Late that Sunday night, he found himself on the pavement outside Philippa Balfour’s flat. He still had the set of keys in his pocket, but wasn’t going inside, not after what happened last time. Someone had closed the shutters in her living room and bedroom. No light was being allowed into the flat, none at all.

It was one week since her disappearance, and a reconstruction was under way. A WPC with a passing resemblance to the missing student had been dressed in clothes similar to the ones Flip might have been wearing that evening. A recently bought Versace T-shirt was missing from Flip’s wardrobe, so the WPC was wearing one just like it. She would walk out of the tenement and be photographed by the waiting newsmen. Then she’d walk briskly to the end of the street, where she’d step into a waiting taxi cab, commandeered for the purpose. She’d get out again and start climbing the hill towards the city centre. There would be photographers with her all the way, and uniformed officers stopping pedestrians and drivers, clipboards ready, questions prepared. The WPC would travel all the way to the bar on the South Side …

Two TV crews – BBC and Scottish – were readying to film the reconstruction. News programmes would show snippets of it.

It was an exercise, a way of showing that the police were doing something.

That was all.

Gill Templer, catching Rebus’s eye from the other side of the street, seemed to acknowledge as much with a shrug. Then she went back to her conversation with Assistant Chief Constable Colin Carswell. The ACC seemed to have a few points he wished to get across. Rebus didn’t doubt that the words ‘a swift conclusion’ would figure at least once. From past experience, he knew that when Gill Templer was irritated, she tended to play with a string of pearls she sometimes wore. They were around her neck now, and she had slipped a finger beneath them, running it back and forth. Rebus thought of all Bev Dodds’s bracelets, and what the kid called Chick had said: well fucking weird … Books of Wiccan in her living room, only she didn’t call it that, called it her ‘parlour’ instead. A Stones song popped into his head: ‘Spider and the Fly’, B-side to ‘Satisfaction’. He saw Bev Dodds as a spider, her parlour a web. For some reason the image, though fanciful, stuck with him …

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