“Recovering,” Rebus told her. “Meantime, I’ve a couple of follow-up questions, if that’s okay. When you stopped your car, you didn’t see any other signs of life?”

“No.”

“Nothing to indicate that she might not have been on her own at the time of the smash?”

“Was there someone else there?”

“We’re just trying to establish a picture, Mrs. Muir.”

“She was in the driver’s seat.”

“And her door was open?”

“I think so.”

“What about the boot?”

“I’ve really no idea. I suppose the impact could have…”

“You don’t remember whether it was open or closed?”

“No.” She paused, then apologized and asked if it was important.

“Not really,” Rebus assured her. “And you didn’t see any other vehicle? No lights further down the road?”

“No.”

“I know it’s a lot to ask, but did you pass any cars traveling in the other direction in the minutes before you reached the scene?”

“I was thinking about my supper. And I had the radio on, singing along most likely.”

“So you don’t remember?”

“I don’t.”

Rebus thanked her and hung up. He reckoned she would have remembered if some boy racer had come roaring out of nowhere. He got up from his desk and walked across to Christine Esson’s. “What have you got for me?” he asked.

She pointed towards the printer. “You being old school, I decided you’d want it on paper.”

“Are we out of papyrus then?” He scooped up the thirty or so printed sheets.

“There was more,” she told him. “But it was all mergers and acquisitions—and a lot of duplication.”

“This’ll do to start,” Rebus said, returning to his desk and angling his chair so he could stretch his legs out. Then he began to read the Internet’s version of Owen Traynor’s life and times. Age fifty-two, married for seventeen years to Josephine Gray, acrimonious (and costly) divorce. Traynor had been declared bankrupt in his midtwenties but come good again within ten years. He was Croydon-born, and had told one interviewer that he’d attended the “university of hard knocks.” More than one profile spoke of his rapid change of mood whenever a subject he didn’t like was raised. An interviewer even confided that Traynor had threatened to hang him by the feet from the window—while making it sound like a joke. Not so much of a joke when that irate investor had started kicking up a fuss—attacked on his doorstep, ending up in intensive care. Charges never pressed. There had been other instances of flare-ups, Traynor’s temper getting the better of him. Barred from at least one racecourse and one five-star hotel in London.

Quite the character, Mr. Owen Traynor.

Rebus tapped the number for the Infirmary into his phone and asked how Jessica Traynor was faring.

“She’s been released,” he was told.

“So soon?”