Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (24 page)

relationship. Lacks the scope for personal rapport, admittedly, but we find places for that elsewhere, like this weekend, for example.'

'Efficient, dynamic business relationships. Smash the state, huh?'

'And you wonder why I'm lying low. I voted for the Lib Dems. Do you want to get your dig in for that too, get it over with?'

'At least they're to the left of New Labour.'

'Splitters!' he said, causing them both to laugh.

'Your face is different,' Emily told him, recognising the changes now that she was close enough to see what was still the same. It wasn't just the years, the tidy crop and the absence of a badge-burdened green raincoat that had made him hard to place.

'Car crash, '93. I looked like a panda for six months. Nose has never been the same. You look a bit different yourself. Hair especially.'

She ran a hand through it automatically, something she'd never have managed way back when. 'Yeah, ideological reasons. I reckoned I was personally responsible for about half the hole in the ozone layer just through hairspray CFCs.'

He laughed, but it sounded a little forced: polite but uncomfortable. He really wasn't quite ready for this.

'So what do I call you?' she asked.

'Donald, please. It's easier. Less confusing, for me most of all.'

'Okay.'

'Oh, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell the rest of them.'

'Of course.'

'Especially Parlabane. It would be manna from heaven for him to find out what's in my past.'

'I wouldn't dream of it, though on evidence so far I don't think he's as bad as he's painted. Even if he did find out, I think he'd probably cut you some slack for being on the side of the angels.'

'Were we?' he asked, in a way that did not invite an answer. Baxter gestured with a nod of the head that she should follow him back to the group, where he said nothing to the others about the lack of an expected minibus and driver. With nobody having pulled up lame and the atmosphere notably chirpy now that the sugar was hitting everyone's bloodstreams, he announced that it was time to press on, and pointed to the top of the spur.

'Only if we don't have to do any swimming at the top of it,' Parlabane said.

'No,' Baxter assured him. 'But mouthy journalists might have to do some flying at the top of it. And you can quote me on that.'

'I left my Dictaphone in my other drysuit. If I can't remember your quote exactly, is it okay if I paraphrase? Something along the lines of: "You're all mine 140

now, mine, you hear? And you're going to die on this hillside. Muahahahaha!"

That cool?'

'Die horribly,' Baxter advised.

'Horribly. Got it.'

The climb was far steeper than any of their ramblings so far. It was nothing Emily couldn't manage, but she was aware of the greater effort registering upon her body temperature. For the first time in more than an hour, instead of damp, cold and clammy, she felt damp, hot and sweaty.

'Horses sweat,' she remembered a particularly prissy schoolteacher correcting her. 'Gentlemen perspire. Ladies
glow
.'

She couldn't get that Kate Bush number out of her head, though running was a rather flattering description of their collective progress. 'Trudging with a hand on each knee to assist with the climb because your thighs are aching like buggery up that hill' was more accurate, but didn't really scan, and it would have been hard to fit the 'yay-yay-yow's in around it too. She wasn't sure quite what had popped the song in there, though; whether she'd have thought of it on the ascent anyway, or whether it had been sparked by contemporary contemplations. It was said that smell was the sense most closely connected to memory, but pop music had formidable mnemonic properties too, and not necessarily the songs you liked. She'd never owned a Kate Bush record in her puff, but that song had been part of the arbitrarily selected soundtrack to that period of her life. She couldn't hear it, couldn't think of it without thinking of back then; same as she couldn't think of back then without hearing that song. A sniff of 'skin-coloured' Clearasil (actually only skin-coloured for those with beige skin, to whom acne was presumably the least of their dermatological problems) was the only thing more capable of rewinding the decades to that time when the world was just waiting for her to sort it out with her Doc Marten's and delusions of maturity.

She expected to feel more breathless, more tired, but the further she climbed, the less she felt the strain, and if anyone had suggested stopping for a rest, she'd have shouted them down. There was a compulsion to reach the top, not just in her, but palpably in the looks and strides of the whole group. Emily wasn't exactly a Munro-bagger, but any time she'd climbed a hill, it had been the same: an irresistible drive overriding considerations of comfort, fatigue, hunger or blistered heels. It felt ancient, instinctive, and wasn't some macho because-it's-there crap. Perhaps it was psychologically very simple: from the top, you could see what lay ahead. You could see what was next. She was among the first to afford herself that perspective, getting there just behind Baxter and Rory. They could see along the top of the ridge, and that it wasn't truncated quite where it had appeared from below. It dog-legged, or dog-stumped might be closer, cut off shortly after the point where it turned. 141

'Glowing' quite profusely, Emily calculated that it might have been quicker to go around the spur rather than over it, but tingling with the endorphin rush released by having done so, she applauded Baxter's choice. The sense of achievement was amplified when their guide, after waiting for the last of them to catch up, told them to turn around and pointed out a tiny Saltire fluttering in the distance, elevated above the greenery by the tower at McKinley Hall. The view ahead had no such icon to indicate civilised settlement, nor any landmark to suggest (to her untrained eye, at least) what their route forward would be. More hills, more woodland, and a stretch of coarse moor spread before it like an Unwelcome mat.

'Where to now?' someone asked, thinking along similar and foot-sore lines.

'We wait here for a helicopter to take us home,' Kathy replied. 'It's in the UML brochure.'

'Like hell it is,' said Baxter.

'Hey, we're the PR firm. I'm writing the brochure copy, and if I say there's gonna be a helicopter, you bastards better deliver.'

'I'd settle for a beer scooter,' Max said.

'Amen,' agreed Rory.

'Well, I'll have to slip an erratum notice into the brochure,' Baxter told them.

'Page twelve, paragraph three. Due to a typesetting error, the word "helicopter" appeared in place of "Shanks's pony".'

'Are we going back the way we came?' Rory asked, his tone suggesting the affirmative would be met with disapproval. It seemed unlikely he'd be feeling the pace (or admitting it anyway), just voicing the disappointment everyone would feel if there weren't new sights to distract them on the journey home.

'Would I do that to you?' Baxter replied. 'No, everybody just catch your breath, then it's onwards and downwards.'

'Down there? Further away?' Liz asked. 'Have you got a tent stashed somewhere?'

'The lie of the land is quite deceptive,' he assured her. 'Believe me, you'll be back in half the time it took you to get here. So everybody catch your breath and enjoy the view, then you can let your feet earn your stomach an indulgence.'

'Speaking of the view,' said Parlabane. 'Is there any kind of boundary that denotes what part is still army land?'

'There's fences, if that's what you mean, but we're still a good way away from it. Why?'

'Just wondering what that pair are up to.'

Baxter looked down and ahead, as did Emily. There were indeed two men in military fatigues now visible on the coarse apron of moor before the woods. They must only have emerged a moment ago, while the group were looking 142

towards the hotel. They had begun digging with heavy spades, oblivious to their audience on the spur above in a way that suggested they understandably assumed themselves to be the only living souls in a considerable radius.

'They're digging,' Grieg observed, proving that last night's display of wit and incisiveness was no fluke.

'Probably a mass grave,' Baxter said dryly, sounding a little intolerant of the portentous tone Grieg had adopted.

Rory laughed. 'Let's ask them. HAW!' he shouted. 'Room for one more inside?'

Both of the diggers stopped and looked up. The one nearer the woods dropped his spade and ran towards the trees where he turned his back and bent to pick something up. He wheeled back around, the thing he'd retrieved held in two hands at his shoulder.

'Christ, that's a rifle,' Max said.

Five shots rang out, the sound tarrying a moment behind the muzzle flare. There were screams, cries and many swearies as the group hit the ground, burying themselves face-down in the grass. Emily couldn't believe how much had turned in a moment. It made her reversal of sentiments towards Rory in that watery tunnel an aeon of meditation by comparison. There was no double-take, no slow-motion piecing together of evidence, no purgatorial pause of incredulity, no top-down view of herself as she inquired: is this real? She was standing on a hilltop sharing a joke, her body flushed but tingling with exertion. Bang bang bang bang bang, and she was or her face, trembling, her stomach threatening to empty itself, the people around her uniformly prostrate and equally alarmed. When she dared to raise her head, the very same sight looked different, as though she was suddenly viewing it all in black and white. Parts of it were instantly less vivid, blurred out of focus as though the image had been pared down to only the most necessary details, stripped of anything peripheral, irrelevant or distracting. One of the men was pointing at the other, the distant and indistinct sound of his angry words carrying on the breezed a second or so later. The one who had fired lowered his gun, but only so that he could pick up a second rifle and hold it out to his companion, who was on his way towards him. With both of them now thus armed, Emily flattened her head to the grass again, but no further shots were heard. She looked up once more, and saw that the pair of them were jogging away in different directions: one dead ahead towards the slope, the other making for the end of the spur.

'Is this a fucking stunt?' Rory demanded furiously of Baxter. 'Because it's in pretty poor taste if it is.'

'Everybody just keep the head,' Baxter responded. 'Pull it together, okay?'

'Why are they shooting at us?' Grieg asked.

143

'How the fuck should I know?' Baxter retorted. 'Believe me, the point at which I was in complete control of the day's activities has passed.'

'Did they think we saw something?' Grieg persisted, thinking aloud.

'Maybe it's the fact that we saw them there at all,' Max pined.

'Christ, does it matter?' said Liz. 'They're not gonna tell us, even if we ask really politely. So let's get a move on.'

'Where to?'

'Down the hill, for a start,' Baxter advised. 'Quickly but carefully. Watch your footing. Then we make for the woods. We've a decent start on them, so we can make it count.'

'What good's a head start against a bullet?' Grieg enquired.

'Good enough if the shooter can't see you through two hundred yards of trees,' Toby answered.

Toby and Baxter looked at each other, Baxter giving him a nod of acknowledgement for his support. Emily looked around the other faces: some helpless, awaiting guidance; some expectant, awaiting leadership; some determined, awaiting only the assurance that the rest were ready for the flight. She didn't see Parlabane's expression. His face was turned away towards his friend Vale, the two of them having some kind of wordless summit.

'Make for the track,' Baxter advised as they began their descent. 'Veer right where it bends - that'll take us away from the spur. And don't look back.'

'We'll never outrun them,' Emily heard Liz say.

Their progress felt like running in a dream, fear stretching the distance in spite of their haste.

'They're carrying full-size, semi-automatic rifles,' Max told her. 'If you've ever felt the weight in one of those things, you'd put your money on us. Just concentrate on your footing.'

It was heavy on the calves, almost as heavy as the ascent had been on the thighs, but this way, the strain was all in the impact and balance. Gravity was an ally, but only if harnessed with cautious restraint. Emily's heart was telling her to charge forward, her middle-ear arguing against, the latter just about holding its own.

Baxter had advised against looking back, but Emily couldn't help stealing glances not only behind, but towards the end of the spur also. All logic -

arithmetical and geographical - told her there would be no threat to see, but she needed the reassurance that their efforts weren't about to be brought to an abrupt end. There were no soldiers, only conspicuously yellow fugitives, randomly spread but almost identical in their posture: knees bent, arms out, palms down, fingers stretched. From a distanced perspective - both physical and emotional - it would have looked like a costumed performance by the official UML Synchronised Shitebag Troupe. Kathy and Rory were making 144

the quickest progress, Kathy reaping unanticipated benefits from her morning jogs around Inverleith Park, as much from its practice in rut-negotiation as physical fitness.

Baxter was no slouch either, but he was trailing the leaders due to stopping and turning around every few seconds to check that nobody had got into difficulties. He wasn't the only one. Toby was keeping pace with Joanna at the rear, holding an arm out now and then to offer extra balance, while Parlabane and Vale had drifted to either flank, their eyes as often on the people between them as the ground under their feet.

With the group spreading out according to pace, they automatically began following the progress of those in the vanguard, irrespective of how they had each envisaged their path down. Rory and Kathy were angling their route sharply towards the bend in the track leading into the forest, which took them down a steeper incline than they had negotiated on the way up. Gradient wasn't the only reason the group had previously avoided it. Baxter called after them, but their momentum meant it was too late for them to stop themselves. The grass thinned out with very little warning and gave way to yards of treacherously intractable scree. Rory hit it first, barely a second before Kathy. Emily stopped as she saw the results. Rory scrambled a few paces, still attempting to find purchase, like Wile E Coyote in mid-air before realising he's run off the cliff. Kathy had enjoyed a moment's more notice to brake, so didn't hit the scree with quite as much pace, but this only meant that she was able to cushion her inevitable fall. She still ended up the same as Rory: flat on her back, skidding down the slope like it was a flume in a waterpark.