‘You’re talking out your arse.’

‘Maybe you’re just not listening.’ Rebus felt calmer now they were on the road. To Jack, he looked like someone had pulled the plug on him: no more sparks. He almost preferred the model with the faulty wiring. The lack of emotion in his friend’s voice was chilling, even in the overheated car. Jack slid his window down a little further. The speedometer was steady on forty, and that was them in the outside lane. Traffic to their left was really crawling. If he could find a space, he’d move to the inside – anything to delay their arrival.

He’d oftentimes admired John Rebus – and heard him praised by other officers – for his tenacity, the way he worried at a case terrier-style, more often than not tearing it open, spilling out secret motives and hidden bodies. But that same tenacity could also be a weakness, blinding him to danger, making him impatient and reckless. Jack knew why they were headed for Glasgow, thought he knew pretty well what Rebus would want to do there. And, as ordered by Ancram, Jack would be close by when the crap came tumbling down.

It was a long time since Rebus and Jack had worked together. They’d been an effective team, but Jack had been glad enough of the posting out of Edinburgh. Too claustrophobic – the town and his partner both. Rebus had seemed even then to spend more time living in his own head than in the company of others. Even the pub he chose to haunt was one with fewer than usual distractions: TV, one fruit machine, one cigarette machine. And when group activities were arranged – fishing trips, golf competitions, bus runs – Rebus never signed up. He was an irregular regular, a loner even in company, his brain and heart only fully engaged when he was working a case. Jack knew the score only too well. Work had a way of wrapping itself around you, so you were cut off from the rest of the world. People you met socially tended to treat you with suspicion or outright hostility – so you ended up mixing only with other cops, which bored your wife or girlfriend. They began to feel isolated too. It was a bastard.

There were plenty of people on the force who coped, of course. They had understanding partners; or they could shut work out whenever they went home; or it was just a job to them, a way of keeping up with the mortgage. Jack would guess CID was split fifty-fifty between those for whom it was a vocation, and those who could fit into any other type of office life, anywhere, any time.

He didn’t know what else John Rebus could do. If they kicked him off the force … he’d probably drink his pension dry, become just another old ex-cop hanging on to a fund of stories, telling them too often to the same people, trading one form of isolation for another.