Country of the Blind (49 page)

"It means you'll all very shortly be free to go home," said Fraz. "And free to vote in the imminent General Election the Prime Minister doesn't yet know he's about to call."

"But what I don't get," interjected Nicole, "is why Voss blackmailed Dalgleish. I mean, this stuff proves Parlabane was right about Swan and the FILM

Accord and pornography and all that stuff, but I don't see why the world's least-convincing Scotsman was brought into it."

"Leverage," said Fraz. "Voss might have reckoned Swan alone wasn't enough. Once the porn ramifications of the Accord were out of the bag, Swan couldn't have gone to the PM and said he was planning to ratify it because the PM

would tell him no he bloody well wasn't. And if Swan insisted, the PM would either think he had gone mad, or worse, suspected he was being pressured from somewhere, and started asking questions. Either way, Swan drops it or he's fired, and Voss doesn't get what he wants. But the PM's long been wary of Swan and Dalgleish together, and he'd fancy a head-on with the pair of them almost as little as he'd fancy the opinion-poll consequences of having to fire two senior ministers."

"Maybe," said Gilmore, not sounding convinced. "But I'm not sure the Dutchman even believed the two of them could pull it off. Knowing Voss, it probably just amused him to play God with their careers, watching them squirm as he squeezed them from both sides in the inescapable dilemma from hell. He made them, gaveth them political life in the first place, so maybe he decided it would be a giggle to taketh away. It's what his newspapers have always done: build 'em up then knock 'em down."

"Aye," contributed Paul, "maybe you should get somebody to root through reports of government scandals across Europe in recent years. Might find a few weird sackings and resignations wi' a hidden story behind them."

"Good idea," Gilmore said. "Bear that one in mind, Ken."

"Sure, sure. But for now I think we'll be pretty busy with events closer to home. Can't wait to see the court artists' impressions of
those
two bastards standing in the dock."

"That'll just be one bastard," corrected Parlabane, standing now behind Fraz and Nicole, holding the phone in his right hand. "That was Jenny Dalziel. 279

Michael Swan's dead, in a cottage in Yorkshire. Acute allergic reaction to a bullet. She just heard down the jungle telegraph; it'll be all over the TV in about half an hour. Usual story, right now cops are only saying 'a forty-fouryear-old man blah-blah-blah', but it's him. One to the head, gun in own hand, no apparent signs of a break-in or struggle."

"Jesus, he topped himself," said Fraz, gaping over the back of the settee.

"Like fuck he did," Parlabane sneered. "Even considering last night's shenanigans and today's media frenzy, Swan had absolutely no way of knowing anyone was actually on to
him
. Somebody took him out."

"Knight?" suggested Nicole.

"Well nobody's seen him today. Sounds good to me. Knight knows it's all going to buggery but he doesn't know he's been named. He gives the world Swan as a suicide then waits for people to make the connection - Christ, he could even be the one who 'discovers' the link from the Voss end - and he thinks he's in the clear. Then the only people who could incriminate him are his own men, who he's pretty confident will keep their mouths shut, Mr Knight not being familiar with certain properties of our native woodland fungi."

"What about Dalgleish?" asked Nicole.

Parlabane nodded, thinking, agreeing something with himself.

"He could incriminate Knight," she continued, "but only by incriminating himself. Of course if he was incriminated already. . . "

"Mr McInnes?" Parlabane said loudly, cutting off Nicole's musings.

"Aye?"

"Could I speak to you and your two erstwhile colleagues alone, please?"

Tam looked around at the gathering, finding confused but interested nods of assent from Paul and Spammy, while Fraz stood up and Gilmore offered to lead Sadie and Nicole out of the room.

Parlabane sat on the edge of Gilmore's desk, waiting for the others to leave. The door to the ante-room closed and he looked around at the three of them, Tam and Paul on a settee, Spammy defying a chair's attempts to support him.

"Gentlemen, I realise you've all had a rather stressful few days what with one thing and another," he began, a sparkle appearing in his otherwise tired eyes that would probably have scared the life out of Tam once; not now.

"But I was wondering if I could enlist your specialist services for one last job. . . "

He should have stayed at the Scottish Office.

He should never have left the building. Bloody hell. Jesus bloody Christ. Dalgleish was crouched on the floor by the window in the semi-darkness, only the glow of the streetlights below picking out the outlines of objects in the room. He sat with his back to the casement, four feet from his desk, 280

on the polished wide floorboards beyond the last tassels of the edge of the carpet, lifting the glass to his mouth with two hands because either on its own trembled too much, and he had already spilled enough down his front to make his shirt cling to his chest. Or maybe that was just the sweat. There had been no gin left in the house, and that parasitic Frog diplomat had finished the last of the brandy yesterday. His drinks cabinet back home would never have been allowed to run so dry, but as he considered the townhouse little more than a dormitory extension of his office up here, he had rather lacked enthusiasm for stocking up. There had been nothing else for it. The only spirits left were the bottles of single malt whisky people kept giving him as "wee gifties". Every time some bastard handed him one, he felt sure the sod somehow
knew
his publicised liking of it was a fraud. Christ. He had prised open the lid of the box, then mutilated himself trying to get the metal seal off the top of the bottle, a stiff sliver sliding neatly under his thumbnail and into the soft flesh below. Craigellachie, it said. Probably bloody Gaelic for agony. He had poured a large measure into a glass and then drowned it in Coke, which made it almost drinkable.

Enough to have two. And three.

But would St Andrew's House have been any safer? There were lots of people around, certainly, but they all went home sooner or later. Then it would have been just him and the security staff, and how could he be sure about them? Knight wouldn't necessarily come himself. He could send anyone. People with all kinds of passes, access, authority. He might not know his assassin until the moment of death. No-one could protect him. He couldn't phone the police because he wouldn't know which of them were in Knight's pay too, and besides, how could he enlist their protection without the risk of them finding out why he needed it?

He could trust no-one. Knight was like a Portuguese man-of-war, his lethal tentacles stretching out for miles, myriad and almost invisible. What had made him an invaluable ally now made him the deadliest enemy. And he knew it was Knight. Swan had been told practically bugger-all about the mechanics of the Voss assassination. On the off-chance that there was any evidence leading the trail to him, the last person to have realised it would have been Michael, and he would be the last person on this
earth
to contemplate suicide. If it came to the crunch, Swan would have brazened it out with a display of bare-faced, squirming slipperiness that would put Aitken and Archer's side-windings in the shade. No. Knight's little thugs had blown it and now he was saving his own skin. Absolutely nobody knew where the bastard was and he simply would not answer his portable phone. Well, Dalgleish at least knew where he had been today. And where he must be headed.

Thank God he and Swan had a reputation for being close, otherwise his 281

near-collapse on hearing the news might have seemed suspiciously dramatic. As it was, it probably scored some sympathy points with the voters for him to show such a human, emotional face when he spoke to the cameras later on, possibly the best on-screen blub by a senior politician since Thatcher's onionin-the-hanky routine in the late Eighties. Except
he
hadn't been acting, though it wasn't Swan he was crying for. He bad heard the report only ten minutes later, from a TV next door in the Press Officer's room.

"Mr Dalgleish, as you saw there, clearly very distraught by the news, having lost not only a colleague and a political ally, but a close friend too. The Scottish Secretary has asked that the media respect Mr Swan's family's need for privacy at this difficult time. [I.e. go and pester the fuck out of them in London and take a few eyes off the unravelling Voss disaster up here.] The Prime Minister has yet to make a statement on the matter, but he is likely to be deeply upset at the loss of a young and promising member of his cabinet."

Not to mention the loss of another MP and the government's Damoclean one-seat majority, Dalgleish thought. Swan's own majority had been 9,000, which made the constituency marginal by today's standards, so with the party's survival plan built around clinging on until June, the Ulster Unionists would be dusting down their wish list right now. Still, there would be consolation for the boss that it wasn't one of his more loyal ministers, and that Swan had been found with his brains blown out rather than with a bag over his head and half the Sainsbury's fruit counter up his arse.

But then Dalgleish realised the dreadful mistake he had made. He had played right into Knight's hands. He could hear the reporter already: "Mr Dalgleish appeared extremely upset late yesterday afternoon when talking about the death of his friend, Michael Swan, and Scottish Office staff said he looked close to collapse upon hearing the news. It has been confirmed that he left St Andrew's House soon after in a state of visible distress, and went home to his Edinburgh residence where. . . "

He had panicked. He had looked out of his office door and seen everyone in the building as a potential assassin, an anonymous hireling. He couldn't even trust his driver, so he had called a black cab and used all his restraint not to break into a run as he left the building. When he got to the townhouse, he sent the domestic staff home immediately, locked all the doors, turned off the lights and retreated to his study.

What else could he do? He couldn't tell anybody. Not only could he trust no-one but there was no-one who could help him anyway. Nobody could put shackles on Knight, not without everything becoming known. He couldn't flee the country either; he was a senior member of the cabinet, for God's sake, not Stephen Fry. Besides, any such dramatic act would only serve to more quickly precipitate discovery of what he had done.

282

But
what
had he done? Good God, what choice had he had? Voss had given him two options, but they were both routes to the same destination, and by Christ that was the terminus. What had been done was for the good of the party; for the good of the whole
country
. He had acted in good faith. They couldn't have Voss flooding England with filth, corrupting our children. And neither could they have one man exerting so much influence over government; it was unhealthy. Ending careers upon a whim, threatening to bring down the whole show and let bloody Labour in. It was simply undemocratic. Voss
had
to be stopped, for the sake of Britain's future.

Oh God. Oh good God.

He heard a noise, a grinding, a thump. Footsteps. Oh God oh God oh God. The glass fell from his shaking hands as he got up, spilling what was left of his drink all over his lap. He scrambled to the door, his steps unsteady with booze and fear, and locked it with a turn of the wrist. Then he backed away, still gripping the key as if it was electrocuting him, eyes fixed on the door as he heard more sounds from the staircase beyond.

So he had taken Voss's schilling, but who could judge him for that? How could he let what his ancestors had worked for and passed down through generations just disintegrate, or worse, be sold into other hands? - Just because Labour had run England into the ground in the Seventies, setting tax levels that forced many of his peers to leave for foreign shores while he stayed to tough it out because he
cared
for this country. Was he to be punished for that?

Just because the Economic Miracle his party brought about - with not a little effort from himself - had come along too late to turn his own businesses around without a little help?

Oh God.

The door handle was turning, back and forth, someone trying to get in. Oh God.

A voice somewhere, inside his head. A voice he had ignored long ago, contemptuously shouted down like an opposition backbencher. A voice of foreboding that never stood a chance of being heard in a time when no-one listened to such doom-sayers, like the luddites and cowards casting their weary words of pessimism over the new dawns of privatisation or health-service reform. A voice of reservation speaking as Voss offered his favour. Get into bed with the devil, and sooner or later you're going to get fucked. He heard strange, quiet clicking and scratching sounds at the door, and found himself frozen to the spot with fear, paralysed, helpless. Sooner or later. . .

He'd thought he could escape by bringing Knight in to get Voss off his back forever, but nothing had changed. He'd only swapped one devil for another. Sooner or later. . .

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There was a dull thud of metal on wood, the bolt sliding back out of the frame. The handle turned. The door opened. And in he walked. It was the devil, all right, but not quite the one he was expecting.
Much
worse.

Parlabane had been surprised at Spammy's agility, the way those long limbs carried him steadily across the slates like a low, scuttling insect, and his reach and strength in pulling himself up where each adjoining building's roof was higher than the other. Paul had been the obvious choice to accompany Parlabane on this part of the job, but Tam insisted Spammy go instead. Parlabane guessed this was because Tam didn't fancy the role of sitting nervously in a car, worrying about what might be happening to his son, and reckoned that having to share that wait with someone like Spammy was probably a factor too.