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asked at last.
    ‘Married.’
    ‘She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.’
    Flight nodded. ‘Separated. She lived with her sister. No kids.’
    ‘And she went drinking by herself.’
    Flight glanced towards Rebus. ‘What are you saying?’
    Rebus shrugged. ‘Nothing. It’s just that if she liked a good time, maybe that’s how she met her killer.’
    ‘It’s possible.’
    ‘At any rate, whether she knew him or not, the killer could have followed her from the pub.’
    ‘We’ll be talking to everybody who was there, don’t worry.’
    ‘Either that,’ said Rebus, thinking aloud, ‘or the killer was waiting by the river for anyone who happened along. Somebody might have seen him.’
    ‘We’ll be asking around,’ said Flight. His voice had taken on a much harder edge.
    ‘Sorry,’ said Rebus. ‘A severe case of teaching my granny to suck eggs.’
    Flight turned to him again. They were about to take a left through some hospital gates. ‘I am not your granny,’ he said. ‘And any comments you have to make are welcome. Maybe eventually you’ll come up with something I haven’t already thought of.’
    ‘Of course,’ said Rebus, ‘this couldn’t have happened in Scotland.’
    ‘Oh?’ Flight had a half-sneer on his face. ‘Why’s that then? Too civilised up there in the frozen north? I remember when you had the worst football hooligans in the world. Maybe you still do, only these days they look like butter wouldn’t melt in their underpants.’
    But Rebus was shaking his head. ‘No, it wouldn’t have happened to Jean Cooper, that’s all I meant. Our off-licences don’t open on Sunday.’
    Rebus fell silent and stared fixedly at the windscreen, keeping his thoughts to himself, thoughts which ran along a very simple plane: fuck you, too, pal. Over the years, those four words had become his mantra. Fuck you, too, pal. FYTP. It had taken the Londoner only the length of a twenty-minute car ride to show what he really thought of the Scots.
    As Rebus got out of the car, he glanced in through the rear window and saw, for the first time, the contents of the back seat. He opened his mouth to speak, but Flight raised a knowing hand.
    ‘Don’t even ask,’ he growled, slamming shut the driver’s-side door. ‘And listen, I’m sorry about what I said …’
    Rebus merely shrugged, but his eyebrows descended in a private and thoughtful frown. After all, there had to be some logical explanation as to why a Detective Inspector would have a huge stuffed teddy bear in the back of his car at the scene of a murder. It was just that Rebus was damned if he could think of one right this second …
    Mortuaries were places where the dead stopped being people and turned instead into bags of meat, offal, blood and bone. Rebus had never been sick at the scene of a crime, but the first few times he had visited a mortuary the contents of his stomach had fairly quickly been rendered up for examination.
    The mortuary technician was a gleeful little man with a livid birthmark covering a full quarter of his face. He seemed to know Dr Cousins well enough and had prepared everything for the arrival of the deceased and the usual retinue of police officers. Cousins checked the post-mortem room, while Jean Cooper’s sister was taken quietly into an ante-room, there to make the formal identification. It took only a tearful few seconds, after which she was escorted well away from the scene by consoling officers. They would take her home, but Rebus doubted if she would get any sleep. In fact, knowing how long a scrupulous pathologist could take, he was beginning to doubt that any of them would get to bed before morning.
    Eventually, the body bag was brought into the post-mortem room and the corpse of Jean Cooper placed on a slab, beneath the hum and glare of powerful strip lighting. The room was antiseptic but antique. Its tiled walls were cracking and there was a stinging aroma of chemicals. Voices were kept muffled, not so much out of