`In the Hanging Garden/No one sleeps'

A seaside holiday: caravan park, long walks and sandcastles. He sat in a deck-chair, trying to read. Cold mind blowing, despite the sun. Rhona rubbed suntan lotion on Sammy, said you couldn't be too careful. Told him to keep an eye open, she was going back to the caravan for her book. Sammy was burying her father's feet in the sand.

He was trying to read, but thinking about work. Every day of the holiday, he sneaked off to a phone-box and called the station. They kept telling him to go and enjoy himself, forget about everything. He was halfway through a spy thriller. The plot had already lost him.

Rhona was doing her best. She'd wanted somewhere foreign, a bit of glamour and heat to go with the sunshine. Finances, however, mere on his side. So here they mere on the Fife coast, where he'd first met her. Was he hoping for something? Some memory rekindled? He'd come here with his own parents, played with Mickey, met other kids, then lost them again at the end of the fortnight.

He tried the spy novel again, but case-work got in the may. And then a shadow fell over him.

`Where is she?’

`What?’ He looked down. His feet mere buried in sand, but Sammy wasn't there. How long had she been gone? He stood up, scanned the seashore. A few tentative bathers, going in no further than their knees.

`Christ, John, where is she?’

He turned round, looked at the sand dunes in the distance.

`The dunes…?’

They warned her. There mere hollows in the dunes where the sand was eroding. Small dens had been created – a magnet for kids. Only they were prone to collapse. Earlier in the season, a ten-year-old boy had been dug out by frantic parents. He hadn't quite choked on the sand…

They were running now. The dunes, the grass, no sign of her.

'Sammy!' `Maybe she went into the water.’

`You mere supposed to be keeping an eye on her!'

`I'm sorry. I…’

`Sammy!' A small shape in one of the dens. Hopping on its hands and knees. Rhona reached in, pulled her out, hugged her.

'Sweetie, we told you not to!'

`I was a rabbit. ' Rebus looked at the fragile roof sand meshed with the roots of plants and grasses. Punched it with a fist. The roof collapsed. Rhona was looking at him. End of holiday.

John Rebus kissed his daughter.

`See you later,' he said, watching her as she left the coffee shop. Espresso and a slice of caramel shortbread – that's all she'd had time for – but they'd fixed another date for dinner. Nothing fancy, just a pizza.

It was October 30th. By mid-November, if Nature were feeling bloody, it would be winter. Rebus had been taught at school that there were four distinct seasons, had painted pictures of them in bright and sombre colours, but his native country seemed not to know this. Winters were long, outstaying their welcome. The warm weather came suddenly, people stripping to t-shirts as the first buds appeared, so that spring and summer seemed entwined into a single season. And no sooner had the leaves started turning brown than the first frost came again.

Sammy waved at him through the cafe window then was gone. She seemed to have grown up all right. He'd always been on the lookout for evidence of instability, hints of childhood traumas or a genetic predisposition towards self destruction. Maybe he should phone Rhona some day and thank her, thank her for bringing Samantha up on her own. It couldn't have been easy: that was what people always said. He knew it would be nice if he could feel some responsibility for the success, but he wasn't that hypocritical. The truth was, while she'd been growing up, he'd been elsewhere. It was the same with his marriage: even when in the same room as his wife, even out at the pictures or around the table at a dinner party… the best part of him had been elsewhere, fixed on some case or other, some question that needed answering before he could rest.

Rebus lifted his coat from the back of his chair. Nothing left for it but to go back to the office. Sammy was headed back to her own office; she worked with ex-convicts. She had refused his offer of a lift. Now that it was out in the open, she'd wanted to talk about her man, Ned Farlowe. Rebus had tried to look interested, but found that his mind was half on Joseph Lintz – in other words, same problem as always. When he'd been given the Lintz case, he'd been told he was well-suited to it: his Army background for one thing; and his seeming affinity for historical cases – by which Farmer Watson, Rebus's chief superintendent, had meant Bible John for another.

`With respect, sir,' Rebus had said, `that sounds like a load of balls. Two reasons for me getting lumbered with this: one, no other bugger will touch it with a barge-pole; two, it'll keep me out of the way for a while.’

`Your remit,' the Farmer had said, unwilling to let Rebus rile him, `is to sift through what there is, see if any of it amounts to evidence. You can interview Mr Lintz if it'll help. Do whatever you think necessary, and if you find enough to warrant a charge…’

`I won't. You know I won't.’ Rebus sighed. `Sir, we've been through this before. It's the whole reason the War Crimes section was shut down. That case a few years back – lot of hoo-has about bugger all.’

He was shaking his head. `Who wants it all dragged up, apart from the papers?’

`I'm taking you off the Mr Taystee case. Let Bill Pryde handle that.’

So it was settled: Lintz belonged to Rebus.

It had started with a news story, with documents handed over to a Sunday broadsheet. The documents had come from the Holocaust Investigation Bureau based in Tel Aviv. They had passed on to the newspaper the name of Joseph Lintz, who had, they said, been living quietly in Scotland under an alias since the end of the war, and who was, in fact, Josef Linzstek, a native of Alsace. In June 1944, Lieutenant Linzstek had led the 3rd Company of an SS regiment, part of the 2nd Panzer Division, into the town of Villefranche d'Albarede in the Correze region of France. 3rd Company had rounded up everyone in the town – men, women, children. The sick were carried from their beds, the elderly pulled from their armchairs, babies hoisted from their cots.

A teenage girl – an evacuee from Lorraine – had seen what the Germans were capable of. She climbed into the attic of her house and hid there, watching from a small window in the roof-tiles. Everyone was marched into the village square. The teenager saw her school friends find their families. She hadn't been in school that day: a throat infection. She wondered if anyone would tell the Germans…

There was a commotion as the mayor and other dignitaries remonstrated with the officer in charge. While machine guns were aimed at the crowd, these men – among them the priest, lawyer, and doctor – were set upon with rifle butts. Then ropes were produced, and strung over half a dozen of the trees which lined the square. The men were hauled to their feet, their heads pushed through the nooses. An order was given, a hand raised then dropped, and soldiers pulled on each rope, until six men were hanging from the trees, bodies writhing, legs kicking uselessly, the movements slowing by degrees.

As the teenager remembered it, it took an age for them to die. Stunned silence in the square, as if the whole village knew now, knew that this was no mere check of identity papers. More orders were barked. The men, separated from the women and children, were marched off to Prudhomme's barn, everyone else shepherded into the church. The square grew empty, except for a dozen or so soldiers, rifles slung over their shoulders. They chatted, kicked up dust and stones, shared jokes and cigarettes. One of them went into the bar and switched the radio on. Jazz music filled the air, competing with the rustle of leaves as a breeze twisted the corpses in the trees.