“Can I get an each-way bet on that?” Rebus had replied.

He stubbed the cigarette into an ashtray and counted how many were left in the packet. Eight, meaning he’d smoked twelve so far today. That wasn’t bad, was it? Time was, he’d have finished one lot and broken open another. He wasn’t drinking as much either: couple of beers of an evening, with maybe a tot or three of whisky before bed. He had a beer open now—his first of the day. Neither Bliss nor Robison had fancied a drink after work, and he hadn’t been about to ask Cowan. Cowan tended to hang around the office late. They were housed within Police HQ on Fettes Avenue, which gave Cowan the chance to bump into senior officers, people potentially useful to him who would notice how he kept a good shine on his shoes and always addressed them properly.

“It’s called stalking,” Rebus had once informed him, having caught him laughing too heartily at an old joke one of the assistant chief constables had been telling in the corridor. “And I notice you don’t pull him up when he calls you Dan…”

In a way, though, Rebus felt sorry for Cowan. There were almost certainly less proficient officers around who had more successfully scaled the heights. Cowan certainly felt that, and it gnawed away at him, so that he was almost hollowed out by it. The team had suffered as a result, which was a pity. Rebus liked many aspects of the job. He felt a small tremor of anticipation whenever he undid the binding from an old case file. There might be boxes and boxes, each one ready to take him on a trip back through time. Yellowed newspapers would contain not only reports of the crime, but also general stories of national and world affairs, plus sport and advertisements. He would get Elaine Robison to guess how much a car or a house had cost in 1974, and would read out the football league tables to Peter Bliss, who had a knack for remembering the names of players and managers. But then, eventually, Rebus would be pulled back to the crime itself, to the details, interviews, evidence and family testimony: somebody thinks they got away with it…knows they got away with it. He hoped all these killers were out there somewhere, growing more ill at ease with each passing year as they read about advances in detection and technology. Maybe when their grandkids wanted to watch CSI or Waking the Dead, they had to leave the room and sit in the kitchen. Maybe they couldn’t bear the sight of newsprint, or weren’t able to listen in peace to the radio or TV news, for fear of hearing about the reopening of the case.

Rebus had posited the idea to Cowan: get the media to report breakthroughs on a regular basis, real or not, just to put the wind up the culprits.

“Something might shake loose.”

But Cowan hadn’t been keen: weren’t the media in enough trouble already for fabricating stories?