Country of the Blind (30 page)

"Now before you get too excited, Scoop, the suits have reined this in tight, because they don't want conspiracy theorists like your good self coming in 168

their jeans. Patted the cops on the head for being observant, but assured everyone that it was a different bus, that they've got documentation for both vehicles' schedules, and that according to the paperwork, the Voss prisoners'

bus didn't stop at Crammond. It just crossed the Forth and went on into the sweet by-and-by."

"So they're saying this guy's wrong about the registration?" Parlabane said incredulously. "About his own wife's initials?"

"No. He only remembered the last three letters. It wouldn't be such a huge coincidence, because if the prison service bought a few vehicles from the same manufacturer at once, they
would
have the same last three letters. So yes, there could have been two identical buses with near-identical plates driving out of Edinburgh last night."

"But there could also have been only the one, with a fifth prisoner on board that nobody's supposed to know about."

"Yes, Jack. Theoretically. But if you're speculating about a conspiracy to frame McInnes and his mates on the kind of scale that could facilitate all this. . .

I mean, why don't we have a planted murder weapon, why don't we have a bloody knife or a smoking gun? And why would there be a fifth prisoner smuggled aboard the bus?"

"Why else? To cause the crash. To carry out the killings, same as at Craigurquhart," he said, as if astonished she didn't recognise it as the most screamingly obvious thing in the world. "To murder the driver and the guards then fuck off, leaving the four mugs to take the blame. Again."

Jenny looked away momentarily, calming herself in a fashion much practised in conversations with Parlabane.

"Well, tell me this, Scoop," she said, voice trembling slightly with latent frustrated rage. "Just why the hell would they want the guards and the driver dead? And why would these evil conspirators want their whipping boys to escape?"

"You've just told me," he said quietly, unsurely, as if answering the question for himself rather than for her. Bad sign. Lightbulb-above-the-head moment.

"What?"

He was quickly losing the colour that his excitement and indignation had stoked up. She was witnessing the bizarre Parlabane thought-process in full, insane, runaway-train-with-a-madman-at-the-controls tilt. She braced herself.

"You don't have enough," he said, somehow to the air in front of Jenny than to her face directly. "The cops don't have enough. But the public already think these guys are guilty and are crying out for blood. If they escape and kill a few more people, then go on the run with a bunch of stolen guns, it pisses all over any confession you could squeeze out of them in an interview room."

169

"Aye, but this time they can actually point a finger at someone else when it gets to court."

Parlabane shook his head gravely, swallowing nervously.

"There won't be a court case if the suspects are all dead."

Jenny started to get up. "You're out of your fucking mind, this time," she said.

"They're seen to kill Voss, they're seen to kill the policemen. . . "

"You've got a personal involvement, Jack. Your pal died. Your judgment's doo-lally."

". . . they go on the run, a danger to the public, they're hunted down and killed, there's an inquiry but no real investigation. . . "

"You're losing it, Jack. Take a holiday. Get Sarah to prescribe you something."

". . . and the bad guys live happily ever after."

"I've got to go."

Jenny was still fizzing as she got into her car and drove off. He was insane. This time he was totally, eye-bogglingly, twisty-head bonkers. His friend had died, and that was upsetting, but he was over the edge, in a way that perhaps only Parlabane could be.

She sped out of Broughton Street and across Queen Street, cutting off some toss in a Probe, which was either the most or least self-consciously named car in automotive history; she could never decide which.

No wonder she had walked out. It was ludicrous. If Parlabane's mind was usually like a Gary Larson cartoon, then today it must look like the one with all the cows, dinosaurs, snakes and hornrim-bespectacled matrons piled shamblingly on top of one another in the cluttered frame, the words "Out of order"

tacked across the picture.

Then the thought began, and she wanted to scream and shout it down; it was something she wanted to blot out, pretend she hadn't heard, but inside, in the place of painful honesty and self-knowledge, she knew it was like a cancer whose development was inexorable once it had started. And it
had
started. She could fight it, but somehow fighting it always became a stimulant part of the process of its growth.

She had walked out on him, something she had never done. But then he had never come out with something quite so outrageous - it was a time for new precedents.

So why didn't she argue the case? Why didn't she laugh him down or agree to disagree? Why did she up and leave, and why so suddenly? Because his case was too irrational to argue against. Because he had equally suddenly 170

postulated an idea that was insulting to her intelligence and her sense of reality. Or something.

But did she walk out. . .

shut up shut up shut up shut up

. . . or was she running away?

Was the reason she had reacted so dismissively to Parlabane's theory - to the extent of leaving so that she didn't have to listen to it any more (like a big wean holding her ears and shouting) - not because she didn't think it could be true, but because she didn't think she could handle it if it was? That if he was right, she would have to deal with it? That she was part of it?

She thought of the atmosphere around the station this week, the suspicion, the secrecy, the feelings of impotence and imposition. The suits, the spooks. The contradictions. The rumours. The inconsistencies. The fear. So if Parlabane was right, then her world was suddenly a very scary place. But still. How could he be right? Maybe these four guys didn't kill Voss, and maybe whoever did would have a reason to try and kill the lawyers because it would ruin their frame-up. But Lafferty? Murdered rather than suicide, in the station, in HQ? And the bus crash? Christ, how high would this thing have to go for them to pull off what he was suggesting? It would be ludicrous, ridiculous, it would be. . .

Terrifying.

She thought of the dead-eyed bastard, MI5 big-noise that was calling the shots. Knight was his name. Bomber, the cops in the station had nicknamed him. Whose call was the prisoner transfer, Parlabane had asked. His.

What was it Callaghan heard from Crammond? Two suits, English, unknown to anyone local. Very hush-hush. No-one knew where they had come from or who the prisoner was, or where he was being taken. And no-one was supposed to ask. Didn't come inside, just waited for the bus in their big black car.

MI5. ID, authority. . . documentation.

Christ.

She had to take a deep breath before walking back into the station, fearing that her mind could be read, hoping she didn't look too pale or that God forbid she was trembling. But when she got to her desk, there was a comfort and security about the familiarity of it all, and her own chair would be a more stable position from which to put what she had heard - and thought - into perspective.

Then Callaghan came over and told her that Robert Hannah had been shot dead by detectives late this morning, having come at them with a pistol. 171

It took less than ten minutes for the phone to ring.

"You know who this is."

"Cunt."

"I take it you've heard, then."

"You know, one day you're going to be wrong, Scoop, and I'm going to enjoy it
so
much."

"Who killed my friend, Jenny?"

"Working on it."

172

NINE

Tam sniffed back tears and catarrh, sighed and took another drink from the receptacle proffered patiently by Spammy. Spammy had found the Irn-Bru can lying discarded at the bottom of a wide tree-stump, which jutted out of the ground to a height of about three feet, and had either been used as a stool or a table by the vessel's previous owner. He had explained to Paul that the small metal item had profound ideological significance. Oh Christ, Paul had thought.

It was proof, Spammy said, that those bobble-hatted rambler wankers aren't quite as self-righteously green and eco-friendly when they're halfway up a mountain and nobody can see them. To Paul's immense relief, he left it at that and went off in search of a burn so that he could fill it. Paul heard his dad's approach before he saw him. They had found a spot high on the ridge, as instructed, which afforded a good view of all approach routes, but he hadn't been on the lookout at the time, not really expecting Tam to have made it this far yet. He heard a panting - heaving, hurried breaths -

and the regular but rapid thud of running feet. Crouching low behind a tree, he looked down the slope and saw Tam clambering towards him, driving forward desperately, erratically, the protest of his exhaustion seemingly silenced by the need to keep moving.

Paul saw the tears as his dad drew closer, thinking at first that they were the drawings of the crisp, cool breeze from wide, uncovered eyes. Tam now sat on Spammy's tree-stump, holding Spammy's ideologically significant can. When he had finally stopped running, the cumulative anger of his abused limbs had dropped him to his knees, and then to prostration, gasping and moaning, lacking the breath to voice what was wrong. Tam handed Spammy back the can and stared at the ground. No-one had spoken since his staccato splutterings, the horrifying facts delivered in wheezy, one-word issues. Neither Paul nor Spammy seemed to know whether they should say anything before Tam broke his own silence, if they could actually find anything to say.

It was the bleakest, coldest silence Paul had ever known, leaving each of them alone with the torment of their thoughts and imaginings. 173

"He started to run," Tam eventually said, eyes gazing forward, into the shadows and the trees. His voice was low and slightly questioning, as if he was having difficulty understanding his own words. "He couldnae run, no really. That's what was even queerer. He was walkin' towards them, givin'

himself up, then he started to run. Hauf-bouncin' on that big pole he had. Why did he run?"

"Mibbe he saw they had guns," Paul offered.

Tam grimaced, shaking his head. "Mibbe. But I never saw them pull a gun until the last minute. Besides, he'd have been expectin' guns - he'd have known
they
suspect
we
might have guns fae the bus, unless they've found that wee shite an' his pal. Ach, fuck knows. Whatever, he saw somethin' that scared the hell oot him, an. . . "

He shook his head, wiped at his bloodshot eyes again. Tam clamped his lips together, and though he said nothing, Paul knew he was thinking about Bob dying in fear. Right now he could imagine no worse way to go.

"So they just shot him in the back?" Paul asked, maybe wanting to think Bob was spared. . . he didn't know,
something
.

"No. They ran after him. They went ahead of him, turned around and. . . "

"Sick bastards," Paul said.

"Smart bastards," Spammy interjected.

"Whit?" Paul demanded, angry and confused.

"Cannae shoot him in the back. Too much explainin' to do. If they shoot him head-on, they can say he was attackin' them or somethin'. Probably put a gun in his hand once he was down."

Paul looked to Tam for a reaction to Spammy's words, fearing he might, in his distressed state, finally flip out at the insensitivity of this matter-of-fact theorising.

"He's right enough," Tam said quietly. "After they. . . after they. . . " He swallowed. "I knew I had to run. I knew I had to get away, get up here, warn yous. But I was frozen for a few seconds. Ma brain was screamin' 'run, run', but ma body, well, ma eyes, couldnae leave. I was stunned. I couldnae look away. Mibbe it was because I couldnae believe what I'd seen, but. . . They bent ower Bob, while he was. . . lyin' there. They might well have been puttin'

somethin' in his hand, I couldnae make it oot fae that distance.

"Aw Christ," he said mournfully, his shoulders slumping as if some weight had been burdened upon them, or some power inside him extinguished. "Aw Jesus fuckin' Christ. Spammy's right. Jesus Christ, Spammy's right."

"What do you mean?" Paul asked, but that wasn't what he wanted to be told. He knew exactly what his dad meant. What he was asking was to be told it wasn't so, to deny it for a last moment of hope, a last second of options and possibilities before he faced this unmerciful truth. 174

"They're gaunny kill us all," Tam said, his voice descending in to the dry, barren tones of a frightened whisper. It was as if the words imparted their meaning to Tam only as he heard them from his own lips, as if the thought that formed them had required this translation to be understood. Or maybe just accepted.

"That's what the crash was for," Tam continued. "We were
supposed
to escape. The crash wasnae aboot springin' that wee shite, it was aboot springin'

us. Now we're dangerous men on the run. Kill't that Voss wan, and his wife. Kill't the polisman an' the driver. Then we aw get shot tryin' to fight off whoever tries to, whatchamacallit, apprehend us. We cannae even give oorsels up. Bob walked oot wi' his hauns in the air."

"How could they spring us?" Paul pleaded. "How could anyone know we were on that bus, or where it was headed?"

"It's a government conspiracy," said Spammy.

Paul wasn't sure if this over-familiar Spammy joke was his attempt to lighten the atmosphere or just another instance of his bizarre penchant for amusing himself with deeply inappropriate humour. "It's a government conspiracy"

was Spammy's stock explanation for any kind of anomaly that someone was imprudent enough to point out in his company, from the over-complication of the bus route between Meiklewood and Paisley Gilmour Street to the fact that you never saw white eggs any more, only brown. Roughly translated, it was Spam-speak for "please stop talking about this, you're boring the arse off me".