The Falls is as much Siobhan’s book as Rebus’s. They share pretty well equal ‘screen time’, and are together only infrequently. Perhaps the point I was trying to make is that Siobhan doesn’t need Rebus any more. She’s happy to work with him, but as equals. I also promote Gill Templer (apart from Rebus, the only character to have survived from book one of the series), and retire ‘Farmer’ Watson.

Rebus himself seems to feel that the tectonic plates are shifting, that younger officers are moving into positions of responsibility while he remains a dinosaur. He can share his worries with Bobby Hogan, a colleague from the ‘old school’, but not with Morris Gerald Cafferty. I decided that Cafferty, criminal Edinburgh’s Mr Big, would be sidelined in The Falls. In past books, he had proven to be a useful foil: someone Rebus felt close to, but not in a good way. Cafferty tempts and teases Rebus, helps him out where no help is wished for. The two men are too alike not to have some respect for each other; but at any moment one of them is quite capable of destroying the other also. Cafferty could have been useful to me in The Falls, but I left him out as a favour to a mentor of mine, Allan Massie. Allan was writer-in-residence for a time at Edinburgh University, and helped me with my early short stories. He also introduced me to Euan Cameron, an editor in London who would eventually publish Knots & Crosses. I acknowledged my debt to both in the dedication page to The Falls, and alluded to another ‘series’ writer, Anthony Powell, when I stated that Allan and Euan had ‘set the ball rolling’.

So why is Cafferty missing? Well, in a newspaper review of one of my previous Rebus novels, Allan Massie had stated a dislike of Cafferty – this Cafferty-less book is the result.

You see, sometimes I do listen to my critics.

May 2005

1

‘You think I killed her, don’t you?’

He sat well forward on the sofa, head slumped in towards his chest. His hair was lank, long-fringed. Both knees worked like pistons, the heels of his grubby trainers never meeting the floor.

‘You on anything, David?’ Rebus asked.

The young man looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, dark-rimmed. A lean, angular face, bristles on the unshaved chin. His name was David Costello. Not Dave or Davy: David, he’d made that clear. Names, labels, classification: all very important. The media had varied its descriptions of him. He was ‘the boyfriend’, ‘the tragic boyfriend’, ‘the missing student’s boyfriend’. He was ‘David Costello, 22’ or ‘fellow student David Costello, in his early twenties’. He ‘shared a flat with Ms Balfour’ or was ‘a frequent visitor’ to the ‘disappearance riddle flat’.