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music in his collection,’ Clarke commented.
    ‘At least he showed taste,’ said Rebus.
    On the way back to the station, he pushed the Orange tape into his car’s antiquated machine.
    The tape played slow, which added to the grimness. Rebus had heard stuff like it before, but not for a wee while. Songs about King Billy and the Apprentice Boys, the Battle of the Boyne and the glory of 1690, songs about routing the Catholics and why the men of Ulster would struggle to the end. The singer had a pub vibrato and little else, and was backed by accordion, snare and the occasional flute. Only an Orange marching band could make the flute sound martial to the ears. Well, an Orange marching band or Iain Anderson from Jethro Tull. Rebus was reminded that he hadn’t listened to Tull in an age. Anything would be better than these songs of … the word ‘hate’ sprang to mind, but he dismissed it. There was no vitriol in the lyrics, just a stern refusal to compromise in any way, to give ground, to accept that things could change now that the 1690s had become the 1990s. It was all blinkered and backward-looking. How narrow a view could you get?
    ‘The sod is,’ said Siobhan Clarke, ‘you find yourself humming the tunes after.’
    ‘Aye,’ said Rebus, ‘bigotry’s catchy enough all right.’
    And he whistled Jethro Tull all the way back to St Leonard’s.
    Lauderdale had arranged a press conference and wanted to know what Rebus knew.
    ‘I’m not positive,’ was the answer. ‘Not a hundred percent.’
    ‘How close?’
    ‘Ninety, ninety-five.’
    Lauderdale considered this. ‘So should I say anything?’
    ‘That’s up to you, sir. A fingerprint team’s on its way to the flat. We’ll know soon enough one way or the other.’
    One of the problems with the victim was that the last killing shot had blown away half his face, the bullet entering through the back of the neck and tearing up through the jaw. As Dr Curt had explained, they could do an ID covering up the bottom half of the face, allowing a friend or relative to see just the top half. But would that be enough? Before today’s potential break, they’d been forced to consider dental work. The victim’s teeth were the usual result of a Scottish childhood, eroded by sweets and shored up by dentistry. But as the forensic pathologist had said, the mouth was badly damaged, and what dental work remained was fairly routine. There was nothing unusual there for any dentist to spot definitively as his or her work.
    Rebus arranged for the party photograph to be reprinted and sent to Glasgow with the relevant details. Then he went to Lauderdale’s press conference.
    Chief Inspector Lauderdale loved his duels with the media. But today he was more nervous than usual. Perhaps it was that he had a larger audience than he was used to, Chief Superintendent Watson and DCI Kilpatrick having emerged from somewhere to listen. Both sported faces too ruddy to be natural, whisky certainly the cause. While the journalists sat towards the front of the room, the police officers stood to the back. Kilpatrick saw Rebus and sidled over to him.
    ‘You may have a positive ID?’ he whispered.
    ‘Maybe.’
    ‘So is it drugs or the IRA?’ There was a wry smile on his face. He didn’t really expect an answer, it was the whisky asking, that was all. But Rebus had an answer for him anyway.
    ‘If it’s anybody,’ he said, ‘it’s not the IRA but the other lot.’ There were so many names for them he didn’t even begin to list them: UDA, UVF, UFF, UR … The U stood for Ulster in each case. They were proscribed organisations, and they were all Protestant. Kilpatrick rocked back a little on his heels. His face was full of questions, fighting their way to the surface past the burst blood vessels which cherried nose and cheeks. A drinker’s face. Rebus had seen too many of them, including his own some nights in the bathroom mirror.
    But Kilpatrick wasn’t so far gone. He knew he was in no