Country of the Blind (35 page)

Just them and. . . whoever. Not the hunted and the hunters, more the condemned and the executioners. The tread of their feet, the rubbing of their clothes against their skin, it all got louder and louder. Their breathing was becoming the crashing of waves, the roar of a crowd. The forest had ceased to absorb their sounds, the channels between the trees seeming to open up and carry the noises to alert, predatory ears.

Shadows lengthening still.

Light, time,
something
, running out.

Paul stood at the back (or was it the front?) of the room, furthest spot from the windows anyway, before the double doors, watching Spammy in the halflight crouching on the other side of the four-poster. The safe was built into the hardwood base that ran from below the mattress to the floor, the hinged panel that hid it disguised as a drawer like the big one next to it. Spammy had thrown the valance back over the bedclothes and was working concentratedly and quickly. Paul should have had a camera.

Urgent looks had been exchanged when the MM's over-ride code drew a blank. The denial, the thumb-sucking thought that the whole job was never going to happen, had been replaced by the unfounded faith that Everything Was Going To Be All Right. They had anticipated being double-crossed, expected to be deceived, but clearly, inside, they all still wanted to believe that they wouldn't be. And so far it had been smooth. But when the code didn't deliver, another hope died. A little bit more of their fear became a reality they were having to deal with.

The MM
was
fucking them over.

Because they were never supposed to open the safe. Because the MM wasn't
interested in the safe. Because the safe was only there, was only mentioned, to
make them believe in it all, to make them believe in the job. Because the safe
was
the double-cross.

Spammy's fingers worked the laptop frantically. He held two of them up and crossed them, then hit the return key with his other hand. No-one breathed. It had worked on the wee safe in the flat, a simple programme that convinced the electronic lock that four-digit codes were being keyed into it. All of them. From 0000 to 9999, one after another, more than a thousand per second. The tricky part was getting the safe to understand the laptop. The worrying part was that it might have a security contingent that set a time-lock after a limited number of wrong attempts. Spammy hadn't been able to come up with anything that could circumvent that; if he had, he explained, no cashcard in the world would be secure.

197

There was a sudden, high-pitched whine and a metallic whirr from the safe, before its steel door was swung open by its own weight. Paul was about to step forward, to come around the bed and see finally what this was all about. Then he heard the noise, and discovered
exactly
what it was all about. A scraping at the door behind him, fingernails, then the thump of knuckles. A gasp, a choked, gurgling splutter. Paul turned around, twisted one of the handles on the double doors, pulling it open, the moonlight through the big open window spilling into the ante-room, with its chairs, its coat-rack, and its secret.

Its punchline, to the sickest joke in the world.

Snap.

Without, within.

Maybe they
all
thought it was a gunshot. Maybe they were running before they looked, before they saw. The order the information arrived in was lost in their heads.

Off to the right, up the slope, they saw him. The figure, in camouflage gear, holding up two halves of the stick he had just broken, waving at them and staring.

Desperate, careering panic, all thoughts jettisoned but the need to run. Paul saw the man begin to run too, and lost his own footing beneath him as his body's momentum pulled him further around the next tree than his feet were ready for. He rattled his knees off the exposed roots, scrambling on all fours for a few yards until he could right himself again, his dad and Spammy charging blindly ahead of him. No more caution, no more thought, no more options. Just flight. Each footfall the last before the bullet. Just running. No target, no destination, no finish line, no sanctuary. Just. . .

Running running running running running run. . .

The woman's face was turned away. The man reached out to Paul, dying, the act of rapping the door having almost finished him. Paul held him in his arms, kneeling on the floor with the man's torso in his lap. The man gasped, unable to speak, a look of incomprehension, such lost incomprehension in his eyes, so full of tears. He reached out a hand towards Paul's head, pulling at the material of the ski-mask. He wanted to see a face, a last human face. Paul pulled the mask off and let the man look into the mirror-image of bewildered fear, pain, horror and sorrow.

"Oh God, oh Jesus God," Tam said, looking down upon them. "Oh Jesus Christ."

Then a woman's voice outside. "Oh NO! OH NO!"

198

A hammering at the door. "Oh God, Mr Voss? Mr Voss? Oh no. HELP!

SOMEBODY HELP ME!"

Tam pulled at Paul, urging him to let go. Paul couldn't.

"Come on, son, come on."

Tam handed Spammy the padded envelope, thrusting it into his hands, the useless, pointless thing they had found in the safe secreted inside. Tam didn't know why he went ahead and put it in there, in with the letters to Sadie. But somehow he needed to do it, needed to achieve what he had come there for, even in the face of what was happening. Maybe especially in the face of what was happening.

"Go, Cameron, son," he said. "Go."

Spammy glanced back at Paul before climbing out of the window.

"Come on, Paul. Come on," Tam said.

He held Paul's shoulders, helped him to his feet after Paul had gently laid the man's head on the floor.

"Come on, son."

Tam took Paul's hand, leading him to the window. Paul could only look back, into the man's dying eyes.

Tam climbed down the ladder, looking up to make sure Paul was following. The security guards were already charging towards him as his feet hit the gravel.

Bob pulled manfully at the steering wheel, struggling against the skid, but with the Hillman in fourth going round that corner, he got no cooperation from the accelerator and the car veered across into the (thankfully empty) on-coming lane, slamming side-on into a pair of telephone boxes outside a Spar mini-market.

Spammy had come crashing out from the hedges, his eyes wide, nostrils flaring, possessed by an energy Bob had never seen in him before, and Bob had guessed immediately that it wasn't a good sign. Spammy had climbed into the passenger seat and just babbled - more words, spilling out of him like an upturned skip, than Bob had heard him utter cumulatively before.

"Just drive, just drive, got to drive," he said, before Bob discovered what had taken place, picking up the facts amid the jumble, like the black box recorder amid the debris.

Spammy had insisted manically that they head into the village of Craigurquhart rather than away from it. Bob had protested until Spammy pulled up his sweatshirt to reveal the envelope tucked into his jeans.

"They'll catch us anyway," Spammy said.

The Hillman had been tearing down the village's main street when Bob saw the flashing lights coming towards them, about three or four hundred 199

yards away. He reacted before he was aware of what he was doing, jumping momentarily on the brakes and hauling at the steering wheel to take the car around into an adjoining road.

Spammy released his seatbelt and opened the door, clambering out of the ancient vehicle.

"Just drive, Bob. Just go."

Bob understood.

Spammy took off on foot across the road and up a lane between two buildings as Bob managed to coax enough enthusiasm from the Hillman to pull it away from the shattered phone boxes and head on up the street. The police car rounded the corner, swaying slightly as it righted itself after the sharp turn, and accelerated.

A second police car appeared further up the sloping road that headed past a trickle of small shops - knitted jumpers and tartan dolls in plastic tubes - to a row of cottages and then out of town. The big Senator slewed itself across Bob's path, causing him to swerve up on to the pavement. He put the Hillman into reverse, with thoughts of some swift doubling-back manoeuvre, but the engine cut out with a scornful splutter, as if to say "in your dreams". Spammy edged out from the lane, peering up and down the street that ran parallel to the one he had left Bob on, looking with frantic hope. There had to be one somewhere. He dashed across the road, spotting another connecting lane, but it turned out to be a dead end.

He had to do this, he knew. Not simply for Paul's mum, or for Paul or for Tam. For all of them. It had to be worth something, even if they didn't know how. They were never supposed to get into that safe, but even if the MM never had designs on what was inside it himself, well. . . Well, whatever the fuck it was, it wouldn't have been in the safe if it wasn't valuable. Somehow. He edged towards the corner, at the junction with the main drag, and saw it, through the side and front windows of a darkened, closed bakery. It was up a street on the other side of the road, about ten yards along. He took a deep breath and charged, spotting from the corner of his vision the police car sitting further up the main street, men climbing out of it and breaking into a run as they saw him. He didn't pull it out until he was out of their sight, as he couldn't afford for them to see.

He folded the envelope in half and gripped it tightly, then rammed it into the open mouth of the postbox as he passed, and kept on running. He heard them round the corner behind him, several feet in an applauding clatter of heavy soles on the pavement. He knew he had nowhere to go, no way of evading them, no hope of outrunning them, but some instinct wouldn't let him stop.

200

Legs aching, lungs bursting, throat rasping, hopes abandoned, just running, still running. . .

Still running, pursuit behind, panting, footfalls, still running. Driven by instinct, nothing else left. Still running. Until the figure loomed ahead, standing on the protruding root of a vast, ancient pine, the figure they had been swept towards, guided towards.

Smiling, pointing a gun.

And they saw, and they understood. Understood the truth, the sickening truth. Understood Spammy was right. Understood why Bob ran, despite his fucked leg, despite being there to give himself up. They saw it all in the face of the man before them.

The Wee Shite.

201

TEN

Careful what you wish for 2.2.

Nicole lay on Parlabane and Sarah's sofa, resting her unshod feet on a cushion and leaning back against one arm. She glanced out of the window, where the late afternoon sunshine seemed tauntingly inappropriate. "Where were you last week when I was bored but comparatively carefree in Glasgow," she wanted to ask it. "Don't you know, I don't
do
Glasgow," she imagined it replying, "you ignorant English bitch."

Parlabane had come back in from his travels, and she was aware of him and Sarah out in the hall, hearing indistinct whispers, the brushing together of clothes, the soft sound of a kiss. She reckoned she might have found them an irritatingly tactile couple had the circumstances not made her cry out for signs of humanity and affection in a world gone very recently, very suddenly and very frighteningly insane.

She had felt a short second of relief when she saw Sarah's jackets on the coathooks last night, and a photograph of her and Parlabane on the wall (in which they wore, rather curiously, matching Elastoplasts on their cheeks). It had struck her - amidst the cacophony of panic and confusion inside her head - that she was walking into a close with a complete stranger, and noone knew she was there. Parlabane saw the look of apprehension in her eyes as he reached for his keys outside the door of the flat, read the scenes of kidnapping, sexual ordeal and murder that were playing behind them, and sighed impatiently. He gave her a stare that said "you know, we really can't afford this", before adding vocally, "Look, you're going to have to start trusting me a bit more. I know it's not easy, but well, tell you what: try thinking up some helpful images, I don't know, maybe charred flesh, mangled wreckage, car exploding in a plume of flames, that kinna thing. I'm not the bad guy, Nicole."

She didn't know the woman's name, hadn't heard him mention her, but there was evidence that she lived here, and it somehow calmed Nicole to see Parlabane rendered more normal, that he had a life outside of car booby-traps, hired assassins and murderous conspiracies. The feeling only lasted until she realised that those two worlds weren't separate, and that she was standing at 203

the proverbial crossroads where they met.

1.1 summarised: "I want to help real people with real problems."

Enter Mrs McGrotty and Mr McCandlish.

2.2: "I'm bored. When does it get more exciting?"

Enter Jack Parlabane.

What a picture the three of them would have made, sitting around the flat that afternoon, matching luggage under the eyes, tired but restless. Nicole felt exhausted but too edgy to contemplate sleep; who needs caffeine when They are out to get you. Parlabane retained an energy about himself, a drive that animated a knackered-looking face and body; like a cross between a marionette and a zombie. Sarah had been up all night trying to figure out what was obstructing the breathing of a 25-year-old RTA victim (Harley Davidson meets Eddie Stobart), before his aorta ruptured and he exsanguinated spectacularly, mouth pouring blood like a burst fire hydrant, and died shortly before six a.m. In between worrying about him she would have been worrying about Parlabane, so altogether she didn't look entirely peachy either. Nobody was treating Nicole like a victim, which was not only good for her self-respect but made it feel less like there was nothing she could do. In fact, both Parlabane and Sarah (perhaps rather worryingly) gave the impression of having had sufficient experience of this kind of thing as to give the air of experts who would not work with amateurs. She had got the impression the night before that Parlabane couldn't afford to carry passengers, but had felt then that he only expected her to pull her weight and do as she was told. Sarah let her know that her contribution would have to be greater. It was while Parlabane was out, during that awkward time when they were first alone in the flat without him, urgent circumstance having truncated introductions to the most cursory of details. She had been trying to press Sarah for information on what sort of person Parlabane really was, without sounding too much like she was saying: "What, you actually
live
with this maniac?