He knew he needed his wits about him. Steve Holly wasn’t going to want to play on Rebus’s terms.
Feet on the steps, a shadow preceding Holly’s entrance into the back room. He peered into the afternoon gloom, squeezing between chairs as he approached the table. He was carrying what looked like a glass of lemonade, maybe with vodka added for good measure. He gave a slight nod, stayed standing until Rebus gestured for him to sit. Holly did so, checking to the left and right, unhappy about sitting with his back to the bar’s other denizens.
“Nobody’s going to leap from the shadows and head-butt you,” Rebus reassured him.
“I suppose I should be congratulating you,” Holly said. “I hear you’re managing to get right up Jack Bell’s nose.”
“And I notice your paper’s supporting his campaign.”
Holly’s mouth twitched. “Doesn’t mean he’s not a prick. You lot should have stuck to your guns, that time you caught him with the prossie. Better yet, you should have phoned my paper, we’d have come down and got some snaps of him
“She stood by him, though.”
“That’s what MPs’ wives do, isn’t it?” Holly said dismissively. Then: “So, to what do I owe the honor? Decided to put your side of the story?”
“I need a favor,” Rebus said, placing his gloved hands on the table.
“A favor?” Rebus nodded. “In return for what exactly?”
“Special relationship status.”
“Meaning?” Holly lifted his glass to his mouth.
“Meaning whatever I get on the Herdman case, you get first shout.”
Holly snorted. Had to wipe some of his drink from around his mouth. “You’re on suspension, as far as I know.”
“Doesn’t stop me from keeping my ear to the ground.”
“And what exactly is it you can tell me about Herdman that I can’t get from a dozen of my other sources?”
“Depends on that favor. It’s one thing I’ve got that they haven’t.”
Holly rolled some more of his drink around the inside of his mouth. Then he swallowed, smacked his lips.
“Trying to throw me off the scent, Rebus? I’ve got you by the short and curlies over Marty Fairstone. Everyone knows it. And now
“Think you’ve got the balls for it?” Rebus said, finishing his own drink. He slid the empty glass across the table towards the journalist. “Pint of IPA, when you’re ready.” Holly looked at him, then smiled with half his mouth and rose to his feet, maneuvering his way back through the chairs. Rebus lifted the lemonade glass and sniffed: vodka, definitely. He managed to light a cigarette, had smoked half of it by the time Holly returned.
“Barman’s got an attitude, hasn’t he?”
“Maybe he doesn’t like what you said about me,” Rebus explained.
“So go to the Press Complaints Commission.” Holly handed the pint over. He’d brought another vodka and lemonade for himself. “Only I don’t see you doing that,” he added.
“That’s because you’re not worth the effort.”
“And this is the guy who wants a favor doing?”
“A favor you haven’t bothered listening to yet.”
“Well, here I am…” Holly opened his arms wide.
“A salvage operation of some kind,” Rebus said quietly. “It happened on Jura, June of ’ninety-five. I need to know what it was for.”
“Salvage?” Holly frowned, his instincts aroused. “A tanker? Something like that?”
Rebus shook his head. “On land. The SAS were brought in.”
“Herdman?”
“He might have been involved.”
Holly chewed on his bottom lip as if trying to dislodge the hook Rebus had landed there. “What’s it got to do with anything?”
“We won’t know that till we take a look.”
“And if I agree, what do I get out of it?”
“Like I said, first go at any story.” Rebus paused. “I might also have access to Herdman’s army files.”
Holly’s eyebrows rose perceptibly. “Anything good in them?”
Rebus shrugged. “At this stage, I couldn’t possibly comment.” Reeling the reporter in… knowing full well there was little in the file to interest any tabloid reader. But then how was Steve Holly to know that?
“Well, we could have a look-see, I suppose.” Holly was rising to his feet again. “No time like the present.”
Rebus studied his beer glass, still three-quarters full. Holly had yet to start on his own second drink. “What’s the rush?” he said.
“You don’t think I came here to pass the time of day with you?” Holly said. “I don’t like you, Rebus, and I certainly don’t trust you.” He paused. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Rebus said, rising to follow the reporter out of the bar.
“By the way,” Holly said, “something that’s been bugging me…”
“What?”
“I was talking to a guy, and he said he could kill someone with a newspaper. You ever heard of that?”
Rebus nodded. “A magazine’s better, but a paper might just do it.”
Holly looked at him. “So how does it work? Smothering or what?”
Rebus shook his head. “You roll it up, tight as you can, then you use it on the throat. Enough force, you’ll crush the windpipe.”
Holly was staring. “You learned that in the army?”
Rebus nodded again. “As did whoever you were talking to.”
“It was a bloke at St. Leonard’s… him and some stroppy-looking woman.”
“Her name’s Whiteread; his is Simms.”
“Army investigators?” Holly nodded to himself, as though it all made sense. Rebus stopped himself from smiling: putting Holly onto Whiteread and Simms was most of his plan.
They were outside the pub now, and Rebus expected that they’d be walking to the newspaper office, but Holly had turned left rather than right, pointing his ignition key at the line of cars parked curbside.
“You drove?” Rebus said as the locks clunked open on a silver-gray Audi TT.
“It’s what your legs are for,” Holly informed him. “Now get in.”
Rebus slid into what space there was, thinking that an Audi TT was the car Teri Cotter’s brother had been driving, the night he’d died, with Derek Renshaw sitting in the passenger seat, same seat Rebus was in now… remembering the photos of the crash, Stuart Cotter’s rag-doll body… He watched as Holly slipped a hand beneath the driver’s seat, sliding out a thin black laptop computer. He placed it across his legs, opening it and holding his mobile phone in one hand while he operated the keyboard with the other.
“Infrared connection,” he explained. “Gets us online in a hurry.”
“And why are we going online?” Rebus had to push back a sudden memory of his nighttime vigil at Miss Teri’s website, embarrassed that he’d allowed himself to be drawn into her world.
“Because that’s where my paper has most of its library. I just enter the password…” Holly stabbed half a dozen keys, Rebus trying to see what they were. “No peeking, Rebus,” he warned. “There’s all sorts of stuff on here: clippings, dropped stories, archives…”
“Lists of the cops you pay for information?”
“Would I be that stupid?”
“I don’t know: would you?”
“When people talk to me, they know I can keep a secret. Those names go to my grave.”
Holly turned his attention back to the screen. Rebus had no doubt this machine was state of the art. Connection had been fast, and now pages were popping up in the blink of an eye. The laptop Rebus had borrowed was, as Pettifer had said, coal-fired by comparison.
“Search mode…” Holly was talking to himself. “We enter the month and year, keywords Jura and salvage… and
