Sabbathman (53 page)

Kingdom was staring at the screen, oblivious to the American sitting beside him. The student had been asking Kingdom about the other murders. He’d only flown in the previous week. What had been happening? Who’d been killed? Kingdom ignored the questions. The A1, he thought. The B627 something. And the name of the village, the little place they’d shown, the name stripped across the top of the general stores. Muker. He was sure of it. Muker.

Kingdom walked at least a mile before he stopped to use the mobile phone. He followed the track inland from the house, doing his best to skirt the deeper puddles. The wind was rising again, and thin cloud veiled a crescent moon, but as his eyes became used to the darkness he could make out the line of the track, winding up through the heather, and the blacker mass of the mountains on either side. From time to time, a lone sheep would emerge from the shadows, clattering away over the loose scree at the foot of the steeper slopes, and once he disturbed a bird of some kind, something big and awkward that flapped away into the night. At first it was cold, the wind eddying down the valley, but he was moving quickly, and by the time he stopped to make the phone call he was beginning to sweat.

He crouched in the lee of an outcrop of rock, punching in the numbers Allder had given him, hoping the phone would work.
Allder should be home by now. He’d been booked on the late afternoon flight from Inverness.

The number began to ring and then a faint voice, barely audible.

‘Sir?’

‘Kingdom? That you?’

Kingdom smiled, fighting the urge to whisper, hearing Allder bellowing into the phone. He had some news from Rob Scarman. He’d been monitoring calls from the phone box on Shanklin sea-front. Ethne Feasey had been talking to
An Carraig
that very morning, and Gifford had arranged for her to travel up to Skye. According to Scarman, she was due to arrive some time Thursday.

Allder paused. ‘Will you be through by then? Only she’s seen you, hasn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what do you think?’

Kingdom had settled on his haunches, his back against the rock. It was getting colder by the minute. ‘What about the rest of those transcripts?’ he asked, changing the subject.

‘What transcripts?’

‘The ones on the seafront number. The one Feasey’s been using.’ He paused. ‘We need to know who ordered the tap. And what she’s been saying.’

‘I know. It’s in hand.’

‘Yeah, but when? When do we get to know?’

Allder grunted something about procedures. Gower Street, as ever, were being difficult. As were the supervisors at the BT intercept centre. Kingdom waited until he’d finished. High up to his right, away in the distance, was a light. He peered at it, trying to decide whether it was moving or not. After a while, he decided it wasn’t. He bent to the phone. Allder had finished.

‘There’s a solicitor friend of mine,’ Kingdom said.

‘What?’

‘A solicitor. Out Ilford way. His name’s Charlie Truman.’ Kingdom spelled the name and repeated the phone number twice. ‘Give him a ring, sir. Tomorrow. First thing. He’ll be expecting your call. I’ll have been in touch.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s got a cassette of mine, an audio tape. I sent it yesterday, first class, from London. Get the cassette off him and listen to it. Then give it to the bloke who used to be in charge of “T” Branch. The one they just elbowed. The one you mentioned.’

‘Wren?’ Six hundred miles away, Allder sounded lost.

Kingdom permitted himself a grim smile. ‘That’s him. Jenny Wren. He used to be Annie’s boss. He liked her. At least, that’s the impression I got.’

‘So what?’

‘Just listen to the tape. Then you’ll understand.’

‘Yes, but why Wren? Why send it to Wren?’

‘Because he’s now in charge of Five’s intercepts people. It’s a kind of Gulag. The place they send the has-beens.’ He paused. ‘If he listens to the tape, I’m sure he’ll oblige.’

‘With what?’

Kingdom frowned, wondering whether Allder had been at the Scotch again. Maybe he’s taken a bottle or two home, he thought. One of those special malts. All the way from Inverness airport. The phone transcripts,’ he said patiently, ‘the Feasey transcripts. What she and Dave Gifford have been up to. How much she knew and how much the customer knew …’ He paused again. ‘Wren will be able to access all that. He’ll know.’

There was silence on the line for a moment or two, then a new note in Allder’s voice. He understands, thought Kingdom. At last he’s beginning to put it together.

‘This cassette,’ Allder was saying, ‘where did you get hold of it?’

‘Three-one-eight Queen’s Gate Gardens. Flat two. That’s the other thing. You should organise a visit. Soon as you can.’

‘You mean a warrant?’

‘No, sir. A visit. A Black and Decker job. If you do the place tomorrow, what we’re after might still be there. It’ll save us a lot of grief on the Willoughby Grant hit, believe me.’

‘What are we looking for?’

‘Anything. Maps. Petrol receipts, A weapon, maybe. Who knows?’

Allder began to ask for a name, the person who owned the flat,
but Kingdom cut across him, repeating the address, then changing the subject.

‘Andy Gifford,’ he said.

‘What about him?’

‘He’s here.’

‘Back already?’

‘No, sir, he never left. He’s been here all weekend. And so has his father.’

‘What?’

Kingdom held the phone at arm’s length a moment, hearing Allder demanding to know more. Then he switched the power off and slipped the mobile into his pocket. High above, suspended in the darkness, the light shone on.

It was Andy Gifford who woke up Kingdom in the bunkhouse next morning. He stood by the bed, his face at the level of Kingdom’s pillow. Kingdom could smell the tang of the peat on his clothes. Something was steaming in the mug he held up.

‘Tea,’ he grinned, ‘two sugars. Breakfast in the house when you’re ready.’

Kingdom drank the tea then struggled out of bed. When he tried the shower, nothing happened so he made do with a cold-water wash in one of the row of basins. The American student who’d been sleeping in the bunk below had already disappeared, his paisley pyjamas neatly folded on his pillow. Kingdom began to dress, pulling on the heavy socks he’d bought at Millets, remembering Andy Gifford standing beside the bunk. Five-foot seven, five-foot eight, he thought. Exactly the height Clare Baxter had described.

Breakfast was served in the Giffords’ kitchen. The room ran the width of the house at the back and was obviously a recent extension. There was an enormous cooking range, fuelled by bottled gas, and a couple of tall fridge-freezers. On a pin board beside the back door was a sheaf of bills from a cash-and-carry in Portree and a washing-up rota dating back to the early summer. Kingdom sat at the long deal table while Andy Gifford served eggs and bacon and nuggets of fried potato from a sizzling pan. There was fresh mud on his boots and Gifford wondered how long he’d been up.

Kingdom was demolishing the last of the fried potatoes when Dave Gifford appeared. He was wearing a dressing-gown over his
T-shirt and there was a comma of shaving foam under his chin. He had an envelope in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. He passed the paper across the table towards Andy, ignoring Kingdom.

‘What d’you think?’ he said.

Kingdom watched as Andy abandoned the coffee pot and picked up the paper. Under a colour photo of an ocean-going yacht, there was a list of specifications. He read them quickly and then returned the paper to his father.

‘Not a lot,’ he said, ‘for ninety grand.’

Dave Gifford peered at the photo again and then shrugged. ‘Looks alright to me,’ he said, folding the details into the envelope and leaving the room.

Kingdom and Andy Gifford set off for Sgurr Fasach about an hour later. They both carried light day sacks with sandwiches, chocolate and flasks of hot soup, and as they made their way inland Kingdom tried to identify the rock where he’d sheltered to make the phone call the previous night. Twice he thought he’d found it and both times he looked up, trying to locate a source for the light he’d seen. On both occasions, though, there was nothing except the browns and purples of the mountainside, dimpled with grey rocks.

At first they walked in silence, Andy in the lead. It was a soft, moist day, not a whisper of wind, the ground soggy underfoot. After a couple of miles, the path divided and Andy paused while Kingdom caught him up. From here on, he said, the going got tougher. Soon, they’d begin to climb. The trick was to find a rhythm. There were no records to break, no prizes to claim. Just getting to the top and back would, he said, be ample reward.

Kingdom listened to him, aware of the warmth in the man, his obvious love of this bare, bleak wilderness, trying to reconcile it with the voice he’d heard in the book he’d read on the plane.
Enemy Territory
had been full of bewilderment, and pain, and anger, and he’d assumed at the time that the Falklands themselves had played a part in all this: the numbing cold he’d described, the endless slog over tussock and bog, the incessant wind and rain, the hints of malevolence in the terrain and the climate. That judgment, though, had been plainly wrong. The west coast of Scotland was
almost identical to the Falklands: treeless, windswept, sub-Arctic. Yet here he was, pushing steadily uphill, pointing out the names of the surrounding peaks, giving each a character. One was ‘a pain’, another ‘a kitten’, a third ‘needed watching’, a fourth you’d ‘lie down and die for’.

The latter phrase brought a smile to Kingdom’s lips. They were halfway up the first serious ascent, the air appreciably colder,
An Carraig
a small white dot a thousand feet below.

‘So why go?’ Kingdom asked between breaths. ‘Why leave all this?’

Andy glanced back over his shoulder. He was still in the lead but only by a yard or so. ‘The old man,’ he said, ‘it’s for him really.’

‘Why?’ Kingdom said again. ‘What’s gone wrong?’

‘Everything, more or less. The business has been OK, that’s held up, but everything else has … I dunno … gone.’

‘Like what?’

Andy looked round again, not answering. Then he stopped and slipped off the day-bag. A thin, fine drizzle had begun to drift in from the sea, almost a mist, and droplets of moisture clung to his face. Andy wiped his nose, then unscrewed the top of the Thermos, and for the first time Kingdom saw the tiny blue eagle tattooed on the back of his right hand. Gloves, he thought. The man had always worn gloves.

‘My mum died,’ Andy was saying, ‘that was the start of it. They’d been close, really close, as long as I can remember. She’d never liked it up here, in fact she hated it, but she never once let on and he loved her for that. That was loyalty, you see. And loyalty meant everything to Dave. He thought the world of her.’

‘Because she was loyal?’

‘Yeah. And because she didn’t winge. Ever.’

He found a seat on a rock and poured a cupful of soup, offering it to Kingdom. Kingdom took it, thinking suddenly of Ernie and his own mother. Same relationship, he thought. Same unquestioning devotion. Andy was watching him now, openly curious about his interest, and Kingdom told him about his own father, what had happened to Ernie over the last few months, how much he’d changed. By the time he’d got to the end of the story, the soup was nearly cold.

‘Shit,’ Kingdom said, offering the cup back to Andy. ‘I’m sorry.’

Andy took the cup and added more from the Thermos. Then he nodded down towards the beach and the tiny collection of huts. ‘Same with Dave,’ he said. ‘He’s a bit younger, I know, but it’s like he’s caught some disease or other. Building that place, the pair of them, he was happy as Larry. And that made mum happy, of course. That’s the way it worked. What she really felt about the weather and all the stuff there was to do didn’t matter. As long as Dave was Dave. That’s why she’d married him. The spirit of the man. I used to come up here sometimes, seven, eight years back, and the place would be chaos. Huts half-built, timber everywhere, no proper sanitation, people shitting in holes in the ground, nothing to eat but porridge and toast, but Dave was in his element. There was nothing could stop him. Nothing. He’d been in the service, the Marines, you probably guessed that already, and that whole thing up here was like one long exercise, the toughest anyone could ever throw at you, positively the worst.’

‘And Dave?’

‘Like I say. Loved it.’

‘And your mum?’

‘Killed her. In the end.’

‘You serious?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded, his eyes still on
An Carraig
, the little white house by the sea. ‘I’ve been up and down here a lot the last couple of years. The place was humming, really busy. Dave had cracked it. They both had. But it was daft, too, and stupid. Because they ended up with the one thing that Dave couldn’t handle.’

‘What was that?’

‘Success. You know the old story?’ He glanced across at Kingdom. ‘The day the goose lays the golden egg is the day you discover you can’t stand omelettes. That’s exactly how it was with Dave. The business just grew and grew. The place was bursting. People were arriving from all over and it just got on Dave’s tits. It was like trespass. Sartre’s line. Hell is other people. He used to call them aliens, the monsters from outer space. He couldn’t stand it, any of it. Drove him nuts.’

Kingdom nodded, taking the cup again, swallowing another
mouthful of hot soup. The Planet Zilch, he thought. Like father, like son.

‘But that’s why he’d built the place to begin with,’ he pointed out. ‘To get people up here. To make money.’

‘Yeah. I know. But he couldn’t handle it. Not when it worked so well.’ He paused, flaking dried mud off the tops of his boots. ‘I suppose you’d call it irony. Isn’t that the word?’

He looked up and Kingdom nodded, finishing the soup.

‘And your mum?’ he said at last. ‘What happened to her?’

‘She got sick. About this time last year. She always suffered when the winter set in, colds and flu and so on, so Dave just put her to bed, thought nothing of it. The place was a factory by then. We were turning over twenty, twenty-five people a week, like I said in the van. Dave was worked off his feet, just keeping it all on the road.’