“Which doesn’t mean you’ll get it, Bobby,” Rebus had said. But he’d patted Ormiston’s arm, to let him know the gesture was appreciated. He’d even asked him to join them for a drink, but Ormiston had shaken his head.
“I think you’ve just assigned me to solace duty,” he’d said.
So it was just Rebus and Hogan in the bar. As they waited their turn, Hogan seemed to deflate just a little. Usually at the end of a case, the whole team gathered in the murder room while cases of beer were dragged in and opened. Maybe a bottle of fizz from the brass. Whiskey for the more traditionally minded. This didn’t seem the same, just the two of them, the original team already dispersed…
“What’ll it be?” Hogan asked, trying to sound breezy.
“Maybe a Laphroaig, Bobby.”
“The measures don’t look generous.” Hogan had run an expert eye over the gantry.
“Better make it a double.”
“And decide right now who’s the designated driver.”
Hogan’s mouth twitched. “I thought you said Siobhan was joining us.”
“That’s cruel, Bobby.” Rebus paused. “Cruel but fair.”
The barman was ready for them. Hogan ordered Rebus’s whiskey and a pint of lager for himself. “And two cigars,” he added, turning towards Rebus, seeming to study him. He rested his arm on the edge of the bar. “Result like this, John, makes me think I want to go out while I’m winning.”
“Christ, Bobby, you’re in your prime.”
Hogan snorted. “Five years ago I’d have agreed with you.” He took a wad of notes from his pocket and extracted a ten. “But this just about does it for me.”
“So what’s changed?”
Hogan shrugged. “A kid who can go and shoot two classmates, no real motive, I mean, none that makes any sense to me… It’s a different world from the one I used to know, John.”
“Just means we’re needed more than ever.”
Hogan snorted again. “You really think so? You see yourself as being wanted, do you?”
“I didn’t say ‘wanted’; I said needed.”
“And who needs us? People like Carswell, because we make him look good? Or Claverhouse, so he’s not screwing up any more than he already is?”
“They’ll do for a start,” Rebus said, smiling. His glass was placed in front of him, and he dribbled some water into it, just enough to take the edge off. Two thin cigars had arrived, and Hogan was unwrapping his.
“We still don’t really know, do we?”
“Know what?”
“Why Herdman did it… topped himself.”
“Did you think we ever would? I had the feeling you brought me in because all the young folk around you were scaring you. You needed another dinosaur in the vicinity.”
“You’re not a dinosaur, John.” Hogan lifted his glass, chinked it against Rebus’s. “Here’s to the two of us.”
“Not forgetting Jack Bell, without whose presence James might have realized he could keep quiet and end up getting away with it.”
“Right enough,” Hogan said with a broad grin. “Families, eh, John?” He started shaking his head.
“Families,” Rebus agreed, lifting the glass to his mouth.
When his phone sounded, Hogan told him to leave it. But Rebus checked the display, wondering if it might be Siobhan. It wasn’t. Rebus motioned to Hogan that he was stepping back outside, where it was quieter. There was a beer garden to the front, just an area of pavement with some tables. Too chill a breeze for anyone to be using them. Rebus lifted the phone to his ear.
“Gill?” he said.
“You wanted to be kept in touch.”
“Young Bob’s still singing, then?”
“I almost wish he’d stop,” Gill Templer said with a sigh. “We’ve had his childhood, bullied at school, the time he wet himself… He keeps bouncing backwards and forwards, I never know if something happened last week or last decade. He says he wants to borrow The Wind in the Willows…”
Rebus smiled. “It’s at my flat. I’ll fetch it for him.” Rebus heard the drone of a light aircraft in the distance. Peered up, shading his eyes with his free hand. The plane was over the Forth Road Bridge, too far away to tell if it was the same one they’d traveled to Jura in. Same sort of size, crawling almost lazily across the sky.
“What do you know about tanning parlors?” Gill Templer was asking.
“Why?”
“They keep cropping up. Some connection with Johnson and the drugs…”
Rebus kept watching the plane. It dipped suddenly, engine changing tone. Then it leveled off, wings tilting from side to side. If it was Siobhan up there, she was learning the hard way.
“Teri Cotter’s mother owns a few,” Rebus said into the phone. “That’s about as much as I know.”
“Could they be a front?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so. I mean, where would she be getting…?” Rebus broke off. Brimson’s car, parked in Cockburn Street where Teri’s mum had one of her shops. Teri admitting to him that her mother was having an affair with Brimson…
Doug Brimson, friend of Lee Herdman. Brimson with his planes. Where the hell had he got the money for them? Millions, Ray Duff had said. It had struck a nerve at the time, but Rebus had become distracted by James Bell. Millions… the kind of money you could make from a few legitimate businesses, and dozens of illegal ones…
Rebus remembered what Brimson had said on the way back from Jura, with the Forth and Rosyth beneath: I often think about the damage… even with something as small as a Cessna… dockyard… ferry… road and rail bridges… airport… Rebus’s hand fell. He squinted into the light.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
“John? You still there?”
By the time she had the words out, he wasn’t.
Ran back into the bar, dragged Hogan out. “We need to get to the airfield!”
“What for?”
“No time!”
Hogan unlocking the car, Rebus getting behind the wheel. “I’m driving!” Hogan not about to argue. Rebus sending the car screaming out of the car park, but then screeching to a halt, staring from the driver’s-side window.
“Jesus, no…” Stumbling from the car, standing in the middle of the road, looking up. The plane had gone into a dive but was coming out of it.
“What’s going on?” Hogan yelled from the passenger seat.
Rebus got back behind the wheel, set off again. Following the plane’s progress as it passed over the rail bridge, made a steep arc as it neared the Fife coastline and started back towards the bridges again.
“That plane’s in trouble,” Hogan stated.
Rebus stopped the car again to watch. “It’s Brimson,” he hissed. “He’s got Siobhan with him.”
“Looks like it’s going to hit the bridge!” Both men were out of the car. They weren’t alone. Other drivers had stopped to watch. Pedestrians were pointing and muttering. The drone of the engine had grown louder, more discordant.
“Jesus,” Hogan gasped, as the plane flew underneath the rail bridge, mere feet from the surface of the water. It climbed steeply, almost vertically, leveled off, and then dived again. This time it went below the central span of the road bridge.
“Is he showing off, or trying to scare the wits out of her?” Hogan said.
Rebus shook his head. He was thinking of Lee Herdman, the way he would try to scare his teenage water-skiers… testing them.
“Brimson’s the one who planted those drugs. He’s bringing them into the country on his plane, Bobby, and I get the feeling Siobhan knows that.”
“So what the hell is he doing now?”
“Scaring her maybe. I hope to hell that’s all it is…” He thought of Lee Herdman, lifting a gun to his temple, and the ex-SAS man who jumped to his death from an airplane…
“Will they have parachutes?” Hogan was asking. “Could she get out?”
Rebus didn’t answer. His jaw was locked tight.
The plane was looping the loop now, but still far too close to the bridge. One wing clipped a suspension cable, sending the plane into a spiraling dive.
Rebus took an involuntary step forwards, yelled out the word “no!” stretching it for the length of time it took the machine to hit the water.