Rebus lifted his coat from the back of his chair. Nothing left for it but to go back to the office. Sammy was headed back to her own office; she worked with ex-convicts. She had refused his offer of a lift. Now that it was out in the open, she’d wanted to talk about her man, Ned Farlowe. Rebus had tried to look interested, but found that his mind was half on Joseph Lintz - in other words, same problem as always. When he’d been given the Lintz case, he’d been told he was well-suited to it: his Army background for one thing; and his seeming affinity for historical cases - by which Farmer Watson, Rebus’s chief superintendent, had meant Bible John for another.

‘With respect, sir,’ Rebus had said, ‘that sounds like a load of balls. Two reasons for me getting lumbered with this: one, no other bugger will touch it with a barge-pole; two, it’ll keep me out of the way for a while.’

‘Your remit,’ the Farmer had said, unwilling to let Rebus rile him, ‘is to sift through what there is, see if any of it amounts to evidence. You can interview Mr Lintz if it’ll help. Do whatever you think necessary, and if you find enough to warrant a charge ...’

‘I won’t. You know I won’t.’ Rebus sighed. ‘Sir, we’ve been through this before. It’s the whole reason the War Crimes section was shut down. That case a few years back - lot of hoo-has about bugger all.’

He was shaking his head. ‘Who wants it all dragged up, apart from the papers?’

‘I’m taking you off the Mr Taystee case. Let Bill Pryde handle that.’

So it was settled: Lintz belonged to Rebus.

It had started with a news story, with documents handed over to a Sunday broadsheet. The documents had come from the Holocaust Investigation Bureau based in Tel Aviv. They had passed on to the newspaper the name of Joseph Lintz, who had, they said, been living quietly in Scotland under an alias since the end of the war, and who was, in fact, Josef Linzstek, a native of Alsace. In June 1944, Lieutenant Linzstek had led the 3rd Company of an SS regiment, part of the 2nd Panzer Division, into the town of Villefranche d’Albarede in the Correze region of France. 3rd Company had rounded up everyone in the town - men, women, children. The sick were carried from their beds, the elderly pulled from their armchairs, babies hoisted from their cots.

A teenage girl - an evacuee from Lorraine - had seen what the Germans were capable of. She climbed into the attic of her house and hid there, watching from a small window in the roof-tiles. Everyone was marched into the village square. The teenager saw her school friends find their families. She hadn’t been in school that day: a throat infection. She wondered if anyone would tell the Germans ...

There was a commotion as the mayor and other dignitaries remonstrated with the officer in charge. While machine guns were aimed at the crowd, these men - among them the priest, lawyer, and doctor - were set upon with rifle butts. Then ropes were produced, and strung over half a dozen of the trees which lined the square. The men were hauled to their feet, their heads pushed through the nooses. An order was given, a hand raised then dropped, and soldiers pulled on each rope, until six men were hanging from the trees, bodies writhing, legs kicking uselessly, the movements slowing by degrees.