Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (22 page)

another song on the same CD echoed the need she felt to find out whatever she could about this place she had, for the time being, thrown in her lot with.
Look over there you used to say

The shape of the land beneath the street

Ridges and valleys and underground streams

You have to know what's under your feet

She had grown up in a Seventies-built estate, watching the town expand slowly outwards in clumps of new housing until there was little left of it that felt old, that spoke of stories and secrets, other than the harsh, open expanse of bleakness and ankle-traps that was Culloden Moor. She'd lived in a lowrise modern house, gone to low-rise modern schools, hung out in a low-rise modern shopping mall and fended off spotty chancers (until the less than crazee hour of one in the morning, thanks to a determined preponderance of Wee Frees on the Licensing Board) in low-rise modern nightclubs. None of these places had tales to tell that were much older than the ones you could read wrapped around your chips. McKinley Hall, in that respect, was a compendium, an anthology - and not one ever likely to appear on the children's bedtime story shelf.

She'd ironically found out more about the place during her brief trips home to Sneck - via the library and the net - than could be reliably discovered in situ. Sir Lachlan, though garrulous when caught at the right moment, preferred to expand upon his family's ties to the place and upon its physical attributes than tread anywhere near the episodes that history's prurient tastes would more likely focus upon. As witnessed by his pep talk, even the word

'history' was uncomfortable for Sir Lachlan, due to its unavoidable inherent allusion to all that had happened here. Lady Jane, having married into the family, did not appear quite so burdened by it, but was sufficiently defensive of what she was now a guiding part of that her staff knew there was a word they must never utter if either of the couple was even potentially in earshot. The word was (whisper it): cursed.

There was no legend of
a
curse, of vengeful necromancers nor of any primary episode of mythical mumbo-jumbo. The locals along in Auchterbuie didn't speak of 'the curse of McKinley Hall', and nor did the writings that made mention of the place. But the word cursed was used, and it meant cursed as in plagued, as in despised, as in wicked, as in doomed. And allowing that sober, rational, objective analysis was forgiving of the odd coincidence, it was fair to say that the evidence bore this out.

The McKinleys themselves could not complain of having been personally afflicted or of this misfortune having been suddenly precipitated upon them. 129

Death was here first. They should have scoped out the neighbours before moving in. The land - this otherwise hospitable and accommodating cradle among the hills, both served and confined by the coils of a river - had been known both as Cairncalb and Cruaidhcalb since long before anyone built upon it, names that still appeared on maps of the area the estate lands covered. Cairn denoted a place of burial, not exactly a rarity on any map or a cue to play string crescendos in your head. The 'cruaidh' part, Alison learned, had been assumed to mean rocky or harsh; 'calb' a gushing of water. However, the etymologies of both words were coincidentally ambiguous; or
un
coincidentally ambiguous, as far as she was concerned. 'Cruaidh', according to some, had come to mean harsh, but quite literally meant 'blood raw'; while water was not exclusive in being the gushing liquid 'calb' had always referred to. Legend, myth, oral history, whatever you wanted to call it, was not particularly exercised by the fact that people had been buried on the site. It just wasn't too convinced that they were dead when they got there. Some traditions claimed it a place of execution, others of pre-Christian human sacrifice. Still others spoke of massacre, a word that was worryingly non-unique in the accounts of the place's history (though admittedly in the self-reflexive process of such things, it would have been tempting to the more hysterical of compilers to allow their speculations to become coloured by subsequent events). What was documented for definite was that there had been two incidences of mass murder on the site - if not the very building - where Alison now resided. The first had been in 1467, back when the first great hall of the McKinleys had stood for less than half a century. Accounts predictably varied as to motive and blame, depending on which clan history's particular spin you were reading. Clans were constantly at each other's throats in those days, few of them distinguishing themselves with displays of tolerance or magnanimity. Often they settled their differences by arranged engagement on some windblown moor, Pyrrhic victors enjoying bragging rights but little more in reward for suffering a lesser cull. Occasionally, however, they went for the risky but more decisive pre-emptive strike to the heart, which at the earlier McKinley keep took the form of stealing in at night and slaughtering whole families in their beds before burning the place down.

Understandably, history had been bequeathed little evidence of how the McKinley defences were so catastrophically breached. Some form of betrayal was generally accepted to have been crucial, but naturally nobody had ever been inclined to offer personal corroboration of the theory. By chance, the laird and his youngest son survived, due to having been delayed overnight on a hunting expedition. Nonetheless, it was more than two centuries before their descendants' fortunes waxed strong enough to fully rebuild their seat, a construction that formed the basis of what still stood 130

today.

By the early Eighteenth Century, the McKinleys were back to playing kings of the castle, but the true laird of Cruaidhcalb was still picking up his fealty. Douglas McKinley, the main man in those days, by all accounts lacked the benefit of modern insight into man-management, to put it mildly. Paranoia and a ruthlessly self-defensive streak were both understandably bred into his lineage, but Douglas's tyrannical brutality and abject lack of compassion put him in a very extreme percentile. Local judiciary power in such hands contributed largely to the horrific incidence of capital punishment at the time, and the ever more trivial offences for which it was meted out. His gallows never empty, he generated sufficient ill-will among his subservients that eventually some of them tried to kill him. It was a desperate and amateurish plot, ironically reliant upon repeating history in recruiting the complicity of the laird's own guards, who were not assumed to be particularly loyal to their increasingly psychotic master. However, history only repeats itself when people fail to learn from it, and that could not be said of the McKinleys. Whether through fear or finance, Douglas had made sure those entrusted with his protection knew what side their bread was buttered. The plot was foiled, its perpetrators exposed, and Douglas's revenge was truly terrible, for it did not stop at the principals.

He hanged entire families, ruling complicity in the conspiracy by whatever merest connection would suit. Fathers, brothers, wives, children. One boy went to the gallows at eleven years.

Ah, the upper classes. How we look to them for enlightenment and example. Douglas may have spared no effort (or lives) in the family's defence, but as steward of its fortunes he failed to appreciate that there was more to the job, and as such failed the McKinleys dreadfully. As well as damning the name in local regard, his neglect and lack of judgement oversaw a decline in the family's enterprises that his successors struggled in vain to arrest. The hall passed from the McKinleys' hands in 1823, and was not to return to their ownership until Sir Lachlan bought it more than a century and a half later. It did not prove a happy investment - certainly not a long term one - for many of its owners in the intervening time. The place changed hands repeatedly until the 1930s, when the next long shadow fell upon the place in the shape of Magnus Willcraft: aristocrat, composer, former opera-singer, occultist and one-time Aleister Crowley acolyte. Willcraft made no secret that he had sought the place because of its past, though it was questionable whether he considered this more conducive to his dark dabblings or to the enhancement of his personal notoriety. To either end, he had entertained a genuine fascination with the more ancient purposes 131

of the site, and brought in archaeological assistance, excavating both in the grounds and in the foundations. He built down there too, bringing in help from the continent rather than entrust the work - or more pertinently, knowledge of it - to the locals. Nobody in current employ had any idea where these chambers were accessed, far less the inclination to look, given that they were known to have been the venue for Willcraft's occult rites. What his excavations uncovered, he chose not to share, though those scornful of Willcraft's cultivated self-image suggested this meant the answer was nothing. Others were less cynical. Willcraft did revel in his infamy, but was also very private about his personal affairs, particularly what he referred to as his religion. You don't buy a house in the middle of nowhere if you really want to attract attention to yourself, and Willcraft's fiercely guarded privacy provoked much rumour and speculation among the locals.

National curiosity about McKinley Hall took off in the late Sixties due to betrayed loyalties of another kind when, following Willcraft's death, a former lover-cum-disciple sold her tales of subterranean ritual and orgy to a Sunday tabloid. This inevitably opened the rest of the place's squalid past to ghoulish scrutiny, leading to its subsequent purchase in the early Seventies by the rock band Stormcrow, who recorded an album there but didn't survive to see its release, all four of them dying in a tour-bus crash in 1975. This was further proof of the Hall's doomed luck, according to Ger, because it would have been better fortune had their bus crashed
before
they recorded the album. 'Total pish,' he said. 'Pseudo-Satanic claptrap that wouldnae frighten your granny. It was wankers like that who forced the Sex Pistols into being.'

Alison hadn't knowingly heard any of Stormcrow's music, but knew enough to concur with Ger's judgement that they were wankers, as was Willcraft before them. What was it that drew them? Stormcrow, whatever their professed mysticism, were just a bunch of middle-class Oxbridge dropouts, but they must have believed there was something they could tap into here, other than marketing potential. Willcraft before them was not so different: another musician seeking a form of inspiration, tasteless as it was. Did they think there was some lingering spoor to catch scent of, some enduring entity that could guide them in unlocking the secrets of man's darkest inclinations?

She didn't believe there could be something inherently evil about a place. It was bricks and mortar, a point on a map. Evil things had happened here, but that didn't mean any force was compelling them to do so again. Something, however, compelled evil men (and mere wankers) to the scenes of evil deeds. Perhaps it was simply that which caused one horror to be piled upon another on these grounds though they were centuries apart.

Poor Sir Lachlan certainly had his work cut out when he got his hands on the place and stated his intention to rehabilitate more than just the build132

ing. Down in the local village of Auchterbuie, they referred to the restored enterprise as McKinley Revival. There was a heavily ironic tone to it, the sentiment not intended to be encouraging. They clearly didn't fancy Sir Lachlan's chances, given the family's track record with the place, and the story so far wasn't exactly encouraging. It was at least to his credit that despite seeking the tourist's coin, he was determined to blot out the very aspects that might be most likely to attract them. Never mind chasing humps and ripples around a conveniently enormous and opaque loch: this was real Scottish horror, something we did pretty well without having to make up monsters. For all its 'wha's like us' keech, Scotland was actually a country that liked to think it had been spared extremes. While refilling wine glasses, Alison had overheard one of the guests say as much of the UK as a whole: that it had been spared extreme weather and extreme governments. But what, she had wanted to ask, about extreme drinking and extreme ill-health? What about extreme landscape? And what about the extremes of our past: extremes of brutality, of judicial cruelty and torture? What about the obsessions of Jamie the Saxt, the sadistic persecution and retribution in the name of religion? Who was to say there hadn't been other extremes of slaughter, disappeared from history by the convenience of lost ages, like the convenience of miracles and self-resurrecting sons of gods being in a time before reliable documentation. Alison had heard her fellow Scots proudly disavow Britishness in distaste at its connotations of imperialism, conquest and any other national characteristic they'd like to attribute conveniently to the English, but it was a deluded copout. The Scots had brought as much brutality to the table as any of its union partners. There was a joke they told each other but didn't like to share with visitors: what is the definition of a Scottish homosexual? A bloke who's more interested in women than drinking and fighting.

Blood spattered the history of McKinley Hall, stained even the ancient names of the land. The place needed to be exorcised, and if it took the form of silly corporate head-games, then who could complain about that?

Mathieson had been going back and forth from the kitchen for a few minutes, returning each time with crockery that Alison recognised from one of the big display cabinets in the restaurant. She'd never seen it put to use in all the time she'd been here, even on the night there'd been a McKinley family gathering and a celebration menu for Sir Lachlan's birthday. She was grateful for his absences, brief as they were, as she kept catching his eye. Despite his muted conduct, he still seemed to be simmering as the day went on, and she got the feeling that he'd hit boiling point before it was over. She'd spotted him eyeing Ger intently too, but with more wariness than anger, now that the sous-chef had threatened to take himself off the leash.

133

The chef returned once again with another antique dish, placing it on a worktop with the rest, then seemed to be hanging around, doing not much of anything but stare at his two perceived dissidents.