There was a small guest bedroom with a padlock on it. Crowbarred open, it gave the lie to one area of speculation. A couple of the CID men had been wondering if Johnny Bible were tricking them – killing an innocent man and setting him up to look like the killer. The guest bedroom said Martin Davidson was Johnny Bible. It had been turned into a shrine to Bible John and other killers: dozens of scrapbooks, cuttings and photos pinned to the cork boards which lined the walls, videos of documentaries about serial killers, paperback books, heavily annotated, and at the centre of it all a blow-up of one of the Bible John flyers: the face almost smiling, a kindly face, and above it the same basic question: Have You Seen This Man?

Rebus almost answered yes; there was something about the shape of the face, he’d seen it before somewhere … somewhere recently. He took the Borneo photo from his pocket, looked at Ray Sloane, then back at the poster. They were very alike, but that wasn’t the similarity that was niggling Rebus. There was something else, someone else …

Then Jack asked him something from the doorway, and Rebus lost it.

They followed everyone back to Queen Street. Rebus and Jack had, by association, become part of the team. There was quiet jubilation, tempered with the knowledge that another murderer was in their midst. But as at least one officer put it, ‘If he did for that bastard, good luck to him.’

Which, Rebus guessed, would be the reaction Bible John would be hoping for. He’d be hoping they wouldn’t try too hard to find him. If he’d come out of retirement, then it had been to one end only – the killing of his impersonator. Johnny Bible had taken the glory, the achievement away from his predecessor; now there’d come the revenge.

Rebus sat in the CID office, staring into space, thinking. When someone handed him a cup, he raised it to his lips. But then Jack’s hand stopped him.

‘It’s whisky,’ he warned. Rebus looked down, saw sweet liquid the colour of honey, gazed at it for a moment, then put the cup down on the desk. There was laughter in the office, cheering and singing, like a football crowd after a result: same songs, same chants.

‘John,’ Jack said, ‘remember Lawson.’ It sounded like a warning.

‘What about him?’

‘He became obsessed.’

Rebus shook his head. ‘This is different. I know it was Bible John.’

‘What if it was?’

Rebus shook his head slowly. ‘Come on, Jack, after everything I told you? After Spaven and everything else? You know better than to ask that.’

Grogan was waving Rebus over to a telephone. Smiling, with whisky breath, he handed Rebus the receiver.

‘Someone wants a word.’

‘Hello?’

‘What in God’s name are you doing there?’

‘Oh, hello, Gill. Congratulations, looks like everything’s coming right for once.’

She melted a little. ‘Siobhan’s doing, not mine. I only passed the info along.’