Country of the Blind (12 page)

She looked up from the paper, beginning to tremble, hand turning the lock, eyes frantically scanning the doors that now seemed to loom menacingly before her, having previously merely loitered aimlessly in the hall, like bored teenagers with their hands in their pockets.

63

"Bear in mind that if I meant you any harm I would not be tipping you off before you got to me. Please do not scream, run from the house, telephone the police or do anything else to attract attention. I know you have no reason to trust me at this stage, so I apologise wholeheartedly for having to distress you like this, and ask that when you proceed to your living room, you do not resort to physical violence at least until you have heard what I have to say."

Nicole opened the front door slightly, leaving it ajar to facilitate a quick exit, then began her slow approach to the living room, a distance that had never seemed a quarter of this length before. Her heart had suddenly become sixteen-valve, fuel-injected, thumping viciously in her chest like an alien preparing to make its traditional entrance. In that time-suspended walk, that limbo in the hallway, she changed her mind back and forth a dozen times about whether to turn and run or see what fate awaited in the living room, that snug but twee little pocket with its cheesy old gas fire and fraying hessian on the walls.

Passing a cupboard she remembered the big golf umbrella given her by a friend who had lived in Glasgow for a while, and who had informed her:

"Believe me, what you get in London isn't rain." She took hold of it, comforted by its heft but unsure which end to grasp: the handle, so that she could stab at him with the grey metal tip, or the tip itself, so that she could bear down with the formidably sturdy wood of the handle. She opted for gripping the handle, as a stabbing motion might prove more effective at close quarters, where she would be unlikely to get in much of a swing.

Nicole backed up against the wall opposite the open living room door, seeking the maximum angle of perspective upon who or what lay within, and thus affording herself a few feet more of a start if events dictated that flight was the best option for self-defence. Edging forward ever slower and by decreasing distances, she caught her first glimpses of the room's interior. Coming teasingly into her field of vision first were the closed, snot-green curtains and the dusty magazine rack full of
People's Friends
in the far corner, next to the turd-brown, corduroy-finish armchair that farted up a cloud of dust every time she sat in it. She leaned over, her feet refusing to move any further forward, and saw the far end of the hateful fireplace with its glass cabinets, before a hand came into view. Trying to calm her loud and tremulous breathing, she stretched her head and shoulders still further, a length of black sleeve becoming visible past the doorframe. It led to a shoulder and then a dirty-blond, mop-topped head, at which point she leaned too far and fell over, landing with a crump as the umbrella rolled away from her.

She rolled on to her bottom and scrambled backwards against the wall, looking up to see the intruder before her, ten feet away, standing still in the centre of the room. He loomed tall in her terrified vision, black boots leading 64

to black jeans and a black polo-neck, missing only the ski-mask to complete the effect. Instead there was a face that she would ever after associate with more danger, trouble and chaos than a black balaclava had ever connoted. His posture indicated he was both uncomfortable and impatient, his quizzical face suggesting he was concerned but bemused.

"Let me help you," he said softly, local accent, and began to move towards her.

"Get back. Stay where you are," she warned, grasping the umbrella once more and climbing to her feet by the ungainly method of sliding backwards up the wall.

He put his hands in the air and backed himself against the fireplace.

"I told you," he said, "I mean you no harm. We need to talk. Urgently."

"Well talk," she barked, still trembling but now having added the feeling of clumsy stupidity to her catalogue of discomfiture.

"Can't you come any nearer?" he asked, in a tone that she was furious to realise suggested he thought she was being unreasonable.

"I'll move nearer when I hear something that interests me enough."

The man shrugged.

"Fair enough," he muttered with a sigh. "Would it interest yotl to know that someone tried to kill you today?"

She swallowed, trying to prevent tears from forming. His words seemed to have no meaning, no significance that she could relate to consciously, but somewhere deeper they were making an announcement her whole body was listening to.

"That. . . " she croaked, then cleared her throat and took a couple of quick breaths, "that would interest me. But you'd better not be selling insurance."

"Would that I was," he said flatly. Genuinely.

"H-how do you know someone tried to kill me?"

"I'm the one that saved you."

She stared numbly at him, baffled as to which emotion she should be feeling, and shook her head minutely, open-mouthed as a fight broke out in the impatient queue of questions jostling for the use of her tongue.

"How did. . . ? When. . . ? Why wou. . . ?" She breathed once. "Who's trying to kill me?" won.

The man looked at the floor for a few seconds, weighing up his words, seemingly reluctant but forced to answer.

"Someone who's put a lot of time and effort into convincing the world that Tam McInnes and his pals killed Roland Voss, and who is not very happy about anyone suggesting the contrary."

If there had been any colour left in the pale cistern of her face, then the last words she heard hit the flush lever. She felt the walls lurch around her and 65

slid back to the floor as her legs decided to withdraw cooperation. He started moving towards her again. She shouted and tried to crawl away from him but he was too fast, crouching before her and grabbing her flailing wrists as she struggled, then pinning her left arm against the wall with his elbow as he covered her mouth with his right hand. She tried to look around herself, even to close her eyes, but felt her own gaze drawn into his, intriguing, sympathetic, challenging and penetrating all at once.

"I'm very sorry," he said softly. "I know how hard this must be for you, but unfortunately neither of us has much time for you to get used to it. I know how scared you are, Nicole, but the bottom line is that you're going to have to trust me. If you run out screaming into the street, they'll kill you. If you phone the police, they'll kill you. If you get into your car and drive out of town, they'll kill you. The world as you remember it doesn't exist anymore. You're somewhere over the rainbow and the bad news is the munchkins are not fucking friendly."

He took his hand away from her mouth, let her arms go as the fight went from them.

"Who are you?" she asked in a whisper.

"My name is Jack Parlabane. I'm a journalist. And I'm not here because I believe Tam McInnes is innocent. I'm here because I
know
Tam McInnes is innocent."

66

FOUR

"This is fucked. This is well fucked," Paul muttered nervously, shaking his head and biting his nails. This was a difficult enough combined manoeuvre, but the handcuffs and the random rock and sway of the bus added an unwanted element of challenge. The effect was more cheese-grater than emery board, and his fingers looked like something the dog had found round the back of the butcher's. His eyes were bloodshot from fatigue, fear and a rationed allowance of self-pity, his throat sore and swollen from the sustained effort of not crying. Tam McInnes looked over at his son from the seat opposite, feeling gagged by the sense of futility that shouted down every word of reassurance he could think to say. Even the desire to reach out and place a paternal hand on the distressed young man's shoulder was made less difficult by the handcuffs than by the notion that he had long forfeited the right and ability to play the wise and protective father. Nonetheless, he hadn't forfeited the right to have a go, so he shuffled across the narrow aisle and sat on the orange squeaky vinyl seat.

"Haw. What's goin' on back there?" shouted their guard, looking up from his
Daily Record
and interrupting his gloat over the prospect of Rangers' latest European misadventure. The young policeman had given up on playing the Imperial Stormtrooper and had sat down, loosening the strap on his semiautomatic so that it lay across his lap under the dismal tabloid.

"Ach, leave them alone for fuck's sake," barked Bob Hannah. "Can you no see the boy's upset?"

"He'll be mair upset if I've to come up there," came the retort, with the unconvincing and clumsily wielded authority that marked low-ranking British officialdom in all its manifestations, from menopausal primary teachers to nervous screws and bum-fluff polismen.

"Aye, he'll be fuckin' shattered," said Bob witheringly. The guard got up from his seat and began to move forward. Bob held his cuffed hands out together before him, palms up.

"Look, son," he said quietly. "After everythin' we've been through recently, and everythin' we're up against, the only way you could scare that boy is if you threaten to make him visit
your
dentist. Do yoursel' a favour. Sit back 67

doon and read your paper."

Bumfluff stopped, frowning, and began backing away again, with a but-thisis-your-last-warning wag of his finger. He leaned back against the darkened glass panel that partitioned off the driver's cab and picked his
Daily Record
back up, a look of intense puzzlement and concentration on his face. Tam half-expected to see his lips move as he read.

"So is the boy afraid of dentists, like?" Bumfluff eventually asked. Bob rolled his eyes and swallowed back a dozen obvious comments.

"Eh, aye," he stated, and looked away, shaking his head.

"What's the matter, son?" Tam asked, nudging Paul with his shoulder. 'Is it the fact that we're all gaunny spend the rest of our lives in the jile, or is it just that your seat's no very comfy?"

Paul laughed involuntarily, the tension finding its own way out whenever it saw a gap.

"Naw," he said, glancing at the blacked-out windows. "It's the view."

Tam smiled and caught his son's eye. Paul's partaking in the time-honoured Scottish denial-therapy of bullets-bounce-off-me humour had been a brave gesture, drawing on God knew how depleted reserves, and had been as much for his father's benefit as for his own. But in Paul's look Tam saw that the time for blame and accusation was gone, or at least postponed. And for the first time in Christ knew how long, neither was ashamed to admit he needed the other.

Paul was, understandably, the most visibly disturbed of the four. He had been the force of sustaining energy in the preceding days and weeks, giving himself up to possession by a desperate nihilism and a sometimes cacklingly black enthusiasm for the pervading absurdity of it all. A man so violently hurled towards the end of his tether can sometimes gain propulsion from the whiplash. And when Paul wasn't acting like it was the ride of his life, he was acting like he didn't believe it was real, so maybe that made the crash all the more violent when he went into the ante-room and found out just how real it was.

Tam feared he would never look at his son's face again without remembering that look of horror and incomprehension as Paul sat on the carpet, the choking, gurgling man lying back in his arms, bleeding to death all over him, four feet from the body of the man's similarly slaughtered wife. Tam wasn't entirely sure what day it was now, how long had passed since that moment. Panic, confusion, flight, pursuit, polis, interrogation, guards, guns, and now this van/bus affair with its frustratingly blacked-out windows and waftingly intermittent smell of stale pish and diesel fumes. The creaking hulk had been the site of their joyless and pale-faced reunion after separation in the cells and interview rooms, a few minutes' stilted conversation enough 68

to establish that none of them knew any more than the rest, and that their cumulative knowledge was far from extensive.

The bus had been backed up to the covered walkway at the rear of the police station, the reverberating bleeps and white noise of radios punctuating the hubbub from beyond the open door at the vehicle's tail as they sat and waited for unseen forces to once more decide where to place their four playthings.

". . . kidding? More than a wee bit unusual," Tam had heard a polisman

- carrying the somehow very British combination of a sub-machine gun and a clipboard - say to a man in plain clothes as the pair passed the door and walked around to the side of the bus.

"It's not the fuckin' corporation number nine. I mean, do you realise who I've got in this bus?"

"And do
you
realise who's signed this order?"

Which had apparently been the decisive statement in the argument. Shortly after that, the greasy-haired wee scrote with the rifle and the
Record
had boarded from the rear, before the door was closed and locked from outside by the polisman with the clipboard, who then climbed into the cab up front beside the driver, placing his own weapon on the wide, shelf-like dashboard with a heavy thump.

"Where are we goin'?" Bob asked the scrote as the engine struggled bronchiticatly into life.

"It's a mystery tour," the scrote sneered. "You'll find out when you get there."

The bus had pulled away with a couple of unsure jolts and had jiggled its miserable contents over a couple of speed bumps before picking up pace with a clunky change of gear and a determined growl from the engine. Tam had sat staring ahead, trying to make out the road through the heavily tinted panel behind the driver's head, but the monochrome kaleidoscope of metamorphosing shapes in the glass only strained his vision. Bob turned round briefly, rolling his eyes and sighing.

To Bob's right, Spammy sat - or more accurately had deposited himself; sitting entailed more coordination than Spammy was generally prepared to apply - and bobbed his head to an imaginary soundtrack, seemingly as oblivious as it was possible to be without ascending beyond the realm of the physical. Tam shook his head as he looked at him. In fact, Tam shook his head almost every time he looked at him.