`Maybe,' she'd said. `Yes, maybe.’

Which would, Rebus knew, be turfed out by the Procurator Fiscal, who knew damned well what any defence lawyer with half a brain would do with it.

`How's the case coming?’

Kirstin Mede asked. Maybe she'd seen some look cross his face.

`Slowly. The problem is all this stuff.’

He waved towards the strewn desk. `On the one hand I've got all this, and on the other I've got a wee old man from the New Town. The two don't seem to go together.’

`Have you met him?’

`Once or twice.’

`What's he like?’

What was Joseph Lintz like? He was cultured, a linguist. He'd even been a Professor at the university, back in the early 70s. Only for a year or two. His own explanation: `I was filling a vacuum until they could find someone of greater standing'. He'd been Professor of German. He'd lived in Scotland since 1945 or 46 – he was vague about exact dates, blaming his memory. His early life was vague, too. He said papers had been destroyed. The Allies had had to create a duplicate set for him. There was only Lintz's word that these new papers were anything but an official record of lies he'd told and which had been believed. Lintz's story – birth in Alsace; parents and relatives all dead; forced enlistment in the SS. Rebus liked the touch about joining the SS. It was the sort of admission that would make officials decide: he's been honest about his involvement with that, so he's probably being honest about the other details. There was no actual record of a Joseph Lintz serving with any SS regiment, but then the SS had destroyed a lot of their own records once they'd seen the way the war was headed. Lintz's war record was vague, too. He mentioned shell-shock to explain the gaps in his memory. But he was vehement that he had never been called Linzstek and had never served in the Correze region of France.

`I was in the east,' he would say. `That's where the Allies found me, in the east.’