‘Maybe he’s learned a thing or two from the Young Pretender.’

‘Make yourself at home,’ Rebus said, walking down the hall. The breakfast things were still on the dining table. Siobhan’s bag of goodies was down the side of a chair.

‘A guest.’

Claverhouse had noticed the two mugs, two plates. He looked around. ‘She’s not here now though?’

‘She wasn’t here for breakfast either.’

‘Because she’s at your daughter’s.’

Rebus froze.

‘I went to settle up with the hotel. They said a police car had come and taken all her things away. So then I asked around, and the driver gave me Samantha’s address as the drop-off.’

Claverhouse sat down on the sofa, crossed one leg over the other. ‘So what’s the game, John, and how come you’ve seen fit to leave me on the bench?’

He sounded calm now, but Rebus could tell there’d been a storm.

‘Do you want a drink?’

‘I want an answer.’

‘When she walked out ... she waited beside my car. I couldn’t think where to take her, so I brought her here. But she recognised the street. Telford had been watching my flat.’

Claverhouse looked interested. ‘Why?’

‘Maybe because I know Cafferty. I couldn’t let Candice stay here, so I took her to Sammy’s.’

‘Is she still there?’

Rebus nodded. ‘So what happens now?’

‘There’s a place she can go, the refugee family.’

‘For how long?’

‘What do you mean?’

Claverhouse sighed. ‘John, she’s ... the only life she’s known here is prostitution.’

Rebus went over to the hi-fi for something to do, looked through his tapes. He needed to do something.

‘What’s she going to do for money? Are you going to provide? What does that make you?’

Rebus dropped a CD, turned on his heels. ‘Nothing like that,’ he spat.

Claverhouse had his hands up, palms showing. ‘Come on, John, you know yourself there’s -’

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘John ...’

‘Look, get out, will you?’

It wasn’t just that it had been a long day, more that it felt like the day would never end. He could feel the evening stretch to infinity, no rest available to him. In his head, bodies were swaying gently from trees while smoke engulfed a church. Telford was on his arcade motorbike, cannoning off spectators. Abernethy was touching an old man’s shoulder. Soldiers were rifle-butting civilians. And John Rebus ... John Rebus was in every frame, trying hard to remain an onlooker.

He put Van Morrison on the hi-fi: Hardnose the Highway. He’d played this music on East Neuk beaches and tenement stakeouts. It always seemed to heal him, or at least patch the wounds. When he turned back into the room, Claverhouse was gone. He looked out of his window. Two kids lived in the second-Moor flat across from his. He’d watched them often from this window, and they never once saw him, for the simple reason that they never so much as glanced outside. Their world was complete and all-absorbing, anything outside their window an irrelevance. They were in bed now, their mother closing the shutters. Quiet city. Abernethy was right about that. There were large chunks of Edinburgh where you could live your whole life and never encounter a spot of bother. Yet the murder rate in Scotland was double that of its southern neighbour, and half those murders took place in the two main cities.