Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  “Gentlemen, I realise you’ve all had a rather stressful few days what with one thing and another,” he began, a sparkle appearing in his otherwise tired eyes that would probably have scared the life out of Tam once; not now.

  “But I was wondering if I could enlist your specialist services for one last job . . .”

  He should have stayed at the Scottish Office.

  He should never have left the building. Bloody hell. Jesus bloody Christ.

  Dalgleish was crouched on the floor by the window in the semidarkness, only the glow of the streetlights below picking out the outlines of objects in the room. He sat with his back to the casement, four feet from his desk, on the polished wide floorboards beyond the last tassels of the edge of the carpet, lifting the glass to his mouth with two hands because either on its own trembled too much, and he had already spilled enough down his front to make his shirt cling to his chest. Or maybe that was just the sweat.

  There had been no gin left in the house, and that parasitic Frog diplomat had finished the last of the brandy yesterday. His drinks cabinet back home would never have been allowed to run so dry, but as he considered the townhouse little more than a dormitory extension of his office up here, he had rather lacked enthusiasm for stocking up. There had been nothing else for it. The only spirits left were the bottles of single malt whisky people kept giving him as “wee gifties”. Every time some bastard handed him one, he felt sure the sod somehow knew his publicised liking of it was a fraud. Christ. He had prised open the lid of the box, then mutilated himself trying to get the metal seal off the top of the bottle, a stiff sliver sliding neatly under his thumbnail and into the soft flesh below. Craigellachie, it said. Probably bloody Gaelic for agony. He had poured a large measure into a glass and then drowned it in Coke, which made it almost drinkable.

  Enough to have two. And three.

  But would St Andrew’s House have been any safer? There were lots of people around, certainly, but they all went home sooner or later. Then it would have been just him and the security staff, and how could he be sure about them? Knight wouldn’t necessarily come himself. He could send anyone. People with all kinds of passes, access, authority. He might not know his assassin until the moment of death. No-one could protect him. He couldn’t phone the police because he wouldn’t know which of them were in Knight’s pay too, and besides, how could he enlist their protection without the risk of them finding out why he needed it?

  He could trust no-one. Knight was like a Portuguese man-of-war, his lethal tentacles stretching out for miles, myriad and almost invisible. What had made him an invaluable ally now made him the deadliest enemy.

  And he knew it was Knight. Swan had been told practically bugger-all about the mechanics of the Voss assassination. On the off-chance that there was any evidence leading the trail to him, the last person to have realised it would have been Michael, and he would be the last person on this earth to contemplate suicide. If it came to the crunch, Swan would have brazened it out with a display of bare-faced, squirming slipperiness that would put Aitken and Archer’s side-windings in the shade. No. Knight’s little thugs had blown it and now he was saving his own skin. Absolutely nobody knew where the bastard was and he simply would not answer his portable phone. Well, Dalgleish at least knew where he had been today. And where he must be headed.

  Thank God he and Swan had a reputation for being close, otherwise his near-collapse on hearing the news might have seemed suspiciously dramatic. As it was, it probably scored some sympathy points with the voters for him to show such a human, emotional face when he spoke to the cameras later on, possibly the best on-screen blub by a senior politician since Thatcher’s onion-in-the-hanky routine in the late Eighties. Except he hadn’t been acting, though it wasn’t Swan he was crying for. He had heard the report only ten minutes later, from a TV next door in the Press Officer’s room.

  “Mr Dalgleish, as you saw there, clearly very distraught by the news, having lost not only a colleague and a political ally, but a close friend too. The Scottish Secretary has asked that the media respect Mr Swan’s family’s need for privacy at this difficult time. [I.e. go and pester the fuck out of them in London and take a few eyes off the unravelling Voss disaster up here.] The Prime Minister has yet to make a statement on the matter, but he is likely to be deeply upset at the loss of a young and promising member of his cabinet.”

  Not to mention the loss of another MP and the government’s Damoclean one-seat majority, Dalgleish thought. Swan’s own majority had been 9,000, which made the constituency marginal by today’s standards, so with the party’s survival plan built around clinging on until June, the Ulster Unionists would be dusting down their wish list right now. Still, there would be consolation for the boss that it wasn’t one of his more loyal ministers, and that Swan had been found with his brains blown out rather than with a bag over his head and half the Sainsbury’s fruit counter up his arse.

  But then Dalgleish realised the dreadful mistake he had made. He had played right into Knight’s hands. He could hear the reporter already: “Mr Dalgleish appeared extremely upset late yesterday afternoon when talking about the death of his friend, Michael Swan, and Scottish Office staff said he looked close to collapse upon hearing the news. It has been confirmed that he left St Andrew’s House soon after in a state of visible distress, and went home to his Edinburgh residence where . . .”

  He had panicked. He had looked out of his office door and seen everyone in the building as a potential assassin, an anonymous hireling. He couldn’t even trust his driver, so he had called a black cab and used all his restraint not to break into a run as he left the building. When he got to the townhouse, he sent the domestic staff home immediately, locked all the doors, turned off the lights and retreated to his study.

  What else could he do? He couldn’t tell anybody. Not only could he trust no-one but there was no-one who could help him anyway. Nobody could put shackles on Knight, not without everything becoming known. He couldn’t flee the country either; he was a senior member of the cabinet, for God’s sake, not Stephen Fry. Besides, any such dramatic act would only serve to more quickly precipitate discovery of what he had done.

  But what had he done? Good God, what choice had he had? Voss had given him two options, but they were both routes to the same destination, and by Christ that was the terminus. What had been done was for the good of the party; for the good of the whole country. He had acted in good faith. They couldn’t have Voss flooding England with filth, corrupting our children. And neither could they have one man exerting so much influence over government; it was unhealthy. Ending careers upon a whim, threatening to bring down the whole show and let bloody Labour in. It was simply undemocratic. Voss had to be stopped, for the sake of Britain’s future.

  Oh God. Oh good God.

  He heard a noise, a grinding, a thump. Footsteps. Oh God oh God oh God.

  The glass fell from his shaking hands as he got up, spilling what was left of his drink all over his lap. He scrambled to the door, his steps unsteady with booze and fear, and locked it with a turn of the wrist. Then he backed away, still gripping the key as if it was electrocuting him, eyes fixed on the door as he heard more sounds from the staircase beyond.

  So he had taken Voss’s schilling, but who could judge him for that? How could he let what his ancestors had worked for and passed down through generations just disintegrate, or worse, be sold into other hands? – Just because Labour had run England into the ground in the Seventies, setting tax levels that forced many of his peers to leave for foreign shores while he stayed to tough it out because he cared for this country. Was he to be punished for that? Just because the Economic Miracle his party brought about – with not a little effort from himself – had come along too late to turn his own businesses around without a little help?

  Oh God.

  The door handle was turning, back and forth, someone trying to get in. Oh God.

  A voice somewhere, inside his head. A voice he had ignored
long ago, contemptuously shouted down like an opposition backbencher. A voice of foreboding that never stood a chance of being heard in a time when no-one listened to such doom-sayers, like the luddites and cowards casting their weary words of pessimism over the new dawns of privatisation or health-service reform. A voice of reservation speaking as Voss offered his favour.

  Get into bed with the devil, and sooner or later you’re going to get fucked.

  He heard strange, quiet clicking and scratching sounds at the door, and found himself frozen to the spot with fear, paralysed, helpless.

  Sooner or later . . .

  He’d thought he could escape by bringing Knight in to get Voss off his back forever, but nothing had changed. He’d only swapped one devil for another.

  Sooner or later . . .

  There was a dull thud of metal on wood, the bolt sliding back out of the frame. The handle turned. The door opened. And in he walked.

  It was the devil, all right, but not quite the one he was expecting.

  Much worse.

  Parlabane had been surprised at Spammy’s agility, the way those long limbs carried him steadily across the slates like a low, scuttling insect, and his reach and strength in pulling himself up where each adjoining building’s roof was higher than the other. Paul had been the obvious choice to accompany Parlabane on this part of the job, but Tam insisted Spammy go instead. Parlabane guessed this was because Tam didn’t fancy the role of sitting nervously in a car, worrying about what might be happening to his son, and reckoned that having to share that wait with someone like Spammy was probably a factor too.

  Spammy had expressed confusion when Parlabane led him up to a close in Mansfield Place, when he knew Paul and Tam had been instructed to park in sight of an address in Drummond Place, a few streets away.

  “It’s my friend Jenny’s flat,” he explained, waiting for her to answer the doorbell. “And I’m afraid I don’t have any pals who actually live right next door to Mr Dalgleish, so this’ll have to do.”

  Parlabane knew the address from a story he had been sniffing around shortly after Dalgleish became Scottish Secretary. Some of the local papers made a big fuss over the fact that Dalgleish’s wife and kids didn’t move north with him, and that he hadn’t bought a Scottish residence yet. Parlabane was less enthusiastic about the relevance of this because Dalgleish was reputed to see sufficiently little of his wife and kids for it to make bugger-all difference, the facade of a marriage only propped up for moral respectability in the party of dysfunctional family values. What Parlabane was interested in was the fact that the Scottish Office had bought the townhouse and furnished it for him to live in when in Edinburgh, and he had tried to wheedle it out of an increasingly nervous contact whether Dalgleish was paying any kind of rent.

  “Well it is now a Scottish Office property, you know, as much as the more administrative buildings.”

  Parlabane had taken that as a no.

  Jenny led them to the skylight, from where they climbed on to the roof, Parlabane explaining to Spammy the fringe benefits – for the burglar – of the architecture and distinctive geometric terraced layout of the New Town; benefits which were of course largely dependent upon having a top-floor address or being the friend of someone who met that criterion.

  It took less than ten minutes to reach the roof of Dalgleish’s equivalent of a council house. There was a museum-piece collapsible-circuit alarm trip where the small window slotted into the frame. Parlabane pulled his polo-neck out of his jeans, as if he was about to strip, which clearly startled Spammy until he noticed the canvas vest affair underneath, which harnessed a number of vital implements. He removed a compact blade and dexterously cut a hole in the glass, three perpendicular slashes making a rectangle against where the pane met the frame. He then levered the rectangle out, the rubbery, ancient paint and dried putty working like a hinge.

  Parlabane pulled from around his chest a length of wire with a fine foil contact at each end, wiping some sweat from his forehead as he crouched over the window-frame. He placed the contacts flat together and slid them between the two white plastic cubes that each housed half of the alarm trip, folding the foil back around them. Then he slowly pulled the skylight open and Spammy held it as he climbed in, Parlabane taking great care not to dislodge the wire.

  Spammy clambered in after him, heedlessly dislodging the wire, indeed snagging it on his jumper and dragging it along behind him on the staircase. Parlabane unsnagged it from behind him and folded it up again, shaking his head.

  “Guess the alarm’s not switched on, huh, Spammy,” he whispered, shooting him an attempt at a chastising glare. Pointless. Spammy just grinned.

  He sent Spammy downstairs to open the front door for the others, and set about looking for Dalgleish. This didn’t prove difficult, as he heard a glass crash to the floor in a room off the landing below when Spammy tiptoed loudly past it. Then he heard the bolt sliding home in the lock, which housed a keyhole from a Tom & Jerry cartoon and doubtless a mechanism installed in a gentler, less security-conscious age. He sighed at its innocent quaintness and pulled out his lock-picking wallet.

  Dalgleish was standing in front of an antique bureau, holding the doorkey like it was a gun, quivering and apparently having pissed himself.

  “Hi there,” said Parlabane, turning on the light. “I’m selling The Watchtower. Does Jesus have a place in your life?”

  “Wh-what? Who are you?”

  “Joe Shmoe. Chuck Fuck. Who do you think?”

  “I-I know why you’re here, but listen to me, listen to me. I’ve got money. I can give you money. As much as you want. I’ll double what Knight’s paying you if you’ll let me go. I’ll treble it. Oh God, please.”

  Parlabane smiled. Dalgleish clearly didn’t find it very comforting.

  “I’m not from Knight, and I’m not here to kill you,” he said. “I’m here in a kind of representative-stroke-advisory capacity. So take a seat.”

  Confused but tremulously wary, Dalgleish moved around behind the desk and sat in his chair.

  “Good. Now there are some gentlemen here I think you should meet. Guys,” he called, leaning back out of the doorway and making a beckoning gesture. Tam walked in first; followed by Paul, carrying a large black case, which he put down with an ominously heavy thump; and finally Spammy. They lined up behind Parlabane, Tam with his arms folded, Paul likewise, Spammy with his hands in his pockets. All of them were staring at Dalgleish. None of them quite looked delighted to see him.

  “Just in case there’s any confusion, Mr Dalgleish, this is Mr Thomas McInnes, this is Mr Paul McInnes, and this is Mr Cameron Scott. I take it that their names are familiar to you? Oh, tears, Mr Dalgleish? Perhaps you were moved by their dreadful ordeal?”

  “Oh God, oh . . .” Dalgleish whimpered, gripping the desk as if it was the only thing preventing him being sucked backwards out of the window and into the Edinburgh night.

  “These three men were framed for the murder of Roland Voss on Sunday night, along with a friend of theirs, Robert Hannah, who was murdered yesterday. They were supposed to be murdered too. So was I, in fact, along with my future missus and these men’s lawyer, Nicole Carrow, whose boss, Finlay Campbell, was murdered on Tuesday. You know why. But more importantly, we know why too. And it would be safe to say we’re not inclined to be very understanding about it.”

  “Look,” Dalgleish said, sweating ruddily but mustering the last dregs of his professional composure. “I can pick up this phone and dial two numbers, an emergency code that will have the police here in moments.”

  “Aye, very good. Gaun yoursel’,” Parlabane said, laughing coldly. “Mr Dalgleish, if you thought the police could protect you in your current plight, my guess is you wouldn’t have been sitting in a locked room with the lights off, pissing your pants with fear. The police can’t help you because it’s Knight who’s after you, and Mr Knight has, shall we say, certain influence in that profession.”

  Dalgleish seethed, allowing himse
lf a moment of angry, outraged hatred before the fear took over again. He tried to look at the four men in front of him, but recoiled every time he caught one of their stares.

  “What do you want?” he asked, voice starting to break up.

  Parlabane clapped his hands together, as if convening something.

  “Well, here’s the deal. Dinner is served.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry, I was adapting the phrase for your unaccustomed ears, but it loses certain nuances in translation. In the native tongue it is – Mr McInnes, would you?”

  “Your tea’s oot,” growled Tam.

  Dalgleish perhaps didn’t follow the phrase itself, but it was plain he understood the import.

  “However, strangely enough,” continued Parlabane, “much as they would dearly like to, and much as you eminently deserve it, my colleagues are not here to beat the shit out of you. In fact, ironically, we are all here to offer you some help. We are in a position to save what I was about to describe as your worthless neck, which would be inaccurate. Fortunately for you, the four of us tend to put a far higher value on human life than yourself or your associates. We also believe that, paradoxically, you consider your own life to be worth a great deal, so we are going to offer you the chance to purchase it. Obviously we’ll take into consideration that your life’s value has undergone a certain depreciation in light of the fact that you’ll be spending the rest of it in prison, but we still figure even that’s worth a few bob.”

  Parlabane’s face became a cruel portrait of mock-sympathy as he noticed Dalgleish’s confusion.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t think I made everything quite clear, and it would be unfair if I wasn’t upfront about the whole deal. Paul?”

  Paul opened the case at his feet and handed Parlabane a cardboard folder from inside, which he placed on the desk in front of Dalgleish, removing and spreading several sheets of paper across the wooden surface.

  “You see, I’m afraid we’re not offering you the chance to get out of this. I think you’ll be able to grasp that from these documents and transcripts.”