The long knives, p.30
The Long Knives, page 30
It’s done.
It’s over.
They have an all-points bulletin out on Vikram Rawat and they’ll find him.
He thinks of Hollis and craves a line of ching. Only the arrival of McCorkel, who enters with Inglis, stops him smashing one back. He’s no intention of introducing a fresh young cop to cocaine in the same way a former senior partner did with him.
Now he has to get back to the cottage to bring Fraser home to Jackie. He will fight the power and slip away quietly out the side door, without saying goodbye to his colleagues. He’s had too much to drive, but still being a cop has its advantages and he drives better drunk. Idly elated about escaping undetected, he surveys the murky streets, doubling back to Fettes car park for the Alfa Romeo.
The bone-searing cold of autumn cuts through his layers, biting away at his flesh. Fortunately, it’s dry and windless, so the purgatory is lessened as he walks with purpose through Stockbridge. Lennox moves on, as dampness starts to roll in from the sea. A clinging, consumptive mist insinuates in the air. The cold seems to have set up home in his back’s nerve endings, causing him to hunch his shoulders. When he gets to the car, he calls Drummond. She still isn’t picking up. — Congratulations …
Drives out the city, back to the cottage. On approach, the whitewashed building seems ominously inert, dark clouds above it. A sinister, overwhelming feeling of despair grips him as he pushes open the unlocked door.
Inside the place is wrecked. There’s no sign of Fraser, only evidence that he struggled. No blood. Fraser fought, but he was taken.
Lennox goes back outside and his heart sinks further as he sees tyre marks stretching to the top of the road.
Rawat … he tracked you right here … he was waiting at Chancelot Mill … was watching the flat …
You have fucked up monumentally. You need to find him. It’s the laptop he was after …
Lennox runs back in. Sally’s laptop, like Fraser, has gone.
Just as he thinks this, the phone indicates a message from: Fraser. Lennox’s blood runs cold. Knows it’s not from his nephew. It’s a video. It shows Fraser in a dark space, lit by torchlight. His arm is secured to a wooden workbench. There’s a rasping buzz, and a power saw is held up to shot. An educated off-camera voice says: — Your nephew is about to lose a hand. You should be here to witness it. You do not have much time, DI Lennox.
He gets back in the car, tearing towards the city at high speed. Drummond calls, and he puts her on speakerphone.
— I should thank you, she gracelessly says, then after a short hesitation, — That was quite a performance from you and Dougie. I’m pleased to be recognised, and I’m looking forward to working with Robbie Sives, but I don’t like being handed things on a plate.
Why the fuck did you leave the little bastard? Rawat has been trailing you. He’s been one jump ahead all the way …
— You’re the best person for the job, Amanda, he responds mechanically. — If the department’s gaunny modernise, it needs people like you.
— But it needs people like you too, Ray. What were you thinking, walking out like that? What will you do?
You will exhale that breath you’ve been holding on to for years … it’s a tunnel … it’s the Colinton Tunnel … but there’s nothing there like that now, it’s all bright art …
— Honestly can’t say.
Fraser. We’ll go to Tynecastle again, pal.
A silence on the speaker is followed by, — Look, Ray, about the other night, it’s best if you don’t phone me on matters that have nothing to do with work … She stalls, then adds assertively, — You and I … that was a mistake.
Mistake? No, Ray Lennox makes mistakes. Big mistakes. Amanda Drummond makes petty errors. She’s the best person not just for this job, but for this life.
— Whatever you say. I’ll be out with almost immediate effect as I have leave due me.
Rawat … where the fuck … the darkness … the last place you want to be …
— Ray …
— So not only will we never sleep together again, we’ll never work together again, he says with a dramatic pause, making him feel disconcertingly like Stuart. — That should save a ton of social embarrassment.
Jackie … you promised her you’d bring him back … what the fuck were you thinking? You had him with you. YOU FUCKING HAD HIM WITH YOU.
— Oh, please! Don’t try to make your resignation out to be about what happened between us. You don’t even believe that yourself … and she’s babbling on but Lennox can’t hear her as he’s scythed by an invasive thought:
IT’S NOT THE COLINTON TUNNEL!
His run several days back, before Toal called about Gulliver’s body being found in the warehouse. How he told Sally he couldn’t go through the long tunnel under Arthur’s Seat.
The Innocent Tunnel.
He slams the call off, searching the tunnel on his smartphone. It’s been blocked off at both ends for two days. Repairs on some subsidence. What is inside?
47
I look at the young man with a certain degree of pity. His bulging eyes, full of fear above the tight gag I have placed over his mouth. I switch on the camera, which stands on its tripod. Your heart has to be cold to do this. I’m concerned that now, religious zeal aside, there is little to differentiate me from Cousin Bette. But that’s the power of the monster: to contaminate. I think back to that ridiculous figure, contemplating the childhood of beatings, humiliation and abuse Bette must have undergone, in order to come out like that.
But this young man will survive, as I did. Who knows what this will do to him? It will certainly give him something to hang every subsequent problem he has in his life on. What a gift I now bestow! For, perhaps strangely, I have no regrets about my own existence. It passed in a sequence of disasters when my parents were murdered and then Roya was raped and took her own life. It may be that he, too, will now lead a more interesting one as a result of this amputation.
It’s Lennox who will carry the real pain. He’s too sensitive to be efficient at enforcing the silly laws of a disintegrating order. Now his nephew will pay for his inability to understand this.
And as there’s nobody else to bear witness, the youth has to listen to my story.
— Sorry about the gag, I explain, — but what you have to say has no relevance. I’m the one with the power, and you are silenced.
The boy’s pupils widen. He seems to get it.
— I became a biographer, working exclusively with people I didn’t like. Mainly the ones who had the knowledge of others I liked even less. A gangster named Lake told me he outsourced many of his operations, using people who wouldn’t ordinarily be traced back to him. But all the idiot was doing was furnishing me with his network of associates, whom I could then manipulate. I learned that a specimen called Toby Wallingham provided rich sex abusers like Christopher Piggot-Wilkins with his victims. So I decided to use Wallingham to engineer a conflict between Piggot-Wilkins and Lake. To stand aside and watch Lake destroy him, then go to prison for this … But I’m sorry, I look at the bemused eyes of the young man, — these names mean nothing to you. Nor should they … I turn to the blinking red light above the cold camera eye, — But this, as I said, is not for you.
— But Sally Hart … and a subverting convulsion bubbles up inside my chest, — she convinced me we had to destroy Piggot-Wilkins ourselves. That my way was too cold-blooded. We had to drink their fear. So while the original plan was superfluous, all its elements remained in place. In one of his many unguarded moments, Lake boasted about the Met source that helped him ‘get rid of beasts’. I investigated further, finding out that this was a DI Mark Hollis. I thought it might be amusing to have him unwittingly pulp his partner, through the obnoxious Wallingham. It’s easy to divide the confused, the demoralised and those blinded by their own sense of narcissistic entitlement. All just mischief really. It’s so strange but what you learn about those men who wield power and randomly destroy our lives is that they’re just stupid, bored and unsatisfied. It’s the human condition …
The boy’s eyes seem to bulge further. His face is red. The gag must be choking him. But it will be removed when Lennox enters the tunnel, in order to hear his nephew scream out.
— And you are welcome to it. Minus your hand, unfortunately.
48
He can scarcely feel the shivers now, in the heat of his car. The sense that he is doing this on his own flows through him. It always feels better that way, like in Miami. To be unleashed, unconstrained. The hangover will kick in soon enough. It will be bundled with the dread that he is acting outside of the authority of a state that never responds well to those who fail to recognise its monopoly of violence. But right now, all Ray Lennox is aware of is the metal taste of vengeance in his mouth. His pumping lungs. His heart beating. Just another one in the billions around this planet. Like all of them, his will, at some point, come to its last beat. His body will atrophy and decay. Until then he can think of nothing better to do than this.
The Alfa Romeo carrying him through the city. Oddly like part of him. A force. The engine almost silent.
Fuck the polis.
He stops at the Repair Shop. It’s empty. The boys – his (former) colleagues – are still in the Stockbridge pub. Orders a double Macallan, knocks it back, asks for another and heads to the toilet where he blasts a line of ching. Pulls a marker pen from his pocket. Writes on the wall:
ACAB
LENNY
BAR-OX
HMFC
Laughs manically at his work.
See what the cunts make ay that!
He’s had his Dutch courage; he heads to the place of dread. Walks through the mundane development of flats in the gloomy sprinkle. It lies ahead, dark, menacing and incongruous. A chill under his skin; it twists in a spasm down his back. Thinks of how it might seem to a child growing up in such housing, like a portal to a darker, more mysterious world.
Now it’s sealed. The bollards and the mesh fencing evident on his last abortive visit have been deployed to cordon the tunnel off. Just on the other side of the barrier, scaffolding pokes into its darkness. He tentatively patrols the sealed mouth, looks at where he might gain access. A door in the mesh fence; padlocked. But in between the edge of the barricade and the wall of the tunnel, a space where the fence post is squeezed into a concrete base. He can slide through the gap; not that easily, but it can be done.
Yet he hesitates.
His heart is booming. The pressure in his ears. The oxygen in his lungs losing its richness. He looks back around the flats. They are completely silent. Only one car parked outside them.
He thinks of Fraser.
Steps inside. As he pushes himself through the gap, he feels his nose and testicles squeezed tight. Thinks of Gulliver and Erskine as he forces them through.
Inside it’s dark; the tunnel’s overhead lights are switched off. Lennox can do nothing but walk into the black void. After only a few steps the various dark shadows he can discern melt into a formless mass. The air is thin. His heart thumps and his skin creeps. He can see nothing in front of him. Feels he might stumble. Turns his head back, just as his momentum carries him another step forward, compelling him to witness the meagre light behind him fade to pitch-black. Is it possible to witness total blackness?
Lennox senses the tunnel and its darkness have swallowed him up. Part of him wants to run, retreat, call for help, try to gain access from the other end, in the park. But no. He needs to be here. And not just for Fraser.
Carries on into the abyss. Reaches for the phone in his pocket. Operates the torch function. A shaking in his legs.
Fight through it. There are no monsters. You arnae a wee laddie.
Slips off his Hugo Boss jacket, opting for the kickboxer’s mobility. As he tosses it sideways into the darkness, a scuttling sound, and a voice suddenly booms out from behind him, — You don’t like tunnels, do you?
Lennox whips round. Nothing but blackness. The voice seems to be coming from his right. He roars at the source, — WHERE IS HE?!
— Bad things happen to little boys who go into tunnels. You know this, Ray Lennox.
— Where’s my fuckin nephew, ya cunt?!
The response is a brief glint of metal in the paltry light from Lennox’s phone, before it makes heavy contact with his face, snapping his neck back.
He raises his hand as it again swings his way but he can’t deflect it and feels it smash into his jaw as his iPhone flies away. The third strike he does parry, but it’s the worst of them all, deadening his arm, which falls helplessly by his side. A sickening pain assails him and Lennox can do nothing, the contents of his stomach exploding from him in the dank air. Ironically this causes his assailant some distress, as his foe lets out a curse, and Ray Lennox senses him taking a backward step, to avoid the splash of vomit. Then he rushes forward and another blow strikes the detective, who feels the ground rising to meet him in the darkness. Then a great force is on him, pinning him down. In the light of his dropped phone, all he can see of the form sitting on him are white teeth and a huge brass hand, poised to strike.
It’s all over. He’s finished. The pain will end where it all started: in another dark tunnel in this ancient city.
Then, to his surprise the man hesitates. He seems to be jolting and jerking … his muscles spasming as he suddenly falls on Lennox and holds him tightly. Two large eyes pop out of the darkness at him, and Ray Lennox flashes back to his ten-year-old self in the tunnel, the one who avoided the fate of Les Brodie, which he now seems set to experience as a man, too weak to fight off this rapist, both men locked together in a bizarre St Vitus’s dance. But there’s something wrong with the man on top of him, it’s like an invasive current is burning through his body, coiling it. His grip on Lennox tightens, that metal hand digging into his back, then it relaxes, as his nerve ends are fried, and his opponent’s mass slumps over Ray Lennox.
Lennox feels an arm grabbing his, pulling his panicking frame out from underneath the stricken man. He looks up to see Brian Harkness, lit by his phone torch, yanking him to freedom, before giving the stunned, prone body another blast of the taser gun he operates with his other arm. — Saw you coming out the pub … didn’t like your body lingo, so follayed ye here …
— Brian … thanks … is as much as Lennox can manage, as he sees the taser threads like spiderwebs glimmer under the light of the phone, which he picks up to retrieve. Harkness, mindful of the brass hand, cuffs the grounded figure alongside him above the elbows.
They find Fraser almost immediately, on what looks and smells like a piss-stained mattress. Bound with plastic ties and almost choking on a ball-gag, his arm is secured to a wooden bench. Lennox traces the torch beam along … to a stump.
OH FUCK NAW …
The boy’s hand has gone.
But no, it’s an illusion, and as the beetle-eyed Lennox shines the torch closer, he sees his discarded jacket has landed over the bench, covering Fraser’s hand. He pulls it away to find it still intact. The boy has severe bruising on one side of his face. As Lennox removes the gag and Harkness cuts the constraints, Fraser gaspingly intones, — I told him nothing, Uncle Ray …
Harkness gets the meaning of Lennox’s glance and goes over to the stricken Rawat, leaving Lennox to whisper, — Are you okay?
— Yes. He didn’t get it, and Fraser drops his voice out of Brian Harkness’s earshot. — You know, what he was after. It’s at Condor’s place. He turned the cottage upside down, but he never checked Condor’s kennel. I told him you had locked it in your desk at police headquarters.
— He didn’t see it … ah didnae see it, Lennox gasps in disbelief.
How did you last so long as a detective … and how the fuck did that cunt as a reporter …?
— I heard him coming in through the front door so I ran out the back and put it in the kennel, under the blanket. Then I went back round to confront him, but he has this metal hand and he’s a big guy, Fraser says in his Merchant School tones. — I tried to give a decent account of myself, but he was too strong.
— You’re a fucking hard-arsed little bastard. He holds Fraser by his shoulders and looks him in the eye. — Whatever you choose to designate yourself, you’re a top human being. That’s what I’ll always think of you, that’s who you are, and he embraces his nephew. — I’ll bet you lasted longer against him than I did.
Suddenly an all-too-familiar voice roars out of the darkness, — WE FARKING WELL GOT IT FROM HERE!
A flashlight, and Billy Lake’s big square head appears. Lennox feels a crushing dread insinuate, as he steps in front of Fraser. Harkness stands up, pulls out police ID.
Then Hollis appears behind Lake, also carrying a torch. The apology in his eyes seems to Lennox like penitence. Now he’s really worried.
Billy Lake seemed to exist in a perma-state of steroid rage. Now it has reached a new high. Lennox wonders how long Lake can live at this intensity, before he takes himself out by popping some vein or artery. Even under the poor lighting, his face is as if a few layers of skin have been torn from it and his eyes shine like demented beacons of Hades. Only his voice is incongruously calm, as he gapes at Rawat. — He’s mine.
Lennox looks from him to Hollis, who explains, — Tracked you on the blower, Ray.
Out of his peripheral vision, the cartilage in Brian Harkness’s neck bobbles. The Serious Crimes DS flashes the ID. — Police …
Ray Lennox knows only one thing: he needs Fraser to be out of here. Whatever happens next, he doesn’t want him, or for that matter even Harkness, further embroiled in this. — No, Brian, Lennox says without looking at the cop, — I’ll sort this. Take Fraser here back to his family, right now. He turns to face Harkness. — Will you do that for me?
Harkness’s Adam’s apple seems to have grown to the extent that it might choke its owner to death. — You sure, Ray?
— Yes. Do it.
