For a while, even though he was keeping his fees low, he was making a profit. That felt good. He bought a seemingly unused Minox spy camera in a pawnshop and found he could take pictures of people virtually in front of their faces without them noticing. Across a street, in a doorway or upstairs window, he was as good as invisible. The original Mr Bond again, almost. He snapped parting kisses, close embraces, married men entering strip bars or gay clubs, or public toilets miles from where they had any reason to be. The work was seedy and tedious but he didn’t mind, it was who he was now, and the best thing was it wasn’t what he’d been doing before. He’d left one clandestine world behind and entered another where the secrets were dirtier but somehow the dirt didn’t cling so much. He forgot about Canterbury. He almost forgot about Croick.
And, he couldn’t help himself, the gatherer in him accumulated information about the city and its inhabitants. The filing system inside him kicked into action. Edinburgh didn’t make a show of its wealth but the place was awash with it, old money and new swirling around among an assortment of lawyers, bankers, property developers and ethically challenged politicians. And there were the women – wives and mistresses influential and ambitious in old-fashioned ways, but some of them infused with a contemporary determination no longer to be exploited by their men. There were plenty of shady transactions out there, and there was plenty of sex, even if only furtively expressed. If you had an instinct for sniffing out secrets, Edinburgh was rich territory.
Something else: if you gather information you can move it on. Not the secret stuff his clients paid him for, not that, but there was always by-product. He dusted off his old journalism skills, renewed his union membership. He sold a story or two to the Evening News. He thought, detective agency, news agency, what’s the fucking difference?
He felt like he had his drinking under control. His other expenses were minimal. He put a lot of money away. He wasn’t so stupid as to believe there weren’t rainy days ahead.
EDGAR: And what was going on politically at this time? For you, I mean.
BOND: Nothing. I didn’t care about politics any more. There was the Winter of Discontent, then the devolution referendum, then Thatcher winning power. I didn’t give a damn about any of it. Croick wasn’t on my back. That was all that mattered to me.
EDGAR: You didn’t care about politics? About devolution? Oh, come on!
BOND (sniffing): I was done with it. But there were other people who weren’t prepared to let the devolution thing drop. I was interested in them.
EDGAR: I see. You didn’t care but you were interested. And who were they, these interesting people?
BOND: Nobody much. A few activists from Labour, the Nats, the Liberals – MPs, councillors, a trade unionist or two. And just some ordinary people.
EDGAR: Ordinary?
BOND: Sometimes they were in some group or other, but they were fundamentally ordinary, decent people with a cause.
EDGAR: Decent?
BOND: Aye, they were. All sorts. They said the Scotland Act had failed because it had been cobbled together at Westminster out of political expediency. It didn’t come from the people and when the people saw it they didn’t think much of it. So their campaign – the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly – was going to have to do it differently, build from the ground up. It was a hopeless cause, but they believed in it. Most of the media weren’t interested. The new Tory government wasn’t interested. I went to one of their meetings just out of curiosity. I recognised plenty of faces but there was nobody keeping an eye on things. Nobody securing the premises, as Croick would have said.
EDGAR: Except you.
BOND: That’s not why I went. I was a free man. I just went for myself.
EDGAR: And no Croick.
BOND: No Croick.
EDGAR: Not a sign of him?
BOND: Not a trace. It was like he’d ceased to exist.
BANG!
He’s broken something, saying those words. Did he say them? He’s broken a spell. One second Edgar was there, shimmering in the armchair, the next he isn’t. Like he’s ceased to exist.
Peter struggles off the settee. Everything is a struggle by this stage. The deputy High Commissioner is running the show now. Peter reaches the chair, grapples the empty space where Edgar was. No Edgar. Gone. Not even a sticky drop of that stuff you get, the sauce left when someone spontaneously combusts. Not a trace, just like Croick. Fuck. He was enjoying their wee heart-to-heart. But that’s how it happens. Whenever he has company he likes, he ends up alone.
Not quite alone. There’s always the deputy, if he can only pin the bastard down. He turns from the empty chair, sways, points and says, I want a word with you. Then his legs give way.
When he woke it was 1985. March. A cold wind was blowing through Leith from the north, rattling an empty beer can up and down the street. And someone was knocking at his door. He rolled off the mattress, finding himself still fully clothed. Whoever it was wasn’t giving up. Not hammering, not aggressive, just persistent. Like they really needed him to answer.
He found his watch. It was eight o’clock, presumably morning. He made it to the door, unlocked it.
Hello, Peter. Long time no see.
He had neither the strength nor any reason to stop him coming in. In he came, and took charge. Jesus, Peter, what a tip! He went through to the back room and filled the kettle, filled the sink with hot water and started washing up mugs and plates, the accumulated crap Peter hadn’t been dealing with. He restored a bit of order. When he went out again it occurred to Peter that he could lock the door, or go out himself and not come back till Croick had given up on him, but he did neither. Instead he changed out of his four-day-old clothes, washed himself. And when Croick came back he let him in at once.
You’ve almost made yourself presentable, Croick said. He’d bought the makings of breakfast and got to work at the hob. Peter hadn’t realised how hungry he was. He gulped starchy, greasy chunks of bacon roll and washed them down with scalding tea. Croick ate more gently, like a doting mother.
How’s business? he asked.
Good, Peter said. Because it wasn’t so bad. The volume of cases rose and fell, more or less according to whether he was off or on the booze. The same with the number of stories he sold. There were some weeks he never touched a drop, other weeks he didn’t even see go by. Somehow he kept resurfacing. Croick seemed to understand this. He seemed to understand everything.
I can help you out, he said. He took out his wallet, stuck a couple of twenties on the table between them.
I don’t want your help. We’re through, remember?
Peter, Croick said. He’d finished eating. He put his mug of tea down and looked straight at him. Don’t take offence. I hear what you’re saying. Actually, it’s the other way round. I need your help.
Fuck off, Peter said.
You don’t mean that, Croick said. He made a slight gesture to indicate that things were as they had been before, the two of them sharing food and drink in Peter’s abode. Look, we didn’t treat you so well. As it happens, I’m not the favourite son at the moment either. Take the money. It’s theirs, not mine.
Forty quid was forty quid. Peter reached for it. A line was crossed.
Fact is, Croick said, I need a place to crash.
There are hotels, aren’t there? Peter said. And safe houses?
If they’re safe. Sometimes I need somewhere I don’t have to check in and out. Do me this one favour, will you? I’ll make it worth your while.
The room they were in, the one at the back, would do. He needed to be able to come and go. Was there a spare key? No matter, he’d get one cut. He wouldn’t be in the road, Peter would hardly know he was there. Mostly he wouldn’t be. He said, I heard a good one the other day. Somebody on the radio, talking about the ’60s, he said, if you can remember them you weren’t there. That’ll be the story here, eh? You’ve been places, you’ve seen things. You don’t remember any of it. Do you?
God knows wh
at he was up to. The miners’ strike had just ended. Scargill and the NUM had been designated ‘the enemy within’ by Margaret Thatcher and you didn’t have to be an ex-spook to understand that people like Croick had been crawling all over the strike. Now it was over. The miners had marched back to the pits behind their brass bands, heads held high and all that but there was no doubting who’d won. So maybe Croick had been busy and now he was freed up, but Peter didn’t think that was what it was. The strike wasn’t Croick’s territory. There was something else.
He stayed a couple of nights that first time. Peter gave him the key and he got a copy made. Maybe he had a car parked somewhere because when he reappeared he was carrying a sleeping bag and a small holdall. He made a kind of nest in one corner of the room and it instantly became his space and Peter avoided it. This okay? Croick asked. Peter shrugged. Croick came and went, just as he said he would, and Peter let him. What was he going to do, throw him out?
He decided not to drink because Croick, booze and himself didn’t mix. Then Croick went away, and Peter took a drink out of relief, and he took another because, aye, go on, admit it, because he missed the company. Fuck’s sake. A couple of days later he stopped, did some work for a week, and it was okay, as if he’d finally shaken it off. But it couldn’t last. Croick turned up again, smiling that mocking, unjovial smile, and he brought with him some lager, a bottle of gin and a litre of tonic and that was them. Mixed.
Croick talked and seemed not to care that Peter said nothing. Things have changed, he said. This country’s finding its feet again. Say what you like about Maggie, she’s got balls. First she stands up to the Russians, and the lesbians at Greenham Common. Then she sees off the Argentines. Didn’t flinch when Bobby Sands and his pals starved themselves to death. Came out of the Brighton bombing like a fucking Amazon. I tell you, it’s heady stuff. Makes you think there’s nothing that can’t be done.
You’d think this was a speech of elation, a champagne toast, the future belongs to us. But Croick’s voice was flat and his smile was humourless. He looked like a condemned man staring at the gallows.
There’s some unfinished business up here, he said. But some people have lost their nerve.
He filled their glasses again.
See if I ever called you, Peter. Short notice. Get yourself here, now. Would you come?
Peter said nothing. A wee tic of excitement was going inside him that he was desperate for Croick not to see. He gulped some gin, wished it was whisky, nodded at Croick to continue.
I can use you. Canterbury and those other cunts, they’re too far away. They don’t understand what it’s like here. They don’t trust me any more. Think I’m a bad apple. Do you trust me?
No, Peter said.
Good answer. But if I call you, you’ll come, won’t you? I know you will. This isn’t about the money any more. Of course there is money, but it’s not about that. Is it?
Peter didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t care. All that mattered was that Croick was letting him – asking him – back in.
Remember you used to wonder where I came from? Croick said. Did you ever figure it out?
Peter shook his head.
Kenya. My father was a police inspector in the Colonial Service. I’ve told you about him before. He was from Aberdeenshire but he went out in the ’20s and never came back. I was born there. My dad had an accent you could have ploughed fields with. Some of it rubbed off on me. When I was eleven he sent me back to an aunt in Aberdeen, and I went to school there because he thought a Scottish education was the best you could get. And then the war broke out, so I didn’t go back to Kenya till ’45, and then a couple of years later I was in London. So no wonder you were confused. No wonder I was, eh? He paused just long enough for Peter to begin to say something, then went on. I’m joking. I was never confused. Neither was my dad. He had a very straightforward view of the world. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Black and white. For him, there wasn’t much that wasn’t a certainty. He knew how to run the show, how to keep the natives docile. It all went to hell after the war, of course. The Mau Mau and that. He did what he could but he always said the place would go to pieces after independence and it’s heading that way. Just taking longer than he expected. Luckily he’s not around to see it.
And so on and so on. Peter’s attention wavered. The gin helped him to float in and out. He just wanted Croick to tell him what he had to do, but Croick seemed intent on reminiscing. He had stories about how his father sorted trouble before it even was trouble. Nipped it in the bud with a systematic beating or two down by the river. It was rough justice but it worked.
Some people really don’t know when to back off, Croick was saying. There’s a guy, a lawyer, old enough to know better, can’t stop trying to dig stuff up. Thinks he’s got everybody else on the run. A loudmouth. Thinks he’s a big shot. You know who I mean.
Somehow they were back in Scotland. Peter tried to concentrate. This lawyer was trying to scupper plans for dumping nuclear waste. The Atomic Energy Authority had been wanting to test-drill in the Ayrshire hills and he’d been involved in the campaign to stop that. The AEA had moved on and so had the lawyer. Dounreay was a possible site. Glen Etive was another. He drove around the country waving papers at public inquiries and asking awkward questions. He was, in Croick’s opinion, a pain in the arse.
He’s been warned off, Croick said, but he won’t listen. His office gets burgled, his home gets done over. He thinks he’s immune. Nuclear waste’s an accident waiting to happen, he says. He should know. He’s an accident waiting to happen. He’s not as smart as he thinks he is. Likes a drink. Doesn’t stop him driving. Smokes too much. No exercise. Gets stressed. Classic candidate for a sudden exit. Croick paused for a significant second. Heart attack. Typical fucking Jock really, eh?
Remember all those dodgy pals you had a few years ago, Peter? All those mad Nats? They were all the bloody same. Drank too much, smoked too much, kept the wrong sort of company. You don’t smoke, good for you. Stupid habit. I could never ally myself with stupid people. I always said you weren’t stupid, just slow. Emotion’s like cigarette smoke. I hate it when emotion clouds people’s judgement. Right or left, doesn’t matter, but all through history the right’s been smarter, more resilient, more sussed, than the left. Lefties think they’re cleverer but even when they are they’re not wiser, and sooner or later they lose their cool and start ranting and raving and generally being an embarrassment. Nats are the same. The Scottish Irrationalists. I could never be on the same side as people like that.
I’ve done the research, I think it’s a racial problem. A big proportion, say one in ten of us, are wired up wrong. I’ve seen it everywhere. London, Kenya, Aberdeen, Hong Kong, Australia. Anywhere there are Scotsmen, which let’s face it is everywhere, you’ll find the one in ten. You’d think we’d know by now. Just leave it alone, eh? But a lot of folk can’t help themselves. Just can’t fucking help themselves. Can’t keep their fingers off the self-destruct button. They know it’s there. They’ve been told often enough. Like Adam and Eve and the apple. Big temptation. Want to push themselves over the edge, see what it feels like. Bang.
Next day he was gone, with all his gear. Two hundred quid on the table. Like he was trying to offload it. Bang. Peter heard the echo of that last word for a week. The worst thing about it was the absence of exclamation. Croick said it like it was just something that happened. Nothing unusual. Just – bang. End of story.
Of course he knew who Croick meant. The lawyer was called Willie McRae, a member of the SNP since the 1930s, a bit of a maverick who’d held senior positions in the party in the past. Had stood for Parliament three times and come within a whisker of winning the Ross and Cromarty seat in 1974. He was a Glasgow solicitor, with a holiday cottage up there, at Dornie. He had a good conceit of himself. Peter remembered him because, unlike most of the SNP top brass, McRae was one of the ones who crossed lines. Never quite separated mainstream party politics from the nutters on the fr
inges. McRae kind of sympathised with their madness, Peter thought. He wasn’t mad himself but he knew what made them mad. There was a group called Siol nan Gaidheal that emerged in the late 1970s. They liked to strut around in black shirts and wave flags at the Bannockburn rallies. They believed in direct action. Early in the 1980s, about the time they dealt similarly with the socialist ’79 Group, the SNP banned anybody in the party from belonging to Siol nan Gaidheal. Willie McRae wasn’t in Siol nan Gaidheal but maybe he understood where they were coming from.
He was, as Croick said, a pain in the arse of officialdom, especially around the nuclear-waste issue. Peter remembers all this about him. And he remembers the news, the facts and the speculation, that started filtering through in April 1985. The kind of stuff he’s chewed and chewed at over the months, the years, the decades …
Willie McRae had been in a crash. Willie McRae’s Volvo had left the road between Fort William and Dornie, careered down a steep bank, and ended up in a burn. Willie McRae was still alive when found. It was a Saturday morning, the day before Easter. Willie McRae had left Glasgow the previous evening. Willie McRae was taken to hospital in Inverness, then transferred to Aberdeen. Willie McRae never regained consciousness. Willie McRae was dead. Willie McRae didn’t die from injuries sustained in the crash. Willie McRae had a bullet in his brain. Willie McRae had shot himself. Willie McRae had no reason to shoot himself. Willie McRae had been depressed. Willie McRae had been in exuberant, optimistic mood when he left Glasgow. Willie McRae’s appointments diary was full. Willie McRae was writing a book. Willie McRae had been drinking. Willie McRae had a half-bottle of whisky in the Volvo’s glove compartment. There was no trace of alcohol in Willie McRae’s blood. Willie McRae had left Glasgow with a briefcase stuffed full of documents to work on over the weekend. No briefcase, no documents, were found at the scene of the accident. No briefcase, no documents, were ever found. The police checked the scene of the accident meticulously. The police were unbelievably careless. The police, the first witnesses on the spot, the vehicle-recovery men, were all over the ground and destroyed any potential evidence before anyone knew about the bullet in Willie McRae’s brain. The scene of the accident was at this location. The scene of the accident was at another location. The police said it was here. The first witnesses on the spot said it was there. The bullet in Willie McRae’s brain was from a .22 revolver. Willie McRae had a .22 revolver. A .22 revolver was found at the scene. The gun was Willie McRae’s gun. It had Willie McRae’s fingerprints on it. The gun was in the burn under the Volvo. The gun was nowhere near the Volvo. The gun was twenty feet away from the Volvo. The gun was sixty feet away from the Volvo. The gun had been fired twice. Willie McRae had fired it once to test it, then had shot himself. He had thrown the gun from the car. He could not have thrown the gun from the car. A dead man, a dying man, could not have thrown it that far. The driver’s door was wedged against the bank of the burn. The driver’s window was wound down. Why would Willie McRae, alive, have got out of the car, torn up some papers including a credit-card bill, left them neatly in a pile along with his watch twenty feet from the car, got back in the car from the passenger side, squeezed himself back behind the wheel and shot himself? How could Willie McRae, dead or dying, have done these things? Somebody else was involved. Nobody else was involved. Willie McRae had committed suicide. If Willie McRae had committed suicide, did he decide to do it after crashing his car, on the spur of the moment? If Willie McRae had committed suicide, why were there no burn marks around the bullet wound? If Willie McRae had held the gun to his head and pulled the trigger, how could there not be burn marks? The bullet that lodged in his brain must have been fired from some distance away. The bullet that lodged in his brain could not have been fired from some distance away and hit him where it did because of the angle at which the car lay. The back window of the car was shattered. Another gun had fired the bullet that lodged in Willie McRae’s brain. Somebody had been tailing him. Nobody had been tailing him. No other car was involved in the incident. Another car had been following McRae for months. The registration number of the other car was this. The registration number of the other car was that. Information on that registration number was blocked. This meant it was operated by the security services. This meant nothing of the sort. Willie McRae was under surveillance. Willie McRae was not under surveillance. Willie McRae was a troublemaker. Maybe Willie McRae was an alcoholic. Maybe Willie McRae was tired. Maybe Willie McRae wasn’t concentrating. Maybe Willie McRae knew the road too well. Maybe Willie McRae’s mind was on other things. Maybe Willie McRae was homosexual. Maybe Willie McRae had vital information. Maybe Willie McRae had secrets. Maybe Willie McRae didn’t know anything. Willie McRae was a pain in the arse. Willie McRae thought he was immune. Willie McRae was dead. Willie McRae, Willie McRae, Willie McRae.
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