by Ian Rankin
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
Oil: 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.
Very reassuring.
The flunkey who’d handed him the brochure had said he hoped Rebus had brought something to read.
‘Why?’
‘Because the flight can take three hours total, and most of the time it’s too noisy for chit-chat.’
Three hours. Rebus had gone into the terminal’s shop and bought himself a book. He knew the journey comprised
two stages – Sumburgh first, and then a Super Puma helicopter out to Bannock. Three hours out, three hours back. He yawned, checked his watch. It wasn’t quite eight o’clock yet. He’d skipped breakfast – didn’t like the idea of boaking it back up on the flight. His total consumption this morning: four paracetamol, one glass of orange juice. He held his hands out in front of him: tremors he could put down to aftershock.
There were two anecdotes he liked in the brochure: he learned that a ‘derrick’ was named after a seventeenth-century hangman; and that the first oil had come ashore at Cruden Bay, where Bram Stoker once took his holidays. From one kind of vampirism to another … only the brochure didn’t put it like that.
There was a television on in front of him, playing a safety video. It told you what to do if your helicopter went down into the North Sea. It all looked very slick on the video: nobody panicked. They slid out of their seats, located the inflatable life-rafts and launched them on to the calm waters of an indoor pool.
‘Holy God, what happened to you?’
He looked up. Ludovic Lumsden was standing there, newspaper folded in his jacket pocket, a beaker of coffee in his hand.
‘Mugged,’ Rebus said. ‘You wouldn’t know anything about it, would you?’
‘Mugged?’
‘Two men were waiting for me last night outside the hotel. Threw me over the wall into the gardens, then stuck a gun against my head.’ Rebus rubbed the lump on his temple. It felt worse than it looked.
Lumsden sat down a couple of seats away, looked aghast. ‘Did you get a look at them?’
‘No.’
Lumsden put his coffee on the floor. ‘Did they take anything?’
‘They weren’t after anything. They just had a message for me.’
‘What?’
Rebus tapped his temple. ‘A thumping.’
Lumsden frowned. ‘That was the message?’
‘I think I was supposed to read between the lines. You wouldn’t be any good at translating, would you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing.’ Rebus stared at him hard. ‘What are you doing here?’
Lumsden was staring at the tiled floor, mind elsewhere. ‘I’m coming with you.’
‘Why?’
‘Oil Liaison. You’re visiting a rig. I should be there.’
‘Keeping an eye on me?’
‘It’s procedure.’ He looked towards the television. ‘Don’t worry about ditching, I’ve had the training. What it boils down to is, you’ve got about five minutes from the time you hit the water.’
‘And after five minutes?’
‘Hypothermia.’ Lumsden lifted his coffee cup, drank from it. ‘So pray we don’t hit a storm out there.’
After Sumburgh Airport, there was nothing but sea and a sky wider than any Rebus had seen before, thin clouds strung across it. The twin-engined Puma flew low and loud. The interior was cramped, and so were the survival suits they’d been made to put on. Rebus’s was a bright orange one-piece with a hood, and he’d been ordered to keep it zipped up to his chin. The pilot wanted him to keep his hood up, too, but Rebus found that sitting down with the hood tight across his head, the legs of the suit threatened to dissect his scrotum. He’d been in choppers before – back in army days – but for short hops only. Designs might have changed over the years, but the Puma didn’t sound any quieter than the old buckets the army had used. Everyone, however, wore ear-protectors, through which the pilot could talk to them. Two other men, contract engineers, flew with them. From flying height, the North Sea looked tranquil, a gentle rise and fall showing the currents. The water looked black, but that was just cloud cover. The brochure had gone into great detail concerning anti-pollution measures. Rebus tried to read his book, but couldn’t. It juddered on his knees, blurring the words, and he couldn’t keep his mind on the story anyway. Lumsden was looking out of the window, squinting into the light. Rebus knew Lumsden was keeping an eye on him, and he was doing so because Rebus had touched a nerve last night. Lumsden tapped his shoulder, pointed through the window.
There were three rigs below them, off to the east. A tanker was moving away from one of them. Tall flares sent bright yellow flames licking into the sky. The pilot told them they would pass to the west of the Ninian and Brent fields before reaching Bannock. Later, he came back on the radio.
‘This is Bannock coming up now.’
Rebus looked past Lumsden’s shoulder, saw the single platform coming into view. The tallest structure on it was the flare, but there were no flames. That was because Bannock was coming to the end of its useful life. Very little gas and oil were left to exploit. Next to the flare was a tower, like a cross between an industrial chimney and a space rocket. It was painted with red and white stripes, like the flare. It was probably the drilling tower. Rebus made out the words T-Bird Oil on the jacket below it, along with the block number – 211/7. Three large cranes stood against one edge of the platform, while a whole corner was given over to a helipad, painted green with a yellow circle surrounding the letter H. Rebus thought: one gust could have us over the side. There was a two hundred foot drop to the waiting sea. Orange lifeboats clung to the underside of the jacket, and in another corner sat layers of white portacabins, like bulk containers. A ship sat alongside the platform – the safety and support vessel.
‘Hello,’ said the pilot, ‘what’s this?’
He’d spotted another boat, circling the platform at a distance of maybe half a mile.
‘Protesters,’ he said. ‘Bloody idiots.’
Lumsden looked out of his window, pointing. Rebus saw it: a narrow boat painted orange, its sails down. It looked to be very close to the safety ship.
‘They could get themselves killed,’ Lumsden said. ‘And good riddance.’
‘I do like a copper with a balanced view.’
They swept out to sea again and banked sharply, then headed for the heliport. Rebus was deep in prayer as they seemed to weave wildly, only fifty feet or so above the deck. He could see the helipad, then whitecapped water, then the helipad again. And then they were down, landing on what looked like a fishing net, covering the white capital H. The doors opened and Rebus removed his ear-protectors. The last words he heard were, ‘Keep your head down when you get out.’
He kept his head down when he got out. Two men in orange overalls, wearing yellow hard hats and ear-protectors, led them off the helipad and handed out hard hats. The engineers were led one way, Rebus and Lumsden another.
‘You’ll probably want a mug of tea after that,’ their guide said. He saw that Rebus was having trouble with the hat. ‘You can adjust the strap.’ He showed him how. There was a fierce wind blowing, and Rebus said as much. The man laughed.
‘This is dead calm,’ he yelled into the wind.
Rebus felt like he wanted to hang on to something. It wasn’t just the wind, it was the feeling of how fragile this whole enterprise was. He’d expected to see and smell oil, but the most obvious product around here wasn’t oil – it was seawater. The North Sea surrounded him, massive compared to this speck of welded metal. It insinuated itself into his lungs; the salt gusts stung his cheeks. It rose in vast waves as if to engulf him. It seemed bigger than the sky above it, a force as threatening as any in nature. The guide was smiling.
‘I know just what you’re thinking. I thought the same thing myself first time I came out here.’
Rebus nodded. The Nationalists said it was Scotland’s oil, the oil companies had the exploitation rights, but the picture out here told a different story: oil belonged to the sea, and the sea wouldn’t give it up without a fight.
Their guide led them to the relative safety of the canteen. It was clean and quiet, with brick troughs filled with plants, and long white tables ready for the next shift. A couple of orange overalls sat drinking tea at one table, while at another three men in checked shirts ate chocolate bars and yoghurt.
‘This place is mad at mealtimes,’ the guide said, grabbing a tray. ‘Tea all ri
ght for you?’
Lumsden and Rebus agreed that tea was fine. There was a long serving-hatch, and a woman at the far end smiling at them.
‘Hello, Thelma,’ their guide said. ‘Three teas. Lunch smells good.’
‘Ratatouille, steak and chips, or chilli.’ Thelma poured tea from a huge pot.
‘Canteen’s open twenty-four hours,’ the guide told Rebus. ‘Most guys, when they first arrive, they overeat. The puddings are lethal.’ He slapped his stomach and laughed. ‘Isn’t that right, Thelma?’ Rebus recalled the man in the Yardarm telling him much the same thing.
Even seated, Rebus’s legs felt shaky. He put it down to the flight. Their guide introduced himself as Eric, and said that seeing how they were police officers, they could skip the introductory safety video.
‘Though by rights I’m supposed to show you it.’
Lumsden and Rebus shook their heads, and Lumsden asked how close the platform was to decommissioning.
‘Last oil’s already been pumped out,’ Eric said. ‘Pump a final load of seawater into the reservoir and most of us will ship out. Maintenance crew only, until they decide what to do with her. They’d better make up their minds soon, manning this even just with maintenance shifts is an expensive business. You still have to get the supplies out here, the shift changeovers, and you still need the safety ship. It all costs money.’
‘Which is all right so long as Bannock is producing oil?’
‘Exactly,’ said Eric. ‘But when it’s not producing … well, the accountants start having palpitations. We lost a couple of days’ worth last month, some problem with the heat exchangers. They were out here, waving their calculators about …’ Eric laughed.
He was nothing like the roustabout of legend, the myth of the roughneck. He was a skinny five and a half feet and wore steel-rimmed glasses above a sharp nose and pointed chin. Rebus looked at the other men in the canteen and tried to equate them with the picture of the oil ‘bear’, face blackened with crude, biceps expanding as he fought to contain a gusher. Eric saw him looking.
‘The three over there,’ meaning the checked shirts, ‘work in the Control Room. Nearly everything these days is computerised: logic circuits, computer monitoring … You should ask for a look round, it’s like NASA or something, and it only takes three or four people to work the whole system. We’ve come a long way from “Texas Tea”.’