Lorna just shrugged, tipping the dregs of the bottle into her glass. ‘And that’s the story,’ she said. But I knew it wasn’t: it was only the beginning of a story. The tale gnawed away at me. I needed to know why it had happened. I needed to give the incident some closure. And if that meant composing a five-hundred-page novel around it, so be it. I had my first chapter, after all. (Though I never did find out what Lorna’s brother thought of his fictional equivalent …)

As I was writing it, the book went through a number of working titles, including The Whispering Rain and Dead Crude (both of which became chapter titles instead). I’d managed to find time for a research trip back to Scotland, taking in Aberdeen but not Shetland. For the Shetland scenes, I had recourse to guide books. I also didn’t get to make a helicopter flight to an oil rig, but found the next best thing in an Aberdonian author called Bill Kirton, who had worked in that field and was able to furnish me with as much detail as I needed to make Rebus’s trip on a ‘paraffin budgie’ realistic. Oil companies were generous in the amount of promotional literature they sent me, perhaps slow to realise that I was unlikely to be singing their praises in what was to be, after all, a crime novel. I’d grown up in a coal-mining town, where coal itself had been referred to as ‘black diamonds’. Oil was sometimes called ‘black gold’, and to get across this sense of the importance of the industry, I decided I needed a final title with the word ‘black’ in it. Well, my previous novel, Let It Bleed, had used the title of a Rolling Stones album, and it so happened they had another called Black & Blue: black for oil; blue for the cops (the ‘boys in blue’ of popular lore). Rebus would take at least one beating in the course of the book, too, leaving him black and blue all over.

I had my title.

One further ingredient, however, had been missing from my work up until this point – anger. My son Kit had come into the world in July 1994. There’d been no sign of any problems during Miranda’s pregnancy. But when he was three months old, we began to wonder why he didn’t move around much. At six months, our local GP in France was concerned too, and at around the age of nine months we knew Kit had some serious problems. There were long twice-weekly drives to the nearest children’s hospital for tests, and longer drives still to the main paediatric facility in Bordeaux. My French was never as good as Miranda’s. I would drive home full of questions, frustrated by my inability to use language properly, fired up at the joke God seemed to be playing on us. And I would climb the rickety wooden ladder which took me through the trapdoor and into the cobwebbed attic of our old farmhouse. Nothing up there but a computer and some maps and photos of Edinburgh. I would sit down and try to get back into the book I was writing – the book which would eventually become Black & Blue. And suddenly I was in charge of this fictional universe. I was able to play God. Language started working for me again, and I used Rebus as my punchbag, raining physical and psychological blows down on him. As a result of which, Black & Blue became a much tougher book than my previous efforts, and left me feeling better too.