The doctor checked the corpse’s head, found a clean gash.

Rebus looked up towards the staff. ‘Anyone see anything?’ Headshakes. ‘Who reported it?’

‘I did.’ The woman tourist, English accent.

Rebus turned to the doctor. ‘How long has he been in the water?’

‘I’m just a GP, not an expert. All the same, if you want a guess … not long. Certainly not overnight.’ Something had rolled out of the drowned man’s jacket pocket and wedged between two of the slats. A small brown bottle with white plastic top. Prescription pills. Rebus looked at the bloated face, fixed it to a much younger man, a man he’d interviewed in 1978 about his connection to Lenny Spaven.

‘He’s a local,’ Rebus told the company. ‘His name’s Fergus McLure.’

He tried phoning Gill Templer, couldn’t track her down, ended up leaving messages for her in half a dozen different places. Back home, he polished his shoes and changed into his best suit, picked out the shirt with the fewest creases, and found the most sober tie he had (excepting his funeral one).

He looked at himself in the mirror. He’d showered and shaved, dried his hair and combed it. The knot in his tie looked OK, and for once he’d found a matching pair of socks. He looked fine, felt anything but.

It was half past one, time to go to Fettes.

The traffic wasn’t too bad, the lights with him, like they didn’t want to hold up his appointment. He was early at L&B HQ thought of driving around, but knew it would only make him more nervous. Instead, he went inside, and sought out the Murder Room. It was on the second floor, a large central office space with smaller compartments off for the senior officers. This was the Edinburgh side of the triangle Johnny Bible had created, the heart of the Angie Riddell investigation. Rebus knew some of the faces on duty, smiled, nodded. The walls were covered with maps, photographs, charts – an attempt at order. So much of police work was putting things in some kind of order: fixing chronology, getting the details right, tidying up after the mess of people’s lives as well as their deaths.

Most of the people on duty this afternoon looked tired, lacking enthusiasm. They were waiting by telephones, waiting for the elusive tip-off, the missing link, a name or a sighting, waiting for the man … They’d been waiting a long time. Someone had mocked up a photofit of Johnny Bible: horns curling from the head, wisps of smoke from the flared nostrils, fangs and a serpent’s forked tongue.

The Bogeyman.

Rebus looked closer. The photofit had been done on computer. The starting-point had been an old photofit of Bible John. With the horns and fangs, he bore a vague likeness to Alister Flower …

He examined the photographs of Angie Riddell in life, kept his eyes away from her autopsy pics. He remembered her the night he’d arrested her, remembered her sitting in his car talking, almost too full of life. Her hair seemed to be dyed a different colour in almost every picture, like she was never quite happy with herself. Maybe she’d just needed to keep changing, running from the person she’d been, laughing to stop herself crying. Circus clown, painted smile …