Siobhan went to the bar for more drinks. The barman had tried asking her about the paperwork, but she’d deflected the conversation and they’d ended up talking about writers instead. She hadn’t known of the Boatman’s connection with the likes of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.

“You’re not just drinking in a pub,” the barman had explained. “You’re drinking in history.” A line he’d used a hundred times before. It made her feel like a tourist. Ten miles from the city center, but everything felt different. It wasn’t just the murders-about which, she suddenly realized, her barman hadn’t said anything. Denizens of the city tended to lump the outlying settlements together-Portobello, Musselburgh, Currie, South Queensferry… they were regarded as just “bits” of the city. Yet even Leith, connected to the city center by the ugly umbilical cord of Leith Walk, worked hard to preserve a separate identity. She wondered why anywhere else should be different.

Something had brought Lee Herdman here. He’d been born in Wishaw, joined the army at seventeen. Service in Northern Ireland and farther abroad, then SAS training. Eight years in that regiment before finding himself back, as he would probably have put it, “on civvy street.” He abandoned his wife, leaving her with two kids in Hereford, home of the SAS, and headed north. The background information was patchy. No mention of what happened to the wife and kids, or why he broke with them. He’d moved to South Queensferry six years ago. And he’d died here, age thirty-six.

Siobhan looked across to where Rebus was studying another sheet of paper. He’d been in the army, and she’d often heard rumors that he’d trained for the SAS. What did she know about the SAS? Only what she’d read in the report. Special Air Service, based in Hereford, motto: Who Dares Wins.