They raised their glasses, said ‘Cheers’, and drank.

‘Fancy a smoke?’ Jack asked.

‘I’d kill for one,’ Rebus said, laughing.

‘So,’ Jack said, ‘what’s been achieved?’

‘Depends on your point of view,’ Rebus said. He’d been asking himself the same question. Maybe the Squaddies would nab all the drug players: Uncle Joe, Fuller, Stemmons. Maybe before that happened, Fuller would have done something with Ludovic Lumsden and Hayden Fletcher. Maybe. Hayden Fletcher was a regular at Burke’s. He met Tony El there, maybe even scored nose-talc from him. Maybe Fletcher was the type who liked to hang out with gangsters – some people were like that. Seeing the Major was worried, and learning that Allan Mitchison was the problem … it would have been easy to talk it over with Tony El, and for Tony to see the chance of some easy cash … Maybe Major Weir himself ordered Mitch’s death. Well, his was the one certain punishment, his daughter would make sure of that. And had Tony El ever actually intended to kill Mitch? Rebus couldn’t even be sure of that. Maybe he’d have torn the bag from Mitch’s head at the last minute. Then maybe he’d have warned him to forget all about T-Bird Oil.

It seemed part of some larger pattern, accidents forming themselves into a dance of association. Fathers and daughters, fathers and sons, infidelities, the illusions we sometimes call memory. Past errors harped on, or made good by spurious confession. Bodies littered down the years, mostly forgotten except by the perpetrators. History turning sour, or fading away like old photographs. Endings … no rhyme or reason to them. They just happened. You died, or disappeared, or were forgotten. You became nothing more than a name on the back of an old photo, and sometimes not even that.

Jethro Tull: ‘Living in the Past’. Rebus had been a slave to that rhythm for far too long. It was the work that did it. As a detective, he lived in people’s pasts: crimes committed before he arrived on the scene; witnesses’ memories ransacked. He had become a historian, and the role had bled into his personal life. Ghosts, bad dreams, echoes.

But maybe now he had a chance. Look at Jack: he’d reinvented himself. Good news week.

The phone rang, was answered by the barmaid, who nodded towards Rebus. He took the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘I tried your first home, decided to try your second home.’

Siobhan. Rebus straightened up.

‘What did you get?’

‘A name: Martin Davidson. Stayed at the Fairmount three weeks before the Judith Cairns murder. The room was charged to his employer, a firm called LancerTech, as in technical support. Based in Altens, just outside Aberdeen. They design the safety elements into platform equipment, that sort of thing.’

‘You’ve talked to them?’

‘Soon as I got his name. Don’t worry, I didn’t mention him. I just asked a couple of general questions. Receptionist said I was the second person in two days to ask her the same thing.’