The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (25 page)

       
Fight your own battles, Tony had said. How? With a gun I’d fired twice? Against professional killers? My conscience was in cold storage now because I had already accepted that this time it was going to be my finger on the trigger. The luxury of getting somebody else to do the killing, of removing myself mentally and physically from the end result, was something I couldn’t afford now.

       
As I studied the map and tried to put together a workable plan I felt no guilt for what had happened or for what was about to happen. That would come later, and I’d try to deal with it then. For the moment the part of my brain that solved problems and worked out strategies was insulated from the part that decided morality and apportioned blame. Friends and enemies were just pieces on a chessboard, taking part in a game I had to win.

       
There were three points in my favour. They were professionals dealing with an amateur, which meant there would be an element of surprise on my side. They wouldn’t expect me to be armed, but I would have a shotgun and I was prepared to use it. And it would be dark. They were my strong suits and however I played it I’d have to maximize those advantages.

       
In the kitchen I found a pile of large, black plastic bags and a ball of thick string. In the stable building I dug out an old inflatable dinghy in which my father had taken me fishing before the pain in his back became too much to bear. It had been deflated and carefully packed into a green nylon bag with rope handles, and I loaded that onto the back seat of the car along with a foot pump and two plastic oars.

       
All I needed now was something heavy, and under a trellis table I discovered four long rusty chains made up of half-inch diameter steel links. Each was about fifteen feet long and I could only lift them one at a time into the boot and the car sagged on its back axle. A helicopter buzzed over the distant fields like an angry wasp as I slammed the boot lid shut.

       
Back in the house I raced up the stairs three at a time and rushed through my wardrobe, picking out the darkest pullover and trousers I could find, and choosing a pair of dark brown walking shoes. In the cloakroom I grabbed a green Barbour jacket and hurtled through the front door as a tall figure in a fawn raincoat came around the side of the house. I fumbled for the locks on the briefcase, cursing loudly, as the man broke into a run, coat flapping against his legs as his feet crunched into the gravel.

       
‘Whoa, sport, it’s me,’ shouted Tony, and for the first time I heard the high-pitched whirring whine of a grounded helicopter as the blades came to rest. I’d been so caught up with my own thoughts that I hadn’t noticed it land in the field behind Stonehaven.

       
‘Thanks for dropping in, Tony,’ I said, trying to clear my head. He still wasn’t smiling, and neither was I. What the hell did he want? I thought, but I already knew the answer. I didn’t offer to shake his hand, this wasn’t a social visit.

       
‘Who’s the chauffeur?’ I asked.

       
‘A friend. A good friend and somebody who’s done me a great many favours in the past. I didn’t like having to ask him again. And be careful what you say, you’re skating on very thin ice at the moment. His name is Joel Riker. He learnt to fly in Vietnam, Hueys, H-23 Hilliers and Chinooks, but now he can fly anything with a rotor blade. That’s a Sikorsky we picked up at Edinburgh. I’d cut out the cracks about him being a chauffeur, too. A year before the war ended he was flying a gunship near Pleiku in South Vietnam when he was shot down. The gunner was killed and Joel and his co-pilot were on their own for six days. They had to fight their way through thirty miles of Viet Cong infested jungle before they were picked up. Between them they killed sixteen VC, most of them with their knives.’

       
Over Tony’s shoulder I could see Riker climbing down from the white helicopter and walking towards us, head bowed under the slowly-turning blades. He was tall, thin and wiry, three inches of wrist sticking out of the sleeves of a tatty old sheepskin flying jacket, a gaunt face topped with a shock of prematurely grey hair.

       
‘How do you know they weren’t exaggerating?’ I asked. ‘These Yanks are all the same.’

       
‘They came back with sixteen sets of ears,’ said Tony quietly, and there wasn’t a lot I could say after that.

       
I shook Riker’s outstretched hand, his grip was soft and gentle, the handshake of a dowager duchess. His voice, too, was effeminate, a nasal, slightly out of breath purr. He sounded a bit like Bambi.

       
‘What’s the game plan?’ he asked Tony.

       
‘Give me a chance, Joel. I haven’t even found out what the rules are yet. Come on, inside.’

       
‘Tony, I don’t have time. I have to go. Now.’

       
‘You’re not going anywhere, sport. Inside.’

       
The two of them bundled me back through the front door, along the hall and into the study.

       
‘Sit,’ said Tony, and as I opened my mouth to speak he placed a finger across my lips. ‘Be silent.’

       
Riker leant against the desk, legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his chest as Tony paced slowly up and down in front of me, thoughtfully chewing the inside of his cheek.

       
‘I rang up Shona from London and got the number of David’s nursing home. So I know he’s missing. And Sammy’s disappeared, too. And you raced up here like a dog with its tail on fire. I want to know where they are and what you plan to do. Come on, Rover, give.’

       
I gave. I had no choice, I didn’t have the time to mess Tony about, and even if I ran out on him all they would have to do was to follow in the helicopter. I gave. Where, when and how. The lot. When I had finished Tony looked at Riker and raised his eyebrows.

       
‘It could work,’ said Riker, answering Tony’s unspoken question.

       
‘There’s no alternative,’ I said. ‘I have to go in alone. They’ll be watching me.’

       
‘I agree,’ Riker said to Tony. ‘If we had enough time and manpower, then we’d stand a chance of storming the place, but as it is  . . .’ He dropped his hands to his sides, palms out. ‘I think we should let him do it.’

       
‘OK,’ nodded Tony. ‘You’re the expert.’ He turned to me, rocking gently back on his heels. ‘We’re coming with you.’

       
‘No,’ I said, and stood up. ‘I have to go alone. Haven’t you been listening?’

       
‘You will be going alone,’ he said patiently. ‘We’ll take the high road.’

       
‘They’ll hear you coming for miles in that thing.’

       
‘Give me credit, sport. Have you got a map of the area?’

       
I pointed towards the atlas on the desk behind Riker. Tony picked it up and stood with the pilot as he ran his finger across the page.

       
Riker spoke quietly. ‘It’ll be dark so we won’t be seen, but the noise will carry for at least two miles, possibly three even if I come in low. Let’s say three and a half to be on the safe side. Here.’ He jabbed at the map. ‘Then we move through the woods on foot. That could take two hours, say two and a half at most if we don’t get lost. We can do it. But we’ll have to leave soon. Like now.’

       
‘Me too,’ I said, but they weren’t listening to me.

       
‘Fuel?’ asked Tony.

       
‘Enough.’

       
‘Anything else?’

       
‘Artillery,’ said Riker, and I realized that they had also flown up from London and passed through the metal detectors. I unlocked the gun cabinet and pulled open the doors like a magician producing a rabbit from a hat.

       
‘Gentlemen,’ I said. ‘Choose your weapons.’

       
Riker took the Winchester and Tony chose one of the Berettas. I handed out cartridges and felt better, I felt part of it.

       
‘OK?’ Tony asked Riker.

       
‘Sure. Let’s do it.’

       
‘Now listen to me, sport,’ Tony said to me, laying his hand on my shoulder. ‘Do exactly what you planned to do. We won’t make a move until you go inside and we hear shooting. Just forget we’re around.’

       
‘We have to go,’ Riker interrupted, checking his watch.

       
‘Right,’ said Tony, looking at me long and hard. ‘One more thing. Laing still hasn’t surfaced, which could mean he’s dead, or on the run, or that he’s behind the killings. Be careful.’

       
Then they turned and I followed them into the evening gloom and watched as they walked down the side of the house, vaulted cleanly over the dry stone wall and waded through the yellow flowers to the helicopter. I locked the front door and pocketed the keys.

       
It was 7.45 pm when I slid into the driving seat of the Cavalier, next to the attache case and the Harrods carrier bag, and pulled out of the drive and pointed the car towards the Forth Bridge as the helicopter clattered into the air.

About ten months before all this had started, before I’d even heard of Kyle and Laing, I had helped one of the few remaining independent whisky firms in Scotland raise cash through a rights issue, and I’d been their guest at a weekend ‘fact-finding exercise’ visiting distilleries in and around Moray and sampling large quantities of the amber fluid.

       
The tours of the distilleries had been very much like a school trip, lectures by serious-faced men with ruddy complexions and tweed jackets who had been in the industry all their working lives and for whom whisky really was Uisge Beatha, the water of life.

       
I remembered very little about the individual distilleries because they all looked basically the same, but a few facts had stuck in my mind like midges to flypaper.

       
Each year, Scotch whisky earns more than £700 million in markets all around the world. A bottle of Scotch is drunk every tenth of a second in the United States, a bottle a second in Venezuela, a bottle every seven seconds in Norway and a bottle every twenty seconds in the Philippines or Malaya or somewhere, and it all comes from about 130 distilleries in Scotland, each making a whisky with its own distinctive taste. Perhaps the weekend whisky binge hadn’t been a complete waste of time, after all. It was only when I began to pull the facts out of my memory that I appreciated just how much I had learnt about the industry.

       
Most of the whisky they make goes for blending, producing brands like Bell’s or Famous Grouse, but some are just bottled as single whiskies, malt or grain. Blends account for about ninety-eight per cent of sales and it can take up to fifty individual malt and grain whiskies to make one blend.

       
At each distillery someone in the party had asked: ‘But what gives Scotch its flavour? Where does the taste come from?’ The question would always be greeted with a knowing smile and a load of Highland waffle about that being one of the great mysteries of distilling, and if everyone knew the secret then the Japanese would be able to produce the real thing instead of the paint stripper they mixed with imported malt to make something that a true Scot wouldn’t dream of allowing past his lips.

       
The most honest answer we had been given came from the export director of the host company, a tall, thin greying man with a bushy handlebar moustache who wore the kilt for the whole trip but who was never out of a dark pinstripe suit when in the firm’s Edinburgh head office. The simple answer, he said, is that we just don’t know.

       
One of the folk laws surrounding Malaysia’s national drink is that it’s the old stills that produce the spirit’s flavour and bouquet, and that when new stills are needed the old ones are faithfully copied, knocks, bashes, dents and all. There seems to be an element of truth in that, all the tweed jackets agreed, but research scientists with PhDs can drink the stuff all night and still not decide why that is. Or why cheaper whiskies result in harsher hangovers than a good single malt.

       
What they can tell you is that whisky, when it has been distilled, is a mixture of ethanol and a host of other minor constituents, essential oils from the malted barley and other cereals and chemicals from the peat, which do depend on the type of still, its shape and even the way it’s operated.

       
Going over in my mind the way whisky is made triggered off memories of the four or five distilleries we’d visited and I tried to picture their layout. All were sited near streams or rivers or pools and most were well away from towns and cities. That meant the men and women who worked there were supplied with cottages, usually in terraces close to the distillery with pretty gardens front and back.

       
The girl on the phone said the distillery had been abandoned, so the cottages would be empty. Mothballed distilleries are pretty common in Scotland now as gin, vodka and white rum become more popular, and their design and isolation means the buildings aren’t good for anything other than whisky production. The big whisky firms just close them down and move the workers out, sometimes keeping a token staff on a care and maintenance basis.

       
One of the distilleries we went to had its own malting room where the barley was screened and soaked in huge tanks of water called steeps, before being poured into revolving mechanical maltings about three times the height of a man where the barley germinates and the starch turns into sugar.

       
Then it’s dried in a peat-fired kiln, the air thick with smoke, before being ground up to form grist. Most distilleries miss out this stage, though, preferring to have the malt delivered from a central malting firm – it’s more economical and means they always have a regular supply. If Inshriach had one, the chances were it would be on the ground floor or in a separate building.