Country of the Blind (21 page)

"Very good."

116

Knight shifted his stance, the slightest impatience creeping in. Dalgleish appreciated that he had things to attend to.

"Will there be anything else, sir?" he asked.

"Just one final thing, George. The contents of the safe. Any joy yet?"

"Nothing, sir. I have good reason to be confident that they didn't manage to open it; and I believe it was empty simply because Voss never hid anything in it in the first place. The police have been combing the area looking for the murder weapons; obviously they're not going to turn those up, but they would certainly have come across anything that was stolen by now. It would have been nice to have a few diamond earrings or a necklace to produce as evidence of what the robbers were up to, once the terrorist motive has been eliminated, but the story of them murdering four people only for the cupboard to be bare has rather a neat tone of tragic irony to it, don't you think?"

Dalgleish smiled.

"Quite."

Knight trotted briskly back down the stairs, all the time concentrating on resisting the urge to shake his head in case Dalgleish or any of his entourage saw it. He had heard nothing during their conversation to conflict with his long-held opinion that the man was among the biggest arseholes ever to walk the earth.

He had to stop himself sniggering at the thought of his own "soldier at attention" routine, which Dalgleish lapped up every time. He wished the pompous sod hadn't been behind the desk so that he could have seen the bulge in his trousers.

"You acted swiftly and decisively," he thought.

Sad pratt.

Dalgleish was often referred to as being one of the "old guard" in his party, as if he had some rare and precious attributes that were all but forgotten these days. Maybe he did, Knight thought, but he also knew that self-deluding snobs were one species in no imminent danger of extinction.

It was ever thus with blokes like that. It was so simple it was almost laughable, to maintain the illusion that it was
they
who were in charge,
they
who were running things. It was easy to convince someone of what they desperately wanted to believe. Dalgleish thought Knight's colours were tied to his mast, and that Knight's fortunes would rise or fall, live or die with his, as Dalgleish chased after the fool's gold that he thought was power. What did he expect ultimately to get? A post near the head of a waning and increasingly ragged political party? Maybe a few years in the limelight before fading back into obscurity as the party or even the country decides it's time for new faces?

117

Dalgleish would be a forgotten has-been sitting on useless subcommittees and giving bitter interviews while Knight was exercising the real power he had built, the power to destroy politicians, businessmen and even monarchs. Power that you didn't need to be re-elected to.

What he always found so eye-poppingly incredible about Dalgleish, as indeed about most of them, was that he never suspected a thing. In all the little commissions, all the dirty tricks, the set-ups, the surveillances, it never occurred to the stupid cunt that Knight would be gathering the dirt on him too, filing it away for when it might come in handy like he did on so many others.

The videotapes of Dalgleish and the embassy "secretary" (Knight's plant) in Singapore typified it. The way he had let her manoeuvre them around the bed as they fucked away, doggy-style, so that both of them faced the two-way mirror.

They were all the same - probably a class thing, a public school thing; they were so busy worrying about the threat from each other that they never suspected where the real danger would be coming from. It just never occurred to them that they had anything to fear from someone who was not one of them, who was not part of their game, and not on what they so arrogantly perceived to be their level.

Dalgleish was far sharper than most, Knight had to admit - that was why he had chosen to hitch a ride on his back all those years ago. Dalgleish had an honest understanding of the depths to which he could stoop, and had not vainly convinced himself that no-one else could be so cunning or so ruthless, which was why he had survived so long and so well. He anticipated the traps his rivals
could
set for him, even if most of the time they weren't smart enough to have laid them.

And, he had to admit, only Dalgleish could have had the balls to suggest the Voss thing. Truth be told, if anyone else
had
suggested it, Knight would have said no, because Dalgleish was probably the only one with the nerve to carry his part of it right through. He wouldn't have considered anything as risky as this if he didn't think the man at the top could be trusted not to give the game away through guilt or fear-induced stupidity. So far he was doing fine, but the acid test would be if something got loose that they really couldn't nail back down.

As Knight approached his car he could hear the
breeeep
of the phone inside it. He removed a parking ticket from the windscreen, scrunching it up and dropping it to the tarmac as if it was a flyer for a car-boot sale. When the meter-maid keyed the reg into the system she'd quickly know not to pursue the matter. He climbed into the car, grabbing the receiver as he pulled the door closed at his side.

118

"Knight. What."

"Morgan, sir. Look, I think we might have a big fucking problem."

"Speak to me."

"It's the lawyer. I checked under her car and the cable-cutters have gone."

"Yes, I think we had established that they were knackered last night when they didn't work. I ordered Addison to get you some new ones. Why are you telling me this?"

"No, sir, I mean they were
gone
. As in, no longer attached."

Knight swallowed, took a moment to digest the news.

"Could they have fallen off?" he asked.

"No chance. She must have removed them. She's on to us, sir."

Christ.

He couldn't afford to even think of the ramifications.

"Kill her," he said, quietly but firmly. "Immediately. Where is she now, her office?"

There was a pause, a short intake of breath on the other end of the line.

"Well, that's the big fucking problem I meant, sir," Morgan finally said, a dread reluctance in his voice. "She's disappeared. We watched the place last night, saw her go to bed and. . . "

Fucking hell.

"Look, Morgan," Knight said, with the sort of hollow calm that precedes a typhoon, "I don't want to know the details of how you fucked up. They are not relevant. All I want to know from you is that she is dead and that so is anyone she might have spoken to, and I don't want to hear your fucking voice again to tell me anything else. Understood?"

"Yes, sir. But how will I find. . . ?"

"If she knows something, she'll want to tell people. If she wants to tell people, she'll have to surface. When she surfaces, you kill her. However, wherever. Clear?"

"Yes, sir."

119

SEVEN

The sunlight was piercing and impatient, as if angry that it had needed to climb this high in the sky to get their attention. The smell of cold sweat, stale breath and arboreal mulches had an incongruous freshness about it as a chilledged breeze diluted the congested air. Wisps of steam spiralled balletically in the broken shards of sunlight, Tam watching their graceful dance for a suspended moment while somewhere in his head he knew he was about to switch on again, stretch mind and body against the rack of their predicament. It was a moment of freedom, of uncomplicated pleasure, the sweeter for its briefest finity.

Some long-sealed chamber of dormant memory released its captive and caused him to think of a fragment of a poem he had been made to learn in school. He couldn't remember its name or that of the poet, but the threat of six of the belt had apparently ingrained the words on his mind not only long enough to recite them before Mrs Dornoch the next day, but long enough for them to return on a cool September morning in the highlands, nearly half a century later.

"Him whose strenuous tongue can burst joy's grape against his palate fine -

his soul shall taste the sadness of her might."

Tam wasn't sure how well it reflected upon the Renfrewshire education department of the time that it had taken him two hours to learn it but forty-odd years to understand it. Still, at least he hadn't been a Catholic. All Bob could remember was bloody prayers.

He blinked, and when he opened his eyes he was no longer lost in the motes of breath, but back under a pile of logs, off a footpath in a forest. His eyes flitted around and noticed that Spammy was also awake, lying back but hunched up a little, supported by the spiny stanchions of his gangly elbows. He was staring out of the opening, eyes squinting against the stabs of the sun through the gaps in their shelter, steam billowing out from his nose like he was a shaggy-headed and drug-addled dragon.

"You been awake for long?" Tam inquired as Spammy caught his eye.

"Aye."

"Well why did you no waken us?"

121

"Yous were sleepin'."

Conversations with Spammy were frequently like this. He seemed somehow able to circumvent logic, or alter its nature so that it behaved differently in his hands.

Tam had learned not to tread further into the labyrinth. He nudged Paul and Bob to life, then crawled into the daylight as they yawned and groaned behind him, dragged back into confrontation with their seemingly omnipotent foe.

Tam climbed to his feet and stretched, a dozen strains and aches responding to his reveille from posts around his anatomy. He edged forward tentatively, moving up the incline of the mound at whose foot they had made their camp, and taking position behind a large pine. Slowly he leaned around it, looking for he didn't know what - police, soldiers, Jeremy fucking Beadle (in which case he hoped he'd lubricated his microphone) - and saw a valley bathed in the crisp sunlight from behind him, its angrily craggy mountains cruelly beautiful as they loomed inquisitively over their dominions below. The river glinted with an icy sparkle, winking in defiance.

The sight delighted his eyes but wounded his soul. It was a place of breathtaking dramatic spectacle, but he now saw the harshness, the mercilessness that must always have existed behind the picture-postcard splendour. He saw the rain-lashed shepherds in the cold damp of the clachans, the punishment of the outcast, and the gauntlet run by the pursued.

Funny how such places didn't fill your heart with quite so much joy when you couldn't get back into your car and drive the fuck away from them. Tam looked back, down at the lean-to where Paul and Spammy were helping Bob to his feet, and glanced with relief at the surroundings. The base of the mound protruded into a low hollow, a tributary path of brown needles leading up to the main trail on the opposite side from where he stood, with trees huddling protectively around the entire area. They had arrived there in darkness, and he had half-expected morning to reveal that their improvised refuge was on the edge of a main road or some other such staringly conspicuous site. In fact it had been the encroaching darkness that had cast the deciding vote the night before on whether to run; or if not cast a vote it had at least forced the election.

"Heh, do you think we might be gettin' set up again here?" Spammy had asked as they stood, dazed, beside the two dead men in front of the bus. No-one answered, even Bob having grasped that feigned obtuseness was Spammy's equivalent of a rhetorical question. Tam had already made the further leap of deducing that the sloth-like fuzzball's occasional deeply obvious comments were a caustic means of taking the piss out of anyone who thought 122

he was slow-witted, a misconception he had probably endured for years.

"They're gaunny do us for this along with the other two," Bob offered, shaking his head at the gruesome sight.

"Four," Tam reminded him. "There were bodyguards, sure."

"Oh aye."

They hadn't even seen the bodyguards. The first any of them knew about the two other victims had been during their interrogations.

"They were shot as well," Bob replied.

"So I heard. The question is, what do we do aboot it?"

"Well that's obvious," said Paul. "We run. It's the only chance we've got."

"Aye, but if we run we look mair guilty," Bob offered.

"What," said Spammy in a slow monotone, "do you mean it's actually possible for us to look mair guilty than we do already?"

"Ach, you know what I mean," Bob retorted, irritated. "Whoever it is is playin' us like a cheap fuckin' moothie, and I'm sure us runnin' is the next bar on the music sheet. I say we just sit and wait for the polis. Maybe noo they'll start believin' that there's somebody else at work on this."

"Bob," said Paul, gritting his teeth to keep his temper in check, "the excuse that a big boy done it and ran away didnae work the last time. What makes you think it'll be any different noo? I say we take our chances. As far as I can see, there's nothin' gaunny convince the polis aboot what really happened at Craigurquhart. You know what kinna papers that bastart Voss owned, so you can imagine what kinna picture the public's got of us. We're never gaunny get a fair trial and we're never gaunny clear our names. If we run for a day or a week or we manage to run for the rest of our lives, that's as much time ootside a prison as we're gaunny get. Once we're back in custody, it's forever."

Inevitably, Bob sought mediation.

"What do you say, Tam?"

Tam looked at the sky for a few seconds, then back at the corpses, then at his friends.

"I say we keep our options open. This looks like the maist lonely and desolate road in the world. Naebody's gaunny know we're missin' until whenever this bus was supposed to arrive, and there's no exactly a queue of motors goin'

past. It could be hours before anybody shows up here. Plus it's gettin' dark and it's gettin' cauld.

"I say we move on, find some shelter. Somewhere oot o'sight, where we can hide and bed doon for the night. Then in the mornin' we'll see how it looks. If we decide to run, we'll have a start, and we'll have had a bit o'kip. If we decide to gie up, or we get caught anyway, for what it's worth we can say we werenae runnin', just takin' shelter for the night. Naebody'd want to sleep in the back of a bus with a deid body. Either way, we can sleep on it."