I walked into the travel agent, asked them what they had at short notice. Having a great time, chilling, doing the café thing, a bit of culture when the mood takes me. Love, Jackie.

She stood the card on her mantelpiece, tried remembering her last real holiday. A week with her parents? That weekend break in Dublin? It had been a hen party for one of the uniforms… and now the woman was expecting her first kid. She looked up at the ceiling. Her upstairs neighbor was thumping around. She didn’t think he did it on purpose, but he walked like an elephant. She’d met him on the sidewalk outside when she was coming home, complaining that he’d just had to fetch his car from the city impound.

“Twenty minutes I left it, twenty on a single yellow… by the time I got back, it’d been towed… hundred and thirty quid, can you believe it? I almost told them it was more than the bloody thing’s worth.” Then he’d stabbed a finger at her. “You should do something about it.”

Because she was a cop. Because people thought cops could pull strings, get things sorted, change things.

You should do something about it.

He was raging all around his living room, a caged animal ready to hurl itself against the bars. He worked in an office on George Street: account executive, retail insurance. Not quite Siobhan’s height, he wore glasses with narrow rectangular lenses. Had a male flatmate, but had stressed to Siobhan that he wasn’t gay, information for which she had thanked him.

Stomp, thunk, plod.

She wondered if there was any purpose to his movements. Was he opening and closing drawers? Looking for the lost remote perhaps? Or was movement itself his purpose? And if so, what did that say about her own stillness, about the fact that she was standing here listening to him? One postcard on her mantelpiece… one plate and mug on the draining board. One shuttered window, with a horizontal locking bar that she never bothered fastening. Safe enough in here as it was. Cocooned. Smothered.

“Sod it,” she muttered, turning to make good her escape.

St. Leonard’s was quiet. She’d intended burning off some frustration in the gym, but instead got herself a can of something cold and fizzy from the machine and headed upstairs to CID, checking her desk for messages. Another letter from her mystery admirer:

DO BLACK LEATHER GLOVES TURN YOU ON?

Referring to Rebus, she surmised. There was a note for her to call Ray Duff, but all he wanted to say was that he’d managed to test the first of her anonymous letters.

“And it’s not good news.”

“Meaning it’s clean?” she guessed.

“As the proverbial whistle.” She let out a sigh. “Sorry I can’t be more helpful. Would buying you a drink help?”

“Some other time maybe.”

“Fair enough. I’ll probably be here for another hour or two as it is.” “Here” being the forensic lab at Howdenhall.

“Still working on Port Edgar?”

“Matching blood types, see whose spatters are whose.”

Siobhan was seated on the edge of her desk, phone tucked between cheek and shoulder as she sifted through the rest of the paperwork in her in-tray. Most of it concerned cases from weeks back… names she could barely remember.

“Better let you get back to it, then,” she said.

“Keeping busy yourself, Siobhan? You sound tired.”

“You know what it’s like, Ray. Let’s have that drink sometime.”

“By then, I reckon we’ll both need it.”

She smiled into the phone. “Bye, Ray.”

“Take care of yourself, Shiv…”

She put the phone down. There it was again: somebody calling her Shiv, trying for a kind of intimacy they thought the foreshortening would bring. She’d noticed, though, that no one ever tried the same tack with Rebus, never called him Jock, Johnny, Jo-Jo, or JR. Because they looked at him or listened to him and knew he was none of those things. He was John Rebus. Detective Inspector Rebus. To his closest friends: John. Yet some of these same people would happily see her as “Shiv.” Why? Because she was a woman? Did she lack Rebus’s gravitas or sense of perpetual threat? Were they just trying to worm their way into her affections? Or would the conferring of a nickname make her seem more vulnerable, less edgy and potentially dangerous to them?

Shiv… It meant a knife, didn’t it? American slang. Well, right now she felt just about as blunt as she ever had. And here was another nickname walking into the room. DS George “Hi-Ho” Silvers. Looking around as if for someone in particular. Spotting her, it took him a second to make up his mind that she might suit his particular requirements.

“Busy?” he asked.

“What does it look like?”

“Fancy a wee drive, then?”

“You’re not really my type, George.”

A snort. “We’ve got a DP.” DP: deceased person.

“Where?”

“Over Gracemount way. Abandoned railway track. Looks like he fell from the footbridge.”

“An accident, then?” Like Fairstone’s chip-pan fire: another Gracemount accident.

Silvers shrugged his shoulders as far as he could within the confines of a suit jacket that had fitted him with room to spare three years before. “Story is, he was being chased.”

“Chased?”

Another shrug. “That’s as much as I know till we get there.”

Siobhan nodded. “So what are we waiting for?”

They took Silvers’s car. He asked her about South Queensferry, about Rebus and the house fire, but she kept her answers short. Eventually he got the message and turned on the radio, whistling along to trad jazz, possibly her least favorite music.

“You listen to any Mogwai, George?”

“Never heard of it. Why?”

“Just wondering…”

There was nowhere to park near the railway line. Silvers pulled up to the curb, behind a patrol car. There was a bus stop, and behind it an area of grassland. They crossed it on foot, approaching a low fence overgrown with thistles and brambles. The fence was broken by a short metal stairway leading to the bridge across the railway, where sightseers from the local apartment houses had gathered. A uniformed officer was asking each one if they’d seen or heard anything.

“How the hell are we supposed to get down?” Silvers growled. Siobhan pointed to the far side, where a makeshift stile had been erected from plastic milk crates and cinder blocks, an old mattress folded across the top of the fence. When they reached it, Silvers took one look and decided it wasn’t for him. He didn’t say anything, just shook his head. So Siobhan clambered up and over, skidding down the steep embankment, digging her heels as far as possible into the soft ground, feeling nettles sting her ankles, briars snag at her trousers. Several figures had gathered around the prone body on the track. She recognized faces from the Craigmillar police station, and the pathologist, Dr. Curt. He saw her and smiled a greeting.

“We’re lucky they haven’t reopened this line yet,” he said. “At least the poor chap’s in one piece.”

She looked down at the twisted, broken body. His duffel coat had been thrown open, exposing a torso clad in a loose-fitting checked shirt. Brown cord trousers and brown loafers.

“A couple of people called in,” one of the Craigmillar detectives was telling her, “saying they’d seen him wandering the streets.”

“Probably not too unusual around here…”

“Except he looked like he was on the hunt for somebody. Kept a hand in one pocket, like he might be carrying.”

“And is he?”

The detective shook his head. “Might be he dropped it when he was being chased. Local kids by the sound of it.”

Siobhan looked from the body to the bridge and back again. “Did they catch him?”

The detective shrugged.

“So do we know who he is?”

“Video rental card in his back pocket. Name’s Callis. Initial A. We’ve got someone checking the phone book. If that doesn’t work, we’ll get an address from the video shop.”