Prior to retirement, Bliss had reached the rank of detective inspector—same as Rebus. Elaine Robison had been a detective constable, and blamed the lack of higher achievement on the fact that she’d always put family before career.

“Quite right too,” Rebus had told her, adding (after he’d known her a few more weeks) that his own marriage had lost its fight with the job early on.

Robison had only just turned fifty. Her son and daughter had left home, graduated from college and moved south for work. There were framed portraits of them on her desk, alongside other photos showing Robison herself posing at the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and seated at the controls of a light airplane. She had recently started to dye her hair, not that Rebus saw anything wrong in that. Streaked gray, she would still have looked ten years younger than her age and might even pass for thirty-five—same as Cowan.

Cowan, he reckoned, had arranged the chairs. They sat in a straight line in front of his desk, so that they all had to look up at him.

“Wearing those socks for a bet, Danny?” Rebus asked from behind the mug.

Cowan deflected the comment with a thin smile. “Do I hear right, John? You’ve applied to rejoin?” He waited for Rebus to acknowledge the truth of this. The retirement age had been raised, meaning those of Rebus’s vintage could reapply. “Thing is,” Cowan continued, leaning forward a little, “they’ll come to me for a reference. Way you’re going, it won’t be a fan letter.”

“You can have my autograph anyway,” Rebus assured him.

It was hard to tell if Peter Bliss’s wheezing had just taken on a different timbre or whether he was stifling a laugh. Robison looked down into her lap and smiled. Cowan shook his head slowly.

“Can I remind you all,” he said quietly, “that this unit is jeopardized? And if it closes down, only one of us will be welcomed back into the body of the kirk.” He pointed a finger at his own chest. “A result would be nice. Progress of any kind would be nice.”

They all knew what he was talking about. The Crown Office was setting up a specialist Cold Case Unit for the whole of Scotland. If it scooped up their workload, their jobs would be history. The CCU would have at its heart a database of ninety-three cases dating back to the 1940s, including all the ones from the Lothian and Borders police authority. With the CCU up and running, questions were bound to be asked about the usefulness of the smaller Edinburgh team. Money was tight. There were already mutterings that dusting off old unsolveds did little but drain cash from current (and more urgent) inquiries in and around the city.

“A result would be nice,” Cowan repeated. He leapt from the desk, strode around it and plucked a newspaper cutting from the wall, brandishing it for effect. “Cold Case Unit in England,” he intoned. “Suspect charged for the murder of a teenager committed almost fifty years ago.” He paraded the clipping in front of their faces. “DNA…crime-scene analysis…witnesses whose consciences have been gnawing away at them. We know how this works, so how about making it work?”