Bible John … looking for his offspring.

‘How’s the inquiry?’ Siobhan called.

‘Which one?’

‘Spaven.’

‘A doddle.’ He stopped, turned back to her. ‘By the way, if you’re really bored …?’

‘Yes?’

‘Johnny Bible: there could just be an oil connection. The last victim worked for oil companies and drank with oilmen. First victim studied at RGIT, geology, I think. Find out if there’s any connection to oil, see if there’s something we can link to victims two and three.’

‘You think he lives in Aberdeen?’

‘Right now, I think I’d lay money on it.’

Then he was gone. One more stop to make before the long haul north.

Bible John was driving through the streets of Aberdeen.

The town was quiet. He liked it that way. The trip to Glasgow had been useful, but the fourth victim had proved more useful still.

From the hotel computer, he had his list of twenty companies. Twenty guests of the Fairmount Hotel who had paid by corporate credit card in the weeks before Judith Cairns’s murder. Twenty companies based in the north-east. Twenty individuals he needed to check, any one of whom could be the Upstart.

He’d played with the connection between the victims, and numbers one and four had given him his answer: oil. Oil was at the heart of it. Victim one had studied geology at Robert Gordon’s, and in the north-east the study of geology was in so many ways connected to the subject of oil exploration. Victim four’s company numbered oil companies and their ancillaries among its best clients. He was looking for someone connected to the oil industry, someone so very like himself. The realisation had shaken him. On the one hand, it made it even more imperative he track down the Upstart; on the other, it made the game that much more dangerous. It wasn’t physical danger – he had long since conquered that particular fear. It was the danger of losing his hard-fought-for identity as Ryan Slocum. He almost felt he was Ryan Slocum. But Ryan Slocum was just a dead man, a newspaper obituary he’d come across. So he’d applied for a duplicate birth certificate, pleading the original’s loss in a house fire. This had been in pre-computer days, easy to get away with.

So his own past ceased to exist … for a time, at least. The trunk in the attic told a different story, of course. It gave the lie to his change of identity: you couldn’t change the man you were. His trunk full of souvenirs, most of them American … He had made arrangements for the trunk to be moved soon, when his wife was out of the house. A moving company would send a Transit. The trunk would be taken to a self-storage warehouse. It made sense as a precaution, but he still regretted it; it was like saying the Upstart had won.

No matter what the outcome.

Twenty companies to check. So far he had dismissed four possible suspects as being too old. A further seven companies were not involved in the oil industry in any way that he could see – they went to the bottom of the list. Leaving nine names. It was a slow business. He’d used guile during telephone calls to the companies’ offices, but guile would only go so far. He’d also had recourse to the telephone book, finding addresses for the names, watching their homes, waiting for a glimpse of a face. Would he know the Upstart when he saw him? He felt he would; at least, he’d recognise the type. But then Joe Beattie had said the same about Bible John – that he’d recognise him in a crowded room. As if a man’s heart showed in the creases and contours of his face, a sort of phrenology of sin.