‘How’s the case coming?’

Kirstin Mede asked. Maybe she’d seen some look cross his face.

‘Slowly. The problem is all this stuff.’

He waved towards the strewn desk. ‘On the one hand I’ve got all this, and on the other I’ve got a wee old man from the New Town. The two don’t seem to go together.’

‘Have you met him?’

‘Once or twice.’

‘What’s he like?’

What was Joseph Lintz like? He was cultured, a linguist. He’d even been a Professor at the university, back in the early 70s. Only for a year or two. His own explanation: ‘I was filling a vacuum until they could find someone of greater standing’. He’d been Professor of German. He’d lived in Scotland since 1945 or 46 - he was vague about exact dates, blaming his memory. His early life was vague, too. He said papers had been destroyed. The Allies had had to create a duplicate set for him. There was only Lintz’s word that these new papers were anything but an official record of lies he’d told and which had been believed. Lintz’s story - birth in Alsace; parents and relatives all dead; forced enlistment in the SS. Rebus liked the touch about joining the SS. It was the sort of admission that would make officials decide: he’s been honest about his involvement with that, so he’s probably being honest about the other details. There was no actual record of a Joseph Lintz serving with any SS regiment, but then the SS had destroyed a lot of their own records once they’d seen the way the war was headed. Lintz’s war record was vague, too. He mentioned shell-shock to explain the gaps in his memory. But he was vehement that he had never been called Linzstek and had never served in the Correze region of France.

‘I was in the east,’ he would say. ‘That’s where the Allies found me, in the east.’

The problem was that there was no convincing explanation as to how Lintz had found himself in the United Kingdom. He said he’d asked if he could go there and start a new life. He didn’t want to return to Alsace, wanted to be as far away from the Germans as possible. He wanted water between him and them. Again, there was no documentation to back this up, and meantime the Holocaust investigators had come up with their own ‘evidence’, which pointed to Lintz’s involvement in the ‘Rat Line’.

‘Have you ever heard of something called the Rat Line?’ Rebus had asked at their first meeting.

‘Of course,’ Joseph Lintz had said. ‘But I never had anything to do with it.’

Lintz: in the drawing-room of his Heriot Row home. An elegant four-storey Georgian edifice. A huge house for a man who’d never married. Rebus had said as much. Lintz had merely shrugged, as was his privilege. Where had the money come from? ‘I’ve worked hard, Inspector.’

Maybe so, but Lintz had purchased the house in the late-1950s on a lecturer’s salary. A colleague from the time had told Rebus everyone in the department suspected Lintz of having a private income. Lintz denied this.