‘Worth a closer look,’ Jean Burchill told him. They got up and began to move forwards, joining the congregation. Rebus thought he recognised wooden carvings of Hitler and Stalin. They were operating a jagged-toothed saw.

‘There’s something else,’ Jean Burchill was saying. ‘There’ve been other dolls, other places.’

‘What?’ He tore his eyes away from the clock.

‘Best thing is if I send you what I’ve got …’

Rebus spent the rest of that Friday waiting for his shift to end. Photos of David Costello’s garage had been placed on one of the walls, joining the haphazard jigsaw there. His MG was a dark blue soft-top. The forensic boffins hadn’t had permission to remove traces from the vehicle and its tyres, but that hadn’t stopped them taking a good look. The car hadn’t been washed of late. If it had been, they’d have been asking David Costello why. More photos of Philippa’s friends and acquaintances had been gathered and shown to Professor Devlin. A couple of prints of the boyfriend had been slipped in, which had caused Devlin to complain about ‘tactics beneath contempt’.

Five days since that Sunday night, five days since she’d disappeared. The more Rebus stared at the jigsaw on the wall, the less he saw. He thought again of the Millennium Clock, which was just the opposite: the more he’d looked at it, the more he’d seen – small figures suddenly picked out from the moving whole. He saw it now as a monument to the lost and forgotten. In its way, the wall display – the photos, faxes, rotas and drawings – comprised a monument too. But eventually, whatever happened, this monument would be dismantled and relegated to some box in a storeroom somewhere, its life limited to the length of the search.

He’d been here before: other times, other cases, not all of them solved to anyone’s satisfaction. You tried not to care, tried to maintain objectivity, just as the training seminars told you to, but it was hard. The Farmer still remembered a young boy from his first week on the force, and Rebus had his memories, too. Which was why, at day’s end, he went home, showered and changed, and sat in his chair for an hour with a glass of Laphroaig and the Rolling Stones for company: Beggars Banquet tonight, and more than one glass of Laphroaig actually. Carpets from the hall and bedrooms were rolled up either side of him. Mattresses and wardrobes, chests of drawers … the room was like a scrapyard. But there was a clear path from the door to his chair, and from his chair to the hi-fi, and that was all he needed.