Rebus had tucked the Saab in between two anonymous grey vans in the mortuary car park. Staff joked that the building was sited in the dead centre of Edinburgh, and they weren’t far wrong. Cowgate was central and yet easy to ignore, being a canyon over which both South Bridge and George IV Bridge passed, the mortuary itself an anonymous modern slab flanked by clubs and pubs. No one staggering late at night from any of these establishments could know that so many corpses lay in chilled stillness close by. The older Rebus got, the less he relished being in its vicinity. He was starting to think he might have to head inside when the staff door opened, Deborah Quant rummaging in her bag for her Lexus key fob.

Bingo.

‘Fancy seeing you here,’ he said, climbing out of his car. She’d had her red hair cut short since they’d last met, a drink at a wine bar where she’d told him there was someone else in her life. ‘The new style suits you,’ he added, nodding towards her head.

‘Fresh start all round,’ she replied, checking the time on her phone. ‘I’ve got a class to teach, John.’

‘I’ll get to the point then: I miss you a lot.’ He paused. ‘And I’m wondering how the Francis Haggard post-mortem went.’

She stared at him in silence as cars crawled past on Cowgate, some of them about to learn that access to Grassmarket had been blocked to allow Richard Branson to build a new hotel.

‘You’re unbelievable,’ she eventually stated. ‘How many years is it now since you left the force?’

‘I’m a private eye these days, though.’

‘A private eye?’ She was trying not to smile. ‘Working for who? The widow?’ She watched him shake his head. ‘You know I can’t tell you anything, John. It would be unprofessional.’

‘I know he was stabbed, so that’s the cause of death established, but was there anything else? Did he defend himself? Were there bruises? Was he even conscious when it happened?’

It took her a moment to decide to throw him a scrap. ‘There was a lot of alcohol in his system, lager and tequila mostly. As far as I know, no empty cans or beer bottles were found in the flat. There was one tequila bottle, mostly finished, only the victim’s fingerprints on it. He wasn’t a complete philistine, though – there was orange juice in both his fridge and his stomach.’

‘So the lager had been consumed elsewhere? A pub, maybe?’

‘Or a friend’s house. He hadn’t eaten at all that day, though.’

‘Nothing?’

Quant shook her head. ‘Then there were the narcotics in his system – cocaine and hash.’

‘What do you make of the stab wounds?’

‘Don’t get greedy, John.’ She opened her car and slung her bag in.

‘I’m serious, you know. I do miss you.’