by Iain Banks
Then you see Mrs Jamieson coming though the gate from the road and up the garden path and you duck down, walking quickly to the door and the top landing. You listen to the front door opening.
Mrs Jamieson comes in and goes through to the kitchen. You remember the creaking stairs. You hesitate for a second, then walk normally to the stairs and go down them with a fairly quick, heavy tread, whistling. The steps creak.
"Murray?" Mrs Jamieson's voice calls from the kitchen. "Murray, I didn't see the car —»
You reach the foot of the stairs. Mrs Jamieson's white-haired head appears beyond the banister rails to your right, her face turning to you.
You swing round, seeing her start to react, mouth dropping. You already know what you're going to do, how you're going to play this, so you punch her, knocking her down. She collapses to the floor, making little flustered, bird-like noises. You hope you didn't hit her too hard. You haul her up and keep your hand over her mouth as you drag her upstairs.
You pin her on the divan base and stuff a handkerchief in her mouth using the handle of the Stanley knife, then pull a pair of her tights over her head, tie them round her neck and mouth and put her inside the old, heavy wardrobe in the main bedroom, pulling out the few clothes hanging there and handcuffing her to the rail. She whimpers and cries but the gag muffles everything. You pull the tights she's wearing down and tie her ankles together above her sensible brown brogues, then you close the wardrobe doors.
You sit on the divan base, pull off the mask and sit there, breathing hard and sweating. You cool off, then put the mask back on and open the door again. Mrs Jamieson stands, trembling, her eyes through the dark grey mesh of the tights looking bright and wide. You shut the door, then close the curtains in that bedroom and the one with the iron-frame bed.
Her husband arrives half an hour later, parking the car in the drive. He comes in by the front door and you're waiting behind the kitchen door as he walks through; you make a noise, he turns and you punch him, sending him clattering back against the kitchen cabinet, producing an avalanche of willow-pattern plates. He tries to get up so you hit him again. He's very old and you're quite surprised it takes two punches to lay him out, though he's still a decent weight.
You stuff a pair of his wife's panties in his mouth and do the same trick with the tights, over the head and tied round the neck, then drag him upstairs to the second bedroom. You can smell he's been drinking recently; G & Ts, probably. Some cigarette-smoke smell, too. You're sweating again by the time you get him onto the bed with the iron frame.
You tie him to the bed, face down. He's starting to come round. When he's secured, you take out the Stanley knife. He was carrying a light windcheater which you left in the kitchen and he's wearing a blue Pringle sweater with a knickerbockered golfer depicted on the front, a Marks & Spencer's check shirt and a light string vest. You cut his clothes off, flinging them into one corner. His fawn slacks scatter golf tees when you throw them aside; his socks are bright red, his Y-fronts white. His golf shoes are brown and white, heavily spiked and with elaborate tongues and tasselled laces.
You take off your day-pack. You get the pillows from the main bedroom and stuff them and those from this bed under the old man's torso, raising his body from the bed. He's making spluttering, shouting noises now and moving weakly. You use a couple of rolled-up blankets to bring his rump up further, then go back to the day-pack and sort out the things you'll need. He struggles, as though wrestling with a pinned, invisible opponent. He's making a noise like he's choking but you don't do anything yet. You take the top off the cream.
There's a spitting, hacking noise and he must get at least some of the gag out of his mouth because he splutters, "Stop this! Stop this, I say!" Not the gruff, home-counties voice you recall from the television; more high-pitched and strained, but that's hardly surprising in the circumstances. He sounds less frightened than you expected, though.
"Look," he says, in something more like his normal voice; deep and no-nonsense. "I don't know what you want, but just take it and get out; there's no need for this; no need at all." You squirt some of the cream onto the vibrator.
"I think you're making a mistake," he says, trying to twist his head round to see you. "Seriously. We don't live here; this is a holiday home. It's rented; there's nothing of value here at all." He struggles some more. You kneel on the bed behind him, inside the inverted V of his scrawny, varicosed legs. There are broken veins on his back and upper arms. His shanks look grey and withered; his buttocks are very pale, almost yellowish, and the skin on his thighs, below the level shorts would come to, has a grainy, mottled appearance; his balls hang like old fruit, surrounded by wiry grey hair.
His cock looks slightly engorged. That's interesting.
He feels you get up onto the bed and shouts, "Look! I don't think you know what you're doing. This is aggravated burglary, young man; you — ah!"
You've put the cream-smeared tip of the vibrator against his anus, grey-pink and pursed between his spread buttocks. The cream must feel cold. "What?" he shouts, voice muffled by the gag. "Stop! What d'you think you're doing?"
You start to work the creamy plastic dildo into him, twisting it from side to side and watching the skin round his anus stretch and whiten as the ivory-coloured plastic slides in; a thin collar of white cream builds up there.
"Ah! Ah! Stop! All right! I know what you're doing! I know what this is about! All right! So you know who I am; but this is no way to — ah! Ah! Stop! Stop! All right! You've made your point! Those women — look, all right, I may have said things I regretted later, but you weren't there! You didn't hear all the evidence! I did! You didn't hear the men who were accused! You couldn't form an opinion of their character! The same with the women! Ah! Ah! Ah! Stop! Please; you're hurting! You're hurting!"
You have the vibrator about a third of the way in, not quite up to its maximum girth. You press harder, pleased at how much grip the surgeon's gloves give you but half-wishing you could say something though you know you can't, which is a pity.
"Ah! Ah! Jesus Christ, for God's sake, man, are you trying to kill me? Look, I have money; I can — ah! Ah, you filthy bastard — " He moans and farts at the same time. You have to turn your head away from the smell, but you push the vibrator in further. You can hear seagulls crying outside, beyond the closed curtains.
"Stop, just stop this!" he shouts. "This isn't justice! You don't know all the facts about those cases! Some of them were dressed like whores, dammit! They'd let any man have them; they were no better than whores! Ah! Fuck, fuck, you filthy blackguard bastard! You filthy, fucking queer bastard! Ah!"
He pulls and bucks, rattling the bed and pulling the knotted sheet-strips tighter. "You bastard!" he splutters. "You'll pay for this! You won't get away with this! They'll catch you; they'll catch you and I'll make damn, fucking sure they give you a lesson in the cells you'll never forget! D'you hear me? Do you?"
You leave the vibrator in there and switch it on. He heaves and pulls again but it doesn't do any good. "Oh, for God's sake, man," he moans, "I'm seventy-six; what sort of monster are you?" He starts sobbing. "And my wife," he says, coughing. "What have you done with my wife?
You get off the bed and take out the little wooden box from the zipped pocket of your shell-suit, carefully slide the lid off and tease apart the nest of toilet tissue inside. The wad of tissue holds a tiny vial of blood and a needle; it's a dirty disposable syringe needle, a little thing barely a centimetre long with a cone of ribbed orange plastic at the end that would fit onto the body of the syringe.
You listen to him as he curses you and threatens you, and you are still unsure. You couldn't decide when you were planning this whether to infect him with HIV-positive blood or not; you couldn't make up your mind whether he really deserved it, and so you've left it until now to make your decision.
Sweat runs into your eyes as you stand there.
"D'you get a thrill from this, do you? Is that it?" He spits. "Closet queer, are you?"
He coughs, then twists his head, trying to look back at you. "Are you still there, are you? What are you doing now? Having a wank, eh? Are you?"
You smile behind the mask and fold the toilet tissue back over the vial and the needle, leaving them in the box. You slide the lid shut again and put it back in your jacket pocket. You take a couple of steps back towards the door, where he can see you.
"You filthy bastard!" he spits. "You filthy, fucking bastard! I served the best I could for thirty years! You've no right to do this! This doesn't prove anything, d'you understand? It doesn't prove anything! I'd do it all just the same if I had my time again! All of it! I wouldn't change one sentence, you fucking little cunt!"
You rather admire the old fellow's attitude. You slip through to the other room to make sure his wife is all right. She's still trembling. You leave her hanging there in the mothball-scented darkness of the old wardrobe. You go downstairs, pack the Elvis mask back into the day-pack with the rest of the stuff and leave by the back door you arrived through.
It's still light and the evening is only just starting to turn chilly as you walk down the back path beneath a deep blue sky ridged with high, dark clouds. A cool wind comes in off the sea and you pull your jacket collar tight.
Your hands still smell of rubber, from the gloves.
I turn in the whisky story, with a teaser paragraph at the end promising further revelations concerning arm-twisting moves being made by the big corporate booze-barons to silence the brave little whisky wizards. Meanwhile I try to work out what's going on in the long-running mole story; the Ares story (Ares the god of massacre, according to the mythology dictionary in the paper's library). I throw «Jemmel» at the databases but they draw a blank. Even Profile throws up its silicon hands in defeat.
"Cameron! It's yourself!" Frank informs me, indubitably. "So you thought you'd put in an appearance; well, well. Hey; guess what the spell-check thinks Colonsay should be?"
"No idea, Frank."
""Colonic"!"
"Hilarious."
"And Carnoustie?"
"Hmm?"
""Carousing"!" He laughs. ""Carousing"!"
"Even funnier."
"By the way, Eddie wants to see you."
"Oh."
Eddie the Ed is a wee, wizened sandy-haired man of fifty-five or so who wears half-moon glasses on his pointy nose and always looks like he's just briefly tasted something extremely sour but is finding it actually quite amusing because he knows you're about to taste it too, soon, and for longer. Technically Eddie is only acting editor while our real Great Helmsman, Sir Andrew, is away for an indefinite period recovering from a heart attack (presumably brought on by that common editorial affliction of having too much heart).
Our resident cynic in the sports section pointed out that Sir Andrew's heart attack occurred only a short decent interval after the murder of Sir Toby Bissett back in August, and hazarded that it was a kind of pre-emptive strike to take him off the target list of what a few editors at the time half-suspected was some editor-offing loony whose next target was them personally. Well, blame a host of guilty consciences, and the confusion caused when the IRA apparently claimed responsibility for Tobe's murder, and then retracted it. No other editors were spiked (though at least that showed our assassin had a sense of humour), and anyway Eddie seems not to worry about such threats to his temporarily elevated position.
The editor's office of the Caledonian probably has one of the best views in all newspaperdom, looking out over Princes Street Gardens to the New Town, the river Forth and the fields and hills of Fife beyond, with a side-window view of the castle's best profile thrown in, just in case the occupant ever gets bored with the frontal aspect.
I have kind of a bad association with this room after an unsuccessful foreign trip last year which resulted in a visit here to see Sir Andrew. I left with my ears singed; if displaying editorial outrage was an Olympic sport, Sir Andrew would undoubtedly be on the British team and saddled with the crushing burden of being a Medal Hope. I'd have resigned there and then except I got the impression that was just what he wanted me to do.
"Cameron, come in, sit down," Eddie says. Sir Andrew is into furniture politics; Eddie is sitting on — no; housed within — a throne of a chair, all black carved wood and buttoned red leather and looking like it's supported more than one royal rear. I'm perched on the class equivalent of an honest artisan, one fabric-covered step up from stackable plastic prole. Eddie did have the decency to look uncomfortable in this piece of power-seating when he first took over the job last month, but I get the impression he's grown to like it.
Eddie leafs through a print-out on his desk. The desk isn't quite as impressive as the chair — only single-bed size rather than the king-size I suspect Sir Andrew and maybe Eddie would prefer — but it still looks fairly impressive. There's a terminal on its surface but Eddie only uses that to spy on people, watching the system as we type notes, input a story, fax outside or e-mail insults to each other.
Eddie sits back in his chair, taking off the half-moon glasses and tapping them against the knuckles of one hand. "I'm not sure about this whisky story, Cameron," he says in the perpetually pained tones of Kelvinside/Morningside Refined.
"Oh? What's wrong with it?"
"The tone, Cameron, the tone," Eddie says, frowning. "It's a tad too combative, you know what I mean? Too critical."
"Well, I'm just sticking to —»
"Aye, the facts," Eddie says, smiling tolerantly and sharing what he thinks is a private joke. "Including the fact that you obviously don't like some of the larger distilling concerns, by the sound of it." He slips his glasses back on and peers at the print-out.
"Well, I wouldn't say that's how it comes across," I say, hating myself for feeling defensive. "You're bringing the fact that you know me to this, Eddie. I don't think somebody coming cold to —»
"I mean," Eddie says, slicing through my waffle like a steak knife, "all this about the Distillers Company and the Guinness take-over. Is that strictly necessary? It's old news, Cameron."
"But it's still relevant," I insist. "It's in there to show the way big business works; they'll promise anything to get what they want and then renege on it without a second thought. They're professional liars; it's only the bottom line that matters, only the shareholders" profits; nothing else. Not tradition or the life of communities or the people who've worked all their lives in —»
Eddie sits back, laughing. "There you go," he says. "You're writing an article about whisky —»
"The adulteration of whisky."
"— and you've got stuff in here basically saying what a lying wee shite Ernest Saunders is."
"Lying big shite; he's —»
"Cameron!" Eddie says, annoyed, taking off the half-moons again and tapping the print-out with them. "The point is that even if this wasn't very possibly libellous —»
"But nobody recovers from senile dementia!"
"It doesn't matter, Cameron! It has no place in an article about whisky."
"… adulteration," I add, sullenly.
"There you go again!" Eddie says, standing and heading to the middle of the three big windows behind him. He half-sits on the window-ledge, hands on the wood. "My God, laddie, you're a terrible one for getting bees in your bonnet, so you are."
God, I hate it when Eddie calls me "laddie'.
"Are you going to print it or not?" I ask him.
"Certainly not, as it stands. This is supposed to grace the front of the Saturday supplement, Cameron; it's for hungover people in their dressing-gowns to scatter their croissant crumbs across; the way it reads at the moment you'd be lucky to get it into the back of Private Eye."
I glare.
"Cameron, Cameron," Eddie says, looking pained at my expression and rubbing his chin with one hand. He looks tired. "You're a good journalist; you write well, you meet deadlines and I know you've had offers to go down south with an even wider brief and extra money, and both Andrew and I give you more leeway than
some people here think you deserve. But if you ask to do a Saturday special on whisky we do rather expect it to have something to do with the cratur itself, rather than read like a manifesto for Class War. It's as bad as that television piece you did last year." (At least he hasn't mentioned the results of my little foreign trip.) He leans over and peers at the print-out. "I mean, look at this: forcing Ernest Saunders to drink so much whisky his brain deteriorates to the "bovinely spongy state he claimed it was in at the end of the Guinness trial"; that's —»
"It was a joke!" I protest.
"It reads like incitement! What are you trying to —?"
"You'd let Muriel Gray away with it."
"Not the way you've put it, I wouldn't."
"Well, get it legalled, then; the lawyers —»
"I'm not going to get it legalled, Cameron, because I'm not going to run it." Eddie shakes his head. "Cameron," he sighs, quitting the window to resume his throne again, "you simply have to cultivate a sense of proportion."
"What happens now?" I say, ignoring this and nodding at the print-out.
Eddie sighs. "Rewrite, Cameron. Try to dilute the vitriol instead of harping on about this asbestos filtering."
I sit and stare at the print-out. "This means we'll lose the slot, doesn't it?"
"Yes," Eddie says. "I'm moving the National Trust series forward a week. The whisky piece will just have to wait."
I purse my lips, then shrug. "Okay, give me till — " I look at my watch "- six. I can have it redone by then if I work right through. We can still make the —»
"No, Cameron," Eddie says exasperatedly. "I don't want a quick rehash with a few of the expletives deleted; I want you to rethink the whole thing. Approach it from a different angle. I mean, get your criticism on the moral corrosion of late capitalism in implicitly if you must, but make it implicit; keep it subtle. I know you… we both know you can do it, and that you're more effective when you're wielding the stiletto rather than the chainsaw. Take advantage of that, for goodness" sake."