Complicity

CHAPTER 12 — BASRA ROAD

The little speedboat swings round the low island. The island is covered in whin and bramble and a few small trees, mostly ash and silver birch. Grey-black walls and roofless ruins and a few slanted headstones and memorials are visible through the bushes and trees, surrounded by ferns turning fawn, and yellowing grass covered by brown, fallen leaves. A gun-metal sky looks down.

Loch Bruc constricts here — amongst the low, bare hills near the sea — until it is only a hundred metres in breadth; the little funeral isle fills most of this bend in the narrows.

William guns the engine once, sending the speedboat surging ahead towards the little jetty which slants into the calm, dark water. The jetty's stones look old. They're unevenly sized, mostly very large, and on the top surface of smooth, dressed stone there are time-worn iron rings, set into circular depressions. On the shore behind us there is an identical slipway, angling out from the end of a track through the trees and the reed-clumped grass.

"Eilean Dubh; the dark isle," William announces, letting the boat drift in towards the island jetty. "Old family burial ground… on my mother's side." He looks around at the gently sloped hills and the higher, steeper mountains to the north. "A lot of this used to belong to them."

"Was that before or after the Clearances, William?" I ask.

"Both," he grins.

Andy sips whisky from his hip-flask. He offers me some and I accept. Andy smacks his lips and looks around, giving the impression he's drinking in the silence. "Nice place."

"For a cemetery," Yvonne says. She's frowning, looking cold even though she has her ski gear on: down-plump jacket and big Gore-tex mitts.

"Yeah," I say in an approximation of a down-home American accent. "Kinda morbid for a graveyard, isn't it, Bill, old buddy? Couldn't ya kinda liven it up a bit, know what I mean? A few neon gravestones, talking holograms of the departed, and — hey — let's not forget a flower concession stand featuring tasteful plastic blooms. A ghost-train ride for the youngsters; necro-burgers made with real dead meat in coffin-shaped polystyrene packs; high-speedboat trips in the funeral barge used in Don't Look Now, the movie."

"Funny you should say that, actually," William says, tossing his blond hair back and leaning out to fend the stone jetty off with his hand. "I used to run boat trips out here from the hotel." He puts a couple of white plastic fenders over the gunwales to protect the boat, then steps up onto the slip, holding the painter.

"Locals take to that all right?" Andy asks, standing up and pulling the stern of the boat closer in to the pier.

William scratches his head. "Not really." He secures the painter to one of the iron rings. "Funeral party turned up one day while one lot were having a barbie; bit of a fracas."

"You mean this place is still used? Yvonne says, accepting William's hand and being pulled up onto the slipway. She tuts and looks away, shaking her head.

"Oh, hell, yeah," William says as Andy and I get out too; a little unsteadily, it has to be said, as we weren't totally sober when we woke up — around noon — in William's parents" house at the top of the loch, and we've been getting stuck into the whisky in first my hip-flask then his on the twenty-kilometre journey down the loch. "I mean," William says, flapping his arms. "That's why I wanted you guys to see this place; this is where I want to be buried." He smiles beatifically at his wife. "You too, blue-eyes, if you want."

Yvonne stares at him.

"We could be buried together," William says, sounding happy.

Yvonne frowns severely and walks past us, heading towards the island. "You'd only want to go on top as usual."

William laughs uproariously, then looks briefly crestfallen as we follow Yvonne onto the grass and head up to the ruined chapel. "I meant side-by-side," he says plaintively.

Andy chuckles and screws down the cap of the hip-flask. He looks thin and kind of hunched. This visit to the west coast was my idea. I invited myself and Andy here for a long weekend with William and Yvonne at William's parents" place on the shores of the loch, not so much for my own enjoyment — I get jealous around William and Yvonne when they're in their weekend-horseplay mode — but because it was the first idea I'd had for a break that Andy didn't reject immediately. Clare died six months ago and, apart from a month of night-clubbing in London which seemed to leave him more depressed than ever and certainly less wealthy and healthy, Andy hasn't left Strathspeld since; I've tried a dozen different ways of getting him away from the estate for a while but this was the only one that sparked any interest.

I think Andy just plain likes Yvonne and is sort of morbidly fascinated with William, who spent a large part of the journey down the loch telling us about his non-ethical investment policy: deliberately putting money into arms businesses, tobacco companies, exploitative mining industries, rain-forest timber concerns; that sort of thing. His theory is that if the smart but ethical money is getting out, the dividends have to get bigger for the smart but unscrupulous money that takes its place. I assumed he was joking, Yvonne pretended not to listen, but Andy was taking him quite seriously, and from William's appreciative reaction I suspect the guy wasn't kidding at all.

We walk up between gravestones of various ages; some are only a year or two old, many date back to the last century, and some are dated in the seventeen and sixteen hundreds; others have been worn smooth by the elements, their text levelled and obliterated back into the grainy nap of the rock. Some of the stones are just flat, irregular slabs, and you get the impression that if the poor people who erected these — and could not afford a stonemason — could write, and did carve the names and dates of their loved ones on such slabs, the letters and numerals must only have been scratched onto the surface of the stone.

I stand looking at some long, flat gravestones set into the ground with crude depictions of skeletons chiselled into them; other carvings are of skulls and scythes and hourglasses and crossed bones. Most of the horizontal stones are covered in grey, black and light green lichens and mosses.

There are a couple of family plots, where more affluent locals have walled off bits of the little island, and grander gravestones of marble and granite stand proud, if they're not covered by brambles. Some of the more recent graves still have wee cellophane parcels of flowers lying on them; many have small granite flowerpots, covered by perforated metal caps that make them look like giant pepperpots, and a couple of these have dead, faded flowers in them.

The walls of the ruined chapel barely come up to shoulder-height. At one end, beneath a gable wall with an aperture like a small window at the apex where a bell might have hung once, there is a stone altar; just three heavy slabs. On the altar there's a metal bell, green-black with age and chained to the wall behind. It looks rather like a very old Swiss cow-bell.

"Apparently some people nicked the old bell, back in the "sixties," William told us last night, in the drawing room of his parents" house, while we were playing cards and drinking whisky and talking about heading down the loch in the speedboat to the dark isle. "Oxford students, or something; anyway, according to the locals the guys couldn't sleep at night because they kept hearing the sound of bells, and eventually they couldn't stand it and came back and replaced the bell in the chapel and they were all right again."

"What a load of old nonsense," Yvonne said. "Two."

"Two," William said. "Yes, probably."

"Oh, I don't know," Andy said, shaking his head. "Sounds pretty spooky to me. One, please. Thanks."

"Sounds like fucking tinnitus to me," I said. "Three. Ta."

"Dealer takes two," William said. He whistled. "Oh, baby; look at these cards…"

I take the old bell up and let it ring once; a flat, hollow, appropriately funereal sound. I set it carefully back down on the stone altar and look round the walled oblong of hill, mountain, loch and cloud.

Silence: no birds, no wind in the trees, nobody talking. I turn slowly, right round, watching the clouds. I think this is the most peaceful place I have ever been.

I walk out, among the cold, carved little stones, to find Yvonne standing glaring at a tall gravestone. Euphemia McTeish, born 18 03, died 1822, and her five children. Died in childbirth. Her husband died twenty years later.

Andy strolls up, drinking from his flask, grinning and shaking his head. He nods up to where William is standing on the wall of the chapel, looking down the loch with a pair of small binoculars. "Wanted to build a house here," Andy says. He shakes his head.

"What?" Yvonne says.

"Here?" I say. "On a graveyard? Is he mad? Hasn't he read Stephen King?"

Yvonne looks coldly at her distant husband. "He was talking about building a house up here, but I didn't know it was… here." She looks away.

"Tried to persuade the local authority with a really good deal on a bunch of computers," Andy says, chuckling. "But they wouldn't play. For the moment he's had to settle for being allowed to get buried here."

Yvonne draws herself up. "Which might happen sooner than he's expecting," she says, and marches off towards the chapel, where William is staring down into the building's interior and shaking his head.

Hard rain on a soft day; it falls from the leaden overcast, continual and drenching, creating a huge rustling in all the grass, bushes and trees around us.

William's body is laid to rest in the thick peaty soil of the dark isle. According to the pathologist's report, he was clubbed unconscious and then suffocated.

Yvonne, beautiful and pale in slim black, her face veiled, nods to the mourners and their few soft words, and murmurs something of her own. The rain drums on my umbrella. She glances at me, catching my gaze for the first time since I got here. I barely made it in time; I had a hospital appointment for this morning — yet more tests — and had to drive hard across country, towards Rannoch and the west. But I got here, got to the Sorrells" home, met William's father and brother, and saw Yvonne briefly but did not get a chance to talk to her before it was time for us all to set off for the circuitous drive round the mountains and down to the far end of the loch, and the hotel there, and the drive up the track to the slipway facing Eilean Dubh and the two little boats that shuttled us across, the last one bringing the coffin.

The minister keeps the service short because of the rain, and then it's over and we're queuing at the slip while the little rowing boats ferry us four at a time back to the mainland, and Yvonne's standing on those old, smooth stones of the slanted pier, receiving the condolences of the other guests. I just stand there, watching her. We all look slightly ridiculous because as well as our formal black clothes all of us sport Wellington boots — some black, most green — to deal with the mud-slicked grass of the island. Somehow Yvonne looks dignified and attractive even in those. Though of course maybe that's just me.

It's been a funny few days; getting back to work, trying to pick up the threads there, having a long soul-to-soul with a very sympathetic Eddie, getting embarrassing slaps on the back and we-were-rooting-for-yous from colleagues and finding that Frank had run out of amusing Scottish place-name spell-checks for me. I've been staying with Al and his wife in Leith while the police stake out my flat, but there's been no sign of Andy.

Meanwhile I've been to the doc, and been sent for various tests at the Royal Infirmary. Nobody's mentioned the C-word yet but I feel suddenly vulnerable and mortal and even old. I've given up smoking. (Well, Al and I had a pipe or two of dope the other night, just for old time's sake, but there was no tobacco involved.)

Anyway, I'm still coughing a lot and I get a sick feeling now and again, but there's been no more blood since that afternoon we found William.

I shake Yvonne's hand as I wait for my return trip in the wee rowing boat. The fine black tracery of her veil, scattered with tiny black gathered specks, makes her look at once mysteriously distant and rawly seductive, rain or no rain, wellies or no wellies.

Through the trees on the mainland, I can see and hear the cars reversing and manoeuvring and bumping away back down the track to the village and the hotel. The tradition is that Yvonne, as the widow, is last onto the last boat; sort of like a captain and a sinking ship, I guess.

"You all right?" she asks me, eyes narrowed, her sharp, evaluating gaze flitting over my face.

"Surviving. And you?"

"The same," she says. She looks cold again, and small. I want so much to take her in my arms and hug her. I feel tears prick behind my eyes. "I'm selling the house," she tells me, looking briefly down, long black lashes flickering. "The company's opening a Euro office in Frankfurt; I'm going to be part of the team."

"Ah." I nod, not sure what to say.

"I'll drop you a line with my new address, once I'm settled."

"Right; good, okay." I nod. There's a splashing, swirling sound behind me, and a soft, hollow bumping noise. "Well," I say, "any time you're in Edinburgh…"

She shakes her head and looks away, then smiles gallantly for me and tips her head, indicating. "That's your boat, Cameron."

I just stand there, nodding like an idiot, wanting to say the one right thing that must exist for me to change all of this, make it good, make it all better, make it eventually happen happily for us, but knowing that that thing just doesn't exist and there's no point looking for it, and so just stand there nodding dumbly with my lips trapped compressed between my teeth, looking down, not able to look her in the eyes and knowing that's it, the end, goodbye… until after those moments she puts me out of my misery and puts out her hand and gently says, "Goodbye, Cameron."

And I nod and shake her hand and after a while I get my mouth to work and it says, "Goodbye."

I hold her hand one last time, just for a moment.

The hotel at that end of the loch is full of dead stuffed fish in glass cages and mangy-looking taxidermised otters, wild cats and eagles. I don't know many people and I think Yvonne's avoiding me, so I have a single whisky and a few sandwiches, then I leave.

The rain is still torrential; I have my wipers on quick-time but even so they're hardly coping. The moisture coming off my brolly and coat lying puddling on the back seat is fighting a pretty equal battle with the heater and blower to mist up the glass on the inside.

I get about fifteen miles on the single-track road round the mountains when the engine starts to misfire. I glance at the instruments; half a tank of fuel, no warning lights.

"Oh, no," I groan. "Come on, baby, come on, don't let me down; come on, come on." I tap the car's dashboard gently, encouragingly. "Come on now, come on…"

I'm heading up a slight hill into a stretch of road through a Forestry Commission plantation when the engine does a passable impression of me in the morning, coughing and spluttering and not quite firing on all cylinders. Then it dies completely.

I coast quickly to a stop in a passing place. "Oh, Christ… Shit!" I yell, slamming the dashboard, then feeling stupid.

The rain makes machine-gun noises on the roof.

I try starting the engine but there's just another bout of coughing from under the bonnet.

I release the bonnet-catch, put my coat back on, take up the sopping umbrella and get out.

The engine makes little metallic, creaking, tinking noises. Steam wisps up as raindrops hit the exhaust manifold. I test the plug leads and look for something obvious like a loose wire. It doesn't appear to be anything obvious. (I don't think I've heard of anybody in a situation like this ever finding it was something obvious.) I hear an engine and look round the side of the raised bonnet to see a car heading in the same direction as me. I don't know whether to try and wave them down or not. I settle for just looking pleadingly at the approaching car; it's one guy in a beaten-up Micra.

He flashes his lights and pulls in ahead of me.

"Hi," I say as he opens the door and gets out, pulling on an anorak and shoving a deerstalker hat on. He's red-haired, bearded. "It just stopped." I tell him. "I've got fuel but it just cut out. Could be the rain, I suppose…" My voice trails off as I suddenly think, Christ, it might be him. It might be Andy; this could be him, disguised, come for me.

What am I doing? Why didn't I get round to the boot and get out the fucking tyre-iron the instant the car stopped? Why aren't I carrying a baseball bat, a can of mace, anything? I stare at the guy, thinking, Is it him, is it? He's the right height, the right build. I stare at his cheek and his red beard, trying to see a join, trying to see glue.

"Aye," he says, stuffing his hands in his anorak pockets and glancing down the road. "Ye goat any WD40, pal?" He nods at the engine. "Looks like yon bit there could do with some."

I'm staring at him, my heart pounding. There's a weird roaring noise in my head and I can hardly hear him over it. His voice sounds different but he was always good at accents. My belly feels like a solid chunk of ice and my legs like they're about to buckle and give way. I'm still staring at the guy. Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ. I'd run but my legs won't work and he was always faster than me anyway.

He frowns at me and I feel like I've got tunnel vision; all I can see is his face, his eyes, his eyes, just the right colour, just the right look… Then he changes somehow, seems to straighten and relax, and in a voice I recognise says, "Ah. Very perceptive, Cameron."

I don't see what he hits me with; just his arm swinging round at me, quick and blurring as a striking snake. The blow lands above my right ear and fells me, sends me folding down in a galaxy of flickering stars and a huge growling swell of noise as if I'm falling through the air towards a great waterfall. I twist as I fall and hit the engine, but it doesn't hurt, and I slide off it and down and fall towards the puddles and the road and I hit the road but I don't feel that either.

Oh God help me here on the island of the dead with the cries of the tormented, here with the angel of death and the acrid stench of excrement and carrion taking me back in the darkness and the pale fawn light to the place I never wanted to go back to, the man-made earthly black hell and the human scrapyard kilometres long. Here down amongst the dead men, midst-ways with the torn-souled and their wild, inhuman screams; here with the ferryman, the boatman, my eyes covered and my brains scrambled, here with this prince of death, this prophet of reprisal, this jealous, vengeful, unforgiving son of our bastard commonwealth of greed; help me help me help me…

My head hurts like buggery; my hearing feels… blurred. That's not the right word but it is. Eyes shut. They were shut with something earlier, shut by something, but not any more, at least I don't think so; I sense light beyond my eyelids. I'm lying on my side on something hard and cold and gritty. I'm cold, and my hands and feet are tied, or taped. I shiver uncontrollably, scraping my cheek across the chill, granular floor. Bad taste in mouth. The air smells sharp and I can hear…

I can hear the dead men, hear their flayed souls, wailing on the wind to no ear save mine and no understanding at all. The view behind my eyelids goes from pink to red then purple into black, and is suffused with a rumbling shift into a terrible, tearing roaring noise, shaking the ground, filling the air, pounding my bones, dark going dark, black stinking hell o mum o dad o no no please don't take me back there

And I'm there, in the one place I've hidden from myself; not that cold day by the hole in the ice or the other day in the sunlit woods near the hole in the hill — days deniable because I was then not yet the me I have become — but just eighteen months ago; the time of my failure and my simple, shaming incapacity to reap and work the obvious power of what I was observing; the place that exposed my incompetence, my hopeless inability to witness.

Because I was there, I was part of it, just a year and a half ago, after months and months of badgering, cajoling and entreating Sir Andrew he finally let me go when the deadline was up and the trucks and tracks and tanks were about to roll I got my wish, I got to go, I was given the chance to do my stuff and show what I was made of, to be a genuine front-line journalist, a rootin-tootin-tokin-tipplin God-bijayzuz gonzo war correspondent, bringing the blessed Saint Hunter's manic subjectivity to the ultimate in scarifying human edge-work: modern warfare.

And forgetting the fact the drinks were few and far between and that the whole media-managed event was so unsportingly one-sided and mostly happened far away from any journos, tendance gonzoid or not, when it came to it — and it did come to it, I did have my chance, it was put right there in front of me practically screaming at me to fucking write something — I couldn't do it; couldn't hack it as a hack; I just stood there, awestruck, horrorstruck, absorbing the ghastly force of it with my inadequate and unprepared private humanity, not my public professional persona, not my skill, not the face I had laboured to prepare to face the sea of faces that is the world.

And so I was humbled, scaled, down-sized.

I stood on the sunless desert, beneath a sky black from horizon to horizon, a rolling, heavy sulphurous sky made solid and soiled, packed with the thick, stinking effluence squeezed erupting from the earth's invaded bowels, and in that darkness at noon, that planned, deliberated disaster, with the bale-fire light of the burning wells flickering in the distance with a dirty, guttering flame, I was reduced to a numb, dumb realisation of our unboundedly resourceful talent for bloody hatred and mad waste, but stripped of the means to describe and present that knowledge.

I crouched on the tar-black grainy stickiness of the plundered sands, within scorching distance of one of the wrecked wells, watching the way the fractured black metal stub in the centre of the crater gouted a compressed froth of oil and gas in quick, shuddering, instantly dispersing bursts and bubbles of brown-black spray into the furious, screaming tower of flame above; a filthy hundred-metre Cypress of fire, shaking the ground like a never-ending earthquake and bellowing madly in a strident jet-engine shriek, shuddering my bones and jarring my teeth and making my eyes tremble in their sockets.

My body shook, my ears rang, my eyes burned, my throat was raw with the acid-bitter stench of the evaporating crude, but it was as though the very ferocity of the experience unmanned me, unmade me and rendered me incapable of telling it.

Later, on the Basra road, by that vast linearity of carnage, a single strip of junk-yard destruction stretching — again — from horizon to horizon on the flat dun face of that dusty land, I wandered the scorched, perforated wreckage of the cars and vans and trucks and buses left after the A10s and the Cobras and the TOWs and the miniguns and the thirty-mill cannons and the cluster munitions had had their unrestrained way with their unarmoured prey, and saw the brown-burned metal, the few bubbled patches of sooty paint, the torn chassis and ripped-open cabs of those Hondas and Nissans and Leylands and Macks, their tyres slack and flattened or quite gone, burned to the steel cording inside; I surveyed the spattered shrapnel of that communal ruin rayed out across the sands, and I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be caught here, beaten, retreating, running desperately away in those thin-skinned civilian vehicles while the missiles and shells rained in like supersonic sleet and the belching fire burst billowing everywhere around. I tried, too, to imagine how many people had died here, how many shredded, cindered bodies and bits of bodies had been bagged and removed and buried by the clean-up squads before we were allowed to see this icon of that long day's slaughter.

I sat on a low dune for a while, maybe fifty metres away from the devastation on the strip of ripped, bubbled road, and tried to take it all in. The lap-top sat on my knee, screen reflecting the grey overcast, the cursor winking slowly at the top-left edge of the blank display.

I gave it half an hour and still couldn't think of anything that would describe how it looked and how I felt. I shook my head and stood up, twisting back to dust my pants.

The black, charred boot was a couple of metres away, half-buried in the sand. When I picked it up it was surprisingly heavy because it still had the foot inside it.

I wrinkled my nose at the stink and let it drop, but it still didn't help, didn't break the log-jam, didn't (ha) kick-start the process.

Nothing did.

I filed a minimum of uninspired war-is-hell-and-frankly-so-is-peace-if-you're-female-out-here stories from the hotel and smoked some mind-bendingly powerful dope I got from an affable Palestinian helper who — as soon the journos left — was picked up by the Kuwaiti authorities, tortured and deported to Lebanon.

When I got back Sir Andrew told me he wasn't at all impressed with the stuff I'd filed; they could have run AP stories for a lot less money and just as much impact. I didn't have an argument against this, and so had to sit there and take the old man's verbal battering for half an hour. And, even though at the time I knew it was wrong, unjustifiable and a feeble, contemptible piece of self-important self-pity, for a while, under that withering deluge of professional contempt, I felt like something trapped and pulverised amongst the dust and greasy ashes on the Basra road.

I'm hearing the cries of the dead men above the roar of the screeching, broken well-heads, and I smell the thick, cloying brown-black oil and the sweet gagging odour of corruption; then the cries turn to the calls of seagulls, and the smell to that of the sea, with an acrid overtone of bird-shit.

I'm still tied up. I open my eyes.

Andy is sitting across from me, his back against a rough concrete wall. The floor underneath us is concrete, as is the roof. There is a doorway to Andy's left; no door, just a pitted aperture to the sunlight outside. I can see more concrete buildings, all derelict, and a skinny concrete tower spattered with seagull droppings. Beyond there are chopping waves rolling white at their tops, and a glimpse of distant land. The wind sighs through the doorway over little stones and shards of glass; I can hear waves hitting rocks. I blink, looking at Andy.

He smiles.

My hands are tied behind my back; my ankles are taped together. I work back to the wall behind me and lever myself up until I'm sitting, too. I can see more of the water outside now, and more land; a faraway scatter of houses, a couple of buoys bobbing in the wind-patterned water, and a small coastal freighter heading away.

I work my mouth; it tastes foul. I blink, start to shake my head to try and clear some of the fuzziness, but then think the better of it. My head aches and throbs.

"How are you feeling?" Andy asks me.

"Fucking awful, what do you expect?"

"Could be worse."

"Oh, I'm sure," I say, and feel very cold. I close my eyes and put my head carefully back against the chilly concrete of the wall. My heart feels like it's beating air; too fast and faint to be propelling anything as thick as blood. Air, I think; Christ, he's injected me with air I'm going to die, heart thrashing on foam on froth on air, brain dying, starved of oxygen, sweet Jesus no… But a minute or so passes and, while I still don't feel too good, I don't die either. I open my eyes again.

Andy is still sitting there; he's wearing brown cord trousers, a combat jacket and hiking boots. There's a big camouflaged rucksack against the wall a metre to his left and a half-full bottle of mineral water in front of him. By his right hand there's a cellphone; by his left, a gun. I don't know very much about handguns beyond the difference between a revolver and an automatic, but I think I recognise that grey pistol; I think it's the one he had that night a week or two after Clare died, when he was all set to take vengeance right then on Doctor Halziel. Maybe — I'm thinking now -1 should have let him.

I'm still wearing what I was when he kidnapped me: black suit, dirty and stained now, and a white shirt. He's removed my tie. My Drizabone is lying, neatly folded but looking scruffy, a metre to my right.

He stretches out one leg, and his hiking boot touches the water bottle. He taps it. "Water?" he says.

I nod. He gets up, takes the top off the bottle and holds it to my lips. I glug down a few mouthfuls, then nod, and he takes it away. He sits back where he was.

He takes a bullet out of his combat jacket and starts turning it over and over in his fingers. He takes a deep, sighing breath and says, "So, Cameron."

I try to get comfortable. My heart's still beating like hell and making my head pound, my bowels are threatening terrible things and I feel kitten-weak, but I'm fucked if I'm going to plead with him. Actually, I'm probably fucked no matter what I do, and — being realistic — when it comes to it I'll probably plead like a little kid, but for now I might as well tough it out.

"You tell me, Andy." I keep my voice neutral. "What happens now? What have you got in store for me?"

He grimaces and shakes his head, frowning down at the bullet in his hand. "Oh, I'm not going to kill you, Cameron."

I can't help it; I laugh. It's not much of a laugh; more of a gasp with pretensions, but it raises my spirits. "Oh yeah?" I say. "Like you were going to give back Halziel and Lingary unharmed."

He shrugs. "Cameron, that was just tactics," he says reasonably. "They were always going to die." He smiles, shaking his head at my naivety.

I inspect him. He's clean-shaven and fit-looking. He looks younger than he did; a lot younger; younger than he was when Clare died.

"So if you're not going to kill me, Andy, what?" I ask him. "Hmm? Give me AIDS? Chop off my fingers so I can't type?" I take a breath. "I hope you've taken into account the advances in computer voice-recognition which are making keyboard-free word processing a realistic possibility in the near future."

Andy grins, but there's something cold in it. "I'm not going to hurt you, Cameron," he says, "and I'm not going to kill you, but I need something from you."

I stare meaningfully at my taped-together ankles. "Uh-huh. What?"

He looks down at the bullet again. "I want you to listen to me," he says quietly. It's as though he's embarrassed. He shrugs and looks me in the eye. "That's all, really."

"Okay," I say. I flex my shoulders, grimacing. "Could I listen with my hands untied?"

Andy purses his lips, then nods. He takes a long knife out of his boot. It looks like a thin bowie knife; the blade is very shiny. He squats while I turn round and the knife slices slickly through the tape. I tear the rest off, taking some hairs with it. My hands tingle. I look at my watch.

"Jesus, how hard did you hit me?"

It's half nine in the morning, the day after the funeral.

"Not that hard," Andy tells me. "I kept you under with ether for a while, then you just seemed to sleep."

He sits back where he was, sliding the knife back into his boot. I put one hand out and lean to the side, looking out the doorway. I squint into the distance.

"Christ; that's the fucking Forth Bridge!" Somehow it's a relief that I can see the bridges and know home's only a few miles away.

"We're on Inchmickery," Andy says. "Off Cramond." He looks around. "Place was a gun battery during both wars; these are old Army buildings." He smiles again. "You get the occasional adventurous yachtsman trying to make a landing, but there are a couple of bolt-holes they can't find." He pats the wall behind him. "Makes a good base, now the hotel's gone. Mind you, it's under the flight path for the airport and I suspect the security boys'll want to give it the once-over before the Euro-summit, so I'm bailing out today, one way or the other."

I nod, trying to think back. I don't like the sound of that "one way or the other'. "Do I remember you bringing me here in a boat?" I ask.

He laughs. "Well, I don't have access to a helicopter." He grins. "Yes. An inflatable."

"Hmm."

He looks to each side, as if checking the gun and the phone are still there. "So; sitting comfortably?" he asks me.

"Well, no, but don't let it put you off."

He gives a small smile that disappears quickly. "I'm going to give you a choice later, Cameron," he says, sounding calm and serious. "But first I want to tell you why I did all those things."

"Uh-huh?" I want to say, It's perfectly fucking obvious why you did them, but I keep my mouth shut.

"It was Lingary, of course, first," Andy says, looking younger still now, and staring down at his hand and the bullet. "I mean, I'd met people I despised in the past, people I had no respect for and who I thought, Well, the world would be a better place without them. But I don't know, maybe I was being naive and expected that in a war, especially in a professional army, it would somehow be better; people would rise above themselves; stretch their own moral envelope, you know?"

I nod cautiously. I'm thinking, Moral envelope? Coast-speak.

"But of course it's not true," Andy says, rubbing the little copper and brass shape of the bullet between his fingers. "War is a magnifier, a multiplier. Decent people act more decently; bastards get to be even bigger bastards." He waves one hand. "I'm not talking about all that banality-of-evil stuff — organised genocide is different — I mean just ordinary warfare, where the rules are obeyed. And the truth is that some people do rise above themselves, but others sink beneath themselves. They don't gain, they don't shine the way some people do in combat and they don't even muddle through the way most people do, scared to death but doing their job because they've been well trained and because their mates are depending on them; they just have their faults and weaknesses exposed, and in certain circumstances, if that person is an officer and his flaws are of a particular type and he's risen to a certain level without ever encountering a real battlefield, those faults can lead to the deaths of a lot of men."

"We all have moral responsibility, whether we like it or not, but people in power — in the military, in politics, in professions, whatever — have an imperative to care, or at least to exhibit an officially acceptable analogue of care; duty, I suppose. It was people I knew had abused that responsibility that I attacked; that's what I was taking as my… authority."

He shrugs, frowns. "The situation was a little different with Oliver, the porn merchant; that was partly to throw them off the scent and partly because I just despised what he was doing.

"And the judge, well, he wasn't quite so culpable as the others; I was comparatively lenient with him.

"The rest… they were all powerful men, all rich — several of them very rich indeed. All of them had all they could ask for in life, but they all wanted more — which is okay, I suppose, it's just a failing, you can't kill people for that alone — but they all treated people like shit, literally like shit; something unpleasant to be disposed of. It was like they'd forgotten their humanity and could never find it again, and there was only one way to remind them of it, and remind all the others like them, and make them feel frightened and vulnerable and powerless, the way they made other people feel all the time."

He holds the bullet up in front of his face, peering at it. "There wasn't one of those men who hadn't killed people; indirectly, the way the Nuremberg Nazis mostly did, but definitely, unarguably, beyond any reasonable doubt.

"And Halziel," he says, taking a deep breath. "Well, you know about him."

"Jesus, Andy," I say. I know I should shut up and let him talk on as much as he likes but I can't help it. "The guy was a selfish bastard and a lousy doctor; but he was incompetent, not malicious. He didn't hate Clare or anything or wish her —»

"But that's just it," Andy says, holding his hands out. "If a certain level of skill — of competence — translates into the gift of life or death it becomes malice when you don't bother to exercise that skill, because people are relying on you to do just that. But," he holds up one hand to me, forestalling, and nods, "I'll admit to a level of personal vengeance there. Once I'd done all the others and I reckoned I didn't have much longer to operate overground, as it were, well, it just seemed the right thing to do."

He looks up at me, a strange, wide-eyed open smile on his face. "I'm shocking you, aren't I, Cameron?"

I gaze into his eyes for a while, then look away out the doorway towards the water and the small white shapes of the circling, crying birds. "No," I tell him. "Not as much as when I realised it was you who'd spiked Bissett like that and it was you behind that gorilla mask and you who burned Howie —»

"Howie didn't suffer," Andy says matter-of-factly. "I stoved his head in with a log first." He grins. "Probably saved him from a terrible hangover."

I stare at him, feeling sick and close to tears at the off-handed way the man I've always thought of as my best friend is talking about murder, and also feeling pretty vulnerable and at risk myself right now, too, no matter what he's said and even though he has untied my hands.

Andy reads my expression. "He was a cunt, Cameron." He pauses, looks at the ceiling. "No that's not fair, and that's what he usually called women, as well; so let's say he was a prick, a dickhead; and a violent prick, a vindictive bullying dickhead, at that. Over the years he broke his wife's jaw, both her arms and her collarbone; he fractured her skull and he kicked her when she was pregnant. He was just an unmitigated pig-fuck of a man. He was probably battered as a kid himself — he never talked about it — but fuck him. That's what we're human for, so we can choose to alter our behaviour; he wouldn't do it himself, so I did it for him."

"Andy," I say. "For Christ's sake; there are laws, there are courts; I know they're not perfect, but —»

"Oh, laws," Andy says, voice saturated with scorn. "Laws based on what? With what authority?"

"Well, how about democracy, for example?"

"Democracy? A two-way choice between tough shit and not-quite-so-tough shit every four or five years if you're lucky?"

"That's not what democracy is! It's not just that; it's a free press —»

"And we have that, don't we?" Andy laughs. "Except the bits that are free aren't read very much and the bits that are most read aren't free. Let me quote you: "They're not newspapers, they're comics for the semi-literate; propaganda sheets controlled by foreign billionaires who just want to make as much money as technically possible and maintain a political environment conducive to that single aim.""

"All right, I stand by that, but it's still better than nothing."

"Oh, I know it is, Cameron," he says, sitting back and looking slightly shocked at being so misunderstood. "I know it is; and I know that what powerful people can get away with, they will get away with, and if the people they exploit let them, well, in a sense that serves them right. But don't you see?" He jabs himself in the chest. "That includes me!" He laughs. "I'm part of it, too; I'm a product of the system. I'm just another human being, a bit better off than most, a bit smarter than most, maybe a bit luckier than most, but just another part of the equation, another variable that society's thrown up. So I come along and I do what I can get away with, because it seems fit to me to do it, because I'm like a businessman, you see? I'm still a businessman; I'm addressing a need. I've seen a niche in the market unfilled and I'm filling it."

"Wait, wait; hold on," I say. "I'm not buying this crap about fulfilling a need anyway, but the point about the difference between your authority and everybody else's is that you're just you; you've made up all this… this rationale by yourself. The rest of us have had to come to some sort of agreement, a consensus; we're all trying to get along because that's the only way for people to exist together at all."

Andy smiles slowly. "Numbers make the difference, do they, Cameron? So when the two greatest nations on Earth — over half a billion people — were so scared of each other they were quite seriously prepared to blow up the world, they were right?" He shakes his head. "Cameron, I'd be prepared to bet that more people believe Elvis is still alive than subscribe to whatever flavour of secular humanism you currently think represents the One True Way for humanity. And besides, where has this consensus of yours brought us?"

He frowns and looks genuinely mystified.

"Come on, Cameron," he chides. "You know the evidence: the world already produces… we already produce enough food to feed every starving child on earth, but still a third of them go to bed hungry. And it is our fault; that starvation's caused by debtor countries having to abandon their indigenous foods to grow cash crops to keep the World Bank or the IMF or Barclays happy, or to service debts run up by murdering thugs who slaughtered their way into power and slaughtered their way through it, usually with the connivance and help of one part of the developed world or another.

"We could have something perfectly decent right now — not Utopia, but a fairly equitable world state where there was no malnutrition and no terminal diarrhoea and nobody died of silly wee diseases like measles — if we all really wanted it, if we weren't so greedy, so racist, so bigoted, so basically self-centred. Fucking hell, even that self-centredness is farcically stupid; we know smoking kills people but we still let the drug barons of BAT and Philip Morris and Imperial Tobacco kill their millions and make their billions; smart, educated people like us know smoking kills but we still smoke ourselves!"

"I've given up," I tell him defensively, though it's true I'm dying for a cigarette.

"Cameron," he says, laughing with a kind of desperation. "Don't you see? I'm agreeing with you; I listened to all your arguments over the years, and you're right: the twentieth century is our greatest work of art and we are what we've done… and look at it." He puts a hand through his hair, and sucks breath through his teeth. The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others."

He stares pointedly at me and his brows flex. I nod, reluctantly recognising something I wrote once.

"So," he says, "in that climate of culpability, that perversion of moral values, nothing, nothing I have done has been out of place or out of order or wrong."

I open my mouth to speak but he waves his hand, and with a faint sneer says, "I mean, what am I supposed to do, Cameron? Wait for the workers" revolution to make everything right? That's like Judgement Day; it never fucking comes. And I want justice now; I don't want these bastards dying a natural death." He takes a deep breath and looks at me quizzically. "So, how am I doing so far, Cameron? Do you think I'm mad, or what?"

I shake my head. "No, I don't think you're mad, Andy," I tell him. "You're just wrong."

He nods slowly at this, looking at the bullet he's turning over and over in his fingers.

"You're right about one thing," I tell him. "You are one of them. Maybe this spotting-a-niche-in-the-market stuff isn't so fatuous after all. But is a sick response to a sick system really the best we can do? You think you're fighting it but you're just joining in. They've poisoned you, man. They've taken the hope out of your soul and put some of their own greedy hate in its place."

""Soul", did you say, Cameron?" He smiles at me. "You getting religion?"

"No, I just mean the core of you, the essence of who you are; they've infected it with despair, and I'm sorry you can't see any better response than to kill people."

"Not even when they deserve it?"

"No; I still don't believe in capital punishment, Andy."

"Well, they do," he sighs. "And I suppose I do."

"And what about hope, do you believe in that?"

He looks disparaging. "What are you, Bill Clinton?" He shakes his head. "Oh, I know there's goodness in the world, too, Cameron, and compassion and a few fair laws; but they exist against a background of global barbarism, they float on an ocean of bloody horror that can tear apart any petty social construction of ours in an instant. That's the bottom line, that's the real framework we all operate within, even though most of us can't or won't recognise it, and so perpetuate it.

"We're all guilty, Cameron; some more than others, some a lot more than others, but don't tell me we aren't all guilty."

I resist the urge to say, Who's sounding religious now?

Instead I ask, "And what was William guilty of?"

Andy frowns and looks away. "Being everything he claimed to be," he says, sounding bitter for the first time. "William wasn't a personal score, like Halziel or Lingary: he was one of them, Cameron; he meant everything he ever said. I knew him better than you did, when it mattered, and he was quite serious about his ambitions. Buying a knighthood, for example; he'd been giving money to the Conservative party for the past ten years — he gave money to Labour, too, last year and this because he thought they were going to win the election — but he'd been putting respectable amounts into Tory coffers for a decade, as well as keeping an eye on how much the average successful businessman has to donate to ensure a knighthood. He once asked me which charity he'd be best advised to join, to provide the usual excuse; wanted one that didn't encourage scroungers.

"This was all long-term, but that was the way William thought. He was still determined to build a house on Eilean Dubh, and he even had a complicated scheme involving a front company and a threatened underground toxic-chemicals store in the area which, if it had worked, would have had grateful locals practically begging him to take the island. And a few times when he was drunk he talked about trading in Yvonne for a more up-market, user-friendly model, preferably one with her own title and a daddy in serious big business or the government. His non-ethical investment programme wasn't a joke, either; he pursued it, vigorously."

Andy shrugs. "It was just a coincidence that I knew him, but I don't think there was any doubt William was going to turn into a man like the others I killed."

He rolls the bullet around in his palm, eyes lowered. "However, for what it's worth, if killing him screwed up things between you and Yvonne, I'm sorry."

"Oh," I say, "that makes it all right, then." It's meant to sound sarcastic, but it just sounds dumb.

He nods, not looking at me. "He was a very charming but actually quite an evil man, Cameron."

I stare at him for a while; he rubs the bullet between his fingers. Finally I say, "Yes, but you're not God, Andy."

"No, I'm not," he agrees. "Nobody is." He grins. "So what?"

I close my eyes, unable to bear the relaxed, merely mischievous expression on his face. I open them again and look out through the empty doorway, at the water and the land and the ceaseless, wheeling birds. "Yeah. I see. Well," I say, "I don't think there's any point in trying to argue with you, is there, Andy?"

"No, you're probably right," Andy says, suddenly all cheery decisiveness. He slaps both knees and jumps up. He lifts the gun and sticks it down the back of his cords. He hoists the rucksack up and puts it over one shoulder. He nods down at the cellphone lying on the concrete floor.

"Here's your choice," he tells me. "Phone and turn me in, or not."

He waits for a reaction from me, so I raise my eyebrows.

He shrugs. "I'm heading down to the boat now; put the kit bag aboard." He grins down at me. Take your time. I'll be back in ten, fifteen minutes."

I stare at the phone on the littered floor.

"It's working," he reassures me. "Your choice." He laughs. "I'll be all right, whatever. Leave me be, and… I don't know; I might retire now, while I'm ahead. But on the other hand there are still a lot of bastards out there. Mrs T, for one, if that piques your interest, Cameron." He smiles. "Or there's always America; land of opportunities. On the other hand, if I end up in jail… Well, there are people in there I'd really like to meet, too; the Yorkshire Ripper, for example, if it's possible to get to him. I'd need just a small blade, and about five minutes." He shrugs again. "Whatever. See you in a bit."

He skips out into the sunlight and the swirling wind, taking the steps two at a time down to a walkway between two concrete blockhouses. I lean back as he disappears, whistling.

I squat on my taped-together feet and lift the cellphone. It looks charged and connected. I dial the number of my mum and dad's old house in Strathspeld village; I get an answer-machine; a man's voice, gruff and curt.

I switch the phone off.

It takes a minute to get the tape off my ankles. I lift my Drizabone from the floor and dust it down, then put it on.

The coat-tails flap round my legs as I stand in the doorway, Fife to my right, the trees of Dalmeny Park and Mons Hill to my left and the two bridges ahead upstream; one tensed, webbed-red and the other straight-curved, battleship grey.

The firth is ruffled blue-grey, the waves marching away, wind blowing from behind, out of the east. Two minesweepers are heading upstream under the bridge towards Rosyth; a huge tanker sits tall and unladen at the Hound Point oil terminal, attended by a pair of tugs; two huge crane-barges float nearby, where they've been most of this year, installing a second terminal pier. A small tanker is almost level with the island, heading out to sea, low in the water with some product from the Grangemouth refinery. North, beyond Inchcolm, a red-hulled LPG tanker sits at Braefoot Bay, loading from the pipelines connected to the Mossmorran plant a few kilometres inland, position marked by white plumes of steam. I watch all this maritime activity, surprised at how industrial, how continuingly mercantile the old river is.

Above and around, the seagulls bank and ride, hanging in the air, bills open, crying to the wind. The concrete blockhouses, towers, barracks and gun emplacements on the small island are all covered in seagull-shit; white and black, yellow and green.

I rub the back of my head, wincing as I touch the bump. I look at the phone in my hand, breathe in the sharp, sea air, and cough.

The cough goes on for a while, then it goes away.

So, what to do? One more betrayal, even if it is one that Andy seems half to want? Or become, in effect, his accomplice and leave him free to murder and maim God knows who else, a free radical in our systemic corruption?

What is to be done?

Shake head, Colley; look round this concrete dereliction and survey this breezily industrious river, and try to find an inspiration, a hint, a sign. Or just something to take your mind off a decision you're sure to regret, one way or another.

I punch the number into the phone.

Various tones and beeps sound in my ear as I watch the clouds all moving away overhead. Then the connection's made.

"Yes, hello," I say. "Doctor Girson please. Cameron Colley." I look around, trying to see Andy, but there's no sign of him. "Yes. Cameron. That's right. I was just wondering if you have the results through yet… So you have… Well, if you could just give me them now, that'd be… Well, over the phone, why not?… Well, I do. I think it is. Well, it's my body, isn't it, doctor? … I want to know now… Look, let me ask you a direct question, doctor: have I got lung cancer? Doctor… Doctor… No, Doctor… Look, I'd really like a straight answer, if you don't mind. No, I don't think… Please, doctor; have I got cancer? No, I'm not trying to… No, I'm just… I'm just… Look; have I got cancer? … Have I got cancer? Have I got cancer? Have I got cancer?"

The doctor loses his temper eventually and does the smart thing and hangs up.

"See you tomorrow, Doc," I sigh.

I switch the phone off and sit down on the step, looking out to the water and the two long bridges under a blue and cloud-strewn sky. A seal pops its head out of the water about fifty metres out into the waves. It bobs there for a while, looking at the island and maybe at me, then it disappears back into the rolling grey water.

I look at the key pad of the cellphone and put my finger on the 9 button.

For all I know Andy is going to come back, cheerfully say, "Hi," and then blow my brains out, just on general principles.

I don't know.

My finger hovers over the button, then retreats.

No, I don't know.

I sit there for a while, in the wind and the sunlight, coughing now and again and looking out and holding the phone tightly in both hands.