Stonemouth

by Iain Banks

  The van’s going faster now; you can hear it in the engine note, in the sound of the tyres on the road and the air slipstreaming round its tall bulk. We slow a little, take a long, constant radius, maybe 270-degree corner.

  Murdo looks at me. ‘See tomorrow?’ he says.

  ‘What?’ I say, voice cracking because my throat’s suddenly dry.

  ‘At the funeral, at the hotel afterwards?’

  ‘What, Murdo?’

  ‘Don’t want you talking to her.’

  ‘But, Murd,’ Norrie asks, though he’s silenced by a glance from his elder brother.

  ‘Ssh,’ Murdo says, before looking back at me. ‘Just leave her alone, right? Grandpa said he wanted you at the funeral – fuck knows why, but he said it, so fair enough. You get to go. But you just leave Ellie alone. Otherwise we’re going to be on you, understand, Stewart?’

  Well, I’m relieved; sounds like I’m going to live, but on the other hand, is that all? What the fuck’s all this Stasi-style kidnap shit for, then? The fuckers could just have texted me.

  ‘Jeez, Murdo,’ I say. ‘She’s her own woman; what if she comes up to me?’

  ‘Then you’d better walk away,’ Murdo says. ‘Cos we’ll be watchin.’

  ‘Murdo, come on—’

  ‘You’re on fuckin dangerous ground, Stewie,’ Murdo tells me. He sounds reasonable, almost concerned. He has changed a bit; there’s less outright aggression, more gravitas. It goes to make a more studied kind of threat.

  The van has felt like it’s been going up a straight, shallow slope for a while now. I can hear the sounds of other traffic. Then there’s pressure against my back as the van brakes smoothly and we slow to what feels like walking speed. Traffic continues to rip past, very close. We stop, then reverse, the van making a beep-beep-beep sound.

  Oh fuck, I think I know where we are. A sudden bang-bang sounds from one of the van’s rear quarters, making me jump. A voice outside shouts, ‘Whoa!’ The traffic outside makes a tearing, ripping noise. Something heavy roars past, making the van shake. Is that a slight up-and-down bouncing motion I can feel?

  The bridge. We’re on the fucking road bridge.

  ‘Dinnae fill yer kecks,’ Murdo tells me with a thin smile. I must look as terrified as I feel. ‘If this was for real it’d be dark and you’d be tied up like a gimp.’

  Norrie opens the rear doors and there’s a rush of traffic noise. Outside where the sky ought to be there’s white and red stripes. ‘Come and take a wee look,’ Murdo says, and the three of us get out.

  We’re on the road bridge all right, somewhere about the middle of the southbound carriageway. The van has backed up to a sort of tall tent structure erected over the roadway, red and white plastic over a metal frame. Whoever banged the side of the van and shouted at us to stop isn’t here now. Two sides and the roof of the tent are rippling in the breeze; the other side thuds and pulses each time a truck goes past.

  A square of the road surface, maybe three-quarters of a metre to a side, has been lifted up and out; it sits, a quarter-metre thick, at an angle beyond the hole, lifting brackets still attached. Murdo takes a handful of my jacket at the shoulder. Norrie’s holding my shoulder and elbow on the other side. They march me to the hole.

  Looking down, I can see the criss-crossing members of the girder work under the road surface. Straight down, though, there’s just air and then the grey waves, a fifty-metre fall away.

  ‘Jeez, Murdo,’ I say, trying to shrink back from the hole. There’s a wind from it, coming rushing up and out, cold and laced with rain or spray.

  They aren’t going to throw me down there, are they? The line about not shitting my pants and it not being dark wasn’t just a way to get me to comply this far, was it? I guess I could still try to make a break, to run. They can’t force me down there, can they? It’s not wide enough to just push me; I could grab the sides.

  ‘Night is better,’ Murdo’s saying. ‘Mist or fog is best.’

  I can’t take my eyes off the waves, far below, moving slowly, cresting and breaking.

  ‘Better yet, if there’s earlier video from the CCTV of the person on the bridge, specially in the same clothes,’ Murdo says.

  Oh, fuck. They have that. I was on the bridge waiting for Powell, just a couple of days ago. Wearing this jacket, too.

  ‘You tear the tape off their mouths,’ Murdo says. ‘They think they’ll get to scream or shout then,’ he tells me, ‘but you just do this.’

  His right fist comes whipping round and punches me in the belly. I’m not ready for it and it sends the breath whistling out of me as I double up, folding around the ball of pain in my guts. Murdo and Norrie let me collapse, falling to my knees right in front of the hole, the wind from it buffeting my face. They’re still holding my jacket.

  ‘Bit harder than that, actually,’ Murdo says thoughtfully. ‘And there’s this really cool knot you can do, with rope, like. You just drop them through and keep a hold of the end. They canny move much or do anythin for the first wee bit but then the slack runs out and the knots come loose and you’ve got all the rope and they’re fallin like they were never tied up in the first place.’

  ‘Ellie taught us that knot,’ Norrie says proudly.

  ‘Norrie,’ Murdo breathes.

  ‘No sayin she knew what for,’ Norrie grumbles. ‘Or,’ he says brightly, like he’s just remembered, ‘you can just whap them over the back of the heid.’

  Norrie illustrates his point with a light blow to the back of my head. I hardly notice. I’m too busy wheezing some breath back into my lungs, still convinced Murdo’s ruptured my spleen or prolapsed my stomach or something.

  ‘Aye,’ Murdo says. ‘No with a bat, though,’ he points out. ‘Injury’s too distinctive.’

  ‘Aye. Traumatic-injury blunt-profile object match,’ Norrie says, stumbling over the words and patently relishing getting to display some garbled snippet from CSI or Bones or whatever the fuck.

  ‘Old-fashioned lead-shot cosh,’ Murdo’s saying, with what might be professional pride or just outright relish. ‘That knocks them out so you can bundle them through. Chances are the signs won’t show up suspicious among all the other injuries from hitting the watter.’

  ‘No complaints so far, eh, Murd, eh?’ Norrie says.

  ‘No too many,’ Murdo says, then his voice alters, coming closer as he bends down, his mouth beside my ear. ‘So just watch what you ask about Callum,’ he says quietly. ‘Okay, Stewie?’ He clacks the iPhone painfully against my nose and lets it drop, sending it tumbling away, a glistening black slab somersaulting towards the grey waves.

  I lose sight of it before it hits and its splash is lost amongst the breaking crests. I hear myself groaning. There was stuff in there I hadn’t backed up.

  I’m dragged back to my feet, bundled back in the van.

  They throw me out in the southern viewing area car park – the place where I sat with Powell Imrie in his Range Rover two days ago – sending me flying into the whin bushes that form one edge of the coach bays.

  I don’t really notice the scratches from the whin thorns; just before they kick open the doors, Murdo says, ‘You won’t forget what we said about Ellie, eh?’ and punches me hard in the balls, so it’s a good ten minutes before I care about anything besides the astounding, sickening, writhing gouts of pain heaving out of my groin and wrapping themselves round my guts and brain.

  Christ, it’s like being a wee bairn again. I have to waddle, to give my poor assaulted nuts sufficient room to hang without causing further excruciating pain. The last time I walked wide-legged like this, I was barely out of nappies and I’d just wet my pants getting all excited about being given a new balloon or something.

  I make my way, gingerly, to the bridge control office. There’s an entry-phone guarding the deserted foyer on the ground floor of the three-storey building, where the tourist information office used to be, back when we could still afford such extravagance. I press the button. With any luck I’ll know som
ebody on duty. Ask them to call a taxi. I don’t think I’m capable of walking all the way over the bridge and back into town.

  No luck; it’s kind of hard to hear with all the traffic but eventually we establish that nobody in the control room knows me and I’m politely informed it’s not policy to phone for taxis for members of the public, sir. No, there is no public phone available any more. I’m advised there’ll be a bus destined for the town centre available from the bus stop on the far side of the old toll plaza, just behind me, in … twenty-five minutes. I should take the underpass.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ I tell the anonymous voice. The ‘fucking’ is silent.

  I waddle to and down the steps and then along the underpass beneath the carriageway to the sound of trucks pounding above my head – I swear the subsonics alone are making my balls ache – then struggle up the steps at the far side and along through the newly resumed rain to the flimsy perspex bus shelter.

  I sit perched carefully on an angled metal-and-plastic rail no wider than my hand, there to stop anyone doing anything as decadent as falling asleep. The rain rattles on the roof. The wind picks up, blowing in under the walls of the shelter and chilling my feet and ankles. Still the place smells of pee.

  You can see why people must be so keen to sleep here.

  I should get home to Mum and Dad’s and just fuck off back to London now, today, without waiting for tomorrow and the funeral or the day after and my booked flight back to London.

  Only I don’t know that I’d be able to sit down for the hour or so it would take to return the car to Dyce. I’m still in some pain just from the punch to my belly, never mind the tender, jangling ultra-sensitivity and continuing sensation of nausea I’m getting from my testes. I feel beaten as well as beaten up; defeated, humiliated, worn out. If I did feel I could drive, I think I would: back to the airport for the next available flight or all the way to London, just me and the car, drop it at City airport and let them work out the charges.

  I don’t think I want to tell anybody what just happened. I’m ashamed I was so easily huckled into the van, so incapable of resisting or talking my way out of the situation. I’d love to think it couldn’t happen again or I’d be able to take some sort of revenge on Murdo and Norrie, but I’m not like them, I’m not naturally violent or trained in it.

  And they do have a point. I was asking about Callum when I guess it’s none of my business – I was just interested after what Grier had said and Ezzie being there seemed like too good an opportunity to miss – and I did hurt their sister and make the whole family look stupid, disrespected, even if it was five years ago. By their standards, I was very much asking for a kicking. Arguably, I’m lucky I got off with a mere punching.

  People only resent, and start to hate, gangsters when they do something that seems unfair, or that impacts on them personally unjustly. If there’s a general feeling that people are only ever getting what was coming to them, and if any violence is kept within the confines of people who have put themselves in play, even potentially put themselves in harm’s way, then nobody really minds too much.

  The Murstons and Mike Mac’s people aren’t above the law; the cops just turn a blind eye where it’s felt that the two families are effectively doing police business – keeping the Toun running smoothly, preserving professional, commercial, middle-class values and generally maintaining Stonemouth as a safe place to raise your children and do business.

  It means that Murdo and his brothers get stuck with parking fines and speeding tickets like anybody else, and Callum didn’t get off on a charge of assault after an altercation in a bar when he was twenty, plus Mike Mac had to tear down an extension to an extension when he was unexpectedly refused planning permission, but the whole drug-dealing business goes quietly on with barely a ripple of interference and apparently it’s possible for the Murstons to commit murder with relative impunity if they feel they have to, dropping people off the road bridge.

  Mike and Donald throw the cops the occasional tiddler every now and again, just to keep the drug-crime clear-up figures looking plausible and encourage the rest of the troops to stay in line, but they themselves are in no danger, providing they don’t get too greedy, or too flamboyant, or too self-important, or think they can do anything they want. They know the limitations, work within them.

  Anyway, the trivial is punished while the gross stuff sails through unchallenged, and when you look at it like that, the whole set-up seems perverse and just wrong.

  So the trick is not to look at it like that.

  I was wearing a jacket and tie. Practically a blazer. Jeez, I’d thought I wouldn’t have to get dressed up to this sort of deeply uncool level for over a week, on the day of the wedding itself. But here I was, in the clubhouse of Olness Golf Club, at the invitation of Mike MacAvett, though apparently entirely with the blessing – and, indeed, probably at the instigation – of Donald Murston.

  I stood in the bar, looking out to the dunes, trying to see the sea. Above a line of bushes just in front of the windows, wee white balls sailed into the air and dropped again, as people on the practice greens tried out their chip shots and sand wedges. I was the proud holder of a degree in fine arts and the offer of a job with an interesting-sounding building-lighting company, based in London but very much international. More money than I’d expected to be earning at this stage.

  I’d had to concede that my earlier dreams of being a Mackintosh/Warhol/Koons de nos jours might have been a little overambitious. I’d found stuff I especially loved doing and got brilliant grades for, and a lot of it seemed to revolve around the use of light on interior and exterior surfaces. My degree show had been a triumph, a lecturer who was a fan had made some phone calls and people from lighting consultancies had come to have a look. One lot in particular seemed to appreciate what I’d been doing. They took me for dinner and made me the offer that evening. In theory I was still thinking about it but I was going to say yes. I’d talked to Ellie and she was okay with moving to London, once she’d completed the fourth and final year of her inherently complicated course; it’d be a new challenge, a new era, and, besides, there were plenty of flights from City airport to Dyce.

  In a little over a week I’d be a married man. It still seemed slightly unreal. Sometimes these days I felt like my own body double – being told to stand here, strike this pose, now walk over here – while the real me, the famous me, sat in his luxury trailer and waited for the call. Other times I felt like I was auditioning for a part in my own lifestory, which would start to take place after these slightly ramshackle, part-improvised rehearsals had been concluded and the producer/director finally pronounced himself happy.

  The little white balls rose and fell above the line of bushes in the rosy early-evening light, like especially well-groomed sand hoppers.

  That first night by the fire with Ellie seemed a very long time ago.

  A group of guys at the bar laughed loudly, as though it was a competition. I hooked a finger into the gap between my neck and my shirt collar, working it a bit looser. I fucking hated ties. I hoped they wouldn’t expect me to wear a tie at work. I was going to wear a clip-on bow tie for the wedding next week. I’d been bought a kilty outfit in the clan tartan by Mum and Dad. The Murstons had been going to set us up in a house locally but were now talking about finding a flat in London for us, assuming I took this job.

  I’d already had what had felt like a semi-formal meeting with Don, up at the house.

  We were well past the what-are-your-intentions-young-man? stage. I was marrying his eldest daughter, the wedding was pretty much fully organised and everything was arranged. Mrs Murston had taken over almost from the start after our original idea of running off to Bermuda or Venice or somewhere – either just the two of us or with a very few close friends – had been dismissed as Not Good Enough. Ellie had put her foot down just once, regarding the dress. She wanted, and had had a friend design, something simple; Mrs M had wanted something that wouldn’t have been out of place on M
y Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. (Allegedly; I hadn’t been allowed to see the designs for either. Clearly, a few centuries back, some rule-obsessed, OCD nut-job had been allowed to dream up the absurd ‘traditions’ surrounding weddings, and the groom not seeing the dress was one of them.)

  At one point during our chat Donald had asked me what I believed in. I was momentarily stumped. Did he mean religion-wise?

  We were having a Church of Scotland wedding, though nobody involved seemed to be especially religious. Including the minister – we’d talked. ‘To be perfectly honest, Stewart,’ he’d told me, tented fingers supporting his bearded chin, ‘I see priests and ministers and so on primarily as social workers in fancy dress.’ And him wearing jeans and a jumper.

  I think the potential for spectacle offered by the rather grand Abbey on Clyn Road had had a lot to do with the choice of venue, and Mrs M was treating the need for any sort of religious component within the service as being a sort of slightly annoying non-optional theme, like a rather elaborate dress code.

  I hadn’t even been sure the Murstons were Prods at all. I’d known that, like most right-thinking people in the region, they were devout Press and Journalists – of course – but their religious affiliations had never seemed germane before.

  ‘Well, I’m not really religious,’ I’d told Donald. We were sipping single malts, just the two of us, at the well-stocked bar in what he called his rumpus room, part of the extensive cellar area beneath Hill House. ‘I suppose I believe in truth.’

  ‘Truth?’ Donald said, brows furrowing.

  ‘Not as an abstract entity,’ I’d told him. ‘More as something you have to seek out and face up to. Rationalism; science. You know.’

  Donald had looked like he really didn’t know at all. ‘Have more whisky, son,’ he’d said, reaching for the bottle.