Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  But maybe it was the sight of Nicole Carrow that had underlined the detachment of his position: it wasn’t his fight any more.

  He liked to think that it was Sarah that had changed him. All the hackneyed old bollocks actually applied. He had never met a woman who made him feel this way. He was feeling emotions not only that he had never experienced before, but that he had previously concluded were not applicable in his case. (So many things had seemed not applicable in his case, which was itself part of the greater problem.)

  However, the fear was that it was because he had already changed that he felt this way about Sarah. That at another time she would have passed him right by, no possibility of him recognising what could lie before them. Or, more simply, that he would have blown it. The thought of having missed her, of her not being there, was a shivering cold one. And along with it came the attendant doubt that he might well have already met women who would have made him feel like this, but . . .

  No. That way madness lay.

  But did it matter? Either way, this was how he felt, this was how it was. They were together now – fate, serendipity or whatever.

  Unfortunately it did matter. Because he still wasn’t entirely sure why he was content to be sitting on his settee at a time like this. He’d like it to be all the right reasons, all the cute, cosy and even mature, adult ones, but he wanted to know how big a factor fear was in the equation. What had he said? It was cops and very dangerous people, and that was his principal consideration.

  It never used to be.

  Once upon a time it had been all and anything for a bloody story. The risks, the gambles, the dangers. The death threats. All for the scoop, for the exclusive. Oh yeah, and THE TRUTH, of course, in hundred-foot letters of fire, burning high on a mountainside. That idol he had made so many sacrifices to.

  Parlabane had never been afraid of dying, he had always known. He had taken actions, decisions out of fear for his life; but fear for your life and being afraid to die were two very different issues. Fear for your life was a basic, unignorable instinct of self-preservation, dictating action and reaction in certain situations. Being afraid to die was what kept most sensible people out of those situations in the first place.

  Once, he had suspected it was because he was daft enough not to believe it was ever going to happen. That it wasn’t applicable to him. That he didn’t fear death because he had never been forced to really contemplate it.

  Then he had been forced to contemplate it pretty close-up.

  Twice he had stared death in the face and on both occasions found that even the Grim Reaper wasn’t immune to a sudden attack of self-doubt when it caught that gleefully malevolent glint in his eye. Bollocks, Death must have thought. Do we really want this.guy loose on the other side?

  So what had changed?

  Well, for a start, he thought, he had someone to miss. Someone he craved and jealously guarded his time with. Someone whose company he looked forward to enjoying for as long as possible. But that wasn’t it.

  Responsibility. A new thing.

  He couldn’t leave her behind and didn’t like the thought of her on her own. She wasn’t some pathetic soul who couldn’t cope without him – Sarah was a resourceful and some might say formidable woman – but he didn’t want her to have to.

  And he had made promises. Obligations. If he wanted to marry her, then that meant he had to want to always be there for her. Doing something that could get himself killed or imprisoned would suggest otherwise.

  But that wasn’t it either.

  It was this: he could feel her fear of his death.

  A coldness, an emptiness, chasmic and desolately lonely. A fear like none he had ever known.

  He could feel how she would miss him.

  In the past, when he was contemplating his next recklessness he hadn’t considered even how his parents would miss him if he died; he knew they’d be sad, but . . . In a relationship based so much upon his needs of them, he hadn’t appreciated that there were ways in which they needed him. In fact he had never appreciated that there were ways in which anyone needed him – not like that.

  He felt how there was something he gave Sarah that she could never replace if he was gone. A preciousness she could not bear to lose, and that he must do all he could to protect.

  In short, he sensed the receipt of his own love, and it was a revelation far more devastating and unexpected than anything he had ever splashed across a front page.

  He held her a little tighter on the settee.

  It didn’t mean he was opting for some culture-of-contentment, lifestyle-pages yupped-up existence with his beautiful new bride, though. He wasn’t about to simply accept that black was black and white was white, start writing a weekly column with a picture byline and do profile pieces for the Sundays. But it did mean his guerrilla days were over: if something was wrong and conventional investigation failed, then maybe it was time for someone younger to prove it.

  Ken Frazer swigged back a can of juice and pored over the b/w laserproof of tomorrow’s front page, feeling a hollow tingle in his guts where there should only have been the dull grind of his sausage supper in slow digestion. He was familiar with the feeling, half-instinct, half emotional memory; the distant suspicion that something was missing, something hadn’t been accounted for. An uncertainty that had its roots in arriving at the school gates and suddenly remembering that it was PE day: your gear was in the washing machine and your arse was out the window. The dread of that moment when you realise (a) what was bothering you; and (b) that it’s now too late to do anything about it.

  He shook his head. Probably nothing. It was an ailment of being the news editor, of having always to be on the alert for potential screw-ups; a phantom symptom, like feeling itchy when someone starts talking about headlice. The kind of nagging worry that was bound to happen on a night like this when he was endeavouring particularly hard to anticipate the pitfalls. This evening’s latest and most bewildering twist in the Voss saga required delicate and dextrous hands. Between the presses rolling and the punters picking up their copy of The Saltire in the a.m. there were hours enough for further hairpin bends in the script. He had instructed the subs to excise anything too speculative regarding the motives or connotations of what had taken place; stick to the facts and the quotes. The tabloid shitrags were happy to wipe their past clean every night and ignore the previous day’s statements and positions when events proved them diametrically wrong; they knew their readers had memories even shorter than their attention spans. But Ken had a professional pride those pricks would never understand. Maybe that made him a dinosaur, but he’d still be a dinosaur who was never embarrassed by the sight of yesterday’s front page.

  He had another gulp of juice and looked away, then quickly back at the proof, an old trick of checking what was the first thing that caught his eye. Nothing was amiss. No unintended insensitive puns in the headlines, no unfortunate juxtapositions. It was fine.

  “Send it,” he told the chief sub, and in that moment of surrendering his option to change anything, realised with a wry smile that what was missing was nothing to do with the page. What was missing was John Lapsley Parlabane, known to his accomplices as Jack.

  He hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which was not in itself unusual, as The Saltire was just one of several newspapers here and in London labouring under the misapprehension that Parlabane worked for them. They all frequently sent him large sums of money as retainers in vain attempts to entangle him in this deluded fantasy, but at best they were just buying a ticket for a raffle, and Parlabane was the one who decided who was going to win the prize of first look at whatever he had unearthed. Mostly it depended on who he felt would handle the story best, which paper he thought it suited, and sometimes he had deals worked out with the Sundays to run a big overview piece as a follow-up to something he broke elsewhere earlier in the week. But as he only lived ten minutes’ walk from Saltire House, The Saltire and Saltire on Sunday tended to see more of him out of
sheer geographical convenience.

  Nonetheless, his arrangements were never sufficiently formal for him to see fit to show up on anything other than a random basis, but with a story as big as the Voss one going down, it was odd that he hadn’t phoned or popped in to shoot the shit and cast an eye over what they had on it. Especially as Jack and Voss went a long way back, although not exactly in a drinking-buddies manner.

  It wasn’t a question of putting your best man on the case or anything like that. These big feeding frenzies were the last place you’d find him; the rest of the hack-pack might wait patiently for the bounteous bovine of the police press office to squirt another pasteurised bulletin into their greedily gaping gubs, but Jack preferred his untreated. You didn’t send Jack Parlabane to a press conference. In fact, you didn’t send Jack Parlabane at all, as Jack very much did what he fancied then fucked off again.

  Jack’s name carried respect – if seldom affection – in any newsroom in the country; and to a lot of the paper’s younger reporters, he was a legend, a figure they might have considered mythical if they hadn’t seen him in the flesh, having heard tales from older hacks that they had previously assumed were made up or at least greatly exaggerated. Ken wasn’t sure what any of his charges really believed about the devious wee Paisley bastard, but he was sure none of the apocrypha was as far-fetched as the truth. Jack for his part stayed tight-lipped about his reputation and his, ahem, “methods”.

  He was a good man to bounce ideas off, and he was usually around somewhere when there was a big story going down because – like Ken – he loved the buzz of a newsroom in full panic. That he and Jack hadn’t exchanged any words at all since Voss’s murder was – and should have struck him earlier as – bizarre.

  Ken knew Jack had promised to go straight as a pre-nuptial condition, but had put the notion to the back of his mind, filed somewhere between sceptical “I’ll believe it when I see it” and worried “How am I going to cope if it happens?”. He had reckoned that if the recidivist reprobate was actually serious, then the acid test would be something like this, and Ken doubted he would pass. Yet here they were, one of the stories of the decade unfolding round about, with a personal angle for Jack to boot, and there was no sign of him. It appeared he really was hanging up the black polo-neck and the grappling hook.

  Say it ain’t so, Jack. Say it ain’t so.

  The movie ended and Parlabane hit the Stop button on the remote as the image of Dennis carrying new bride Ellen around their apartment faded to black beneath the credits. The poe-faced bastard in the trenchcoat appeared, steam from his breath picked out by the lighting as he looked with brow-furrowed concentration into the camera.

  “. . . believe that he must have taken some kind of poison, possibly cyanide, as he was only alone for a matter of minutes. Police are trying to maintain as much calm as possible at this time, but the possible ramifications of this apparent suicide are obviously very sinister, and potentially very far-reaching, with the circumstances surrounding the death of Roland Voss becoming increasingly bizarre.”

  “Do you fancy a cup of coffee, honey?” Sarah asked, pulling herself upright and standing by the arm of the settee, a hand running through Parlabane’s hair.

  “Yeah, please,” he said, and she turned and walked out of the room.

  “. . . appears to answer the riddle of who may have leaked information to the four men still being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, given his involvement in coordinating security at Craigurquhart House, but poses many more disturbing questions as the mystery begins to assume trappings more usually associated with James Bond films.”

  The image of PFB Trenchcoat suddenly shrank to fit a screen in the studio, where the anchorman sat addressing him from his desk.

  “But curiously, isn’t it true that Mr Lafferty came forward voluntarily this afternoon?” the anchorman asked.

  “Yes he did. Mr Lafferty had in fact been involved in the investigation at the Perthshire end, and was asked to come down to Edinburgh to help look into the allegations of a security leak. There has been speculation that he decided to take his own life after discovering the police knew something he thought they didn’t, but it’s far too early to draw any kind of conclusions. All I can tell you is that I spoke to Mr Lafferty a few hours beforehand, as he entered the station, and that he seemed very nervous and agitated. He . . .”

  “Ex – Excuse me, Terry,” interrupted the anchorman, “but I believe we have those pictures just now.”

  And Parlabane’s heart stopped.

  Donald Lafferty was standing in the light drizzle, a few hours ago and less than a couple of miles from where Parlabane sat. He looked about fifteen years older than he should, pale as a virgin at a vampire stag night, trembling visibly, eyes darting suspiciously to and fro.

  “Obviously veh-very shocked at what has taken place, ah-and am eager to cooperate in eh-any way that can assist the ih-investigation. I am devastated at what has happened and intend to ss-stop at nothing to find out how our security arrangements weh-were circumvented.”

  “And do you have any suspicions about the source of a possible leak?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t really comment on that, f-further than to say I don’t know much more than you about it at this stage. I-I’ve been busy at Craigurquhart since the eh . . . since it happened, and I haven’t really had time to c-catch up on developments down here at this end of . . .” He looked suddenly straight into the camera. “. . . of the arena.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “It’s not as if I’ve been sitting around listening to my favourite music, although I think a lot more people should. Excuse me,” he muttered, and moved off-camera.

  “As you can see, he did seem very concerned about something,” stated the reporter as the clip ended.

  “Yes,” rejoined the anchorman, “and his last remarks seemed very curious.”

  “They did indeed. At the time they struck me as the words of a very distracted – and I suppose extremely tired – man, but as you can imagine, in light of the strange and tragic events that have followed, there has inevitably been speculation as to whether this was some kind of coded message. However, if that was the case, your guess is as good as mine as to what those words might have meant.”

  But Parlabane, tears welling in his eyes as he knelt trembling on the carpet, knew exactly what they meant.

  They meant black was white, white was black, something was very, very wrong – and only he could prove it.

  THREE

  The death of Donald Lafferty hit Nicole like a fall from castle walls in darkness.

  As Monday had progressed, she had become distantly aware of the thought that her world was changing, unexpected doors and pathways opening before her and leading to unexplored chambers, unknown heights. An insecure concern that she was being urged or even led through, along, up – that someone somewhere had a role, a place for her. Fate, if you like, telling her great things were afoot; you took difficult decisions but made the right choices, and here is your reward, your future.

  There had been the usual detachment she tended to feel during momentous events, the rest of her functions and processes carrying on efficiently while her emotions lagged behind like an old woman carrying too many bags. She had seen herself on TV when she got home, and couldn’t remember saying a word of what she was hearing. It might as well have been someone else playing her; or was it just that she had been playing someone else?

  Then there had been the phone calls, of course. Mum, then a couple of friends (not Dad; not home yet; not unusual). Saying how thrilled they were to see her on TV. How they could see her becoming a big legal personality, this was just the sort of thing that got you off to a great start, oh isn’t it exciting . . . Nobody mentioned multiple murders or terrorism, but then that was, literally, last night’s news. Mum talked about the well-known TV reporter, what was he like in the flesh; about how she had looked, was she nervous, it didn’t show; and had she videotaped it, as
Mum still couldn’t operate the dashed thing. It was as if she had been appearing on a game show.

  How do you feel about sticking up for those accused of the crime of the century?

  Who is this man you’re defending?

  Do you really believe he’s innocent?

  Do you think you’ve any chance of saving him?

  If not, how many millennia will he go down for?

  Nobody asked those things, and during those conversations, she didn’t think about them either. But then that was law. Footballers, she reflected, tend not to agonise over how the ball might be feeling. Law was other people’s nightmares. Nightmares of the victims, nightmares of the accused, nightmares of the guilty, nightmares of the convicted. All on the other side of the big screen, except that they were the ones helplessly, passively watching you in action.

  She had got to be a player for a day.

  Open the mystery envelope and see what you’ve won, Miss Carrow. Congratulations, a sensational day-trip to Edinburgh! And what a prize it is! You’ll get to talk tough to some policemen, produce a sheet of paper like a rabbit from a hat, then enjoy the spectacle of several pompous middle-aged men suddenly ceasing to treat you like an eight-year-old girl. After that you will be interviewed and taken very, very seriously by some very, very serious men in suits, and finally, to round off your trip, you’ll get to address the nation on BBC Television! Just set that video-recorder for an instant memento of your day as a legal hot-shot!

  She still felt a nervous exhilaration as she sat at home later, feeling satisfied, important, part of something. Then she saw the latest news and discovered herself to be in a world whose nature she had entirely misunderstood.