Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  So he had been a good boy so far, and Sarah must have been afraid this reappearance of a ghost from his past might send him off on some last crusade, a disappointingly male demonstration of his suppressed virility. So near to the wedding, she was probably worried he might consider it his own equivalent of a stag night.

  He shook his head, laughing a little at the thought of her anxiety and at what now struck him as the ridiculousness of certain past antics. Jack Parlabane: sniffer of a million scams, fearless, intrepid, resourceful, incisive, and quite clearly, in vivid retrospect, in need of serious spiritual and emotional guidance. He saw images of a furtive-looking bloke in a black polo-neck and black jeans, climbing out of windows, dozens of floors up, computer disks and photocopied documents strapped to his chest, shinning up ropes, hanging off gutters and drainpipes.

  Oh yeah, and getting shot at.

  What the fuck were you doing? he often asked himself.

  Ah, Sarah, he thought. Didn’t she remember what he had said back then, in response to her request?

  “I’m too old for all that carry-on.”

  In a simple equation: if he was mature enough to finally want to get married – and he meant really, really, achingly want – then he was too mature for “all that James Bond stuff”, as she called it.

  Still, didn’t mean he couldn’t take an interest.

  If Roland Voss had got his way, Parlabane would still be in jail right now for Class A possession with intent to supply, in little danger of seeing any more of the twentieth century first hand, especially since that tit Howard – the one who seemed to have such difficulty achieving the relatively simple feat of pronouncing the letter “L” – had attempted with embarrassing desperation to win some votes by mooting the abolition of early remission. Parlabane’s crime was to let Voss know, with trademark subtlety, that he knew the Dutchman had been using him. Neither was infringing any laws: what Voss was up to – getting Parlabane to do hatchet jobs on his business rivals in his flagship Sunday broadsheet, Parlabane unaware of the fringe benefits of his exposés – was as legal as it was difficult to prove. Parlabane, for his part, had simply resigned and made no threat to embarrass Voss publicly with his knowledge. But within a matter of hours his Clapham flat had been turned over, and he discovered and disposed of a large slab of party powder with moments to spare before the cops turned up looking for it. Jack was a man who could take “fuck off” for a hint. He shipped. Put most of his gear in storage and took off for California, on a promise from an old friend who was now Metro editor of the LA Tribune.

  Perhaps Voss had him set up with the coke just in case, but Parlabane suspected it was simply a punitive sanction to demonstrate the folly of having the audacity to oppose the Dutchman’s will in any capacity whatsoever.

  He was an evil, evil man.

  The Monopolies and Mergers Commission seemed afflicted by chronic cataracts as it failed to notice anything amiss throughout his acquisition of newspaper after newspaper after radio station after pay-TV channel, making Parlabane wonder whether the government body’s senior staff actually knew what the word “monopoly” meant. Either that or they had misunderstood their remit and thought their role was to help create the things.

  But by a staggeringly unlikely coincidence, all of Voss’s media voices just happened to be singing the government’s tune, whatever their previous allegiances. Which obviously had no bearing whatsoever on the blind spot that Voss seemed to occupy in the MMC’s field of vision.

  Parlabane saw the tabloids as Voss’s own private Cerberus, a multi-headed bulldog baying its ugly howl of racism, misogyny, homophobia and moral repression in a seething ferox of hatred. Cerberus would defend to the death the ordinary Brit’s right to remain ignorant, underlining for its readers that just because the person telling you something is the world authority in that particular field doesn’t mean he knows any better than you. Safe sex? Pah! AIDS is a poof’s disease, innit. If you’re not an arse-bandit, you’ve nothing to fear. Guildford Four? If they didn’t do that one, they’re bound to have done something else. If we’d been able to string’em up back then, British Justice would never have been called into question. Greenhouse effect? Bollocks! If it’s getting warmer we should celebrate. Save us splashing out on foreign holidays and handing over our hard-earned to a bunch of dagoes.

  With obscenity barked so loud and so long, people got used to it, desensitised. Stopped seeing the harm. Thus is the political climate altered.

  Voss also had a couple of prestige broadsheets (two-hundred-year reputations soiled almost instantly by the touch of his leprous hand) for window-dressing, but the Dutchman’s main British media trade was in ignorance. He packaged ignorance, marketed ignorance and sold ignorance – to the ignorant. Millions of acres of pine forest, millions of gallons of ink, legions of hacks, subs, photographers, all combining daily to tell people . . . nothing.

  “Famous, important, reputable married man and young, attractive single woman in role-playing/kinky/S&M/back-of-the-car/hotel-room/privacy-of-their-own-home sex romp shock.”

  Sub editor please.

  “Famous married man and single woman have sex.”

  No, still some redundancies. Neater please.

  “Married man and single woman have sex.”

  Just the bones of the story, space is tight.

  “Man and woman have sex.”

  What a scoop. Hold the front page.

  Drive that common denominator lower. Distract the proles with drying-green tittle-tattle so they don’t notice anything of what’s actually going on in the world.

  Jesus, when he thought about it, Parlabane had probably hated Roland Voss more than he hated any other human being on the planet, even Jimmy Hill.

  How many revenges had he fantasised? How many poetic come-uppances? How many gruesome, lonely and humiliating deaths? However, they were only fantasies; Parlabane was not a violent man. But it wasn’t the pain or the violence that was the turn-on. Entirely. It was of penetrating Voss’s invulnerability, rendering him human. Of him suffering the things he was so protected from, the everyday reality of normal people that he never experienced but still cast judgment upon, and which he could greatly affect. “Mile in my shoes” stuff. Fantasies of Voss suffering poverty, joblessness, discrimination, as much as of him being beaten up by homosexual martial arts experts after his papers declared gays were “not man enough to be in the armed forces”. It was the thought of him being forced to pay dues for his words and actions. Being forced to acknowledge that there was a price, even for him, the mighty Roland Voss. And the fun of the fantasy, the source of the fantasy, was its sheer impossibility.

  But last night someone had cut Voss’s wife’s throat right in front of him – probably forced him to watch – and then made sure it was the last thing he ever saw.

  Voss didn’t deserve that. Neither did his wife. No-one did. No-one. A solid, full-blooded boot in the balls, maybe, but not that. Detached postures of schadenfreude were one thing, but the visceral reality of Voss’s death made Parlabane sick. And if it could make him sick, it would make anyone sick. Which was why the media was loudly asking itself who these men were that could bring themselves to do such a terrible thing. “A dire, extreme consequence of the Left’s politics of envy,” suggested one generously superannuated pundit, making the most of the Robbin’ Hoods angle throughout the frustrating delay in the cops tossing them a terrorist motive they could really get their teeth into.

  Parlabane didn’t care who had done it. And although naturally curious, he wasn’t particularly consumed by wondering why they’d done it – Christ, pick one motive from a thousand.

  What he really wanted to know was how the fuck they had done it.

  DS Jenny Dalziel opened the cold can of diet Irn-Bru with a practised action of her index finger, holding it up with her right hand and clanking it against Callaghan’s Sprite as he leaned against her desk, not taking her eyes off the report in front of her. She made to reach for a pile of change
amidst the clutter that ringed her peripheral vision like crime-scene ghouls, but Call waved a hand dismissively and pulled away from the desk.

  Jesus, you needed Call on a day like today. In fact, it was in these moments after the fan had liberally redistributed the Douglas Hurd that he was usually at his best, adversity and chaos provoking a laconic, unflappable air; as if just a plain ol’ normal day somehow didn’t provide the right sort of stimulation. You got the impression he was there for you, or at the very least that he understood, even if it was just the shared secret of a subtly abusive gesture, like half an hour ago when he had cupped one hand around the right side of his chest after that MI5 bear started shouting at everybody.

  When his missus sprogged last year, Jenny had feared Callaghan might, like many before him, turn into a jumpy, obsessive goo-ball or a tired-eyed Grumposaurus Rex, but there had so far been no evidence of either. Thank fuck.

  Her phone started ringing as Callaghan walked away, prompting him to turn around and grin archly. He held up nine fingers, in reference to their last conversation.

  “A fiver,” he said.

  Jenny just fixed him with an “I don’t need this” look.

  “Answer it. A fiver.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Go away, Call,” she said, eyeing the phone resentfully. He held up the nine fingers again then turned away.

  The phone kept ringing.

  She really didn’t need this.

  When she walked into the building this morning, it was like someone had been through and sprayed the place with oestrogen repellent. The British Olympic team for the Male Self-Importance event had invaded Lothian & Borders HQ, a rampant infestation of facial hair and Y chromosomes. They had been parading around the place with a brusque arrogance that was just dying for an excuse to tell you how much more serious their business was than anything you might be trying to get on with, such as the body of Fiona Dickson, prostitute, found bludgeoned behind Commercial Street in Leith. Fiona didn’t own any newspapers or TV stations, so manpower was likely to be a little thinner on the ground when it came to the investigation of her death, what with everyone having to impress the Scottish Office with a result on the Voss killings.

  Wankers.

  The station hadn’t been besieged, it had been taken over. Anyone not directly involved with the Voss investigation was being treated not only as irrelevant, but with a hostility that bordered on suspicion of complicity. The atmosphere was horrible. There were more desperate men outside the cells than in. To paraphrase the great WB, the worst were full of passionate intensity, and right now they lacked a conviction.

  And of course this whole thing had to follow a weekend largely dominated by one of Angela’s periodic episodes of psycho-analysing her own sexuality, another bout of “am I really a lesbian, I mean, am I just reacting to my upbringing, is this a phase, I’m so confused, I find you attractive but then I sometimes find some men attractive although I’m not sure I’d want to do anything with them, you know, sexually, it’s just that, oh, I don’t know . . .” Etcetera. It was funny how these soul-searching crises of sexual confusion always coincided with the approach of one of Angela’s law exams. And funny also how Angela was less uncertain of her desires and orientations when she was licking ice-cream off Jenny’s stomach on summer Sunday afternoons after a stroll round the Botanies.

  She was used to it. It would pass. But now wasn’t a good time; Jenny felt at the moment that she should be the one being indulged a bit of erratic or self-pitying behaviour.

  Still the phone rang. Wearily, she reached over and picked it up.

  “Hi Jenny, guess who?”

  “I don’t need to,” she said gravely. “I already knew. Why do you think I let it ring so long? It’s a fucking circus over here, and Callaghan was just saying he gave this entire situation a Parlabane factor of nine, making it only a matter of time . . . and now here you are.”

  “It’s nice to be wanted.”

  “You’re not fucking wanted,” she said, trying to sound mordantly humorous but failing to hide the harassed tones in her voice.

  Jack Parlabane. Or, to give him his full name, Jack Bloody Parlabane. Also known as Trouble. Jesus Christ’s arrival had been precursorily heralded by the appearance of John the Baptist. Parlabane’s had been preceded by a ridiculously mutilated corpse overlooked by a gigantic jobbie on a mantelpiece. It could not have been more appropriate. Carnage, chaos and dead people seemed to surround him like an aura, and after his passing, there was always plenty of shite to clear up, with Jenny usually the one left wielding the shovel.

  His involvement infallibly ensured that a situation would imminently go out of control on a scale she seldom had the stomach to anticipate; and if it was already disintegrating, Parlabane was a guarantee that you hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. However, it remained a fluctuating matter of internal debate for Jenny whether he was more trouble than he was worth. She knew that her career had been enhanced by having been the one who put the collar on certain high-profile scumbags whose deeds would have remained undetected without his unorthodox and frequently unnerving interventions, notably that NHS big-noise last year. But there was, at the same time, the gnawing question of what opportunities may have been lost to the time she spent either clearing up after him or trying to warn him off for his own good.

  Because that was the real fear. Parlabane wasn’t a catalyst; he didn’t stroll through the wreckage and the rubble, oblivious to the havoc he was precipitating. He was a danger to himself and others. While he could often be the one who saw through the facades, who had the intuition and the sheer balls to break a case right open, there was always and equally the possibility that he’d bring the whole thing down on top of himself and anyone else who happened to be in the vicinity.

  All of which made him the last person she wanted anywhere near her on a day like today.

  “Are you okay, Jen?” he asked, concerned. He had once described her as “as phlegmatic as a spittoon at a bronchitics’ convention”. It wouldn’t take much for him to clock that all was not peachy.

  “Look, nothing personal, Jack, but fuck off,” she said quietly, eyeing the testosterone casualties stomping loudly about the office. “That’s not an instruction, it’s a piece of advice, you hearing me?”

  “I’m listening, but I’m not picking up much sense. Qu’est-ceque c’est le Hampden?”

  “You want to know the score?” she replied in an agitated near-whisper. “Well as I’m sure you know, somebody just popped the Conservative Party’s chief meal-ticket, with the result that they’re wheeling out the fucking dancing girls in putting on a show of official reaction. The building’s suddenly full of guys with stern faces and smart suits but no name-badges, if you know what I mean. It’s like a bad ’tache society reunion. Nobody knows who the fuck these guys are, but the vibe is that they get to ask the questions and you get to do whatever the hell they say.”

  “G-men types?”

  “If it’s G for goon squad, aye. Call it a hunch, but I’ve got an irrational suspicion they know absolutely bugger-all more than anyone else, as the word is that the men in custody aren’t saying much that anyone wants to hear, and what they are saying is posing more questions than it answers.”

  “What do you mean? What are they saying?”

  I’m not getting into this, she thought. Not today.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to know and that’s just as well, because it’s pretty clear us plain old cops aren’t supposed to ask. But whatever it is, it has obviously not been enlightening and constructive. That’s the problem: these morons are always ten times as dangerous when they don’t know what they’re looking for.

  “Listen to me, Jack, I knew a guy who was on duty in Brighton the night of the bomb in ’84. He said they got orders to round up every Irish person they could find. I mean every Irish person. Like fucking shamrocknacht, you know? He says they lifted pretty much anyone with an Irish accent, Irish name, anyone who’d ever visited
Dublin for a stag night, anyone who’d ever drunk a pint of Guinness and anyone who’d ever been to Parkhead. Panic, Scoop. Panic and the political need to be seen to be taking massive and decisive action.

  “That’s what’s brewing here. They’ve got four guys in custody with – literally – blood on their hands, but they still don’t know what the fuck’s going on, why the thing went down, anything. Consequently it’s time for Hunt The Motive. They’re already out knocking on doors across the country. Lefties, union officials, anyone they can think of. And if memory serves, you crossed swords with the corpse yourself once, didn’t you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well that would be enough for these eejits. Like I said, Scoop, fuck off. Keep your head down and your mouth shut. I know you’ve got a personal interest, but you’d be wise to stay well away from this mess.”

  “You know I can’t do that,” he said, with what would normally have proved infectious humour.

  Jenny sighed. Stay out of this, Jack. Take a holiday.

  “Christ, I wish I could,” she said. “I’ve got better things to be getting on with. Another dead prostitute in Leith, and the male public being as forthcoming and cooperative as ever, the hypocritical bastards. Mother of three, but who cares, she’s just a pro. Could be some nutter on the loose and I can’t get any bodies on to the case because of this Voss fiasco. In fact I could hardly get out the fucking station for TV cameras. It’s a media menagerie out there – I got swamped nicking out for a roll and bacon a wee while ago. I’d have had to starve if they hadn’t started queuing up for their shot at this lawyer who’s been making a nuisance of herself.”

  “Who she?”

  “No idea. She showed up about half-eleven, apparently, claiming to represent one of the suspects. She knows fine she can’t speak to him, so she started making noises about wanting some evidence to support the use of Prevention of Terrorism powers. Callaghan said she was getting short shrift until she produced some document, upon which she was immediately wheeched into an office by a couple of the ‘tache team. They took their own stat of whatever it was, but Call says she insisted on accompanying them to the photocopier, wouldn’t let the thing out of her sight. Half-an-hour later she’s out front and the telly’s lapping her up. She’ll be all over the lunchtime news.”