The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (26 page)

       
The handover of the cash was going to take place on the first floor which meant it would be in one of three places, the mashing room, the fermentation room or the stillhouse.

       
The floors in all three would be of thick wire mesh running the whole length of the building with steel staircases climbing up and down to link the various levels.

       
The mashing room is where the grist is mixed with hot water in large metal barrels with gleaming domed copper lids about twenty feet across. Much of the mash tuns is below floor level with about six to eight feet sticking through, and inspection hatches set into the lids along with temperature sensors. The wort, the thick sugary liquid, is drawn off from the tuns and the crud that’s left is sold for cattle food. ‘Which is why the Highland coo always has a wee smile on its face,’ we were told on four separate occasions. The whisky might vary from distillery to distillery but the jokes remain the same.

       
The wort is cooled and pumped into even bigger vessels, fermentation vats, this time made of wood and holding up to 45,000 litres. Yeast is thrown in and this converts the sugar into crude alcohol.

       
The fermentation rooms always smelled like breweries, the air heavy and sweet as the wort bubbled and frothed. ‘One chap fell in and took four hours to drown. He wouldn’t have lasted so long if he hadn’t had to get out and go to the toilet twice.’ That one we heard three times.

       
Again, the bulk of the fermentation vats is below floor level. About twelve feet in diameter, they would come up to a man’s stomach, and unlike the mash tuns the lids are flat and made of wooden sections which can be removed one by one.

       
There could be as many as a dozen vats in the fermentation room. A good place to hide, and to fight.

       
Somewhere close to the fermentation vats would be the stills, tall copper cones, rounded and bulbous at the bottom like an onion and stretching up to five, six, maybe seven times the height of a man, thinning out until just a few feet thick and then bending over so that the evaporating alcohol pours off and down towards the spirit safe, where the still-man can check the quality and proof of the whisky without being able to touch it.

       
There would be at least two stills, probably more, larger wash stills for the first distillation and smaller spirit stills for the second time around. The spirit that’s eventually sold in shops and pubs and bars is the middle cut of the second distillation, but even that is barely drinkable until it’s been allowed to mature for several years under lock and key and the watchful eye of HM Customs and Excise.

       
The casks would be stored in long, narrow, bonded warehouses, probably wooden with pitched roofs and likely to be found at the side of the distillery. If the distillery was in mothballs then chances were the warehouses would be empty too, except for the smell of maturing spirit and whisky-soaked wood, but they’d be kept secure and without windows so that’s where David and Sammy could be kept out of the way. Maybe.

       
Thinking of the two of them added a good fifteen mph to the speed of the Cavalier, but I didn’t ease back because Tony and Riker had delayed me and the roads were good as I passed through Perth and headed for Pitlochry.

       
It was starting to rain and I switched on the windscreen wipers and turned up the heater, then turned it down again as I realized I couldn’t be cold because my palms on the steering wheel were sweating.

It was dark by the time I reached Kingussie following the route Sammy, David and I had taken to visit the Highland Wildlife Park. God, it seemed a lifetime ago. I turned into the B9152, driving to Kincraig parallel to the shore of Loch Inch. The Cavalier headlights carved out tunnels of light through the blackness, the road speckled with raindrops, the windscreen wipers whirring quietly. The effect was almost hypnotic and twice I braked too late and too hard when an insomniac sheep wandered in front of the car.

       
The inhabitants of Kincraig were all indoors out of the rain when I passed through the town, and it had been more than an hour since I’d seen another car on the road. I felt like the last man alive, the only occupant of a dead world, a ghost planet. When I crossed the last streetlight, plunging into the dark and leaving the glow of the town behind me, I pressed the trip counter on the speedometer and watched it count off the tenth-mile segments as the road twisted and turned through the hillside.

       
I saw the signpost just before it clicked up 2.4. It leant to the right, the wood was cracked and gnarled and the lettering was obscured by green moss, but I could just make out the ‘Insh’ of ‘Inshriach’ and I pulled the wheel round sharply to the right and drove into the woods.

       
The track was just wide enough for one vehicle with passing places every hundred yards or so. It was rutted and potholed and the car bucked and swayed as it bounced from hole to hole.

       
The soaking tree trunks glistened under the headlights, branches whipping to and fro in the wind. The windscreen wipers began to clog up with fallen leaves, and the car skidded as I followed the track to the right and guided the car uneasily alongside a line of stone terraced cottages, gardens overgrown behind white picket fences, windows blank like the eyes of a blind man, washing lines bare, rainwater cascading over blocked gutters. On the downstairs window sill of the middle house sat a brown and white cat, its eyes glowing brightly, tail twitching as it turned to watch the Cavalier go past.

       
The track opened up into a large tarmac carpark in front of the distillery itself, a two-storey whitewashed building, E-shaped with the three prongs of the E pointing towards the cottages. On the left of the building was a white Ford Sierra and I parked by the side of it, three yards away from the black door the girl had described. I switched the lights off and allowed my eyes time to get used to the watery moonlight which faded and flickered as rain clouds passed overhead, then stepped out of the warmth of the car with the briefcase.

       
My footsteps echoed around the courtyard as I climbed the metal steps. At the top I wiped my soaking hands on the Barbour jacket and seized the brass door handle.

       
The door opened easily and silently and I crossed the threshold into the mashing room, moonlight reflecting off the copper-topped tuns.

       
Down the left-hand side of the whitewashed stone wall were a series of small, circular windows, five times the width of a ship’s portholes. Through them I could see clouds passing over the dulled stars in the night sky and then the moon was blotted out and I was in complete darkness.

       
At the far end of the room was an oddly-squeezed goal-post of light, and as my eyes became accustomed to the dark I could see it was a closed door with light shining through from whatever lay beyond. Then the moon reappeared from behind a cloud like a scolded child putting its head around a door and I moved across the room, the thick wire mesh floor rattling under my feet with each step, briefcase handle gripped firmly in my right hand, left hand forward to open the red-painted wooden door in front of me.

       
I felt like a latecomer to a party as the door opened and I stepped into the light, blinking. All conversation, if there had been any, stopped and everyone was looking at me as if I’d arrived at a black tie reception dressed in a blazer and slacks. But this wasn’t a party and there was no smiling host to step forward and cover my embarrassment and offer to introduce me to everybody.

       
The light came from a battery-powered lantern which was hanging from one of the steel girders that criss-crossed the high roof above the fermentation vessels. There were no windows in the fermentation room and the lamp suggested that all power had been cut off to the mothballed distillery.

       
I could see four people in the room, spread among a dozen wooden circular tubs which came up to just above stomach height, ranged in three lines of four, two lines close to the walls and the third running down the middle. With the red door behind me I was standing in a corridor between the central line of four vats and the right-hand batch.

       
At the end of the room and to the left were David and Sammy, David sitting with his back to one of the vats with his legs pulled up against his chest, Sammy standing by his side, ruffling his hair. David beamed as he saw me and tried to get up, but Sammy crouched down beside him and whispered into his ear. He settled back down but watched me carefully with wide eyes. I smiled and waved with my free hand.

       
‘It’s all right, David, you’ll soon be home,’ I said loudly, still walking, now passing the first vat, the hand holding the briefcase clamped tightly shut, eyes taking in as much as I could.

       
The girl was standing six feet to the right of David and Sammy, in the space between the left and centre lines of vats. She was about five feet two with close-cropped red hair and an elfin face with a crop of freckles around her pert nose. In thigh-length boots and green jerkin she could have passed for Peter Pan, but she was wearing a green waterproof anorak zipped up to the neck and blue jeans and in her right hand hanging by her side was a large black handgun.

       
She took a cigarette from her lips with her left hand, dropped it to the ground and moved to stamp it out, but it fell through the wire mesh in a shower of sparks to the room below. ‘Well now, just in time,’ she said, glancing at her wristwatch. ‘And with the money, too.’ Hers was the voice on the phone.

       
She smiled and turned to her partner, tall, thin with a mane of black curly hair and a long, hooked nose. He was standing at the end of the corridor I was walking along, but slightly to the right so that the lower part of his body was obscured by the last wooden vat in the right-hand line.

       
He was wearing a similar anorak, but his was open to the waist showing a white crew-necked pullover underneath and he had on grey herringbone trousers instead of jeans. They both wore blue and grey training shoes and could have passed for students hitching around Europe, if they’d had a couple of rucksacks and if they hadn’t both been carrying guns.

       
His was black and seemed bigger than hers and from sixty feet away it looked like a revolver, but the lamp was tied with a piece of wire to the girder which crossed the room directly over their heads so it shone straight down on them, and it was hard to judge exactly what they had in their hands other than to see quite clearly that his was pointing at my stomach.

       
The door clicked shut behind me and I whirled round in a panic because I’d left it open. Ronnie Laing was there, leaning against the wall, arm across the door, a lazy smile on his suntanned face, every strand of his blond hair in place, blue eyes watching my every move with cold amusement.

       
He wasn’t carrying a gun, with two professional killers on tap he didn’t need one. He rubbed his long tapered hands together, smoothing them like a concert pianist about to play to a packed Albert Hall. The smile grew wider.

       
‘So glad you could make it,’ he said softly, the spider to the fly. ‘I was almost hoping you wouldn’t come and I’d be able to play with Sammy.’ The eyes behind the green-framed glasses blazed with evil intent and I knew full well that unless I came out on top he would get to play with her and that she’d die screaming while he stood over her, smiling his lazy smile.

       
I was surrounded, but two had guns and one didn’t so it was no contest. Laing would have to wait.

       
I turned my back on him and began walking again. I swung the case slowly backwards and forwards in time with my feet and started talking, not concerned with the words or the sense, just trying to keep their minds off the case and what it contained and my mind off what was going to happen and what could happen if it all went wrong. Mouth in overdrive, brain on auto-pilot, I was back in my father’s study in front of his desk, reciting poetry.

       
‘The money’s all here,’ I said, and I was surprised at how steady my voice was. My throat was dry and my tongue felt twice its normal size and I couldn’t swallow. ‘Just keep calm,’ I said. ‘There’s no need for anybody to get hurt.’

       
The girl smiled at that and she moved to the right, away from David and Sammy, and stood behind the penultimate vat in the middle line about six paces away from her partner who moved to his right and stood in the corridor facing me.

       
She raised her gun in both hands and pointed it at my chest and my skin crawled as I saw that she was still smiling, eyes flashing like a flirtatious teenager.

       
Now I’d passed the second vessel and the third was only three steps away, left, right, left and then I was swinging the briefcase up in a relaxed, fluid motion across my body and onto the wooden lid of the vat in front of me.

       
The man’s gun was pointing down towards the floor and I hadn’t seen him take off the safety catch but that didn’t mean anything because the chances were it was already cocked and ready to fire. They’d both moved forward and their faces were in shadow, the lamp shining behind them giving them halos around their hair like two wayward angels.

       
The case came down on the lid with a dull reverberating thud and I saw Sammy jump. She stayed low beside David and put her arms protectively around his shoulder, hugging him to her. Our eyes met and instinctively I realized that she knew exactly what was going to happen next. She half smiled, a brief flash of her perfect teeth, and she nervously reached up to brush a strand of loose hair away from her face. As my hands moved towards the case she shifted her body, putting herself between David and the two killers, watching me over her shoulder, muscles tensed, a cat ready to spring.