Country of the Blind (5 page)

"That bad, eh?" Mr McInnes inquired.

"You've no idea," she said, and then began, inexplicably, to rant to this total stranger, letting go everything from the past couple of weeks and far beyond between mouthfuls of tea, while he sat there and nodded sagely, or responded with understanding, unjudgmental comments.

"My own fault, really," she had said during one of the more lucid passages.

"Being a such a bloody-minded and impetuous creature. Such a bloody stereotyped middle-class daughter, trying to rebel against Daddy for reasons I can't even begin to understand, and that I don't think Freud understood so well either. Do you have children, Mr McInnes?"

He nodded with a smile, his eyes straying just long enough for her to detect the conflicts of love, hope, disappointment and regret.

"Aye."

"Well, forgive them," she said, "for they know not what they do. My father's a lawyer. His father was a lawyer. Two of his brothers are lawyers. I suppose if I really wanted to rebel I should have gone into the arts or something."

"Or become a crook," Mr McInnes offered.

"No. Two sides of the same coin. If you're going to play fast and loose with the law anyway, you might as well get a bit of security."

"So what was your big rebellion?"

Nicole laughed. "Coming here, I suppose, among other things."

"To Glesca?"

"Yeah, sort of. Well, partly. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know."

She had another gulp of tea.

23

"Daddy specialises in libel law, and I grew to see that as a way for rich, successful people to make themselves even more rich and successful because they'd never heard the phrase 'sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me'."

"I wouldnae be so sure they hadn't heard it," Mr McInnes offered. "Seems to me being called a few names hasn't hurt a few of them, financially speakin'."

"Yes, but that's precisely my point. It just seemed to be about money, nothing but money. Among people to whom only money meant anything, my father included, and that was something I could never understand."

"Well, it certainly comes in handy when you're peyin' for the messages."

She shook her head, laughing sadly at herself.

"I know, I know. It's pathetic. I'm a collage of cliches. I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing here. Some bunch of reasons that seemed so important once upon a time but suddenly didn't seem quite so inspirational this morning.

"I came here because I wanted to prove I could make it on my own, away from all that. . . benevolent familial support. I also had some insane notion about helping people. Maybe some adolescent Gareth Pearce fantasy, I don't know."

"Why here?"

"Well, I didn't want to leave England, and I couldn't think of anywhere more different from London, more removed from what I was used to. It's also a different legal system, which meant an awful lot of extra studying and even a few correspondence courses, but it meant that I'd be working within something my family - and I suppose I really mean my father - were excluded from."

"So did your father dae somethin' to upset you? Ach, sorry, that's none of my business."

Nicole shook her head and waved her right hand placatorily.

"No, no. You're quite right. It's a logical enough question. But the fact is quite the opposite. He provided everything for me. Put me through school, university, and was ready to set me up in the legal profession for life. I always loved him, dearly, but I don't know. . . I wasn't trying to bite his hand; I wasn't trying to throw it all back in his face. I don't know what the bloody hell I was trying to do."

"Maybe you were tryin' to make him proud of you," Mr McInnes said flatly, a notion that made her suddenly sit up. "You could have been a good wee lassie and gone and worked for his firm, but then you'd only have been a good wee lassie. Maybe this way you're tryin' to show him what you can achieve on your own, even to repay him for everythin' he'd given you."

Nicole just sat and stared, fixated by the sad-smiled man opposite, and thinking that his words were quite the most disarmingly perceptive ones she 24

had heard in several years.

Another part of her wondered at what mistakes he had made and what harsh lessons he had learnt as the price for such understanding.

"So, Mr McInnes," she eventually said, after some polite small-talk had cleared the ashes of their previous discussion. "I hope after all that that there is actually something I can do for you."

"Aye," he said, rather darkly, and produced an A4 brown envelope from inside his jacket.

"I need you to look after this," he explained, placing it on the desk. "I need you to record that I've gie'd you it, sealed, then haud on to it until next Monday afternoon. If I don't pick it up before then, open it."

"What's in it?"

"If we're baith lucky, you'll never find oot."

25

TWO

"Bastards! Bastards! How dare they! Who the hell do they think they are?

Killing him just like that, arbitrarily putting an end to the man's life without the merest thought."

Carefully carrying a couple of mugs of morning coffee into the bedroom, Sarah Slaughter was slightly perturbed by her fiance's uncharacteristic hawkishness as he sat, red-eyed and ranting at the radio. He usually turned over and slept on after the alarm went off and she got up to have her bath, but he had obviously heard something of profound interest - and irritation - while she lay in the tub.

She handed him his coffee now that his arms had temporarily ceased their agitated gesticulation.

"So who's dead, Jack?"

"Didn't you hear? Roland Voss. Roland fucking Voss. Cops have four guys in custody."

"Really? My God," she gasped. Then "Ah," suddenly understanding his upset. She put her coffee down on the bedside table and took his left hand in both of her own, then leaned over and kissed his neck in a proven method of calming his spirits. "That's a shame," she whispered sympathetically. He put his own mug down, switched off the radio and sat back against the headboard, his tousled hair making him look like Oor Wullie meets a Van de Graaf generator.

"Sorry to get so worked up, Sarah, but I just think it's such a tragic, tragic waste."

"It is, it is," she agreed softly.

"I mean, there must have been thousands of people in this world biding their time until they could get their own back on that slimy nyaff, and now these four clowns have gone and spoiled it for everybody. Inconsiderate arseholes."

"Come on, you can't blame them completely, darling," Sarah reasoned, her soothing English tones a balm against his early-morning Glaswegian croak.

"Maybe they didn't know who he was."

Jack Parlabane's eyes widened with frustration.

27

"Well, that's a matter for some conjecture. But the thought that they might not have is what's so bloody tragic. If they had taken the time to get to know him even a little, or to learn just a wee bit about him, I'm pretty sure they would have decided that death was too good for the devious, Machiavellian son of a bitch."

"Well, I'm certainly relieved to hear you say that. For a moment I thought you were upset because you had been planning to kill him yourself."

Jack raised his eyebrows and grinned, a mix of aw-shucks bashfulness and RKO-villain malice that she found in equal measures unsettling and endearing. Sarah remembered an uncomfortable few seconds about eighteen months back, during which she had feared Jack
was
going to kill someone, right in front of her. Retrospectively it had seemed a rather ungrateful gesture, considering that it was the man who had effectively brought the two of them together, but in Jack's defence, he
had
also tried to murder the pair of them. It would make great small-talk when they met long-lost rellies. So how did you two meet? Oh, familiar stuff. Boy meets girl, boy meets slaughtered corpse of girl's ex-husband, boy and girl uncover massive conspiracy, that sort of thing. Same old same-o.

"So what happened?" Sarah asked. "When was all this?"

"Last night. Amazing what you can miss when you're pished out of your face, isn't it."

Sarah reached again for her coffee and rubbed the side of her head.

"Tell me about it," she said mournfully.

She had been on-call over the weekend, but had the rest of Monday off once she got home around ten. After a couple of hours' kip and a long soak, they had hit the Cask for lunch and remained there for an inadvisably long time afterwards. Somewhere amidst the blur she could hazily remember an inevitable curry and some very clumsily executed but nonetheless enjoyable sex. The next flashback was of staggering woozily into the kitchen at about three a.m. for some Irn-Bru and a couple of paracetamol. Significant world events had, curiously, not featured.

"I can hardly believe it," Jack mumbled. "Voss dead. Actually dead. I mean, guys like Voss don't die. Good guys die. Arseholes live forever. John Smith dies, John Major lives. Bill Hicks dies, Jim Davidson lives. After all these years, it's so hard to believe the slimebag is just suddenly gone."

"So whodunnit? Who are these guys the cops've got?"

"Christ knows. Couple of them have form for turning over some country mansions back in the Eighties. Cops are invoking the Prevention of Terrorism Act so they can turn the screw without any interference from lawyers, but from the sound of it, they're still entertaining the possibility that it was a burglary, and that killing Voss and his missus was just part of the deal."

28

"They killed his wife too?" said Sarah, appalled.

"Yeah. And two bodyguards. Which makes it sound to me that killing was definitely on the itinerary; it was certainly an eventuality they were prepared for. These guys were shot through the head, standing outside the VIP suite, presumably so that they didn't interrupt."

"And Mr and Mrs Voss?" asked Sarah.

Jack winced visibly. He drew a finger quickly and unhistrionically across his neck, looking away from her. Sarah's ex-husband had become an ex-person in roughly the same fashion, and although his loss hadn't exactly devastated her, it was still the method of violence least likely to be mentioned in a romantic dinner conversation between them.

"So why did they. . . do that when they had shot the bodyguards? I mean, if they had guns. . . "

"I was beginning to ask myself the same question," he said, with a look of concentration she had long ago learnt to be wary of.

"Oh dear," said Sarah accusingly. "I can see your antennae beginning to swivel. Conspiracy glands starting to secrete?"

"Just a little," he confessed, smiling. "A smidgen."

"Well at least wait until you've heard some more details before you start cooking up any theories."

"Oh sure," he offered. "But I was just thinking that the - shall we say -

inconsistency
in the manner of execution does lend itself to the possibility of a terrorist, or at least vengeful, motive."

"So would it make you feel better to think that someone had specifically set out to kill
him
, rather than to kill whoever happened to get in the way?"

"Well I'd hate to think whoever did it didn't appreciate what a privilege it was."

"You're a sick bastard, Jack Parlabane, do you know that?"

"Well, just remember you've opted to be Mrs Sick Bastard, Dr Slaughter."

She stood up and reached for a dress, letting the bathrobe slip to the floor.

"It's a decision that's seldom far from my thoughts," she said, with a stern tone but a devilish glance.

Parlabane wasn't just being facetious or gratuitously offensive, even though he had an effortless talent for both. Unlike the many thousands of people who would be having a little chuckle over their cornflakes this morning, or maybe an extra drink before bed last night after catching the late news, his score with Voss was personal. Mutually.

And Sarah knew that, which was why, despite her efforts to hide it, he could tell she had been a little on edge before going out to work. She obviously 29

hadn't wanted to overstate her case, but he could read the point she needed him to consider:

People do just get killed. Murdered even. It can happen to anybody. Even evil, scheming, right-wing billionaires. Just because his demise would cause wider ripples than normal didn't mean there was more to Voss's death than met the eye.

Hey, hey. My, my.

Parlabane was a connoisseur of conspiracy theories. It had been remarked that he was so paranoid, he should have been a Catholic; better yet, a Celtic supporter. He considered his own thoughts on Voss that morning. He couldn't just die, not someone like that. Even if there was a revenge motive, even a terrorist motive, how could four guys - two of whom had to be well into their fifties circumvent the kind of security there must have been, and take out two trained bodyguards?

But then he could hear Sarah's voice talking again about the mythology that seems to grow like a fungus upon the corpse of a dead celebrity. Some people can't deal with the loss, with the thought of a world darkened by the snuffing out of
that
bright star. Voss hadn't exactly brought light to Parlabane's world, but he still had a very special place in his thoughts, in that most volatile of compartments, the one marked "Unfinished Business".

And that, Sarah would surely tell him, was the problem: he needed Voss to still be there; and with no more life, he had to find greater meaning in his death. Like Elvis Presley. Like John Lennon. Like Marilyn Monroe. Like JFK?

Nah.

Sarah was probably nervous because of the timing. Less than a month to the wedding, promises made and (so far) promises kept. Then this. The Last Temptation of Parlabane.

"Look upon it as a challenge," she had said, as much in consolation as encouragement. "You can still be the world's most paranoid and irritating investigative reporter; you just have to do it without playing fast and loose with the police, the security forces or the laws of physics."

It was what he had to agree to before
she
would agree to becoming his wife. No more recourse to his, ahem, less conventional journalistic techniques; viz, picking locks, scaling buildings, burgling offices and hacking computer systems.