A Good Hanging and other Stories by Ian Rankin

head when the boat went over. He was also suffering from shock and exhaustion. Mr Ford’s sister, Mrs Isabel Hammond, was never traced.
    They had investigated a little further. The business run jointly by Messrs Abbot and Ford now became Mr Abbot’s. The case-notes contained a good amount of information and suspicion - between the lines, as it were. Oh yes, they’d investigated Alexander Abbot, but there had been no evidence. They’d searched for the body, had found none. Without a body, they were left with only their suspicions and their nagging doubts.
    ‘Yes,’ Rebus said quietly to himself, ‘but what if you were looking for the body in the wrong place?’ The wrong place at the wrong time. The work on the cellar had ended on Friday afternoon and by Saturday morning Hugh Ford had ceased to exist.
    The path Rebus was on had become less overgrown, but it was still rock-strewn and dangerous, still a potential dead-end.
     
    The Fishing-Net Hotel was still in existence, though apparently much changed from its 1960 incarnation. The present owners told Rebus to arrive in time for lunch if he could and it would be on the house. Largo was north of Burntisland but on the same coastline. Alexander Selkirk, the original of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, had a connection with the fishing village. There was a small statue of him somewhere which Rebus had been shown as a boy (but only after much hunting, he recalled). Largo was picturesque, but then so were most, if not all, of the coastal villages in Fife’s ‘East Neuk’. But it was not yet quite the height of the tourist season and the customers taking lunch at the Fishing-Net Hotel were businessmen and locals.
    It was a good lunch, as picturesque as its surroundings but with a bit more flavour. And afterwards, the owner, an Englishman for whom life in Largo was a long-held dream come true, offered to show Rebus round, including ‘the very room your Mr Ford stayed in the night before he died’.
    ‘How can you be sure?’
    ‘I looked in the register.’
    Rebus managed not to look too surprised. The hotel had changed hands so often since 1960, he despaired of finding anyone who would remember the events of that weekend.
    ‘The register?’
    ‘Yes, we were left a lot of old stuff when we bought this place. The store-rooms were choc-a-bloc. Old ledgers and what have you going back to the 1920s and 30s. It was easy enough to find 1960.’
    Rebus stopped in his tracks. ‘Never mind showing me Mr Ford’s room, would you mind letting me see that register?’
    He sat at a desk in the manager’s office with the register open in front of him, while Mr Summerson’s finger stabbed the line. ‘There you are, Inspector, H. Ford. Signed in at 11.50 p.m., address given as Duddingston. Room number seven.’
    It wasn’t so much a signature as a blurred scrawl and above it, on a separate line, was Alexander Abbot’s own more flowing signature.
    ‘Bit late to arrive, wasn’t it?’ commented Rebus.
    ‘Agreed.’
    ‘I don’t suppose there’s anyone working here nowadays who worked in the hotel back then?’
    Summerson laughed quietly. ‘People do retire in this country, Inspector.’
    ‘Of course, I just wondered.’ He remembered the newspaper story. ‘What about John Thomson? Does the name mean anything to you?’
    ‘Old Jock? Jock Thomson? The fisherman?’
    ‘Probably.’
    ‘Oh, yes, he’s still about. You’ll almost certainly find him down by the dockside or else in the Harbour Tavern.’
    ‘Thanks. I’d like to take this register with me if I may?’
     
    Jock Thomson sucked on his pipe and nodded. He looked the archetype of the ‘old salt’, from his baggy cord trousers to his chiselled face and silvery beard. The only departure from the norm was, perhaps, the Perrier water in front of him on a table in the Harbour Tavern.
    ‘I like the fizz,’ he explained after ordering it, ‘and besides, my doctor’s told me to keep off the alcohol. Total abstinence, he