A voice hissing, close to his ear. Blood pounding there, so he had to strain to hear it. A hiss close to a whisper, hard to identify.
‘There’s a message, so I hope you’re listening.’
Rebus couldn’t speak. His mouth was full of dirt.
He waited for the message, but it didn’t come. Then it did.
Pistol-whipped to the side of his head, just above the ear. An explosion of light behind his eyes. Then darkness.
He woke up and it was still night. Sat up and looked around. His eyes hurt when he moved them. He touched his head — no blood. It hadn’t been that kind of thwack. Blunt, not sharp. Just the one by the feel of things. After he’d lost consciousness they’d left him. He searched his pockets, found money, car keys, warrant card and all his other cards. But of course it hadn’t been a robbery. It had been a message, hadn’t they told him so themselves?
He tried standing. His side hurt. He checked, saw that he’d grazed it coming down the slope. A graze on his forehead too, and his nose had bled a little. He checked the ground around him, but they hadn’t left anything. It wouldn’t have been professional. All the same, he tried as best he could to trace the route they’d come down, just in case something had been left behind.
Nothing. He hauled himself back over the wall. A taxi driver looked at him in disgust and pressed harder on the accelerator. He’d seen a drunk, a tramp, a loser.
Last year’s man.
Rebus limped across the road into the hotel. The woman behind the reception desk was reaching for the phone, ready to summon back-up, but then recognised him from earlier.
‘Whatever happened to you?’
‘Fell down some steps.’
‘Do you want a doctor?’
‘Just my key, please.’
‘We’ve a first aid kit.’
Rebus nodded. ‘Have it sent up to my room.’
He took a bath, a good long soak, then towelled off and examined the damage. His temple was swollen where the butt had connected, and he had a headache worse than half a dozen hangovers. Some thorns had lodged in his side, but he was able to pick them out with his fingernails. He cleaned the graze, no need for plasters. He might ache in the morning, but he’d probably sleep, so long as the ticking noise didn’t come back. A double brandy had arrived with the first aid; he sipped it, hand trembling. He lay on his bed and phoned home, checking the machine. Ancram, Ancram, Ancram. It was too late to phone Mairie, but he tried Brian Holmes’s number. A lot of rings later, Holmes picked up.
‘Aye?’
‘Brian, it’s me.’
‘What can I do you for?’
Rebus had his eyes screwed shut; difficult to think past the pain. ‘Why didn’t you tell me Nell had walked out?’
‘How do you know?’
‘I came by your house. I know a batch pad when I see one. Do you want to talk about it?’
‘No.’
‘Is it the same problem as before?’
‘She wants me to leave the force.’
‘And?’
‘And maybe she’s right. But I’ve tried before, and it’s hard.’
‘I know.’
‘Well, there’s more than one way of leaving.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Nothing.’ And he wouldn’t say any more about it. He wanted to talk about the Spaven case. The bottom line from his reading of the notes: Ancram would smell collusion, a certain economy with the truth; which wasn’t to say there was anything he could do about it.
‘I also notice you interviewed one of Spaven’s friends at the time, Fergus McLure. He’s just died, you know.’
‘Dearie me.’
‘Drowned in the canal, out Ratho way.’
‘What did the post mortem say?’
‘He received a nasty bump to the head some time before entering the water. It’s being treated as suspicious, so...’
‘So?’
‘So if I were you, I’d steer clear. Don’t want to hand Ancram any more ammo.’
‘Speaking of Ancram...’
‘He’s looking for you.’
‘I sort of missed our first interview.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Laying low.’ With his eyes closed and three paracetamol in his stomach.
‘I don’t think he went for your flu story.’
‘That’s his problem.’
‘Maybe.’
‘So you’re finished on Spaven?’
‘Looks like.’
‘What about that prisoner? The one who was the last to speak to Spaven?’
‘I’m on it, but I think he’s no fixed abode, could take a while.’
‘I really appreciate it, Brian. Do you have a story ready if Ancram finds out?’
‘No problem. Take care, John.’
‘You too, son.’ Son? Where had that come from? Rebus put down the phone, picked up the TV remote. Beach volleyball would just about do him for tonight...
Dead Crude
18
Oiclass="underline" black gold. The North Sea’s exploration and exploitation rights had been divvied up long ago. The oil companies spent a lot of money on that initial exploration. A block might yield no oil or gas at all. Vessels were sent out laden with scientific equipment, their data studied and discussed — all this before a single test well was sunk. The reserves might lie three thousand metres beneath the sea bed — Mother Nature not keen to give up the hidden trove. But the plunderers had ever more technical expertise; water depths of two hundred metres no longer bothered them. In fact, the latest discoveries — Atlantic oil, two hundred kilometres west of Shetland — involved a water depth of between four and six hundred metres.
If the test drilling proved successful, showing reserves worth the game, a production platform would be built, along with all the various modules to accompany it. In some parts of the North Sea the weather was too unpredictable for tanker loading, so pipelines would have to be installed — the Brent and Ninian pipelines took crude directly to Sullom Voe, while other pipelines carried gas to Aberdeenshire. All this, and still the oil proved stubborn. In many fields, you could expect to recover only forty or fifty per cent of the available reserve, but then the reserve might consist of one and a half billion barrels.
Then there was the platform itself, sometimes three hundred metres high, a jacket weighing forty thousand tonnes, covered in eight hundred tonnes of paint, and with additional weight of modules and equipment totalling thirty thousand tonnes. The figures were staggering. Rebus tried to take them in, but gave up after a while and decided just to be awestruck. He’d only ever once seen a rig, when he’d been visiting relatives in Methil. The street of prefab bungalows led down to the construction yard, where a three-dimensional steel grid lay on its side, towering into the sky. From a distance of a mile, it had been spectacular enough. He recalled it now, staring at the glossy photographs in the brochure, a brochure all about Bannock. The platform, he read, carried fifteen hundred kilometres of electrical cable, and could accommodate nearly two hundred workers. Once the jacket had been towed out to the oilfield and anchored there, over a dozen modules were placed atop it, everything from accommodation to oil and gas separation. The whole structure had been designed to withstand winds of one hundred knots, and storms with hundred-foot waves.
Rebus was hoping for calm seas today.
He was sitting in a lounge at Dyce Airport, only a little nervous about the flight he was about to take. The brochure assured him that safety was paramount in ‘such a potentially hazardous environment’, and showed him photos of fire-fighting teams, a safety and support vessel on constant standby, and fully equipped lifeboats. ‘The lessons of Piper Alpha have been learned.’ The Piper Alpha platform, north-east of Aberdeen: over a hundred and sixty fatalities on a summer’s night in 1988.