Still he wouldn’t give up, and she realized that what had started-presumably-as a joke had turned into a more serious form of game. So she’d decided to bring one of her stronger pieces into play. Rebus had noticed anyway: the calls she wasn’t taking, the time she spent by the office window, the way she kept glancing around her when they were out on a call. So eventually she’d told him, and the pair of them had paid a visit to Fairstone’s public housing unit in Gracemount.

It had started badly, Siobhan soon realizing that her “piece” played by his own set of rules rather than anyone else’s. A struggle, the leg snapping from a coffee table, pine veneer yielding to the MDF within. Siobhan feeling worse than ever afterwards-weak, because she had brought Rebus in rather than deal with it herself; trembling, because at the back of her mind lurked the thought that she’d known what would happen, and had wanted it to happen. Instigator and coward.

They’d stopped for a drink on the way back into town.

“Think he’ll do anything?” Siobhan had asked.

“He started it,” Rebus told her. “If he keeps on hassling you, he knows now what he’s in for.”

“A hiding, you mean?”

“All I did was defend myself, Siobhan. You were there. You saw.” His eyes fixing hers until she nodded. And he was right. Fairstone had lunged at him. Rebus had pushed him down onto the coffee table, trying to hold him there. Then the leg snapped and both men slid to the floor, rolling and struggling. It had all been over in a matter of seconds, Fairstone’s voice shaking with rage as he told them to get out. Rebus pointing a warning finger, repeating his order to “back off from DS Clarke.”