The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (19 page)

       
Read took the holdall then the night exploded in a burst of light and noise and the man in the water flew backward, a gaping hole in his chest. There was a second explosion from somewhere behind me and Read pitched forward onto his face, the back of his green suit a mass of red, the briefcase still in one hand, the holdall in the other. His hat rolled off his head and the wind took it and whisked it away along the beach. Through the buzzing in my ears I heard the click clack of a third cartridge being thrust home as the gunman on the shore raised his pistol, but before he could fire there was another blast and he screamed and dropped the gun from his shattered hand. He flopped into the loch and threshed about in an imitation of swimming, dog-paddling his way back to the boat past the body of his colleague who was now floating face down.

       
I turned to see Iwanek, shotgun held across his chest, face streaked with black like a commando under a woollen balaclava helmet.

       
‘Put your hands above your head,’ he hissed and pointed the gun at McKinley’s groin. ‘Now.’

       
We both raised our arms and Iwanek moved around us, picking up the briefcase and the bag with his left hand, the right keeping the shotgun level, covering us both. I wanted to say no, this isn’t what’s supposed to happen, you don’t understand, nobody is supposed to get hurt, that’s why you said you’d use a shotgun.

       
I wanted to say that there’d been a mistake, go back, start again, but Iwanek knew exactly what he was doing, there was no mistake. I’d hired a killer and now he was killing.

       
Over his shoulder I saw the swimmer helped aboard by the man in the boat, pulled over the side by the back of his trousers, legs flicking up and over. Then the boatman leant forward and picked up a gun, maybe it was a rifle or a shotgun, it was too far away to see clearly, but I saw him aim it and I flinched as Iwanek grinned and tightened his finger on the trigger. The boatman fired first, the bullet whined and kicked up a shower of stones by Iwanek’s foot and he cursed. He dropped both bags and fired two shots in quick succession at the inflatable which was now about fifty feet from the shore.

       
Then he turned back to us and pointed the shotgun at McKinley and fired as I threw myself sideways into McKinley, sending him sprawling as the shot tore into my left shoulder and arm, burning and biting into the flesh through the layers of clothing.

       
A burst of gunfire from the boat made Iwanek drop to the ground, arms and legs outstretched, then he rolled and was back on his feet, the shotgun still safe in his grasp. He gathered up the dropped bags and zig-zagged back to the road, keeping his head well down.

       
Through a cloud of pain I heard the outboard motor kick into life and subside as the boat headed back up the loch at full throttle, towards the sea. Then McKinley was looking down at me, asking me if I was OK, could I hear him?

       
The pain deepened and I felt myself slipping. I gripped his arm, hard, and he put his ear close to my mouth, beard rasping against my lips as I told him what he had to do and then his face blurred and spun and I passed out.

PART TWO

There was a fine mist in the room, the sort of drizzly veil that rolls down rivers on autumn days, blurring and blending the banks into a grey mass of misshapen lumps. River mists are cold and clammy and make the back of your neck crawl and arthritic joints ache, but this mist was warm and sticky like the inside of a sauna and the ceiling floated in and out of focus so I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing. I opened them again and the mist was finer and I could see a three-stranded brass light fitting, and the pink and white striped wallpaper seemed to jump into my vision and then Shona’s face appeared, looking down at me side on which made my stomach queasy so I closed my eyes again and concentrated on not being sick.

       
The room felt hot and airless and my head rang with a cacophony of dull thuds and bumps, out of time with my breathing and my heart, and then I heard Shona say ‘he’s coming to’ and the next time I opened my eyes the mist had disappeared but so had the light because it was night and it was dark, but I could still hear the muffled bangs and thumps in my head, my throat felt raw and my right shoulder ached, and when I tried to sit up pure pain lanced through my arm and I lay back and closed my eyes and concentrated on not dying.

       
At some point during the night I woke up on my side with someone poking and prodding my shoulder and back, then I felt a sharp pain in my arm and I slept.

       
It was light again when my head finally cleared and I could open my eyes without feeling sick, or passing out or wishing I was dead. The first thing I saw was Shona, the second was the worried look on her face, then I felt her cool hand on my forehead.

       
‘How do you feel?’ she asked.

       
‘Like I was dead,’ I tried to say, playing the wounded soldier, but my throat was so dry it sounded like a sea lion coughing. A glass of water appeared before me and I winced as she helped lift my head to drink. Sod the wounded soldier act, it hurt like hell.

       
‘Thanks,’ I managed. ‘How am I doing?’

       
‘The shot’s all out, though some of it was very deep and you’re going to be sore for a few weeks. A couple of inches to the right and it would have been a different story – you could have died.’

       
The bedroom door opened behind her and Tony walked in and sat on the bed. She sat down next to him and said; ‘You should be in hospital. But after what your strange friend Get-Up told me I thought you’d want to keep this quiet. One of my father’s friends is a surgeon at Glasgow’s Royal Infirmary and he drove over to do the honours. He’s well aware that it wasn’t an accident but he won’t say anything.

       
‘He gave you an injection to make you sleep last night and he’ll be back to check on you later this evening. You’ve been very lucky.’

       
I knew that. ‘Where is Get-Up?’ I asked.

       
‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘He dropped you off late on Saturday night, gave me a very cryptic breakdown of what had happened and then sped off in a Rolls-Royce saying he had to get to London.’

       
At least he’d managed to drive the BMW to the hotel and pick up the Rolls. I didn’t remember the switch but that was hardly surprising because I remembered nothing after being shot. ‘What time is it?’ I asked.

       
‘It’s two-thirty, Monday afternoon. You’ve been asleep for more than thirty-six hours.’

       
‘Is he coming back? Did he say he’d be back? If he is, he should be here by now. Damn.’ Now I was talking to myself, had McKinley got the Rolls back to Heathrow in time? If so, where was he? Damn, damn.

       
‘What is going on?’ she asked, which was fair enough because up until now I’d been asking all the questions. Then Tony joined in. ‘Who is he? And who the hell shot you? Where has he gone?’ Three questions from him fired one after the other like an over-zealous TV quizmaster without waiting for an answer. They both looked at me, concern mixed with anger in about equal amounts. They wouldn’t exactly twist my injured arm to extract the information but if I didn’t tell them I would badly damage two friendships, two friendships that were very, very precious to me.

       
‘You aren’t going to like this,’ I said, and tried to force a smile.

       
‘Try us,’ said Shona, and she placed another pillow behind my head. ‘Just try us.’

       
‘What’s that banging noise?’ I asked. ‘It’s been going on ever since I woke up.’

       
‘The Tattoo,’ said Shona. ‘They’re putting up the seating and stuff, it’ll go on pretty much non-stop for the next few weeks.’

       
I remembered then that Shona’s flat on the Mound over-looking Edinburgh was close to the Castle, home of the Edinburgh Tattoo, and every year about this time she and her neighbours had to put up with the preparations for the famous show. It was a small price to pay for the breathtaking views of the city, especially as the workmen now had to use specially-silenced tools, hammers and spanners all wrapped in cloth to cut the noise down to a minimum. I was just glad that the clinking and banging was coming from outside the window and not inside my head.

       
Tony stood up and walked around the bed, sitting opposite Shona so that I had to turn my head from side to side to see them both. That hurt so I looked between them while I talked. The fact that I didn’t have to look at them helped. A little.

       
‘Remember the two men that took over SCOT? Laing and Kyle?’ They nodded. ‘They killed my parents, no ifs, buts or maybes. My father left a note explaining what had happened. I found it on the desk by his body. In it he said that Laing had phoned him, warned him not to put up a fight to keep SCOT and that if he did try to thwart the takeover he’d get hurt. That was the day before my mother died when the brakes of the Volvo failed.’

       
Tony and Shona looked at each other in horror, and then back to me. I closed my eyes and Shona held my hand, tightly.

       
‘Her death and the loss of his life’s work were too much for him. He was depressed, lonely and afraid, and though it was his own hand on the trigger it was Laing and Kyle who killed him.’

       
‘You should have gone to the police,’ whispered Shona.

       
‘I couldn’t,’ I said, and opened my eyes. ‘There was no evidence, a letter from a man disturbed enough to kill himself wouldn’t carry enough weight in court. There was no record of the phone call, and the brake fluid had leaked from the Volvo, or had been drained. It’s not as if the brake lines had been cut. There was no evidence, nothing tangible.’

       
‘Then you should have come to me. I could have dealt with them,’ said Tony.

       
‘How, Tony? What would you have done? Put out a contract on them? Just how long would it have been before it was traced back to you? Or to me? Neither of us are in the business of hiring assassins. And there were more practical considerations. I don’t expect either of you to understand but I didn’t want their deaths on my conscience, not directly. I couldn’t kill them myself, even if I had the necessary skills. And I couldn’t pay someone to do the job for me. I knew that if I did, it would always come back to haunt me and I’d wake up at night in a sweat with the sound of the gunshot echoing through my head and that one day I’d have to confess.’

       
‘So what did you do?’ asked Tony.

       
‘I sat down with David a couple of days after we buried Dad and worked out a way of getting someone else to do the job for me. I’d already made a few phone calls to London and got some background info on Laing and Kyle, and Laing’s drugs connections seemed to be the obvious solution.

       
‘I figured that all I’d have to do was to set up some sort of drugs deal and make it look as if Laing had double-crossed them. The sort of gangsters in that business would act first and ask questions later, so if I could set them up they’d tear him apart.

       
‘Five steps were necessary. First I had to arrange to buy a large quantity of drugs. Then I had to get Laing out of the country. With him out of the way I’d get someone to steal the drugs, that was step three. Step four was to leave as many signs as possible pointing to Laing. Step five was to plant the drugs on Kyle, in the boot of his car.

       
‘It was like setting up a line of dominoes, once the first one was pushed they’d all fall down, one after the other. The drugs dealers would hunt Laing down, and either they or the police would get to Kyle. And I’d be in the clear.’

       
Tony and Shona looked at each other across the bed again, Tony shaking his head slowly while Shona squeezed my hand.

       
‘It’s a long way from a threadbare plan like that to pulling it off,’ said Tony. ‘How did you manage it?’

       
‘I rented a flat in London and spoke to as many people who knew Laing as I could, carefully so as not to set off any alarms. I’ve an old schoolfriend who’s now a crime reporter on one of the nationals and he told me the story of Get-Up McKinley, the guy who dropped me here. He told me how he’d just come out of prison after serving time for an armed robbery that went wrong. He used to work for Laing. I traced McKinley and offered him a job as my minder. He jumped at it. Through him I arranged to buy quarter of a million pounds of cocaine. The deal was set up for Saturday night so I fixed up a weekend in Paris for Sammy and Laing.’

       
‘Sammy?’ said Shona, turning towards Tony. ‘The girl you took to see David? You were using her, too?’

       
‘Did she know what she was getting into?’ asked Tony, ignoring Shona’s question. ‘And what about Carol?’

       
‘I told Sammy everything. We used a rented flat and an assumed name – there’s no way anyone will be able to trace her. She’s my friend now, Tony. I won’t let anything happen to her. And Carol knows nothing, except that Sammy was helping me.

       
‘I hired an ex-soldier to steal the drugs, told him when and where they’d be arriving. That was Iwanek, the man you caught following me. He wasn’t supposed to hurt anyone, just to take the cocaine and run, handing it back to me later. But he obviously had plans of his own. He killed at least one of the drug couriers and the guy who’d fixed up the deal for us. Then he turned the gun on McKinley and I got shot.’