Rebus went to the National Library annexe on Causewayside. It wasn’t much more than a five-minute walk from St Leonard’s. When he’d shown his ID and explained what he needed, he was taken to a desk where a microfilm reader sat. This was a large illuminated screen above two spools. The film was placed on one spool and would be wound on to the empty one. Rebus had used the machine before, back when newspapers had been stored at the main building on George IV Bridge. He’d told the staff that today’s was ‘a rush job’. Even so, he sat for the best part of twenty minutes before a librarian arrived with the film boxes. The Courier was Dundee’s daily paper. Rebus’s own family had taken it. He remembered that up until recently it had retained the look of a broadsheet from a previous era, with column-wide ads covering its front page. No news, no photos. The story went that when the Titanic sank, the headline in the Courier had been ‘Dundee Man Lost at Sea’. Not that the paper was parochial or anything.

Rebus had the Huntingtower cutting with him, and wound the tape forward until he was four weeks shy of its appearance. There, on an inside page, was the headline ‘Tourist’s Disappearance a Mystery, Say Police’. The woman’s name was Betty-Anne Jesperson. She was thirty-eight and married. She’d been a member of a tour party from the USA. The tour was called ‘The Mystical Highlands of Scotland’. The photograph of Betty-Anne came from her passport. It showed a heavy-set woman with dark permed hair and thick-rimmed glasses. Her husband, Garry, said she was in the habit of waking early and going for a pre-breakfast walk. No one in the hotel had seen her depart. The countryside was searched, and police went into Perth town centre armed with copies of the photograph. But as Rebus wound the film forward a week, the story was cut down to half a dozen paragraphs. A further week along, and there was just a single paragraph. The story was in the process of vanishing as completely as Betty-Anne had.

According to the hotel receptionist, Garry Jesperson had made several trips back to the area in that first year, with a further month-long trip the year after. But then the last she’d heard, Garry had met someone else and moved from New Jersey to Baltimore.

Rebus copied the details into his notebook, then sat tapping at the page he’d just written on until one of the browsers cleared their throat, warning him that he’d started to make too much noise.