They were hunters, maybe hunter-gatherers: Rebus was convinced of it.
There was a soft tapping at the door. Rebus checked the spy hole: it was Siobhan. He let her in, and she put the file back on the dressing table.
“Pages in the right order?” Rebus asked.
“Good as gold.” She had the copied sheets in a padded yellow envelope. “We ready to leave?”
Rebus nodded, and followed her to Simms’s door. But then he stopped, turned back. The file was lying faceup. He turned it over, gave the room a final look around, and left.
They’d offered the receptionist a smile as they’d passed her. A smile, but no words.
“Think she’ll tell Whiteread?” Siobhan had asked.
“I doubt it.” And he’d shrugged, because even if she did, there was nothing Whiteread could do about it. There’d been nothing in her room for anyone to find, and nothing was missing. While Siobhan drove them along the A90 towards Barnton, Rebus got started on the file. A lot of it was chaff: various test scores and reports, medical stuff, results from promotion boards. Penciled marginalia commented on Herdman’s strengths and weaknesses. His physical stamina was questioned, but his career was textbook stuff: tours of duty in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Middle East; training exercises in the UK, Saudi Arabia, Finland, Germany. Rebus turned a page and found himself staring at a sheet blank save for a few typed words: REMOVED BY ORDER. There was a scribbled signature and a stamped date, going back only four days. The date of the killings. Rebus turned to the next page and found himself reading about Herdman’s closing few months in the army. He had told his employers that he wouldn’t be signing up again-a copy of his letter was enclosed. Moves had been made to entice him to stay, but to no avail. After which the file descended into a bureaucracy of form filling. Events taking their course.
“Did you see this?” Rebus said, tapping the words REMOVED BY ORDER.
Siobhan nodded. “What does it mean?”
“It means something’s been taken out, probably locked away somewhere in SAS HQ.”
“Sensitive information? Not for Whiteread’s and Simms’s eyes?”
Rebus was thoughtful. “Maybe.” He flicked back a page, concentrated on the final paragraphs. Seven months before Herdman had walked away from the SAS, he’d been part of a “salvage team” on Jura. On first glancing down the page, Rebus had seen the word Jura and assumed it referred to an exercise. Jura: a narrow island off the west coast. Isolated, just the one road and some mountains. Real wilderness country. Rebus had done some training there himself, back in his army days. Long marshy hikes, broken up with rock climbing. He remembered the range of hills: the “Paps of Jura.” Recalled the short ferry crossing to Islay, and how, at the end of the exercise, they’d all been taken to a distillery there.
But Herdman hadn’t been there on an exercise. He’d been part of a “salvage team.” Salvaging what exactly?
“Any further forwards?” Siobhan asked, braking hard as the divided highway ended. Ahead of them lay a backup from the Barnton roundabout.
“I’m not sure,” Rebus admitted. Nor was he sure how he felt about Siobhan’s involvement in his little spot of subterfuge. He should have made her stay in Simms’s room. That way, it would have been his face the staff member in the business suite would remember. His description they would give to Whiteread if she ever came sniffing…
“Was it worth it, then?” Siobhan was asking.
He just shrugged, growing thoughtful as they took a left at the roundabout, watching as she pulled up at a driveway, then turned the car into it. “Where are we?” he asked.
“James Bell’s house,” she told him. “Remember? We were going to talk to him?”
Rebus just nodded.
The house was modern and detached, with small windows and harled walls. Siobhan pressed the bell and waited. The door was opened by a tiny woman in her well-preserved fifties, with piercing blue eyes and her hair tied back with a black velvet bow.
“Mrs. Bell? I’m DS Clarke, this is DI Rebus. We were wondering if we could have a word with James.”
Felicity Bell examined both IDs, then stepped back to allow them inside. “Jack’s not here,” she said, in a voice devoid of energy.
“It’s your son we wanted to see,” Siobhan explained, voice dropping for fear of scaring this small, harried-looking creature.
“But all the same…” Mrs. Bell looked around her wildly. She’d brought them into the living room. In an attempt to calm her, Rebus lifted a family photo from the windowsill.
“You’ve got three children, Mrs. Bell?” he asked. She saw what he was holding, stepped forward to pluck it from his grasp, and did her best to put it back in the exact spot it had come from.
“James is the last,” she said. “The others are married… flown the nest.” She made a little flapping movement with one hand.
“The shooting must have been a terrible shock,” Siobhan said.
“Terrible, terrible.” The wild look had come back into her eyes.
“You work at the Traverse, don’t you?” Rebus asked.
“That’s right.” She didn’t seem surprised that he would know this about her. “We’ve got a new play just starting… really, I should be there to help out, but I’m needed here, you see.”
“What’s the play?”
“It’s a version of The Wind in the Willows… do either of you have children?”
Siobhan shook her head. Rebus explained that his daughter was too old.
“Never too old, never too old,” Felicity Bell said in her quavering voice.
“I take it you’re staying home to look after James?” Rebus said.
“Yes.”
“So he’s upstairs, is he?”
“In his room, yes.”
“And would he be able to spare us a couple of minutes, do you think?”
“Well, I don’t know…” Mrs. Bell’s hand had gone to her wrist at Rebus’s mention of “minutes.” Now she decided that she’d better look at her watch. “Gracious, nearly lunchtime already…” She made to wander out of the room, perhaps in the direction of the kitchen, but then remembered these two strangers in her midst. “Maybe I should call Jack.”
“Maybe you should,” Siobhan conceded. She was studying a framed photo of the MSP, triumphant on election night. “We’d be happy to speak to him.”
Mrs. Bell looked up, focusing on Siobhan. Her eyebrows drew together. “What do you need to speak to him for?” She had a clipped, educated Edinburgh accent.
“It’s James we want to talk to,” Rebus explained, taking a step forwards. “He’s in his room, is he?” He waited till she’d nodded. “And that’s upstairs, I take it?” Another nod. “Then here’s what we’ll do.” He had laid a hand on her bone-thin arm. “You go get the lunch started, and we’ll find our own way. Less fuss all round, don’t you think?”
Mrs. Bell seemed to take this in only slowly, but at last she beamed a smile. “Then that’s what I’ll do,” she said, retreating into the hall. Rebus and Siobhan shared a look, then a nod of agreement. The woman was not cooking with a full set of saucepans. They climbed the stairs, found what they took to be James’s room: stickers placed on the door in childhood had been scraped off. Nothing on it now but old concert tickets, mostly from English cities-Foo Fighters in Manchester, Rammstein in London, Puddle of Mudd in Newcastle. Rebus knocked but got no answer. He turned the handle and opened the door. James Bell was sitting up in bed. White sheets and duvet, stark-white walls with no ornamentation. Pale green carpet half-covered with throw rugs. Books were crammed onto bookshelves. Computer, hi-fi, TV… CDs scattered around. Bell wore a black T-shirt. He had his knees up, propping up a magazine. He turned the pages with one hand, the other arm being strapped across his chest. His hair was short and dark, face pale, one cheek picked out by a mole. Few signs of teenage rebellion in this room. When Rebus had been in his teens, his own bedroom had been little more than a series of hiding places: soft-porn mags under the carpet (the mattress wouldn’t do, it got turned occasionally), cigarettes and matches behind one leg of the wardrobe, a knife tucked away beneath the winter sweaters in the bottom drawer of the chest. He got the feeling that if he looked in the drawers here, he’d find clothes; nothing under the carpet but thick underlay.