Wouldn't have taken you for a poetry lover, Doc,' Rebus comBnted.

'Are we in the midst of a diplomatic incident?' Gates snorted.

auld we be checking for poisoned umbrella tips?'

'Looks like he was mugged by a psycho,' Rebus explained.

'Unless there's a poison out there that strips the skin away from your face.'

'Necrotising fasciitis,' Curt muttered.

'Arising from Streptococcus pyogenes,' Gates added. 'Not that I think we've ever seen it.' To Rebus's ears, he sounded genuinely disappointed.

Blunt force trauma: the police doctor had been spot-on. Rebus sat in his living room, not bothering to switch on any lights, and smoked a cigarette. Having banned nicotine from workplaces and pubs, the government were now looking at banning it from the home, too. Rebus wondered how they'd go about enforcing that. A John Hiatt album was on the CD player, volume kept low. The track was called 'Lift Up Every Stone'. All his time on the force, he hadn't done anything else. But Hiatt was using stones to build a wall, while Rebus just peered beneath them at the tiny dark things scuttling around. He wondered if the lyric was a poem, and what the Russian poet would have made of Rebus's riff on it. They'd tried phoning the consulate, but no one had answered, not even a machine, so they'd decided to call it a night. Siobhan had been dozing off during the autopsy, much to Gates's irritation. Rebus's fault: he'd been keeping her late at the office, trying to get her interested in all those cold cases, all the ones still niggling him, hoping that maybe they would keep his memory warm…

Rebus had dropped her home and then driven through the silent pre-dawn streets to Marchmont, an eventual parking space, and his second-floor tenement flat. The living room had a bay window, and that was where his chair was. He was promising himself he'd make it as far as the bedroom, but there was a spare duvet behind the sofa just in case.