Fox had ceased to take alcohol because he was an alcoholic, while Rebus continued to sup for the exact same reason. Somehow, though, Rebus still functioned, while Fox seldom had. Alcohol fogged his mind and made him short-tempered. It gave him the sweats and the shakes and nights of the worst possible dreams. Rebus was probably the kind who slept better after a dozen or so malts, damn the man.

Then there was the fact that Fox had seen Rebus in action. Their time together in CID had been short, but it had been enough, the preening ego obvious from the start—always late, or off somewhere, the paperwork piling up on his desk while he coughed his way to another cigarette break. If in doubt, Fox had been told, try the pub across the street, you can usually find him there, deep in thought with a whisky in front of him.

Did I nick your sweets in the playground and now you need to get your own back…?

It wasn’t that at all. The force had spent generations tolerating and turning a blind eye to cops like Rebus. Those men were gone now, memories of them fading, their foibles no longer humored by officers of Fox’s generation. Rebus was the last. He had to be convinced that his time was past. Then there was Siobhan Clarke, a good detective who had flourished once freed from Rebus’s influence. Now that he was back, her loyalty to him could well prove her undoing. So Fox sat on his sofa with the TV news channel muted, sifting through his pages of notes on the man. Ex-army, divorced, one daughter. A brother who’d served time for drug-dealing. No current relationships, other than with the bottle and anyone who happened to sell tobacco. A flat in Marchmont, bought back when he was first married, that no cop would be able to afford these days. A string of one-time colleagues who had fallen by the wayside, including a couple killed in the line of duty. Whichever way you looked at it, Rebus was bad news. Siobhan Clarke had to know that. She wasn’t stupid. The Chief Constable should know it too. Did Rebus have something on the boss—was that the explanation? Something buried in all the paperwork? And maybe there was some hold he had over DI Clarke, too—missed by Fox despite his diligence.

He knew what he had to do. Start reading again. Start from the very beginning…

Information was always worth paying for, that was the way Cafferty looked at it. The cop’s name was Ormiston and he didn’t come cheap, but he had delivered tonight. Cafferty tapped Darryl Christie’s number into his phone and waited. The young man answered.

“You on your own?” Cafferty asked.

“Just driving home.”

“That’s not what I asked.”