Complicity

CHAPTER 9 — GROWTH

I remember that, remember the feeling of his warm, cooling, sunlit juice on my hand, slippy becoming sticky, but I can't think about it any more without thinking of gorilla man and the little guy tied to the chair. I think they were surprised when I threw up; I hope they were, I hope they were surprised and very interested and thought, "Ullo "ullo "ullo it wasn't "im then after all; he ain't the villain, he's been fitted up so help me… Oh God, I hope my belly spoke for me better than my fucking brain, in other words.

Not guilty, didn't do it that's why what gorilla man did sickened me; no blood well hardly any blood literally a drop, a drip, a fucking pixel on the screen and the only thing slicing into flesh was a needle, tiny and delicate not a chainsaw or an axe or a knife or anything, but it's that image that idea that old devil meme, I keep dreaming about it, keep having nightmares about it, and I'm the trapped one, I'm the man in the leather-and-chrome chair and he's there with his gorilla face and his squeaky baby voice, explaining to the camera that what he has in this bottle and in this syringe is sperm; the crazy fucker's loaded it up with jism man looks like half a fucking milk bottle of the stuff and he's going to inject it into the little guy's veins and he ties something round the naked upper arm of the little guy strapped to the chair and pulls it tight and waits for the vein to show while the little guy howls and screams like a child and tries to shake the chair to bits or rip it apart but he's too well strapped in there no purchase no leverage and then the man in the gorilla mask just does it; sinks the needle into the little guy's skin with a bit of blood and empties the whole syringe into him. I throw up onto the floor and they pause the video for me and somebody goes to get a mop.

After I've stopped chucking and coughing they restart the video and we cut to the other scene and the tall hospital chair and the little guy again with empty eyes and McDunn says his bit about Persistent Vegetative State.

Well, indeed. They did a DNA-fingerprint test and found he had a bus-load of people in him, linked it to some guy who was in the toilets under Centre Point the day before hiring rent boys but he didn't want the full business just wanted them to wank into this bottle thank you for your contribution young man every little bit helps going to a good home thank you mind how you go…

I'm thinking.

"This is the trickle-down effect in action, is it?"

"No, this is the show-off effect in action," Clare tells me, having to shout over the din. Everybody else seems to be cheering. Andy and William are standing on a seat; Andy leans out over a table laden with glasses, a champagne bottle in one hand and his other arm held by William, who leans out the opposite way to balance him.

The table Andy is perched over is stacked with several hundred champagne glasses, forming a glittering pyramid rising a couple of metres from the table's surface. Andy is filling the single champagne glass at the apex of the pyramid with champagne; it is overflowing, filling the three glasses beneath it; they in turn are overflowing, filling the glasses on the level beneath them, which are also full and so spilling over to the level underneath, and so on and so on down almost to the bottom; Andy is on his eighth magnum. He glances down at the final layer of glasses.

"How we doing?" he roars.

"More! More!" everybody shouts.

"William!" somebody yells from the crowd. "Fifty quid if you just let him go!"

"Don't you fucking dare, Sorrell!" Andy shouts, laughing, upending the magnum over the topmost glass as the bottle empties.

"Not for a measly fifty," William laughs, as he and Andy pull together and draw together, tottering on the seat while Andy throws the emptied bottle to someone in the crowd and is handed another full magnum by his partner in The Gadget Shop, a fellow ex-ad-man who's a few years older than Andy. It strikes me the symbolism of this whole venture would be better were it he and Andy balancing together on the seat, but I get the impression Andy's partner isn't fully into such flamboyance.

"Winch me out there, Will!" Andy bellows.

"God, though, it's tempting," William says, leaning back and letting Andy crane out over the pyramid of glasses again.

"This is infantile," Clare says, shaking her head.

"What's what?" Yvonne asks, making her way through the crowd. She clutches a bottle of champagne.

"This is infantile," Clare says, nodding at the pyramid of glasses. She sees the bottle in Yvonne's hand. "Oh, I say, well done that woman." She holds out her flute. Yvonne fills the glass.

"Cameron?"

"Ta."

She fills her own glass and stands beside Clare and me, watching Andy pouring the champagne onto the top of the pyramid. Yvonne's wearing a little black number that to my untutored eye looks like it could have cost ten quid or a thousand; Clare is rather more ostentatious in a short, sparkling, crimson creation that looks like it wants to be a ball-gown when it grows up. Andy and William are in monochrome, DJs removed for the bubbly-waterfall operation.

Yvonne grins. "Boys," she says, sounding long-sufferingly affectionate.

I look around. When Andy invited me to the launch of the The Gadget Shop I naively assumed it would be in the shop itself, in Covent Garden. But that didn't measure up to Andy's sense of showmanship; it wasn't glitzy enough, dramatic enough, or even big enough. Instead, he hired the Science Museum. Part of it, anyway. That got people interested. A shop is just a shop, and even a shop selling expensive executive toys is still just a shop, but a museum is, well, glamorous. People reckon the Natural History Museum is the most glamorous — partying in the shadow of all those dinosaurs in that huge space is just the business — but for The Gadget Shop the Science Museum along the road was the obvious venue, as well as being cheaper. Besides, everyone who matters has already been to some sort of bash at the Natural History Museum; this is new.

There's a full-size hovercraft held tipped on wires directly above us; a virtually circular thing with a tiny cabin and a huge fluted central air-intake. I vaguely recall making an Airfix kit of that thing when I was a kid. It floats above us, gleaming in the darkness as if supported on a cloud of talk and booze while the people below swarm and chat and roar Andy on; the champagne — already dripping down off the edges of the table onto the temporary matting beneath from spillages — is almost overflowing the second-last level of glasses.

"More! More!" people yell.

"Oh, less, less," Clare mutters, sniffing.

"Nearly there yet?" Andy shouts.

"More! More!" everybody roars.

I look at them all. These are people like me. Christ. Media people, people from the advertising company Andy has just left, a few politicians — mostly Tory or Social Democrats though there are a couple of Labour guys — bankers, lawyers, business advisers, investment experts, actors, TV people — at least one film crew, though their lights are switched off for now — various other city types, a scattering of people who are, well, just professionally famous, and the remainder seemingly either part of some enormous floating meta-party or hired from some agency to impersonate people having a whale of a time: Rent-a-Hoot or something similar. I'm mildly surprised we haven't had a kiss-o-gram, but maybe that's a little lo-rent for Andy. Clare told me he'd taken rather a lot of convincing — once he'd determined to do the slightly naff champagne-pyramid stunt in the first place — not to try doing it with proper champagne flutes but to use the perry glasses like everybody else did; too tall, too unstable otherwise.

"You're very quiet, Cameron," Yvonne says, smiling at me.

"Yeah," I say helpfully.

"I think Cameron," Clare says, sniffing, "disapproves." She draws out the «oo» sound in the word.

Clare is a tall, auburn girl with striking angular looks she shares with her brother, but whereas Andy is — at the moment — bulkily fit-looking and tanned, Clare is just thin, and luminously pale. I reckon she's overly keen on coke and spends too much time in clubs, but maybe I'm just jealous; my cub-reporter status on the Caley and the triumph-of-miniaturisation salary that goes with it make habits that expensive out of the question. Clare has always had rather more in the way of aristocratic pretensions than Andy, who has that aura of classless broth-of-a-boyhood that usually only the congenitally rich can carry off convincingly.

Clare works for an estate agent so far up-market it's mostly estates they deal in, not humble houses, no matter how extensive; if it doesn't boast a couple of salmon rivers, a few square miles of trees and a brace of hills, lochs or lakes, then they just aren't interested.

"Cameron," Clare continues, "is content to lurk here on the sidelines radiating self-righteous socialist disapproval and imagining how after the revolution we'll all have to pull ploughs, eat raw turnips and take part in interminable self-criticism sessions long into the candle-lit night on the collective farm, aren't you, Cameron?"

"You don't pull ploughs," I reply. "You push them."

"I know, dear — there is a farm next door to us back on the dear old homestead and Daddy does usually describe himself as a farmer — but I meant that we capitalist parasites would be taking the place of the oxen, not the horny-handed salt-of-the-earth types cracking the whip over them."

"Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you," I tell her, "but I'm afraid you're assuming a rather more lenient revolution than the one I had in mind. I had you down as bone-meal actually, come the day. Sorry." I shrug, watching Andy start to pour what everybody nearby seems to agree will be the last magnum required before the glass pyramid is finally full of champagne.

Clare looks at Yvonne. "Cameron always did take a hard line on these things," she tells her. "Oh well, might as well enjoy ourselves while we can before the commissars take their gloating revenge. I'm off to powder my nose; would you like to come?"

Yvonne shakes her head. "No, thanks."

"I'll leave you with young Hot-to-Trotsky here, then," Clare says, patting Yvonne on the shoulder and winking at me as she sidles off through the cheering crowd. The pyramid is still not quite full.

"One more bottle! One more bottle!" everybody is shouting.

I turn to Yvonne. "So, how's the venture-capital businesss these days?"

"Venturesome," Yvonne says, flicking back her shoulder-Ilength black hair. "How's the newspaper business?"

"Folding."

"Oh; ha ha."

I shrug. "No, I'm enjoying it. Money's not brilliant but someetimes I see my name on the front page and I feel almost successful for a while, until I come to something like this." I nod at Andy, taking yet another opened magnum and leaning out over the glass-stacked table. His task is almost finished; the pyramid is nearly full.

Yvonne glances at the pyramid with what might be contempt. "Oh, don't let your head get turned by all this shit," she says.

The tone of her voice surprises me. "I thought you'd love all this," I tell her.

She looks slowly around, at the people and the place. "Hmm," she says, and packs a disconcerting amount of cold equivocation into that single sound. She fixes her gaze on me. "But don't you just long for a neutron bomb sometimes?"

"Constantly," I tell her, after a pause.

She nods, eyes narrowed, for a moment, then she shrugs, tiurning to me and grinning. ""Hot-to-Trotsky"?" she asks, looking; after Clare, still heading, thinly majestic in the thick of the crowrd, for the ladies.

"I made the mistake of trying to get Clare into bed onoce," I confess.

"Cameron! Really?" Yvonne looks delighted. "What happenned?"

"She just laughed."

Yvonne tuts. She glances round. "I'd have given you a refearence, Cameron," she says quietly.

I smile and drink my champagne, remembering when Andy came to Stirling for Yvonne and William's party, five years ago. It seems like a lot longer.

"Did you ever tell William about that?" I ask her.

Yvonne shakes her head. "No," she says. She shrugs. "Maybe when we're older."

I think about telling her that Andy was there, in his sleeping bag, listening the whole time, but while I'm thinking about it something goes wrong; there must have been a flaw in one of the glasses, or the weight is just too much, because there's a cracking sound and one side of the pyramid starts to collapse, sending an avalanche of falling glass and frothing champagne spilling crashing down off the table and smashing, bouncing and splashing onto the mats and the floor below.

Andy goes, "Aww…" and holds his arms straight out.

People cheer.

Still thinking.

Four years later Clare and her latest fiance were spending a weekend at Strathspeld when she died of a heart attack. I heard the news from a guy I knew who still lived in the village. I couldn't believe it. A heart attack. Overweight male execs squeezing themselves behind the wheel of their Mercs; they died of heart attacks. Arthritic working-class guys raised on a diet of fish and chips and fags; they died of heart attacks. Not young women in their mid-twenties. Christ, Clare was even fit at the time; she'd given up doing coke and taken up healthy shit like running and swimming. It couldn't be a heart attack.

And that was exactly what the doctor thought; that was precisely what helped kill her. The local doc — the guy who'd helped save Andy after he almost died under the ice all those years earlier — was on holiday at the time and there was a locum, a deputising doctor in charge of the practice, except from what the locals muttered later it seemed he'd treated his stay in Strathspeld as a holiday, too, and spent more time on river banks with a rod in his hands than at bedsides toting a stethoscope. The family called him when Clare started to complain of chest pains in the late afternoon but he didn't come out; told them she'd just strained something; rest and painkillers. They called him twice again, and eventually he appeared that evening once it was explained the family wasn't used to this sort of treatment (and once he realised the best salmon stream in the area ran through the estate). He still couldn't find anything wrong, and left again.

They called an ambulance when Clare became unconscious and her lips turned blue, but by then it was too late.

Andy and his partner had sold The Gadget Shop chain the previous year; Andy was still thinking about what he wanted to do next — now he was rich — and was deep in the desert on a trans-Saharan expedition when Clare died. The funeral was private, family only; Andy got back just in time. I rang the house a week later and talked to Mrs Gould, who said Andy was still there. She thought he would like to see me.

A grey day in a cold April, one of those winter's-end days when the land looks exhausted and worn and it seems like all the colour is gone from the world. The cloud was thick and low and moving slowly on a damp, chilling wind, a lidding expanse hiding the sky and the snow on the distant hills. The trees, bushes and fields were all the same dun shade, as though a thin layer of dirt had been sprayed everywhere, and wherever you looked there seemed to be mud or rotting leaves or bare, dead-looking branches. I thought that, if I'd just come from the Sahara to here, I'd head back as soon as possible, family duties or not.

I stopped at the house to give my condolences to Mr and Mrs Gould. Mrs Gould was covered in flour and smelled faintly of gin. She was a tall, nervous woman who'd gone grey early; she always wore large bifocals and usually dressed in tweeds. I'd never seen her without a single string of pearls, which she fingered constantly. She apologised for the mess, wiping her hands on her apron and then shaking my hand while I said how sorry I'd been to hear. She looked around the hall distractedly, as if wondering what to do next, then the door to the library opened and Mr Gould peeked out.

He was about the same height as his wife but he looked stooped now, and he was wearing a dressing-gown; normally he was the epitome of tweedy country-squiredom, an archetypal laird in three-piece suit, clumpy shoes, checked shirt and cap; he resorted to a beaten-up, much reproofed Barbour when the weather turned particularly foul. I'd never seen him in anything as soft-looking, as human as the pair of scruffy trousers, open-necked shirt and dressing-gown he wore then. His strong, square face looked drawn and his thinning brown hair hadn't been combed. He came out of the library when he saw it was me, shook my hand and said "Terrible thing, terrible thing" a few times, while Beethoven sounded loudly from the opened library door and his wife tutted and tried to smooth his errant hair. His eyes kept looking away over one of my shoulders or the other, never meeting my gaze, and I got the impression that like his wife he was constantly waiting for something important to happen, expecting someone to arrive at any moment, as though they both couldn't believe what had happened and it was all a dream or a ghastly joke and they were just waiting for Clare to come gangling through the front door, kicking off muddy green wellies and loudly demanding tea.

Andy was out shooting. I could hear the shotgun barking as I walked through the dim, dripping woods from the house, staying off the muddy path as much as possible and walking on the flattened, exhausted-looking grass at its side to keep my shoes from clogging up.

The field was surrounded by trees and looked out towards the river upstream from the loch. The river wasn't visible, but there had been a lot of rain over that week and one corner of the field had flooded, leaving a shallow temporary loch reflecting the tarnished dark silver of the clouds; its waters were still and flat.

There was a stretch of curved gravel, edged with planks, near this end of the field; six posts stood along the front edge of the gravel stand, and on top of each post there was a little flat piece of wood like a tray. Twenty yards in front of the gravel pathway was a low mound where the launcher mechanism for the clays sat. There were two other mounds about the same distance away to either side. I could hear the little generator puttering away inside the central mound as I got closer, clearing the trees and looking across and down at where Andy stood. I watched for a moment.

Andy wore cords, shirt and jumper and body-warmer; a cap hung from the top of one of the nearby posts. He was very tanned. A big box of shells sat opened on top of the post in front of him; a foot switch at the end of a long, snaking flex operated the catapult in the pit. He slotted six cartridges into the long-barrelled pump-action gun and turned to aim.

His foot tapped once, and the clay shot out of the hide, spinning away into the greyness in a day-glo orange blur. The gun roared and the clay disintegrated somewhere out over the field. When I looked carefully I could see lots of orange fragments scattered over the sodden grass and glistening brown earth of the field.

The generator revved up and down, providing power to the automatic launcher; it had some sort of randomly set variation built into where it was aiming because the clays came out at a different angle and heading each time. Andy got them all with his first shot except for the last one. He even tried to reload fast enough to have another crack at it, but it thumped into the wet heather near the river before he could get the shell into the gun. He shrugged, put the cartridge back into the box, checked the gun and turned to look at me. "Hi, Cameron," he said, and I knew then he'd been aware of me all the time. He put the pump-action down carefully on an oiled gun bag lying on the gravel.

"Hi," I said, walking up to him. He looked tired. We shook hands a little awkwardly, then hugged. He smelled of smoke.

"Fucking squaddie culture, yeah; adoration of the fucking Maggie and pit bulls and getting some scoff down your neck and let's get pissed on lager and all moon together from the bus and camouflage jackets in the high street and yeah-well-I'm-inarestid-in-martial-arts-in't-I? I'm not a fucking Nazi I just collect militaria I'm not a fucking racist I just hate blacks and gun magazines instead of magazines for guns wanking over the glossy photos of chromed Lugers I'll bet; half of them think Elvis is still alive, buncha fucking stupid little cunts! The dip-shit little bastards deserve the fucking Micks turning them into mince; saw the inside of an armoured car once; been blown to buggery; thrown a hundred feet into the air and then rolled all the way down a hill; we took turns looking inside just to prove we were real men; looked like the inside of a fucking slaughter-house…"

I sat with Andy while he ranted on. We were drinking whisky. He had a big room on the second floor of the house at Strathspeld; we'd played here as kids, making models, fighting wars with toy soldiers and the train set and Airfix tanks and forts made from Lego; we'd conducted experiments with our chemistry sets, raced our Scalextric cars, flown gliders out the window down to the lawn and shot at targets in the gardens with our air rifles and killed a couple of birds and smoked a few packets of illicit fags from the same window. We'd smoked untold spliffs here, too, listening to records with pals from the village, and with Clare.

"Why are people so fucking incompetent?" Andy screamed suddenly, and threw his whisky glass across the room. It hit the wall near the window and smashed. I remembered the disintegrating pile of champagne glasses in the Science Museum, only four years earlier. The whisky left in the glass he'd thrown made a pale brown stain on the wall. I focused on the liquid as it slowly dribbled down.

"Sorry," Andy muttered, not sounding sorry at all, getting unsteadily out of his seat and going to where the bits of glass lay broken on the carpet. He squatted and started to pick them up, then let them drop back to the floor and just crouched there and put his hands over his face and started to cry.

I let him cry for a bit and then went over to him and squatted down beside him and put my hand over his shoulders.

"Why are people so fucking useless?" he sobbed. "Fucking let you down, fucking can't do their fucking job! Fucking Halziel; Captain fucking Michael fucking Lingary DSO — cunts!"

He pushed away from me and stood up and stumbled over to a wooden chest, tearing one of its drawers right out so that it crashed to the carpeted floor and a load of jumpers fell out. He got down on his knees behind the drawer and I heard tape rip.

He stood up holding an automatic pistol and started trying to slot a magazine into the grip. "Fucking brain-ectomy coming up, Doctor fucking Halziel," he said, still crying and still trying to get the magazine to fit into the gun.

Halziel, I thought. Halziel. I recognised Lingary's name from the times Andy had talked about the Falklands; he'd been Andy's CO, the one Andy blamed for the deaths of some of his men. But Halziel… Oh yeah, of course: the name of the locum who'd let Clare die. The guy the locals thought was more interested in fishing than doctoring.

"Fucking load, cunt!" Andy screamed at the gun.

I got up, suddenly feeling cold. I hadn't felt like this when I'd seen him firing the shotgun. It hadn't occurred to me to feel frightened of him then. Now it did. I wasn't at all sure I was doing the right thing but I got up and started towards him as he finally got the clip to slide into the gun and snick home.

"Hey, Andy," I said. "Man, come on…"

He glared up at me as though seeing me for the first time. His face was red and blotchy and streaked with tears. "Don't you fucking start, Colley, you little cunt; you let me down too, remember?"

"Hey, hey," I said, putting my hands out, and retreating.

Andy crashed into the door, opened it and almost fell out into the landing. I followed him down the stairs, listening to him curse and shout; in the front hall he tried to get a jacket on over his clothes but couldn't get it to fit over his hand holding the gun. He hauled the front door open so hard that when it hit the stop the stained-glass panel shattered. I looked woozily around for Mr and Mrs Gould but there was no sign of them. Andy slammed the heel of his hand off the half of the storm door that was still closed, then fell out into the night.

I went after him; he was trying to get into the Land Rover. I stood beside him while he cursed at the keys and thumped the side window. He put the gun sideways in his mouth to give him two free hands and I thought about trying to grab it off him but I thought I'd probably kill one of us and even if I didn't I was no match for him and he'd just take it off me again.

"Andy, man," I said, trying to sound calm, "come on; this is crazy. Come on. Don't be insane, man. Killing this dickhead Halziel isn't going to bring Clare back —»

"Shut up!" Andy yelled, throwing the keys down and grabbing me by the collar and slamming me back against the side of the Landie. "Shut the fuck up, you stupid little shit! I fucking know nothing'll bring her back! I know that!" He banged my head against the Land Rover's side window. "I just want to be sure that there'll be one stupid incompetent fuck less in the world!"

"But — " I said.

"Ah, fuck off!"

He hit me in the face with the gun; an inefficient, glancing blow with more chaotic anger than directed malice behind it; I fell down, correspondingly, more because I felt I ought to than because I was actually knocked out. Still hurt, though. I lay on the gravel, face up. It was only then I realised it was raining.

I worried distantly about being shot and killed. Then Andy slammed the gun side-on against the Land Rover and kicked the door.

"Christ!" he bellowed. He kicked the door again. "Christ!"

I was getting wet. I could feel water seeping through my jumper and making my back damp.

Andy bent down and looked at me. His eyes screwed up.

"You all right?"

"Yeah," I said wearily.

He flicked something on the gun and stuffed it down the back of his cords, then held a hand out to me. I put my hand up to his. I remembered William and Andy, balanced on the chair under the old hovercraft.

He pulled me up. "Sorry I hit you," he said.

"Sorry I was a prat."

"Oh, man, Christ…" He put his head on my shoulder, breathing hard but not crying. I patted his head.

Still thinking.

Yvonne and I at South Queensferry a couple of summers ago, across the road from the Hawes Inn at the slipway underneath the tall stone piers of the rail-bridge, the mile-wide river bright before us, people promenading along pavements and down the pier, an occasional smell of frying onions from the snack bar beside the Inshore Lifeboat shed. We were there to witness William getting to grips with his brand-new Jet Ski; this process seemed to consist largely of getting on, powering away, trying to turn too fast and falling off in an extravagant splash. His big blond head kept coming up, shaking once and then bobbing through the water as he struck out for the machine. There were another three Jet Skis buzzing around on that part of the river and a few water-skiers with their big-engined speedboats, all creating a fair old racket, but we could still hear William laughing; the guy thought buying a frighteningly expensive piece of machinery and spending most of your time falling off it into the water was just the most enormous wheeze.

"What do you actually use these things for?" I asked.

"What, Jet Skis?" Yvonne said, leaning on the sea wall and clinking ice around in her fruit juice. "Fun." She watched William bank into a turn, narrowly miss another Jet Ski and plough into the wash of a water-ski boat, sending William — in a new variation on his repertoire of falls — somersaulting over the handlebars of the Jet Ski and flopping on his back into the water in a cloud of spray. His laughter whooped above the revving motors. He waved to show he was all right, then swam back to the floating machine, still laughing. Yvonne put her sunglasses on. "They're for fun; that's what they're for."

"Fun," I said, nodding. William was still laughing. I watched Yvonne watching him. He waved again as he got onto the Jet Ski. She waved back. Listlessly, I thought.

Yvonne was slim and muscled in shorts and T-shirt. Her breasts were pushed up by the wall she was leaning against. We had been lovers for a year or so. She shook her head gently as William gunned the machine's engine again. I leant on the wall beside her.

"Do you ever think about leaving him?" I asked her quietly.

She paused, turned to me, put her sunglasses down her nose and looked at me over them. "No?" she said.

And there was a question in her voice; it was asking me why I'd asked such a thing.

I shrugged. "I just wondered."

She waited for a family to pass by, eating ice-creams, then she said, "Cameron, I've no intention of leaving William."

I shrugged again, sorry I'd asked now. "Like I say, it just occurred to me."

"Well, un-occur it." She glanced at where William was bumping enthusiastically across the waves, miraculously still upright. She put a hand out and briefly touched my arm. "Cameron," she said, and her voice was tender, "you're the excitement in my life; you do things for me William couldn't even imagine. But he's my husband, and even if we do stray now and again, we'll always be an item." She narrowed her eyes then added. "… probably." She looked at him again as he executed a slower turn, wobbling but upright. "I mean, if he ever gave me AIDS I'd give him a Colombian necktie —»

"Eugh," I said. I'd seen a photograph of one of those; they cut your throat and pull your tongue out through the slit. Surprisingly big, the human tongue. "You told him that?"

She laughed once. "Yeah. He said if I left him he'd demand custody of the Merc."

I turned and looked at the subtly tarted, much breathed-upon 300 sitting at the kerb, then made a show of sizing up Yvonne.

I shrugged. "Fair enough," I said, turning to look out across the water and drinking my pint. She kicked me on the knee.

Later, when we were helping William take the Jet Ski out of the water, some very loud people — all wearing black leather jackets with BMW logos — arrived with a gleaming black Range Rover and a big black ski boat. They demanded that everybody get out of their way so they could launch their boat, while people who'd been there for the best of the tide were already bringing their craft out. Their triple-engined ski boat had blocked the exit to the road and when people asked them to move it the BMW people started arguing. I even heard one of them claiming to have booked the slipway.

There was impasse for about ten minutes. We got the Jet Ski onto its trailer but William's Merc was one of the cars trapped on the slip; he tried to reason with the BMW people, then sat in the car and sulked. Yvonne seemed silently furious, then announced she was going up to the lifeboat shed to buy some souvenir crap or whatever.

"When in doubt, shop," she told us, slamming the car door.

William sat tight-lipped, looking in his rear-view mirror at the argument continuing further up the slip. "Bastards," he said. "People are so fucking inconsiderate."

"Shoot the lot of them," I said, thinking about getting out and having a cigarette (no smoking on the champagne-hued leather of the Merc).

"Yeah," William said, hands kneading the steering wheel. "People might be a bit more polite if everybody carried guns."

I looked at him.

It was all sorted out after some confusion and a lot of ill-feeling; the BMW people moved their boat forward so cars and trailers could get past it to the road. We picked Yvonne up at the top of the slip by the RNLI shed where they sold stuff to help pay for the lifeboat.

She didn't seem to have bought much; she tossed me a box of matches as she got into the car. "Here," she said.

I studied the matchbox. "Wo. Hey, you sure about this?"

I looked back as we powered away up the hill through the trees, heading for Edinburgh. There was another commotion going on down on the slip; the BMW people were gesticulating wildly and pointing at the tyres on one side of the trailer holding the big ski boat, which appeared to be listing slightly in that direction now. It looked like it was all getting rather heated again down there; then the leaves got in the way and we couldn't see any more. I was sure I'd seen a punch thrown.

I turned back to find Yvonne's grinning face looking past me in the same direction. She looked suddenly innocent and sat back in her seat, humming. I remembered the time Andy and I had let down all the wheels of his dad's car, folding matches in half and sticking them into the tyre valves. I opened the box of matches Yvonne had given me, but you couldn't have told whether there were a couple of them missing or not.

"Looks like they had some sort of problem with their trailer there," I said.

"Good," William said.

"Probably a puncture," Yvonne sighed. She glanced at William. "We do have lockable tyre valves on this thing, don't we?"

William in the woods, outskirts of Edinburgh, almost within sight of the estate where his and Yvonne's new house is, toting a paint gun on another of these stupid but grudgingly-sometimes-fun-in-a-terribly-boyish-sort-of-way paint-ball games (his computer-company boys and girls versus the crack troops of the Caledonian news room). My gun jammed and William recognised me and came forward laughing and firing shot after shot at me while I waved and tried to duck and these yellow paint balls went splat, splat, thunking into my hired camouflage trousers and combat jacket and smacking into my visored helmet while I waved at him and tried to get the damn gun to work and he just walked forward slowly shooting me; bastard had his own paint gun and he'd probably had it souped up; knowing William, that was almost inevitable. Splat! Splat! Splat! He was getting closer and I was thinking, Christ does he know about me and Yvonne? Has he guessed, has somebody told him, is that what all this is about?

It was pretty fucking annoying even if it wasn't; I really wanted to get the bastard because we'd been having this stupid argument before we'd started about how greed really was good and how William had been so disappointed at how poorly the argument was put across by the Gekko character in Wall Street.

"But it is good," William protested, waving his gun around. "That's how we measure fitness to survive these days." We were being shown round the paint-ball site, having flagpoles and log barricades and that sort of stuff pointed out to us. "It's natural," William insisted. "It's evolution; when we still lived in caves we used to go out and hunt and whoever brought back the mammoth or whatever ate the best meat and got to fuck the women, and all that was good for the human race. Now it's got a bit more abstract and we use money instead of animals but the principle's the same."

"But it wasn't just individuals who hunted animals; that's exactly the point," I told him. "It was all about cooperation; people worked together and got results and shared the spoils."

"I agree," William agreed. "Cooperation is great. If people didn't cooperate you couldn't lead them so easily."

"But —»

"And you'll always need leaders."

"But greed and selfishness —»

"— have produced everything you see around you," William said, waving the paint-ball gun around again.

"Exactly!" I exclaimed, throwing my arms out wide. "Capitalism!"

"Yes! Exactly!" William echoed, also gesturing with his hands. And we stood there, me with a great big frown on my face, quite mystified that William couldn't see what I was getting at… and William smiling but looking equally puzzled that I appeared to be incapable of understanding what he meant.

I shook my head, exasperated, and brandished my paint-ball gun. "Let's fight," I said.

William grinned. "I rest my case."

So I really wanted to nail the bastard — preferably with the cooperation of my team-mates just to prove the point — but the fucking technology let me down and the gun jammed and he had me pinned, firing shot after shot at me, and finally I gave up trying to un-jam the gun and made to throw it at him though I could hardly see because there was yellow paint all over my visor, but he ducked and tripped and sat down on a trunk, holding his stomach, and the bastard was laughing his socks off because I looked like a giant dripping banana, only I'd just realised the gun wasn't jammed after all, the safety catch was on. I must have knocked it or something and I'd a couple of shots left and I ought to have shot the swine but I couldn't, not while he was sitting there killing himself laughing.

"Bastard!" I yelled at him.

He twirled his paint gun around one gloved ringer. "Evolution!" he shouted. "You learn a lot when you live with a liquidator!" He started laughing again.

Later at the buffet lunch in the marquee he barged to the front of the queue saying, "Oh, I don't believe in queuing!" and when somebody behind him objected, convinced her with a sort of apologetic bashfulness that actually he has diabetes, you see, and so needs to eat right now. I cringed, blushed, and looked away.

Still thinking; thinking about all the times I've seen people I know do something for revenge, or do anything vindictive or sneaky or smart or even threaten to. Hell, everybody I know's done something like that at some time or another but that doesn't make them a murderer; I think McDunn's crazy but I can't tell him that because, if he's wrong about that and I'm wrong about it being something to do with those guys who died in the Lake District a few years ago, then there's only one suspect left and that's me. The trouble is my theory's looking shakier all the time because McDunn's convinced me it really was all just a smoke-screen: there is no Ares project, never was any Ares project, and Smout in his prison in Baghdad isn't connected to the guys that died; it was just somebody coming up with a clever conspiracy theory, just a way of getting me to go to remote places and wait for phone calls and deprive me of an alibi while gorilla man did something horrible to somebody else somewhere else. Of course McDunn points out that I could still be the murderer; this could all be a story I've made up. I could have recorded the mysterious Mr Archer's phone calls and had them directed to the office while I was there. They found most of the equipment to do just that in my flat when they searched it: an answer-machine, my PC and its modem; another lead or two and it would have been easy to set it up if you knew what you were doing, or just used trial and error and were patient.

McDunn really wants to help, I can see that, but he's under pressure, too; the circumstantial evidence against me is so strong people who don't know the details of the case are getting impatient over the lack of progress. Apart from that fucking business card they have no forensic evidence; no weapons, bloodstained clothes or even minutiae like hairs or fibres to link me with any of the attacks. I suspect they don't think I'd be identified by any of the witnesses or I'd have been on an identity parade by now, but it just all looks so obvious: it must be me. Lefty journalist goes loco, wastes right-wingers. Apparently I've missed some good headlines while I've been in here. Actually, I missed some good ones in the couple of days" holiday I took; if I'd just bothered to look at a single fucking news-stand after I left Stromeferry I'd have seen this story starting to break about this guy — "The Red Panther" the tabloids decided on eventually — murdering these right-leaning pillars of the community.

McDunn doesn't want to charge me with any of the other murders but they're going to have to make a decision before too long because my initial time under the PTA is nearly up and the Home Secretary isn't going to grant an extension; I'll have to appear in court soon. Hell, I might even get a lawyer.

I'm still terrified, even though McDunn's on my side, because I can see he's not so hopeful any more and if they take him off this I might get the bad cops, the ones that just want a confession and Christ I'm in England, not Scotland, and despite the McGuire Seven and the Guildford Four they still haven't changed the law: down here you can still be convicted on an uncorroborated confession even if you try to retract it later.

I'm getting paranoid about that, determined not to sign anything, worried that maybe I already have when they first brought me here and said it was just a receipt for personal effects or a legal-aid application or whatever, and I worry about them getting me to sign something when I'm tired and they've been interviewing me in shifts and all I want to do is go to bed and sleep and they say oh do us all a favour and sign this and you can sleep, come on now; it's just a formality you can always deny it later, change your mind, but you can't you can't of course, they're lying and you can't; I even worry about signing something in my sleep, or them hypnotising me and getting me to do it that way; hell, I don't know what they get up to.

"Cameron," McDunn says. It's day five; the morning. They want to charge you with all the murders and assaults and take you to court, day after tomorrow."

"Oh, Jesus." I accept a fag; McDunn lights it for me.

"You sure you can't think of anything?" McDunn asks. "Anything at all?" He makes that sucking noise with his teeth again. It's starting to annoy me.

I shake my head, rubbing my face in my hands, not caring that the smoke from the fag goes in my eyes and my hair. I cough a bit. "Sorry. No. No, I can't. I mean, I've thought of lots of stuff, but nothing —»

"But you're not telling me about it, are you, Cameron?" the DI says, sounding regretful. "You're keeping it all locked up inside you; you won't share it with me." He shakes his head. "Cameron, for God's sake, I'm the only one who can help you. If you have any suspicions, any doubts, you have to let me know about them; you have to name names."

I cough again, looking down at the tile floor of the room.

"This might be your last chance, Cameron," McDunn tells me softly.

I take a deep breath.

"If there's anybody you can think of, Cameron, just give me their name," McDunn says. "It'll probably be easy to eliminate them from the enquiry; we aren't going to frame anybody or hassle anybody or pull anything heavy."

I stare at him, still uncertain. My hands are still splayed over my lower face. I take another drag on the fag. Fingers shaking again. McDunn continues. "There are, or were, people on this case who are very good, dedicated, and enthusiastic officers, but the only thing they're enthusiastic about nowadays is getting you charged with the rest of the attacks and getting you into the dock. I've persuaded the people who matter that I'm the best man to work with you to help us clear this up, but I'm like a football manager, Cameron; I can be replaced at a moment's notice and I'm only as good as the results I get. At the moment I'm not getting any results, and I could go at any time. And believe me, Cameron, I'm the only friend you've got in here."

I shake my head, frightened to speak in case I break down.

"Names; a name; anything that might save you, Cameron," McDunn says patiently. "Is there anyone you've thought of?"

I feel like a worker in Stalinist Russia denouncing his comrades but I say, "Well, I thought of a couple of friends of mine…" I look at McDunn to see how I'm doing. There's a concerned-looking frown on his dark, heavy face.

"Yes?"

"William Sorrell, and… well, it sounds daft, but… his wife, umm, Yvo —»

"Yvonne," McDunn says, nodding slowly and sitting back. He lights a fag. He looks sad. He taps the cigarette packet round and round on the table surface.

I don't know what to think or feel. Yes, I do: I feel sick.

"Are you having an affair with Yvonne Sorrell?" McDunn asks.

I stare at him. I really don't know what to say now.

He waves his hand. "Well, maybe it doesn't matter. But we've looked into Mr and Mrs Sorrel's movements. Discreetly, once we knew they were friends of yours." He smiles. "Always have to be alive to the possibility it's more than one person, Cameron, especially with a group of crimes spread out over so much territory, and fairly complicated ones at that."

I nod. Looked into. Movements looked into. I wonder how discreet is discreet. I want to cry very much now because I think I'm admitting to myself that, no matter what happens, life is never going to be the same again.

"As it turns out," McDunn says, while the fag packet goes tap, tap, "although they are both away from home a lot, their movements are very well documented; we know pretty well what they were doing during all the attacks."

I nod again, feeling like my guts have been ripped out. So I've denounced them and there wasn't even any point to it.

"I thought of Andy," I tell the floor, looking down there, avoiding McDunn's eyes. "Andy Gould," I say, because — apart from everything else — Andy stayed with me during the summer, round about the time the card with my writing on it went missing. "I thought it might be him, but he's dead."

"Funeral's tomorrow," McDunn says, flicking ash and then inspecting the glowing end of his cigarette. He scrapes it round the edge of the light metal ashtray until the tip of the fag is a perfect cone, then smokes it carefully. My ash falls on the floor. I sweep it to nothing with my foot, guiltily.

God, I could use some dope; I need to mellow out, I need to calm down. I'm almost looking forward to prison; plenty of dope in there, if I'm allowed to mix with other inmates. Christ, it's going to happen. I'm accepting it, I'm coming to terms with it. Christ.

"Tomorrow?" I say, swallowing. I'm trying not to cry and I'm trying not to cough, either, because that might make me cry. "Yes," McDunn says, tapping ash carefully off his cigarette again. "Burying him tomorrow, at the family estate. What's it called again?"

"Strathspeld," I tell him. I look at him but can't tell if he really forgot the name or not.

"Strathspeld." He nods.,'Strathspeld." He rolls the word around his mouth, as if savouring a good malt. "Strathspeld on the Carse of Speld." He sucks air through his teeth again. I wish he'd get his teeth seen to; do they have special police dentists or do they have to go to the ones everybody else goes to and hope the dentist doesn't have some… have some grudge… some grudge against…?

Wait a minute.

Wait a fucking minute here…

And I know.

It's like a speck of dust drifts down and goes into my eye and I look up to see where it came from and I'm hit by this tonne of bricks; it hits me that hard. I sit there for a second thinking, No, it can't be… But it is; it won't go away, and I do know, and I know that I know.

I know and I feel sick but it's something just to feel this certain about anything again. I can't prove anything and I still don't understand it all, but I know, and I know that I have to be there, have to get to Strathspeld. I could just tell them to get there, be there, keep watch there, because he's bound to be there, has to be there, there of all places. But I can't let it happen like that, and whether they get him or not — and I doubt they will — I have to be there.

So I clear my throat and look McDunn in the eyes and say, "All right. Two more names." Pause. Swallow, something sticking in my throat. Jesus, am I really going to say this? Yes, yes I am: "And I've got something else for you."

McDunn tips his head to one side. His brows say, "Oh yes?"

I take a deep breath. "I want something from you, though."

McDunn frowns. "What would that be, Cameron?"

"I want to be there tomorrow, at the funeral."

McDunn frowns more deeply. He looks down at the fag packet and taps it round another couple of revolutions on the table. He shakes his head. "I don't think I can do that, Cameron."

"Yes, you can," I tell him. "You can because of what I've got for you." I pause, take another breath, the air catching in my throat. "It's there, too."

McDunn looks puzzled. "And what would that be, Cameron?"

My heart is hammering, my hands are balled into fists. I swallow, throat dry, tears finally coming into my eyes and eventually I squeeze the words out:

"A body."