Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  “Oh God, oh Jesus God,” Tam said, looking down upon them. “Oh Jesus Christ.”

  Then a woman’s voice outside. “Oh NO! OH NO!”

  A hammering at the door. “Oh God, Mr Voss? Mr Voss? Oh no. HELP! SOMEBODY HELP ME!”

  Tam pulled at Paul, urging him to let go. Paul couldn’t.

  “Come on, son, come on.”

  Tam handed Spammy the padded envelope, thrusting it into his hands, the useless, pointless thing they had found in the safe secreted inside. Tam didn’t know why he went ahead and put it in there, in with the letters to Sadie. But somehow he needed to do it, needed to achieve what he had come there for, even in the face of what was happening. Maybe especially in the face of what was happening.

  “Go, Cameron, son,” he said. “Go.”

  Spammy glanced back at Paul before climbing out of the window.

  “Come on, Paul. Come on,” Tam said.

  He held Paul’s shoulders, helped him to his feet after Paul had gently laid the man’s head on the floor.

  “Come on, son.”

  Tam took Paul’s hand, leading him to the window. Paul could only look back, into the man’s dying eyes.

  Tam climbed down the ladder, looking up to make sure Paul was following. The security guards were already charging towards him as his feet hit the gravel.

  Bob pulled manfully at the steering wheel, struggling against the skid, but with the Hillman in fourth going round that corner, he got no cooperation from the accelerator and the car veered across into the (thankfully empty) on-coming lane, slamming side-on into a pair of telephone boxes outside a Spar mini-market.

  Spammy had come crashing out from the hedges, his eyes wide, nostrils flaring, possessed by an energy Bob had never seen in him before, and Bob had guessed immediately that it wasn’t a good sign. Spammy had climbed into the passenger seat and just babbled – more words, spilling out of him like an upturned skip, than Bob had heard him utter cumulatively before.

  “Just drive, just drive, got to drive,” he said, before Bob discovered what had taken place, picking up the facts amid the jumble, like the black box recorder amid the debris.

  Spammy had insisted manically that they head into the village of Craigurquhart rather than away from it. Bob had protested until Spammy pulled up his sweatshirt to reveal the envelope tucked into his jeans.

  “They’ll catch us anyway,” Spammy said.

  The Hillman had been tearing down the village’s main street when Bob saw the flashing lights coming towards them, about three or four hundred yards away. He reacted before he was aware of what he was doing, jumping momentarily on the brakes and hauling at the steering wheel to take the car around into an adjoining road.

  Spammy released his seatbelt and opened the door, clambering out of the ancient vehicle.

  “Just drive, Bob. Just go.”

  Bob understood.

  Spammy took off on foot across the road and up a lane between two buildings as Bob managed to coax enough enthusiasm from the Hillman to pull it away from the shattered phone boxes and head on up the street. The police car rounded the corner, swaying slightly as it righted itself after the sharp turn, and accelerated.

  A second police car appeared further up the sloping road that headed past a trickle of small shops – knitted jumpers and tartan dolls in plastic tubes – to a row of cottages and then out of town. The big Senator slewed itself across Bob’s path, causing him to swerve up on to the pavement. He put the Hillman into reverse, with thoughts of some swift doubling-back manoeuvre, but the engine cut out with a scornful splutter, as if to say “in your dreams”.

  Spammy edged out from the lane, peering up and down the street that ran parallel to the one he had left Bob on, looking with frantic hope. There had to be one somewhere. He dashed across the road, spotting another connecting lane, but it turned out to be a dead end.

  He had to do this, he knew. Not simply for Paul’s mum, or for Paul or for Tam. For all of them. It had to be worth something, even if they didn’t know how. They were never supposed to get into that safe, but even if the MM never had designs on what was inside it himself, well . . . Well, whatever the fuck it was, it wouldn’t have been in the safe if it wasn’t valuable. Somehow.

  He edged towards the corner, at the junction with the main drag, and saw it, through the side and front windows of a darkened, closed bakery. It was up a street on the other side of the road, about ten yards along. He took a deep breath and charged, spotting from the corner of his vision the police car sitting further up the main street, men climbing out of it and breaking into a run as they saw him. He didn’t pull it out until he was out of their sight, as he couldn’t afford for them to see.

  He folded the envelope in half and gripped it tightly, then rammed it into the open mouth of the postbox as he passed, and kept on running. He heard them round the corner behind him, several feet in an applauding clatter of heavy soles on the pavement. He knew he had nowhere to go, no way of evading them, no hope of outrunning them, but some instinct wouldn’t let him stop.

  Legs aching, lungs bursting, throat rasping, hopes abandoned, just running, still running . . .

  Still running, pursuit behind, panting, footfalls, still running. Driven by instinct, nothing else left. Still running. Until the figure loomed ahead, standing on the protruding root of a vast, ancient pine, the figure they had been swept towards, guided towards.

  Smiling, pointing a gun.

  And they saw, and they understood. Understood the truth, the sickening truth. Understood Spammy was right. Understood why Bob ran, despite his fucked leg, despite being there to give himself up. They saw it all in the face of the man before them.

  The Wee Shite.

  TEN

  Careful what you wish for 2.2.

  Nicole lay on Parlabane and Sarah’s sofa, resting her unshod feet on a cushion and leaning back against one arm. She glanced out of the window, where the late afternoon sunshine seemed tauntingly inappropriate. “Where were you last week when I was bored but comparatively carefree in Glasgow,” she wanted to ask it. “Don’t you know, I don’t do Glasgow,” she imagined it replying, “you ignorant English bitch.”

  Parlabane had come back in from his travels, and she was aware of him and Sarah out in the hall, hearing indistinct whispers, the brushing together of clothes, the soft sound of a kiss. She reckoned she might have found them an irritatingly tactile couple had the circumstances not made her cry out for signs of humanity and affection in a world gone very recently, very suddenly and very frighteningly insane.

  She had felt a short second of relief when she saw Sarah’s jackets on the coathooks last night, and a photograph of her and Parlabane on the wall (in which they wore, rather curiously, matching Elastoplasts on their cheeks). It had struck her – amidst the cacophony of panic and confusion inside her head – that she was walking into a close with a complete stranger, and no-one knew she was there. Parlabane saw the look of apprehension in her eyes as he reached for his keys outside the door of the flat, read the scenes of kidnapping, sexual ordeal and murder that were playing behind them, and sighed impatiently. He gave her a stare that said “you know, we really can’t afford this”, before adding vocally, “Look, you’re going to have to start trusting me a bit more. I know it’s not easy, but well, tell you what: try thinking up some helpful images, I don’t know, maybe charred flesh, mangled wreckage, car exploding in a plume of flames, that kinna thing. I’m not the bad guy, Nicole.”

  She didn’t know the woman’s name, hadn’t heard him mention her, but there was evidence that she lived here, and it somehow calmed Nicole to see Parlabane rendered more normal, that he had a life outside of car booby-traps, hired assassins and murderous conspiracies. The feeling only lasted until she realised that those two worlds weren’t separate, and that she was standing at the proverbial crossroads where they met.

  1.1 summarised: “I want to help real people with real problems.”

  Enter Mrs McGrotty and Mr McCandlish
.

  2.2: “I’m bored. When does it get more exciting?”

  Enter Jack Parlabane.

  What a picture the three of them would have made, sitting around the flat that afternoon, matching luggage under the eyes, tired but restless. Nicole felt exhausted but too edgy to contemplate sleep; who needs caffeine when They are out to get you. Parlabane retained an energy about himself, a drive that animated a knackered-looking face and body; like a cross between a marionette and a zombie. Sarah had been up all night trying to figure out what was obstructing the breathing of a 25-year-old RTA victim (Harley Davidson meets Eddie Stobart), before his aorta ruptured and he exsanguinated spectacularly, mouth pouring blood like a burst fire hydrant, and died shortly before six a.m. In between worrying about him she would have been worrying about Parlabane, so altogether she didn’t look entirely peachy either.

  Nobody was treating Nicole like a victim, which was not only good for her self-respect but made it feel less like there was nothing she could do. In fact, both Parlabane and Sarah (perhaps rather worryingly) gave the impression of having had sufficient experience of this kind of thing as to give the air of experts who would not work with amateurs. She had got the impression the night before that Parlabane couldn’t afford to carry passengers, but had felt then that he only expected her to pull her weight and do as she was told. Sarah let her know that her contribution would have to be greater.

  It was while Parlabane was out, during that awkward time when they were first alone in the flat without him, urgent circumstance having truncated introductions to the most cursory of details. She had been trying to press Sarah for information on what sort of person Parlabane really was, without sounding too much like she was saying: “What, you actually live with this maniac? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “He thinks you’re very sharp, very perceptive,” Sarah had told her, in that surprisingly (and right then comfortingly) English accent. “He was singing your praises after your TV performance. I know you must be feeling like the little girl that’s lost in the department store right now, being led around by the hand, but believe me, if Jack didn’t think you had something he could use, he wouldn’t have brought you here. He’d have dumped you with some babysitter – Jenny, probably – and picked you up again when the coast was clear.”

  “Who’s Jenny?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll probably find out. But believe me, Nicole, when he comes back you’d better be wide awake.”

  Nicole felt momentarily distanced from herself as Parlabane spelled out what he had done and what he had discovered, suddenly catching a glimpse of where she was, what she was doing, what she was part of. Part of – not on the fringes, not spectating, not along for the ride. In on it. Working to crack a conspiracy of unknowable proportions, staying frosty to evade the assassins, discussing options and scenarios, her opinions sought and considered. Despite the fear, the fatigue and the disorientation, it was an image of herself she wished she could frame. If only they could see me now.

  If only who? Her father? No. With the best will in the world, he’d still only be able to see his little girl in danger, and the thought of his concerned face brought the little girl within that bit closer to the surface, training the fear upon where she was most sensitive to it. She blocked his image from her mind.

  Rob.

  Yes. If fucking Rob could see her now. Rob who saw her as a different little girl, a little girl with cute little tits who he liked to screw, and a little girl whose triviality got on his nerves after he came. Rob of the standard-issue scrawny goatee and ever-present pack of “Marley Lights” sticking out of his shirt pocket, that triangle on the lid like the attention-seeking pride badge of a love that can’t help but speak its name: narcisexuality. Rob of a thousand lefty causes, each one more earnest than the last, providing moral reasons to disapprove of just about every nation, state, organisation and individual on Earth. Rob the sensitive feminist, who used his disgusted-deconstruction-of-aggressive-male-sexuality routine to get women into bed. And Rob, whose habit of saying “come to Papa” as he rolled on a condom and she took her knickers off, might keep psychoanalysts busy for a very long time.

  Parlabane wasn’t really expecting Michael Swan to appear on national television and admit that he had murdered Roland Voss. Mind you, he hadn’t been expecting a dead man to appear on television a few nights before and tell him that there was a massive cover-up going on, either. But while each revelation came in a form that was understood by Parlabane alone, the difference was that Swan didn’t know he was telling him.

  “So can’t you find out who was up at Craigurquhart, who these MI5 guys were?” Nicole asked, with a restless impatience Parlabane would only tolerate in someone whose life was under threat.

  “Not today I can’t,” he stated, leaning back in his chair, Sarah sitting on the arm of it, absently stroking his hand. The six o’ clock TV news was burbling quietly in the background, the volume down since the latest Voss manhunt item ended, but the VCR still whirring, Parlabane now obsessively recording every broadcast on the matter. “I’ve learned in this line of work that you have to be careful who you’re asking questions about, and who knows you’re asking. And on this case, I think we only have to look to the late Messrs Lafferty, Campbell and now Hannah to appreciate that discretion is definitely the better part of valour.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Right now? Lock all the doors and windows and sit tight until The Saltire comes out. By which time I expect to be sound asleep. Tomorrow, things will look a lot different. I know it doesn’t help these poor sods on the run, but there’s nothing we can do until that paper hits the streets, and we certainly can’t do them any good if we’re dead. The Saltire’s running the booby-trap story plus pictures, which should buy you a little insurance. It’s also running the floorplan and my contention that the Voss Four couldn’t have done it.”

  “This is running under the false byline, right?” Sarah said, concern on her face.

  “Yeah, the usual,” Parlabane confirmed. “John Lapsley. Anyway, once all this stuff’s public, we can stand back and watch where everybody jumps. Then we can start asking who else was on that grassy knoll and other such awkward questions. Because then everyone is going to be demanding to know what really went on up there.”

  A silence fell among them, the absence of their voices letting the sounds from the TV fill the gap, their re-awareness of it in the corner once more drawing their eyes. Michael Swan was standing at a lectern in a low-ceilinged room, temporary lightstands visible on one side of the small stage, which was partitioned off by pale blue hoardings. Michael was talking but it was not his words that provided the soundtrack; whatever his speech had said, it was being summarised for the viewer by Roger Oakham, the Conservative Central Office press officer who had long been masquerading as the BBC’s political correspondent.

  “Bring back John Cole,” Sarah muttered.

  “Hondootedly,” agreed Parlabane.

  Then Michael’s voice did break in, the snippet that had been selected for direct consumption.

  “We will not let Europe impose its so-called standards on Britain, when by ‘standards’ it means dragging us down to its level,” he said, all bad suit and rehearsed histrionics. “We will not let filth flood into this Christian country, filth that will corrupt young minds, filth that will degrade women . . . and filth that will cause sexual violence figures to soaaar.”

  Very onomatopoeic, Parlabane thought.

  “For let anyone who doubts the power of this filth listen to these words: ‘We are your sons, and we are your husbands, and we grew up in normal families. I had a wonderful Christian home. But pornography can reach out and snatch a child from any house today.’ These are not the words of a moralist, or a campaigner. These were the words of Ted Bundy, the American serial murderer, who confessed that pornography drove him to kill and to kill and to kill and to kill. And this same pornography is what Brussels wants to bring into our ho
mes. British homes.”

  “Jesus, not this shite again,” moaned Parlabane. If the Voss story was this week’s orchestra, Swan and his crusade had been the kazoo player in the background, more irritation than distraction, and Parlabane had been a wee bit too busy to pay attention to it. It had started on Monday with a few radio soundbites, fairly off-the-cuff, but now Swan had obviously progressed to the full-on press conference, doubtless including glossy info-packs for the assembled hacks, and probably a homepage on the fucking Internet: http://www.tory.wanker.co.uk.

  “Quoting Ted Bundy,” Parlabane said, shaking his head. “He’d sound more credible quoting Al Bundy. ‘Hey, Peg.’” he mimicked, “‘vote Conservative.’”

  The Bundy shite was familiar to Parlabane from his LA days, when he had heard it trooped out regularly by Republican equivalents of Swan to support a worryingly fundamentalist “family” agenda. Christian Reactionaries Against Pornography. Bundy was a serial sex killer sentenced to death in the US, who was approached by the pro-censorship Meese Commission and told that if he linked porn to his crimes, they might be able to get the sentence commuted to life. So despite never having blamed it before, and despite the police finding none on him, Bundy suddenly decided Porn made me do it. (Cf: God made me do it; see also: A big boy done it and ran away.)

  What Bundy didn’t tell the Meese Commision was that from the age of three he was raised by his grandfather, an exceptionally violent man who regularly beat up his family and tortured animals. Neither did he mention that his own mother was a wee bit concerned at occasionally finding this normal wee boy stabbing his own bed with butcher’s knives. But hey, that kind of shit didn’t work so well in a soundbite.

  “So what’s this about?” asked Sarah, whose routine of alternate working/sleeping often meant major news developments passed her by.

  “It’s the FILM Accord,” said Parlabane. “All caps, but it’s not an acronym. It’s an EC body; they’d need a different name or acronym for each member-state’s language, so instead they come up with something everyone understands and then cap it up so that it sounds important. They used to have MEDIA 92 and MEDIA 95, before the funding plug got pulled.”