Rebus talked to everyone he could find. In the Spar, there was a new shift on, but he got home phone numbers from the manager and called up the workers from the previous night. They hadn’t seen or heard anything. First they’d known had been the flashing lights of the ambulance. The kebab shop was closed, but when Rebus banged on the door a woman came through from the back, wiping her hands on a tea-towel. He pressed his warrant card to the glass door, and she let him in. The shop had been busy last night. She didn’t see the accident - she called it that, ‘the accident’. And that’s what it was: the word really hadn’t sunk in until she said it. Elvis Costello: ‘Accidents Will Happen’. Was the next line really ‘It’s only hit and run’?

‘No,’ the woman said, ‘the first thing that caught my attention was the crowd. I mean, only three or four people, but I could see they were standing around something. And then the ambulance came. Will she be all right?’

The look in her eyes was one Rebus had encountered before. It almost wanted the victim dead, because then there was a story to be told.

‘She’s in hospital,’ he said, unable to look at the woman any longer.

‘Yes, but the paper said she’s in a coma.’

‘What paper?’

She brought him the first edition of the day’s Evening News. There was a paragraph on one of the inside pages - ‘Hit and Run Coma Victim’.

It wasn’t a coma. She was unconscious, that was all. But Rebus was thankful for the story. Maybe someone would read it and come forward. Maybe guilt would begin to press down on the driver. Maybe there’d been a passenger ... It was hard to keep secrets, usually you told someone.

He tried Remnant Kings, but of course they had been closed last night, so he climbed to the flats above. There was no one home at the first flat. He wrote a brief message on the back of a business card and pushed it through the letterbox, then jotted down the surname on the door. If they didn’t call him, he’d call them. A young man answered the second door. He was just out of his teens and pushed a thick lock of black hair away from his eyes. He wore Buddy Holly glasses and had acne scars around his mouth. Rebus introduced himself. The hand went to the hair again, a backward glance into the flat.

‘Do you live here?’ Rebus asked.

‘Mm, yeah. Like, I’m not the owner. We rent it.’

There were no names on the door. ‘Anyone else in at the moment?’

‘Nope.’

‘Are you all students?’

The young man nodded. Rebus asked his name.

‘Rob. Robert Renton. What’s this about?’

‘There was an accident last night, Rob. A hit and run.’

So many times he’d been in this situation, passing on the bland news of another changed life. It was a whole hour since he’d telephoned the hospital. In the end, they’d taken his mobile number, said it might be easier if they phoned him whenever there was news. They meant easier for them, not him.