Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  It was rather a shame about the wife, of course, but the embarrassing little Eurotrash trollop did insist on following him around, always managing to make several hundred thousand pounds’ worth of clothing look like mismatched items from a particularly insalubrious jumble sale. Unfortunately they didn’t have a lot of time to play with, and there simply hadn’t been an opportunity to get the bugger alone.

  The bodyguards he felt no remorse about whatsoever. Bloody gorillas, the pair of them. Just because someone had taught them to walk upright when in public didn’t mean they were actually sentient beings. He had always hated the way they still eyed him up when they knew exactly who he was, and had never forgiven them for the time they pinned him to a wall at that dinner in Paris, within six feet of about twenty bloody photographers. They claimed that he had approached Voss a little hastily and suggested that they feared he might be reaching for a weapon as he put his hand inside his jacket. He was actually reaching for a cheque made out to the charity Voss was hosting the dinner in aid of, having decided that if he was going to chuck money away on some bunch of foreign parasites, he might as well try and get a half-decent photo-op out of it.

  Two years on, the “Mugger Dalgleish” tag was still following him around.

  From his town-house window he looked across the gardens of Drummond Place and considered with a smile that its concave terrace reminded him a little of Bath. However, the memory of the real thing served to sadden him once more, as thoughts of England always did while he was stuck up here.

  There was no getting away from it, he hated the place. Hated the whole bloody country. Getting back to London felt like coming up for air after any prolonged stay, an oasis after days in the parched desert of this remote and detached wasteland. Summer had been the worst, with so little parliamentary business to take him back south. An endless ordeal of flesh-pressing in shoddy factories and smelly community centres, under perennially grey skies. Where the sun don’t shine, indeed.

  And what really stuck in the craw, what burnt and was as hard to swallow as the bloody whisky, was being thought of as Scottish, as one of them. He had never even been to the bloody place until about three years ago, and that was an overnight visit to the Scottish party conference as the token senior minister. He was an Englishman, through and through, and damn proud of it. His father, admittedly, had been a Scot, but for goodness’ sake, no-one considered Portillo Spanish, did they?

  But he had needed to be Scottish, or at least to put on a show of displaying his credentials, because of the ridiculous fuss made over the idea of an Englishman being Secretary of State for Scotland. And it was ridiculous. Who, for instance, was the last Welsh secretary who was actually bloody Welsh? Or Northern Ireland secretary who was from the province? In Dalgleish’s opinion, it was precisely this sort of pandering and indulgence that was responsible for the party’s poor showings north of the border – if you let a child have its way every time it whinges or whines about something, you end up with an indisciplined brat, don’t you? He simply couldn’t understand the inconsistency of it all. To put it bluntly, if you’re not worried about whether having only ten MPs out of seventy-two constitutes a mandate to govern, why start getting mealy-mouthed about the nationality of the man in charge?

  There were plenty of Scottish MPs whose constituencies were in England, weren’t there, and the English didn’t make a fuss about that, did they?

  But no, bloody Scotland had to have a bloody native son. His own suggested strategy was to accuse the dissenters of racism, talk about their “sinister insistence upon ethnic purity”, chucking in some overtones about Bosnia, and topple them from their self-righteous PC perches.

  Disappointingly, the party spin-doctors wouldn’t wear it. Not right now, anyway, they said, although he could tell they would be considering its viability for the future. Chances were they would soon have to. That was part of the reason he had been made Scottish Secretary in the first place: there were just no Scots left to choose from. Between the aforementioned ten and the dribs and drabs representing seats in England, it had been a rather meagre selection to begin with. And out of those you could discount a couple who had too firm a grip on their current portfolios to step down into this regionalised (and marginalised) role, several more who had been picked off by various scandals involving everything from pick-axes to bedroom slippers, and a few of the remainder who were either too autonomous or too sporran-swingingly barmy to be entrusted with ministerial duties.

  Of course, the bloody stupid thing was that many of those who had fallen through scandal had actually been stitched up by each other’s manoeuvrings as they vied for position in the Scottish party. He had found it rather pathetic, such mediocre, medium-sized fish battling for supremacy in a small pond, and only having the opportunity to do so because of the scarcity of their own numbers – absolutely none of them would have any chance of rising above eternal back-bench obscurity had they been down south. The abject lack of competition in Scotland would have ensured most of them a half-decent job just by default, if they hadn’t buggered up their own chances with their parochial disputes.

  So that rather much left his good self.

  He hadn’t exactly been delighted at the appointment (although under the circumstances it was better than the proverbial poke in the eye with a sharp stick). He saw it as an isolated post, keeping you out of the cut and thrust of the parliamentary party by whisking you up north to quell the uncivilised and ceaselessly hostile natives. It cast his mind back to the Thatcher days, when the favoured punitive sanction of TBW against dissenting cabinet ministers was banishment to Gulag Ulster to face Dr Paisleystein and the three Bs (Bogtrotting Bastards in Balaclavas).

  It was no secret he and Swan had been doing a bit of posturing and jockeying in ’95 – the odd fringe meeting or keynote speech – just to see where the land lay with the backbenchers, but as everyone else was at it, it would have been silly not to buy a ticket for that particular raffle. However, only Redwood had been either deluded or crazy enough to ask the boss to step outside, and he had paid the price. Dalgleish and Swan hadn’t directly spoken out against the PM and had given their backing loyally in that summer’s scrap behind the bikesheds, but the boss (wisely) still didn’t trust them. However, he had clearly been wary of alienating the considerable support they carried, which was why he hadn’t bounced them altogether. Party unity could be a strange and wonderful thing.

  Dalgleish saw the PM’s famous balancing tricks at work in Swan’s new appointment. The younger man was made Heritage Secretary, which could be seen as a comparatively light ride for a first senior ministerial post, a place to train for bigger things; but it was also a rather difficult job to shine in, fielding endless gripes about the Lottery, and with few opportunities to “get tough” with anything or anyone. Swan’s being a good little boy would therefore be his only ticket upwards.

  There seemed a similar ambiguity in giving Dalgleish the Scottish job: it would keep him at arm’s length for a spell, while allowing him the chance to prosper as an ally, should he choose to toe the line. However, he suspected a great element of serendipity had saved him from being given something more obviously retributive – a poisoned chalice like Health, for instance – by a PM who would have liked to be rid of him without being seen to get rid of him.

  It was the only time in his life he had felt reason to be glad of his father’s nationality.

  It was not a job he had wanted, but then it had never been a job he had even considered. It was Scottish business, parochial politics, nothing to do with him. However, once he was forced to start thinking about it, he saw in it a great deal of potential. For a start, you could play a hand in several games at once; you could be Home Secretary one minute, Employment Secretary the next, Chancellor, Health Secretary . . . a chance to audition for any number of big future roles. And in playing the statesman, you had the chance to show that if you were able to run one part of the country, then you just might have what it takes to run the whole bo
iling.

  A huge bonus was the level of party support he had to be given right from the off. The tenuousness of his Scottish connection was inevitably going to be seized upon by the Opposition, who would drone on tediously about colonialism and the Tories not being able to find a Scot to govern Scotland, but the flak was always going to be aimed at the man who had made the appointment. By protecting Dalgleish, the party were protecting the boss, and to make the boss look good, Dalgleish had to look good.

  An early hurdle was the fact that his constituency was – rather obviously – not in Scotland; in fact it was a comfortable and satisfying 300 miles from the wretched place. So with much distaste and greater regret, he agreed to proclaim an abiding love for his “homeland”, and to declare that he would stand in a Scottish constituency at the next election. The latter part was agreed with party bosses on the tacit understanding that he would be in a new job by that time and therefore relieved of this unthinkable obligation.

  But then next had come this bloody Scottishness business, a pantomime of tartanry and shortbread as the PR people flailingly over-compensated for his understandable ignorance (and, he would have loved to be able to admit, indifference) about the country.

  Learning to drink whisky was only the tip of the iceberg. He had suggested that he could just pose for the odd photo-op drinking cold tea, like they do on stage or on television. However, they insisted that he would have to drink it at dinners and other social events, and apart from the impracticality of supplying him with phony stuff on such occasions, the threat of being found out – and the ensuing tartan-media gloating frenzy – was considered too great.

  The biggest disaster, however, was the football match.

  It had been decided that his public profile needed to be boosted, and the ideal opportunity, the PR man said, was a sporting event, where he could be seen to be actively supporting his “beloved” country. Dalgleish was nervous about the idea from the start, and his concern over straying into dangerous, uncharted territory grew when his suggestion of a cricket match was rejected.

  “No, no, a public event,” the PR man said.

  Dalgleish looked quizzically at him, wondering where the breakdown in logic had occurred.

  Bill Mason, the rotund and hygienically challenged editor of the Scottish edition of one of Voss’s tabloids, had been present at the meeting, during which they were also discussing press strategies to discredit Labour-controlled unified councils. Mason more helpfully explained that “the average attendance at a Scottish cricket match is usually about thirty – and that’s including both teams, the umpire, stray dogs and any tramps who happen to be sleeping off the Special Brew in that particular park that day”.

  This had made things a little clearer but also served to make him feel even more lost and further from home. Who could imagine a land where cricket meant nothing?

  Unfortunately, Mason was not present at the meeting during which a bloody football match was decided upon. He was a gruff and rather ill-bred character, but Dalgleish suspected he might have been able to offer sufficient local insight to abort the public relations catastrophe conceived that day.

  A rugby international had been suggested first, and sounded absolutely ideal. Being seen on national TV waving his little plastic saltire next to Princess Anne would do his profile no harm whatsoever – on both sides of the border. And he remembered one of the Scottish cabinet members telling him that Murrayfield was always a sell-out despite the paltry attendances at club rugby matches, “because it’s the biggest public-school reunion in the world”, which suggested that he would be seen by and among the right people. However, the PR man had muttered something about preaching to the converted, and any further debate on this had anyway been curtailed when his assistant consulted the fixture calendar: the Five Nations had not long passed, and there weren’t any more internationals scheduled for six months. There was, however, a big game coming up at Hampden Park in Glasgow in a few weeks, and it was being screened live on BBCl . . .

  It was the longest, most humiliating and thoroughly miserable night of his life.

  His first torment came when he went to take his seat, emerging from the stairwell as the bloody awful pipers marched up and down the pitch, bathed in the brilliant glare of the floodlights. The blast of freezing air hit him in the chest, and as he struggled for breath he noticed that all of the SFA representatives in the VIP party had suddenly acquired long, heavy coats over their suits. Within moments of sitting down he feared he would develop hypothermia. And within ten minutes of that, he wished he had died of it.

  It looked a full house, an imposing mass on long, sloping concourses, alive with a riot of swirling flags – none of which, he was concerned to note, were Union Jacks. He was sure there had been plenty of those when he saw a clip of a Scottish football match on TV a couple of weeks before, and indeed had felt reassured about the prospect of the international after learning how much Conservative support there was from the board of the biggest club, Glasgow Rangers.

  Then it began. Not the match, the disaster.

  “Welcome to Hampden Park for tonight’s European Championship warm-up friendly between Scotland and Norway,” announced a disembodied voice crisply over the PA system. “And the National Stadium welcomes as its guest tonight, the Secretary of State for Scotland, the Right Honourable Alastair Dalgleish.”

  As a cricket man, prior to that moment he hadn’t known what thirty-five thousand people furiously booing sounded like. He did now, as indeed did anyone who happened to tune in for the live television and radio-transmissions.

  It reverberated terrifyingly around the stadium, amplified by the sweeping roof that covered the grandstands, which he suspected had been partly designed for that specific purpose. The blast of baying voices was dotted with piercing whistles, the overall effect like an angry titan with asthma. He felt momentarily in fear of his life, his mind filling with images of spontaneous mob eruption and his corpse swinging from a noose tied to one of the crossbars. Then, as the fear passed, he felt his cheeks begin to burn with a mixture of humiliation and utter fury, no doubt captured in glorious Technicolor for posterity.

  When the booing subsided, the air was filled with concerted chanting.

  “DURTY ENGLISH BASTARD. DURTY ENGLISH BASTARD.”

  “ALLY DALGLEISH, YOU’RE A WANKER, YOU’RE A WANKER – ALLY DALGLEISH, YOU’RE A DONKEY’S ARSE.”

  And “DALGLEISH, DALGLEISH, GET TAE FUCK, DALGLEISH, GET TAE FUCK,” upon which someone behind him rather obscurely commented, “Well, I never thought I’d hear those words here.”

  He thought his ordeal was finished when the teams took the field and the crowd turned their attention to the match, but as the game turned out to be a dispassionately drab affair, the neanderthals in the stands chose to amuse themselves every so often by striking up another chorus of this gratuitous and foul-mouthed abuse, every word of which was heard across the land.

  But the nightmare didn’t end there. It turned out some malignant and no doubt pinko director at the BBC had chosen to zoom in on his face during the pre-match playing of the national anthems, and of course after the first roll on the drums he had launched full-throated into “God save our gra . . .” before stopping as he realised that everyone else was singing “Oh flower of Scotland”. To compound the gaffe, he didn’t know any of the words to the stupid bloody dirge, and the cameras had returned a couple of times to show him close-mouthed and blushing as those all around him strove to burst a lung.

  The lefty press had a bloody party with the whole affair, and just to complete the fun, he later learned that there was a special “sporting What Happened Next” round on that Have I Got News For You nonsense the following Friday, in which they had shown footage of him taking his seat at Hampden and then stopped the film.

  He demanded to know who the PA announcer had been, so that he could insist on him being sacked on the spot, as the bastard must have known he was giving the animals in the crowd their cue. However, the PR
man advised that this would be further bad publicity, as whether the announcer had ulterior motives or not, it was a hard thing to prove; besides, it was best to show that he was above reacting to such disgraceful behaviour. He agreed with this, and comforted himself by sacking the PR man instead.

  Dalgleish glanced down to the street below, his attention caught by the manoeuvring of a black Ford Scorpio as it slotted itself smoothly into a parking space. Knight was at the controls, his broad shoulders and bullet head recognisable from thirty feet above. He had one hand on the wheel and the other holding that scrambled-frequency earphone to his ear, his head twitching as he spoke, probably talking as forcefully and deliberately as he did everything else.

  Knight was possessed of many admirable qualities, as far as Dalgleish was concerned, but the most valuable – and certainly these days the most rare – was that he knew his place. Knight knew the measure of remarkable men and was not too proud to serve. He knew what he did well and was content to do it, without ambitions beyond his station in life. There are men born to command and men born to obey, and it was a tribute to Knight’s strength of character that he knew his role. Certainly, he also knew he would be well rewarded, as loyalty always is, and that he would enjoy his own measure of power as his dividend from Dalgleish’s success, but he had no illusions as to who was in charge.

  That was why Dalgleish trusted him, and Knight clearly understood the value of such a man’s trust.

  Knight was MI5. They had got to know each other some years back when Dalgleish had a fairly junior Home Office post, and both had recognised the potential benefits of reciprocal cooperation. At the time Dalgleish was liaising with Knight over a standard dirty tricks campaign, setting up a few opposition front-benchers and the odd union leader for nasty and very public falls. Knight was working on, you could say, the practical side, and Dalgleish was involved for the valuable links he had with Voss, whose newspapers would have their own vital contribution to make.