She sighed, leaning away from the table and back in her chair. Body language of resignation and cooperation.
“McInnes was being blackmailed into carrying out a robbery,” she stated. “He didn’t know who, just where. There were photocopies of floorplans of Craigurquhart House, diagrams showing the positions of closed-circuit cameras, electric fences, alarm trip-lasers, the works. There were also photocopies of security-camera stills showing McInnes in the act of burgling three different business premises, which were being used to ensure his participation. McInnes swears in the letter that the pictures are fakes, says he’s never committed a burglary since leaving prison.
“The letter says whoever was behind it contacted him several times by telephone using a voice disguiser. McInnes was instructed to rob the safe of the house’s VIP suite, as someone very rich would be in residence. It would be a safe with an electronic lock, the combination programmable by the distinguished guest, but there was an over-ride access code which would be supplied to McInnes at the latest possible moment in case it was changed. He wasn’t told what was expected to be in the safe, just to take whatever he found and that he would be contacted again afterwards about handing over the spoils, upon which he would be paid a generous percentage.”
Nicole held up her palms as if to say “that’s it”.
“Now,” she said stiffly, “maybe this is me being naive, or perhaps my judgment might be clouded by a conflict of interest, but I can’t see why they would want to kill me just because I know this. Surely, if anything, this information only serves to explain why McInnes was there. Obviously there is a factor of mitigation regarding his being coerced into doing the job – though that won’t be worth a monkey’s toss against a murder charge. But there’s nothing of use in actually proving he and his colleagues didn’t carry out the killings.”
“That’s not the aspect of it that worried them,” Parlabane said. “It’s not about whether or not people believe McInnes is guilty. It’s about them. It’s about who they are.”
“I’m sorry, Mr Par . . .”
“Call me Jack. I know you don’t like me very much, so it’s not supposed to be a term of endearment, but it’s easier.”
“Jack. I’m not following this.”
“Right,” he said, pulling at the sleeves of his polo-neck as though he might be about to produce a bunch of flowers from one of them. “Let me put it this way. Here’s their ideal situation. They kill Voss, McInnes and co are caught for it, and go to jail. McInnes whines to the cops about being given inside information, and the terrorist scare caused by the high profile of the victims forces the cops to look into this possibility. However, with no evidence, the trail goes cold. Bad guys live happily ever after. End of story.
“Situation number two: they kill Voss, McInnes and co are caught for it, and a lawyer shows up with a letter saying . . . yakka yakka yakka, proving McInnes isn’t making up what he’s telling the cops. Suddenly the world knows for sure there’s someone else involved. But then a high-ranking member of the security operation commits suicide inside a police station and voilà: the world has its mysterious background figure. A few people get jumpy about the fact that he popped a cyanide capsule rather than hung himself, but apart from the hyper-paranoid UFO-spotting brigade, everyone forgets about it after a while, because there’s no hard evidence to suggest anyone further was involved. Cops won’t go a-hunting when everyone’s satisfied that all the questions have already been answered. Bad guys live happily ever after. End of story again.
“Situation number three: as before, but this time lawyer is in possession of information suggesting that whoever was behind it had sufficient resources to blackmail McInnes with faked security stills. Lawyer wonders aloud whether this was maybe a bit too impressive for a one-man show, and suddenly it’s not just the UFO-spotters who are looking beyond Donald Lafferty for the source. However, if bad guys steal evidence and kill lawyer, or as it turns out, lawyers, before they can produce it and do the wondering aloud bit, then we revert to situation number two, in which, you may remember, the bad guys live happily ever after.”
Nicole nodded, sighing.
“So who are they?”
“Bollocks,” he said, patting his pockets. “I’ve lost their business card. That would have been really handy, too.”
“You know what I mean. Terrorists? Organised crime?”
“Well, whoever they are, they’re very well organised and extremely well connected. Enough to plan and execute the burglary of your offices in a matter of hours and leave so little trace that no-one noticed. Enough to find out the registration of your car and booby-trap it.”
“So how did you find out which car was mine?”
“Friends in the police. Same as them.”
“The police?”
“Like I said, well organised and well connected. Enough to acquire security shots of burglaries-in-progress and drop Tam McInnes’s face on to them. Enough to murder Finlay Campbell in broad daylight and make it look like a mugging. And enough to murder Donald Lafferty in a room inside the headquarters of a major regional police force.”
The feeling of grasping, hopeless exasperation returned. Another encore in the interminable Jack Parlabane Contradictions and Impossibilities Showcase.
“Donald Lafferty committed suicide. I thought even you had just mentioned that.”
He burned into her eyes with a look of such darkness that she suspected his previous glowers had been his idea of a sunny demeanour to put her at ease in this time of stress and anxiety. The idea of nipping out to meet the unseen assassins supposedly waiting in a car in the street acquired a fleeting allure.
“Donald Lafferty,” he said, very quietly, in low rumbling tones she could feel in her own diaphragm, “is the reason I’m here. And by extension, the reason you’re still alive. The fact that they murdered him was what made me realise they might also murder you, get it?”
She nodded solemnly, waiting until he had acknowledged her acquiescence to add, appealingly, “But how?”
“Well, what’s the official story?” he asked agitatedly. “What’s been on the news all day? Someone – some cop who ‘can’t be identified for security purposes’ – walks into a room and sees Donald Lafferty swallow something, next thing he’s dead? Bloke’s supposed to have attempted to make him cough it up but he was fought off. Presumably there’s signs of struggle to verify this. Maybe the bloke’s got a couple of bruises and so has Donald. Maybe a few marks on the furniture, a knackered chair. So why am I the only person in the fucking universe who thinks this suggests that the struggle was Donald trying to prevent someone forcing a cyanide capsule down his throat?”
He closed his eyes and turned his head away briefly, letting the swell of emotion subside. There was a beguiling but sad and even pained smile in his eyes.
“Let me tell you a wee secret about Donald Lafferty,” he said, “although it won’t be secret for long, unless I’m way off the mark. He used to be a cop. That’s not the secret. But get this: he was the cop who arrested Tam McInnes for the Robbin’ Hoods burglaries. It’s not common knowledge. He was just a plod at the time, and the credit officially went to the guy leading the investigation, but it was Donald who made the big breakthrough and it was Donald who physically put the cuffs on McInnes. I know this because he was also my friend. And the whole world will know it soon enough because somebody is about to use it to establish his guilt, posthumously, now that he isn’t around to answer back.”
Parlabane had a sour look, regret and anger.
“Cops at the time were totally stumped. They had few clues, little evidence and the MO just didn’t fit any of the usual suspects, or even any of the wilder cards. To cut a very long story short, Donald sussed that the reason they couldn’t match up the methods was because the culprits were new to the game – previously, everyone assumed it was a gang coming in from another part of the country, or some bunch of housebreakers moving up the social scale. As a result he looked a bit harde
r at the details of the first place to get tanned, and from the fact that the items stolen there were fewer and on the whole more personal than in later robberies, worked out that there might be an element of grudge involved.”
“And given that the house belonged to Sir Michael Halworth, the police concentrated their suspicions on recently laid-off car workers,” Nicole said, happy to demonstrate that there was part of this she could follow.
“Indeed. Now, do you want to hear what I think is really going on?”
“I think it would be grossly negligent not to, given my circumstances.”
“Donald Lafferty was murdered because he had worked out that they were setting him up. They were setting him up as the criminal fucking mastermind, just like they set up McInnes and associates as the killers. He’s the ex-cop working on the security at Craigurquhart, who knew the place inside out, knew who was going to be staying there, dates, times, advance itineraries, the whole show.
“What the world was supposed to believe is this: Lafferty hatched the cunning and dastardly plan but needed someone to carry it out, so he enlisted the services of some gentlemen he knew for a fact had considerable experience in the field, keeping his own identity secret from them. But it all goes wrong on opening night: the hired help get caught in the act, and whether it was in Lafferty’s original script or not, they’ve left four stiffs at their backs. Robbers tell the cops there’s another party pulling the strings, and the hunt begins for the shadowy figure behind the curtain. Someone somewhere makes the crucial and timely ‘discovery’ that Lafferty was once instrumental in putting McInnes and Hannah away for a string of country-house break-ins, and Lafferty commits suicide after his terrible secret is revealed.”
Nicole’s face was a study in concentration, suddenly broken by a flaw in the logic.
“But that fact hadn’t been discovered when he died. Unless it just hasn’t been given to the media yet.”
“No, it hadn’t been ‘discovered’. And cyanide wasn’t part of the plan. Hear me out. According to my contact, and contrary to the bollocks the spokesman told the TV cameras, Donald Lafferty was summoned to police HQ specifically in response to what you produced. You buggered up the agenda. He wasn’t supposed to be there right then – he was meant to be in Perthshire, where he had been all night, and from where he should have gone home. And my guess is he was supposed to ‘commit suicide’ at his house later on, by more conventional means, after ‘realising’ or ‘being told’ that his secret was out. But instead he shows up at police HQ, knowing now that McInnes and Hannah – to whom he has a connection – are among the men in custody, and that inside knowledge is suspected. On the way into the building he gives a brief, nervous and extremely weird interview to a TV reporter. The interview is broadcast at 6:20. Donald Lafferty is dead before seven.
“Someone who saw that interview feared Lafferty had clocked he was being set up, or at least that he knew something, so his ‘suicide’ had to be brought forward before he did or said anything that might blow the gaffe. Any money you like, they’ll wait until the hysteria has died down over the use of cyanide and the possibility of the fucking martians being behind it all – then they’ll leak the Lafferty–Hoods connection and use it to put a firm lid on the whole thing.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, holding a hand up, eyes narrowed in concentration. “I understand. And it sounds logical, if not entirely plausible – although I’m beginning to lose my grasp on the meaning of that word. But, well, how can I put this? I realise that this Donald Lafferty was a friend of yours, and I mean no offence, but could your friendship possibly be clouding your judgment?”
He creased his brow, looking more quizzical than annoyed, his silence beckoning her to elaborate.
“It’s just that you seem very convinced he had no part in it what-soever. Obviously, in light of recent developments I’m aware that Donald Lafferty wasn’t where the buck stopped, but I’ve got to ask this: if he’s the ex-cop with all the information, de-blah de-blah de-blah, and the men in custody are . . . who they are, is it possible that Lafferty was being leaned on to set this thing up in just the same way as McInnes et al were leaned on to carry it out?”
“No,” he said blankly.
“And why not?”
“Because it would be pointless, an unnecessary extra remove. If you’re setting some guys up to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you just do it – yourself. You make as few people party to a conspiracy as possible, and you certainly don’t force someone else to do it, because he could double-cross you, tip off the patsies, tip off the cops.”
“But what if he was party to the conspiracy – or thought he was – and it’s he who was double-crossed later on?”
He gave a little dry laugh and shook his head.
“All right, fair enough,” he said, “although he was my friend, I’ll admit that nobody can say for certain whether someone is capable of murder – but I can say that he wasn’t fucking stupid. If he was setting up somebody to take the fall, he’d hardly pick guys with a traceable connection to himself. Do you see? Contrary to how the world is supposed to read it, it’s the fact that McInnes and Hannah are involved that tells me Donald had nothing to do with it.”
“So how long had you known him?” Nicole asked, sitting on the edge of her armchair, unable to prevent her eyes straying occasionally towards the close-curtained windows, out of which Parlabane had expressly forbidden her to peek. He had a shattered look about him almost every time he mentioned Lafferty’s name, and she sensed it was bothering him to talk about him only in this painful context. Her resentment of him was subsiding in the sight of his own hurt; before that she had felt angry that he was removed and immune from the anarchy he was unveiling.
They had moved back to the living room upon his suggestion, on the dual grounds that firstly, to their outside observers, Nicole had spent an awful lot longer in the kitchen than was normal for dinner for one, and that secondly, the wooden chairs were becoming literally a pain in the arse.
“Since adolescence, really,” he said. “I was a ‘budding young hack’ – actually office dogsbody on the newsdesk – and he was your actual rookie polisman. I got talking to him at the scene of a major crime incident: couple of teenagers had hijacked an ice-cream van and gone joyriding through a scheme in Nitshill, firing balls of it at the windscreens of passing cars. When they ran out of soft scoop they moved on to oysters and nougat wafers. It wasn’t a pretty sight.”
His eyes glinted with a symbiotic combination of pleasure and sadness at the memory.
“Misunderstood youth. A cry for help,” Nicole offered with a smile, pleased and relieved that her facial muscles still remembered the drill.
“Well, they were certainly crying for help when the drivers started turning round and giving chase. This was Nitshill. Ice-cream scoops are notoriously difficult to retrieve from the lower intestine. Anyway, I bumped into him a couple of nights later at the Apollo.”
“A club?”
“No, the erstwhile greatest music venue in the world. The Skids were playing and I was reviewing it. As I was getting paid to be there, I was probably supposed to be sitting in the circle, scribbling contemplatively in my notebook. Instead I was down the front – although not that near; the stage was about twelve feet high so you had to stand back to see anything – engaging in activities known in the modern parlance, I believe, as ‘moshing’. There was the usual tangle of bodies – you just grabbed on to someone in the crowd and burled around for a bit. At the end of Into The Valley I found that I was hanging on to Donald. We went for a few after the show and it kind of started from there.
“We weren’t bosom buddies, like. We just met up every so often, usually for gigs, occasionally just for a few beers. I never knew much about his personal life; I know you’re probably condemning this as a guy thing, but there are some pals you meet up with and discuss anything, and others with whom you stick to . . . I don’t know, established common ground. We talked rock’n’roll
, work and a bit of football. We stayed kind of in touch as we got older; despite climbing the ranks and having to be generally respectable, Donald could still occasionally be tempted along to a show, usually some bunch from the old days that really should have chucked it by then. Irresistible allure of nostalgia for the aging male who’s pining for lost youth. How the hell else could SLF and The Buzzcocks sell out venues in the late 1980s?”
He leaned back on the settee, running a hand through his uncooperative locks.
“I went to work in London for a few years and then Los Angeles for a couple more, and I guess we had probably forgotten about each other. It’s a bit difficult after all that time to just call up like it’s been a fortnight, even on the off-chance that you do have the phone number. Then a few months back I met him in Edinburgh out of the blue, outside the Usher Hall – Big Country had been playing; Skids connection. We went to a pub nearby and caught up a wee bit. He told me he was no longer in the police; he was working as a security adviser on some kind of government project. He wouldn’t say what or where; and to be honest, I’d have been the last person he would tell, if he was doing his job properly.”
“I can’t think why.”
“I got his address and phone number. I was kind of in the middle of moving into a new place with my girlfriend at the time and we didn’t have a phone number yet, so I said I’d forward it when I knew. Of course I didn’t, but I had his, and when you see someone after more than five years, it’s pretty easy to wait six months before ringing them up again.”
Nicole looked disapprovingly at him.
“Look,” he said defensively. “Wait until you’re at least ten years older before you start getting judgmental about this kind of thing. Anyway, the next time I saw him was on the TV last night.”
“On the six o’clock news?”
“No. The morbid action replay on Newsnight after he was dead.”
“God, that’s how you found out? I’m sorry.”
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