Country of the Blind (8 page)

The policeman held up his hands in an explanatory gesture. "At this stage,"

he continued, "we cannot for certain say that this
wasn't
just a very bloody and ruthless attempted robbery, but nothing we have seen gives us any reason to rule out a terrorist motive either, and for that reason we can't afford to relax our position. These men have already managed to murder one of the most powerful businessmen in the world. If there is a terrorist group behind them, then it is a very merciless and very resourceful one, and if this is a demonstration of their capabilities, I think it is vital to the security of not just our own country that we do everything in our power to hunt them down."

Fair enough, thought Parlabane, but something was still discomforting him, some half-formed realisation that had got lost along the way, an irritation like trying to remember in which movie he had previously seen some minor-role actress - and whether she might have taken her clothes off in it. 41

He jogged the remote control to picture-search Rewind, watching the figures and talking heads suddenly turn black and white, and jiggle, newsreelstyle, at jerky high-speed. The cop disappeared, replaced by the reporter, replaced in turn by Nicole Carrow, Parlabane all the time trying to remember what had sparked his truncated revelation.

There, he suddenly thought, watching her hand place hair into her eye in a sharp, precise movement. He hit Play and the image slowed, lurchingly, restoring itself to colour a moment before sound returned.

". . . ot, I had instructions to open it. Inside wuh. . . "

Sudden look of uncertainty in the unobscured eye, glancing quickly off and back before she cleared her throat and then swept the offending strands clear. Offending strands that hadn't been bothering her for the four or five seconds they had already been sitting there.

"Excuse me. Inside was a let. . . "

Something was wrong. Something had slightly knocked her off balance. He jogged into reverse once again, that hand plonking the hair faithfully back into her eye a second time.

". . . open it. Inside wuh. . . Excuse me. Inside was a letter. . . "

She had given something away, or rather was afraid she had.

". . . uctions to open it. Inside wuh. . . Excuse me. Inside waw. . . "

He listened to the accent, the inflections and emphases.

". . . it. Inside wuh. . . "

He had it. She was about to say "inside
were
", not "inside was". That's what was bothering him. She had talked about an envelope first, not a letter. She had something else. McInnes had given her something else. The tape played on, Parlabane's blind wondering about what more had been in Carrow's envelope giving way to wondering why no extracts from the letter were being thrown up in any tediously overblown computer-animated graphic sequence to accompany the report, or at least read out by the poe-faced bastard in the trenchcoat. The only explanation for this was that they hadn't been given a copy, and as he couldn't imagine the cops sticking any kind of injunction on the letter and then blabbing on about its contents to the cameras, it must have been Carrow who denied them.

Why?

At this stage, with no evidence on the table, the name of the game is publicity. Why not give the media a copy, get it right into the public domain? Unless she was holding something else back, too.

". . . as disingenuous to suggest that a few handwritten words can in any way clear the suspicion of a terrorist motive," said Garloch again.

"And why do you believe that?"

42

"Well, Miss Carrow's paragraphs do not actually
prove
that the suspects didn't. . . "

He sat up straight, hit Pause, leaving the policeman open-mouthed and palms-up on the screen in front of him, trisected by two vibrating lines of interference.

A few handwritten words, thought Parlabane. Miss Carrow's paragraphs. Never mind what else she was holding back - she hadn't even let the cops see the full text of the letter.

Sarah rested her head on Parlabane's chest as she lay along the settee, eyes on the TV screen, attempting to digest the latest assault in his chili-laden campaign to defoliate their colonic flora. He lowered his head slightly as he sat, enough for his nose to touch a few stray strands of that cascading red hair, and breathed in her smell as she wriggled cosily against him. She was losing herself in the video; he was losing himself in her. Again.

"Surprised to see you here," she had said when she arrived back from work and found him in the kitchen, thoughtfully stirring a voluminous pot.

"I thought you'd be up in Perthshire causing trouble, and asking awkward questions."

"Who, me?" he asked, feigning indignant disbelief, arms wide like an Italian full-back who's just decapitated a winger. They were both making light of it, tiptoeing their way around a dangerous obstacle. She had to joke because she didn't want to sound too accusatory, or to lay her worries on too thick. He had to joke back to assure her that he wasn't offended and that she had nothing to worry about anyway.

And she didn't, he had gradually come to realise.

"There's no angle," he said as they ate. She had brought the Voss thing up, probably hoping that he might benefit from a certain amount of catharsis, and hoping equally that what she heard would reassure her. "I'm interested, of course, but really just from a spectator's point of view. I spoke to Jenny today, and it sounds like they're under martial law."

"So they're really going for this terrorist thing? What do you reckon about it?"

"Couldn't say. That lawyer on the news knows something more than she's letting on, but what she's said doesn't change the fact that these guys went in
very
well prepared and took out four people in an incisively clinical exercise. They knew what they were doing, and whether it was for purposes of robbery, revenge, terrorism or their idea of a laugh on a dull Sunday night seems of secondary importance to me."

"So if they knew what they were doing so much, how come they all got caught?"

43

"Don't know. Cops haven't said yet. In fact, there's a lot of things the cops haven't said, but I can't say their reticence either surprises me or makes me suspicious. Whatever went on up there, there's some bad bastards involved, and I'm more than happy for it to be the cops who find out who they are and what they're about. Whether it's cops and robbers or cops and terrorists, I don't care. Either way it's cops and very dangerous people, and that's my principal consideration."

His eyes were on the screen, but he wasn't watching the movie. He'd seen it a dozen times and he'd see it a dozen more when he
would
be paying attention. But what was weird was that it wasn't the Voss murder that was distracting him; it was the fact that the Voss murder wasn't distracting him. Sure, there were a few tantalising contradictions and enticing inconsistencies in the information being issued, but somehow none of it seemed enough any more to have him sliding down the Batpole and into action. Not off this settee with the scent of Sarah's hair in his nostrils, the warmth of her shoulders in his lap and his left palm rested on her left breast, pressed into place against her T-shirt by her own right hand.

He realised that all of this meant he was changing; indeed had changed, and he wasn't even sure whether he should feel sad about that. He felt a confusing mixture of excitement, envy and comfort when he thought about Nicole Carrow, recklessly playing cat-and-mouse with the cops, driven by a belief in some unknowable cause, running on adrenalin and hiding her fear behind a glistening sheen of arrogance. Excitement at recognising someone he once knew, someone that age, who had shown the same raw, enervating energy and promise, with a glint in the eye that said "I'll find out all your secrets, but you'll never know mine." Envy that that person still had so many exciting paths to explore back then; at the thought of what was to follow. And comfort at the thought that someone from the Resignation Generation actually looked like picking up the torch.

"We're going to fuck you up the arse," said the government, all the time. In his adolescence the collective response was: "Come ahead and try it, ya bass. See what you get." These days they would just drop their trousers then drop some eckies so that their acquiescent complicity was a fun and trippy experience.

But maybe it was the sight of Nicole Carrow that had underlined the detachment of his position: it wasn't his fight any more. He liked to think that it was Sarah that had changed him. All the hackneyed old bollocks actually
applied
. He
had
never met a woman who made him feel this way. He was feeling emotions not only that he had never experienced before, but that he had previously concluded were not applicable in his case. (So many things had seemed not applicable in his case, which was itself part 44

of the greater problem.)

However, the fear was that it was because he had
already
changed that he felt this way about Sarah. That at another time she would have passed him right by, no possibility of him recognising what could lie before them. Or, more simply, that he would have blown it. The thought of having missed her, of her not being there, was a shivering cold one. And along with it came the attendant doubt that he might well have already met women who would have made him feel like this, but. . .

No. That way madness lay.

But did it matter? Either way, this was how he felt, this was how it was. They were together now - fate, serendipity or whatever. Unfortunately it did matter. Because he still wasn't entirely sure why he was content to be sitting on his settee at a time like this. He'd like it to be all the right reasons, all the cute, cosy and even mature, adult ones, but he wanted to know how big a factor fear was in the equation. What had he said? It was cops and very dangerous people, and that was his principal consideration. It never used to be.

Once upon a time it had been all and anything for a bloody story. The risks, the gambles, the dangers. The death threats. All for the scoop, for the exclusive. Oh yeah, and THE TRUTH, of course, in hundred-foot letters of fire, burning high on a mountainside. That idol he had made so many sacrifices to. Parlabane had never been afraid of dying, he had always known. He had taken actions, decisions out of fear for his life; but fear for your life and being afraid to die were two very different issues. Fear for your life was a basic, unignorable instinct of self-preservation, dictating action and reaction in certain situations. Being afraid to die was what kept most sensible people out of those situations in the first place.

Once, he had suspected it was because he was daft enough not to believe it was ever going to happen. That it wasn't applicable to him. That he didn't fear death because he had never been forced to really contemplate it. Then he had been forced to contemplate it pretty close-up. Twice he had stared death in the face and on both occasions found that even the Grim Reaper wasn't immune to a sudden attack of self-doubt when it caught that gleefully malevolent glint in his eye. Bollocks, Death must have thought. Do we really want this guy loose on the other side?

So what had changed?

Well, for a start, he thought, he had someone to miss. Someone he craved and jealously guarded his time with. Someone whose company he looked forward to enjoying for as long as possible. But that wasn't it. Responsibility. A new thing.

45

He couldn't leave her behind and didn't like the thought of her on her own. She wasn't some pathetic soul who couldn't cope without him - Sarah was a resourceful and some might say formidable woman - but he didn't want her to have to.

And he had made promises. Obligations. If he wanted to marry her, then that meant he had to want to always be there for her. Doing something that could get himself killed or imprisoned would suggest otherwise. But that wasn't it either.

It was this: he could feel
her
fear of his death. A coldness, an emptiness, chasmic and desolately lonely. A fear like none he had ever known.

He could feel how
she
would miss
him
. In the past, when he was contemplating his next recklessness he hadn't considered even how his parents would miss him if he died; he knew they'd be sad, but. . . In a relationship based so much upon his needs of them, he hadn't appreciated that there were ways in which they needed him. In fact he had never appreciated that there were ways in which anyone needed him -

not like that.

He felt how there was something he gave Sarah that she could never replace if he was gone. A preciousness she could not bear to lose, and that he must do all he could to protect.

In short, he sensed the receipt of his own love, and it was a revelation far more devastating and unexpected than anything he had ever splashed across a front page.

He held her a little tighter on the settee.

It didn't mean he was opting for some culture-of-contentment, lifestylepages yupped-up existence with his beautiful new bride, though. He wasn't about to simply accept that black was black and white was white, start writing a weekly column with a picture byline and do profile pieces for the Sundays. But it did mean his guerrilla days were over: if something was wrong and conventional investigation failed, then maybe it was time for someone younger to prove it.

Ken Frazer swigged back a can of juice and pored over the b/w laserproof of tomorrow's front page, feeling a hollow tingle in his guts where there should only have been the dull grind of his sausage supper in slow digestion. He was familiar with the feeling, half-instinct, half emotional memory; the distant suspicion that something was missing, something hadn't been accounted for. An uncertainty that had its roots in arriving at the school gates and suddenly remembering that it was PE day: your gear was in the washing machine and your arse was out the window. The dread of that moment when you realise 46

(a) what was bothering you; and (b) that it's now too late to do anything about it.

He shook his head. Probably nothing. It was an ailment of being the news editor, of having always to be on the alert for potential screw-ups; a phantom symptom, like feeling itchy when someone starts talking about headlice. The kind of nagging worry that was bound to happen on a night like this when he was endeavouring particularly hard to anticipate the pitfalls. This evening's latest and most bewildering twist in the Voss saga required delicate and dextrous hands. Between the presses rolling and the punters picking up their copy of
The Saltire
in the a.m. there were hours enough for further hairpin bends in the script. He had instructed the subs to excise anything too speculative regarding the motives or connotations of what had taken place; stick to the facts and the quotes. The tabloid shitrags were happy to wipe their past clean every night and ignore the previous day's statements and positions when events proved them diametrically wrong; they knew their readers had memories even shorter than their attention spans. But Ken had a professional pride those pricks would never understand. Maybe that made him a dinosaur, but he'd still be a dinosaur who was never embarrassed by the sight of yesterday's front page.