Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  He returned to the newsdesk on the deputy editor’s salary, giving him what seemed for a while like the best of both worlds – until the paper was sold and the new management began to salivate at the prospect of Ken’s removal and replacement with someone younger and cheaper.

  But that wasn’t what was depressing him.

  He was lonely in his dissatisfaction with the paper’s coverage of the Voss affair. The young reporters were wetting their pants the whole time about getting their bylines on the story of the decade, walking around full of energy and self-importance, like they had just broken fucking Watergate. But none of them had got their hands dirty; not unless the phones hadn’t been cleaned for a while. Ken was reminded of a few pompous sports hacks who seemed to think it reflected on their careers and abilities that they had covered Real Madrid v Eintracht Frankfurt at Hampden. Christ, all you needed was eyes and a fucking typewriter.

  The circulation department was equally pleased, Monday morning’s edition selling more than any other since the Sixties, and Tuesday’s a decade record for that day of the week. The boss was happy, and so, reportedly, were the suits upstairs. And given the, er, uncertainty over his position of late, Ken should have been on his knees thanking the heavens for this godsend, making a show of his own efforts and enthusiasm, and reminding a few people that the compliments should be passed to the same place the buck usually was.

  Ach, he didn’t really think so harshly of the young yins. He didn’t harbour any sentimental notions that they didn’t make hacks like they used to, or that these kids couldn’t have handled it back in the [insert personally preferred golden decade]. Hacks never changed much, in any generation. You always got the same complement of trojans, skivers, flakes, whizzkids and bampots. If there was anything different about this crop it was that – probably as a consequence of high unemployment and hence gratitude for not just a job but a job they liked – they maybe worked a bit too hard and drank a bit too little for his liking. But they’d grow out of that in time.

  He shouldn’t begrudge them their day in the sun with the Voss thing, either. What was bothering him, he knew, was just another bout of the periodic crisis of purpose and identity that afflicted every print news editor in the latter third of the twentieth century, usually precipitated by a big, world-scale event such as this: dealing with a stark reminder that your job wasn’t to break the story any more. That lay in the domain of the TV and radio boys. Sure, he knew that when it came to actual coverage, to intelligent, insightful rendering of the facts and details, his paper pissed all over the broadcasters – and from an increasing height since the Beeb and (particularly) ITN started interpreting the news for the sentiently challenged, assuming the comprehensive faculties of a four-year-old viewer. But in a way, that made the reality of it even more painful. These fucking morons told you first. No-one had picked up The Saltire on Monday morning and learned with a jolt that the Grim Reaper had shown up at Craigurquhart the night before and said “taxi for Voss”. No-one bought it on Tuesday because they wanted to find out the latest developments in the investigation. But still they bought it.

  Ken knew the game had changed for the print boys, and he wasn’t some anachronistic fossil who couldn’t deal with it – in fact it was his proven ability to deal with it that had put him where he was now. But the hack’s most primal instinct did growl every so often: to be the first to know, first to tell. No – the only one to tell. For your paper to be the only place someone could “read all about it”.

  But that was just a self-torturing pipe-dream, a practical impossibility, even when you did get something ahead of the competition, like some local scandal or even just a new angle. First edition was on the streets for the back of ten at night. Anything you ran that the others didn’t have would be quickly shoehorned into their pages within the hour, with some half-redundant new quote added so that they could tag their version of your fucking story with “Exclusive”. And by that time it was hardly relevant anyway, because the public already knew the juice before any paper hit their doormat, having heard it on the morning radio or caught it at the arse-end of Newsnight.

  There was barely such a thing as an exclusive any more, not really. Not a big one. What passed as a poor substitute these days was when some scheming politico chose one particular paper to leak some hopefully damaging document to. Or when some starfucker signed up to one or other of the sleaze sheets to exaggerate the sexual content of his or her fifteen minutes. And the success of that tabloid in netting such stories was much like the success of the Rangers in netting league titles: there was little merit to admire when it was simply a matter of having the biggest chequebook.

  All of which he could live with – most of the time. See, despite the sales, the quality and the accolades, the Voss affair depressed him because none of it was exclusively his. And for the most part he could live with that too. But as John Cleese had once said in tortured agony: it’s not the despair, it’s the hope. Every so often something did come along that no-one else had, something that even on TV and radio would initially be prefixed with the phrase “revelations in The Saltire". So despite putting all his efforts and abilities into making his paper’s coverage and analysis of secondhand news the most fresh, incisive and downright fucking sharp, a part of him was not only hoping, but indeed had to be alert and ready, for someone to walk in the door and tell him they had an exclusive on the Voss story that would not only blow the competition away, but would rock the whole country.

  He shook his head, bringing himself back from his reverie, focusing again on the bus-crash graphic as Keith hovered and Lump vegetated.

  Then Jack Parlabane walked in the door and told him he had an exclusive on the Voss story that would not only blow the competition away, but would rock the whole country.

  “This one comes with fries and salad, Fraz,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere quiet.”

  *

  “So what the devil is that?” Ken asked, staring quizzically at the metal contraption Parlabane had dumped on a table in the art office, which was where Keith and Lump lurked when they weren’t demonstrating their creations to the appropriate desk.

  “That’s what was supposed to kill Nicole Carrow, McInnes’s lawyer. Fitted under the car, triggered by a remote, takes out the brake cables, then it’s down to that law of physics which says two objects can’t occupy the same space simultaneously.”

  “Jesus. Who’s trying to kill her?”

  “Whoever killed Voss.”

  Ken leaned back against an old paste-up board, a relic of the lamented pre-DTP days, apparently saved from the skip by Keith, although as he did all his work on computers too, Ken couldn’t figure what it was used for.

  “Wait a minute, Jack. You’re saying they didn’t . . . Mclnnes, Hannah . . . they didn’t do it?”

  “It’s a set-up, Fraz. They didn’t kill Voss and I’d take short odds that they didn’t kill anyone last night either. They’re the fall guys. Carrow was showing every intention of pointing that out, so she had to be silenced. So did her boss, but I didn’t know that in time, and now he’s dead.”

  “Her boss?”

  “Finlay Campbell. Murdered yesterday in Glasgow by – reportedly – two muggers. You interested yet?”

  This was familiarly bleak Parlabane humour. Ken knew he looked anaemic.

  “And the lassie?” he asked stumblingly.

  “She’s safe for the time being.”

  “Have you told the polis? I mean, have you shown them this thing?”

  “Not yet. Whoever’s behind this has family-size cop connections. This is the only hard evidence I have right now, and I don’t want it going ‘missing’. Neither do I want to answer any questions about where Nicole Carrow is, or advertise my own involvement in this thing.”

  “Fair enough,” Ken reflected, folding his arms. “So what does the lassie know that’s so dangerous?”

  “Tam McInnes and amigos weren’t being assisted from the inside, they were being blackmailed.
They were being forced into carrying out a burglary – a burglary, note – basically to put them in the right place at the right time to pick up the tab for Mr Voss’s sudden demise.”

  “Any proof?”

  “Not any more. What there was took a walk from the Manson & Boyd offices in Glasgow, probably overnight on Monday.”

  “Fuck’s sake. You’ve got them comin’ oot the woodwork, Jack.”

  Parlabane nodded.

  “And polis connections? How do you know that?”

  Parlabane paused.

  “They killed my friend, Fraz,” he said after a few seconds, looking him in the eye and then looking away, in his face a hurt and uncertainty Ken had never witnessed before. He didn’t follow the logic, but it could wait.

  “Jesus, I’m sorry Jack. Who . . .?”

  “Lafferty. Donald . . .” Parlabane shook his head. “It wasn’t a suicide. Don’t ask me how I know, but believe me, I know.”

  “But why? I mean, I thought . . .”

  “They’re killing anybody who knows anything, anybody who can pick a hole in the case against the Voss Four. This is someone very powerful but very desperate, and that’s a fucking dangerous combination. That’s why I’m here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I need you to run this.”

  Ken laughed. “Christ, Jack, if the Queen suddenly confessed to killing Kennedy it wouldn’t bump this story off my front page.”

  Parlabane smiled a little, at last. “I know, Fraz. But what I mean is I need to lead on the angle that someone tried very surreptitiously to kill Nicole Carrow, and that by a remarkable coincidence her boss was murdered the same day. I don’t have anything solide on the other stuff; for instance, Nicole and I are the only people who know anything went missing from her office, and the reasons I have for believing Donald Lafferty was murdered would get the paper laughed off the news stands. But I need the world to know that someone is trying to kill Nicole, because that could be the only way to protect her and protect anyone else tied into this.”

  “How would that protect her? If these blokes are so powerful, surely they can still top her and leave us all wondering in vain who they are.”

  “It would change the game,” Parlabane stated, leaning his elbow on top of a Mac monitor. “Right now they don’t want anyone playing join-the-dots with the bodies they’ve left behind. They don’t want people to know that these victims were specifically targeted. Lafferty’s a guilt-ridden suicide, Campbell’s murdered in a mugging, Carrow’s supposed to die in a car-crash. These guys don’t want anybody to know they exist, never mind that they’re trying to stop anyone poking their nose into the Voss murders, because knowledge of their existence, their activities, their agenda, in itself casts doubt on the guilt of the current suspects. If we let them know we’re on to them, let the world know Carrow is a target, then they can’t kill her – or anyone else, such as my good self – without it turning the whole Voss affair on its head.”

  “And won’t running this story do that anyway?”

  “To an extent. And yeah, they could just decide to proceed with wiping out anyone in the know and hoping they don’t get caught before they slink off back to the shadows. But I’m hoping it makes them change their strategy. Cover their tracks some other way and let the mystery of these unsolicited improvements to Carrow’s car fade from the public’s short-attention-span interest.”

  “What’ll you do then?”

  “I’ll keep breathing, and so will Nicole, and I’ll take it from there.”

  Ken took a seat on the high stool that had been tucked under the tall paste-up board, while Parlabane slumped into a swivel-chair in front of a big Mac monitor that was aswirl with multicoloured screen-saver patterns.

  “So your friend,” Ken began tentatively, “did you manage to speak to him at all after the Voss murders?”

  “I hadn’t spoken to him in months. I knew him from back when he was a cop in Glasgow. I didn’t find out he was working at Craigurquhart until after he was dead.”

  “Right.”

  “Incredible, isn’t it? Would have been a hell of a source, and I didn’t even know that’s what he was up to.”

  Ken gave a regretful little laugh. “It’s funny,” he said. “It keeps cropping up.”

  “What does?”

  “Craigurquhart House. Been a great source of stories on its own in recent years.” Ken reached down to beside another of the Macs and lifted a fat and tattered brown folder, dog-eared sheets of paper jutting untidily from its three open edges. He offered it to Parlabane.

  Parlabane placed it on the table and began leafing through, glancing at the headlines on the clippings and the captions on the pictures. It was a well-worn and much-accessed library file, corroborating what Ken had just said. There were yellowed newsprint sheets dating back to the Twenties, when the place suffered a blaze which claimed five lives, through its restoration in the Thirties, visits by several Hollywood stars and starlets in the Fifties, when its owner was something of a playboy, and on until the political storms of recent years.

  “The real fun went on while you’d have been living in the States a few years back,” Ken explained. “The place was under the ownership of Lord Wainscroft, a Tory peer, whose freight and shipping business collapsed, you might remember, after the company finally lost an extremely distasteful negligence and compensation claim in Singapore.”

  “I remember the incident,” Parlabane said. “Ship went down somewhere off Malaysia, didn’t it? Lost about fifty crew and polluted the fuck out of some nearby islands. Set new standards in the cheerful contravention of safety procedures in pursuit of driving down operating costs. I think Private Eye started calling the proprietor ‘Lord Wainscroft of Kuan Lan’ afterwards. But that must have been way back in about ‘87.”

  “It was,” Ken confirmed. “But Wainscroft’s lawyers played a blinder at stalling every inquest, inquiry and report, as well as the court case itself. And the book of legal dirty tricks came out in a revised edition after some of the moves they pulled to avoid paying a wooden thrupenny to the widows and the islanders. Smear campaigns, intimidation, you name it. I think they were maybe hoping the plaintiffs would give up or even die so that they could walk away from it. But a verdict was eventually reached about four years ago, then upheld after the inevitable appeal which dragged the saga on for the best part of another year, and Wainscroft got it hard up the jacksie to the tune of about thirty mill.”

  “I wish I’d known at the time,” Parlabane reflected. “I’d have drunk to that.”

  “Aye, it was fairly entertaining. Especially when the Singapore courts seized all of Pole Star’s assets before Wainscroft could siphon the cash away and claim the company was skint. He didn’t have the thirty mill, but at least they fleeced him of what there was. So back in Blighty, Lord W is on his uppers with a wife and six racehorses to support, and needs to liquidise some assets. He decides to sell Craigurquhart, as he only goes there for the odd shooting weekend now and again anyway, and happily finds a buyer.”

  “A company called HMG, by any chance?”

  “The very same. They paid two mill of public money for the estate, cash which I’m sure came in very handy for Lord W at such a difficult time. Justification was the same line as for when they bailed out that Churchill tit with Lottery dosh, that it would be in public ownership, a fine country estate, invaluable part of Perthshire’s heritage staying in the nation’s hands, blah blah blah.”

  There was an inquisitive and expectant glint in Parlabane’s eye, something Ken welcomed greatly after the shock of seeing him so unusually grave. “So what was the juice?” he asked.

  “Guy from Leith phones me here, a chartered surveyor down in Bernard Street, which is CS central. Says he surveyed the place seven or eight months before, for revised insurance purposes. He put it at seven hundred K, and he’s got the documentation to prove it.”

  “Olé,” said Parlabane.

  “Indeed. It was a happy cou
ple of days round here, I can tell you. But like everything else with these unconscionable fuckers, they just rode it out, brassnecked it. Got the Voss papers to rubbish the evaluation, dug some dirt on the CS, full overkill, and by the time they’re through, the establishment version is that the government stiffed Wainscroft by taking advantage of his urgent need for cash to snatch this incredible estate for a song.”

  Parlabane flicked further through the clippings file. “But the fun didn’t stop there, I see.”

  “Far from it. They spent a further fortune doing the place up, then waited until the next royal extra-marital shaggarama was hogging the front pages to let slip that they’re not opening the joint to Joe Punter. It’s to become a facility for ‘entertaining’ civic guests, VIPs, and foreign businessmen considering major investments in the UK.”

  “By which you mean Beanoland Holiday Camp for major Conservative Party contributors and supporters.”

  “You’re a harsh and cynical man, Jack. And absolutely correct. I’ve got a contact up there, a chef. Pal of my son’s from college.”

  “You’ve got someone on the inside?” Parlabane asked, suddenly sitting up in his chair.

  Ken shook his head, waving down his excitement. “I know what you’re thinking, but it was a non-starter. He was the first guy I phoned when I heard, but he knows nothing. He wasn’t even there. Voss and his wife weren’t eating in Craigurquhart on Sunday night, they were supposed to be going to some party fund-raising shindig in Perth. Kitchen and waiting staff had the night off, as did half the folk who worked there.”

  “Which whoever killed Voss must have known. Fewer potential witnesses.”