Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  If there had been any colour left in the pale cistern of her face, then the last words she heard hit the flush lever. She felt the walls lurch around her and slid back to the floor as her legs decided to withdraw cooperation. He started moving towards her again. She shouted and tried to crawl away from him but he was too fast, crouching before her and grabbing her flailing wrists as she struggled, then pinning her left arm against the wall with his elbow as he covered her mouth with his right hand. She tried to look around herself, even to close her eyes, but felt her own gaze drawn into his, intriguing, sympathetic, challenging and penetrating all at once.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said softly. “I know how hard this must be for you, but unfortunately neither of us has much time for you to get used to it. I know how scared you are, Nicole, but the bottom line is that you’re going to have to trust me. If you run out screaming into the street, they’ll kill you. If you phone the police, they’ll kill you. If you get into your car and drive out of town, they’ll kill you. The world as you remember it doesn’t exist anymore. You’re somewhere over the rainbow and the bad news is the munchkins are not fucking friendly.”

  He took his hand away from her mouth, let her arms go as the fight went from them.

  “Who are you?” she asked in a whisper.

  “My name is Jack Parlabane. I’m a journalist. And I’m not here because I believe Tam McInnes is innocent. I’m here because I know Tam McInnes is innocent.”

  FOUR

  “This is tucked. This is well fucked,” Paul muttered nervously, shaking his head and biting his nails. This was a difficult enough combined manoeuvre, but the handcuffs and the random rock and sway of the bus added an unwanted element of challenge. The effect was more cheese-grater than emery board, and his fingers looked like something the dog had found round the back of the butcher’s. His eyes were bloodshot from fatigue, fear and a rationed allowance of self-pity, his throat sore and swollen from the sustained effort of not crying.

  Tam McInnes looked over at his son from the seat opposite, feeling gagged by the sense of futility that shouted down every word of reassurance he could think to say. Even the desire to reach out and place a paternal hand on the distressed young man’s shoulder was made less difficult by the handcuffs than by the notion that he had long forfeited the right and ability to play the wise and protective father. Nonetheless, he hadn’t forfeited the right to have a go, so he shuffled across the narrow aisle and sat on the orange squeaky vinyl seat.

  “Haw. What’s goin’ on back there?” shouted their guard, looking up from his Daily Record and interrupting his gloat over the prospect of Rangers’ latest European misadventure. The young policeman had given up on playing the Imperial Stormtrooper and had sat down, loosening the strap on his semi-automatic so that it lay across his lap under the dismal tabloid.

  “Ach, leave them alone for fuck’s sake,” barked Bob Hannah. “Can you no see the boy’s upset?”

  “He’ll be mair upset if I’ve to come up there,” came the retort, with the unconvincing and clumsily wielded authority that marked low-ranking British officialdom in all its manifestations, from menopausal primary teachers to nervous screws and bum-fluff polismen.

  “Aye, he’ll be fuckin’ shattered,” said Bob witheringly. The guard got up from his seat and began to move forward. Bob held his cuffed hands out together before him, palms up.

  “Look, son,” he said quietly. “After everythin , we’ve been through recently, and everythin’ we’re up against, the only way you could scare that boy is if you threaten to make him visit your dentist. Do yoursel’ a favour. Sit back doon and read your paper.”

  Bumfluff stopped, frowning, and began backing away again, with a but-this-is-your-last-warning wag of his finger. He leaned back against the darkened glass panel that partitioned off the driver’s cab and picked his Daily Record back up, a look of intense puzzlement and concentration on his face. Tam half-expected to see his lips move as he read.

  “So is the boy afraid of dentists, like?” Bumfluff eventually asked.

  Bob rolled his eyes and swallowed back a dozen obvious comments.

  “Eh, aye,” he stated, and looked away, shaking his head.

  “What’s the matter, son?” Tam asked, nudging Paul with his shoulder. “Is it the fact that we’re all gaunny spend the rest of our lives in the jile, or is it just that your seat’s no very comfy?”

  Paul laughed involuntarily, the tension finding its own way out whenever it saw a gap.

  “Naw,” he said, glancing at the blacked-out windows. “It’s the view.”

  Tam smiled and caught his son’s eye. Paul’s partaking in the time-honoured Scottish denial-therapy of bullets-bounce-off-me humour had been a brave gesture, drawing on God knew how depleted reserves, and had been as much for his father’s benefit as for his own. But in Paul’s look Tam saw that the time for blame and accusation was gone, or at least postponed. And for the first time in Christ knew how long, neither was ashamed to admit he needed the other.

  Paul was, understandably, the most visibly disturbed of the four. He had been the force of sustaining energy in the preceding days and weeks, giving himself up to possession by a desperate nihilism and a sometimes cacklingly black enthusiasm for the pervading absurdity of it all. A man so violently hurled towards the end of his tether can sometimes gain propulsion from the whiplash. And when Paul wasn’t acting like it was the ride of his life, he was acting like he didn’t believe it was real, so maybe that made the crash all the more violent when he went into the ante-room and found out just how real it was.

  Tam feared he would never look at his son’s face again without remembering that look of horror and incomprehension as Paul sat on the carpet, the choking, gurgling man lying back in his arms, bleeding to death allover him, four feet from the body of the man’s similarly slaughtered wife.

  Tam wasn’t entirely sure what day it was now, how long had passed since that moment. Panic, confusion, flight, pursuit, polis, interrogation, guards, guns, and now this van/bus affair with its frustratingly blacked-out windows and waftingly intermittent smell of stale pish and diesel fumes. The creaking hulk had been the site of their joyless and pale-faced reunion after separation in the cells and interview rooms, a few minutes’ stilted conversation enough to establish that none of them knew any more than the rest, and that their cumulative knowledge was far from extensive.

  The bus had been backed up to the covered walkway at the rear of the police station, the reverberating bleeps and white noise of radios punctuating the hubbub from beyond the open door at the vehicle’s tail as they sat and waited for unseen forces to once more decide where to place their four playthings.

  “. . . kidding? More than a wee bit unusual,” Tam had heard a polisman – carrying the somehow very British combination of a sub-machine gun and a clipboard – say to a man in plain clothes as the pair passed the door and walked around to the side of the bus.

  “It’s not the fuckin’ corporation number nine. I mean, do you realise who I’ve got in this bus?”

  “And do you realise who’s signed this order?”

  Which had apparently been the decisive statement in the argument.

  Shortly after that, the greasy-haired wee scrote with the rifle and the Record had boarded from the rear, before the door was closed and locked from outside by the polisman with the clipboard, who then climbed into the cab up front beside the driver, placing his own weapon on the wide, shelf-like dashboard with a heavy thump.

  “Where are we goin’?” Bob asked the scrote as the engine struggled bronchitically into life.

  “It’s a mystery tour,” the scrote sneered. “You’ll find out when you get there.”

  The bus had pulled away with a couple of unsure jolts and had jiggled its miserable contents over a couple of speed bumps before picking up pace with a clunky change of gear and a determined growl from the engine.

  Tam had sat staring ahead, trying to make out the road through the heavily tinte
d panel behind the driver’s head, but the monochrome kaleidoscope of metamorphosing shapes in the glass only strained his vision. Bob turned round briefly, rolling his eyes and sighing.

  To Bob’s right, Spammy sat – or more accurately had deposited himself; sitting entailed more coordination than Spammy was generally prepared to apply – and bobbed his head to an imaginary soundtrack, seemingly as oblivious as it was possible to be without ascending beyond the realm of the physical. Tam shook his head as he looked at him. In fact, Tam shook his head almost every time he looked at him.

  “Don’t call him Spammy. That’s cruel. The boy’s name is Cameron,” Tam had told Paul sternly when his son was about nine, not wanting him party to the pack-instinct weirdo-baiting that kids enjoy and anthropologists enjoy even more.

  “Call me Spammy,” Spammy insisted, when Paul brought him along as the fourth member of the team.

  He was a gangling, hairy galoot whose face always seemed to be saying “I’ll be back in a minute” and who could probably contrive to look sartorially dishevelled in just a pair of swimming trunks. Tam and Paul had to do this job. Not an issue. Bob had agreed out of friendship, loyalty and a desperate old man’s need to ride out and taste the action one more time. But if anyone knew why Spammy had signed up then it sure as shite wasn’t Spammy. For a while Tam had assumed Paul must know – some bond, some friendship thing, a debt, a favour – but when asked, Paul euphemistically explained that Spammy “kept his own counsel”, quietly confiding that the Yeti’s recent and most radical drug experimentation – abstinence – had made him even more inscrutable than anyone was used to. “If he gets hold of some acid and gets a handle on this situation from a perspective he’s used to, he’ll probably freak out and we’ll never see him again,” Paul warned, the morning before the job.

  “Riding along in an army truck / In a humpity bumpity army truck,” Spammy sang to himself, then giggled. The scrotey polisman/ guard glared at him with a mixture of contempt, bafflement and wariness, which reminded Tam of Spammy’s mysteriously protected status on the scheme in Meiklewood. “It’s like a force-field,” Paul had explained. Not even the hard-cases, psychos or the Meikle teeny “Kick to Kill Krew” hassled him. “He’s just too weird.”

  Without conversation or a view it was impossible to track time or distance as the bus continued its journey, only the frequent halts, gear changes and turns suggesting that the surroundings must still be urban. Even speed was difficult to gauge, as the metal cabin seemed consistently shoogly regardless of velocity.

  The vehicle took a very slow, strainingly sharp left turn, and failed to pick up momentum afterwards, which made Tam suspect they were climbing a hill until he felt two bumps underneath and heard more bleeps and radio interference outside. The bus slowed still further, each of them glancing fervently at the others, uniformly unprepared for whatever the next chapter might bring, reluctant to lose the comparatively easeful limbo of transit. It would be time for deep breaths and once more withdrawing into the self, pulling down the mask, hiding scared behind a stone face.

  There was an excruciating, extrapolated moment of purgatory as they realised the bus had stopped and awaited the silencing of the engine, with all it would herald.

  It never came.

  They heard a door open ahead, and saw PC Clipboard hop out.

  More voices. Authoritative tones. Posh accents. Crap jokes. Sycophantic laughter.

  Then the rear door was opened and the Wee Shite climbed in, cuffed and smirking, a cocksure erection of sinewy limbs. Tam clocked him right away, one half of a fight, impatient and unfussy about finding a partner. Keelus Glasguensas Vulgaris, the lesser-brained Glesca Keelie. A specimen so archetypal he should be in a zoo, where he could be exhibited for educational and instructional purposes. No, thought Tam. Make that a museum. They’re infinitely less bother deid.

  “Woah-ho,” the Wee Shite announced, taking his place on the backmost seat, relaxing as if it was his own personal stretch-limo. “I’m in the presence of greatness. Yous kill’t that Dutch cunt, didn’t yous.”

  “Fuck off,” Paul snapped as the door was slammed to once again.

  The Wee Shite put his hands up.

  “Awright. Nae bother, chief,” he said, all mock gravity. “I’m not messin’ wi’ yous cunts. Yous are fuckin’ mental. Fuckin’ hard bastarts, eh? Better watch my fuckin’ mooth, eh?”

  “Just ignore him, Paul,” Tam stated flatly.

  “Aye, that’s right, faither,” the Wee Shite yelped. “Don’t be consorting with the likes of that scruff,” he added with theatrical articulacy. “You might end up in the jile.”

  At this he cackled throatily for a while; then, content that he had reaffirmed his status as the world’s wittiest man, he sat back in his seat, cuffed hands behind his head, and began to whistle The Sash.

  PC Clipboard clambered back into the cab, minus the eponymous article, and looking rather distraught for the loss of it.

  “Bloody circus, so it is,” he told the driver. “Waving orders from on high, and you’ve to jump when they clap their hands. As if it’s no stupid enough comin’ over here to pick that wee shite up, they’ve took my records off me. Comin’ out with all this Top Secret, Need To Know shite.”

  “So what happens to the order, the file?” the driver enquired.

  “Fuck knows, Davie. He’s away with it. I says I need a copy as well, but he gie’d me more shite about orders from above. I tell’t him, I says if anythin’ happens, I’ve no record of who’s on this bus. Prick just says ‘Well you’d better not let anything happen then.”’

  “But he’s got record of it, hasn’t he?”

  “Aye, but . . .”

  “Well it doesnae matter if you haven’t.”

  “Aye, but it’s the principle.”

  “Aw, haud your wheesht, Alec,” said the driver with a small laugh, putting the bus into reverse and pulling away.

  After that, time seemed to dissolve. Tam could see less through the tinted panel and guessed the light was starting slowly to fail outside. The jolts of junctions and the pull and drag of turns had ceased, he realised, gradually appreciating their absence. Open road, maybe even motorway. There had been a syncopated beat beneath the wheels – ka-clomp, ka-clomp, ka-clomp – which he took to mean they were crossing a bridge, and he guessed at the Forth. After that, the disorientation was complete, with nothing to suggest change in direction, speed or distance. They could have been circling Knockhill race-track for all they knew.

  The numbness of it was frightening. It fuelled paranoia, like you had a bag over your head and your hands tied behind your back, and you had been forced through a door into a room that might be full of boxers or might be full of nothing at all.

  All thoughts turned inwards and backwards. That was when Paul had started to panic, and Tam had tried to comfort him.

  “Aw, that’s dead touchin’, so it is,” offered the Wee Shite, who had temporarily given up baiting his travelling companions in protest at their concerted policy of ignoring him.

  “That’s like, hingmy, the softer side of the beasts or somethin’. Cold-blooded killers wi’ hearts of gold an’ that, no?”

  “We never fuckin’ killed anybody, right?” hissed Paul, shooting him a furious glare.

  “Aw, it’s an injustice case, is it? We’ll have to get a campaign goin’ well. ‘Free the Dutch Cunt Four’. That’s got a ring to it, eh? Free the Dutch Cunt Four. Free-the-Dutch-Cunt-Four,” he started chanting. “Free-the-Dutch-Cunt-Four.”

  The Wee Shite began stamping his feet and clapping his hands in rhythm with his chant.

  “Now see what you’ve done?” Tam muttered. Paul rolled his eyes apologetically.

  “THAT’S ENOUGH OF THAT,” the guard yelled, throwing down his newspaper and standing up, hands on his weapon, upon which the Wee Shite desisted. “Christ’s sake,” the guard mumbled, sitting back down. “Like a bloody school trip.”

  The sound of the engine and the passing cars outside fil
led the bus, seemingly louder as a wordless vacuum grew.

  “I’m bored,” Spammy suddenly and loudly decided, probably an hour after everyone else had arrived at that position. “Anybody for a gemme of I-Spy?”

  Tam, of course, shook his head.

  “Aye,” shouted the Wee Shite, thus declaring that he was the only one not to get the joke. “I spy with my little eye, somethin’ beginnin’ with . . . hingmy, M C.”

  Bob sighed loudly and turned to the black window, pretending to stare out of it, then began banging his head against the glass.

  “A muwllyin green bottles, hangin’ on the wall,” sang Spammy.

  Bob banged his head harder.

  “Do yous give in?” asked the Wee Shite, ignoring the fact that none of them had given any indication of actually taking part.

  “Awright,” he announced triumphantly. “I’ll tell yous. It’s . . .”

  “Miserable Cunts,” said everyone else, including the guard, in monotonal unison.

  This had the satisfying effect of shutting the Wee Shite up, but obviously made it unclear whose go it was next, had anyone wished to continue the game.

  The driver and PC Clipboard, being in the cab at the front, were not included, but just out of interest, what they saw with their little eyes – for all of a quarter of a second before they hit it at sixty miles an hour – began with C.

  What Tam would mainly remember was the noise, a single, percussive, metallic BANG that seemed to boom at them from all four walls of their steel chamber, imploding upon them with a fury and ferocity he’d never known sound could possess.

  The room had been full of boxers.

  With the eruption of terrifying sound came a rapidly accelerating lurch to the left, which threw all of them to the right. Tam was cushioned by Paul’s body between him and the window, and he gripped the handrail on top of the seat in front, pulling against the G-force to prevent his bulk crushing his son against the wall. Bob was thrown towards Spammy, but slammed into the side of the seat opposite rather than directly across the aisle, as the angle of swerve altered erratically.