“We have to talk, Gregor. You know we do. This has to end.” Then he repeated his phone number before hanging up. The first half-dozen times, Magrath had actually answered, ending the call only when Rebus identified himself. Since then, however, he had let the machine pick up for him.

Rebus studied his reflection in the living room window. “Friday night in the big city, eh?” he told it, as rain dribbled down the panes. The copies of the missing persons files were still sitting on his dining table, and he pulled out a chair and seated himself in front of them. One day soon he would feel able to bin them, but not just yet. So far nothing had been found that could place Kenny Magrath near the other women on the days they’d been abducted. His paperwork had proved incomplete, but then whose wasn’t? He didn’t keep a diary or hang on to calendars and notebooks, and neither did his wife. Rebus reached across to the bottle of beer and took a slug from it. His hand rested against a letter that had been sitting there a couple of days, the one inviting him to interview by Lothian and Borders Police Applications Board. There was a date for his medical, plus a sheet to be signed and returned, once its boxes had been ticked. Rebus read through it for the umpteenth time as he rubbed the guitar pick between his fingers.

“Maybe if I’d bought the actual bloody guitar,” he muttered to himself, before rising to his feet in search of a pen.

Cafferty’s house was a detached Victorian mansion on a leafy street off Colinton Road. It sat in half an acre of grounds with its own coach house. There were plenty of public rooms, but Cafferty usually retreated to his study with its view of the back garden. There was a big old chair there that he’d owned since he was in his twenties. He sat in it to read books, and to think. Tonight he was thinking about Darryl Christie. Christie had invited him to Annette’s funeral. Cafferty had duly turned up at the chapel, noting that the young man had brought some muscle with him—half a dozen faces Cafferty didn’t know. Young but toughened—maybe army vets who’d bailed from Iraq or Afghanistan. They stood apart from the main phalanx of mourners and followed at a distance when the procession headed for the graveside, Darryl and his two younger brothers acting as pallbearers with three other men.

No Frank Hammell. No Derek Christie.