So he had an old address for the Oram family, a couple of grainy photographs, and the fact that the Potter’s Bar had morphed from pool hall to a pub called the Moorfoot. Not much to show for an evening, in other words. But then there was the lettings agency on Lasswade Road – if Oram needed a flat, did that imply that he was steering clear of his family? Did they have any inkling he was alive and kicking? And suppose Rebus did manage to track him down, was Cafferty really about to offer an olive branch to the guy, or was it not far more likely he’d be tying a noose to that branch instead?

Rebus reached across the table and lifted the envelope he’d taken from Cafferty’s flat. It was fat with twenties and fifties. He didn’t know what he was going to do with it, but he wasn’t going to keep it.

And he definitely wasn’t handing it back.

He knew that Eric Linn, the man he’d told about Albert Cousins’ poker losses, had died of lung cancer a couple of years back; he had heard as much from someone who’d attended the funeral. Cousins himself, one of Rebus’s more reliable snitches in CID days, had gambled everything away, lost his wife and his home, and topped himself. There hadn’t been more than a dozen people at the crema­torium. When Rebus had chatted to Linn in the pub that night, had he known that Linn knew Cafferty? He didn’t think so. Had he known that Cafferty was a silent partner in the Potter’s Bar? Yes. But how the hell could he have known the poker nights were happening without Cafferty’s knowledge? He looked again at the photos of Jack and Ishbel Oram. At the time, he hadn’t given the story much thought. The past was littered with people like Oram who’d got on the wrong side of Cafferty and suddenly not been around any longer. There was no way he could have connected it to a few words spoken during yet another drinking session. It really wasn’t his fault.

Brillo was lying curled in his basket. He gave his owner an imploring but resigned look as Rebus slipped a jacket on.

‘A couple of hours max,’ Rebus explained, thinking that it might even be true.