Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (39 page)

There must have been such a time, though: a time before sex, a time when all you wanted was to be with that certain girl, to be hers, to be kissing her. Yes, you knew you'd want other things, but they seemed secondary, things that could wait. A time when mere smiles meant more than a glimpse of underwear - amazing as that was then too.

What happened? Where did it go? Was this what was meant by innocence? He hated that word for how it had been appropriated, and by whom. If their idea of 'innocence' was a lack of carnal desire, then there was no innocence about even fledgling sexual relationships. And yet there was truly an innocence to things that would appal the prudes: a journey of mutual discovery in those trembling shared acts, touches, partial undressings. Innocence wasn't lost in crossing lines and doing these things. Innocence wasn't lost in the passing of virginity when it was between two people who cared for each other. Innocence was lost when you stopped caring about the person and even stopped caring about yourself, only about the end product, and in his case product was definitely the word. Creature of Thatcher, he had become the quintessential consumer in his attitude to women, to sex, to life in general. It was all about what it brought him, what he could reach out and take, procure for himself. He wasn't on a journey like once before, encountering and experiencing. Instead it was gratification on demand, and not just in his sex life. That had been the motto of his
whole
life. Gratification on demand, and with deep pockets like his you could demand a lot. Material wealth and personal kudos brought most forms of gratification that he'd sought, and what they couldn't bring wasn't worth having.

Or so he'd thought.

In the currency required to give him what he wanted now, he feared he was bankrupt. If he wasn't already, then he certainly would be once Toby cashed his blank cheque. What would that leave? The knowledge of his worthlessness made Emily look all the more special, all the less attainable. Maybe the last time he'd felt this way was the last time he'd felt prepared to surrender so much of himself.

'Time to tell them this,' he said. . .

240

[?] [?] [?]

They were rearranging the deckchairs on the
Titanic
, but Alison was a rapt observer nonetheless. She knew she, Ger, Sir Lachlan and Charlotte were among the plus ones, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, but for that it felt somehow all the more imperative that there should be an explanation for why the others had been targeted.

She'd overheard Baxter ask people individually whether a tattoo of a boat meant anything to them, restlessly interrupting their tasks like it might precipitate some breakthrough that would change everything. He received no significant response, as she heard him stress to Vale. While they worked, waited and worried, posted around the grand staircase, the big question kept circling like a plane over Heathrow, with so far no sign of clearance to land.

'I wasn't aware I had any real enemies since Carol Clark stopped talking to me for three days in Primary Seven,' said Kathy. 'Why would anyone want all of us dead? Apart from the people we came with, none of us even knows each other.'

Toby spoke quietly as he re-fed a cable across one of his improvised siegeengines. 'That's not entirely true,' he said, instantly commanding the attention of everyone in earshot, which was pretty much everyone bar Parlabane and the four who were manning the barricades.

'Rory and I knew each other once,' he went on. 'But this is the first time we've seen each other since then.'

'Since when?' Kathy asked.

'Since we were students together in the Eighties. St Andrews. It's a small world; I suppose we were bound to run into each other again sometime, but that it turned out to be on this weekend might not be a coincidence.'

'Why?'

Toby sighed resignedly. 'It might mean nothing still, but no matter what, you're not going to like either of us much after I tell you this. Please remember it was a long time ago and we're different people now.'

'This doesn't sound promising,' Liz remarked.

'No. Well, I suppose we all found out where each other stands - or in some cases stood - politically last night. Rory and I met because we were both members of a campus Conservative group that was, shall we say, not at the wetter end of the spectrum.'

'The lefties were just spoilsports to me,' Rory explained. Emily nodded understandingly. After last night, none of this was exactly coming out of left - or should that be right - field, but it was early yet.

'I knew fuck-all about politics, I just knew they were the ones trying to take away my fun. And to me, student life was about having fun. My parents saw 241

me all right, thank you, with my flat and my car and my endowment, and suddenly the benefits of freedom were at my disposal. Yet here were all these dedicated killjoys bringing down the party buzz by whining about everything and organising demonstrations. The country seemed to be doing very well from where I was standing, and yet they were determined to do it down and latch on to every negative issue they could lay hands on. If they couldn't find a native issue, they'd import them, like apartheid or whatever. I know, I know. You think I'm scum. These were important matters. They just weren't important to me at the time.'

'I don't think you're scum,' Emily said sincerely. 'I would have back then, but. . . well, maybe some of those issues weren't as important to me as I'd convinced myself. Perhaps I could have done with having a bit more fun. It wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs being a lefty. Do you know what it's like to feel guilty about every good time you have? Drank beer. Was that a Coors?

They're funding the Contras. Bought a new top. Is it from Gap? Was it made with sweatshop child labour? Went to a club. What, while the rest of us were holding a candle-lit vigil outside the South African consulate? You're right, we could find an issue to get angry about every minute of the day.'

'I wasn't interested in issues, apart from us and them, us being the cool, have fun, cars-and-girls set, them being the "carpers", as Thatcher called them. I came up with the name Conservative Student Forum because it abbreviated to CSF, which was close to "C as F": that's what we said to describe something we liked, and to describe ourselves. C as F. Cool as fuck.'

'Oh God,' said Kathy. 'Was that the lot whose little drinking song was:
Singing
Thatcher, Reagan, Botha, Pinochet
to the tune of
She'll Be Coming Round the
Mountain
? "Hang Mandela" T-shirts? Didn't Tebbit disband you for being too extreme? A bit like getting thrown out of Oliver Reed's house for being too pissed.'

'That was the Confederation of Conservative Students, to which some people I knew were affiliated, yes. But we were a localised affair, less bothered about Party policy and the like; being a national body, that was more the CCS's thing. We'd have had to actually know something about politics for that. We were just a glorified campus clique, a bunch of spoiled kids too used to getting our own way, brought together as much as anything by collective umbrage at the antics of the lefties. I don't know how much any of us believed what we thought we believed. There was a large element of posturing about it: adopting positions and professing statements in a kind of pee-the-highest contest to see who could outdo the others, or what we could do to outrage the lefties most. So yeah, if the lefties said "Free Mandela", we'd have said hang him, even if we didn't know who he was. It was schoolboyish tit-for-tat. You 242

remember what it was like in those days.'

'I don't,' said Alison. 'My parents hadn't even met when Margaret Thatcher came to power. All I know about her is that my grandfather won't hear her name uttered in his house.'

'I'll place you on the spectrum,' Kathy said. 'How many of the following do you hate: black people? Scottish people? The working classes? Gays?

Intellectuals? Artists? The Irish? The French? Foreigners in general?'

'Eh, none of the above.'

'Then trust me, you and she wouldn't have gotten on.'

'Thank you, Kathy,' Toby said, 'for illustrating exactly what we were reacting to.'

'And how exactly did you react?'

'With much anger and self-righteousness. We felt inclined to fight militancy with militancy. I think the bottom line, the defining emotion, was a desire to shut the lefties up. They weren't in power, the overwhelming majority had voted against them, so we didn't see why we had to listen to them.

'Then came the Brighton Bomb. We saw it as an attack on ourselves, and part of the greater whole. It wasn't so much like Sinn Fein was the political wing of the IRA as the IRA was the paramilitary wing of this perceived lefty coalition, from Scargill to student agitators to the BBC. It didn't matter who they were, they were all out to do us down. And after Brighton we wanted to hit back. We wanted to defend ourselves. The SAS in Gibraltar felt like Mrs T

was telling us that's what she wanted too.'

'What did you do?' Kathy asked accusingly.

'You remember the
Death on the Rock
programme? I think we felt more outrage over that than about the Brighton Bomb. It seemed like conclusive evidence of the enemy within, making our side look like the bad guys.'

'What did you do, Toby?' Kathy repeated.

'It was a fantasy that got out of hand,' Rory said. 'Haven't you ever wished you could just silence the people you disagree with?'

Emily nodded, an uncomfortable expression on her face, like she was feeling ashamed on his behalf, or maybe just having to work hard at politely hiding her disgust.

'We talked ourselves into believing. . . I don't know, everything seems so certain when you're that age. The SAS had just gone right in there, bang bang bang. Why couldn't it be like that, we asked ourselves. If people want to hurt us, let's show them we can hit them just as hard. Except, we weren't talking about the IRA. They were just one part of a bigger problem. What if we could silence these agitators, these enemies within, we wondered. Not upfront, obvious execution-style, because we saw from Gibraltar how that could 243

backfire. But what if we could kill these people in ways that made sure no-one suspected a political assassination, or even a murder?

'It was just talk, just late-night fantasies. But the problem was, Toby met someone who wanted to make our wishes come true.'

'The was in the OTC, the Officers Training Corps,' Toby said. 'It's kind of the student TA. I got friendly with one of the army liaison guys, found we had a lot to talk about, having some of the same conversations with him as with Rory. The difference was, this guy was in the position to walk the walk. His name was Shiach. Maurice Shiach. He claimed to have connections in the intelligence services as well as the security services. More than connections, as it turned out. He was an informant. His role meant he had dealings with OTC and TA groups around the country, and he was officially supposed to be gathering intell on militant far-right elements in these reservist forces. There were a few such cells broken up around those days, but not on Shiach's watch. He was using his position to recruit like-minded volunteers for a little project he called the MoV: Ministry of Vigilance.

'It was going to do things for the defence of this country, Shiach said. Things that the government needed done but couldn't do for itself, or couldn't be seen to do for itself. He meant killing people who were, as he put it, a threat to security. Killing them in ways that would deflect suspicion from those benefiting from their deaths. He hinted at unofficial sanction from higher up, but I'm not sure how true that was. There were certainly no resources forthcoming. At the time we were happy to convince ourselves, but let's face it, if the powers-that-be really wanted to set up a covert assassination bureau, they'd hardly pick students and TA weekend soldiers to do it.'

'They might if they wanted them to be disposable,' Kathy said. 'People they could easily disavow if it went wrong. Who the hell would believe you were anything other than fanatics acting off your own steam?'

'But that's exactly what we were. There
was
another intelligence agent involved, or so Shiach claimed. We never met him or learned his real name, because he was engaged in undercover work, infiltrating left-wing organisations. Shiach referred to him as the Architect, which suggested he was the brains behind the operation. He talked like this guy was the greatest, said he was a genius at blending in and earning the trust of the people he was there to spy on. You'd never suspect him in a million years: he could be your best friend, a guy you thought you knew inside out. You could look him in the eye and see no trace of deceit, yet all the while he was the enemy in your midst.'

'Campbell,' said Kathy.

'I guess. . . I don't know.'

244

'Of course it's Campbell,' said Baxter. 'You just described exactly what he did to me, what he did to all of us.'

'You don't understand. At the time, Rory and I weren't entirely convinced the Architect existed, and in retrospect I've always doubted he was anything more than a figment of Shiach's imagination, to help convince us we were part of something greater, something semi-official. He was also a convenient source of propaganda, allowing Shiach to gee us up with stories the Architect told him about just how evil and threatening these lefties he spied upon were. Rory and I came to the conclusion that in reality Shiach was the biggest fantasist of us all, just a nutter who was dragging us way out of our depth.'

'So you didn't go through with anything?' Emily asked.

'Of course not. We were just wankers, not murderers. We sat around thinking up schemes, ways of selling a murder as something else, such as the robbery-gone-wrong scenario. You find out where and when the target regularly buys his paper, say. You stage a botched robbery down the street, at the bank or Post Office, all masked up. Then in your plausibly erratically driven getaway car, you mount the pavement and run him down. It was my introduction to the ethics of advertising, you could say: selling an impression that disguised the truth. But believe me, the minute it threatened to get real, we bailed out. Shiach came up with a target, or rather, he said the Architect had. He wouldn't tell us the name, "for our own protection", but he was talking dates and locations. Toby and I, as they say in the common tongue, shat it. We told Shiach we weren't up to the job.'