Complicity

CHAPTER 10 — CARSE OF SPELD

I run down the hill, into the sunlit glen and then up the far side, with Andy crashing through the bushes, heather and ferns behind me. I shake my hand free of most of his semen and deliberately let my hand brush across the leaves and blades as I dash past, wiping the rest off. I'm laughing. Andy's laughing too, but shouting threats and insults as well.

I run up the hill, seeing movement ahead and assuming it's a bird or a rabbit or something, and almost run straight into a man.

I stop. I can still hear Andy pumping up the hill behind me, tearing through the bushes and yelling curses.

The man is dressed in walking boots, brown cords and a shirt and green hiking jacket. He wears a brown rucksack on his back. He has red hair and he looks furious.

"What do you boys think you were doing?"

"What? Eh? Ah…?" I say, looking back to see Andy coming up the hill behind me, suddenly slowing and looking wary as he sees the man.

"You!" the man shouts at Andy. His voice makes me jump. I hide my sticky hand behind me, as if it's brightly stained. "What were you doing there with this boy, eh? What were you doing?" he shouts, looking around. He puts his thumbs between the shoulder straps of his rucksack and his jacket and sticks his chest and chin out. "Come on! What d'you think you were doing, eh? Answer me, boy!"

"None of your business," Andy says, but his voice is shaky. I can smell something funny. I worry that it's coming from my sticky hand and I'm frightened that the man will smell it.

"Don't you talk to me like that, boy!" the man yells, glancing round again. He spits as he shouts.

"You've got no right being here," Andy says, sounding frightened. "This is private property."

"Oh, is it?" the man says. "Private property, is it? And that gives you the right to do dirty, perverted things, does it?"

"We-"

"Shut it, laddie." The man takes a step forward, looking over my head at Andy. The man's so close I could touch him. I get that smell even stronger. Oh God, he's bound to smell it now. I feel myself trying to shrink, cowering. The man thumps himself in the chest with one finger. "Well, let me tell you something, sonny," he tells Andy. "I'm a policeman." He nods, drawing back and upright again. "Aye," he says, eyes narrowing. "You may well look frightened, boy, because you're in deep bloody trouble."

He looks down at me. "Right; this way, come on!"

He takes a step away. I'm trembling, rooted to the spot. I glance back to see Andy looking uncertain. The man grabs my arm and pulls me. "I said come on, boy!"

He drags me after him through the woods. I start crying and try to break away, struggling weakly.

"Please, mister, we weren't doing anything!" I wail. "We weren't doing anything! Honest! We weren't doing anything, honest we weren't! Please! Please let us go, please; please let us go, we won't do it again, honest; please, please, please…"

I look back through my tears at Andy, who's following, looking desperate and uncertain, biting on one knuckle as he follows us through the bushes.

We're near the summit of the hill, deep in the bushes under the thin cover of trees; the smell is very strong and my knees feel like the bones are gone. If I wasn't being held up by the man's gripping hand hauling me through the ferns I feel like I'd fall down.

"Leave him!" Andy shouts, and I think he's going to burst into tears like me. He seemed so old a few minutes ago and now he's like a little kid again.

The man stops, whirls me round and holds me against his chest. He feels very warm behind me and the smell is even stronger.

Andy comes to within a couple of yards.

"Come here!" the man shouts. I can see spittle arc out from above me as he shouts. Andy looks from him down to me; I can see his jaw trembling.

"Come here!" the man screeches. Andy comes forward a couple of feet. "Take off those trousers!" he hisses at Andy. "Go on; I saw you! I saw what you were doing! Take off those trousers!"

Andy shakes his head, backing off.

I start to sob.

The man shakes me. "Right!" he says. He leans over me, puts his big fingers to the zip of my jeans and starts trying to pull the zip down. I'm struggling and howling but I can't get free. The smell is all around me; it's him; it's his sweat, his smell.

"Leave him, you bastard!" Andy shouts. "You're not a policeman!" I can't see what Andy's doing because the man's body is in the way, but then Andy hits into him, bowling him backwards and he shouts and I wriggle away from them; I scramble off through the ferns on all fours and then stop and look back and the man's got Andy, he's struggling with him, leaning over him, folding him, pressing him down, and Andy's breathing hard, grunting, trying to break free. "Bastard! Leave me alone! You're not a policeman! You're not a policeman!"

The man doesn't say anything; he pushes Andy down into the ferns, and gets a hand free and punches Andy in the face. Andy goes limp but then moves weakly; the man is breathing very hard and when he looks at me his eyes are wide and staring. "You!" he gasps. "You; just stay there! Stay there, d'you hear?"

I'm shaking so hard I can hardly see straight. Tears fill my eyes.

The man pulls Andy's trousers down; I can see Andy looking round groggily. His gaze fastens on me.

"Help," he croaks. "Cameron… help…"

"Cameron, is it?" the man says, glancing at me and pulling down his own trousers. "Well, you just stay there, Cameron; you just stay there, right?"

I shake my head and back off.

"Cameron!" Andy wails; the man is struggling with his underpants as Andy tries to get out from under him. I'm stumbling backwards, almost falling; I have to turn to stop myself tripping and the turn becomes a run and I can't stop myself, I just have to escape; I race away through the woods, tears burning on my face, sobbing hysterically, the breath whistling and whooping in and out of me, hot and desperate and livid in my throat; ferns whip at my legs and branches lash at my face.

I gave McDunn the two names last night and told him the respective professions of their owners, then clammed up, just refused to say any more about them or about the body. There was a lot of tooth-sucking for a while as he tried to get me to say more and that was almost funny, given that it was the tooth-sucking that made me think of it in the first place, suddenly thinking. The dentist! Recalling going into Kyle, while I was at Stromefirry-nofirry, and remembering that nightmare vision of the burned-black man after the blevey — Sir Rufus with his black bones, black nails, black wood and his black jaw hinged back and very much a dental-records job — and thinking, How did they identify Andy?

The names worked even better than I expected. I can see a way out now. I feel like Judas, but there's a way out; not with any honour, perhaps, but I've looked at myself pretty closely over the last few days and I've had to admit to myself that I'm not quite as wonderful a guy as I liked to think I was.

I've imagined myself in situations like this, made up speeches in my head, speeches about truth and freedom and protection of sources, speeches I imagined delivering from the witness box just before the judge sentenced me to ninety days or six months or whatever for contempt of court, but I was kidding myself. Even if it's true that I would have gone to prison to protect somebody else or make some dubious point about the freedom of the press, I know I'd only have been doing it to make myself look good. I'm just like everybody else: selfish. I can see a way out and I'm taking it, and the fact it's a kind of betrayal doesn't really matter.

Besides, I'm paying for the betrayal by telling them about the body. By itself it doesn't prove a thing, but it's my way of getting them to take me to Strathspeld for the funeral; I can look McDunn in the eye and tell him the truth and he knows it's the truth and he'll take me. I think.

And, perhaps, with this act of treachery I can finally buy my freedom from the burden of buried horror that bound me to Andy twenty years ago, so that — dispossessed of that trespass — I'm left free to betray him again, now.

McDunn's in very early this morning; we're here in the same old interview room. The place is familiar, becoming home, taking on a tinge of spurious cosiness. McDunn's standing behind the table, smoking. He waves me to sit in the chair and I do, yawning. I actually slept fairly well last night, for the first time since I got here.

"They've both disappeared," McDunn says. He's staring at the table. He draws on the B&H. I'd quite like a cigarette, too, even though it's still early and I've barely got over the morning cough but McDunn seems to have forgotten his manners.

"Halziel and Lingary," he says, staring at me, and he looks really concerned, worried and harried and tired for the first time; yes, it's all change here in Paddington Green. "They've both disappeared," the DI tells me, sounding shaken. "Lingary just yesterday, Doctor Halziel three days ago."

He pulls the seat back and sits in it. "Cameron," he says. "What body?"

I shake my head. "Take me there."

McDunn sucks his teeth and looks away.

I just sit there. I feel in control at last. I suppose in theory I could be lying through my teeth and have some other reason for wanting to go to Strathspeld — maybe I'm just getting homesick for Scotland — but I'm certain he knows that I'm not lying and that there is a body; I think he can see it in my eyes.

McDunn breathes hard, then glares at me. "You do know, don't you? You know who it is." He sucks on his teeth. "Is it who I think it is?"

I nod. "Yes, it's Andy."

McDunn nods grimly. He frowns. "So who was it in the hotel? There's been nobody reported missing up there."

There will be," I tell him. "Guy called Howie… I can't remember his second name; begins with a G. He was supposed to leave for Aberdeen the day I left, to start some job on the rigs. Anyway, a few of us had a drink in the hotel that night, and apparently there was a fight; this was after I got drunk and got put to bed. Andy told me Howie and another two locals jumped a couple of travellers who'd been at the party as well. The local cop was called and he was looking for Howie." I hold my hands out. "I mean, this is all stuff that Andy told me, so it could be just a story, but I'd bet that up to that point it's all true. I think Andy offered to let Howie hole up in the hotel while the cops were looking for him, and everybody else up there just assumes Howie's offshore at the moment." I tap my fingers on the table and look at McDunn's cigarette packet, hoping he'll get the hint. "Grissom," I tell McDunn, suddenly remembering. Couldn't think of it all night but now I have, just by talking about it. "That's who it was. Howie Grissom; his second name was Grissom."

There's a terrible sick, empty feeling in my guts. My hands are shaking again and I put them between my legs. I give a small laugh. "I even saw the local cop outside the dentist's, day of the party. I just assumed he was there to get a tooth filled or something, but Andy must have broken in and switched the records then."

"We're checking the dental records of the body from the hotel with the Army's records," McDunn says, nodding. He glances at his watch. "Should have something this morning." He shakes his head. "And why those two? Why Lingary and Doctor Halziel?"

I tell the DI why; I tell him about two more betrayals; about the commanding officer who had let men die to cover up his own inadequacy (or at least Andy believed he had, which was all that mattered), and I tell him about the locum doctor who couldn't be bothered to attend a patient and then, when he eventually did pay a visit, just assumed her pain was something trivial.

McDunn finally offers me a cigarette. Oh, joy. I take it and suck hard, coughing a bit. "I guess," I tell him, "he's getting personal now because his usual targets have become more wary." I shrug. "And maybe he's guessed I'll put you onto him, or that you'll just work it out for yourselves, so he's settling old scores while he can, before they're warned, too."

McDunn is staring at the floor and turning the gold B&H packet over and over on the table. He shakes his head. I get the impression he agrees with what I'm saying and he's just shaking his head at the sheer extent of human deviousness and spite. I think in a strange sort of way I feel sorry for McDunn.

There's a pause while a young constable comes in with some tea; the man at the door gets his cup, and McDunn and I sip ours. "So, Detective Inspector," I say, sitting back in my chair. Hell, I'm almost enjoying this, sick feeling or not. "Are we going there or not?"

McDunn sucks his lips in and looks pained. He nods.

I trip on something in the ferns, twisting in mid-air as my ankle gives underneath me and I slam backwards into the ground, winding myself. I lie there, gulping for air, terrified of the man coming to get me while I lie there helpless; then I hear a scream.

I get to my feet.

I look down at what I tripped over; a fallen branch, about the size of a man's arm. I stare at it, thinking down the depth of years to that frozen day by the river.

Get a branch.

The scream again.

Get a branch.

I'm still staring at the branch; it's like my brain's screaming at me inside my own head and I don't know what else it is that's listening, except it isn't listening; my brain's screaming Run! Run! at me but the message isn't getting through, there's something else in the way, something else pulling me back, back to Andy and back to that frozen river bank; I hear Andy crying out and I can still see him reaching towards me and he's about to slip away from me again and I can't do anything… but I can, this time I can; I can do something and I will.

I take hold of the branch and pull it ripping out of the grass and ferns. I start to run again, back the way I've just come, the branch held out in front of me in both hands. I can hear Andy's muffled shouting; for a moment I think I've lost them and run past them somehow; then I see them, almost straight ahead. The man is moving up and down over Andy, his backside looks large and white against the green of the ferns; he still has the rucksack on and it looks weird, frightening and comical at the same time. He has one hand over Andy's face, clamped tight; his head is turned away from me, red hair fallen down over one ear. I put the branch two-handed over my right shoulder as I run up to them, jump over a small bush and then as I land at their side bring the branch swinging down. It whacks into the man's head with a dull, hollow sound, jerking his head to one side; he grunts and starts to get up, then goes limp. I stand over him.

Andy is wheezing, struggling for breath; he pulls himself out from underneath the man; there is blood round his backside. He pushes the man away; the man flops onto his side, then rolls forward onto his face again, groaning.

Andy sucks breath, staring at me; he pulls his trousers up, then he puts out his hand and takes the branch from me. He raises it over his head and brings it crashing down on the back of the man's head; once, twice, three times.

"Andy!" I shout. He raises the branch again, then drops it. He stands there, shaking, then hugs himself, chin on his chest, staring down at the man, his head and whole body trembling.

There is blood leaking from the back of the man's head, beneath the red hair.

"Andy?" I ask him. I put my hand out to him but he flinches.

We both stand and stare at the man, and at the blood spreading amongst the red hair.

"I think he's dead," Andy whispers.

I put one shaking hand out and roll the man over. His eyes are half-open. He doesn't seem to be breathing. I hold one of his wrists for a while, trying to find a pulse.

"What are we going to do?" I ask, letting the man roll forward onto his face again. Sunlight dapples the grass and ferns around us. Birds call from the trees above and I can hear the distant sound of traffic on the main road, through the forest.

Andy is silent.

"We'd better tell somebody, don't you think? Andy? We'd better tell somebody, eh? We'd better tell… tell, tell, tell your mum and dad. We'll have to tell the police; even if he is… even if he was… I mean, this was self-defence, they call it, it was self-defence. He, he, he, he was trying to kill us, kill you; it was self-defence, we can say that, people'll believe us, it was self-defence; self-defence — Andy turns to me, face set and pale. "Fucking shut up."

I shut up. I can't stop shaking.

"Then what are we going to do?" I wail.

"I know," Andy says.

A civvy Granada to Heathrow. London on a bright November morning. People and cars and buildings and shops. I watch the real life go by outside like it's something from an SF movie; I can't believe how alien it all looks, how strange and foreign. I feel a bizarre sense of loss and yearning. I watch the men and women as they crowd along the streets or sit in their cars and vans and buses and trucks, and their freedom seems inestimably precious, exotic and vicariously intoxicating. To be able just to walk, or drive, wherever you want; Christ, I've been away from all this for less than a week and I feel like somebody coming out after thirty years.

And I know these people don't feel free, I know they're all hurrying along or sitting there worrying about their jobs or their mortgages or being late or an IRA bomb in the nearest litter-bin, but I look at them and feel a terrible sense of loss, because I think I've surrendered all this; the ordinariness of life, the ability just to be part of it and take part in it. I want to hope that I'm being melodramatic and everything will settle back to the way it used to be, before all this ghastliness, but I doubt it. In my guts I feel that, even if everything goes the best it possibly can for me, my life has changed completely and forever.

But fuck it; at least I'm back in the real world, and with a modicum of control.

I'm discreetly handcuffed to Detective Sergeant Flavell — McDunn has the key — and we have a couple of burly plain-clothes men with us I strongly suspect are tooled up, but the pressure seems to be off me a bit. I don't think I'm suspect numero uno any more; I think McDunn at least believes me and that's enough for now. The unfortunate Captain — later Major — Lingary (retired) and Doctor Halziel have done me a lot of good by disappearing so mysteriously. I try not to think what Andy might be doing to them. I try even harder not to think about what he might do to me if he ever got the chance.

We're on the dear old elevated section of the M4 where lorries are so apt to break down when there's a call for McDunn; he takes the handset, listens and sucks his teeth for a bit, then says, "Thank you." He puts the phone down and looks back at me. "Army records," he says. He turns back to face the front as we head through the late-morning traffic. "The body in the hotel was not Andrew Gould's."

"Did they check the records against the ones in Howie's file?" I ask.

McDunn nods. "They match Gould's. Not perfectly; he's had work done since, but they say they're ninety-nine per cent sure. They were switched."

I sit back, smiling; for a while there's a glow in my belly which displaces the sickness. For a while.

McDunn gets on the phone to somebody from Tayside police and tells them to contact the Goulds and stop the funeral.

Lunch for five at 35,000 feet, then Edinburgh from the air: greyly grand and a tad misty. We land just after one o'clock and get straight into a Jag jam-sandwich (so a Ford at both ends — ha!). The XJ speeds north over the road-bridge, no lights or siren on but we clip along and it's the smoothest fucking motorway journey I've ever had; just a total hassle-free zone creaming along around the ton with no worries about unmarked police cars and hoo-wee the traffic in front of us just fucking evaporates, man, just brakes (and wobbles sometimes as the guy probably gets the cold sweats and the wo-where'd-my-stomach-go? feeling), swings meekly left and brakes again; you've never seen a beefy BMW 5-series duck in so fast in your life; might as well all be driving 2CVs. It's beautiful.

We take a leg each and drag the man face-down through the ferns towards the northeast end of the hill. His cord trousers are still rolled down round his ankles and get in the way and we have to stop and turn him over and pull the trousers back up, fastening them by one button. His cock is small now and there is dried blood crusted on it. We pull him away beneath the trees; in his other hand, Andy is still holding the branch we hit him with.

We come to a thicket under the trees; a cluster of rhododendron and bramble bushes. Andy clears a way through the undergrowth and we drag the man beneath the thorns and soft fruit of the brambles and the glossy leaves of the rhodies, into the green darkness; his rucksack catches on the branches above and Andy takes it off him, pushing it ahead of us.

We come to a stubby cylinder of undressed stone; the second of the two chimneys from the old railway tunnel under the hill.

We make good time on the road from the motorway; people actually help you overtake when you're in a cop car. Unbelievable. I almost wish I'd become a cop-car driver instead of a journalist now; this is such sweet driving. Still, maybe it kind of takes some of the sport out of it.

At Gilmerton, where the three wee blue Fiat 126s used to live, there's a Sapphire Cosworth orange-and-white squatting just off the road by the junction; it flashes its lights at us as we pass. There's another patrol car at the turn-off to Strathspeld.

"Kind of high-profile here, aren't we?" I ask McDunn.

"Mm-hmm," is all he'll say.

We come to the village. I look up at our old house; bushes and trees are taller. Satellite dish. Conservatory on one side. I watch the familiar shops and houses go by; Mum's old gift shop (now a video shop); the Arms, where I had my first pint; Dad's old garage, still doing business. Another police car, parked on the village green. "Will the Goulds be at the house?" I ask.

McDunn shakes his head. "They're in that hotel we just passed."

I'm relieved. I don't think I'd know what to say to them. Hi; the good news is I didn't kill your son, in fact he isn't dead at all, but the bad news is he's a multiple murderer.

Five minutes later we're at the house.

The gravel circle outside the house looks like the car park at a cop convention. I hear a clattering in the air as McDunn gets out of the Jag and I look up over the trees into high, bright overcast. Fuck me, they've even brought a chopper.

McDunn stands talking to some heavily brassed uniformed cops on the steps of the front door. I look round the old place; the window surrounds have been painted, the flower-beds look a bit unkempt. Nothing else has changed; I haven't been here since that day a week after Clare died, and it had the same muddily washed-out look about it then.

McDunn comes back towards the car, catches FlavelPs eye and beckons him. We get out and follow McDunn into the house.

Nothing much different inside, either; still looks and smells the same: polished parquet flooring, sumptuous but fading old rugs, assorted mostly very old furniture, lots of big houseplants on the floor and time-dulled landscapes and portraits on the wood-panelled walls. We walk under the angle of the main staircase, into the dining room. The place is full of cops; there's a map of the estate on the table, almost covering it. McDunn introduces me to the other officers. I have never had so many hard, suspicious looks in my life.

"So, where's this body?" one of the uniformed guys from Strathclyde asks. He's here because they've loaned the helicopter.

"Still here," I tell him. "Unlike… unlike the man you're looking for." I look at McDunn, the one friendly-ish face in here and the only one I can look at without feeling like a five-year-old who's just wet his pants. "I thought the idea was to let the funeral go ahead, or at least make it look like it was; he was bound to be here. You might have caught him then."

McDunn's face gives a good impression of being stone-clad. "That was not felt to be the most suitable way of proceeding in this matter," he says, sounding like a police spokesman for the first time.

There's a sensation of well tailored black uniforms rustling in the room and I get the impression from the general atmosphere and a few exchanged looks that this is a contentious point.

"We're still waiting for this body," says the man with the braid from Tayside, the boys officially in charge. "Mr Colley," he adds.

I look down at the map of the estate. "I'll show you," I tell them. "You'll need a… crowbar or something, about fifty metres of rope and a torch. A hacksaw might be handy, too."

Andy reaches up to the iron grating and pulls at it.

"This one comes away," he grunts; his voice is still shaky.

I help him; we lift the rusting grating up at one end but the far side is still secured by an iron pin and we can't shift it any further.

Andy takes the branch we hit the man with and wedges it under the grating; part of it sticks through but there's a stump where a smaller branch has broken off and the grating rests on that, held a half-metre or so off the stone rim.

Andy throws the man's rucksack into the shaft, then bends and takes the man under one armpit, trying to heave him up.

"Come on!" he hisses.

We haul the man up, his back against the stone of the vent, his head flopping down onto his chest. There's a little blood on the stones of the chimney. Andy takes the man's calves under his armpits and lifts; I get underneath and force the man's shoulders up; his head goes over onto the stone rim of the vent, beneath the grating. We both push and heave and the man's shoulders scrape over the rim; his arms drag up and over as Andy pushes, grunting, feet slipping on the old leaves and soil. I push the man's behind up, lifting with all my might. The man's trousers snag on the stone and start to come down again, then the branch holding the grating shirts and the iron grid falls down, thumping into the man's chest.

"Shit," Andy breathes. We struggle to lift the grating up and wedge the branch underneath again. The man's head is poised over the shaft, drooping down into it. We push his legs but they buckle at the knees, so we have to hold them up above our heads as we push to make them stay straight, then as we shove and his trousers are rolled down by the rim of stone, his arms flop over the far side of the shaft rim and it suddenly gets easier to push him. He slides out of our grasp, slipping into the shaft with a scraping noise. His trousers bunch round his ankles again, then catch round his boots and disappear over the edge of the chimney, kicking up at the last moment and hitting the grating; the branch slips and the grating slams down. The branch falls through it into the shaft and drops after the man.

We stand there for a second or two. Then there is — unless we each imagine it — a very faint thump. Andy suddenly jerks into motion and scrambles up onto the rim of the chimney. He stares through the grating, down into the darkness.

"Can you see him?" I ask.

Andy shakes his head. "But let's get some branches anyway," he says.

We prop the grating open with another branch and spend the next half-hour pulling fallen branches and logs from all over that part of the hill, dragging them into the clump of bushes and throwing them into the shaft; we snap dead branches off trees and bushes and haul and peel living ones off; we scrape together armfuls of dry leaf litter and throw those over the edge of the chimney, too; everything goes under the grating and down into the shaft. We still can't see anything down there.

Eventually a large branch with lots of other branches on it and lots of leaves — half a bush, practically — snags only a few metres down the shaft and we stop, breathless, sweating, trembling from exertion and delayed shock. We let the grating fall back and throw the last branch down into the darkness; it catches on the branches stuck near the top of the shaft. We sit on the dead leaves at the foot of the vent, backs against the stone.

"Are you all right?" I ask Andy after a while.

He nods. I put a hand out to him but he flinches again.

We sit there for some time but I keep glancing up, and gradually become terrified that the man is somehow not dead or has become a zombie and is climbing back up the shaft towards us, to push the grating up and put his already rotting hands down and grab us both by the hair. I stand up and face Andy. My legs are still shaky and my mouth has gone very dry.

Andy stands too. "A swim," he says.

"What?"

"Let's — " Andy swallows. "Let's go for a swim. Down to the loch, the river." He glances back at the stones of the air shaft.

"Yeah," I say, trying to sound cheerful and unconcerned. "A swim." I look at my hands, all scraped and dirty. There's some blood on them. They're still shaking. "Good idea."

We crawl out of the undergrowth into the bright day.

There are a few minutes, perhaps not more than three or four, when I exist in a bewildering storm of hope, joy, incomprehension and dread, when they don't find the body at the bottom of the shaft.

We walked here through the gardens and the woods, past the hill where Andy and I lay in the sunlight all those summers ago, into the little glen, then up through the bushes and the dead auburn wreckage of the ferns, to the trees at the summit of the small hill. A damp wind blew from the west, shaking drips off the high, bare trees and taking the sound of the main road away.

There are about twenty of us altogether, including half a dozen constables carrying the gear. I'm still very much attached to Sergeant Flavell. I'd naively thought they could mount some low-profile operation to catch Andy watching his own funeral; I'd imagined cops slinking through the undergrowth, whispering into radios, gradually closing in. Instead we're here mob-handed, crashing through the undergrowth towards a dead body.

Except it isn't there. I tell them it is; I tell them there's a man's body at the bottom of the air shaft and they believe me. It takes them long enough to cut a way through to the chimney of the air shaft, sawing through the rhodie branches and tearing away the brambles and other undergrowth; then they lever off the iron grating over the shaft without any difficulty, and one of the younger cops, in an overall and a hard hat, wraps the rope around himself — proper climbing rope they had in the back of one of the Range Rovers — and abseils down into the darkness.

McDunn's listening on a little radio handset.

It crackles. "Lot of branches," the cop on the end of the rope says. Then: "Down, on the bottom."

The helicopter clatters overhead. I'm wondering where Andy is by now when I hear the guy in the shaft say, "Nothing here."

What?

"Just a load of branches and stuff," the cop says.

McDunn doesn't react. I do; I stare at the radio. What's he talking about? I feel dizzy. It did happen. I remember it. I've lived with it ever since, had it at the back of my head ever since. I know it happened. I feel like the woods are revolving around me; maybe if I wasn't still handcuffed to the sergeant, I'd fall over. (And I remember the man saying, can remember his voice perfectly, hear him again as he says, "I'm a policeman!)

Some of the other cops gathered round the air shaft are wearing knowing looks.

"Wait a minute," the cop in the tunnel says. My heart thuds. What has he found? I don't know if I want him to find him — it — or not.

"There's a rucksack here," the voice on the radio says. "Large day-pack size, brown… looks full. Fairly old."

"Nothing else?" McDunn asks.

"Just the branches… can't see to the end of the tunnel in either direction. Patch of light in the distance… eastwards."

"That's the other air shaft," I tell McDunn. "Back that way." I point.

"Want me to have a look round, sir?"

McDunn looks at the Tayside chief, who nods. "Yes," McDunn says. "If you're sure it's safe."

"Safe enough, I think, sir. Untying."

McDunn looks at me. He sucks his teeth. I avoid the eyes of the other cops. McDunn's eyebrows rise a little.

"He was there," I tell him. "It was Andy and I. This guy attacked us; abused Andy. We hit him with a log. I swear."

McDunn looks unconvinced. He peers over the edge of the stonework, down into the shaft.

I'm still feeling dizzy. I put a hand out to the stones of the air-shaft chimney, to steady myself. At least the rucksack's there. It did happen, for Christ's sake; it wasn't an hallucination. The guy was probably dead when we tipped him into the shaft — we just assumed he was at the time though the older I got the less sure of that I was — but even if wasn't, he must have been killed when he hit the bottom; it's thirty metres at least.

Could Andy have decided since that the body wasn't well enough concealed, and come back and removed it; hauled it up, taken it away and buried it? We'd never talked about that day, and we never again came near this old air shaft; I don't know what he might have done since but I'd always assumed he was like me and just tried to forget about it, pretend it never happened.

Denial. Hell, sometimes it's best.

"— ear me yet?" the radio crackles.

"Yes?" McDunn says.

"Found him."

It will take a while to get the body out; they have to get more guys down there, take photographs; the usual shit. Most of us return to the house. I don't know what the hell to feel. It's finally over, it's out, people know, other people know; the police know, it's no longer just between me and Andy, it's public. I do feel some relief, no matter what happens now, but I still feel I have betrayed Andy, regardless of what he's done.

The man's body was under the other air shaft. The poor fuck must have crawled all that way, a hundred metres or more to that second patch of light; our bright idea of putting the branches down after him to cover him up was pointless; for all these years it would only have needed some more kids to have come along with torches or bits of burning paper to discover the body. They reckon there was a load of fallen branches lying under the air shaft before we pushed the guy down it; according to the young cop who first went down it looked like he'd crawled out from the middle of the pile. Even so, I don't know how he survived that fall; God knows what he broke, how he suffered, how long he took to crawl there to the other slightly brighter patch of light; how long he took to die.

Part of me feels sorry for him, despite what he tried to do, what he did do. God knows, maybe he'd have ended up killing Andy, killing both of us, but nobody deserves to die like that.

On the other hand there's a part of me that rejoices, that is glad he paid the way he did, that for once the world worked the way it's supposed to, punishing the wrongdoer… and that saddens and sickens me too, because I think that this must be the way Andy feels all the time.

It's strange to be in Strathspeld, to be in the house and not have seen Mr and Mrs Gould. Some of the cops have gone; there are only ten cars and vans on the gravel drive now. The chopper went to refuel, came back and buzzed around some more and then returned to Glasgow. Apparently they had road blocks and patrols on roads all over the area, and they searched the grounds of the house. Fat chance.

Back at the house, in the library, I tell a DI from Tayside all that happened that day, twenty years ago. McDunn sits in, too. It isn't as painful as I thought it would be. I tell it just as it happened, from where we ran up the hill almost straight into the man; I leave out what Andy and I were doing just before, and the man's line about dirty, perverted things. I can't tell that with McDunn sitting there; it would be like telling my father. Actually, I guess I wouldn't want to tell it to anybody, not so much because I'm ashamed (I tell myself) as because it's private; one last thing I can hide that's between me and Andy only, so letting me feel that there is one thing at least in which I've not betrayed him utterly.

Sergeant Flavell has been released from me to take notes; I'm attached to myself now, wrists cuffed together. The aged, respectable leather-bound tomes of the Gould family library look down upon the nasty tale I have to tell with musty distaste. Outside, it's dark.

"Think I'll be charged?" I ask the two DIs. I already know there's no time limit between committing a murder and being charged with it.

"Not for me to say, Mr Colley," the Tayside guy says, gathering up his notebook and tape recorder.

McDunn's mouth twists down at the edges; he sucks through his teeth, and for some reason I feel encouraged.

They've ordered food from the Strathspeld Arms; the same food the funeral guests would have eaten. A bunch of us eat in the dining room. I'm handcuffed to one of the London burlies now and we both have to eat with one hand. I'd kind of been hoping they'd take the cuffs off me altogether by now but I suppose they're thinking that the body in the shaft doesn't prove anything by itself, and that Andy could still be dead, or he could be alive and he — or somebody else — could have kidnapped Halziel and Lingary to provide cover for me.

McDunn comes in as I'm chasing bits of quiche around my plate with my fork.

He comes up to me, nods to the burly and unlocks the cuffs.

"Come here," he tells me, putting the handcuffs in his pocket. I wipe my lips and follow him to the door.

"What is it?" I ask him.

"It's for you," he says, striding across the hall towards the phone, where the handset's lying on the table and an officer is attaching a little device like a sucker to the phone; a wire leads from the sucker to a Pro Walkman. The officer starts the machine recording. McDunn glances back at me before stopping at the phone and nodding down at it. "It's Andy."

He hands me the phone.