Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  As Knight approached his car he could hear the breeeep of the phone inside it. He removed a parking ticket from the windscreen, scrunching it up and dropping it to the tarmac as if it was a flyer for a car-boot sale. When the meter-maid keyed the reg into the system she’d quickly know not to pursue the matter. He climbed into the car, grabbing the receiver as he pulled the door closed at his side.

  “Knight. What.”

  “Morgan, sir. Look, I think we might have a big fucking problem.”

  “Speak to me.”

  “It’s the lawyer. I checked under her car and the cable-cutters have gone.”

  “Yes, I think we had established that they were knackered last night when they didn’t work. I ordered Addison to get you some new ones. Why are you telling me this?”

  “No, sir, I mean they were gone. As in, no longer attached.”

  Knight swallowed, took a moment to digest the news.

  “Could they have fallen off?” he asked.

  “No chance. She must have removed them. She’s on to us, sir.” Christ.

  He couldn’t afford to even think of the ramifications.

  “Kill her,” he said, quietly but firmly. “Immediately. Where is she now, her office?”

  There was a pause, a short intake of breath on the other end of the line.

  “Well, that’s the big fucking problem I meant, sir,” Morgan finally said, a dread reluctance in his voice. “She’s disappeared. We watched the place last night, saw her go to bed and . . .”

  Fucking hell.

  “Look, Morgan,” Knight said, with the sort of hollow calm that precedes a typhoon, “I don’t want to know the details of how you fucked up. They are not relevant. All I want to know from you is that she is dead and that so is anyone she might have spoken to, and I don’t want to hear your fucking voice again to tell me anything else. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir. But how will I find . . .?”

  “If she knows something, she’ll want to tell people. If she wants to tell people, she’ll have to surface. When she surfaces, you kill her. However, wherever. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  SEVEN

  The sunlight was piercing and impatient, as if angry that it had needed to climb this high in the sky to get their attention. The smell of cold sweat, stale breath and arboreal mulches had an incongruous freshness about it as a chill-edged breeze diluted the congested air. Wisps of steam spiralled balletically in the broken shards of sunlight, Tam watching their graceful dance for a suspended moment while somewhere in his head he knew he was about to switch on again, stretch mind and body against the rack of their predicament. It was a moment of freedom, of uncomplicated pleasure, the sweeter for its briefest finity.

  Some long-sealed chamber of dormant memory released its captive and caused him to think of a fragment of a poem he had been made to learn in school. He couldn’t remember its name or that of the poet, but the threat of six of the belt had apparently ingrained the words on his mind not only long enough to recite them before Mrs Dornoch the next day, but long enough for them to return on a cool September morning in the highlands, nearly half a century later.

  “Him whose strenuous tongue can burst joy’s grape against his palate tine – his soul shall taste the sadness of her might.”

  Tam wasn’t sure how well it reflected upon the Renfrewshire education department of the time that it had taken him two hours to learn it but forty-odd years to understand it. Still, at least he hadn’t been a Catholic. All Bob could remember was bloody prayers.

  He blinked, and when he opened his eyes he was no longer lost in the motes of breath, but back under a pile of logs, off a footpath in a forest. His eyes flitted around and noticed that Spammy was also awake, lying back but hunched up a little, supported by the spiny stanchions of his gangly elbows. He was staring out of the opening, eyes squinting against the stabs of the sun through the gaps in their shelter, steam billowing out from his nose like he was a shaggy-headed and drug-addled dragon.

  “You been awake for long?” Tam inquired as Spammy caught his eye.

  “Aye.”

  “Well why did you no waken us?”

  “Yous were sleepin’.”

  Conversations with Spammy were frequently like this. He seemed somehow able to circumvent logic, or alter its nature so that it behaved differently in his hands.

  Tam had learned not to tread further into the labyrinth.

  He nudged Paul and Bob to life, then crawled into the daylight as they yawned and groaned behind him, dragged back into confrontation with their seemingly omnipotent foe.

  Tam climbed to his feet and stretched, a dozen strains and aches responding to his reveille from posts around his anatomy. He edged forward tentatively, moving up the incline of the mound at whose foot they had made their camp, and taking position behind a large pine. Slowly he leaned around it, looking for he didn’t know what – police, soldiers, Jeremy fucking Beadle (in which case he hoped he’d lubricated his microphone) – and saw a valley bathed in the crisp sunlight from behind him, its angrily craggy mountains cruelly beautiful as they loomed inquisitively over their dominions below. The river glinted with an icy sparkle, winking in defiance.

  The sight delighted his eyes but wounded his soul. It was a place of breathtaking dramatic spectacle, but he now saw the harshness, the mercilessness that must always have existed behind the picture-postcard splendour. He saw the rain-lashed shepherds in the cold damp of the clachans, the punishment of the outcast, and the gauntlet run by the pursued.

  Funny how such places didn’t fill your heart with quite so much joy when you couldn’t get back into your car and drive the fuck away from them.

  Tam looked back, down at the lean-to where Paul and Spammy were helping Bob to his feet, and glanced with relief at the surroundings. The base of the mound protruded into a low hollow, a tributary path of brown needles leading up to the main trail on the opposite side from where he stood, with trees huddling protectively around the entire area. They had arrived there in darkness, and he had half-expected morning to reveal that their improvised refuge was on the edge of a main road or some other such staringly conspicuous site.

  In fact it had been the encroaching darkness that had cast the deciding vote the night before on whether to run; or if not cast a vote it had at least forced the election.

  “Heh, do you think we might be gettin’ set up again here?” Spammy had asked as they stood, dazed, beside the two dead men in front of the bus. No-one answered, even Bob having grasped that feigned obtuseness was Spammy’s equivalent of a rhetorical question. Tam had already made the further leap of deducing that the sloth-like fuzzball’s occasional deeply obvious comments were a caustic means of taking the piss out of anyone who thought he was slow-witted, a misconception he had probably endured for years.

  “They’re gaunny do us for this along with the other two,” Bob offered, shaking his head at the gruesome sight.

  “Four,” Tam reminded him. “There were bodyguards, sure.”

  “Oh aye.”

  They hadn’t even seen the bodyguards. The first any of them knew about the two other victims had been during their interrogations.

  “They were shot as well,” Bob replied.

  “So I heard. The question is, what do we do aboot it?”

  “Well that’s obvious,” said Paul. “We run. It’s the only chance we’ve got.”

  “Aye, but if we run we look mair guilty,” Bob offered.

  “What,” said Spammy in a slow monotone, “do you mean it’s actually possible for us to look mair guilty than we do already?”

  “Ach, you know what I mean,” Bob retorted, irritated. “Whoever it is is playin’ us like a cheap fuckin’ moothie, and I’m sure us runnin’ is the next bar on the music sheet. I say we just sit and wait for the polis. Maybe noo they’ll start believin’ that there’s somebody else at work on this.”

  “Bob,” said Paul, gritting his teeth to keep his temper in check, “the excuse t
hat a big boy done it and ran away didnae work the last time. What makes you think it’ll be any different noo? I say we take our chances. As far as I can see, there’s nothin’ gaunny convince the polis aboot what really happened at Craigurquhart. You know what kinna papers that bastart Voss owned, so you can imagine what kinna picture the public’s got of us. We’re never gaunny get a fair trial and we’re never gaunny clear our names. If we run for a day or a week or we manage to run for the rest of our lives, that’s as much time ootside a prison as we’re gaunny get. Once we’re back in custody, it’s forever.”

  Inevitably, Bob sought mediation.

  “What do you say, Tam?”

  Tam looked at the sky for a few seconds, then back at the corpses, then at his friends.

  “I say we keep our options open. This looks like the maist lonely and desolate road in the world. Naebody’s gaunny know we’re missin’ until whenever this bus was supposed to arrive, and there’s no exactly a queue of motors goin’ past. It could be hours before anybody shows up here. Plus it’s gettin’ dark and it’s gettin’ cauld.

  “I say we move on, find some shelter. Somewhere oot o’ sight, where we can hide and bed doon for the night. Then in the mornin’ we’ll see how it looks. If we decide to run, we’ll have a start, and we’ll have had a bit o’ kip. If we decide to gie up, or we get caught anyway, for what it’s worth we can say we werenae runnin’, just takin’ shelter for the night. Naebody’d want to sleep in the back of a bus with a deid body. Either way, we can sleep on it.”

  Tam suggested they walk on the road, partly so as not to leave tracks, and partly to avoid the ankle-snapping treachery of the clumpy fields on either side. He walked in front at first, before relieving Paul who was helping Bob limp along on his one good leg. Spammy straggled along at the rear, having earlier dismayed them by kneeling over the dead driver and rifling his pockets. He held up a lighter by way of explanation.

  “I saw him havin’ a fag. We might want to light a fire.”

  They came to where a dry, hard-earth track met the roadside on the left, the chevrons of mucky tractor tyre-tracks arcing out across the tarmacadam in both directions. There was little light left, just a low glow playing off the underside of the sparse cloud cover in the distance. Tam looked up the slope, where the track followed a drystone dike towards the edge of a wood, into which the dusty trail disappeared.

  “That’ll do,” he said. “Right. Naebody stand on these tyre marks. Try an’ move fae stone to stone,” he instructed, indicating the sunken boulders that jutted out of the track like acne. He sent Paul ahead first, while he and Spammy carried Bob – legs and arms – over the chevrons and as many yards along the trail as they could manage.

  By the time they reached the edge of the forest the sunlight was completely exhausted, but the clouds were shuffling disgruntledly out of the way of a bright and insistent moon, and the trail remained enticingly visible before them. They came to a clearing where the track ended, a circular area occupied by three large piles of felled and stripped tree trunks and a small hillock of gravel and pebbles, which looked like it was being either gradually built up or gradually depleted by the attentions of the small dump vehicle that sat motionless in front of it, its metal scoop resting on the ground like it was a grazing brontosaurus.

  There were three exits: the track, leading back down to the road, and two paths. One led downwards in roughly the opposite direction, continuing to skirt the edge of the pines, and the other led up, higher into the hill and deeper into the woodland.

  “Decisions, decisions,” said Spammy as they stood motionless in the clearing.

  Bob hopped over to one of the timber piles and fished out a sturdy length of wood to serve him as a walking staff.

  “Ach, fuck it,” Bob said. “If we’re gaunny run an’ hide, let’s dae it properly.”

  Their gradual progress along the path was made to the slow, thudding rhythm of Bob’s stick as he thrusted it down to bear his weight on alternate steps. Everyone was tired and sore but no-one would admit it when any of his companions enquired. For each of them, the feeling of walking, of moving, of once again – to whatever extent – controlling their own fates urged them forwards despite the pain. Eventually, however, they came to a small hollow as the clouds returned with their big brothers to chuck the moon back out of the swingpark.

  All the time they had been passing small piles of trunks by the edge of the path, awaiting collection and transportation, and near to those were carpets of discarded boughs and branches. They worked silently and quickly to build the lean-to, Tam, Paul and Spammy dragging and placing the trunks against the needle-strewn mound that jutted into the hollow, Bob laying branches across the top for insulation.

  Spammy’s suggestion of lighting a fire for added heat was vetoed on the grounds that in the unlikely event that they didn’t burn themselves and the whole fucking forest down, it might act as a homing beacon for any pursuers, as they couldn’t be sure how close they were to roads or houses.

  “I’ll be pickin’ skelfs oot ma hands all night,” Paul moaned as they lay down side by side and huddled together for warmth. “That’s when I’m finished pickin’ bits of glass oot ma shoulder.”

  “Ach, shoosh,” Bob muttered. “I’ve had hauf a tree through ma leg the night, an’ you’re talkin’ aboot skelfs.”

  “Aye, but they say size doesnae matter,” Paul countered.

  Bob farted loudly in lieu of a rejoinder.

  “Aw for fuck’s sake,” Paul protested.

  “Jesus, Bob, that’s a liberty,” added Tam. “This is a confined space.”

  “I hope they’ve nae sniffer dugs,” mumbled Spammy.

  They all laughed. Wee boays at scout camp.

  Tam suspected none of them would actually sleep, but he reckoned without the effects of having barely done so in several days, combined with the exertion of their hike and the sheer mental, physical and emotional exhaustion from all they had been through. He had felt the power drain languidly from his limbs as soon as he took the weight from his feet and lay down, and realised they had been running on fumes for several miles. Within minutes they were sleeping like . . .

  Unlike some, Tam McInnes never found himself looking back upon his life and wondering where it all went wrong, because he knew exactly, to the year, month and day. It all went wrong when some prick in a suit who had never lifted a shovel in anger decided that record productivity and decades of loyalty counted for less than the fact that you could get cheaper labour in Mexico.

  Well, that wasn’t the whole truth, really, but it was easier to put a face on your need to blame. There was a political agenda that none of them had known about; in fact that no-one was ever supposed to know about, but for some documents being leaked to a journalist a few years later. Tam had read all about it in jail, which seemed cruelly ironic. He was serving his sentence for the burglaries that had started as an act of revenge for what Sir Michael Halworth had done, when he discovered that Sir Michael Halworth was really just a willing cog in a far bigger machine.

  It was about ideology, about politics, about power. The big bosses in the States had probably been toying with the idea for years, and to people of that mentality it must have been tantalisingly tempting. But they were never going to do it in America – well, not in those days. In the battle with the Japanese for domestic sales, waving the stars and stripes was about all they could do in the face of an increasingly superior product. Shutting down plants in Michigan and fucking off to Guadelajara might just have been misinterpreted by the American public as a less-than-patriotic gesture.

  For a long time they couldn’t do it in the UK either, despite the fact that the British operation was usually barely in profit. And the only reason it was in profit at all was that it was heavily subsidised – the government trying to keep things ticking over until the recession lightened and people started buying new cars again – which was also the reason the company couldn’t pull out. Not only would it be regarded as a helli
shly ungrateful breach of trust, but it wouldn’t have done a fuck of a lot for Anglo–American relations.

  Enter the Thatcher administration.

  On the surface, Tam remembered, it appeared that the Yanks were unilaterally shipping out, muttering about obstructive unions and restrictive industry regulation, amidst crocodile tears of regret from the government and many “you’ve only got yourselves to blame” speeches. We chased the jobs away, they said. We have to learn our lessons from this: we have to be more competitive, we have to streamline, we have to abolish the restrictions and archaic union practices that have hamstrung not just our car industry but all our industries.

  “The lessons of Meiklewood”, was the irritating phrase that chimed throughout dogmatic declamations down through the Eighties.

  We have to wreck the unions. We have to slash jobs. We have to worry less about health and safety, because it eats into profit. We have to decimate wages, because we’re in a global labour market now, and that means we’re competing with the Third World.

  Never forget the lessons of Meiklewood.

  Of course, it was all a fucking stitch-up. What had later been discovered by this investigative hack was that the government instigated the whole thing. They had very quietly decided to pull the plug on the subsidies, and tipped the wink to the Americans, assuring them that there would be no public blame, and that there was no potential for damage to “the special relationship”.

  Why?

  Christ, why not?

  The government had nothing to lose. The money that would have gone into subsidising Meiklewood could be spent on something useful instead, like nuclear submarines, or tax cuts. And the loss of a few thousand jobs wasn’t a drawback, it was a bonus.

  Mass unemployment wasn’t a government failure, it was a government strategy – as everyone well knew. It was the weapon they used to break unions, force down wages, dictate conditions. But it was more sophisticated than that. It wasn’t merely a question of finding any three or four million people to haunt the thoughts and weaken the resolve of every disgruntled employee. It was a specific three or four million people, Tam knew.