‘We must have different ideas of a start-time,’ he said. Remembering what she’d said yesterday, she reddened, but when she glanced in his direction he was smiling.

‘What have you got?’ she asked.

‘Our friends in the north came good.’

‘Paula Gearing?’

Rebus nodded. ‘She was twenty-seven. Married four years to a husband who worked on a North Sea oil platform. Nice bungalow on the outskirts of town. No kids. She had a part-time job in a newsagent’s … probably for company more than financial necessity.’

Wylie came over to his desk. ‘Was foul play ruled out?’

Rebus tapped his notes. ‘Nobody could ever explain it, according to what I’ve read so far. She didn’t seem suicidal. Doesn’t help that they’ve no idea whereabouts on the coast she actually entered the water.’

‘Pathology report?’

‘It’s in here. Can you get on to Donald Devlin, see if he can spare us some time?’

‘Professor Devlin?’

‘He’s the person I bumped into yesterday. He’s agreed to study the autopsies for us.’ He didn’t say anything about the actual circumstances of Devlin’s involvement, how Gates and Curt had turned him down. ‘His number will be on file,’ Rebus said. ‘He’s one of Philippa Balfour’s neighbours.’

‘I know. Have you seen this morning’s paper?’

‘No.’

She fetched it from her bag, opened it to one of the inside pages. A photofit: the man Devlin had seen outside the tenement on the days preceding Philippa’s disappearance.

‘Could be anybody,’ Rebus said.

Wylie nodded agreement. Short dark hair, straight nose, narrowed eyes and a thin line of a mouth. ‘We’re getting desperate, aren’t we?’ she said.

It was Rebus’s turn to nod. Releasing the photofit to the media, especially one as clearly generalised as this, was an act of desperation. ‘Get on to Devlin,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir.’

She took the newspaper with her, sat down at a spare desk and gave her head a little shake, as if clearing the cobwebs. Then she picked up the telephone, preparing to make the first call of another long day.

Rebus went back to his reading, but not for long. A name leaped out at him, the name of one of the police officers involved in the Nairn inquiry.

A detective inspector with the surname Watson.

The Farmer.

‘Sorry to bother you, sir.’

The Farmer smiled, slapped a hand on Rebus’s back. ‘You don’t have to call me “sir” any more, John.’