‘We’re not so very different,’ she told him.
‘Like father and daughter,’ he said, returning the kiss.
He parked at the front of St Andrew’s House, and a guard came out and told him he couldn’t do that. Rebus showed his warrant card, but the guard was adamant, and directed him to the visitors’ parking.
‘Tell me,’ Rebus said, ‘if I was Sir Iain Hunter, would I still have to move the car?’
‘No,’ said the guard, ‘that would be different.’
And Rebus smiled, feeling a little of the tension leaving him. The man was right: that would be different.
He walked up the steps to the building. Close up, it didn’t look so much like a power station or the Reichstag. He was signed in at the desk and given a visitor’s pass. Security had to check the contents of his bag — just some papers and a cassette. Someone came down to escort him upstairs, where he was passed on to someone else who took him to a secretary’s office. On the way, in a short narrow corridor, his escort nearly bumped into Sir Iain Hunter. She apologised, but Sir lain wasn’t paying her any attention. Rebus winked at him and smiled as he passed. He didn’t look back, but he could feel the eyes boring into him, right between the shoulder-blades.
This, he thought, is for Willie and Dixie, and for Tom Gillespie. And for everyone who doesn’t know the way the system works, the way it makes room for lying and cheating and stealing.
But he knew, above all, that he was doing it for himself.
There was no secretary in the secretary’s office, just Rory McAllister, looking very ill-at-ease but there, as he’d promised. Rebus found another wink to spare. Then the secretary came in and ushered them into an ante- chamber. She knocked on the door in front of them and opened it.
He’d joked with the security man about the contents of his bag — ‘I’d hardly be carrying a bomb in a Spar carrier-bag’ — but now he walked into the room with the booby-trap tucked under his arm.
‘Good of you to find time to see us, sir.’
He meant it, too. Dugald Niven, Secretary of State for Scotland, had a busy schedule. Rebus was sure it would go ahead as usual, no matter what.
The End
