Pay Off (23 page)

Riker took the Winchester and Tony chose one of the Berettas. I handed out cartridges and felt better, I felt part of it.

'OK?' Tony asked Riker.

'Sure. Let's do it.'

'Now listen to me, sport,' Tony said to me, laying his hand on my shoulder. 'Do exactly what you planned to do. We won't make a move until you go inside and we hear shooting. Just forget we're around.'

'We have to go,' Riker interrupted, checking his watch.

'Right,' said Tony, looking at me long and hard. 'One more thing. Laing still hasn't surfaced, which could mean he's dead, or on the run, or that he's behind the killings. Be careful.'

Then they turned and I followed them into the evening gloom and watched as they walked down the side of the house, vaulted cleanly over the dry stone wall and waded through the yellow flowers to the helicopter. I locked the front door and pocketed the keys.

It was 7.45 pm when I slid into the driving seat of the Cavalier, next to the attache case and the Harrods carrier bag, and pulled out of the drive and pointed the car towards the Forth Bridge as the helicopter clattered into the air.

About ten months before all this had started, before I'd even heard of Kyle and Laing, I had helped one of the few 187 remaining independent whisky firms in Scotland raise cash through a rights issue, and I'd been their guest at a weekend 'fact-finding exercise' visiting distilleries in and around Moray and sampling large quantities of the amber fluid.

The tours of the distilleries had been very much like a school trip, lectures by serious-faced men with ruddy com- plexions and tweed jackets who had been in the industry all their working lives and for whom whisky really was Uisge Beatha, the water of life.

I remembered very little about the individual distilleries because they all looked basically the same, but a few facts had stuck in my mind like midges to flypaper.

Each year, Scotch whisky earns more than �700 million in markets all around the world. A bottle of Scotch is drunk every tenth of a second in the United States, a bottle a second in Venezuela, a bottle every seven seconds in Norway and a bottle every twenty seconds in the Philippines or Malaya or somewhere, and it all comes from about 130 distilleries in Scotland, each making a whisky with its own distinctive taste. Perhaps the weekend whisky binge hadn't been a complete waste of time, after all. It was only when I began to pull the facts out of my memory that I appreciated just how much I had learnt about the industry.

Most of the whisky they make goes for blending, producing brands like Bell's or Famous Grouse, but some are just bottled as single whiskies, malt or grain. Blends account for about ninety-eight per cent of sales and it can take up to fifty individual malt and grain whiskies to make one blend.

At each distillery someone in the party had asked: 'But what gives Scotch its flavour? Where does the taste come from?' The question would always be greeted with a knowing smile and a load of Highland waffle about that being one of the great mysteries of distilling, and if everyone knew the secret then the Japanese would be able to produce the real thing instead of the paint stripper they mixed with imported malt to make something that a true Scot wouldn't 188 dream of allowing past his lips.

The most honest answer we had been given came from the export director of the host company, a tall, thin greying man with a bushy handlebar moustache who wore the kilt for the whole trip but who was never out of a dark pinstripe suit when in the firm's Edinburgh head office. The simple answer, he said, is that we just don't know.

One of the folk laws surrounding Malaysia's national drink is that it's the old stills that produce the spirit's flavour and bouquet, and that when new stills are needed the old ones are faithfully copied, knocks, bashes, dents and all. There seems to be an element of truth in that, all the tweed jackets agreed, but research scientists with PhDs can drink the stuff all night and still not decide why that is. Or why cheaper whiskies result in harsher hangovers than a good single malt.

What they can tell you is that whisky, when it has been distilled, is a mixture of ethanol and a host of other minor constituents, essential oils from the malted barley and other cereals and chemicals from the peat, which do depend on the type of still, its shape and even the way it's operated.

Going over in my mind the way whisky is made triggered off memories of the four or five distilleries we'd visited and I tried to picture their layout. All were sited near streams or rivers or pools and most were well away from towns and cities. That meant the men and women who worked there were supplied with cottages, usually in terraces close to the distillery with pretty gardens front and back.

The girl on the phone said the distillery had been abandoned, so the cottages would be empty. Mothballed distilleries are pretty common in Scotland now as gin, vodka and white rum become more popular, and their design and isolation means the buildings aren't good for anything other than whisky production. The big whisky firms just close them down and move the workers out, sometimes keeping a token staff on a care and maintenance basis.

One of the distilleries we went to had its own malting room where the barley was screened and soaked in huge tanks of water called steeps, before being poured into revolving mechanical meltings about three times the height of a man where the barley germinates and the starch turns into sugar.

Then it's dried in a peat-fired kiln, the air thick with smoke, before being ground up to form grist. Most distilleries miss out this stage, though, preferring to have the malt delivered from a central malting firm - it's more economical and means they always have a regular supply. If Inshriach had one, the chances were it would be on the ground floor or in a separate building.

The handover of the cash was going to take place on the first floor which meant it would be in one of three places, the mashing room, the fermentation room or the stillhouse.

The floors in all three would be of thick wire mesh running the whole length of the building with steel staircases climbing up and down to link the various levels.

The mashing room is where the grist is mixed with hot water in large metal barrels with gleaming domed copper lids about twenty feet across. Much of the mash funs is below floor level with about six to eight feet sticking through, and inspection hatches set into the lids along with temperature sensors. The wart, the thick sugary liquid, is drawn off from the funs and the crud that's left is sold for cattle food. 'Which is why the Highland coo always has a wee smile on its face,' we were told on four separate occasions. The whisky might vary from distillery to distillery but the jokes remain the same.

The wort is cooled and pumped into even bigger vessels, fermentation vats, this time made of wood and holding up to 45,000 litres. Yeast is thrown in and this converts the sugar into crude alcohol.

The fermentation rooms always smelled like breweries, the air heavy and sweet as the wart bubbled and frothed.

'One chap fell in and took four hours to drown. He wouldn't have lasted so long if he hadn't had to get out and go to the toilet twice.' That one we heard three times.

Again, the bulk of the fermentation vats is below floor level. About twelve feet in diameter, they would come up to a man's stomach, and unlike the mash funs the lids are flat and made of wooden sections which can be removed one by one.

There could be as many as a dozen vats in the fermentation room. A good place to hide, and to fight.

Somewhere close to the fermentation vats would be the stills, tall copper cones, rounded and bulbous at the bottom like an onion and stretching up to five, six, maybe seven times the height of a man, thinning out until just a few feet thick and then bending over so that the evaporating alcohol pours off and down towards the spirit safe, where the still- man can check the quality and proof of the whisky without being able to touch it.

There would be at least two stills, probably more, larger wash stills for the first distillation and smaller spirit stills for the second time around. The spirit that's eventually sold in shops and pubs and bars is the middle cut of the second distillation, but even that is barely drinkable until it's been allowed to mature for several years under lock and key and the watchful eye of HM Customs and Excise.

The casks would be stored in long, narrow, bonded warehouses, probably wooden with pitched roofs and likely to be found at the side of the distillery. If the distillery was in mothballs then chances were the warehouses would be empty too, except for the smell of maturing spirit and whisky-soaked wood, but they'd be kept secure and without windows so that's where David and Sammy could be kept out of the way. Maybe.

Thinking of the two of them added a good fifteen mph to the speed of the Cavalier, but I didn't ease back because Tony and Riker had delayed me and the roads were good as 191 I passed through Perth and headed for Pitlochry.

It was starting to rain and I switched on the windscreen wipers and turned up the heater, then turned it down again as I realized I couldn't be cold because my palms on the steering wheel were sweating.

It was dark by the time I reached Kingussie following the route Sammy, David and I had taken to visit the Highland Wildlife Park. God, it seemed a lifetime ago. I turned into the B9152, driving to Kincraig parallel to the shore of Loch Inch. The Cavalier headlights carved out tunnels of light through the blackness, the road speckled with raindrops, the windscreen wipers whirring quietly. The effect was almost hypnotic and twice I braked too late and too hard when an insomniac sheep wandered in front of the car.

The inhabitants of Kincraig were all indoors out of the rain when I passed through the town, and it had been more than an hour since I'd seen another car on the road. I felt like the last man alive, the only occupant of a dead world, a ghost planet. When I crossed the last streetlight, plunging into the dark and leaving the glow of the town behind me, I pressed the trip counter on the speedometer and watched it count off the tenth-mile segments as the road twisted and turned through the hillside.

I saw the signpost just before it clicked up 2.4. It leant to the right, the wood was cracked and gnarled and the letter- ing was obscured by green moss, but I could just make out the 'Insh' of 'Inshriach' and I pulled the wheel round sharply to the right and drove into the woods.

The track was just wide enough for one vehicle with passing places every hundred yards or so. It was rutted and potholed and the car bucked and swayed as it bounced from hole to hole.

The soaking tree trunks glistened under the headlights, branches whipping to and fro in the wind. The windscreen wipers began to clog up with fallen leaves, and the car skidded as I followed the track to the right and guided the car uneasily alongside a line of stone terraced cottages, gardens overgrown behind white picket fences, windows blank like the eyes of a blind man, washing lines bare, rainwater cascading over blocked gutters. On the downstairs window sill of the middle house sat a brown and white cat, its eyes glowing brightly, tail twitching as it turned to watch the Cavalier go past.

The track opened up into a large tarmac carpark in front of the distillery itself, a two-storey whitewashed building, E-shaped with the three prongs of the E pointing towards the cottages. On the left of the building was a white Ford Sierra and I parked by the side of it, three yards away from the black door the girl had described. I switched the lights off and allowed my eyes time to get used to the watery moonlight which faded and flickered as rain clouds passed over- head, then stepped out of the warmth of the car with the briefcase.

My footsteps echoed around the courtyard as I climbed the metal steps. At the top I wiped my soaking hands on the Barbour jacket and seized the brass door handle.

The door opened easily and silently and I crossed the threshold into the mashing room, moonlight reflecting off the copper-topped tuns.

Down the left-hand side of the whitewashed stone wall were a series of small, circular windows, five times the width of a ship's portholes. Through them I could see clouds passing over the dulled stars in the night sky and then the moon was blotted out and I was in complete darkness.

At the far end of the room was an oddly-squeezed goalpost of light, and as my eyes became accustomed to the dark I could see it was a closed door with light shining through from whatever lay beyond. Then the moon reappeared 193 from behind a cloud like a scolded child putting its head around a door and I moved across the room, the thick wire mesh floor rattling under my feet with each step, briefcase handle gripped firmly in my right hand, left hand forward to open the red-painted wooden door in front of me.

I felt like a latecomer to a party as the door opened and I stepped into the light, blinking. All conversation, if there had been any, stopped and everyone was looking at me as if I'd arrived at a black tie reception dressed in a blazer and slacks. But this wasn't a party and there was no smiling host to step forward and cover my embarrassment and offer to introduce me to everybody.

The light came from a battery-powered lantern which was hanging from one of the steel girders that cries-crossed the high roof above the fermentation vessels. There were no windows in the fermentation room and the lamp suggested that all power had been cut off to the mothballed distillery.

I could see four people in the room, spread among a dozen wooden circular tubs which came up to just above stomach height, ranged in three lines of four, two lines close to the walls and the third running down the middle. With the red door behind me I was standing in a corridor between the central line of four vats and the right-hand batch.

At the end of the room and to the left were David and Sammy, David sitting with his back to one of the vats with his legs pulled up against his chest, Sammy standing by his side, fuming his hair. David beamed as he saw me and tried to get up, but Sammy crouched down beside him and whispered into his ear. He settled back down but watched me carefully with wide eyes. I smiled and waved with my free hand.