Gregor’s laughter collapsed into a cough. He slapped at his chest, then looked at Rebus and smiled again.

Then sprang.

Rebus’s instinct was to dodge, but Jack was moving away from him. And both of them knew precisely where he was headed. As his foot touched the last inch of earth, he leapt out into the air, jumping feet first. A couple of seconds later came the sound of his body hitting the water. Rebus toed his way to the edge of the rock and looked down, but the cloud was closing in again overhead. The moonlight was lost. There was nothing to see.

Making their way back to Deer Lodge, there was no need for Knox’s torch. The flames lit up the surrounding countryside. Glowing ash landed on the trees as they made their way through the woods. Rebus ran his fingers over the back of his head. The skin was stinging. But he got the feeling shock might have set in: the pain wasn’t quite so bad as before. His ankles stung too – thistles, probably. He’d run through what had turned out to be a field full of them. There was no one near the house. Moffat and Steele were waiting by Knox’s car.

‘How good a swimmer is he?’ Rebus asked Steele.

‘Beggar?’ Steele was massaging his untethered arms. ‘Can’t swim a stroke. We all learned at school, but his mum used to give him a note excusing him.’

‘Why?’

Steele shrugged. ‘She was scared he’d catch verrucas. How’s the head, Inspector?’

‘I won’t need a haircut for a while.’

‘What about Jack?’ Moffat asked.

‘He won’t be needing one either.’

They searched for Gregor Jack’s body the following morning. Not that Rebus was there to participate. He was in hospital and feeling dirty and unshaven – except for his head.

‘If you have a problem with baldness,’ one senior doctor told him, ‘you could always wear a toupee till it grows back. Or a hat. Your scalp will be sensitive, too, so try to keep out of the sun.’

‘Sun? What sun?’

But there was sun, during his time off work there was plenty of it. He stayed indoors, stayed underground, reading book after book, emerging for brief forays to the Royal Infirmary to have his dressings changed.

‘I could do that for you,’ Patience had told him.

‘Never mix business and pleasure,’ was Rebus’s enigmatic response. In fact, there was a nurse up at the infirmary who had taken a shine to him, and he to her . . . Ach, it wouldn’t go anywhere; it was just a bit of flirting. He wouldn’t hurt Patience for the world.

Holmes visited, always with a dozen cans of something gassy. ‘Hiya, baldie,’ was the perennial greeting, even when the skinhead had become a suedehead, the suedehead longer still.

‘What’s the news?’ asked Rebus.

Apart from the fact that Gregor Jack’s body had still not been recovered, the big news was that the Farmer was off the booze after having been ‘visited by the Lord’ at some revivalist Baptist meeting.