‘Know what, John? You’re always needing it asked.’
Rebus smiled and rubbed his neck. ‘I’m fine.’
As Toal had run at him, Rebus had kneed the young man in the groin with enough force to lift him off his feet. After that, the uniforms had found him just about manageable, especially with a Vulcan death grip to his carotid.
‘What do you want to do?’ Jack asked.
‘One copy of the tape goes to CID here. It’ll give them enough to go on until we get back.’
‘From Aberdeen?’ Jack guessed.
‘And points north.’ Rebus pointed to the machine. ‘Stick the copy back in and turn it on.’ Jack did so. ‘Gill, here’s a little present for you. I hope you’ll know what to do with it.’ He nodded, and Jack stopped recording and ejected the tape.
‘We’ll drop it off at St Leonard’s.’
‘So we are going back to Edinburgh?’ Jack was thinking of tomorrow’s meeting with Ancram.
‘Only long enough for a change of clothes and a doctor’s line.’
Outside in the car park, a solitary figure was waiting: Eve.
‘Going my way?’ she asked.
‘How did you know?’
She smiled her most feline smile. ‘Because you’re like me — you’ve got unfinished business in Aberdeen. I’m only going to be there as long as it takes to visit a few banks and close a few accounts, but there are those two hotel rooms...’
A good point: they’d need a base, preferably one Lumsden didn’t know about.
‘He’s in a cell?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘How many men did you need?’
‘Just the two.’
‘I’m surprised.’
‘We all surprise ourselves some time,’ Rebus said, opening the back door of Jack’s car for her.
Rebus wasn’t surprised to find Gill Templer’s office locked up for the night. He looked around the night shift and saw Siobhan Clarke trying to make herself inconspicuous, dreading their first meeting since she’d been part of the search team at his flat. He walked up to her, the yellow padded envelope in his hand.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, ‘I know why you were there. I think I should thank you.’
‘I just thought...’
He nodded. The relief on her face made him wonder what she’d been going through.
‘Working on anything?’ he asked, figuring she was owed a minute’s conversation. Jack and Eve were downstairs in the car, getting to know one another.
‘I’ve been on Johnny Bible background: deadly dull.’ She perked up. ‘One thing though. I was going through the old newspapers in the National.’
‘Yes?’ Rebus had been there, too: he wondered if that were her story.
‘One of the librarians told me someone was looking at recent newspapers and asking about people calling up ones from 1968 to ’70. I thought the combination was a bit odd. The recent papers were all from just before the first Johnny Bible murder.’
‘And the others were the years Bible John was operating?’
‘Yes.’
‘A journalist?’
‘That’s what the librarian says. Only, the card he handed over was a fake. He contacted the librarian by telephone.’
‘Did the librarian have anything?’
‘A few names. I took them down, on the off chance. A couple of them are journalists. One is you. The others, God knows.’
Yes, Rebus had spent a long day poring over the old stories, arranging for photocopies to be made of the relevant pages... building his collection.
‘And the mysterious journalist?’
‘No idea. I got a physical description, but it doesn’t help much. Early fifties, tall, fair-haired...’
‘Doesn’t rule too many people out, does it? Why the interest in recent papers? No, wait... Looking for cock-ups.’
Siobhan nodded. ‘That’s what I thought. And at the same time asking about people who’d shown an interest in the original Bible John case. It might sound crazy, but maybe Bible John’s out there looking for his offspring. Thing is, whoever he was... he’s got your name now, and your address.’
‘Nice to have a fan.’ Rebus thought for a moment. ‘Those other names... can I see?’
She found the relevant page in her notebook. One name leapt out: Peter Manuel.
‘Something?’ she asked.
Rebus pointed. ‘Not his real name. Manuel was a killer back in the fifties.’
‘Then who...?’
Reading up on Bible John, using a killer’s name as an alias. ‘Johnny Bible,’ Rebus said quietly.
‘I’d better have another word with that librarian.’
‘First thing in the morning,’ Rebus advised. ‘Speaking of which...’ He handed her the envelope. ‘Can you see to it that Gill Templer gets this?’
‘Sure.’ She shook it. The cassette rattled. ‘Anything I should know about?’
‘Definitely not.’
She smiled. ‘Now you’ve whetted my curiosity.’
‘Then unwhet it.’ He turned to leave. He didn’t want her to see how shaken he was. Someone else was hunting Johnny Bible, someone who now had Rebus’s name and address. Siobhan’s words: Bible John... looking for his offspring. Description: tall, fair-haired, early fifties. The age was right for Bible John. Whoever it was knew Rebus’s address... and his flat had been broken into, nothing stolen, but his newspapers and cuttings disturbed.
Bible John... looking for his offspring.
‘How’s the inquiry?’ Siobhan called.
‘Which one?’
‘Spaven.’
‘A doddle.’ He stopped, turned back to her. ‘By the way, if you’re really bored...?’
‘Yes?’
‘Johnny Bible: there could just be an oil connection. The last victim worked for oil companies and drank with oilmen. First victim studied at RGIT, geology, I think. Find out if there’s any connection to oil, see if there’s something we can link to victims two and three.’
‘You think he lives in Aberdeen?’
‘Right now, I think I’d lay money on it.’
Then he was gone. One more stop to make before the long haul north.
Bible John was driving through the streets of Aberdeen.
The town was quiet. He liked it that way. The trip to Glasgow had been useful, but the fourth victim had proved more useful still.
From the hotel computer, he had his list of twenty companies. Twenty guests of the Fairmount Hotel who had paid by corporate credit card in the weeks before Judith Cairns’s murder. Twenty companies based in the north-east. Twenty individuals he needed to check, any one of whom could be the Upstart.
He’d played with the connection between the victims, and numbers one and four had given him his answer: oil. Oil was at the heart of it. Victim one had studied geology at Robert Gordon’s, and in the north-east the study of geology was in so many ways connected to the subject of oil exploration. Victim four’s company numbered oil companies and their ancillaries among its best clients. He was looking for someone connected to the oil industry, someone so very like himself. The realisation had shaken him. On the one hand, it made it even more imperative he track down the Upstart; on the other, it made the game that much more dangerous. It wasn’t physical danger — he had long since conquered that particular fear. It was the danger of losing his hard-fought-for identity as Ryan Slocum. He almost felt he was Ryan Slocum. But Ryan Slocum was just a dead man, a newspaper obituary he’d come across. So he’d applied for a duplicate birth certificate, pleading the original’s loss in a house fire. This had been in pre-computer days, easy to get away with.
So his own past ceased to exist... for a time, at least. The trunk in the attic told a different story, of course. It gave the lie to his change of identity: you couldn’t change the man you were. His trunk full of souvenirs, most of them American... He had made arrangements for the trunk to be moved soon, when his wife was out of the house. A moving company would send a Transit. The trunk would be taken to a self-storage warehouse. It made sense as a precaution, but he still regretted it; it was like saying the Upstart had won.