‘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.