The Naming of the Dead

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In place of a closing hymn, there was music. The Who, “Love Reign o’er Me.” Rebus recognized it the moment it started, thunderclaps and teeming rain filling the chapel. He was in the front pew; Chrissie had insisted. He’d rather have been further back: his usual place at funerals. Chrissie’s son and daughter sat next to her. Lesley was comforting her mother, an arm around her as the tears fell. Kenny stared straight ahead, storing up emotion for later. Earlier that morning, back at the house, Rebus had asked him his age. He would be thirty next month. Lesley was two years younger. Brother and sister looked like their mother, reminding Rebus that people had said the same about Michael and him: the pair of you, the spitting image of your mum. Michael…Mickey, if you preferred. Rebus’s younger brother, dead in a shiny-handled box at the age of fifty-four, Scotland ’s mortality rate that of a third world nation. Lifestyle, diet, genes-plenty of theories. The full postmortem hadn’t come through yet. Massive stroke was what Chrissie had told Rebus on the phone, assuring him that it was “sudden”-as if that made a difference.

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