Christopher Brookmyre (24 page)

She didn't see Ferguson again, and the chances of doing so were seriously diminished by being forced to give up the private-hire work. Circumstances had forced her to give up plenty of things down the years, but this was the one that really rankled. She was let go by the cab firm. She knew trouble was on its way when she was told there had been complaints about her driving. She was too slow, the manager said. Customers expected her to put the foot down at times and she hadn't been prepared to do so. This not only made customers late, it made for unacceptable delays between jobs.

A few passengers
had
complained to her that she was too cautious while she was driving, but neither they nor the firm could seriously expect her to break the speed limit or blaze through amber lights in the name of the job. She had a clean licence and hadn't broken any laws since her last under-age tipple or possibly her last illegally taped LP. Nobody could demand that she change that, she told the manager, but despite a protracted exchange of views on the subject, they both knew that it was nothing to do with the real problem. The real problem, about which this was a coded ultimatum, was that she refused to do 'drops'.

The cab firm had recently come under new ownership, not that its previous owner had any intention of selling until about six hours before the paperwork - and a baseball bat - were put in front of him. The new proprietor was one Anthony Connelly, who was building a monopoly of private-hire companies in Lanarkshire, the better to control and distribute the drugs from which he made his real money. He'd started with the biggest firms in the area, but not even smaller outfits like the one Jane worked for were immune, and she quickly learned why. 'Drops' were passengerless fares, door-to-door deliveries of all Class-A varietals. Connelly didn't need every outfit in the area in order to meet logistical demands; he needed every outfit in the area so that the drivers would be forced to comply, cutting off the option to quit and go work for an untainted firm.

Jane considered quitting anyway, both on principle and as a matter of personal safety, but a more defiant part of her didn't want to just melt away for the convenience of these people. It they wanted rid of her, they would have to come out and blatantly admit why.

After the 'slow driving' warning, she expected to be binned outright the next time she refused to respond to a drop call, but it didn't happen like that. Rumours were rife of the threats and coercions that had been applied to drivers by Connelly's foot-maggots, so she got pretty jumpy at the ensuing lack of consequences. Almost a week passed, and it felt like too long a silence. But it turned out that this was a courtesy, and she was a special case. Connelly, she knew, had been in Tom's year at both primary and secondary school, and, while it wouldn't be fair to say that Tom refused to hear a word against him, his own words about the man were far from condemnatory. He was a decent enough guy at school, Tom told her. Not one of the nutters. Could look after himself, but never a bully, never gave Tom a hard time, stuck up for him once, blah blah blah. Nor did it hurt Tom's estimations that the duplicitous creep went to Mass every Sunday at his parish, to maintain his respectable public face.

It was probably true of every little clique, coven and insular community on earth, and therefore unfair to single one particular sect, but Jane found it sickening that Connelly's charade was indulged by the likes of her husband on the rationale that he might be a drug-dealing gangster, but at least he's a Catholic drug-dealing gangster.

She came home one night to find Connelly's Mercedes parked outside the house, and as she walked up the drive, Tom was showing him out the front door, the pair all joking and genial. He patted Tom on the back as he walked away, but barely looked Jane in the eye as he passed.

'What did
he
want?' she asked Tom accusingly.

'You'd better come in and have a seat,' he said.

Then he laid it down, not that any of it was news. Connelly had used allusion and euphemism, Tom indulging him the moral cowardice of his language like he indulged him his pillar-of-the-community fantasy on a Sunday. There was trouble in the air, dangers Tom wouldn't want his wife exposed to. The minicab business wasn't what it once was in this neck of the woods, no place for a lady. He'd come as an old friend and fellow parishioner; a courteous letting-down-gently but an unquestionable letting-down nonetheless. Tom had indulged Connelly, but Jane didn't indulge Tom. She spelled out what was really going on and demanded to hear Connelly's every word and nuance. Tom looked regretful and exasperated.

'I don't approve of what he does, but we don't want to be on the wrong side of a guy like that, do we? And you don't want to be involved with all this, surely? Let it go, Jane.'

She knew she had to, but it stung, and she hated Tom for letting himself be Connelly's instrument. She couldn't have expected him to defy or antagonise such a man, but she did expect him to have a little dignity, on both their behalfs. Tom had let the guy patronise him, kid him on that he was treating him with respect. It made her sick, and it felt like such a betrayal, something not helped by the fact that Tom got what he wanted from it, too. It brought an end to this latest daft dalliance; and there would be no more microwaved dinners to tolerate, either.

She reached the village of Le Muy just after three o'clock, having missed the turn-off the first time and then doubled back to approach from the opposite direction. It was just a daft oversight, a misreading of the right-hand exit lane, and it probably only cost her five or six minutes, but it told her how tightly wound she was that every second the autoroute took her away from her destination felt like miles.

It looked a quiet little place. In fact, for the most part, it looked shut, and it was only when she located the local
poste
that she found an establishment open for business at this sleepy time of the day. She knew practically no French, but for a few phrases still rattling around her head since sitting her Higher at the age of seventeen. The teller didn't know much English either, but, fortunately, giving him a look at the address on the phone's LCD was enough to convey what she required. He started babbling lots of
a gauches
and
a droits
before remembering how little any of it meant to her and, more helpfully, drawing a map. She thanked him and returned to the Beetle. She'd have thanked him more if he could have told her what the place she was looking for actually
was
, but, as it wasn't identified by anything more than a tiny image of some black gates, it was perhaps a little much to ask. Rue Marisse, when she found it, began a couple of streets north of the village square, before snaking its way right out of town. She drove along it slowly, flanked at first by tall terraced buildings, uniformly shuttered, before these gave way to lower walls and eventually bushes and trees. After her recent experience overshooting the autoroute, it occurred to her to go back and look again in case she had missed something: perhaps the gates covered a passage between buildings, and they were unseen for being opened inwards against the walls.

Instinct and reason overruled. It made sense that the place be out of town, isolated. If this guy's reach was long enough to hand her a phone in EK, then she somehow couldn't picture him living up a close. She drove on, the windows down to let in some cool air as the afternoon sun warmed the car. She passed fields, vineyards, walled orchards. She wished she could bank how it looked, how it smelled, the feeling of the breeze through the windows of the VW - save it for a time when she could enjoy it. A blue Citroen passed in the opposite direction, the only other car she'd seen since leaving the village. The desire to turn around and retrace her route returned. How far out could this place be and still have Le Muy as its address? Then she saw it, maybe a quarter of a mile ahead on the right. Not the gates, for she was too far away yet, but a sight that she was certain denoted what she was looking for. It was the trees. Conifers. Lots of them, tall and thin, standing like a line of sentries, conspicuously distinct from the indigenous arbour in their regimentation and their dress. They stood in rigid perpendicular ranks, clothed tightly and slim in thick green, masking whatever was beyond them from the road. As Jane drew nearer she could see a low stone wall supporting iron railings in front of these looming guards. The wall skirted the trees for a considerable distance in both visible directions, broken only, she observed with a mixture of accomplishment and dread, by two black wrought-iron gates.

Jane gently hit the brakes and pulled in, indicating despite there being no other drivers anywhere in sight to be indicating to. She pulled out the phone and toggled to the image, though she needed no confirmation. Those were the gates. This was the place.

She stepped out of the car and walked towards them. Up close, she could see that the ironwork formed an intricate mesh of thorned creepers around supporting rigid spars, like some metal parasitic weed had overgrown the place. The effect was less than welcoming; nor, did she suspect, was it intended to be. In the centre, where the gates met, there was wording incorporated into the interlacing design. Maison

-- Rla --

an Tir

Through the ironwork she could see only more trees, with a narrow, dustcovered avenue snaking between them before itself bending out of sight. She stood there a few seconds, wondering whether there was any angle she could play here to give her some kind of leverage, and more pertinently, how she was actually going to get in. That was when she noticed the intercom built into the wall on the left-hand side of the gatepost, a grey panel of buttons with the cold circle of a glass lens above it, ready to remotely examine the caller. She reached tentatively for the buzzer, but before she could touch it, the gates began to swing open with a near-balletic grace; noiseless too, but for a faint buzz of the electrical mechanism.

Jane stood and waited to see whether a person or vehicle was approaching. None did. Having tarried long enough to convince herself that their unlocking was not a coincidence of timing, she climbed back into the Beetle, took a very deep breath, then drove through the gap.

The land of do as you please

Most people, happily, never had occasion to give any thought to what going on the lam for their lives might feel like. If they dwelt upon it for a moment, they would probably imagine an obvious checklist of fears and insecurities, physiological and psychological symptoms. They might even consider a few practical and logistical elements: money, transport, bicycle clips to stop the shite running out the bottom of their trousers - that kind of thing. And they wouldn't be very wrong, as far as they went, but as far as they went would in most instances only cover the initial sprint. Running for your life, as Ross Fleming was in the process of discovering, was a marathon. Flight and concealment? Fine, done, covered. The more demanding part could best be summed up by merely two words: now what?

The closest thing he could think to compare it to was dogging school, though the metaphor wasn't exactly based upon an abundance of experience. He'd only actually dogged school once, which meant he could speak more authoritatively about being on the lam, but there was sufficient overlap for it to be valid. It hadn't even been a full day, just an unexpectedly sunny spring lunchtime when his pal Davey had even less expectedly suggested they head literally for the hills rather than back to face double Chemistry and double Physics.

What he mainly remembered was a disorientating absence of purpose. They just wandered around the paths, fields and slopes, the welcome warmth of the sun on their shoulders - all pleasant enough, but Ross had felt that he was doing nothing more valuable than killing the hours until he could feasibly walk in the front door without his mum asking why he was home early. Purposelessly marking time was the driven over-achiever's idea of hell. The problem, now as then, was of not knowing what to do with himself, all the while knowing there were things elsewhere that he could otherwise be more constructively getting on with. The problem, now as then, was having more freedom at his disposal than he had the detachment to appreciate or the imagination to use. This was something he was going to have to remedy pretty quickly, because killing the hours until he could go back to Mammy wasn't an option.

135

He could go wherever he wanted, other than home, do whatever he liked, apart from show up for work, and he had, right then, a responsibility only to himself. Who wouldn't fancy some of that? Who hadn't wished it for themselves as they slogged out another few revs on their own personal hamsterwheels? Yet it didn't feel like any kind of freedom. Nothing did, nothing could that was enforced, because freedom began with choice, and his had been suddenly very restricted the moment he knew Project F was compromised. Actually, maybe his choices had been restricted earlier than that: pick any point on the line right back to the moment he gave it voice and let the very idea out of the safely contained environment of his head. There was a fine line sometimes, not a molecule wide, between the best idea you ever had and the absolute worst. Just ask Alfred Nobel. Or Joseph Guillotin. Perhaps it was a flaw inherent in the inventive mind to have vision but not foresight. Was it that so much concentration went into developing the idea that they could not see beyond it? Or was it an inhibition of the urge to see beyond that allowed them to develop ideas before they could be dismissed as folly? Any eejit could have told Alfred that stabilising explosives and thus reducing the risk to their deployer was only going to lead to an awful lot more things being blown up. Any eejit could have told Joseph that a quicker and more humane way of executing people would inevitably lead to more - albeit quick and humane - executions. Someone spying that wee bit further might even also have wagered that, as an aristocrat, Joseph might have to be light on his feet to ensure the last sound he heard himself wasn't 'whoosh - clunk'. And any eejit could have told Ross that attempting to implement his own bright spark would be roughly equivalent to donning a T-shirt with a large concentric-circle target on it above the legend: 'Please kill me'. But not one of these three non-eejits had caught a glimpse of what they were heading towards until they were on the other side, until the idea was out there, at which point they couldn't believe how blind they'd been, and at which point their deeds were, unfortunately, irreversible. Boom. Whoosh - clunk. Please kill me.