“Then I’m out of here in twenty.”

“You don’t like cake?”

“It’s the speeches that’ll no doubt accompany it.”

Clarke smiled and sipped her orange juice. Rebus held an open bottle of lager, but had no intention of finishing it—too gassy, not cold enough.

“So, DS Rebus,” she said, “what did you get up to this afternoon?”

He stared at her. “How long are we going to keep this up?” Meaning her use of his rank—detective sergeant to her inspector. A decade back, the roles had been reversed. But when Rebus had applied to rejoin, he’d been warned of a surfeit of DIs, meaning he would have to drop to DS.

“Take it or leave it,” he’d been told.

So he’d taken it.

“I think I can string it out a little longer,” Clarke was saying now, her smile widening. “And you haven’t answered my question.”

“I was looking up an old friend.”

“You don’t have any.”

“I could point to a dozen in this very room.”

Clarke scanned the faces. “And probably as many enemies.”

Rebus seemed to ponder this. “Aye, maybe,” he conceded. And he was lying anyway. A dozen friends? Not even close. Siobhan was a friend, perhaps the closest he’d ever had—despite the age gap and the fact she didn’t like most of the music he played. He saw people he’d worked alongside, but almost no one he would have invited back to his flat for whisky and conversation. Then there were the few he would gladly give a kicking to—like the three officers from Professional Standards. They stood apart from the rest of the room, pariah status confirmed. Yet they had a haunted look—as with the Cold Case Unit, so too with their particular jobs: packed off elsewhere come reorganization. But then a face from the past was squeezing through the throng and heading in Rebus’s direction. He stuck out a hand, which Rebus took.

“Bloody hell, I almost didn’t recognize you there,” Rebus admitted.

Eamonn Paterson patted what was left of his stomach. “Diet and exercise,” he explained.

“Thank God for that—I thought you were going to tell me you had some sort of wasting disease.” Rebus turned towards Clarke. “Siobhan, this is Eamonn Paterson. He was a DS when I was a DC.” While the two shook hands, Rebus continued the introduction.

“Siobhan’s a detective inspector, which has her under the cruel delusion she’s my boss.”

“Good luck with that,” Paterson said. “When he was wet behind the ears I couldn’t get him to take a telling, no matter how hard I kicked his backside.”

“Some things never change,” Clarke conceded.

“Eamonn here used to go by the name of Porkbelly,” Rebus said. “Came back from a holiday in the States with the story he’d eaten so much of the stuff a restaurant had given him a T-shirt.”