A man sat in the driver’s seat, a woman next to him. They looked cold and bored. The woman was Detective Constable Siobhan Clarke, who had worked with Rebus at St Leonard’s until a recent posting to the Scottish Crime Squad. The man, a Detective Sergeant called Claverhouse, was a Crime Squad regular. They were part of a team keeping twenty-four hour tabs on Tommy Telford and all his deeds. Their slumped shoulders and pale faces bespoke not only tedium but the sure knowledge that surveillance was futile.

It was futile because Telford owned the street. Nobody parked here without him knowing who and why. The other two cars parked just now were Range Rovers belonging to Telford’s gang. Anything but a Range Rover stuck out. The Crime Squad had a specially adapted van which they usually used for surveillance, but that wouldn’t work in Flint Street. Any van parked here for longer than five minutes received close and personal attention from a couple of Telford’s men. They were trained to be courteous and menacing at the same time.

‘Undercover bloody surveillance,’ Claverhouse growled. ‘Only we’re not undercover and there’s nothing to survey.’

He tore at a Snickers wrapper with his teeth and offered the first bite to Siobhan Clarke, who shook her head.

‘Shame about those flats,’ she said, peering up through the windscreen. ‘They’d be perfect.’

‘Except Telford owns them all,’ Claverhouse said through a mouthful of chocolate.

‘Are they all occupied?’ Rebus asked. He’d been in the car a minute and already his toes were cold.

‘Some of them are empty,’ Clarke said. ‘Telford uses them for storage.’

‘But every bugger in and out of the main door gets spotted,’ Claverhouse added. ‘We’ve had meter readers and plumbers try to wangle their way in.’

‘Who was acting the plumber?’ Rebus asked.

‘Ormiston. Why?’

Rebus shrugged. ‘Just need someone to fix a tap in my bathroom.’

Claverhouse smiled. He was tall and skinny, with huge dark bags under his eyes and thinning fair hair. Slow-moving and slow talking, people often underestimated him. Those who did sometimes discovered that his nickname of ‘Bloody’ Claverhouse was merited.

Clarke checked her watch. ‘Ninety minutes till the changeover.’

‘You could do with the heating on,’ Rebus offered. Claverhouse turned in his seat.

‘That’s what I keep telling her, but she won’t have it.’

‘Why not?’

He caught Clarke’s eyes in the rearview. She was smiling.

‘Because,’ Claverhouse said, ‘it means running the engine, and running the engine when we’re not going anywhere is wasteful. Global warming or something.’

‘It’s true,’ Clarke said.

Rebus winked at her reflection. It looked like she’d been accepted by Claverhouse, which meant acceptance by the whole team at Fettes. Rebus, the perennial outsider, envied her the ability to conform.

‘Bloody useless anyway,’ Claverhouse continued. ‘The bugger knows we’re here. The van was blown after twenty minutes, the plumber routine didn’t even get Ormiston over the threshhold, and now here we are, the only sods on the whole street. We couldn’t blend in less if we were doing panto.’