Jacqueline Balfour had been born Jacqueline Gil-Martin, her father a diplomat and landowner, the family estate a chunk of Perthshire comprising nearly nine hundred acres. The father was dead now, and the mother had moved into a cottage on the estate. The land itself was managed by Balfour’s Bank, and the main house, Laverock Lodge, had become a setting for conferences and other large gatherings. A TV drama had been filmed there apparently, though the show’s title meant nothing to Rebus. Jacqueline hadn’t bothered with university, busying herself instead with a variety of jobs, mainly as a personal assistant to some businessman or other. She’d been running the Laverock estate when she’d met John Balfour, on a trip to her father’s bank in Edinburgh. They’d married a year later, and Philippa had been born two years after that.

Just the one child. John Balfour himself was an only child, but Jacqueline had two sisters and a brother, none of them currently living in Scotland. The brother had followed in his father’s footsteps and was on a Washington posting with the Foreign Office. It struck Rebus that the Balfour dynasty was in trouble. He couldn’t see Philippa rushing to join Daddy’s bank, and wondered why the couple hadn’t tried for a son.

None of which, in all probability, was pertinent to the inquiry. All the same, it was what Rebus enjoyed about the job: constructing a web of relationships, peering into other people’s lives, wondering and questioning …

He turned to the notes on David Costello. Dublin-born and educated, the family moving just south of the city to Dalkey in the early nineties. The father, Thomas Costello, didn’t seem to have turned a day’s work in his life, his needs supplied by a trust fund set up by his father, a land developer. David’s grandfather owned several prime sites in the centre of Dublin, and made a comfortable living from them. He owned half a dozen racehorses, too, and spent all his time these days concentrating on that side of things.