One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (15 page)

‘Sufferin’ God.’

With a diminishing sense of determination, McGregor picked himself up once again and walked across to assess the latest developments. He climbed clumsily into the driver’s seat and tossed the arm into the passenger‐
side footwell.

‘Some fuckin’ driver you were,’ he told it, sticking the car into forward one more time. The Renault crawled labouringly up the grassy incline and was finally on the open road again. He executed a dozen‐
point turn on the narrow tarmac and headed off in the direction of Rosstown.

It was a single‐
track road with passing‐
places, so he was relieved, if a little surprised, not to meet any traffic coming in the opposite direction. Still, it wasn’t exactly Princes Street round here, so presumably it wasn’t that much out of the ordinary. As he passed a sign denoting that he was two miles from town, the spell ended and he at last encountered another vehicle. Less comfortingly, it was a helicopter, swooping down from nowhere and dogging him less than ten yards to his left, flying about thirty feet above the fields. He craned his neck to look upwards out of the window, snatching glances back at the road to ensure that he didn’t lose control. It looked like a police bird, with a bloke staring back down at him through binoculars, talking into a hand‐
mike as he did so.

McGregor reached down automatically for a radio hand‐
set, the years of habit and conditioning prompting a now‐
redundant action. His outstretched fingers found only an open ashtray with a moist, half‐
sooked boiled sweetie in it. There was a bend approaching. He slowed the car a little and had another gander up at the chopper before he hit the turn. The man with the mike was still doing his Peter O’Sullivan, by the looks of it. When McGregor fixed his eyes back upon the road, it was just in time to see two police cars slewing across his path in front of the junction he was nearing at – according to the speedo – Christ! Ninety! There seemed no time to brake, and he’d kill himself and both the polis drivers if he hit them head‐
to‐
side like that. He had no option but to swerve to his left and aim for the hedge.

The Renault burst effortlessly through what turned out to be an anorexic privet, and immediately encountered something more substantial in the form of an astonished and transfixed Cheviot. McGregor heard a gassy groan – half‐
baa and half‐
burp – as the sheep was bounced into the air, the Renault bludgeoning onwards beneath. The ewe flew over the hedge, into the roadway and crashed through the windscreen of the next arriving squadcar, which consequently ploughed into the two units forming the make‐
shift roadblock.

McGregor grappled with the squirming steering wheel as the Renault thumped along the grass, somehow managing to aim the car through an open gate and back on to the Queen’s highway. His detour had taken him diagonally across a section of the grazing field before emerging forty yards down from the junction, where steam and smoke could now be seen rising above the hedge. He trundled the car slowly up towards the crossroads, above which the helicopter was now hovering.

Choppers and roadblocks. Jesus. Something very big was going down, almost certainly related to whatever he’d stumbled upon back at the farm. He could see two more police cars arriving at speed, blue lights and sirens. They pulled up at the junction and six men exploded out, kitted in full body armour and bearing automatic weapons. Christ, an Armed Response Unit! He remembered the shellcase in his pocket and decided his suspicions must have been bang‐
on. Someone extremely dangerous was on the loose.

The ARU guys filed across the road ahead of him, he assumed to take up covered positions behind the roadblock. But instead they knelt down in formation on the tarmac, pointing all of their guns directly at the slow‐
approaching Renault. Then they shot out all his tyres.

‘In the name of the wee man,’ McGregor yelped, jumping on the brakes and ducking down behind the dashboard.

‘This is the police,’ came a hailer‐
amplified voice. Like there might be hunners of other blokes running about in kevlar around Rosstown. ‘Turn off your engine and step out of your vehicle with your hands up.’

‘Aw, for fuck’s sake,’ McGregor muttered, a grim realisation descending upon him as he eyed the spare body‐
part lying across the passenger‐
side floormat.

‘Step out of the vehicle, I said. Come out right now with your hands in the air. Slowly. Come on, let’s see those hands. I want to see those hands.’

McGregor looked again at the arm and decided he owed it to himself.

‘If we can go over it once again, you’re claiming that at this point, whilst out walking, you were suddenly attacked?’

McGregor was getting bored now. His head was still sore and he wanted to go home to his bed. He hadn’t had anything to eat all day and the only liquid refreshment on offer was tea that he wouldn’t have foisted on a mass‐
murderer back down the road in Edinburgh. He’d used his phone call to ring Molly and ask her to come down and collect him, guessing he’d have explained his way out in a matter of minutes, but that had been reckoning without Sergeant Mutton‐
Molester.

Playing the dunderheid could sometimes be an effective interrogation technique: you pretended you didn’t quite understand, made yourself out to be slow on the uptake. it forced the suspect to repeat himself and get frustrated, and that’s when the inconsistencies started to come out. Unfortunately, as this particular interview wore on, it was becoming depressingly clear that Sergeant Mutton‐
Molester wasn’t pretending.

‘I was knocked unconscious, yes,’ McGregor said steadily, using his experience on the other side of the table to keep his emotions in check. ‘I’m assuming it was the arm that hit me, but I don’t think I’d call it an attack. It’s not as though the bloke had a lot of say over where his arm was going at the time.’

‘So you’re saying your assailant was out of control?’

‘No, I’m saying my “assailant” exploded.’

‘He exploded, yes, he exploded with
rage
and he attacked you. Set upon you in the woods when you were minding your own business. But you retaliated, didn’t you, Mr McGregor? You exacted terrible revenge.’

Oh for Christ’s sake.

When he’d first set eyes on his interrogator, McGregor pegged him for some young up‐
and‐
comer who’d be heading south for greater things once he’d cut his teeth in the sticks. However, a closer look at his coupon betrayed that the red hair and freckly chops had conspired to knock a deceptive few years off his appearance, and a few minutes of witnessing the numpty in action told McGregor that the bright lights of the big city would most definitely not be beckoning. In fact, if at any point in the past this tube had made it down to civilisation, there was little doubt he had been posted back north to sheep‐
shagging country to keep him the fuck out of the way of serious police work.

McGregor took another long, slow, deep breath.

‘Look, Sergeant, I’ve told you this three times now, and if you play the tape back you’ll see my story’s been entirely consistent—’

‘Ah, so you admit it’s a story. Now we’re getting somewhere. So why don’t you save us all a lot of time, forget about your
story
, and just tell us where the rest of the body is?’

McGregor leaned forward until his forehead touched the plastic table‐
top. Maybe if he went to sleep he’d wake up in his own bed. He helped himself to yet another long breath. The calming effect was diminishing every time.

‘I don’t know where the rest of the body is,’ he mumbled, his head still resting face‐
down on the table as he spoke. ‘And I really think you should start to address the issue of what caused it to disappear in the first place, especially as there’s ample evidence of some kind of firefight having taken place at the same locus. I mean, that to me would seem to be the most pressing matter, but then maybe I’m lacking the advantage of your detective skills.’

Sergeant Mutton‐
Molester slapped his hand down on the table‐
top, close to McGregor’s ear. In a saner parallel universe, McGregor throttled him to death for it. In this one he remained still and listened.

‘What you’re lacking, Mr McGregor,’ the eejit announced loudly, ‘is a plausible explanation for why you were apprehended in a hijacked vehicle with a severed arm in your possession, and why in your crazed desperation to evade capture, you contrived to wreck three police cars, injure four men and inflict fatal injuries upon a prize‐
winning and highly regarded local sheep.’

McGregor sent the bucket down the deep‐
breath well one more time. It hit the bottom with a dry clatter and came back empty.

Right.

He had been entirely cooperative, lucid, forthcoming, truthful and generally everything that suspects, in his vast experience, were dedicatedly not. He had, quite definitely, up to this point, done everything he could to help, and it had not proven rewarding. It was now his moral right to be a pain in the arse.

His head still resting face‐
down on the sweaty plastic, he began mentally composing the most lengthy, tediously elaborate, irritatingly detailed, thoroughly fib‐
filled and utterly outrageous statement it would ever be this half‐
wit’s misfortune to transcribe, at the end of which he would refuse to sign. It was only a matter of time before hard evidence intervened on his behalf, proving his original story true and forcing them to let him go, so he might as well keep himself amused.

However, at that point there was a knock at the door, and Sergeant Mutton‐
Molester was drawn outside for a brief conversation in the corridor. McGregor couldn’t make out much above mumbling, but the words ‘Lothian and Borders’ were definitely uttered, as were ‘decorated officer’. The words ‘your arse is oot the windae’ were not, but the import was clear from the sergeant’s failure to return and his replacement with a highly apologetic and obsequious more senior detective, DS McLeod, who’d just come on shift via the farm at Nether Kilbokie.

Fifteen minutes later, McGregor was being driven home in Molly’s Primera, powering back along the same road he’d travelled earlier but this time without airborne accompaniment. The polis were satisfied that his story about the explosion was true, having been out and checked the site themselves, but they still didn’t share his evaluation of the significance of the spent shell. Tomorrow, they would have people examining what had been found at the farm to try to determine what caused the explosion and – if possible – the identity of the fatality. However, they remained conspicuously unworried about the possibility of foul play.

There’d been much arse‐
kissing by DS McLeod regarding how long it had taken to confirm that McGregor was indeed who he claimed to be, and more regarding the scepticism shown in the interim. However, the patronising bastard had nonetheless let slip something about retired policemen occasionally having over‐
active imaginations. ‘I don’t think we need lose too much sleep over mad bombers, Mr McCregor,’ he’d offered glibly. ‘I mean, what could terrorists find to interest themselves around here?’

Smug prick.

Molly gunned the engine to climb Kilbokie brae, taking them above the liftings yard. As they came over the brow, that daft floating‐
hotel fiasco loomed enormously into view.

‘There you are, big man. Grab a pew. Whit you fur?’

‘Eh pint o’ heavy would be lovely, Eddie.’

‘Right you are. Two pints of heavy, please, Jim.’

‘Coming right up, sir.’

‘Grand.’

‘So, is this whit you’ve been dein’ wi’ yoursel’, Ed? Mighta known. Where’s the wife?’

‘She’s upstairs gettin’ the good frock an’ the warpaint on.’

‘Aye, Tina’s the same. I thought I’d best leave her tae it. She’s bad enough at the best o’ times, but she’s really gaun for it the night. Brought two dresses an’ she’s changed in an’ oot o’ baith o’ them aboot five times already, no’ sure which wan looks best. Of course, then she asks me. It’s wan o’ thae questions you can only get wrang, no matter whit you say. You say you like the blue wan, so she says does that mean you don’t like the black wan? And she’s no’ even
started
on the shoes yet. I had tae get oot. She’s up tae high doe, so she is. You know whit it’s like. Says she doesnae want tae show hersel’ up in front o’ aw these auld schoolmates.’

‘Bit late for that – look who she came wi.’

‘Aye, very good. Comin’ fae Man at Poundstretcher sittin’ there. How long have you been here, anyway?’

‘Ach, don’t look at me like that, Charlie. It’s a free bar, for fuck’s sake. You’ve got tae make the maist o’ these things. I’m just surprised you wurnae in here sooner.’

‘Aye, well, Tina wanted tae see roon the place, so we took the wee tour. Were you no’ curious for a wee swatch yoursel’?’

‘You kiddin’? I mean, I know they’ve spent a lot o’ money buildin’ this place an’ aw that, but I find it hard tae believe they’ve installed anythin’ on it that could possibly be mair of an attraction than Jim, there.’

‘How’s that, then?’

‘He pours you drinks an’ he doesnae ask you for money.’

‘Better than Disneyland, then, Eddie, eh?’

‘Sure is.’

‘There you are, gentlemen. Two pints of heavy. That will be … nothing whatsoever.’

‘Ooooh, I just never get sick o’ hearin’ that wan. Keep the change, pal.’

‘Thank you, sir, most generous of you.’

‘Cheers, Eddie.’

‘Cheers, big man.’

‘So, have you been in here yoursel’ the whole time? Just you an’ your new best pal here?’

‘Naw, there’s been a few familiar faces drifted in an’ oot. Kenny Collins, of course. He was here for aboot hauf an ’oor, dunn’ which, bless me, Father, I must confess for the first time in my life I began to have doubts aboot the merits o’ free drink.’

‘So how’s he no’ here noo? Cannae see Kenny poppin’ in for a quick Dry Martini then poppin’ back oot.’

‘There’s two bars in the hotel, thank fuck. Somebody tell’t him you could get snacks at the other yin. Oh, which reminds me. You’ll never guess who
did
pop in for a quick wan. Matt Black!’