‘It riles him all right.’ Half a smile.

‘The second thing was Mitch himself, once I knew you two were friends. Jake Harley tells me Mitch had gleaned some gen on Negrita, top-secret stuff. Well, Mitch might have been resourceful in some areas, but I couldn’t see how he’d manage to work his way back through a paper trail. He travelled light, no sign of any notes or anything like that, either in his flat or in his cabin. I’m assuming he got the gen from you?’ She nodded. ‘And you’d have to seriously have it in for T-Bird Oil to bother with that sort of labyrinth in the first place. But we already know you’ve got something against T-Bird – the demo outside their HQ; chaining yourself to Bannock in full view of the TV cameras. I thought maybe it was something personal …’

‘It is.’

‘Major Weir’s your father?’

Her face turned sour and strangely childlike. ‘Only in the biological sense. Even then, if you could get a gene transplant I’d be at the front of the queue.’ Her voice sounded more American than ever. ‘Did he kill Mitch?’

‘Do you think he did?’

‘I’d like to think so.’ She stared at Rebus. ‘I mean, I’d like to think he’d sink that low.’

‘But?’

‘But nothing. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.’

‘You reckon he had the motive?’

‘Sure.’ Not aware she was doing it, she picked at a nail and then bit it, before starting on another. ‘I mean, Negrita and the way T-Bird’s culpability was hushed up … and now the dumping. He had plenty of economic reasons.’

‘Was Mitch threatening to go to the media with the story?’

She removed a sliver of nail from her tongue. ‘No, I think he was trying blackmail first. Keep quiet about everything, so long as T-Bird went for ecological scrapping of Bannock.’

‘Everything?’

‘What?’

‘You said “everything”, like there was more.’

She shook her head. ‘No.’ But she wasn’t looking at him.

‘Joanna, let me ask you something: why didn’t you go to the media, or try blackmail on your father? Why did it have to be Mitch?’

She shrugged. ‘He had the chutzpah.’

‘Did he?’

Another shrug. ‘What else?’

‘See, the way it looks to me … you don’t mind tormenting your father – as publicly as possible. You’re at the front of every demo, you make sure your picture’s on TV … but if you actually came forward and let the world know who you are, that would be even more effective. Why the secrecy?’

Her face turned childlike again, her mouth busy with fingers, knees together. The single braid fell between her eyes, like she wanted to hide from the world but be caught at the same time – a child’s game.

‘Why the secrecy?’ Rebus repeated. ‘Seems to me it’s precisely because this is so personal between you and your father, like some sort of private game. You like the idea of torturing him, letting him wonder when you’ll go public with any of this.’ He paused. ‘Seems to me maybe you were using Mitch.’