Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  “Like what?” Nicole said apprehensively.

  “In your case, this morning, a Mr McCandlish, an octogenarian who, if he’s being consistent, probably wishes to sue whoever is top of the charts for plagiarising a radio jingle he wrote thirty-odd years ago. According to the senior partners, he used to do a lot of this in the Sixties, and everyone had assumed he’d died or given up. Unfortunately bands like The Stone Roses and Oasis came along in recent years, and by ripping off the songs he got upset about back then, they’ve inadvertently set him off again. Good luck.”

  The fear and the uncertainty, the high stakes and the precipitous sense of danger drifted away as the morning went on, and it wasn’t down to the soothing qualities of the music she was forced to listen to. Mr McCandlish had brought along the most dilapidated-looking item of audio equipment she had ever seen, a bulky, bakelite reel-to-reel tape player that gave off a worryingly smoky smell as its spindles turned with arthritic labour and a syncopated squeaking. It looked heavy enough to have induced a heart attack in the wiry and animatedly cantankerous old soul in his efforts to transport it upstairs to the office, but unfortunately he was made of sterner stuff than he looked.

  To illustrate his point, he played each jingle three or four times on the reel-to-reel before resorting to his other museum piece, the oldest functioning micro-cassette player in existence, for a tinny rendition of the offending lines or bridge from the suspect song. As he insisted on singing the corresponding couplet from his allegedly plagiarised jingle over the top of the later composition, Nicole felt he was somewhat prejudicing the demonstration, although the chorus from Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back In Anger” did have spooky echoes of the McCandlish-penned “Buy Mulligan’s tripe - the stuff that you’ll like”.

  Nicole was as polite and constructive as she could manage, but the meeting ended in what she was beginning to consider familiar (and inevitable) acrimony when she felt bound to point out that Mr McCandlish’s jingles had last been aired some years before Noel Gallagher’s birth – and even then only in central Scotland.

  “It’s a conspiracy!” he declaimed, before the door closed with its now equally familiar slam.

  The only re-intrusion of her greater concerns came in the form of Finlay Campbell, sticking his head around the door and asking for The Envelope.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have it,” she told him. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve had it since yesterday morning, before I went through to Edinburgh.”

  “Bugger,” he winced. “Ach, never bother. I was really just asking on the off-chance. I can’t find it and if you had it, it would have saved rooting through that office of mine. Look, I’ve got to nip out for a few hours. Could you ask Linda to hunt for it when she comes back from the stationers? It’s buried in there somewhere, along with Lord Lucan, Shergar and the Stone of Destiny, probably.”

  “Will do.”

  He had driven around the block a couple of times, looking for the car. He had the make, colour and reg number, but between the one-way system and the parking restrictions, there was no guarantee it would be anywhere near the office. Someone was pulling out of a space close to the corner of the junction opposite the building, so he flipped the indicator to left instead of right and manoeuvred into the spot. He had a good view of the main entrance from there, and unless there was a back door he would see her coming out; with any luck she would be having to feed a meter somewhere, so he could follow her. He wouldn’t intercept her then; he’d find out where the car was and weigh up the options for when she returned.

  He had the home address, courtesy of his invaluable police contacts, but that was a last resort, as you never knew who might be watching. And for all his experience, getting in might not be a picnic. He was sure he could manage it, but if it came to that he’d have to make sure he left no trace. If she came in and spotted something that told her all was not as it should be, she might panic, freak out screaming before he could get to her, and then he would have all sorts of inconveniences to deal with.

  There was a noise from across the road, the reluctant grind of a stiff and heavy iron window frame being laboriously swung open to let in some air. Looking up at the first floor he noticed with a shock that it was her. He glanced down at the picture on the front of this morning’s paper, inset into the bigger one of Lafferty, for a final confirmation. She stood with one hand on the frame for a moment, letting the smoggy but cool breeze fan her face and hair, then retreated further inside.

  He experienced a curious feeling of disbelief that she could appear so ignorant of her predicament, of being watched. There seemed such an intimacy about it, the way it placed her in his grasp, that it seemed impossible she couldn’t feel anything through her part of it. Such ignorance, such vulnerability made her seem puny and frail.

  Maybe it was this perceived weakness that made the predator despise the prey.

  A man emerged from the main entrance, striding purposefully on to the road as the lights changed to let him cross, looking like he might have been visiting Manson & Boyd to enlist them in preparing a claim against whichever incompetents had advised him on his haircut and jacket. He cut diagonally across the junction, past the car, and disappeared into a narrow gap between two buildings on the smaller road that crossed West Regent Street going north. A few minutes later he was in front of the car again, but this time behind the wheel of a large, blue BMW which had apparently emerged from nowhere. The traffic lights changed and the BMW took off at speed.

  He got out of his car and headed towards the gap that the sartorial casualty had disappeared into, and discovered that it concealed the entrance to an underground permit-holders-only car park.

  He ducked under the card-operated barrier and trod quietly down the tightly spiralling ramp, on the balls of his feet. Sticking his head around the last bend he saw four lines of cars, two rows back-to-back in the middle, each facing another row against opposite walls. At the nearest corner was a yawning gap, presumably left by the BMW upon its exit.

  He continued inside, his already light footfalls muted further by the lagging material on the low ceiling, and spotted the car he was looking for, one space from the far end of the row against the right-hand wall. He was about to approach when he saw something that made him grateful for his stealth. There was a pair of trainer-shod feet between the front wheels of the red Golf, the right one twitching arhythmically, like a nervous tic. He then heard a dull but unmistakably metallic sound, some weighty and solid steel implement being placed on the concrete floor, and the scrape-cum-rattle of another being dragged a few inches before being picked up.

  He retreated from the subterranean chamber with continued caution, returning to his car and scanning the pavements now for a different vehicle.

  There it was.

  “Cowan’s Garage,” advertised an anaemically off-white Escort van, the paintwork of the sign in far better condition than that of the bodywork. “Breakdown recovery and on-road repair service.”

  Hmmm, he thought.

  He took note of the address and telephone number, picked up his portable and began to dial.

  Nicole sat in the traffic queue and regretted for the nth time that her geographical grasp of the city was so poor, and that she had neither taken steps to rectify this, nor even explored an alternative route home from work. She had decided that whoever planned and designed the Kingston Bridge must have had an abiding love of the Clyde and the Glasgow skyline, enough to devise a feature that would not only afford people a magnificent perspective upon it, but hours and hours to enjoy the view without such distractions as having to push the accelerator and move forward.

  “Does it improve when there are no roadworks?” she had asked Linda, Finlay Campbell’s secretary.

  “I wouldn’t know,” she replied. “I’ve only been driving for twenty years.”

  She switched on the car stereo but was instantly irritated by the mid-Atlantic accent that seemed to be a standard requirement of DJs on Scottish music stations, wishing
that the mid-Atlantic was where this particular drive-time jock was right now, preferably without the assistance of anything buoyant. She turned the dial a few degrees and heard the more authentically Scottish accent of a female newsreader.

  “. . . ritage Secretary said he would be fighting the proposal tooth and nail, saying it wasn’t for Brussels to impose its own low standards on Great Britain.

  “Detectives in Glasgow are appealing for more witnesses after a man was found stabbed to death in Partick this afternoon. The man, who has not been named until relatives are informed, is believed to have been the victim of a mugging. Police say a wallet was discovered close to where the body was found, and one witness saw two youths running from the scene . . .”

  Nicole reached in front of the gearstick and grabbed a tape from a compartment cluttered with torn pieces of roadmaps, flyers removed from beneath her wiperblades, and gradually biodegrading travel sweets, which were working slowly to bind all the surrounding constituents into one amorphous paper and plastic nest. The various sensations of slimy stickiness and fluffy dust on different digits triggered a vague, finger-wagging guilt about how long it had been since she last cleaned the interior or exterior of the vehicle.

  She slammed the cassette into the player and the radio was silenced, replaced by the wobbly sounds of an ancient compilation tape. She always felt bad about switching off disturbing news; it sometimes seemed the least you could do was listen to what was going on, as you weren’t the one having to cope with the tragedy first-hand. But there had been a little too much death on her plate over the last few days, and stories of murder and violence, especially in Glasgow, made her that bit more nervous now that she was living alone, and in a city where she really had no-one to turn to. She glanced to her side and took one hand off the wheel to push down the doorlock button.

  The sound quality began to improve at roughly the same time as the traffic, and she was allowed to move out of first gear occasionally as the conditions gradually cleared. She found herself giggling as an old Stone Roses track rasped through the speakers. It hadn’t been one of those under scrutiny today, but she couldn’t help wondering whether it had an unknown subliminal precursor in a Sixties pile-ointment commercial.

  Reaching the stretch that climbed gently alongside the twin glass towers of Scotland Street School, she cranked up the volume as she was finally able to move up the gears and put her foot down, the swell of the power chords and the surge of acceleration bringing a liberating sense of escape.

  A couple of hundred yards back on the M8, another driver was rather surprised and more than a little disappointed not to see Nicole die in a horrific fireball, as her car quite inexplicably failed to go out of control and plough into the back of the slowing traffic ahead.

  The action of her key in the lock was not as smooth as usual – there seeming to be a grinding sensation as it turned and she pushed the door open. First signs of it buggering up, she feared, remembering a frustrated few hours waiting for a locksmith on the doorstep of her former home in Blackheath, after she and her flatmates had concertedly ignored the ancient Chubb’s progressive deterioration. She would have vowed to get this one seen to right away but for the fact that she was renting this place and would probably be out of it in a few weeks, and that there was a white sheet of A4 staring up at her from the screaming red swirly-patterned carpet.

  It was lying several feet from the door, a lot further away than her mail usually came to rest, even allowing for a certain distance of gliding. What was more suspicious was that it was dead straight, uncreased and equidistant from the hallway’s two bubonically Anaglyptaed walls. And if its improbable positioning wasn’t enough to draw maximum attention to itself, it also bore the words “READ THIS NOW NICOLE” in large, handwritten capitals across the top.

  She put her bag on the floor as she knelt to pick it up, her heart beginning involuntarily to pound as her mind raced to anticipate the possibilities. She began reading as she stood upright again, her hand reaching automatically for the small brass knob on the door, although which side of it she planned to put herself before locking it was unfamiliarly in the balance.

  “I have written this so as not to alarm you,” it began, with unconscious irony, “as this warning should lessen the shock when you discover that there is an intruder in your flat.”

  She looked up from the paper, beginning to tremble, hand turning the lock, eyes frantically scanning the doors that now seemed to loom menacingly before her, having previously merely loitered aimlessly in the hall, like bored teenagers with their hands in their pockets.

  “Bear in mind that if I meant you any harm I would not be tipping you off before you got to me. Please do not scream, run from the house, telephone the police or do anything else to attract attention. I know you have no reason to trust me at this stage, so I apologise wholeheartedly for having to distress you like this, and ask that when you proceed to your living room, you do not resort to physical violence at least until you have heard what I have to say.”

  Nicole opened the front door slightly, leaving it ajar to facilitate a quick exit, then began her slow approach to the living room, a distance that had never seemed a quarter of this length before. Her heart had suddenly become sixteen-valve, fuel-injected, thumping viciously in her chest like an alien preparing to make its traditional entrance. In that time-suspended walk, that limbo in the hallway, she changed her mind back and forth a dozen times about whether to turn and run or see what fate awaited in the living room, that snug but twee little pocket with its cheesy old gas fire and fraying hessian on the walls.

  Passing a cupboard she remembered the big golf umbrella given her by a friend who had lived in Glasgow for a while, and who had informed her: “Believe me, what you get in London isn’t rain.” She took hold of it, comforted by its heft but unsure which end to grasp: the handle, so that she could stab at him with the grey metal tip, or the tip itself, so that she could bear down with the formidably sturdy wood of the handle. She opted for gripping the handle, as a stabbing motion might prove more effective at close quarters, where she would be unlikely to get in much of a swing.

  Nicole backed up against the wall opposite the open living room door, seeking the maximum angle of perspective upon who or what lay within, and thus affording herself a few feet more of a start if events dictated that flight was the best option for self-defence. Edging forward ever slower and by decreasing distances, she caught her first glimpses of the room’s interior. Coming teasingly into her field of vision first were the closed, snot-green curtains and the dusty magazine rack full of People’s Friends in the far corner, next to the turd-brown, corduroy-finish armchair that farted up a cloud of dust every time she sat in it. She leaned over, her feet refusing to move any further forward, and saw the far end of the hateful fireplace with its glass cabinets, before a hand came into view. Trying to calm her loud and tremulous breathing, she stretched her head and shoulders still further, a length of black sleeve becoming visible past the doorframe. It led to a shoulder and then a dirty-blond, mop-topped head, at which point she leaned too far and fell over, landing with a crump as the umbrella rolled away from her.

  She rolled on to her bottom and scrambled backwards against the wall, looking up to see the intruder before her, ten feet away, standing still in the centre of the room. He loomed tall in her terrified vision, black boots leading to black jeans and a black polo-neck, missing only the ski-mask to complete the effect. Instead there was a face that she would ever after associate with more danger, trouble and chaos than a black balaclava had ever connoted. His posture indicated he was both uncomfortable and impatient, his quizzical face suggesting he was concerned but bemused.

  “Let me help you,” he said softly, local accent, and began to move towards her.

  “Get back. Stay where you are,” she warned, grasping the umbrella once more and climbing to her feet by the ungainly method of sliding backwards up the wall.

  He put his hands in the air and backed himself
against the fireplace.

  “I told you,” he said, “I mean you no harm. We need to talk. Urgently.”

  “Well talk,” she barked, still trembling but now having added the feeling of clumsy stupidity to her catalogue of discomfiture.

  “Can’t you come any nearer?” he asked, in a tone that she was furious to realise suggested he thought she was being unreasonable.

  “I’ll move nearer when I hear something that interests me enough.”

  The man shrugged.

  “Fair enough,” he muttered with a sigh. “Would it interest you to know that someone tried to kill you today?”

  She swallowed, trying to prevent tears from forming. His words seemed to have no meaning, no significance that she could relate to consciously, but somewhere deeper they were making an announcement her whole body was listening to.

  “That . . .” she croaked, then cleared her throat and took a couple of quick breaths, “that would interest me. But you’d better not be selling insurance.”

  “Would that I was,” he said flatly. Genuinely.

  “H-how do you know someone tried to kill me?”

  “I’m the one that saved you.”

  She stared numbly at him, baffled as to which emotion she should be feeling, and shook her head minutely, open-mouthed as a fight broke out in the impatient queue of questions jostling for the use of her tongue.

  “How did . . .? When . . .? Why wou . . .?” She breathed once. “Who’s trying to kill me?” won.

  The man looked at the floor for a few seconds, weighing up his words, seemingly reluctant but forced to answer.

  “Someone who’s put a lot of time and effort into convincing the world that Tam McInnes and his pals killed Roland Voss, and who is not very happy about anyone suggesting the contrary.”