The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (27 page)

       
I could feel Laing’s eyes boring into my back and I fought the urge to turn and look at him. If I did I knew for sure that I’d be lost. The man and the girl were moving again, she walked round to the right and into the corridor next to him, he then shuffled across to give her room and the bottom half of his body was once more hidden by the last vat in the right-hand line.

       
I wanted to scream at them, to tell them to stand where they were. Stay calm. Stay cool.

       
‘I suppose you’ll want to count it but I’d be grateful if you’d get a move on because I want to get David home as soon as possible,’ I said, as my hands moved to operate the locks on the case. I’d already set the combinations and the locks flew open as I pushed the gilt buttons either side, the two clicks sounding like one.

       
The girl’s gun was still aimed at my chest, the man’s down at the ground. They turned to smile at each other as I raised the lid.

       
‘You’ve no idea the problems I had getting the money together at such short notice,’ I said. ‘I almost didn’t make it. And you didn’t give me nearly enough time to drive up from Edinburgh, the roads can be vile at this time of night  . . .’

       
I was talking too much but it didn’t matter any more because the shotgun was in my hands and I stepped away from the open case. In one movement Sammy pushed David sideways onto the wire mesh floor and threw herself on top of him, using herself as a shield, a tigress protecting her young. But David wasn’t her offspring, he was my brother, and she was still risking her life to keep him out of harm’s way. Whatever happened I promised myself I’d never let Sammy down again, no way would I ever disregard the loyalty she’d shown, a loyalty I knew I didn’t deserve. I held onto that one thought, blocking all else from my mind.

       
The girl turned first, her eyes opened wide and her mouth formed a perfect circle of surprise as she fought to unscramble the messages from her retina.

       
The man saw the look of confusion on her face and he stepped forward towards her and then began to turn. Her gun was pointing at my groin but she made no move to pull the trigger, and she frowned in confusion like a little girl trying to remember her nine times table and then I fired.

       
The shot ripped through her anorak and jeans the way it had shredded the blanket tied against the outbuilding back at Stonehaven, and the green and blue of her clothing was stained with red as she lurched backwards and slammed into the wooden vat behind her, mouth still open, face untouched because I’d aimed low. Behind me I heard Laing curse and scrabble for the door handle. I ignored him, he wasn’t armed.

       
The gun dropped from the girl’s fingers and rattled onto the metal floor and she groaned and pitched forward with her hands clutching her bloodstained stomach.

       
I turned the shotgun towards her partner but I knew I wouldn’t make it because his gun was already levelled at my chest and the finger was tightening on the trigger and I still had to move through ninety degrees to stand a chance of hitting him, so I angled it upwards instead and fired at the lamp above his head.

       
The two bangs were simultaneous and the lamp went out. I heard it shatter and the pieces slam against the roof as the bullet from his gun caught me in the chest, lifted me off my feet and threw me backwards down the corridor. I hit the floor shoulders first and then my head crashed back and I felt it open and bleed, but the pain was nowhere as bad as the crippling numbness in my chest. The door behind me opened and closed as Laing fled the scene, footsteps clattering and echoing.

       
I could breathe only in short, halting gasps, like an engine starved of petrol, shuddering and juddering. My ribs felt as if they’d been hit with a sledgehammer and at least two were cracked or broken, but I was lucky that he’d gone for the chest and not tried a head shot or hit me in the legs because then the lightweight bulletproof vest that Tony had given me at Heathrow wouldn’t have saved my life, and I’d be lying bleeding to death on the floor like the girl and not inching backwards to rest against one of the empty oak vats and groping around to find the shotgun in the blackness.

       
David started screaming and then his piercing yell was muffled as Sammy put her hand over his mouth and comforted him. ‘Are you all right?’ she called. ‘My God, are you all right?’ But I couldn’t answer, I was still recovering my breath and, anyway, to have replied would have given away my position – horizontal, hurt and, for the moment at least, helpless. Sammy didn’t call out again, though I could hear her whispering softly to David.

       
Somewhere in front of me the man moved, slowly and carefully because he was as blind as I was in the pitch-dark room, but he was fit and healthy while I was lying winded on the floor and feeling as if an elephant had sat on my chest. And he had a gun in his hand.

       
He had seen where I’d fallen so all he had to do was to inch forward in the dark until he found me and then it would be over. I managed to pull myself sideways, dragging myself to one side and out of his way but stopped when he heard me moving, and then there was a flash and a bang about fifteen feet from me and a bullet tore a chunk out of the vat to my right so he knew I wasn’t dead, but at the very least he must have thought I was in a bad way because he’d seen the first bullet slam into my chest.

       
A second shot hit the floor and the bullet screeched off the metal and ricocheted into the blackness. Then there was only silence and I tried to steady my breathing because in my ears it sounded like a steam engine puffing and blowing, and I could hear my heart pounding but there was nothing I could do about that.

       
I screwed up my eyes and then opened them wide but it made no difference, the darkness was absolute, no light at all in the room. Then my eyes started to play tricks and I saw greenish circles and spots of red which twisted and rolled, and white whirlpools swirling above my head as my information-starved brain produced its own signals to make up for the lack of stimulation from the optic nerves.

       
He moved again and this time he was creeping sideways, to my right, but I wasn’t used to relying solely on my ears so I couldn’t tell if he was ten feet away or twenty as the perspiration dripped down the back of my arms like blood from an open wound.

       
I reached into the pocket of the Barbour jacket and pulled out Tony’s second going away present. They smelled of rubber as I pulled them over my eyes and pressed the ridged button on the right-hand side. The light intensifiers flickered once and then I could see again, the goggles picking out details of the room and its contents in a greenish-grey hue.

       
They came from a consignment Tony was in the process of selling to a West African state. Manufactured by Ferranti, powered by a small nickel-cadmium battery, they were the perfect issue for infantry fighting at night.

       
Worn like a pair of ski goggles, they didn’t have to be fixed to a rifle like the Nato night sight, and they allowed soldiers to move easily in the darkness with their hands free to shoot and fight.

       
From where I was sitting I couldn’t see Sammy or David but the man was there, about fifteen feet away to the right, facing in my direction and creeping stealthily towards me, right arm holding his gun at waist height and his left waving in front of his chest.

       
He was pushing one foot forward, slowly, feeling along the metal floor so that as soon as he touched my body he’d know where to pump in the bullets. He stopped moving his left foot, transferred his weight over and then began moving his right. Two feet ahead of him was my shotgun and he was heading straight for it.

       
Reaching for it was out of the question, I could barely breathe never mind crawl to the gun before his probing feet found it, and once I had started moving he’d have a good idea where I was, and it wouldn’t take more than a few random shots in my direction to hit me and this time I might not be so lucky.

       
My ribs felt on fire as I took a lungful of air and spoke. ‘You’re standing two feet to the right of a vat, your right foot is forward and you’re holding your left hand out in front of your body. Unless you drop your gun I’m going to blow your balls off.’

       
Immediately the words left my mouth I rolled over twice, wincing with the pain as I got out of his line of fire.

       
He stopped dead in his tracks and in the grey-green image intensifiers he looked like a zombie with his arms outstretched, his mouth open so that he could breathe shallowly with the minimum of noise and his eyes wide and staring, trying to pick out any details in the dark and wondering how it was that I could see him when he couldn’t make out his own hand in front of his face.

       
He pointed the gun at where I’d been lying and then what I had said sunk in and he dived to his left, thudding into the vat and falling to the floor where he scampered off in a panic on all fours towards the wall.

       
He disappeared from view but I heard another dull thud as he collided with something in his rush to get away. I managed to crawl to the shotgun on hands and knees, the metal mesh biting into my skin. I knelt with the gun between my thighs as I fumbled for a couple of fresh cartridges from my pocket, and as I slotted them into the breech I saw the man again, this time standing upright in the far corner of the fermentation room, face towards the wall with his arms outstretched, palms touching the whitewashed bricks. He was moving quickly crabwise, legs moving together and then apart, like a rock climber traversing a cliff face. He was heading for a door at the end of the corridor I was in, the twin of the entrance I’d come through from the mashing room.

       
He reached for the handle with searching fingers as I brought up the shotgun, still kneeling, but he tore open the door just before I pulled the trigger and moonlight flooded in and the goggles went opaque. I fired anyway, but when I ripped off the goggles the door was open and a cloud of white powder was billowing down from the pockmarked wall above it.

       
I staggered to my feet and lumbered to the door, the goggles bouncing around my neck, bending double because of the pain but also to keep myself as small a target as possible. I peered around the door frame and saw a row of four stills, copper gleaming in the moonlight. At the far end of the stillhouse long, thin windows stretched from the ceiling to the floor below as if in a church, and they rattled eerily as the wind outside buffeted and pushed and threw squalls of rain against them.

       
A shot cracked through the air, whistled past my ear and into the roof behind me and I pulled back my head. Footsteps clanged as he ran down metal steps to the ground floor and then it was quiet again.

       
Still bent double I went over to Sammy and David, crouched together on the floor, David crying and Sammy holding him in her arms, whispering gently into his ear, kissing away the tears. I knelt beside them and stroked the base of David’s neck.

       
‘Stay here,’ I whispered. ‘Whatever happens, stay here.’

       
Sammy seemed too shocked to speak and she just nodded dumbly and carried on petting David. Neither of them was dressed for a night in an unheated Highland distillery. David was wearing old brown cord trousers and an American baseball jacket I’d brought back as a present from a business trip to Baltimore last year. Sammy wore a light-weight blue linen trouser suit, and they were both shivering.

       
I took off my jacket and put it round her shoulders, but it didn’t stop her trembling because it was fear and anger that were making her muscles shake and spasm, not the cold.

       
The girl’s gun was lying three feet in front of her and the butt was dotted with blood. She was moaning softly, almost purring like a contented cat. There was a dripping sound, plop, plop, plop, like water from a tap, but it wasn’t water it was blood running through the metal grille and onto the concrete floor below.

       
I didn’t feel sorry for her and I didn’t move to help her, because she’d been the only one smoking and that meant it had been her who tortured Carol and it had been her that Carol had begged to stop. But she hadn’t stopped and Carol had died in her bath, burnt and bleeding.

       
I picked up the gun, wiped off the congealed blood and handed it to Sammy, who looked at it as if I’d given her a dead mouse. I checked the safety catch was off and that there was a bullet in the chamber as the gun trembled in her elegant hand. It looked out of place, like an air raid shelter in a pretty country garden. Would she use it? Probably not, but it made me feel a little easier knowing it was there.

       
‘I’m going to shut the door again and then I’m going outside,’ I said to her. ‘No matter what happens, stay here. It’ll be pitch dark so don’t move around. Do you understand?’

       
She nodded and hugged David tightly, her eyes wide and afraid and fixed on the girl’s body.

       
‘Listen to me, Sammy,’ I said, and she looked up and forced a half smile.

       
‘If that door opens when I’m gone, fire the gun.’ I pointed to the doorway leading to the stillhouse. ‘It won’t be me, I’ll come back the way I leave, through the door at the end,’ and I gestured towards the door where I had walked in only minutes before, swinging the briefcase and telling everybody to keep calm.

       
‘And make sure it’s me. Laing’s still around. Do you understand?’