Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  Ken nodded. “Plausible enough. Anyway, this chef – Davie Evans is his name – has always kept us informed of who the taxpayer’s hospitality is being extended to at Craigurquhart.”

  “In advance?”

  “No, no. He just lets us know who’s been, and it’s served us quite well. A sort of ‘running embarrassment’, ‘on-going scandal’ kind of thing. I mean, there are people entertained at Craigurquhart who are on diplomatic business or might well be planning to start an electronics firm in Livingston or whatever, but the number of free-loading wankers who are up there as gratitude for political or financial services rendered is astronomically greater.

  “We waited until it had been up and running for a few months before we broke the story. We ran a wee table of who had been there, weighing up the legit against the liggers to emphasise the point. And every so often after that we’d update it, mainly for mischief value, as the Scottish Office never gave the slightest indication that they cared a fuck what anyone thought of the situation. These days we only dig it up if somebody that the average lefty reader finds particularly loathsome has been hunting, fishing and guzzling at public expense. There would probably have been mention in the paper this week of Roland Voss’s stay there, if circumstances hadn’t cut it short the way they did.”

  Parlabane gave a dry laugh. “Yeah,” he said. “Cannae quite see the VIPs queuing up for a weekend there now.”

  He put the folder down on top of the computer’s keyboard, open at the maligned CS’s report. Ken rubbed at his beard in a manner so familiar that it often irritated himself when he realised he was doing it.

  “Don’t suppose you’ve got any theories about who actually did it, Mr P?”

  Parlabane exhaled slowly, opening his bloodshot and tired eyes wide. “Not a scoob, Fraz.” His hand strayed idly to the folder, fingers toying with the edges of pages without actually turning any. “It’s obviously someone very powerful, very connected and very ruthless, but that doesn’t really narrow the field much, as that kina profile fits a lot of people in the circles Voss moved in. Think about it. Voss owned people – politicians, cops, Intelligence – not only in this country, but probably every country in Europe and quite a few beyond. His friends and enemies would too. I mean, we’re not just talking about media magnates or international businessmen here, Fraz. We’re talking about arms dealers, arms manufacturers, people who make, buy and sell fighter jets and fucking tanks. The big media moguls get such a high profile simply because it comes with the business they’re in, and maybe it’s a business that attracts a fairly extrovert personality, but Voss was in partnerships – and rivalries – with guys whose names few ordinary people have heard, but who have a sight more money and clout than any newspaper baron.”

  “The old military-industrial complex chestnut?”

  Parlabane smiled. “Well, not exactly. I know how that sounds. But what I’m saying is that we’ll probably never know what this was really about, what Voss did to deserve it, never mind who actually called in the hit. Even if we did catch who pulled the trigger or wielded the blade, they’re not going to talk – that’s if they live long enough to be asked any questions.”

  “Aye, true enough,” said Ken. “We’d never know the real story. But I don’t imagine those four poor bastards up in the hills would be worrying about that. If you found out who did pull the trigger, then at least it would prove it wasnae them.”

  Parlabane gripped one arm of the swivel-chair, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. “I know, I know, Christ,” he said. “But I’ve nothing to go on. If I knew a wee bit about what was found, what evidence there is, it would at least be a start. Working out how is usually a big help in working out who. But it’s not like the polis are gaunny let us have a wee traipse round the murder scene. In fact, the cops are wrapped so tight about this one that my own contact is giving me heavy vibes that I should keep my head down for both our sakes. Let me tell you, it’s a hell of a trick discrediting the evidence against someone if they won’t tell you what the evidence is.”

  Parlabane reached for a couple of the many old newspapers that were scattered about the small room liberally enough to cause a fire safety officer to torch the place himself just to get it over with. He placed a copy of The Times on the desk first, then slapped a Saltire down on top of it.

  “I mean, look at this,” he complained, indicating the two front pages. “This is as much as anyone’s got. Same details, same quotes, even the same fucking stupid graphic.”

  “Well, Keith was working on our own,” Ken explained in half-hearted defence, “but Lump crashed the system, so we had to just pull that one off the wire at the last minute. It’s from NewsGraph or Infographics or somebody.”

  The graphic was an extremely simplified detail of the layout of Craigurquhart House – Voss’s room and part of the hallway outside – showing where each of the four bodies were discovered; the two VIPs side-by-side in the bedroom, and the two bodyguards just outside the door. The little black silhouette figures each had their arms around their heads and their right legs bent at the knee. From a certain angle they looked like they were performing a Highland Fling.

  “Christ, it’s pathetic,” Parlabane spat. “Folk are actually happy to accept this sort of pish as a substitute for news. Maybe they think the easy-to-understand wee diagram makes up for the fact that none of it is telling them anything. I mean, what does this graphic actually say?”

  Ken laughed wryly as he watched Parlabane stand up and lean over the desk to scrutinise the two front pages, wishing the acerbic wee bugger could have been an ally in his recent discussions with the assistant editor.

  “The copy tells us four bodies were found,” Parlabane continued. “Two in the bedroom and two in the hall. You don’t really need a diagram to get your head round that concept, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “With all of my heart, Jack.”

  Parlabane shook his head, stopping himself from ranting further, his eye drifting momentarily away from the two newspapers and over the open folder. He was about to sit down again when he apparently realised what he had just been looking at, and had another glance to confirm it.

  “So Jack,” Ken said, “do you . . .?”

  Parlabane raised a palm to request Ken wait a moment. He continued to look at the open folder, but now far more intently.

  “This is your genuine ’fishell architectural floorplan for Craigurquhart, yeah?” he asked.

  “Aye. Part of the CS’s report. We didn’t need it, but we kept all his stuff together.”

  “Master Bedroom. That would be the VIP suite now, wouldn’t it?”

  “Aye. One of the English Sunday supplements did a big photo spread on it when it had just been done up. What’s the deal?”

  Parlabane lifted the photocopied plan from the folder and placed it and The Saltire on the tilted and scalpel-scarred paste-up board.

  “Right. Forget Voss and Mrs Voss,” he said, drawing a couple of matchstick men on the plan to represent the corpses of the bodyguards. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

  Ken rubbed at his face-fuzz in consternation, then suddenly stopped himself. He was doubly self-conscious about doing it around Parlabane, as he had once said Ken’s beard “looks like a squirrel’s shagging your mouth”.

  “I’m afraid you’ve lost me, Jack,” he confessed, placing his hands in his pockets.

  Parlabane took his pencil and pointed at the plan.

  “These were highly trained bodyguards, Fraz.” He put the point of the pencil between the two matchstick men and began slowly tracing a line down the long corridor that led away from the door of the Master Bedroom to the top of a spiral staircase. “This hallway is about fifteen yards long,” he said as he drew.

  “And?”

  “There’s no doors. Look at this. There’s an outside wall on this side, and on the other side, the rooms that back on to this passage are accessed via another hallway, another staircase, here,” he indicated, jabbing the pencil into a diffe
rent part of the plan. “Do you know why there’s no doors, Fraz?”

  “Well, I read something about it keeping the master’s quarters separate . . .”

  Parlabane was shaking his head, the gas turned up a notch in those Stygian flames in his eye. “Security purposes,” he said. “This place was built back in pretty rough times, remember. Never mind privacy or any bollocks like that, the purpose of this big long approach to the master’s room was so that no-one could get to it without being seen by the master’s guards, who would have been positioned – then as now – right outside the fuckin’ door.

  “The bad guys couldn’t have come in the window of the bedroom because Voss and his wife were in there and they’d have called for help – the guards would have come storming in in a second, not wait to be gunned down in the hallway. And if by some chance the killers were able to get into the room and do their thing without Voss raising the alarm, then why bother offing the bodyguards if they don’t know anything’s amiss? No. Whoever took out these two had to come up this staircase and into this hallway to do it. These men were shot, what was it, once each through the forehead? Between the eyes?”

  “Something like that.” Ken nodded, smiling. “I see what you’re saying. If someone who’s not supposed to be there comes into that hallway, he – or they – have got about half a second to get their shots in before the bodyguards draw their own weapons and ask what they want. Less than half a second, because if the bodyguards see guns, they’re going to react as trained – do all that ‘smallest possible target’ shite. So from fifteen yards, that’s bloody sharp shooting. They’d have to be serious pros, not some ex car-workers or spaced-out druggies.”

  Parlabane was shaking his head again, intriguingly. “They were pros, certainly,” he said. “But that’s not the point. The point is they didn’t need to spring out suddenly and shoot these blokes through the forehead from that distance, even if they were capable of it. The point is they were able to walk right up to them. The point is the bodyguards knew them. It was someone who was supposed to be there, whose presence wouldn’t trigger any reaction. ‘Oh hi guys, how you doing.’ Blam.”

  “Someone on the inside. But why didn’t the cops suss this out?”

  “There was no need. If they had just come across the four bodies, it’s the sort of thing they’d have clocked right away, to help work out who they should be looking for. But they didn’t need to go looking for anyone. They already had four guys caught running away, one of them resembling an extra from a Peckinpah picture.”

  “Maybe this is what your pal was on to,” Ken said quietly after a moment.

  Parlabane nodded, solemnly. He closed the folder and handed it to Ken. “Right,” he said. “Give us the number of this chef bloke.”

  “I already told you Jack, he wasn’t there on Sunday night.”

  “I know. But he might be able to tell us who was.”

  Sarah sat on the settee in her dressing gown, hair still damp, nestling a coffee in her lap, and glancing through the gap between the door and the frame where she could see Nicole standing by the telephone table in the hall. She looked very small and very tired, standing on uneasy legs and staring blankly into space with eyes that were feeling the strain of having been open far too long. She held the receiver to her ear but didn’t speak.

  Nicole was an awkward person for Sarah to meet.

  Was that unfair?

  She thought of Jack on Monday night, shattered and crying, dropping to the floor as if shot, a hamstrung version of himself that she had never seen before. Buckled with grief, tortured by the thought of phone calls he never made, ways he might have made things different. Some might find it odd that he could be so hurt by the death of someone he seldom saw, someone he wasn’t even that close to any more, but emotion has a long memory. He and Donald had been very close once, and that’s how close you feel when the loss hits home.

  She was also wise enough to know it’s a sentimental heart that beats in the chest of the cynic.

  She had held him so tight, and for so long.

  She knew he’d have to get involved now, and she wouldn’t ask him to sacrifice doing so “for her”, because it would really only be for some insecure and selfish part of her. She knew that people’s lives were in danger, and that Jack might be able to help them. And she knew that despite his grief and anger, he’d be careful; that he loved her too much to give in to the self-indulgence of any nihilistic recklessness. But still she had wished she could stop him, and had clung on to him in bed as if she might be able to prevent him ever leaving her grasp.

  They had made love as words and tears spilled into kissing and entangling; the proximity of death is so often curiously aphrodisiac. How she had gripped and squeezed him, so possessively, with every part of herself.

  Now here she was, looking at a young woman using her telephone who – had it not been for Jack – would have died last night. Scared, exhausted, confused and disorientated, but still alive. And Sarah understood that with his instincts, his insight, his skills and his abilities, whether he liked it or not, there was a great responsibility attached to being Jack Parlabane.

  Female doctors had the highest divorce rate in the country, and many of those marriages broke up because the husbands couldn’t take what their wives brought home. It wasn’t so easy to blame them. Sarah dealt with so much suffering, so much pain, so much grief, and so, so much death. You couldn’t just hang it up along with your hat and jacket when you came home at night. Jack had appreciated that. He listened to her cathartic rants, talked her through the periodic depressions, forced her into the pub when he had decided nothing but a skinful would clear her head of it all. And he had told her that he knew this would always be the price of being married to her.

  Now she understood her side of the bargain.

  “I couldnae believe it, like. I cannae believe it.”

  “Don’t. It’s bollocks. It’s a set-up.”

  “I mean, Donald. No Donald. Donald was cool, ken?”

  “I know.”

  “Aye brightened the place up. He was never miserable, ken? No like some o’ the dour-faced bastarts he was in charge o’. Took his job serious, but he never took himsel too serious, ken?”

  “I know.”

  “It’s no like he’d somethin’ on his mind. It’s no like you’d have got the impression he wasnae – I dinnae ken – content, much as any of us are. Like he was . . . fuckin’ . . . lookin’ for a way oot, or a way up. Christ, if Donald had wanted tae screw somebody in the place for money, he coulda done it himsel’ wi’ a lot less bother, ken?”

  “I know.”

  Parlabane was patient, despite his pressing need for what Evans could tell him. He of all people understood the young man’s need to give vent to his exasperating incredulity, his perplexing frustration at what he had been asked to accept. Yet another soul tortured a thousand ways by the loneliness of one single thought: it doesn’t make sense. At least he wasn’t having to run for his life or his liberty at the same time.

  “Used to talk music to him. Man, he knew so much stuff, ken? Fuckin’ saw The Clash at The Apollo. Never had a ticket. Got helped in a back windae aff Joe Strummer.”

  Parlabane couldn’t help but smile. It was a well-known story, the hall full to bursting because the band had been operating an unofficial open-door (or open-window) policy from their dressing-room. Everyone you met who had been there that night claimed they were one of the fortunate freeloaders. There had actually only been about forty of them, and four thousand liars. Donald was one of the latter, and apparently still persisting when he should have been too grown-up to fib. Parlabane knew this because he personally had queued all fucking night in Renfield Street in a pish-smelling doorway to get tickets for both of them. And if Parlabane had wanted to break in free through a window, he wouldn’t have needed Joe fucking Strummer to help him.

  “He was sharp, tae,” Evans continued. “Ken’t everythin’ that was goin’ on.”

  “Apar
t from who was telling The Saltire about who was visiting.”

  “Naw, he ken’t that fine. He turned a blind eye partly because he didnae have much love for the Tories, ken? But mainly ’cause I was just tellin’ them who had been. If somebody was leakin’ who was due to be comin’, that would have been a different story.”

  “So tell me, Davie, apart from Donald, who else was working on security for the Voss visit?”

  “Eh, let me think . . . there’d have been Tony Cowan, Grant Crossland, Jimmy Mc . . .”

  “Is this Donald’s guys you’re talking about?”

  “Aye.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Who else, who was involved that wasn’t part of the regular Craigurquhart set-up?”

  “Oh, I see. Well, there were Voss’s two bodyguards, obviously. And there were the government guys.”

  “Government?”

  “Ken, like fuckin’ secret service or somethin’. We usually only get them when there’s some foreign politician or ambassador or somethin’. They’re, like, overseein’ the whole visit, ken? So if it’s, say, likes o’ the prime minister of somewhere or other, he might be at Craigie for a coupla days, then doon tae Embra, then London, ken? And these guys are checkin’ oot aw the arrangements right doon the line. So I suppose at Craigie they come in an’ check what Donald’s set-up’s like – was like – then gie it the thumbs-up or ask for their ain wee alterations.

  “As I says, but, this is usually only for real big noises. If it’s just the high heid-yin of some company, then it would just be up to Donald. But this Voss gadge got the full bhoona; he wasnae part o’ any European government, but I suppose it was because he owns hauf the European governments.”

  “So these ‘secret service’ guys. Did you see much of them?”

  “Aye. I couldnae tell you how many there were, ’cause some o’ them keep an awfy low-profile, ken. Just kinna blend into the background, which is their job, I suppose. Only ones I saw much of were the under-cover guy and the boss man.”