A Question of Blood

  “It’s not what you said, DI Rebus.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me, then. I’m not exactly a hundred percent . . .”

  “Are you on drugs of some kind?”

  “Painkillers, yes.” Rebus held up his hands to remind Mullen of why.

  “And you took the most recent dose when?”

  “Sixty seconds before clapping eyes on you.” Rebus let his eyes widen. “Maybe I should have mentioned at the start . . . ?”

  Mullen slapped the desk with both palms. “Of course you should have!” He wasn’t talking to himself anymore. He let his chair fall backwards as he got to his feet. Carswell had risen, too.

  “I don’t see . . .”

  Mullen leaned across the desk to switch off the tape recorder. “You can’t hold an interview with someone who’s under the influence of prescribed drugs,” he explained, for the ACC’s benefit. “I thought everyone knew that.”

  Carswell started muttering something about how he’d just forgotten, that was all. Mullen was glaring at Rebus. Rebus gave him a wink.

  “We’ll talk again, Detective Inspector.”

  “Once I’m off the medication?” Rebus pretended to guess.

  “I’ll need the name of your doctor, so I can ask when that’s likely to be.” Mullen had opened the file, his pen poised over an empty sheet.

  “It was the infirmary,” Rebus stated blithely. “I can’t remember the doctor’s name.”

  “Well, then, I’ll just have to find out.” Mullen closed the file again.

  “Meantime,” Carswell piped up, “I don’t need to remind you about making that apology, or that you’re still on suspension?”

  “No, sir,” Rebus said.

  “Which rather begs the question,” Mullen said quietly, “of why I found you in the company of a fellow officer at Jack Bell’s house.”

  “I was hitching a lift, that’s all. DS Clarke had to stop off at Bell’s place to talk to the son.” Rebus gave a shrug, while Carswell expelled more air.

  “We will get to the bottom of this, Rebus. You can be sure of that.”

  “I don’t doubt it, sir.” Rebus was the last of the three to rise to his feet. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then. Enjoy the bottom when you get there . . .”

  Siobhan, as he’d guessed, was waiting with her car outside. “Nicely timed,” she said. The back of the car was full of shopping bags. “I waited ten minutes to see if you’d tell them straight off.”

  “And then went to do some shopping?”

  “Supermarket at the top of the road. I was going to ask if you fancied coming round for dinner tonight.”

  “Let’s see how the rest of the day pans out.”

  She nodded agreement. “So when did the question of the painkillers arise?”

  “About five minutes ago.”

  “You left it a while.”

  “Wanted to see if they’d anything new to tell me.”

  “And did they?”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t look like they consider you a suspect, though,” he told her.

  “Me? Why should they?”

  “Because he was stalking you . . . because every cop knows the old chip-pan trick.” He shrugged.

  “Any more of that and the dinner invite’s canceled.” She started driving them out of the car park. “Next stop Turnhouse?” she asked.

  “You think I need to be on the next plane out of here?”

  “We were going to talk to Doug Brimson.”

  Rebus shook his head. “You talk to him. Drop me off somewhere first.”

  She looked at him. “Where?”

  “Anyplace on George Street will do.”

  She was still looking. “Suspiciously close to the Oxford Bar.”

  “That wasn’t what I had in mind, but now that you come to mention it . . .”

  “Drink and tranqs don’t mix, John.”

  “It’s an hour and a half since I took those pills. Besides, I’m on suspension, remember? I’m allowed to misbehave.”

  Rebus was waiting for Steve Holly in the back room of the Oxford Bar.

  It was one of the city’s smaller pubs: just the two rooms, neither much bigger than the living room of a normal house. The front room was usually busy, in that three or four bodies could make it seem so. The back room had tables and chairs, and Rebus had positioned himself in the darkest corner, farthest from the window. The walls were the same jaundiced color they’d been when he’d first found the place, three decades back. The stark, old-fashioned interior had the power to intimidate newcomers, but Rebus wasn’t betting on it having any such effect on the journalist. He’d called the tabloid’s Edinburgh office—only a ten-minute walk from the bar. His message had been curt: “I want to talk to you. Oxford Bar. Now.” Cutting the connection before Holly could start a conversation. Rebus knew he would come. He’d come because he would be intrigued. He’d come because of the story he’d broken. He’d come because that was his job.

  Rebus heard the door open and close. He wasn’t worried about the occupants of the other tables. Anything they happened to overhear, they would keep to themselves. It was that kind of place. Rebus hoisted what was left of his pint. His grip was improving. He could pick up a glass one-handed, flex his wrist without the pain becoming unbearable. He was steering clear of whiskey: Siobhan had given him good advice, and for once he would heed it. He knew he needed his wits about him. Steve Holly wasn’t going to want to play on Rebus’s terms.

  Feet on the steps, a shadow preceding Holly’s entrance into the back room. He peered into the afternoon gloom, squeezing between chairs as he approached the table. He was carrying what looked like a glass of lemonade, maybe with vodka added for good measure. He gave a slight nod, stayed standing until Rebus gestured for him to sit. Holly did so, checking to the left and right, unhappy about sitting with his back to the bar’s other denizens.

  “Nobody’s going to leap from the shadows and head-butt you,” Rebus reassured him.

  “I suppose I should be congratulating you,” Holly said. “I hear you’re managing to get right up Jack Bell’s nose.”

  “And I notice your paper’s supporting his campaign.”

  Holly’s mouth twitched. “Doesn’t mean he’s not a prick. You lot should have stuck to your guns, that time you caught him with the prossie. Better yet, you should have phoned my paper, we’d have come down and got some snaps of him in flagrante. Have you met the wife?” Rebus nodded. “Bananas, she is,” the reporter continued. “Nervous wreck by all accounts.”

  “She stood by him, though.”

  “That’s what MPs’ wives do, isn’t it?” Holly said dismissively. Then: “So, to what do I owe the honor? Decided to put your side of the story?”

  “I need a favor,” Rebus said, placing his gloved hands on the table.

  “A favor?” Rebus nodded. “In return for what exactly?”

  “Special relationship status.”

  “Meaning?” Holly lifted his glass to his mouth.

  “Meaning whatever I get on the Herdman case, you get first shout.”

  Holly snorted. Had to wipe some of his drink from around his mouth. “You’re on suspension, as far as I know.”

  “Doesn’t stop me from keeping my ear to the ground.”

  “And what exactly is it you can tell me about Herdman that I can’t get from a dozen of my other sources?”

  “Depends on that favor. It’s one thing I’ve got that they haven’t.”

  Holly rolled some more of his drink around the inside of his mouth. Then he swallowed, smacked his lips.

  “Trying to throw me off the scent, Rebus? I’ve got you by the short and curlies over Marty Fairstone. Everyone knows it. And now you’re asking favors?” He chuckled, but there was no humor in his eyes. “You should be begging me not to rip your gonads right off.”

  “Think you’ve got the balls for it?” Rebus said, finishing his own drink. He slid the empty glass across the table towards the journalist. “Pint of
IPA, when you’re ready.” Holly looked at him, then smiled with half his mouth and rose to his feet, maneuvering his way back through the chairs. Rebus lifted the lemonade glass and sniffed: vodka, definitely. He managed to light a cigarette, had smoked half of it by the time Holly returned.

  “Barman’s got an attitude, hasn’t he?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t like what you said about me,” Rebus explained.

  “So go to the Press Complaints Commission.” Holly handed the pint over. He’d brought another vodka and lemonade for himself. “Only I don’t see you doing that,” he added.

  “That’s because you’re not worth the effort.”

  “And this is the guy who wants a favor doing?”

  “A favor you haven’t bothered listening to yet.”

  “Well, here I am . . .” Holly opened his arms wide.

  “A salvage operation of some kind,” Rebus said quietly. “It happened on Jura, June of ’ninety-five. I need to know what it was for.”

  “Salvage?” Holly frowned, his instincts aroused. “A tanker? Something like that?”

  Rebus shook his head. “On land. The SAS were brought in.”

  “Herdman?”

  “He might have been involved.”

  Holly chewed on his bottom lip as if trying to dislodge the hook Rebus had landed there. “What’s it got to do with anything?”

  “We won’t know that till we take a look.”

  “And if I agree, what do I get out of it?”

  “Like I said, first go at any story.” Rebus paused. “I might also have access to Herdman’s army files.”

  Holly’s eyebrows rose perceptibly. “Anything good in them?”

  Rebus shrugged. “At this stage, I couldn’t possibly comment.” Reeling the reporter in . . . knowing full well there was little in the file to interest any tabloid reader. But then how was Steve Holly to know that?

  “Well, we could have a look-see, I suppose.” Holly was rising to his feet again. “No time like the present.”

  Rebus studied his beer glass, still three-quarters full. Holly had yet to start on his own second drink. “What’s the rush?” he said.

  “You don’t think I came here to pass the time of day with you?” Holly said. “I don’t like you, Rebus, and I certainly don’t trust you.” He paused. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Rebus said, rising to follow the reporter out of the bar.

  “By the way,” Holly said, “something that’s been bugging me . . .”

  “What?”

  “I was talking to a guy, and he said he could kill someone with a newspaper. You ever heard of that?”

  Rebus nodded. “A magazine’s better, but a paper might just do it.”

  Holly looked at him. “So how does it work? Smothering or what?”

  Rebus shook his head. “You roll it up, tight as you can, then you use it on the throat. Enough force, you’ll crush the windpipe.”

  Holly was staring. “You learned that in the army?”

  Rebus nodded again. “As did whoever you were talking to.”

  “It was a bloke at St. Leonard’s . . . him and some stroppy-looking woman.”

  “Her name’s Whiteread; his is Simms.”

  “Army investigators?” Holly nodded to himself, as though it all made sense. Rebus stopped himself from smiling: putting Holly onto Whiteread and Simms was most of his plan.

  They were outside the pub now, and Rebus expected that they’d be walking to the newspaper office, but Holly had turned left rather than right, pointing his ignition key at the line of cars parked curbside.

  “You drove?” Rebus said as the locks clunked open on a silver-gray Audi TT.

  “It’s what your legs are for,” Holly informed him. “Now get in.”

  Rebus slid into what space there was, thinking that an Audi TT was the car Teri Cotter’s brother had been driving, the night he’d died, with Derek Renshaw sitting in the passenger seat, same seat Rebus was in now . . . remembering the photos of the crash, Stuart Cotter’s rag-doll body . . . He watched as Holly slipped a hand beneath the driver’s seat, sliding out a thin black laptop computer. He placed it across his legs, opening it and holding his mobile phone in one hand while he operated the keyboard with the other.

  “Infrared connection,” he explained. “Gets us online in a hurry.”

  “And why are we going online?” Rebus had to push back a sudden memory of his nighttime vigil at Miss Teri’s website, embarrassed that he’d allowed himself to be drawn into her world.

  “Because that’s where my paper has most of its library. I just enter the password . . .” Holly stabbed half a dozen keys, Rebus trying to see what they were. “No peeking, Rebus,” he warned. “There’s all sorts of stuff on here: clippings, dropped stories, archives . . .”

  “Lists of the cops you pay for information?”

  “Would I be that stupid?”

  “I don’t know: would you?”

  “When people talk to me, they know I can keep a secret. Those names go to my grave.”

  Holly turned his attention back to the screen. Rebus had no doubt this machine was state of the art. Connection had been fast, and now pages were popping up in the blink of an eye. The laptop Rebus had borrowed was, as Pettifer had said, coal-fired by comparison.

  “Search mode . . .” Holly was talking to himself. “We enter the month and year, keywords Jura and salvage . . . and see what Brainiac comes up with.” He hit a final key and sat back, turning again towards Rebus to measure how impressed he was. Rebus was hellish impressed but hoped it didn’t show.

  The screen had changed again. “Seventeen items,” Holly said. “Christ, yes, I remember this.” He angled the screen a little, and Rebus leaned towards him so that he could see what was there. And suddenly Rebus remembered it, too, remembered the incident, but hadn’t registered it as happening on Jura. An army helicopter, half a dozen top brass on board. Killed outright, along with the pilot, when the chopper had crashed. Speculation at the time that it had been downed. Jubilation in some quarters in Northern Ireland—a splinter Republican group taking early credit. But in the end, “pilot error” had been given as the cause.

  “No mention of the SAS,” Holly pointed out.

  Instead, a vague mention of a “rescue team,” sent to locate the debris and, more important, the bodies. Whatever was left of the chopper would be taken away for analysis, the bodies sent for autopsy prior to the funerals. An inquiry was set in motion, its findings a long time coming.

  “Pilot’s family weren’t happy,” Holly said, racing through time to the end of the investigation. Memories tarnished by that conclusion: “pilot error.”

  “Go back again,” Rebus said, annoyed that Holly was a faster reader than him. Holly obliged, the screen switching in an instant.

  “So Herdman was part of the rescue team?” Holly observed. “Makes sense, army sending in their own . . .” He turned to Rebus. “What point is it you’re supposed to be making?”

  Rebus didn’t want to give him much more, so said he wasn’t sure.

  “Then I’m wasting my time here.” Holly hit another button, blacking out the screen. Then he twisted his body so he was facing Rebus. “So what if Herdman was on Jura? What the hell’s it got to do with what went on in that school? You going for the stress/ trauma angle?”

  “I’m not sure,” Rebus repeated. He stared at the reporter. “But thanks anyway.” He pushed open the door and started levering himself out of the low-built seat.

  “Is that it?” Holly spat. “I show you mine and you chicken out?”

  Rebus leaned back down into the car. “Mine’s more interesting than yours, pal.”

  “You didn’t need me for this,” Holly said, glancing towards his laptop. “Half an hour with a search engine and you’d’ve learned as much.”

  Rebus nodded. “Or I could have asked Whiteread and Simms, only I don’t think they’d have been quite as accommodating.”

  Holly blinked. “Why not???
?

  Bait taken, Rebus just winked and slammed shut the door, walked back into the Ox, where Harry was about to pour his drink down the sink.

  “Let me relieve you of that,” Rebus said, stretching out his hand towards the barman. He heard the roar of the Audi’s engine, Steve Holly making a quick and angry getaway. Rebus wasn’t bothered. He had what he needed.

  A helicopter crash. Top brass involved. Now there was something to whet the appetite of a couple of army investigators. What was more, when Holly had flicked back through the screens, Rebus had registered the news that a few of the locals on the island had helped with the search, men who knew the Paps of Jura well. One of them had even been interviewed, giving his description of the crash site. His name was Rory Mollison. Rebus finished off the pint, standing at the bar, his eyes staring at the TV without taking any of it in. A kaleidoscope of colors, that was all it meant to him. His mind was elsewhere, crossing land and then water, gliding over hilltops . . . Sending the SAS to pick up bodies? Jura wasn’t exactly the most mountainous terrain, certainly a long way short of the peaks you’d find in the Grampians. Why send such a specialized team?

  Gliding over moor and glen, inlets and sheer cliff faces . . . Rebus fumbled for his phone, pulled off his glove with his teeth and punched numbers with his thumbnail. Waited for Siobhan to pick up.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  “Never mind that: what the hell are you doing talking to Steve Holly?”

  Rebus blinked, ran to the door and pulled it open. She was standing right in front of him. He put the phone back in his pocket. As if in a mirror image, she did the same with hers.

  “You’re tailing me,” he said, trying to sound appalled.

  “Only because you need tailing.”

  “Where were you?” He started pulling the glove back on.

  She nodded towards North Castle Street. “Car’s parked just around the corner. Now, to return to my original question . . .”

  “Never mind that. At least this means you’ve not been back to the airfield.”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “Good, because I want you to talk to him.”

  “Who? Brimson?” She watched him nod. “And after that, you’ll tell me what you were doing with Steve Holly?”