Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  In the spacious office itself, he had found Tam and Sadie McInnes sitting close together on one of two facing settees, clutching each other’s hands tightly. Sadie was a neat wee woman, compact rather than small, damaged but not fragile. Her eyes were red and her face puffy with the passing of tears, but she was smiling as she spoke to Gilmore. Tam couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her. Physically he dwarfed her, but he still seemed to be looking up to her somehow.

  Fraz sat at the round conference table by one of the windows, where the failing glow of a strangely lilac sky could be seen reflected in the glass shop-fronts of Princes Street. At two more chairs sat Paul and Nicole, and on the table before them sat Fraz’s tape recorder, amidst several piles of used dinner plates, coffee mugs and not a few beer bottles. Paul and Nicole were trying to make what they were describing sound real to themselves, its absurdity more striking now that the guns were gone and the blades were sheathed. Fraz was keeping them talking, just two of the five exclusive and sensational interviews that would have people fighting in newsagents tomorrow after the last copy was sold.

  Spammy sprawled in a chair and leaned over Gilmore’s ornate, antique desk, like an Illustrated Dictionary entry for “incongruity”. He was pulling envelopes, papers and plastic boxes from a poly bag advertising a Paisley department store Parlabane knew for a fact had shut down in the early Eighties. The bag looked like it had been buried in a peat bog ever since.

  The three erstwhile fugitives were clean-shaven, showered and kitted in new clothes purchased by Catriona across the road – at M&S going by the ruff of empty green carrier bags sticking out of a bin near the door. Parlabane wasn’t sure whether they had grabbed some shut-eye in the interim or whether the mattresses were for in case they had to lie low here overnight. Probably the latter. Gilmore had sent someone to pick up Sadie (and retrieve certain items from a Paisley address) as soon as the three of them were smuggled into the building, and he couldn’t imagine Tam or Paul zedding out while they waited anxiously to see her.

  They looked a bit like they’d not long come off a flight home from Australia – one that had taken the corporation bus route. Well dressed (almost leisurely attire), tearfully emotional to be with loved ones again, and looking like they’d sleep for three days if they shut their eyes for a second.

  Parlabane had grabbed one of the beer bottles and stood by the desk with Spammy, poring over the haul of evidence. He was impressed with Gilmore, who was being generously solicitous towards Tam and Sadie, chatting away, reassuring them in any way he could, and insisting on getting things – food, drink, whatever – for them himself. He seemed humble before them, deferential as if they were so much greater than he for what they had come through. It made a change from guys in Gilmore’s position who thought everyone they met should appreciate – (a) who, and (b) how important – they were. Fraz was right: the guy had the heart of a hack, enough to know that it’s the tale that matters, not the teller.

  Gilmore had stood up partly because Fraz was shooting him eager looks, keen to get more from Tam and some insight into what it must have been like for Sadie. If Parlabane knew Fraz, he’d put special emphasis on how she coped with the blood-thirsty baying of the other newspapers, as he always enjoyed a bit of quality self-righteousness when he could get it.

  Gilmore pulled a chair over from the conference table and sat down at the edge of the desk, swigging at a beer bottle and rolling up his sleeves. Parlabane couldn’t begrudge him his vicarious thrill; indeed he realised then, looking around the normally neat and sedate office, that in fact it wasn’t so vicarious. Three men still wanted for six brutal murders, holed up right here. This whole thing went sour and everyone in this room could go to jail.

  Parlabane stood back from the desk and leaned against the window, taking another mouthful from the bottle. He had warned Fraz and Gilmore that there was to be no arsing about with big-splash revelations, as Tam, Paul and Spammy couldn’t wait for press deadlines; as soon as they had collated the evidence, it would go to Jenny, who would present it to the appropriate authorities. Parlabane hadn’t told Jenny about the helicopter trip or what was going on at the office. He knew she’d have vivid enough suspicions, but as long as he said nothing, as a police officer she wasn’t put in a compromising position. The issue of how Jenny would bypass Knight in presenting the new evidence looked like never being broached, as the last time Parlabane called her, she told him Knight hadn’t shown up today, and nobody had any idea why not or where he was.

  “I’d say we’ve got them up the arse with a blowtorch,” Parlabane stated matter-of-factly. “Look. Maps, technical plans of Craigurquhart House, faked photos of Mr McInnes, dupes of the stuff stolen from Manson & Boyd . . . but that’s just the veg. Here’s the meat.” He walked the five feet to where a compact midi-system sat on a low table, speakers either side, popped a cassette into the slot and pressed Play.

  There was the recognisable bass hiss that identified a portable phone connection, but it seemed to dissipate each time someone spoke. The voices were a little distant, so Parlabane turned up the volume and adjusted the EQ until the words were clearer.

  “Knight kill Voss . . . Knight takes Voss . . . Check . . . Knight and Harcourt . . . Harcourt . . . big hard-on . . . killing a billion . . . billionaire . . . doesn’t make you any . . . any richer.”

  Parlabane cued forward on the tape and pressed play again.

  “. . . only reason yous cunts made it this far is because they were followin’ orders to look in the wrang places, an’ because they knew we had yous in oor sights the whole fuckin’ time.”

  “Good God,” said Gilmore, eyes widening.

  “That’s Paterson and Bowman, the two men arrested in Strathgair last night,” explained Parlabane. “Harcourt is the one who tried to kill Sarah and myself. He was planning to use a knife. I do believe that’s his forte. The estimable Mr Scott here . . .”

  “Spammy.”

  “Sorry, the estimable Mr Spammy here has also got tapes of the initial blackmail approaches and all subsequent instructions regarding the robbery of Craigurquhart, in which the caller is very specific about the date and time they had to be there, to the minute: 7:20 p.m., last Sunday. Voss was supposed to be heading out to that wankfest shindig in Perth right about then. Knight and Harcourt nip up the stairs while him and the missus are putting on their glad rags, kill everybody then saunter back down. A wee bit later someone goes to see why the VIPs haven’t shown up at the waiting limo, and finds the bodies. The guy on the tapes uses a voice-disguiser, but it’s what’s being said that’s important rather than who’s saying it.”

  “It’s absolutely incredible,” Gilmore declared, shaking his head.

  “Oh aye, there’s this as well,” said Spammy, reaching into a tattered brown envelope that Parlabane noticed was addressed to Sadie McInnes and pulling out a glinting, silver disc with no label on either side.

  “What’s that?” Parlabane asked.

  “This is what was in the safe,” Spammy said. “The only thing that was in the safe, in fact.”

  “You got into the safe?” gasped Gilmore.

  “Of course. We’re professionals,” he grinned. “Check the postmark.”

  They did.

  “Cute,” said Parlabane. “So what’s on it?”

  “Fuck knows, man. This is the first I’ve seen it since Sunday night.”

  “It says ‘McGoughan Technologies’,” Gilmore pointed out. “Right there, very small letters. Is that one of Voss’s companies?”

  “Nah,” said Parlabane, picking up the CD. “Disc manufacturer.”

  He placed it on the midi-system’s awaiting tray and watched it slide smoothly inside, only to be greeted with an angry, sustained, strangulated electronic shrieking when he pressed Play.

  “Wow!” Spammy laughed. “Voss was intae early Mary Chain. Mental.”

  “What?” asked Gilmore.

  Parlabane shook his head, smiling at Spammy’s joke and Gilmore’s confusion.
“Computer data,” he explained. “It’s a CD-ROM.”

  “I wonder what would happen if you did actually try to load some early Mary Chain intae a computer,” Spammy was saying, unconcerned with whether anyone was paying attention. “Maybe subliminal messages would start appearin’ on the screen, kinna the new-tech equivalent of playin’ Sabbath albums backwards. ‘Come and live in East Kilbride’, it might say. Or ‘Bobby Gillespie is Santa’.”

  If someone was listening to Spammy, it wasn’t Parlabane. He had hooked up a CD-ROM drive to the PC on Gilmore’s desk and was staring at the screen, right hand on mouse, left hand on keyboard, bottom jaw on floor.

  “. . .” he said.

  “Any joy?” inquired Gilmore after a few more minutes, now sitting over at the conference table where Nicole was nibbling a chocolate bar, Paul having splayed himself across the settee opposite his parents.

  Parlabane reckoned that if he concentrated really hard, he could maybe think of what to say and restore relations between his brain and his mouth long enough to say it.

  “. . .” he said again.

  “Jesus, Jack, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  He swallowed, gave it another shot.

  “I have,” he said, dazed. “But I’m not the one being haunted.”

  “What is it?” said Fraz, getting up.

  “Proof.”

  “Of what?”

  “Whodunnit.”

  “Swan?” Fraz offered.

  “Swan, yes. Swan and another.”

  “Someone else? Who?”

  “The Right Honourable Alastair Dalgleish MP, Secretary of State for Scotland.”

  Gilmore sprang to his feet, every eye in the room suddenly on Parlabane, whose own remained intent upon the monitor in front of him.

  “Proof?” asked Fraz, walking towards the desk.

  “Proof,” confirmed Parlabane.

  Proof – that landed gentry, Old Money, High Tory Alastair, free political thinker, “his own man” and self-styled independent spirit, would have been the Waldemere-Dalgleish who saw his forebears’ legacies of land and business crumble if Voss hadn’t been secretly propping them up since even before the ’87 crash.

  – that self-made Eighties-Thatcherite-Revolution success story Michael Swan had also been riding with stabilisers, so to speak, with a hidden benefactor assisting when his entrepreneurial genius inexplicably failed him or circumstances conspired against his otherwise inspired investment decisions.

  But Roland Voss had never been in the business of altruistic philanthropy, and there was proof also

  – that while a junior minister at the DTI in the late-Eighties, Dalgleish had massaged reports of Voss’s liquidity while his bid to buy the Allied Newspapers group was under consideration. Irony number one was that Voss’s empire was in ebulliently robust health at the time, but Dalgleish’s report had nonetheless greatly exaggerated the extent of his arms revenues. This was to compensate for Voss’s reciprocal concealment of the size of his European pornography interests. Irony number two, of course, was that the British establishment found dealing in weapons of torture, mutilation and death more acceptable in a potential proprietor of national newspapers than dealing in videos of a few consenting adults having a shag.

  – that while both working at the Foreign Office in 1992, Michael Swan and Alastair Dalgleish had exerted diplomatic influence to stall and eventually scupper territorial peace talks between the military government and rebel guerrillas in the former British colony of Sonzola in western Africa, where Voss coincidentally happened to be on the verge of some massive weaponry transactions. (Voss was diplomatic himself, as well as exemplarily unpartisan – he was flogging hardware to both sides.)

  – and that Swan and Dalgleish both owned undisclosed shares in the company which subsequently sealed those multi-million-dollar deals in Sonzola, where anti-personnel mines laid during the conflict, now ended for three years, were still killing and maiming civilians today.

  And that was just the highlights. It was all there. Every last blind eye turned in government, every kickback, every hand-out, the works.

  “Jesus, where does it tell you who killed Kennedy?” asked Gilmore, gazing transfixed at the monitor.

  There were several folders on-screen, each with a general title, such as “Swan” or “DTI”, and inside those were rows of icons with names and dates alongside. Every icon, when double-clicked, revealed a different secret. The document icons – depicting a sheet of paper with one corner folded over – when activated, filled the screen with copies of contracts, letters, agreements, certificates, memos; and these were photographs, not DTP files. Voss would doubtless have the originals deposited somewhere. Camera icons threw up photographs of Dalgleish, Swan and assorted others in meetings, with dates and locations printed in the top-left corners, the names and positions of all depicted personnel along the bottom. Cassette icons played back secretly recorded conversations, a panel appearing centre-screen simultaneously providing a transcript plus (of course) names, dates, speakers, venues. And movie-projector icons activated Quick-Time video clips – again surreptitiously recorded – of segments of the meetings detailed in the tape playbacks, just to supply further evidence of who was present and what they were talking about.

  “So what does it all mean?” asked Tam, leaning forward on the settee, Sadie and Paul either side of him. Fraz and Nicole sat opposite, Spammy and Gilmore at either end on chairs removed from the conference table. Parlabane stood at the far end of the room, by the window, taking a call on his portable phone.

  “It means you’ll all very shortly be free to go home,” said Fraz. “And free to vote in the imminent General Election the Prime Minister doesn’t yet know he’s about to call.”

  “But what I don’t get,” interjected Nicole, “is why Voss blackmailed Dalgleish. I mean, this stuff proves Parlabane was right about Swan and the FILM Accord and pornography and all that stuff, but I don’t see why the world’s least-convincing Scotsman was brought into it.”

  “Leverage,” said Fraz. “Voss might have reckoned Swan alone wasn’t enough. Once the porn ramifications of the Accord were out of the bag, Swan couldn’t have gone to the PM and said he was planning to ratify it because the PM would tell him no he bloody well wasn’t. And if Swan insisted, the PM would either think he had gone mad, or worse, suspected he was being pressured from somewhere, and started asking questions. Either way, Swan drops it or he’s fired, and Voss doesn’t get what he wants. But the PM’s long been wary of Swan and Dalgleish together, and he’d fancy a head-on with the pair of them almost as little as he’d fancy the opinion-poll consequences of having to fire two senior ministers.”

  “Maybe,” said Gilmore, not sounding convinced. “But I’m not sure the Dutchman even believed the two of them could pull it off. Knowing Voss, it probably just amused him to play God with their careers, watching them squirm as he squeezed them from both sides in the inescapable dilemma from hell. He made them, gaveth them political life in the first place, so maybe he decided it would be a giggle to taketh away. It’s what his newspapers have always done: build ’em up then knock ’em down.”

  “Aye,” contributed Paul, “maybe you should get somebody to root through reports of government scandals across Europe in recent years. Might find a few weird sackings and resignations wi’ a hidden story behind them.”

  “Good idea,” Gilmore said. “Bear that one in mind, Ken.”

  “Sure, sure. But for now I think we’ll be pretty busy with events closer to home. Can’t wait to see the court artists’ impressions of those two bastards standing in the dock.”

  “That’ll just be one bastard,” corrected Parlabane, standing now behind Fraz and Nicole, holding the phone in his right hand. “That was Jenny Dalziel. Michael Swan’s dead, in a cottage in Yorkshire. Acute allergic reaction to a bullet. She just heard down the jungle telegraph; it’ll be all over the TV in about half an hour. Usual story, right now cops are only saying ‘a forty-four-ye
ar-old man blah-blah-blah’, but it’s him. One to the head, gun in own hand, no apparent signs of a break-in or struggle.”

  “Jesus, he topped himself,” said Fraz, gaping over the back of the settee.

  “Like fuck he did,” Parlabane sneered. “Even considering last night’s shenanigans and today’s media frenzy, Swan had absolutely no way of knowing anyone was actually on to him. Somebody took him out.”

  “Knight?” suggested Nicole.

  “Well nobody’s seen him today. Sounds good to me. Knight knows it’s all going to buggery but he doesn’t know he’s been named. He gives the world Swan as a suicide then waits for people to make the connection – Christ, he could even be the one who ‘discovers’ the link from the Voss end – and he thinks he’s in the clear. Then the only people who could incriminate him are his own men, who he’s pretty confident will keep their mouths shut, Mr Knight not being familiar with certain properties of our native woodland fungi.”

  “What about Dalgleish?” asked Nicole.

  Parlabane nodded, thinking, agreeing something with himself.

  “He could incriminate Knight,” she continued, “but only by incriminating himself. Of course if he was incriminated already . . . ”

  “Mr McInnes?” Parlabane said loudly, cutting off Nicole’s musings.

  “Aye?”

  “Could I speak to you and your two erstwhile colleagues alone, please?”

  Tam looked around at the gathering, finding confused but interested nods of assent from Paul and Spammy, while Fraz stood up and Gilmore offered to lead Sadie and Nicole out of the room.

  Parlabane sat on the edge of Gilmore’s desk, waiting for the others to leave. The door to the ante-room closed and he looked around at the three of them, Tam and Paul on a settee, Spammy defying a chair’s attempts to support him.