Templer first … chain of command. Then she’d have to break the news to the ACC, who in turn would probably have to disturb the Chief Constable’s daily routine. Mid-afternoon … Grant wondered how late he could leave it. Maybe Holly would call Templer or Carswell himself. If Grant sat on it till day’s end, he’d be in bigger trouble. It could even be that there was still time for that two-eye.

He picked up the phone, squeezed shut his eyes once more in what, this time round, was a short and silent prayer.

Made the call.

It was late afternoon, and Rebus had been staring at the coffins for a good five minutes. Occasionally he would pick one up, examine the workmanship, comparing and contrasting with the others. His latest thought: bring in a forensic anthropologist. The tools used to make the coffins would have left tiny grooves and incisions, marks an expert could identify and explore. If the exact same chisel had been used on each joint, maybe it could be proven. Perhaps there were fibres, fingerprints … The scraps of cloth: could they be traced? He slid the list of victims so that it sat in front of him on the desk: 1972 …’77 …’82 and ’95. The first victim, Caroline Farmer, was the youngest by far; the others were in their twenties and thirties, women in the prime of life. Drownings and disappearances. Where there was no body, it was all but impossible to prove a crime had been committed. And death by drowning … pathologists could tell if someone were alive or dead when they entered the water, but other than that … Say you knocked someone unconscious and pushed them in: even if it came to court, there’d be room for haggling, the murder charge reduced to culpable homicide. Rebus remembered a fireman once telling him the perfect way to commit murder: get the victim drunk in their kitchen, then turn the heat up under the chip-pan.

Simple and clever.

Rebus still didn’t know how clever his adversary had been. Fife, Nairn, Glasgow and Perth – certainly he’d ranged far and wide. Someone who travelled. He thought of Quizmaster and the jaunts Siobhan had taken so far. Was it possible to connect Quizmaster to whoever had left the coffins? Having scribbled the words ‘forensic pathologist’ on to his notepad, Rebus added two more: ‘offender profiling’. There were university psychologists who specialised in this, deducing aspects of a culprit’s character from their MO. Rebus had never been convinced, but he felt he was banging his fists against a locked and bolted door, one he was never going to break down without help.

When Gill Templer stormed down the corridor, past the CID suite’s doorway, Rebus didn’t think she’d seen him. But now she was heading straight for him, her face furious.

‘I thought,’ she said, ‘you’d been told.’

‘Told what?’ he asked innocently.