Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  Nicole reached for her glass of water and took a long gulp, having feared for a moment that she would need to make another quick exit to the bathroom. The nausea passed, but her eyes were filling with tears again. She knew that it was shooting the messenger, and that it was even rather ungrateful, but she could feel nothing but hatred for this man before her who was saying these things, tearing down the painted backdrops of the world she thought she lived in to reveal the black, damp, hewn stone of dungeon walls.

  Amidst the swirl of thoughts, facts and fears, one consideration came suddenly into focus at the heart of the maelstrom.

  “They’ll be coming for me, then? Coming to kill me, here, tonight?”

  He ran both hands agitatedly through his hair, looking down at the ugly carpet for a moment.

  “Not necessarily,” he said, wrestling with possibilities. “That’s why I had to pick your lock and sneak in. I had to let you come all the way home without knowing about this. Like I said, you’re safe as long as they think you’re under control. Right now they don’t know you’ve found out about them. They just think they’re going to have to change their radio supplier. They’ll reckon they’ve still got plenty of time to fix up something else that will look like an accident. They might have somebody outside watching the place all night, or they might decide you’re safely ignorant and tucked up for the evening, so they can come back before you get going again in the morning. You can’t make a run for it right now, though. You can’t afford to make them nervous, because they can’t afford to take any chances. That’s why they set out to kill you in the first place.”

  “So what do I do? Enjoy one last kip and then offer myself to them in the morning?”

  He smiled, which she grudged to admit made her feel a microscopic bit better.

  “Well, you can’t stay here any more,” he said, “which is a helluva shame with you having decorated it so nicely.”

  “Ha bloody ha.”

  “You’ll have to come with me. We’ll wait until they think you’re asleep for the night, then make a break for it. My car’s parked round the block, so we can get there across the back greens and out a different close.”

  “Where are you planning to take me?”

  “Somewhere you can lie low. Somewhere safe, comparatively.”

  “What about work?”

  “That’ll be staked out too, especially once you’ve given them the slip. I’m sorry, Nicole, but your life is on hold. This isn’t hide and seek. They won’t give up after a few days and say, ‘Okay, you win.’ This is a race: we have to find out who’s behind them – and prove it – before they find you.”

  “How did you know?” she asked, both hands clasped around the coffee mug she was clutching to her chest, the comfort of its warmth the smallest of consolations. She sat at the kitchen table, slumped low on her wooden chair, feeling bedraggled and deflated as her pulse cautiously decelerated and the terror gave way to exhaustion. Her voice was croakier than usual, her throat suffering from the swelling of suppressed sobs.

  The man in black, Jack Parlabane, sat opposite, his chair backed tight against the wall so that not even his shadow was visible to anyone who might be looking from outside at the closed curtains.

  “I saw someone working under your car,” he said. “There was a van parked across the road purporting to be from a recovery service. I called the number painted on the side but got that ‘number non-existent’ tone after about four digits. Then I phoned directory inquiries and gave them the name and address. Never heard of them. So I waited until he was gone and had a wee deck at his handiwork.”

  “No, I meant, how did you know these people, whoever the hell they are, would try to kill me?”

  “Because they’ve got a lot to lose and they’re not playing a percentage game. They’ll kill anyone who poses a threat, whether that person knows it or not. They killed Roland Voss and then set up four guys to take the rap; four guys who look so guilty that nobody’s worrying too much about the on-going lack of a plausible motive. You don’t really need one when you catch them fleeing the scene, covered in large samples of the appropriate blood group. Then you come along and start asking awkward questions, showing the cops parts of a letter claiming Tam McInnes was being fed information.”

  She put her mug down and leaned over the table, placing her head momentarily on her folded arms, then looking up at the man in black.

  “But if the police have already seen the letter, what good would it do these people to kill me now?”

  “Because it’s not the letter they’re worried about. Not what you’ve shown the cops anyway. It’s the fact that you’ve not shown them the whole thing. And you haven’t shown them whatever else was in McInnes’s envelope.”

  She sat upright, taken aback.

  “Come on,” he said disparagingly. “I worked out you weren’t quite coming clean from your TV interview, so it seemed a fair bet they would too. McInnes gave you more than just a letter, I guessed, and so did they. So why didn’t you produce everything at L&B HQ?”

  She sighed, buying time to take in the revelation that so many people seemed to know things she thought were securely secret.

  “Law can be a game of bluff sometimes,” she offered defensively, her feelings of vulnerability fuelling a desire to restore her credibility as an intelligent human being. “You don’t show your hand until someone pays to see it. I only showed the police what I needed to at that stage. To extend the card metaphor, I was waiting to see what they played in response.”

  Nicole took a quick swig from her mug.

  “It’s as much a public relations game as a legal one. Think of the Scott Report, for God’s sake; it doesn’t matter what the evidence says, or how blatantly it says it – it’s how you present it, and how your opponent responds. It’s spin. If I give three good reasons, three pieces of evidence to back up my argument, all at once, and the police come up with a good way to refute just one of them, the public perception, the media perception is that I’ve been discredited. If I shout about the fact that they haven’t answered the other two issues, I just look like a sore loser. But by playing them one at a time, I would be forcing the police to counter the arguments each issue raised individually.”

  The man in black grinned, raising an eyebrow.

  “Very smart,” he said. “Theoretically, very smart. But with the unknown drawback that you made certain anonymous individuals as nervous as Ian Paisley at Parkhead. They wouldn’t have anticipated Tam McInnes’s wee surprise package in the first place, so they needed to know what was in it and how exposed it left them.”

  He paused and took a breath, evaluating.

  “To be absolutely honest, I didn’t know for a fact they would come after you,” he admitted. “Not so soon, anyway. I knew they’d be watching you, but I didn’t think they would make a move until they were sure of how much a threat you constituted. The reason I came looking for you was to find out what else you knew about this. I was looking for your car so that I could intercept you on your way to it from the office, so that it looked to unwanted observers that I had just bumped into you. When I found the vehicle in question I realised that events were already at a rather advanced stage.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the intended manner of your demise suggests that discretion is a consideration for these guys, putting them in the ‘evil but not psychotic’ category. This isn’t a killing spree, it’s a cover-up. The more corpses accumulate, the more people start asking questions, and worse still, making connections. If they have to, they’ll kill someone without a thought – but if they don’t have to, they’d probably rather not add to the body-count. What you said on TV yesterday will have given them a serious hard-on for that envelope, but just suspecting you know more than you’re saying might not have been enough for them to decide you were for the off. So between then and this morning they’ve encountered something that tipped the scales. Did you see the envelope today?”

  “No. My boss
was looking for it, but his office is such a . . .”

  “Aw fuck. Then it’s gone,” he stated flatly. “They must have broken in last night.”

  “What?” This was insane. She was growing exasperated and angry as he revised and extended the catalogue of impossibilities he had brought for her to look at.

  “No,” she said firmly, slapping the kitchen table and looking accusingly at him. “My boss had it. He just couldn’t find it among all the stuff in . . .”

  “It’s gone, Nicole,” he rebuked, eyes flashing with a compelling mixture of fire and regret. “You’ve got to understand: these people are from the No Fucking About school of operations. They needed to see what you had, so they broke in. That’s their logic, that’s their gig. If they had given the contents of the envelope a quick swatch and decided it was no threat, they would have put it back where they found it and left you alone, but they didn’t.”

  She lowered her head back on to her arms on the table, momentarily closing her eyes against the pain that was beginning to throb behind them.

  “You make it sound as if they’re everywhere, that they can do anything,” she protested.

  He looked at the ceiling, steadying his thoughts.

  “They’re not, and they can’t,” he said softly, staring into her eyes with a look that she found both sympathetic and cautionary. “But you’re going to have to start acting upon the assumption that they are and they can.”

  His appellant expression suddenly changed, his facial muscles seemingly deactivated as if someone had switched off the power to his head. Whatever was pumping colour to his cheeks was also apparently running off the same supply.

  “Jesus,” he said. “You said your boss had the envelope? It was in his office?”

  He reached down to the duffel bag (black, bloody natch) he was carrying and produced a portable telephone.

  “Manson & Boyd has a 24-hour emergency line, doesn’t it? I’ve seen the ads. Who’s in the office?”

  “Woman called Margaret operates the nightline.”

  “Call her. We’ve both got to be sure about this. Ask her to have a look for the envelope.”

  “Oh for goodness sake, I . . .”

  “Do it,” he insisted impatiently.

  “I thought you said it would be tapped.”

  “Yeah, but nobody’ll be monitoring while the office is shut, and this could be an emergency. Do it.”

  She lifted the phone from his palm across the table and dialled the number, glancing up from the ugly moulded plastic device to launch a few more daggers at her tormentor.

  “Hello, Manson & Boyd,” said a female voice. Nicole considered the tones unusually shaky, but dismissed the thought as a combination of her own fragile state and the portable’s typically crap reception.

  “Hello, Margaret, it’s Nicole here. I was just calling to . . .”

  “I know, it’s terrible,” the voice interrupted, now undoubtedly wavering with distress. “It’s so terrible.” The snuffle of tears was audible despite the audio interference.

  “I’m sorry, Margaret, what’s happened?” Her pulse was off the blocks and gaining speed yet again.

  “Oh hen, don’t you know? Oh Nicole, pet, I thought . . . It’s Mr Campbell. Oh God, the poor sowel, and him wi’ weans as well.”

  “What’s happened, Margaret?” she asked again, this time in a dread whisper.

  “He’s dead,” she replied, breaking into sobs. “Aw hen, aw pet. They found him this afternoon, over in Partick. He’d been stabbed. They were after his wallet. Killed him for a few quid. A few quid. Some pair o’ wee thugs.”

  “Ha-have the police arrested them, Margaret?” she breathed, swallowing.

  “Naw, pet. The wee . . . bastards are still runnin’ aboot. Probably spent his money on the drugs by now.”

  He sat with his elbows resting on the table and both hands holding his head, tangled sprays of hair jutting out from the angled gaps between his spread fingers. In the lengthening silence, neither could estimate how much time had elapsed. Nicole had cried gushingly, bending over the kitchen sink as the waves of grief rocked her body, taken there by some daft notion that cold water on her face would stem the flow from her eyes. She knew she couldn’t pretend she was crying just for Mr Campbell. He was a nice man, a good man; at least these were her impressions from the few conversations they had shared. But in truth the news of his death had served to jettison all of the turbulent emotional flotsam that had been swilling around uncomfortably inside her.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder but she knocked it away and glared furiously at him. He had done this, she told herself, briefly, unfairly and knowingly indulging her aching need to blame. He returned to his seat, and she followed some moments later.

  “Sorry,” she sniffed.

  He made a slight gesture with his hand as if to dismiss her concerns, and allowed her to retreat into her silence.

  “I heard the story on the radio,” Nicole eventually said, her voice hollow. She stared into nothing, her eyes gazing wide, her head turned away from the wall. “The victim hadn’t been . . . Mr Campbell hadn’t been named. They said a witness saw two youths fleeing the scene. His wallet was . . .”

  Parlabane exhaled slowly through his nose and looked up from the table.

  “Witness probably saw two men with neddish haircuts and shell-suit jackets,” he said quietly with another small sigh. “Maybe a Celtic top or a Public Enemy T-shirt. Youths from all but the closest distance.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” she snapped. “You can’t possibly be sure of that.”

  “Well it’s a bit of a fuckin’ coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

  Nicole had no response to that. She knew she believed him, but part of her was still fighting to deny it, to hang on to the rules, the logic of a reality that was becoming terrifyingly obsolete.

  “Why?” she eventually asked him. They were mirroring each other now, one elbow on the table, hand supporting jaw, temple resting against the wall, eyes flitting back and forth from the wooden surface to the face opposite.

  “Why did the mafia kill Einstein?” he replied.

  She screwed her face up in bemused confusion. What the fuck are you talking about now, read the expression.

  “He knew too much,” Parlabane explained with a sad smile. “They found the envelope in Finlay Campbell’s office. They must have known he was your boss and therefore sanctioning your actions, ergo they figured if they got rid of you, he’d just step into the breach.”

  “My boss,” she said stumblingly. “He represented Thomas McInnes during the Robbin’ Hoods trial. Would they have known that?”

  “What do you think.”

  “So they’d have known he knew McInnes well enough to find the murder accusation hard to swallow.”

  “It certainly looks that way. So he was a threat, you were a threat and this envelope was a threat. And at this point, according to their plan, there’d be no you, no him, and no envelope.”

  “But you said they wouldn’t want to attract attention. Wouldn’t two deaths at one law firm seem a conspicuous coincidence?”

  “Not that conspicuous. Manson & Boyd’s not a family solicitor’s, remember. It’s got, what, twenty offices across the West of Scotland, maybe a dozen in the East? And we’re not talking about execution-style killings. One death by street mugging, one by car crash, same office, same day . . . tragic coincidence maybe, but not necessarily a suspicious one.”

  “But as far as they know, other people at the office could have seen the envelope too. They can’t kill everybody.”

  “No need. Knowledge of the envelope’s contents is useless if you can’t produce them. And it’s no good claiming it’s been stolen, because anything you didn’t give to the police effectively now never existed. You might entertain a few conspiracy enthusiasts with the story, but it’s not going to cut much ice in court, is it?”

  Nicole felt like she was climbing a staircase in an Escher painting, fearing her expre
ssion of baffled consternation might become a permanent feature as their circumlocutive argument continued to spin dizzyingly back and forth upon itself.

  “But if that’s the case, why would they still have to kill me and . . .”

  “Because it’s not this letter, this envelope that they fear. The letter was just a weapon, a catalyst, even. The danger to them is someone being motivated enough to start poking holes in what the rest of the world is perfectly satisfied is an open-and-shut murder case. The danger is someone believing not only that Tam McInnes and friends weren’t there specifically to kill Roland Voss, but that they didn’t kill him, full stop. You said that on TV, remember, in front of several million viewers, most of whom until that point were expecting this whole thing to unfold without hearing a single word of dissent against the idea that those four men did it. Jesus Christ, I mean, did you ever hear anyone say they thought Fred West didn’t do it?”

  “No,” she conceded.

  “But there you are, saying the unsayable, and suddenly some viewers out there in TV-land are wondering whether there might be more to this one after all. Suddenly there’s a few people asking themselves: ‘What does she know?’. And unfortunately that included the bad guys, who had a more urgent need than most to find out. Like I said, if it turned out you had nothing much, the bad guys would let it go. You’d be just a silly wee lassie with her knickers in a twist and the media would soon get fed up watching you bang your head off a brick wall. But you didn’t have nothing, did you? And my guess is you had proof not just that McInnes was receiving inside information, but that he was being set up. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  Nicole glared at him.

  “You know, you’re doing so well on your own, I can’t work out what you need me for.”

  “Don’t get huffy. We can’t afford it. What was in the envelope, Nicole? What did the letter really say?”