still watching from her doorway as he started the ignition. A couple of day-trippers were approaching along the pavement. Rebus knew exactly where they were headed and why. He made sure to turn the steering-wheel hard, running the sign over, front and back tyres both.

On the way back into Edinburgh, Jean asked if they were going to Portobello. He nodded, and asked if that was okay with her.

‘It’s fine,’ she told him. ‘I need someone to help me move that mirror out of the bedroom.’ He looked at her. ‘Just until the bruises have healed,’ she said quietly.

He nodded his understanding. ‘Know what I need, Jean?’

She turned towards him. ‘What?’

He shook his head slowly. ‘I was hoping you might tell me …’

Sexual repression and hysteria are what Edinburgh is all about.

Philip Kerr, ‘The Unnatural History Museum’

Afterword

Firstly, a big thank-you to Mogwai, whose ‘Stanley Kubrick’ EP was playing in the background throughout the final draft of this book.

The collection of poetry in David Costello’s flat is I Dream of Alfred Hitchcock by James Robertson, and the poem from which Rebus quotes is entitled ‘Shower Scene’.

After the first draft of this book was written, I discovered that in 1999 the Museum of Scotland commissioned two American researchers, Dr Allen Simpson and Dr Sam Menefee of the University of Virginia, to examine the Arthur’s Seat coffins and formulate a solution. They concluded that the most likely explanation was that the coffins had been made by a shoemaker acquaintance of the murderers Burke and Hare, using a shoemaker’s knife and brass fittings adapted from shoe buckles, the idea being to give the victims some vestige of Christian burial, since a dissected corpus could not be resurrected.

The Falls is, of course, a work of fiction, a flight of fancy. Dr Kennet Lovell exists only between its pages.