Country of the Blind (17 page)

"Someone who saw that interview feared Lafferty had clocked he was being set up, or at least that he knew
something
, so his 'suicide' had to be brought forward before he did or said anything that might blow the gaffe. Any money you like, they'll wait until the hysteria has died down over the use of cyanide and the possibility of the fucking martians being behind it all - then they'll leak the Lafferty-Hoods connection and use it to put a firm lid on the whole thing."

"Okay, okay," she said, holding a hand up, eyes narrowed in concentration.

"I understand. And it sounds logical, if not entirely plausible - although I'm beginning to lose my grasp on the meaning of that word. But, well, how can I put this? I realise that this Donald Lafferty was a friend of yours, and I mean no offence, but could your friendship possibly be clouding your judgment?"

He creased his brow, looking more quizzical than annoyed, his silence beckoning her to elaborate.

"It's just that you seem very convinced he had no part in it whatsoever. Obviously, in light of recent developments I'm aware that Donald Lafferty wasn't where the buck stopped, but I've got to ask this: if he's the ex-cop with all the information, de-blah de-blah de-blah, and the men in custody are. . . who they are, is it possible that Lafferty was being leaned on to set this thing up in just the same way as McInnes et al were leaned on to carry it out?"

"No," he said blankly.

"And why not?"

"Because it would be pointless, an unnecessary extra remove. If you're setting some guys up to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you just do it - yourself. You make as few people party to a conspiracy as possible, and you certainly don't
force
someone else to do it, because he could double-cross you, tip off the patsies, tip off the cops."

"But what if he was party to the conspiracy - or thought he was - and it's
he
who was double-crossed later on?"

He gave a little dry laugh and shook his head.

"All right, fair enough," he said, "although he was my friend, I'll admit that nobody can say for certain whether someone is capable of murder - but I
can
say that he wasn't fucking stupid. If he was setting up somebody to take the fall, he'd hardly pick guys with a traceable connection to himself. Do you see?

92

Contrary to how the world is supposed to read it, it's the fact that McInnes and Hannah are involved that tells me Donald had
nothing
to do with it."

"So how long had you known him?" Nicole asked, sitting on the edge of her armchair, unable to prevent her eyes straying occasionally towards the closecurtained windows, out of which Parlabane had expressly forbidden her to peek. He had a shattered look about him almost every time he mentioned Lafferty's name, and she sensed it was bothering him to talk about him only in this painful context. Her resentment of him was subsiding in the sight of his own hurt; before that she had felt angry that he was removed and immune from the anarchy he was unveiling.

They had moved back to the living room upon his suggestion, on the dual grounds that firstly, to their outside observers, Nicole had spent an awful lot longer in the kitchen than was normal for dinner for one, and that secondly, the wooden chairs were becoming literally a pain in the arse.

"Since adolescence, really," he said. "I was a 'budding young hack' - actually office dogsbody on the newsdesk - and he was your actual rookie polisman. I got talking to him at the scene of a major crime incident: couple of teenagers had hijacked an icecream van and gone joyriding through a scheme in Nitshill, firing balls of it at the windscreens of passing cars. When they ran out of soft scoop they moved on to oysters and nougat wafers. It wasn't a pretty sight."

His eyes glinted with a symbiotic combination of pleasure and sadness at the memory.

"Misunderstood youth. A cry for help," Nicole offered with a smile, pleased and relieved that her facial muscles still remembered the drill.

"Well, they were certainly crying for help when the drivers started turning round and giving chase. This was Nitshill. Icecream scoops are notoriously difficult to retrieve from the lower intestine. Anyway, I bumped into him a couple of nights later at the Apollo."

"A club?"

"No, the erstwhile greatest music venue in the world. The Skids were playing and I was reviewing it. As I was getting paid to be there, I was probably supposed to be sitting in the circle, scribbling contemplatively in my notebook. Instead I was down the front - although not that near; the stage was about twelve feet high so you had to stand back to see anything - engaging in activities known in the modern parlance, I believe, as 'moshing'. There was the usual tangle of bodies - you just grabbed on to someone in the crowd and burled around for a bit. At the end of
Into The Valley
I found that I was hanging on to Donald. We went for a few after the show and it kind of started from there.

93

"We weren't bosom buddies, like. We just met up every so often, usually for gigs, occasionally just for a few beers. I never knew much about his personal life; I know you're probably condemning this as a guy thing, but there are some pals you meet up with and discuss anything, and others with whom you stick to. . . I don't know, established common ground. We talked rock'n'roll, work and a bit of football. We stayed kind of in touch as we got older; despite climbing the ranks and having to be generally respectable, Donald could still occasionally be tempted along to a show, usually some bunch from the old days that really should have chucked it by then. Irresistible allure of nostalgia for the aging male who's pining for lost youth. How the hell else could SLF

and The Buzzcocks sell out venues in the late 1980s?"

He leaned back on the settee, running a hand through his uncooperative locks.

"I went to work in London for a few years and then Los Angeles for a couple more, and I guess we had probably forgotten about each other. It's a bit difficult after all that time to just call up like it's been a fortnight, even on the off-chance that you do have the phone number. Then a few months back I met him in Edinburgh out of the blue, outside the Usher Hall - Big Country had been playing; Skids connection. We went to a pub nearby and caught up a wee bit. He told me he was no longer in the police; he was working as a security adviser on some kind of government project. He wouldn't say what or where; and to be honest, I'd have been the last person he would tell, if he was doing his job properly."

"I can't think why."

"I got his address and phone number. I was kind of in the middle of moving into a new place with my girlfriend at the time and we didn't have a phone number yet, so I said I'd forward it when I knew. Of course I didn't, but I had his, and when you see someone after more than five years, it's pretty easy to wait six months before ringing them up again."

Nicole looked disapprovingly at him.

"Look," he said defensively. "Wait until you're at least ten years older before you start getting judgmental about this kind of thing. Anyway, the next time I saw him was on the TV last night."

"On the six o'clock news?"

"No. The morbid action replay on
Newsnight
after he was dead."

"God, that's how you found out? I'm sorry."

"Ach," he said, dismissing the need for any ministrations of sympathy.

"No, that must have been a horrible shock. Believe me, I'm becoming something of an authority. And I'm sorry for pressing the idea that he might have been in on the Voss thing."

"It was a fair point at the time."

94

"Still sorry. It was just that when you mentioned his appearance on the news, I thought. . . well, he said some rather odd things, and I wondered if what he said might have been some kind of message or code after all. That the. . . bad guys. . . knew what he meant because he had been, I don't know, somehow one of them."

Parlabane sat up, that sad smile on his lips and in his eyes again, like when he had spoken about first meeting Lafferty.

"'I haven't had time to catch up on developments at this end of the arena',"

he recited. "'It's not as if I've been sitting around listening to my favourite music, although a lot more people should.'"

"Yes, that was it, that was what he said."

"It
was
a message," he stated firmly, causing her to sit up and even to hold her breath. "Donald would have been trying to work out what the fuck happened all night. Examining the scene, the grounds, talking to the cops. . . all that stuff. Trying to explain how someone so successfully circumvented all of his security systems, trying to deduce what failure had allowed four people to be slaughtered in cold blood. At some point he'd have found out who was being held, and we can only guess at what else he might have discovered. But whatever he suspected, he could see that he was being manoeuvred into the frame, and unlike McInnes he couldn't pre-empt the accusation. He knew they had him done up like the proverbial kipper, and very possibly that the culprits had heavyweight police connections. I doubt if even
he
suspected they would kill him, but he knew he was going down, alongside the four stooges.

"He needed an advocate, someone on the outside. He needed someone to start searching for what really happened at Craigurquhart House before the conspirators had covered their tracks and completed the job of framing up their scapegoats. Someone he could trust, someone who would believe him. Someone with a track record for tenacious, exhaustive and frequently illegal methods of investigation."

"Someone in black, perhaps?"

"These are just my working clothes. Try breaking into someplace in faded denims and a white T-shirt and you'll be counting the seconds before you hear sirens. But yes, you're right."

"And someone whose phone number he didn't have."

"Correct. So he got a message across the only way he could, a message he knew only I would understand - though he probably knew he was also inviting the bad guys to burgle his flat and rifle through his record collection."

"So what does it mean? What was his favourite music?"

"Lately? No idea. Once upon a time, I don't know, The Skids, The Boomtown Rats, The Police, Undertones."

95

She felt the pain returning behind her eyes. He was regressing once more into inscrutability.

He reached for his duffel bag and rummaged inside it, then produced a battered and aged-looking white cassette, minus cover, which he threw to her.

"Clue was in what he said beforehand. 'At this end of the arena'," Parlabane explained. "Skids had a song called Arena. Donald loved it. We both did. Well, not the whole song. Verses and chorus were ploddingly awful, and the lyrics were among the most excruciatingly pompous, pretentious and downright stupid that Richard Jobson ever wrote - and believe me, that's saying something."

"Richard Jobson?"

"Yes. For it was he. Self-styled Aryan-Olympian-Dunfermlian post-punk poet, fashion model, ubiquitous TV star etcetera etcetera. Like I said, most of the song is absolute bollocks. But after the second chorus, it gets interesting. Play it."

Nicole put the tape into the hefty but purportedly portable cassette and CD player on the mantelpiece, momentarily nervous that Parlabane's geriatric tape would give it the audio equivalent of a sexually transmitted disease. He had cued it up at the right place, and she pushed up the volume as the sound began to break through.

She glanced briefly at him, but he was staring fixedly at the machine, either urging her attention or aware of the awkwardness of not knowing where to look when two people are concentrating on simply listening to something. The recently abused chorus was ending, and the song broke down to just a synth sound and a tentative, creeping bass for a few bars. The synth riff was repeated as a rhythm guitar surfaced somewhere, a dry sound like helicopter blades chopping overhead. Then a lead guitar entered quietly, snaking around the synth and growing gradually louder in the mix as the hypnotic melody circled again and again and drums began to pulse in the distance, getting ever clearer, ever nearer.

She felt a thrilling sense of anticipation as the orchestration expanded and each of the instruments grew louder, her desire for the song to reveal its hidden secret enhanced by the dramatic and teasing build-up. The tension reached breaking point and the toms suddenly gave way to snare, the lead guitar screaming in, full-blooded, to take up the riff introduced by the synth, a crashing wave of sound and emotion. Somewhere she could see the man in black, younger than her, swaying and waving in a bacchae of sweating bodies beneath the swelter of stage lights.

There was a voice, somewhere, lost amidst the storm. She was about to reach for the volume control again when she realised that, like what had gone before it, the voice would grow stronger and louder in passing cycles. 96

Other voices joined it on each pass, their tune now defined but the lyrics still agonisingly obscured.

With the next repetition, she
thought
she had made out what was being said, and it was a possibility that stopped her breath until the next pass confirmed it.

The voices were singing the same words over and over. Over and over.

"All the boys are innocent."

"Well, if this isn't what he meant, it's a hell of a coincidence," Nicole admitted.

"Yeah. Either that or I've picked the wrong song and someone called Albert Tatlock is getting away with murder."

"What?"

"Never mind. Skids joke. Let's get going."

Nicole shifted in her seat, straining momentarily against the belt to glance up at the buildings as the car passed beneath them, the looming glass towers slalomed by the motorway incongruously futuristic amidst the dignified age of the terraces, domes and spires. The night was crisply still and clear, the waters of the Clyde black, motionless and reflective as the vehicle crossed a hundred feet above.

She felt sharply awake despite the late hour and the unusual rigours of a long and unprecedentedly distressing day, brightly alive to the beauty of the city by night. As they passed through the centre of it, she felt they had the place to themselves, so deserted were the roads, pavements, buildings and even the motorway.