“Under-cover?”
“Aye. That’s what we called him. They’d a guy brought in, posin’ as a waiter. Happens with quite a lot o’ the high-security visits. They think we’re fuckin’ stupit, an’ we’ll no notice anythin’ strange aboot a new waiter startin’ work a week before a big visit, always some big clumsy fucker wi’ hauns mair used to haudin’ necks than dinner plates. I think they dae it to check we’re no spit-tin’ in the Tory bastarts’ dinners. This wan was actually all right. He knew we had clocked him, so he came clean fairly soon and we all got on okay.”
“And the boss?”
“Built like a brick shitehoose. I wouldnae have fuckin’ messed wi’ him, believe me. He came into the kitchen a coupla times, looked around then started sayin’ move this, shift that. Made fuck-all difference, but it happens all the time. I think they dae it to let you know they’re in charge.”
“What was his name?”
“Never heard. They tend no to say. Even the under-cover gadge, he says his name was Billy, but he wouldnae tell us his surname. Never answered to Billy a few times, either. All I remember aboot the bossman was that he liked to come across as Mr Control, ken? Really calm and soft-spoken. But it was funny, like, ’cause you could tell he was wan o’ these guys that only does it ’cause he’s permanently wan fuck-up away fae losin’ the place awthegether. I heard him crackin’ up at Grant Crossland wan time, and shoutin’ at his own guys, tae. When he lost his temper he dropped the posh accent and started soundin’ like, fuck, I don’t know, a country bumpkin, ken? Some fuckin’ yokel wi’ a big daud o’ straw stickin’ oot his mooth.”
“And do you remember anything about any of the other guys, anything at all?”
“Naw. They aw look much the same after a while. Torn-faced bastarts in suits, tryin’ to look hard. To be honest, I couldnae even tell you how many of them there were that weekend. Could have been four, could have been six. They just float aboot tryin’ to look intense to disguise the fact that they’re bored oot their trees. Every now and then wan’ll stop you an’ ask where you’re gaun wi’ that steak pie, like there might be a fuckin’ bomb hidden inside it. Or a very wee assassin. Fuckin’ wanks.”
Quite, thought Parlabane.
The phone rang, again. It had been like a mewling bairn, girning away for attention all morning, never satisfied by any amount of delicate handling and soft words, wearyingly restless in its cradle. The handle was uncomfortably warm, the earpiece more so and sticky with it, and the mouthpiece was starting to bounce back last night’s garlic.
“Hello, D . . .”
“You know who this is,” interrupted a quiet but insistent voice.
“Uh-huh.”
“Usual. Twenty minutes.”
“I can’t do that,” she said flatly. “I’m in the middle of . . .”
“Nothing as important as this.”
Click.
The bastard. The bastard. The arrogant, egotistical, self-important wee shite. Irritating, cock-sure, obnoxious, presumptuous little toley.
He had something.
Jenny jammed the file she was looking through back into a forbiddingly messy drawer, grabbed her car keys and left.
The Cask was busy with the lunchtime pie-and-a-pint crowd, the loud hubbub of mixed conversation hitting her as she came through the double doors. It was standing room only, drinkers ringing the horseshoe-shaped bar and leaning against pillars across the wooden floor. She peered between gaps in the throng and saw him, sitting alone at a small table, his bag slung proprietorially across the empty chair opposite, which was attracting disapproving glances from some leg-weary bystanders. She went towards the bar, catching the landlord’s eye from behind a few fiver-clutching punters. He gestured hello with a raised brow, then indicated one of the pumps to request confirmation that she’d like the usual. She replied with a gesture indicating that a half would do, and he set about pulling it.
“Cheers, Mac,” she said, lifting the drink and handing him payment.
“Welcome, Jen,” he said, then nodded to one side. “Sherlock’s over there.”
Jenny placed her drink on the table with one hand and whipped Parlabane’s bag off the chair with the other, sitting down and staring him confrontationally in the eye.
“This better be fucking front-page news, Scoop. What the hell’s going on?”
He took an annoyingly long pull at his own pint, then placed it very slowly and precisely down on the ring of liquid it had previously left on the table-top. Then he sighed.
Jenny was about to grab him by the throat and tell him to get on with it when he began speaking.
“All right, Jen, I appreciate the inconvenience and the short notice and so on, so I’ll do you the courtesy of giving it to you straight. Here’s the facts. Tell me if there’s anything you don’t follow.”
He glanced down at the table for a second as if he had notes written there.
“Sunday night, an evil, Machiavellian, right-wing, scheming, worthless piece of shit called Roland Voss finally gets what’s long been coming to him. I don’t care. His wife gets it too, which is a bit of a shame, but to tell you the truth, I’m not too broken up about that either. Maybe she didn’t deserve to die, but then again, neither did any of the thousands of civilians killed in Angola and various other war-torn African hell-holes by the anti-personnel mines that helped pay for her rocks and frocks. I don’t know. Call it compassion fatigue.
“Two bodyguards also die. Again, I’m not squirting too many tears. To paraphrase the late great JC, live by the automatic, die by the automatic.
“Monday afternoon, well that’s different. Monday afternoon a friend of mine dies inside your police station, reportedly by his own hand. That one I care about.”
“You knew Lafferty? I’m sorry, Jack . . .”
“Hear me out,” he interrupted, calmly but firmly. “The song ain’t finished. Tuesday afternoon someone walks into an underground car park in Glasgow and attaches a remote-controlled device to the bottom of Nicole Carrow’s car – that’s McInnes’s lawyer, by the way. It’s supposed to take out her brakes at a rather inopportune moment on her way home from work. Fortunately, it gets removed by an intrepid, intelligent and devilishly handsome journalist . . .”
“Any relation to a paranoid, short-arsed soap-dodger?”
“. . . And the attempt on her life fails. Also on Tuesday afternoon, Carrow’s boss is stabbed to death in Partick by two alleged muggers. Tuesday evening, the bus transporting the Voss accused to Peterhead mysteriously crashes somewhere in the hills. The four prisoners escape. One guard is apparently killed in the accident, and the other cop and the driver are shot dead. Now, maybe it’s just paranoid old me, but is the word ‘conspiracy’ entering your mind here at all?”
“Well, when you say . . .”
“Not sure? Fair enough. Let me continue. Wednesday morning, said short-arsed soapdodger is looking at a floorplan of Craigurquhart House when he notices that the two unfortunate bodyguards were shot through the forehead at one end of a fifteen-yard-long corridor with no doors off it. Now, either they were taken out from that distance by Martin fucking Riggs – and I haven’t seen Mel Gibson round these parts since Braveheart opened – or they were shot from close range by one or two persons they thought they had no reason to be suspicious of. Either way, it couldn’t have been any of the four men hiding in the hills with acorns up their arses. So you tell me, Jenny, what the hell’s going on?”
“Why you asking me, Scoop?” she said huffily. He could get very smug when he was on to something. “Sounds like you’re the one with all the answers.”
“Somebody killed my friend, Jenny. Who was it?”
She sighed, staring down into her drink. “I’m sorry, Jack, I really am. I don’t mean to be moody, but, well, things haven’t exactly been a barrel of laughs lately. The station’s felt like a terrorist siege, between the media camped outside and the arrogant wankers shouting orders inside. As for Lafferty . . .”
; “He didn’t kill himself, Jenny. He tried to get a message through to me just before he died. Whoever claims to have ‘found’ him taking cyanide must have been the one who force-fed him the stuff. Who was it?”
If anyone else had suggested this, Jenny would have fallen off her chair. Coming from Parlabane, it was just in context. She knew it was too late now. He was involved. Call was right. The whole thing was now a Parlabane situation. Fasten your seatbelts.
“I don’t know,” she said, weary and worrying. “Seems like no-one knows anything about this whole disaster-opera, including the cops investigating it. Place is crawling with MI5, giving everyone suspicious looks the whole time, as if to say ‘fuck off, you’re no gettin’ a game’. There’s cops from L&B and Tayside on the case, but it sounds like the suits are really running the show. When the Lafferty thing happened, they just seemed to come out of the woodwork, running past you to get to the interview rooms. They wouldn’t let anyone else near the area. Can’t say I was suspicious about the fact that they’re not talking much about the incident. It represents a Class A fuck-up for all concerned, and controlling what the media knows about shite like this is paramount.”
She shook her head and took a quick sup of her beer. “I don’t know, Jack. You say you don’t think he topped himself . . . I’ve learnt not to question your instincts – too much. But the other stuff you’re saying, well, Christ, I suppose it would explain a few things.”
“What?” he said insistently.
This was probably a bad idea, but as the genie was already out of the bottle . . .
“Well, like I said, the suits are trying to keep the whole deal strictly within their own domain, but you know what cop-shops are like. Biggest gossip-parlours and rumour-mills on the planet, so if someone tells them to mind their own business, it sends them into overdrive. It’s like telling a kid not to look over there. But the word is that the investigation was running into the proverbial brick wall. I mean, obviously they’ve caught these guys literally red-handed, and they’ve been dubiously given Prevention of Terrorism powers, a real licence to lean. So they’re off to a flier, then bang.” She slapped her palms together, left on top of right.
“I think on Sunday night/Monday morning they must have thought they’d have a confession before first light, but they get fuck-all. All four of these guys are telling the same story, and the full repertoire of psychological trip-up tricks fails to get one of them to contradict another, or to make an inconsistency in repeating his own story. Even lying doesn’t work, telling them one of their pals has cracked and confessed. None of them changed his tune by a note. Actually, strictly speaking, we’re talking about three of them here. This Cameron Scott character apparently had his two interviewers threatening to resign if someone else didn’t relieve them. And according to one of the Tayside boys, the next bloke to try it broke three of his own fingers punching the wall after a couple of hours with the guy.”
“And what were the other three saying?”
“That they didn’t kill anyone. That they were being forced, blackmailed into carrying out a robbery.”
“No shit. And it didn’t occur to anyone after about thirty hours of questioning that they might be telling the truth?”
“Look, Jack, we’re not fucking idiots up there. We pull in guys we’ve caught red-handed all the time, and trust me, contrary to what you might think, on the whole they tend not to put their hands up and say ‘it’s a fair cop – you’ve got me bang to rights, guv’nor’. Added to that, in this case there’s a plethora of rumours buzzing around about everything from terrorism to mafia to arms dealers, you name it. So no, under the circumstances, after thirty hours or more, a good cop would have every right to think not that they were telling the truth, but that they were fucking good at lying. That they were pros. That they knew what they were doing.”
“Okay, okay,” Parlabane said, holding his hands up in surrender and apology. Which was just as well.
“But the interviews were only half of it,” she continued, calming down. She might as well tell him. If there’s a load of weird shit flying around your head, doing nothing but confusing you, you might as well give it to someone who’ll appreciate it.
“What else?”
“Nothing else. That’s the point. No murder weapon. No guns, no knives, no witnesses, no fingerprints. Fuck all. Hundreds of people combing the area, and all they’ve found’s a laptop, some wire-cutters and a wee contraption for carving holes in windows, which obviously wasn’t used to cut any throats as it was blood-free and still had glass fragments allover it. This time yesterday, the whisper was that if the cops went to court with what they had at that stage, it would be a far from foregone conclusion. Without a confession, they’re relying more on the public’s moral outrage to convict them than on hard evidence. So the detectives are all geared up for one more big push, when the word comes through from on high that the prisoners are to be moved. Cops are incandescent with rage, but the suits are listening to none of it. Someone somewhere has decreed. They’re talking about growing security risks following the Lafferty death, saying they’re uncomfortable having the whole world know where these men are being held, ‘don’t know what we could be dealing with here’, that sort of thing. Plus, I think, concern over the travelling fair outside on the front steps, as well as louder and louder grumblings from the lawyers in Glasgow.
“They were being moved to Peterhead,” she told him, “except no-one was supposed to know.”
“What, without being charged?”
“Wasn’t the first time it’s been done. If they were charged, the lawyers could move in, which tends to make confessions harder to extract. The idea, I’m told, was to resume hostilities up there, where – ironically enough – security would be tighter and the lawyers would be as inconvenienced as possible.”
“So whose call was this?”
“Chief suit, presumably. There was certainly no consultation with our guys, who naturally freaked, but they had to live with it, and the prisoners all got bundled into a bus yesterday afternoon.”
“After which the story took a radical new turn.”
“Hmm,” she said, arching her eyebrows. In for a penny. “So you want to hear this morning’s wee rumour?”
“Is the Pope a misogynist?”
“A few cops over at Crammond station got their knickers in a twist, claiming they had seen a bus pick up a prisoner from the back of their nick yesterday evening. Some guy who’s been sitting handcuffed in a big Rover with two suits keeping guard on him. Bus comes in, they chuck him out of the Rover and into it, bus fucks off again, and so do they. Cops were told it was très hush-hush. But one of them says he’s sure it’s the same bus that he saw on TV and in the papers, claims he remembers the last three letters of the plate because when it pulled into Crammond he thought it would do his wife for a personalised reg.”
Parlabane’s eyes looked like they were being inflated from the back.
“Now before you get too excited, Scoop, the suits have reined this in tight, because they don’t want conspiracy theorists like your good self coming in their jeans. Patted the cops on the head for being observant, but assured everyone that it was a different bus, that they’ve got documentation for both vehicles’ schedules, and that according to the paperwork, the Voss prisoners’ bus didn’t stop at Crammond. It just crossed the Forth and went on into the sweet by-and-by.”
“So they’re saying this guy’s wrong about the registration?” Parlabane said incredulously. “About his own wife’s initials?”
“No. He only remembered the last three letters. It wouldn’t be such a huge coincidence, because if the prison service bought a few vehicles from the same manufacturer at once, they would have the same last three letters. So yes, there could have been two identical buses with near-identical plates driving out of Edinburgh last night.”
“But there could also have been only the one, with a fifth prisoner on board that nobody’s supposed to know about.”
> “Yes, Jack. Theoretically. But if you’re speculating about a conspiracy to frame McInnes and his mates on the kind of scale that could facilitate all this . . . I mean, why don’t we have a planted murder weapon, why don’t we have a bloody knife or a smoking gun? And why would there be a fifth prisoner smuggled aboard the bus?”
“Why else? To cause the crash. To carry out the killings, same as at Craigurquhart,” he said, as if astonished she didn’t recognise it as the most screamingly obvious thing in the world. “To murder the driver and the guards then fuck off, leaving the four mugs to take the blame. Again.”
Jenny looked away momentarily, calming herself in a fashion much practised in conversations with Parlabane.
“Well, tell me this, Scoop,” she said, voice trembling slightly with latent frustrated rage. “Just why the hell would they want the guards and the driver dead? And why would these evil conspirators want their whipping boys to escape?”
“You’ve just told me,” he said quietly, unsurely, as if answering the question for himself rather than for her. Bad sign. Lightbulb-above-the-head moment.
“What?”
He was quickly losing the colour that his excitement and indignation had stoked up. She was witnessing the bizarre Parlabane thought-process in full, insane, runaway-train-with-a-madman-at-the-controls tilt.
She braced herself.
“You don’t have enough,” he said, somehow to the air in front of Jenny than to her face directly. “The cops don’t have enough. But the public already think these guys are guilty and are crying out for blood. If they escape and kill a few more people, then go on the run with a bunch of stolen guns, it pisses all over any confession you could squeeze out of them in an interview room.”
“Aye, but this time they can actually point a finger at someone else when it gets to court.”
Parlabane shook his head gravely, swallowing nervously.
“There won’t be a court case if the suspects are all dead.”
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