The Falls

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‘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’.

Nor was the flat just a flat. It was ‘the flat in Edinburgh’s fashionable New Town’, the ‘quarter-million flat owned by Ms Balfour’s parents’. John and Jacqueline Balfour were ‘the numbed family’, ‘the shocked banker and his wife’. Their daughter was ‘Philippa, 20, a student of art history at the University of Edinburgh’. She was ‘pretty’, ‘vivacious’, ‘carefree’, ‘full of life’.

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