by Iain Banks
I shut up. I can't stop shaking.
"Then what are we going to do?" I wail.
"I know," Andy says.
A civvy Granada to Heathrow. London on a bright November morning. People and cars and buildings and shops. I watch the real life go by outside like it's something from an SF movie; I can't believe how alien it all looks, how strange and foreign. I feel a bizarre sense of loss and yearning. I watch the men and women as they crowd along the streets or sit in their cars and vans and buses and trucks, and their freedom seems inestimably precious, exotic and vicariously intoxicating. To be able just to walk, or drive, wherever you want; Christ, I've been away from all this for less than a week and I feel like somebody coming out after thirty years.
And I know these people don't feel free, I know they're all hurrying along or sitting there worrying about their jobs or their mortgages or being late or an IRA bomb in the nearest litter-bin, but I look at them and feel a terrible sense of loss, because I think I've surrendered all this; the ordinariness of life, the ability just to be part of it and take part in it. I want to hope that I'm being melodramatic and everything will settle back to the way it used to be, before all this ghastliness, but I doubt it. In my guts I feel that, even if everything goes the best it possibly can for me, my life has changed completely and forever.
But fuck it; at least I'm back in the real world, and with a modicum of control.
I'm discreetly handcuffed to Detective Sergeant Flavell — McDunn has the key — and we have a couple of burly plain-clothes men with us I strongly suspect are tooled up, but the pressure seems to be off me a bit. I don't think I'm suspect numero uno any more; I think McDunn at least believes me and that's enough for now. The unfortunate Captain — later Major — Lingary (retired) and Doctor Halziel have done me a lot of good by disappearing so mysteriously. I try not to think what Andy might be doing to them. I try even harder not to think about what he might do to me if he ever got the chance.
We're on the dear old elevated section of the M4 where lorries are so apt to break down when there's a call for McDunn; he takes the handset, listens and sucks his teeth for a bit, then says, "Thank you." He puts the phone down and looks back at me. "Army records," he says. He turns back to face the front as we head through the late-morning traffic. "The body in the hotel was not Andrew Gould's."
"Did they check the records against the ones in Howie's file?" I ask.
McDunn nods. "They match Gould's. Not perfectly; he's had work done since, but they say they're ninety-nine per cent sure. They were switched."
I sit back, smiling; for a while there's a glow in my belly which displaces the sickness. For a while.
McDunn gets on the phone to somebody from Tayside police and tells them to contact the Goulds and stop the funeral.
Lunch for five at 35,000 feet, then Edinburgh from the air: greyly grand and a tad misty. We land just after one o'clock and get straight into a Jag jam-sandwich (so a Ford at both ends — ha!). The XJ speeds north over the road-bridge, no lights or siren on but we clip along and it's the smoothest fucking motorway journey I've ever had; just a total hassle-free zone creaming along around the ton with no worries about unmarked police cars and hoo-wee the traffic in front of us just fucking evaporates, man, just brakes (and wobbles sometimes as the guy probably gets the cold sweats and the wo-where'd-my-stomach-go? feeling), swings meekly left and brakes again; you've never seen a beefy BMW 5-series duck in so fast in your life; might as well all be driving 2CVs. It's beautiful.
We take a leg each and drag the man face-down through the ferns towards the northeast end of the hill. His cord trousers are still rolled down round his ankles and get in the way and we have to stop and turn him over and pull the trousers back up, fastening them by one button. His cock is small now and there is dried blood crusted on it. We pull him away beneath the trees; in his other hand, Andy is still holding the branch we hit him with.
We come to a thicket under the trees; a cluster of rhododendron and bramble bushes. Andy clears a way through the undergrowth and we drag the man beneath the thorns and soft fruit of the brambles and the glossy leaves of the rhodies, into the green darkness; his rucksack catches on the branches above and Andy takes it off him, pushing it ahead of us.
We come to a stubby cylinder of undressed stone; the second of the two chimneys from the old railway tunnel under the hill.
We make good time on the road from the motorway; people actually help you overtake when you're in a cop car. Unbelievable. I almost wish I'd become a cop-car driver instead of a journalist now; this is such sweet driving. Still, maybe it kind of takes some of the sport out of it.
At Gilmerton, where the three wee blue Fiat 126s used to live, there's a Sapphire Cosworth orange-and-white squatting just off the road by the junction; it flashes its lights at us as we pass. There's another patrol car at the turn-off to Strathspeld.
"Kind of high-profile here, aren't we?" I ask McDunn.
"Mm-hmm," is all he'll say.
We come to the village. I look up at our old house; bushes and trees are taller. Satellite dish. Conservatory on one side. I watch the familiar shops and houses go by; Mum's old gift shop (now a video shop); the Arms, where I had my first pint; Dad's old garage, still doing business. Another police car, parked on the village green. "Will the Goulds be at the house?" I ask.
McDunn shakes his head. "They're in that hotel we just passed."
I'm relieved. I don't think I'd know what to say to them. Hi; the good news is I didn't kill your son, in fact he isn't dead at all, but the bad news is he's a multiple murderer.
Five minutes later we're at the house.
The gravel circle outside the house looks like the car park at a cop convention. I hear a clattering in the air as McDunn gets out of the Jag and I look up over the trees into high, bright overcast. Fuck me, they've even brought a chopper.
McDunn stands talking to some heavily brassed uniformed cops on the steps of the front door. I look round the old place; the window surrounds have been painted, the flower-beds look a bit unkempt. Nothing else has changed; I haven't been here since that day a week after Clare died, and it had the same muddily washed-out look about it then.
McDunn comes back towards the car, catches FlavelPs eye and beckons him. We get out and follow McDunn into the house.
Nothing much different inside, either; still looks and smells the same: polished parquet flooring, sumptuous but fading old rugs, assorted mostly very old furniture, lots of big houseplants on the floor and time-dulled landscapes and portraits on the wood-panelled walls. We walk under the angle of the main staircase, into the dining room. The place is full of cops; there's a map of the estate on the table, almost covering it. McDunn introduces me to the other officers. I have never had so many hard, suspicious looks in my life.
"So, where's this body?" one of the uniformed guys from Strathclyde asks. He's here because they've loaned the helicopter.
"Still here," I tell him. "Unlike… unlike the man you're looking for." I look at McDunn, the one friendly-ish face in here and the only one I can look at without feeling like a five-year-old who's just wet his pants. "I thought the idea was to let the funeral go ahead, or at least make it look like it was; he was bound to be here. You might have caught him then."
McDunn's face gives a good impression of being stone-clad. "That was not felt to be the most suitable way of proceeding in this matter," he says, sounding like a police spokesman for the first time.
There's a sensation of well tailored black uniforms rustling in the room and I get the impression from the general atmosphere and a few exchanged looks that this is a contentious point.
"We're still waiting for this body," says the man with the braid from Tayside, the boys officially in charge. "Mr Colley," he adds.
I look down at the map of the estate. "I'll show you," I tell them. "You'll need a… crowbar or something, about fifty metres of rope and a torch. A hacksaw might be handy, too."
Andy reaches up to
the iron grating and pulls at it.
"This one comes away," he grunts; his voice is still shaky.
I help him; we lift the rusting grating up at one end but the far side is still secured by an iron pin and we can't shift it any further.
Andy takes the branch we hit the man with and wedges it under the grating; part of it sticks through but there's a stump where a smaller branch has broken off and the grating rests on that, held a half-metre or so off the stone rim.
Andy throws the man's rucksack into the shaft, then bends and takes the man under one armpit, trying to heave him up.
"Come on!" he hisses.
We haul the man up, his back against the stone of the vent, his head flopping down onto his chest. There's a little blood on the stones of the chimney. Andy takes the man's calves under his armpits and lifts; I get underneath and force the man's shoulders up; his head goes over onto the stone rim of the vent, beneath the grating. We both push and heave and the man's shoulders scrape over the rim; his arms drag up and over as Andy pushes, grunting, feet slipping on the old leaves and soil. I push the man's behind up, lifting with all my might. The man's trousers snag on the stone and start to come down again, then the branch holding the grating shirts and the iron grid falls down, thumping into the man's chest.
"Shit," Andy breathes. We struggle to lift the grating up and wedge the branch underneath again. The man's head is poised over the shaft, drooping down into it. We push his legs but they buckle at the knees, so we have to hold them up above our heads as we push to make them stay straight, then as we shove and his trousers are rolled down by the rim of stone, his arms flop over the far side of the shaft rim and it suddenly gets easier to push him. He slides out of our grasp, slipping into the shaft with a scraping noise. His trousers bunch round his ankles again, then catch round his boots and disappear over the edge of the chimney, kicking up at the last moment and hitting the grating; the branch slips and the grating slams down. The branch falls through it into the shaft and drops after the man.
We stand there for a second or two. Then there is — unless we each imagine it — a very faint thump. Andy suddenly jerks into motion and scrambles up onto the rim of the chimney. He stares through the grating, down into the darkness.
"Can you see him?" I ask.
Andy shakes his head. "But let's get some branches anyway," he says.
We prop the grating open with another branch and spend the next half-hour pulling fallen branches and logs from all over that part of the hill, dragging them into the clump of bushes and throwing them into the shaft; we snap dead branches off trees and bushes and haul and peel living ones off; we scrape together armfuls of dry leaf litter and throw those over the edge of the chimney, too; everything goes under the grating and down into the shaft. We still can't see anything down there.
Eventually a large branch with lots of other branches on it and lots of leaves — half a bush, practically — snags only a few metres down the shaft and we stop, breathless, sweating, trembling from exertion and delayed shock. We let the grating fall back and throw the last branch down into the darkness; it catches on the branches stuck near the top of the shaft. We sit on the dead leaves at the foot of the vent, backs against the stone.
"Are you all right?" I ask Andy after a while.
He nods. I put a hand out to him but he flinches again.
We sit there for some time but I keep glancing up, and gradually become terrified that the man is somehow not dead or has become a zombie and is climbing back up the shaft towards us, to push the grating up and put his already rotting hands down and grab us both by the hair. I stand up and face Andy. My legs are still shaky and my mouth has gone very dry.
Andy stands too. "A swim," he says.
"What?"
"Let's — " Andy swallows. "Let's go for a swim. Down to the loch, the river." He glances back at the stones of the air shaft.
"Yeah," I say, trying to sound cheerful and unconcerned. "A swim." I look at my hands, all scraped and dirty. There's some blood on them. They're still shaking. "Good idea."
We crawl out of the undergrowth into the bright day.
There are a few minutes, perhaps not more than three or four, when I exist in a bewildering storm of hope, joy, incomprehension and dread, when they don't find the body at the bottom of the shaft.
We walked here through the gardens and the woods, past the hill where Andy and I lay in the sunlight all those summers ago, into the little glen, then up through the bushes and the dead auburn wreckage of the ferns, to the trees at the summit of the small hill. A damp wind blew from the west, shaking drips off the high, bare trees and taking the sound of the main road away.
There are about twenty of us altogether, including half a dozen constables carrying the gear. I'm still very much attached to Sergeant Flavell. I'd naively thought they could mount some low-profile operation to catch Andy watching his own funeral; I'd imagined cops slinking through the undergrowth, whispering into radios, gradually closing in. Instead we're here mob-handed, crashing through the undergrowth towards a dead body.
Except it isn't there. I tell them it is; I tell them there's a man's body at the bottom of the air shaft and they believe me. It takes them long enough to cut a way through to the chimney of the air shaft, sawing through the rhodie branches and tearing away the brambles and other undergrowth; then they lever off the iron grating over the shaft without any difficulty, and one of the younger cops, in an overall and a hard hat, wraps the rope around himself — proper climbing rope they had in the back of one of the Range Rovers — and abseils down into the darkness.
McDunn's listening on a little radio handset.
It crackles. "Lot of branches," the cop on the end of the rope says. Then: "Down, on the bottom."
The helicopter clatters overhead. I'm wondering where Andy is by now when I hear the guy in the shaft say, "Nothing here."
What?
"Just a load of branches and stuff," the cop says.
McDunn doesn't react. I do; I stare at the radio. What's he talking about? I feel dizzy. It did happen. I remember it. I've lived with it ever since, had it at the back of my head ever since. I know it happened. I feel like the woods are revolving around me; maybe if I wasn't still handcuffed to the sergeant, I'd fall over. (And I remember the man saying, can remember his voice perfectly, hear him again as he says, "I'm a policeman!)
Some of the other cops gathered round the air shaft are wearing knowing looks.
"Wait a minute," the cop in the tunnel says. My heart thuds. What has he found? I don't know if I want him to find him — it — or not.
"There's a rucksack here," the voice on the radio says. "Large day-pack size, brown… looks full. Fairly old."
"Nothing else?" McDunn asks.
"Just the branches… can't see to the end of the tunnel in either direction. Patch of light in the distance… eastwards."
"That's the other air shaft," I tell McDunn. "Back that way." I point.
"Want me to have a look round, sir?"
McDunn looks at the Tayside chief, who nods. "Yes," McDunn says. "If you're sure it's safe."
"Safe enough, I think, sir. Untying."
McDunn looks at me. He sucks his teeth. I avoid the eyes of the other cops. McDunn's eyebrows rise a little.
"He was there," I tell him. "It was Andy and I. This guy attacked us; abused Andy. We hit him with a log. I swear."
McDunn looks unconvinced. He peers over the edge of the stonework, down into the shaft.
I'm still feeling dizzy. I put a hand out to the stones of the air-shaft chimney, to steady myself. At least the rucksack's there. It did happen, for Christ's sake; it wasn't an hallucination. The guy was probably dead when we tipped him into the shaft — we just assumed he was at the time though the older I got the less sure of that I was — but even if wasn't, he must have been killed when he hit the bottom; it's thirty metres at least.
Could Andy have decided since that the body wasn't well enough concealed, and come b
ack and removed it; hauled it up, taken it away and buried it? We'd never talked about that day, and we never again came near this old air shaft; I don't know what he might have done since but I'd always assumed he was like me and just tried to forget about it, pretend it never happened.
Denial. Hell, sometimes it's best.
"— ear me yet?" the radio crackles.
"Yes?" McDunn says.
"Found him."
It will take a while to get the body out; they have to get more guys down there, take photographs; the usual shit. Most of us return to the house. I don't know what the hell to feel. It's finally over, it's out, people know, other people know; the police know, it's no longer just between me and Andy, it's public. I do feel some relief, no matter what happens now, but I still feel I have betrayed Andy, regardless of what he's done.
The man's body was under the other air shaft. The poor fuck must have crawled all that way, a hundred metres or more to that second patch of light; our bright idea of putting the branches down after him to cover him up was pointless; for all these years it would only have needed some more kids to have come along with torches or bits of burning paper to discover the body. They reckon there was a load of fallen branches lying under the air shaft before we pushed the guy down it; according to the young cop who first went down it looked like he'd crawled out from the middle of the pile. Even so, I don't know how he survived that fall; God knows what he broke, how he suffered, how long he took to crawl there to the other slightly brighter patch of light; how long he took to die.
Part of me feels sorry for him, despite what he tried to do, what he did do. God knows, maybe he'd have ended up killing Andy, killing both of us, but nobody deserves to die like that.