Pond pushed open the bathroom door and ushered Rebus inside. ‘Ah-ha,’ he said, ‘looks like Mrs Heggarty was running out of time.’ He nodded towards where a towel lay in a heap on the floor. ‘Usually, that would go straight in the laundry.’ The shower curtain had been pulled across the bath. Rebus drew it back. The bath was drained, but one or two long hairs were sticking to the enamel. Rebus was thinking: We can check those. A hair’s enough for an ID. Then he noticed the two glasses, sitting together on a corner of the bath. He leaned over and sniffed. White wine. Just a trickle of it left in one glass.

Two glasses! For two people. Two people in the bath and enjoying a drink. ‘Your telephone’s downstairs, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Come on then. This room’s out of bounds until further notice. And I’m about to become a forensic scientist’s nightmare.’

Sure enough, the person Rebus ended up speaking to on the telephone did not sound pleased.

‘We’ve been working our bums off on that car and that other cottage.’

‘I appreciate that, but this could be just as important. It could be more important.’ Rebus was standing in the small dining room. He couldn’t quite tie up these furnishings to Pond’s personality. But then he saw a framed photograph of a couple young and in love, captured some time in the 1950s. Then he understood: Pond’s parents. The furniture here had once belonged to them. Pond had probably inherited it but decided it didn’t go with his fast women/slow horses lifestyle. Perfect, though, for filling the spaces in his holiday home. Pond himself, who had been sitting on a dining chair, rose to his feet. Rebus placed a hand over the receiver.

‘Where are you going?’

‘For a pee. Don’t panic, I’ll go out the back.’

‘Just don’t go upstairs, okay?’

‘Fine.’

The voice on the telephone was still complaining. Rebus shivered. He was cold. No, he was tired. Body temperature dropping. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘bugger off back to bed then, but be here first thing in the morning. I’ll give you the address. And I mean first thing. All right?’

‘You’re a generous man, Inspector.’

‘They’ll put it on my gravestone: he gave.’

Pond slept, with Rebus’s envious blessing, in the master bedroom, while Rebus himself kept vigil outside the bathroom door. Once bitten . . . He didn’t want a repetition of the Deer Lodge ‘break-in’. This evidence, if evidence it was, would stay intact. So he sat in the upstairs hallway, his back against the bathroom door, a blanket wrapped around him, and dozed. Then he slid down the door, so that he was lying in front of it on the carpet, curled into a foetus. He dreamed that he was drunk . . . that he was being driven around in a Bentley. The chauffeur was managing to drive and at the same time stick his backside out of the window. There was a party in the back of the Bentley. Holmes and Nell were there, copulating discreetly and hoping for a boy. Gill Templer was there, and attempting to undo Rebus’s zip, but he didn’t want Patience to catch them . . . Lauderdale seemed to be there, too. Watching, just watching. Someone opened the drinks cabinet, but it was full of books. Rebus picked one out and started to read it. It was the best book he’d ever read. He couldn’t put it down. It had everything . . .