And the Land Lay Still (46 page)

Peter shook his head.

The insignificant bastards are waiting for something to happen. They want a cause, a war with England, martyrdom. Okay, let them have it. Give them to Boothby. He’ll make soldiers out of them.

He already knows Teague.

So he knows Teague. Give him the others. If he knows them it confirms to him that you know what you’re talking about. If he doesn’t, he’ll check them out and get the same result. You won’t be his only source anyway. Just nudge him.

And what you’re telling me is, if I give Boothby a bit more than is really there, it won’t do any harm?

See? You’ve worked it out for yourself. You can wind Boothby up as tight as you like and the spring won’t burst.

Croick drained the rest of his mug, stood up. I need to get going, he said. Somewhere else I should be. You all right with everything?

Aye, I think so, Peter said, also standing.

And you’re fine in yourself?

Aye.

We don’t ask a lot of you, do we? Easy money. Like taking lambs to the slaughter.

I suppose so.

Croick turned at the door. Don’t feel sorry for these cunts. Nobody forced them into this.

Aye, right enough.

You’re not going soft are you, Peter? Now you’re back among your ain folk? There was contempt in those last three words.

Of course I’m not.

That’s good. Canterbury worries about you sometimes. About whether we did the right thing when you left the firm. It’s completely against the rules, you know, keeping you on like this. But what were rules made for, eh, if not to be … disregarded?

Peter said nothing.

Anyway, I know you better than that big English bastard, don’t I? You’re all right.

I’m fine.

Of course you are. Right, I’m away. Have you worked out where I’m from yet?

Up north somewhere.

That’s a bit vague. Think I’m a teuchter, do you? Maybe I am. I tell you one thing, it’s a long time since I went home. Sometimes I forget where I’m from myself.

You won’t be his only source. Completely against the rules.
Jesus, Peter, how many fucking clues did you want?

Groom him
. Another one. Croick’s words. That has a whole other connotation these days. Croick told him he was doing well, and Peter, more or less, believed him. He was uneasy about the free rein they gave him but on the other hand he wasn’t going to complain. He was doing what they wanted him to do, and it got results.

Boothby laid plans for some kind of military stunt in the West Highlands. These days they’d call it a ‘spectacular’. Back then the Scottish version of spectacular was to march around Ullapool in balaclavas for twenty-four hours, for fuck’s sake. Probably the good folk of Ullapool wouldn’t have noticed they’d been occupied, let alone anyone else. So anyway there were a couple of fund-raising trips. One group went to Liverpool to hold up a bank there. Teague, the guy from Lochgilphead, MacHarg from Alloa and Dennis Hogg from Borlanslogie, all three of them now enlisted in the APG, teamed up and went to Newcastle. They drove down the A68 with a couple of sawn-off shotguns in the car boot, and were tailed all the way. They checked in to a guesthouse in Whitley Bay the day before the raid. In the middle of the night the police surrounded the guesthouse and arrested them all. It was 1 April. Knock knock. Who’s there? Room service. Room service who? Bang. April Fool, it’s the law. It was a similar sequence of events in Liverpool. By the end of June the trials were over. All involved found guilty of varying degrees of conspiracy, possession of firearms, criminal intent, et cetera. Teague got five years, MacHarg four and Hogg three.

By coincidence (if you trust the phrase – Peter has examined it
long and hard over the years, and abandoned all faith in it) this sorry tale of cocked-up conspiracies hit the news right at the start of the 1970 General Election campaign. The SNP didn’t do badly in this election but they failed to live up to expectations. They gained the Western Isles but Winnie Ewing was beaten in Hamilton and the party lost most of its deposits in the seats it contested. Maybe they’d peaked. Labour were dominant in Scotland but unexpectedly lost the election in England. The Tories were back in power. Earlier in the year Douglas-Home’s constitutional committee had made its report, suggesting a kind of watery Scottish Convention with no real powers at all, and the Tories had stuck this recommendation in their election manifesto. But now Ted Heath was in Downing Street, he made a few noises about waiting to hear what the Royal Commission had to say on devolution, then forgot about it.

Croick, on the phone: Nice work, Peter. And when Peter said, What did I do? Croick said, Nothing. Clean hands, pure heart, that’s what we like.

It was nicer still that Major Boothby was untouched, still twitching, fulminating, active, useful. Live bait. There was a trail that went right back to him but strangely the police didn’t follow it that far. Meanwhile, the search warrants around the trial turned up a mass of ‘new’ information about nationalist extremism. Some was produced as evidence and thus found its way into the public domain, and some – how clearly Peter can see this now – was kept back for later.

Future exploitation, Croick called it. That Denny Hogg, he’s not a bad lad. Quite bright too, for a fucking eejit. Might exploit him some time.

That was all he said. Peter didn’t know Hogg, but later he did notice that he didn’t serve even a year of his sentence.

Peter went to London for an overnighter and Croick and Canterbury met him in that same windowless room and they seemed almost to want him back; they talked and talked and while they didn’t quite hand over files for him to peruse at his leisure they told him what some of them contained. He recognised things: things he’d written in reports and things he’d told Croick,
things that were true and things he’d invented. There was this blurring of boundaries. He asked them what were they going to do about it.

About what? Canterbury said.

These files, Peter said. Some of what’s in them is genuine and some is what we originated ourselves. You know which is which, so would I if I saw them, but somebody coming in fresh wouldn’t.

And? Canterbury said.

Well, they’re contaminated.

Genuine? Croick said. Contaminated? Peter, it’s all contaminated. We’re talking guns and bombs here. We’re watching what’s happening in Northern Ireland and trying to make sure it doesn’t happen in Scotland.

You know what I mean, Peter said. There are things I made up that are being used to put people away.

Shouldn’t they have been put away? Canterbury asked. They were about to rob a bank at gunpoint.

I’m not saying that. It just makes me feel uneasy, this mixing of … He stopped, struggling for the words for what he meant.

Fact and fiction? Croick said, supplying exactly the phrase he’d been avoiding. Feeling uneasy is what this is all about, Peter. Listen, I’m not a good sleeper. Six nights out of seven I wake up in the wee hours worrying. You know what, it’s the night I sleep right through that bothers me. The others I find reassuring. I like the fact that I can’t get back to sleep again, that I have to get up and think. You know why I like it? It means I’m doing my job. I’m even doing it in my sleep. I worry when I’m not worried. So should you.

Peter thought, does he sleep alone, does he share his bed with a wife, a girlfriend, another man? I know nothing about this bastard. Peter felt a need to defend himself, but what would he be defending? His innocence? Maybe his guilt, his complicity. And simultaneously he felt a desire to walk out. And there was something else: what would he be walking out of? Why did he get the sense that only the three of them knew this meeting was taking place? Why did he have the feeling that it was even more off the record than usual? But before he could say or do anything Croick, holding up a finger, carried on.

You talk about contamination. This is a process, not a one-off
event. We can’t muddy the water and then flush it clean again. The whole point of what we do – what you do – is that it stirs up the scum. We know these people and what they might be capable of. We know what they’re going to do before they know what they’re going to do. You’re doing a good job, a necessary job, a vital job. I’ve told you before, don’t start feeling guilty about it.

And Boothby? Peter said. Is he doing a good job?

What do you mean?

Is he one of yours? He wanted to say
one of ours
but he couldn’t.

He belongs to us, Croick said. As you know, that’s not the same thing.

After the 1970 General Election the SNP momentum seemed to slow slightly, but it was only a temporary lull. They had a long black, slick campaign card up their sleeve and it was called North Sea Oil. They’d had a couple of brains in a back room doing the economics of oil long before anybody in the other parties thought it mattered, long before most voters had even woken up to the energy, employment and revenue implications, let alone the political ones. And even though they consistently underestimated the amount of oil under the sea, and even though the quantities being piped ashore remained tiny until the middle of the decade, people began to pick up on what they were saying. Their slogans had punch. They made an impact.
IT’S SCOTLAND’S OIL.
That wasn’t a comfortable message. It was saying, haud on a minute, that’s oors and some other cunt’s taking it. RICH SCOTS OR POOR BRITONS? That wasn’t very nice. It sounded greedy, grabby. It
was
greedy. But by Christ it made people sit up and take notice.

Peter remembers the way Tory, Labour and Liberal politicians started protesting: I am not a Nationalist. Not with a big N. I am a small-n nationalist. I am as Scottish as the next man. But I am not a big-N Nationalist, oh no, heaven forfend. I stand up for Scotland with a big S but I am not one of those bigoted, narrow-minded, small-s scottish, big-N Nationalists. I am both Scottish and British. I glory in my duality. It is what gives me my entry pass to the House of Commons and my ticket away from the ghastly hellhole from whence I came, the inhabitants of which I have been elected
to keep in servitude. Sorry, to serve. Thank you. Your humble servant. Here endeth the lesson.

And here’s an interesting statistic. No, not a statistic, a graph. There are two lines on this graph. One represents the electoral performance of the SNP in the 1970s. The other represents the number and intensity of ‘tartan terror’ events in the same period: pipeline explosions, pylons blown up, caches of guns and explosives found, letter-bombs sent to public figures or organisations, trials of suspected terrorists, conviction and imprisonment of same. Peter has plotted these two lines. He has plotted them so many times he can do it as a doodle. There you go. Horizontal axis: the years, and the months of the years. Vertical axis: votes cast for the big-N Nats; bombs set off by the nasty nats. Surprisingly – no, not surprisingly – no, not fucking surprisingly enough – the two lines rise and dip and rise like a flock of those wee birds you see at the seaside sometimes. Total unison and you don’t know how they do it, twisting and turning and wheeling together so you’d think they must be joined at the hip. But wee shoreline birds don’t have hips. And we’re only talking two lines on a graph here, not a flock of birds. And actually one line is slightly ahead of the other, just nudging out in front with the other one coming along behind, then, whoops, it’s as if the front line gets a fleg from the one at its back and drops off a bit, then it picks up, then, whoops, there’s that pesky second line again, the one with the bombs and balaclavas, almost as if the graph is saying vote for Scotland’s oil and you get bombed pipelines, vote for independence and you get bad guys in balaclavas. Weird, eh, how that repeats? A repetitive pattern. Spooky even. Like something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jock, but maybe you’ll just stick with the devil you know for another five years, eh? And another five, and another, until the oil’s all been sooked out of the sea and after that, well, after that you paranoid schizo sheepfuckers can do whatever the fuck you like.

Peter sinks another glassful. Can’t call it a dram, about six drams in it. He’d fucking known what was happening, just hadn’t been able to admit it. I don’t think those links exist. He mimics himself.
I
don’t think those links exist.
Pathetic. Croick and Canterbury made them exist, they put him in the chain and kept him there, adding more links.
You won’t be his only source
. A great tangle of chain, with Peter right in among the other poor sods. Linked. Intimately bound.

In heaps around the flat are dozens of different periodicals, newsletters and pamphlets from that period: most of them badly printed or roneoed, some hand-stapled, some not bound at all, the occasional grainy photo or blurry line-drawing breaking up unforgivingly dense text. Spilled religion. People, some people, really wanted to change the world in the 1970s. They thought it was possible, and they thought it could be done from small beginnings, three guys round a table in a public-house snug, with a new take on Mao or Trotsky or Bakunin. It could even be done from Scotland. You couldn’t move for revolutionary groups, and every group seemed to produce at least one publication for distribution to the members, or to potential supporters, or just to anyone who might give a damn. Nobody read more of this literature, or read it more avidly, than Peter Bond. He bought it in radical bookshops in Edinburgh and Glasgow, or from rival vendors flogging their variant ideologies round the pubs, or from fugitive stalls, crowded with samizdat-style news-sheets and manifestos, which appeared for an hour on street corners or in university basements. He grabbed it all, ten pence here, fifteen there, and pored over it restlessly, noting down and cross-referencing names, venues, forthcoming meetings and their speakers. He went to the meetings. When he had to give his name he gave it, Peter Bond. If somebody was going to get suspicious then they would get suspicious, regardless of what name he used. Anyway, he worked in the bookshop. Occasionally a familiar face showed up there and clocked his. Occasionally he posted a book to someone whose name he recognised, whose address he then made a note of. Scotland was a small country. It was why he’d wanted to get out of it.