The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (24 page)

       
‘Anything else?’ he asked eagerly, like an old Spaniel begging for a stick to be thrown.

       
‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any foam rubber, about so big and so thick?’ I said, marking out the size with my hands.

       
‘I think I have, in the back,’ he said, and scurried off. I wandered round the little shop, running my fingers through barrels of bulbs, a huge cardboard box full of assorted bundles of string, and racks and racks of screwdrivers, spanners, hammers and things for getting boy scouts out of horses’ hooves. Before long he was back, a piece of yellow foam rubber clutched to his chest which he carefully rolled up, tied with string and placed in a carrier bag with the rest of the purchases.

       
I paid him and drove the rest of the way to Stonehaven trying to work out exactly what I had to do and the order in which it had to be done.

       
The day after my father’s funeral the house had been closed, I had driven David to the nursing home and then gone straight to London in the Porsche. A lady from the village came in twice a week to air the rooms and dust the furniture, but other than that the house had been left alone, deserted. That’s exactly how it looked as I drove up the drive and parked in front of the stone porch. It wasn’t a home any more, it was a building waiting for a family. It had no heart, no soul. The leaves had started to fall from the sycamores that marked the boundary with the road and they swirled around my feet as I groped in my jacket for the keys.

       
It was early afternoon but the house seemed gloomy inside and it felt and smelt damp. I’d planned to bring David back to the house when this was all over, bring in a housekeeper to clean and cook for us, but now I was having second thoughts. Without our parents as a focus it was just a collection of stones and slates and wood and we’d be better off starting afresh.

       
I opened the door to the study and walked over to the green velvet curtains which had been drawn since the police forensic team had left. The room had been dusted once or twice, certainly not as thoroughly as the rest of the house, and though somebody had tried to wash the blood off the wallpaper there was still a speck or two there, and on the bookcase I could see a piece of lead shot looking no more sinister than the stuff anglers use to weigh down their lines. I found the key to the security cabinet in the bottom left-hand drawer of the desk.

       
From the outside the cabinet appeared to be a simple mahogany box, about five feet high and three feet wide with double opening doors. It could have held drinks or files but it was lined with steel and the lock was better than the one on the front door, and inside was a rack with spaces for a dozen shotguns including the one my father had used to kill himself.

       
The key turned easily and silently and I drew back the doors. The guns gleamed and light glinted off the engraved plates. There was a pair of Denton and Kennell Number Ones, walnut stocks and delicate engravings, and three Midland over and under shotguns my father used to give guests who fancied a little rough shooting. There was a Winchester over and under and a couple of Beretta Sporting Multichokes that he lent to more serious shots, but my father’s pride and joy was a pair of Purdeys that he’d bought for nigh on £12,000 six years ago at a Sotheby’s auction at Pulborough.

       
They used to belong to one of the best game shots of all time, the second Marquis of Rippon, who was reckoned to have blown apart something like half a million birds in his lifetime. They had a history and my father loved them.

       
He’d spent hours polishing and cleaning the pair, but it was only one of them that he’d used to blow his brains out and that was the one I took from the cabinet and tucked under my arm as I grabbed a handful of cartridges and relocked the doors. I picked up the carrier bag of tools and foam rubber, walked down the hall and unbolted the door leading to the back garden.

       
At the end of the garden next to the grey stone boundary wall was an old brick building that in years gone by had been a stable but which was now used as a tool shed, a place to store gardening equipment during the winter months and the place where we went to look for anything that had gone missing from the house. It was filthy and the wooden door was covered in cobwebs. It wasn’t locked because there was nothing inside worth stealing, but it had the one thing I wanted which was a solid oak workbench with a huge steel vice, made like they don’t make them any more.

       
The light switch wouldn’t work or maybe the bulb had gone, but there was still enough light coming in through the cracked and dirty window panes to see by. I opened the vice as far as it would go, placed the shotgun between the heavy metal plates and clamped it as tightly as I could. The hacksaw cut easily, surprisingly easily, through the barrels, but I was still sweating by the time they clanked noisily onto the stone floor.

       
The stock was a lot harder. I tried to remember the shape of the gun Iwanek had used but he’d moved so quickly once the shooting had started that I’d barely caught a glimpse of it. I decided to try to cut it into the general shape of a pistol grip and I scratched into the walnut with a rusty six-inch nail I’d found on the bench, marking out the lines where I would use the wood saw. I had three or four goes but it still didn’t look right. Eventually I attacked it with the saw, hoping that once I’d got started the shape would become obvious, like a sculptor chiselling away at a block of stone, allowing the material to define its own form rather than having one imposed on it.

       
It took half an hour of solid sawing to take off the bottom eight inches of the stock, the wood was hard and compact, more like metal than the product of a tree and I’d really worked up a sweat by the time I had finished. I used the hacksaw to cut the remaining bit of the stock into something approaching a grip but it was very uneven and wouldn’t sit in my hand. The balance was completely gone and it was going to need both hands and a lot of concentration to fire accurately, but I planned to follow Iwanek’s advice and get in close so maybe that wasn’t too important.

       
It was starting to cloud over and I could hardly see what I was doing inside the shed so I picked up what was left of the shotgun and the sandpaper and went back to the study.

       
I sat in my father’s captain’s chair in front of the desk and rubbed and sanded the grip until it was smooth and slid into my hand and my finger could reach the trigger without straining. I loaded two cartridges into the breech and went into the garden again carrying a thick blanket from one of the spare bedrooms, down the crazy paving path to the stable building.

       
It wasn’t overlooked; behind the boundary wall was a field of yellow oil-seed rape and in this part of the country a shotgun going off at dusk wouldn’t worry anybody, local farmers were forever taking potshots at rooks and rabbits. The stable wall furthest away from the house was bare brick with no windows or doors, and I hung the blanket over it by tying two of the corners to the old rusting guttering.

       
I stood about twelve feet away and let go with both barrels, one at a time, the shot ripping through the blanket, shredding and tearing it and kicking up puffs of brick dust from the wall. At that distance the shot spread out in a seven-foot wide circle, much wider than a standard shotgun but that’s why the barrels are normally so long, to focus the energy and the destructive power. Shorten the barrel and the range is drastically reduced, but close up that didn’t matter and judging by the state of the blanket there wouldn’t be much left of the target from twelve feet away.

       
The gun had kicked in my hands and pulled to the left when the first barrel exploded, but when I fired the second I was ready for it and steered the gun round, held it steady and firm and hit the already tattered blanket dead centre.

       
Back in the study I cleaned and polished the Purdey, much as my father used to, carefully, lovingly, but above all efficiently. When I had finished I tried to fit it into my brown, metal-framed leather briefcase, a present from Shona, but it was too narrow and the lid wouldn’t close.

       
Then I remembered my father’s old briefcase, a black plastic one, scuffed and grubby with a thick plastic handle with indentations for the fingers. The reason he’d always used it was that it was a good five inches deep and held twice as much paperwork as any other case he’d ever had.

       
I found it in the cloakroom under the stairs and by its weight it was obviously full of papers. It was locked with two gilt combination locks at either end, the gilt finish long since worn away. The numbers were my father’s birthday, 611, and my mother’s, 129, and I tipped out the papers onto the floor, took the empty case through into the study and heaved it onto the desk. The gun fitted diagonally, plenty of space above and below and at least an inch and a half to spare at either end.

       
I took the shotgun out and untied the rolled up piece of foam rubber which was about half as big again as the case but about the right thickness. All I needed was a pair of scissors or a sharp knife to cut a hole for the gun, and I found the former in one of the drawers under the kitchen sink and I hacked and cut the foam rubber so that it fitted tightly around the gun with a couple of gaps where my fingers could grip the barrel and the butt and pull it out smoothly.

       
It was six-thirty pm and I spent a full thirty minutes practising walking with the case, swinging it onto the desk in one fluid motion, then flicking the locks open, lifting the lid and bringing the gun out.

       
I did it again and again, until the actions felt right and I could get the shotgun into my hands while looking perfectly calm and relaxed, until I could do the whole operation blindfold, doing it all by touch while my eyes looked straight ahead. I did it with my eyes closed, I recited poetry with a fixed grin on my face and eventually it came naturally, one moment I was placing the case on the desk, the next the gun was in my hands, cocked and ready to fire. Bang, bang, you’re dead. Maybe.

The call came at seven, exactly as promised, and it was a girl. At first I thought it was Sammy, and half a sentence had passed before what she was saying registered and I realized the voice was slightly softer and younger than Sammy’s and that it came with a warm, Irish brogue.

       
It was a voice J. Walter Thompson could have used to sell Guinness, Irish whiskey, or holidays in tinkers’ caravans, a voice that was mellow and sweet, that you felt was ready to break into an infectious laugh and tease you and scold you.

       
‘. . . but I suppose there was no way you wouldn’t be there, now was there? You have the money with you?’ There was a slight intake of breath as she asked the question, a startled gasp as if she’d just been kissed unexpectedly on the cheek.

       
‘I have it here,’ I said. ‘I want to speak to Sammy.’

       
‘Well now, you’ll just have to be wanting, for a while at least. They’re quite safe, and they’ll stay that way as long as you do as you’re told, and you are going to do as you’re told, aren’t you?’ A pause. ‘Aren’t you?’

       
‘Yes. Don’t hurt them. Please.’

       
‘Do you have a pen and paper? I’ll say this once, and only once. Drive from Edinburgh, across the Forth Bridge to Perth and from there take the A9 to Pitlochry, exactly as if you were going to Shankland Hall to see your darling brother.

       
‘This time, though, you’ll continue along the A9 for another forty-five miles or so until you reach Kingussie. Then you’ll leave the A9 and take the B9152 to Kincraig, on the northern shore of Loch Inch.

       
‘Go through Kincraig and drive for exactly 2.4 miles from the last streetlight in the town. Then you’ll see a signpost on the right for Inshriach Distillery, down a single track road. The distillery has been shut down so we won’t be disturbed.

       
‘Follow the track to the end, you’ll pass a terrace of cottages on the right, and then you’ll come to the carpark in front of the distillery building. It’s E-shaped and on the left you’ll see a large black door. Immediately to the right of it are metal steps leading to another door on the first floor. You’ll be met there.

       
‘Now, I want to make one thing clear to you. You will be watched, and if we should for one minute think you are trying to double-cross us again your lady friend and your brother will be dead. If you don’t come alone they’re dead. If you don’t have the money with you they’re dead. The drive will take you four hours if you’re lucky, four and a half if you’re not. If you are not here by midnight then they’re dead. And once they are dead we’ll come for you. I suggest you hurry.’

       
Then the line was dead, and the message was all the more chilling coming from such a provocatively sexy voice. In the bookcase behind the desk was a leather-bound atlas and I turned the pages until I came across a large-scale map of the Scottish Highlands. The distillery would be close to the River Spey and by the look of the map it was in the middle of nowhere which is why they had chosen it. To the west was Loch Ness and south west was Loch Ericht. To the east were the Cairngorm Mountains and the whole area around the distillery seemed to be thickly wooded so there’d be no problems if they had to make a run for it. But at least it would be dark when I arrived, and tonight the weather forecast was cloudy and there wouldn’t be much in the way of a moon.

       
Four hours sounded about right for the drive so I sat for a while, head in my hands and elbows on either side of the atlas, thinking harder than I had ever thought before because this time it was my life that depended on the decisions I made now. My life and Sammy’s and David’s.