The ‘names’ just kept on coming, most of them, as Jack himself had put it while making out the list, ‘seasoned dissolutes and hangers-on’. Mainly old money, as Chris Kemp had said, and a long way away from Gregor Jack’s own ‘pack’. But there was one curio among them, one seeming exception. Even Rebus had recognized it as Gregor Jack scratched it on to the list.

‘What? The Barney Byars? The original dirty trucker?’

‘The haulier, yes.’

‘A bit out of place in that sort of company, isn’t he?’

Jack had owned up. ‘Actually, Barney’s an old school-pal of mine. But as time’s gone on, he’s grown friendlier with Liz. It happens sometimes.’

‘Still, somehow I can’t see him fitting in with that lot –’

‘You’d be surprised, Inspector Rebus. Believe me, you would be surprised.’ Jack gave each word equal weight, leaving Rebus in no doubt that he meant what he said. Still . . . Byars was another fly Fifer, another famous son. While at school, he’d made his name as a hitchhiker, often claiming he’d spent the weekend in London without paying a penny to get there. After school, he made the news again by hitching his way across France, Italy, Germany, Spain. He’d fallen in love with the lorries themselves, with the whole business of them, so he’d saved, got his HGV licence, bought himself a lorry . . . and now was the largest independent haulier that Rebus could think of. Even on last year’s trip to London, Rebus had been confronted by a Byars Haulage artic trying to steer its way through Piccadilly Circus.

Well, it was Rebus’s job to ask if anyone had seen hide or hair of Liz Jack. He’d gladly let others do the hard work with the likes of Jamie Kilpatrick and the grim-sounding Julian Kaymer; but he was keeping Barney Byars for himself. Another week or two of this, he thought, and I’ll have to buy an autograph book.

As it happened, Byars was in Edinburgh, ‘drumming up custom’, as the girl in his office put it. Rebus gave her his telephone number, and an hour later Byars himself called back. He would be busy all afternoon, and he’d to go to dinner that evening ‘with a few fat bastards’, but he could see Rebus for a drink at six if that was convenient. Rebus wondered which luxury hotel would be the base for their drink, and was stunned, perhaps even disappointed, when Byars named the Sutherland Bar, one of Rebus’s own watering holes.

‘Right you are,’ he said. ‘Six o’clock.’

Which meant that the day stretched ahead of him. There was the Case of the Lifted Literature, of course. Well, he wasn’t going to hold his breath waiting for a result there. They would turn up or they would not. His bet would be that by now they’d be on the other side of the Atlantic. Then there was William Glass, suspect in a murder inquiry, somewhere out there in a back close or a cobbled side street. Well, he’d turn up come giro day. If, that is, he was more stupid than so far he’d proved to be. No, maybe he was full of cunning. In which case he wouldn’t go near a DHSS office or back to his digs. In which case he would have to get money from somewhere.