Country of the Blind (11 page)

She nodded and smiled, feeling a welcome moment of comfort as some aspect of solidity, of reassurance returned.

"They never hurt anyone," she said.

"Exactly. Not the proverbial fly. Not then, not before, not since. No knives and no guns. Not even a big stick with a nail through it. But that's only half the point. The reason I sanctioned your wee publicity tour yesterday was that, knowing what I did about McInnes, it seemed at least
plausible
that somebody might enlist his services forcibly or otherwise - if they wanted to burgle a country mansion, especially if they had inside knowledge that someone as moneyed as Voss would be filling the wardrobes for a few days. And the kind of coercion he's described made sense because as far as I know, Tam McInnes has never committed another burglary since back then, and would be unlikely to be tempted, whatever the potential rewards. What doesn't make sense is murder. Even discounting our generous opinions of Tam's character and 58

morality, the fact is, you don't hire a joiner to fix a burst pipe.

"Now, this suicide business might suggest there's someone else lurking in the background, but to us that's irrelevant. Whether no-one else was behind it or Ernst Stavro fucking Blofeld was behind it, no matter what might have gone wrong, no matter what happened in that bedroom on Sunday night, Tam McInnes went into Craigurquhart House to rob the place. Why there were four corpses behind him when he left is something we aren't going to find out without actually talking to him, so until we're allowed to do that I'd suggest we both distract our tired minds with other matters."

"Like what?" Nicole said apprehensively.

"In your case, this morning, a Mr McCandlish, an octogenarian who, if he's being consistent, probably wishes to sue whoever is top of the charts for plagiarising a radio jingle he wrote thirty-odd years ago. According to the senior partners, he used to do a lot of this in the Sixties, and everyone had assumed he'd died or given up. Unfortunately bands like The Stone Roses and Oasis came along in recent years, and by ripping off the songs he got upset about back then, they've inadvertently set him off again. Good luck."

The fear and the uncertainty, the high stakes and the precipitous sense of danger drifted away as the morning went on, and it wasn't down to the soothing qualities of the music she was forced to listen to. Mr McCandlish had brought along the most dilapidated-looking item of audio equipment she had ever seen, a bulky, bakelite reel-to-reel tape player that gave off a worryingly smoky smell as its spindles turned with arthritic labour and a syncopated squeaking. It looked heavy enough to have induced a heart attack in the wiry and animatedly cantankerous old soul in his efforts to transport it upstairs to the office, but unfortunately he was made of sterner stuff than he looked. To illustrate his point, he played each jingle three or four times on the reel-to-reel before resorting to his other museum piece, the oldest functioning micro-cassette player in existence, for a tinny rendition of the offending lines or bridge from the suspect song. As he insisted on singing the corresponding couplet from his allegedly plagiarised jingle over the top of the later composition, Nicole felt he was somewhat prejudicing the demonstration, although the chorus from Oasis's "Don't Look Back In Anger" did have spooky echoes of the McCandlish-penned "Buy Mulligan's tripe - the stuff that you'll like". Nicole was as polite and constructive as she could manage, but the meeting ended in what she was beginning to consider familiar (and inevitable) acrimony when she felt bound to point out that Mr McCandlish's jingles had last been aired some years before Noel Gallagher's birth - and even then only in central Scotland.

59

"It's a conspiracy!" he declaimed, before the door closed with its now equally familiar slam.

The only re-intrusion of her greater concerns came in the form of Finlay Campbell, sticking his head around the door and asking for The Envelope.

"I'm sorry, I don't have it," she told him. "In fact, I don't think I've had it since yesterday morning, before I went through to Edinburgh."

"Bugger," he winced. "Ach, never bother. I was really just asking on the offchance. I can't find it and if you had it, it would have saved rooting through that office of mine. Look, I've got to nip out for a few hours. Could you ask Linda to hunt for it when she comes back from the stationers? It's buried in there somewhere, along with Lord Lucan, Shergar and the Stone of Destiny, probably."

"Will do."

He had driven around the block a couple of times, looking for the car. He had the make, colour and reg number, but between the one-way system and the parking restrictions, there was no guarantee it would be anywhere near the office. Someone was pulling out of a space close to the corner of the junction opposite the building, so he flipped the indicator to left instead of right and manoeuvred into the spot. He had a good view of the main entrance from there, and unless there was a back door he would see her coming out; with any luck she would be having to feed a meter somewhere, so he could follow her. He wouldn't intercept her then; he'd find out where the car was and weigh up the options for when she returned.

He had the home address, courtesy of his invaluable police contacts, but that was a last resort, as you never knew who might be watching. And for all his experience, getting in might not be a picnic. He was sure he could manage it, but if it came to that he'd have to make sure he left no trace. If she came in and spotted something that told her all was not as it should be, she might panic, freak out screaming before he could get to her, and then he would have all sorts of inconveniences to deal with.

There was a noise from across the road, the reluctant grind of a stiff and heavy iron window frame being laboriously swung open to let in some air. Looking up at the first floor he noticed with a shock that it was her. He glanced down at the picture on the front of this morning's paper, inset into the bigger one of Lafferty, for a final confirmation. She stood with one hand on the frame for a moment, letting the smoggy but cool breeze fan her face and hair, then retreated further inside.

He experienced a curious feeling of disbelief that she could appear so ignorant of her predicament, of being watched. There seemed such an intimacy about it, the way it placed her in his grasp, that it seemed impossible she 60

couldn't feel anything through her part of it. Such ignorance, such vulnerability made her seem puny and frail. Maybe it was this perceived weakness that made the predator despise the prey.

A man emerged from the main entrance, striding purposefully on to the road as the lights changed to let him cross, looking like he might have been visiting Manson & Boyd to enlist them in preparing a claim against whichever incompetents had advised him on his haircut and jacket. He cut diagonally across the junction, past the car, and disappeared into a narrow gap between two buildings on the smaller road that crossed West Regent Street going north. A few minutes later he was in front of the car again, but this time behind the wheel of a large, blue BMW which had apparently emerged from nowhere. The traffic lights changed and the BMW took off at speed. He got out of his car and headed towards the gap that the sartorial casualty had disappeared into, and discovered that it concealed the entrance to an underground permit-holders-only car park.

He ducked under the card-operated barrier and trod quietly down the tightly spiralling ramp, on the balls of his feet. Sticking his head around the last bend he saw four lines of cars, two rows back-to-back in the middle, each facing another row against opposite walls. At the nearest corner was a yawning gap, presumably left by the BMW upon its exit.

He continued inside, his already light footfalls muted further by the lagging material on the low ceiling, and spotted the car he was looking for, one space from the far end of the row against the right-hand wall. He was about to approach when he saw something that made him grateful for his stealth. There was a pair of trainer-shod feet between the front wheels of the red Golf, the right one twitching arhythmically, like a nervous tic. He then heard a dull but unmistakably metallic sound, some weighty and solid steel implement being placed on the concrete floor, and the scrape-cum-rattle of another being dragged a few inches before being picked up.

He retreated from the subterranean chamber with continued caution, returning to his car and scanning the pavements now for a different vehicle. There it was.

"Cowan's Garage," advertised an anaemically off-white Escort van, the paintwork of the sign in far better condition than that of the bodywork. "Breakdown recovery and on-road repair service."

Hmmm, he thought.

He took note of the address and telephone number, picked up his portable and began to dial.

Nicole sat in the traffic queue and regretted for the nth time that her geo61

graphical grasp of the city was so poor, and that she had neither taken steps to rectify this, nor even explored an alternative route home from work. She had decided that whoever planned and designed the Kingston Bridge must have had an abiding love of the Clyde and the Glasgow skyline, enough to devise a feature that would not only afford people a magnificent perspective upon it, but hours and hours to enjoy the view without such distractions as having to push the accelerator and move forward.

"Does it improve when there are no roadworks?" she had asked Linda, Finlay Campbell's secretary.

"I wouldn't know," she replied. "I've only been driving for twenty years."

She switched on the car stereo but was instantly irritated by the mid-Atlantic accent that seemed to be a standard requirement of DJs on Scottish music stations, wishing that the mid-Atlantic was where this particular drive-time jock was right now, preferably without the assistance of anything buoyant. She turned the dial a few degrees and heard the more authentically Scottish accent of a female newsreader.

". . . ritage Secretary said he would be fighting the proposal tooth and nail, saying it wasn't for Brussels to impose its own low standards on Great Britain.

"Detectives in Glasgow are appealing for more witnesses after a man was found stabbed to death in Partick this afternoon. The man, who has not been named until relatives are informed, is believed to have been the victim of a mugging. Police say a wallet was discovered close to where the body was found, and one witness saw two youths running from the scene. . . "

Nicole reached in front of the gearstick and grabbed a tape from a compartment cluttered with torn pieces of roadmaps, flyers removed from beneath her wiperblades, and gradually biodegrading travel sweets, which were working slowly to bind all the surrounding constituents into one amorphous paper and plastic nest. The various sensations of slimy stickiness and fluffy dust on different digits triggered a vague, finger-wagging guilt about how long it had been since she last cleaned the interior or exterior of the vehicle. She slammed the cassette into the player and the radio was silenced, replaced by the wobbly sounds of an ancient compilation tape. She always felt bad about switching off disturbing news; it sometimes seemed the least you could do was listen to what was going on, as you weren't the one having to cope with the tragedy first-hand. But there had been a little too much death on her plate over the last few days, and stories of murder and violence, especially in Glasgow, made her that bit more nervous now that she was living alone, and in a city where she really had no-one to turn to. She glanced to her side and took one hand off the wheel to push down the doorlock button. The sound quality began to improve at roughly the same time as the traffic, and she was allowed to move out of first gear occasionally as the conditions 62

gradually cleared. She found herself giggling as an old Stone Roses track rasped through the speakers. It hadn't been one of those under scrutiny today, but she couldn't help wondering whether it had an unknown subliminal precursor in a Sixties pile-ointment commercial.

Reaching the stretch that climbed gently alongside the twin glass towers of Scotland Street School, she cranked up the volume as she was finally able to move up the gears and put her foot down, the swell of the power chords and the surge of acceleration bringing a liberating sense of escape. A couple of hundred yards back on the M8, another driver was rather surprised and more than a little disappointed not to see Nicole die in a horrific fireball, as her car quite inexplicably failed to go out of control and plough into the back of the slowing traffic ahead.

The action of her key in the lock was not as smooth as usual - there seeming to be a grinding sensation as it turned and she pushed the door open. First signs of it buggering up, she feared, remembering a frustrated few hours waiting for a locksmith on the doorstep of her former home in Blackheath, after she and her flatmates had concertedly ignored the ancient Chubb's progressive deterioration. She would have vowed to get this one seen to right away but for the fact that she was renting this place and would probably be out of it in a few weeks, and that there was a white sheet of A4 staring up at her from the screaming red swirly-patterned carpet.

It was lying several feet from the door, a lot further away than her mail usually came to rest, even allowing for a certain distance of gliding. What was more suspicious was that it was dead straight, uncreased and equidistant from the hallway's two bubonically Anaglyptaed walls. And if its improbable positioning wasn't enough to draw maximum attention to itself, it also bore the words "READ THIS NOW NICOLE" in large, handwritten capitals across the top.

She put her bag on the floor as she knelt to pick it up, her heart beginning involuntarily to pound as her mind raced to anticipate the possibilities. She began reading as she stood upright again, her hand reaching automatically for the small brass knob on the door, although which side of it she planned to put herself before locking it was unfamiliarly in the balance.

"I have written this so as not to alarm you," it began, with unconscious irony, "as this warning should lessen the shock when you discover that there is an intruder in your flat."