“There’s not an easy way to put this, Mr. Blunt, but were you ever a suspect?”

“Only in my wife’s eyes.”

“But you got through it, you and Lesley?”

“Lesley came later. After Judith had walked out on me.” Blunt paused. “Zoe had quite a lot of ‘friends,’ you know. We’d stopped seeing one another several months before she went missing.”

“And there’s nothing else you can tell me about the photo?”

“Only that it ended my marriage.”

“Sure that wasn’t your doing, Mr. Blunt?”

The line went dead. Rebus considered calling Blunt back, but decided against it. He would almost certainly refuse to answer. Instead, he walked over to the Zoe Beddows file, its contents splayed across the dining table. He knew he would have to read it again, every single line of it. He was fairly confident there was nothing about Zoe and her “friends.” If any more of them had been interviewed, their relationship to the MisPer had not been flagged up. Laziness, or a sense of propriety on the part of the investigators? They would have known what the media would have done with it: created a story; distorted the facts; sold the public another version. In the process, Zoe Beddows would have become slightly less mourned. Rebus had seen it a dozen times or more. Prostitutes were “asking for it,” “putting themselves in danger”; anyone with a chaotic lifestyle could be pitied less than the newspaper’s mass of readers, the ones with families and steady jobs, the ones who feasted on those same vicarious details.

Rebus reckoned it had been a conscious decision on somebody’s part to leave speculation out of the case. Which was problematic for anyone opening the files from cold: the whole story wasn’t there. He thought about phoning Ken Lochrin again, but decided it could be done later. He called Clarke instead. She answered with a question.

“What?”

“I was just thinking,” Rebus said. “The stuff at my flat, it’s been sorted into piles and pinned up on the wall—wouldn’t it be easier for us to work from here?”

“This is a police inquiry, John, not a hobby. It needs to be brought to the station.”

“Understood.” A caller was waiting. Rebus glanced at the display. “I’ll see you in an hour,” he told Clarke. Then, to Daniel Cowan: “Rebus speaking.”

“I don’t like this, John, not one little bit.”

“I take it DCI Page has been on the blower?”

“If it’s a cold case, it should be run from SCRU. You should be here.”

“Believe me, sir, if it were up to me…”

“Your patter’s pish, John. Is this your way of sucking up to the big boys?”

“I’m a team player, sir—ask Bliss and Robison, they’ll vouch for me.”

“It’s not them you need to win over. Don’t forget what I said: without my approval, you’re staying retired.”

“But your approval’s all I’ve ever really craved, Danny…”

Cowan’s voice was rising to something just short of a yell when Rebus ended the call.