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
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.
Music was leaking from the headphones James Bell wore. He still hadn’t looked up from his reading. Rebus guessed he thought his mother had come in, and was studiously ignoring her. The facial similarity between son and father was remarkable. Rebus bent down a little, angling his face, and James finally looked up, eyes widening in surprise. He slipped off the headphones, turned the music off.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Rebus said. “Your mum said we should just come up.”
“Who are you?”
“We’re detectives, James. Wondered if you could give us a moment of your time.” Rebus was standing by the bed, being careful not to kick over the large bottle of water by his feet.
“What’s going on?”
Rebus had lifted the magazine from the bed. It was about gun collecting. “Funny subject,” he said.
“I’m trying to find the one he shot me with.”
Siobhan had taken the magazine from Rebus. “I think I can understand that,” she said. “You want to know all about it?”
“I didn’t get much of a look at it.”
“You sure about that, James?” Rebus asked. “Lee Herdman collected gun stuff.” He nodded towards the magazine, which Siobhan was now flicking through. “That one of his?”
“What?”
“Did he let you borrow it? We hear you knew him a bit better than you’ve been letting on.”
“I never said I didn’t know him.”
“‘We’d met socially’-your exact words, James. I heard them on the tape. You make it sound like you’d bump into him in the pub or the newsagent’s.” Rebus paused. “Except that he’d told you he was ex-SAS, and that’s more than just a casual comment, isn’t it? Maybe you were talking about it at one of his parties.” Another pause. “You used to go to his parties, didn’t you?”
“Some. He was an interesting guy.” James glared at Rebus. “I probably said that on the tape, too. Besides, I told the police all this already, told them how well I knew Lee, and that I went to his parties… even about that time he showed me the gun…”
Rebus’s eyes narrowed. “He showed you?”
“Christ, haven’t you listened to the tapes?”
Rebus couldn’t help but glance towards Siobhan. Tape
“The one he kept in his boathouse.”
“Did you think it was real?” Siobhan asked.
“It looked real.”
“Anyone else there at the time?”
James shook his head.
“You never saw the other one, the pistol?”
“Not until he shot me with it.” The teenager looked down at his injured shoulder.
“You and two others,” Rebus reminded him. “Am I right to say that he didn’t know Anthony Jarvies and Derek Renshaw?”
“Not that I know of.”
“But he left you alive. Are you just lucky, James?”
James’s fingers hovered just above his wound. “I’ve been wondering about that,” he said quietly. “Maybe he recognized me at the last moment…”
Siobhan cleared her throat. “And have you been wondering why he did it in the first place?”
James nodded slowly but didn’t say anything.
“Maybe,” Siobhan continued, “he saw something in you he didn’t see in the others.”
“They were both pretty active in the CCF, could be it had something to do with that,” James offered.
“How do you mean?”
“Well… Lee was in the army half his life… and then they kicked him out.”
“He told you that?” Rebus asked.
James nodded again. “Maybe he had this grudge. I’ve said he didn’t know Renshaw and Jarvies, but that doesn’t mean he hadn’t seen them around… maybe in their uniforms. Some kind of… trigger?” He looked up, smiled. “I know-I should leave the hack psychology to the hack psychologists.”
“You’re being very helpful,” Siobhan said, not because she believed it necessarily but because she thought he was looking for some sliver of praise.
“The thing is, James,” Rebus said, “if we could understand why he’d left you alive, we’d maybe know why the
