It lay on the passenger seat, screen blank. One of these days he’d take it to the garage that installed the car’s CD player. An inspection of the backseat, floors, and trunk had failed to turn up anything by The Who, so Rebus was listening to Elbow instead-Siobhan’s recommendation. He liked the title track, “Leaders of the Free World.” Stuck it on repeat. The singer seemed to think something had gone wrong since the ’60s. Rebus tended to agree, even coming at it from a different direction. He guessed the singer would have liked more change, a world run by Greenpeace and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, poverty made history. Rebus had been on a few marches himself in the ’60s, before and after joining the army. It was a way to meet girls if nothing else. Usually there was a party somewhere afterward. These days, though, he saw the ’60s as the end of something. A fan had been stabbed to death at a Stones concert in 1969, and the decade had petered out. The 1960s had given youth a taste for revolt. They didn’t trust the old order, certainly didn’t respect it. He wondered about the thousands who would descend on Gleneagles, confrontation a certainty. Hard to imagine it in this landscape of farms and hillsides, rivers and glens. He knew that Gleneagles’s very isolation would have been a factor in its choice as venue. The leaders of the free world would be safe there, safe to sign their names to decisions that had already been made elsewhere. On the stereo, the band was singing about climbing a landslide. The image stuck with Rebus all the way to the outskirts of Auchterarder.

He didn’t think he’d been there before. All the same, he seemed to know the place. Typical small Scottish town: a single, well-defined main street with narrow side roads leading off, built with the notion that people would walk to their local shops. Small, independently owned shops at that; he didn’t see much that would inflame the antiglobalization campaigners. The baker was even selling limited-edition G8 pies.