Country of the Blind (10 page)

She thought of Thomas McInnes, what his letter said, and what had followed. It said someone on the inside - as it turned out, Lafferty - had been behind what was only supposed to be a robbery, even given the letter's other strange claims. This contradicted the idea of anything larger, anything more sinister, being at work (as if four murders weren't sinister enough). But now she wondered, as that cop had suggested, was McInnes acting to protect someone, something? Had somebody set up and used Lafferty, the same as they had set up and used McInnes?

She needed more than ever to talk to her client; previously it had been so that she could help him, but now the relationship was likely to be more reciprocal.

She felt disorientated and exposed. Whatever was afoot, whatever forces were abroad, she was now part of this. She was
involved
-and no longer as a player in the game, but as a piece on the board.

Morning had been a long time in coming, after comfortless waking episodes like irritating stops at minor stations on a lengthy train journey, the normally caressing pillow transformed into a sack of Meccano pieces with a built-in face-heating filament.

When it did arrive, morning had apparently had a rotten journey too and was in a remorselessly uncooperative mood. There was no hot water for a 53

shower, as she had inevitably managed to bugger up the central heating programme, having still failed to master a computerised LCD panel that seemed to have been built for surfing the net rather than regulating the labours of the boiler. The time machine that was an unadvertised built-in feature of her fridge had once again altered the "best before" dates on both the milk and her sausages, so she had to make do with black tea and toast, the latter thoughtfully burnt by the toaster, which had neglected to eject its contents as part of its on-going "vigilance training" regime.

By the time she had driven to work, she had become sufficiently aware of being grumpily paranoid as to be getting fed up with it and with herself, which was why she paid less heed than would have been normal to the feeling that she was being watched as she walked from her car to the office. What also proved efficacious in expelling it from her mind was the mental projection of acting on the impulse to tell someone about it, picturing her forthcoming meeting with Finlay Campbell.

"I've got this feeling that I'm being watched."

"Yes, dear, you were. By about ten million people. It's a thing called television. Us Scots invented it, don't you know."

Sod that.

Another tiny voice queried whether it was possible that awareness of being paranoid might cause over-compensation in ignoring the feelings of paranoia that would be vital in warning a person if "they" really were out to get you. And still another queried whether she might be going out of her fucking mind. There were cheers and some applause when she walked into the office, the inevitable cracks about being a TV personality, and Ian West holding out a notepad and a pen as if seeking her autograph. She said nothing in reply, keeping her head down and holding up her right hand in the widely recognised "wanker" gesture. It was almost reassuring to see that it was still all a game to some people. She could see Finlay Campbell on the phone, his office door wide to the wall, and upon catching her eye he gestured her to come in. Nicole sat opposite his desk as he finished his phone-call, booming-voiced and overbearingly jovial, certainly for that time of the morning. He leaned over towards the cradle of the telephone as he wound up the conversation, as if moving the earpiece gradually nearer its place of rest would in itself make the person at the end of the line do likewise. She caught the glare of his shinybald crown, surrounded by black shoulder-length strands of hair in a bad midEighties West-Coast post-glam style, the overall effect described disparagingly by Ian as "a Hateley cut". She hadn't known who Ian was talking about, but when he showed her a couple of pictures of the former Rangers striker and hairdressing casualty, she had laughed out loud. "Just be grateful Campbell doesn't go to the same tailor," Ian added, "embarrassing as his suits may be."

54

[?] [?] [?]

Yesterday morning was the first time she had experienced a conversation with Mr Campbell that had lasted more than thirty seconds. He hadn't been among those who interviewed her for the job, so she hadn't really known where she stood with him. He struck her as a little slimy but generally good-hearted, and when you're talking about lawyers, a
little
slime is probably not worth making much fuss over. He was in his late thirties/early forties, dressing smartly but perhaps a little too flamboyantly for his age. She saw in him an affable fellow, generous of spirit but perhaps over-keen to be liked. A onetime looker, probably a ladies' man, who had screwed up at least one good relationship somewhere along the line and was trying to recapture youthful glory days because he couldn't recapture whatever he had regretfully thrown away. It was a lot to read into a bad haircut and silly jacket, but she did have a good track record on this sort of thing.

The place had been in a ferment over the fact that one of the Voss accused was a client. And when they opened the envelope - working on the reasonable assumption that Thomas McInnes was unlikely to show up in person to retrieve it - Campbell had ushered her into his office and closed the door.

"I'll make this brief because I've got to be in court in half an hour," he had said. "But the first thing you should know is that I defended Thomas McInnes, Robert Hannah and associates during the Robbin' Hoods trial. That's why McInnes came to Manson & Boyd with this," he added, in response to the involuntary widening of Nicole's eyes. "When I say defended, I suppose I should really say represented, as there wasn't much defending to do. They pleaded guilty. That wasn't on my advice - they had decided on it well before it reached that stage. When the game was up, the game was up, was how they saw it. Kind of the opposite of 'it ain't over till it's over'.

"My job was really to present them as remorseful and penitent men, who posed no danger to society and who had committed their spate of crimes -

first offences, incidentally - in circumstances unlikely to be repeated, etcetera etcetera." A sad look of pity and regret passed over his normally indefatigably smiley face.

"I have no idea whether I was any good or not," he continued, shrugging,

"because I could have stood up and said, 'Your honour, my client would like to state before the court that you suck horses' cocks and your wife shags donkeys,' and it wouldn't have been much worse. These guys had been screwing the homes of the great and the good and they were going to get it up the arse with a chainsaw for their troubles, no matter what mitigation I presented. Normally, poor people just steal from other poor people. And back then, Scottish country mansions simply didn't
get
burgled. The establishment were affronted at the sheer temerity of it, that some bunch of oiks could even 55

dare
to attempt what they had done. But what really sealed the Hoods' fate was that insurance premiums on such properties soared as a result; before this, they were - ironically or not - regarded as comparatively low-risk. Like I said, nobody stole from these places. After the Hoods hit the headlines, the insurance firms saw things a wee bit differently. So these four men's actions hadn't just deprived a few toffs of some trinkets - their repercussions were going to hit the pockets of every member of the landed gentry across the UK. Including the judge, Lord McLean."

"And I suppose an exemplarily harsh sentence would be seen as a deterrent to further such offences, and thus smiled upon by the insurers?"

"You got it. Seven years."

"Jesus," Nicole gasped.

"Unprecedented and unbefuckinglievable. Not only that, but their parole was messed about with and various strings pulled to make sure they served just about all of it. The establishment made sure they got every ounce of their pound of flesh. So I took it as a measure of the man's character that McInnes actually came
back
here for legal assistance. Blamed no-one but himself for what happened. A man of dignity and humility.

"He got pulled in for questioning a few times about rural break-ins, first year after he got out, and always got in touch with us for a brief. He even handled all
that
stoically as part of the price he was paying, and fortunately the cops gradually got the picture that he was an unlikely repeat offender, and gave it up. I never dealt with him personally again - I had moved onwards and upwards by the time he was out and about once more - but we exchanged a few words the odd time. He even gave me a wave through the door last week when he was in seeing you.

"But what I'm getting at is that I believe what's in this letter, as much as I
can't
believe he was part of what happened last night. It just doesn't add up, and we won't be able to make much sense of it without talking to him in person. I want you to go to Edinburgh. . . "

He finally put the phone down, then sat back in his chair and turned his attention to Nicole.

"It's getting interesting, isn't it," Campbell opened.

"Indeed," she replied, with a furrow of the brow.

"Interesting, as in 'may you live in interesting times'," he confirmed, expressing his awareness of her discomfiture. "Another day, another dead body. Question is, where does it put us?"

"I've been asking myself that all night."

"Well, the simple answer, for the time being, is that it puts us right here, until our client is actually charged and we're allowed to speak to him. What56

ever progress you might have made yesterday - and you handled the whole thing extremely effectively, I have to say - has been undone by Mr Lafferty's DIY demise."

He picked up a pen, toying absently with it, its turning in his fingers like a wind-turbine powering his thoughts.

"Although the police were right in saying that our letter was of no intrinsic value in terms of proof," Campbell continued, "I think it nonetheless depicted a very plausible scenario that people might be ready to believe, especially in the continuing absence of any substantial alternative. Public opinion would have been with us, even if public sympathy obviously wouldn't. Everyone was bound to be getting bored of conjecture over possible terrorist motives for killing Voss; we offered something a lot more realistic: robbery. What better reason for breaking into the residence - albeit temporary - of one of the richest men in the world? People understand greed a lot better than they understand the politics of intra-European sub-factional splinter-groups. If Voss was an Arab or an Irishman, different story. And of course, if Lafferty had done himself in more conventionally, something a bit more obviously spur-of-thedarkest-moment. . . "

"I know, I know," she commiserated. "Mind you, the post-mortem report could still show up something different. Sub-arachnoid haemorrhage or. . . "

Campbell shook his head and frowned, as if impatient with this futile and misguided optimism.

"I've got some police contacts. PM results won't be through for a while, but they know he took a pill; whether it was cyanide is incidental. The word is that the bloke who found Lafferty walked into the room and saw him pop something into his mouth and swallow it, upon which - get this - he said

'bye-bye' and sat down. The bloke tried to get him to cough up - Heimlich manoeuvre or whatever - but was fought off. Whatever he took, the result was that he was dead in minutes. And the result for us is that suddenly it's all very cloak and dagger again, and this terrorist crap has come crashing back down like a bloody anvil."

Campbell leaned back in his chair, running a hand through his thinning locks and widening his eyes in frustration

"I don't know what to think any more," Nicole confessed, breaking a growing silence. "If Lafferty was working for someone, or even just being used by someone. . . what does that do to what McInnes gave us? It looks now like Lafferty was the middle man, but maybe the whole operation
was
just to kill Voss. Thomas McInnes told us he was being coerced into carrying out a robbery, but could the letter actually be a cover-up after all? Could he even have been coerced into writing the letter as part of the deal? I mean, if the letter is genuine, why didn't it tell us he was being coerced into carrying out 57

a murder?"

"Nicole, Nicole," Campbell said quietly, attempting to calm her storm-tossed thoughts. "There are millions of baffling questions flying around, and it's infuriating that we can't answer them, but what we mustn't do is let them distract us from what we know
for sure
."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you've met him. Do you believe Thomas McInnes could have carried out - or been party to - those murders?"

"To tell you the truth, this whole thing's getting so weird I don't know what I believe any more."

He rolled his eyes gently and smiled. "Look at yourself, Nicole. You're forgetting which way is up. Do you know who Tam McInnes is? What he did?"

"Only very roughly. Really just what you told me yesterday."

"He was a burglar. Not by profession, just by, well, a combination of circumstance, naivety and probably a bit of booze, in the first instance. He and his pals robbed country mansions; you know that much. The first one was the home -
a
home - of the man who took the decision to close down the car plant where they had all worked, because labour was cheaper in the Third World. They had intended the robbery as a protest, a stunt, if you like; said they were originally planning to give the gear back. However. . . to cut a long story short, when it became apparent that nobody had a bloody clue who had done it, they decided to keep their mouths shut and ended up doing it again somewhere else. The spree lasted a few months; they hit I think seven, maybe eight places. But the thing is, they mostly hit places when they were empty; and if someone was going to be home, they made sure they were in and out without a soul knowing. Do you see what I'm saying?"