09:00 - NETHER KILBOKIE - ELITE UNIT ASSEMBLESWilliam Connor was standing outside a disused cattleshed on a bright Highland summer’s morning, ankle-deep in cowshit, liquidised mercenary raining splashily down about his head from the crisp blue sky above. He wasn’t an overly superstitious man, but this was precisely the sort of thing that tended to make him wonder whether fate wasn’t trying to drop just the subtlest of hints.
He reached up reluctantly and wiped the gore from his eyelids, then, grimacing, ran a hand through his caked hair, shaking it at the wrist in a whiplash motion. The slick red goo made a wet snicking sound as it licked the dung-carpeted ground. Sighing, he turned around languorously to face Dawson, who was as inevitably likely to be right behind him as he was extremely unlikely to be impressed. In fact, Dawson’s state of impressedness had begun at its default low and pursued a steepening downward trajectory since his arrival an hour back. At that point, he had given the assembled unit a cursory few moments’ scrutiny, then signalled Connor to join him out in the yard.
‘Who the fuck are these clowns?’ he’d asked.
‘This is the crew, Finlay. These are my men.’ Connor had tried to sound persuasively confident, but only managed slightly miffed.
‘Men? They look like a bunch of thugs. Where did you get them? Ned Warehouse?’
‘Don’t judge them till you’ve seen them in action,’ he countered, throwing in a knowing smile to disguise the fact that his teeth were beginning to grind. It had been a few years since he’d seen Dawson, but it had taken only moments for the backlog of irritation and resentment to catch up. ‘Believe me, mate, these guys are sharp.’
‘You’ve worked with them? All of them?’
‘Individually, yes,’ Connor offered confidently, until Dawson’s sodium-pentathol stare had its inescapable effect. ‘Well, most of them, anyway,’ he adjusted.
‘Never together, never as a unit?’
Connor sighed, ever his most consistent means of expression in Dawson’s company. ‘No, but I can assure you - ’
‘Who actually are they, Bill? What’s their background?’
‘Christ, Finlay, we don’t have time. Do you want a pile of fucking CVs? You’re the one came to me at about five minutes’ bloody notice. You wanted a team - I got you one.’
The display of petulance failed to deflect Dawson’s stare. Connor guessed an extended tenure attaching electrodes to anyone who disagreed with him couldn’t have done much to mellow the man’s notoriously uncompromising nature.
Dawson glanced across to where two men were unloading a crate from Connor’s truck.
‘Those two, for instance. Which half-derelict council scheme did they escape from?’
Connor looked across to the diesel-reeking vehicle. Both of the men stopped a moment and gave him a salute. He wasn’t sure whether it was paranoia induced by Dawson’s withering disapproval, but he couldn’t help thinking there was an element of sarcasm to the gesture. ‘That’s Mailey and McKelvie.’ Dawson’s penetrative gaze demanded he elaborate. Balls. He’d been hoping to put off this particular revelation until Dawson had seen what the pair could do. ‘They’ve both been in, em, active service,’ he mumbled.
‘British Army?’
‘British Army was involved, yes.’
‘Involved?’
‘Yes, they -’ Connor sighed, yet again, and rolled his eyes. ‘All right, they’re ex-paramilitaries,’ he admitted.
Dawson’s eyeballs began to inflate. ‘Paramilitaries? Terrorists? Good God, I need soldiers, not amateurs, man.’
‘I’m telling you, Finlay, these guys are far from amateurs. It’s a bloody stunning track record they’ve got. You should see the list of places they’ve blown up. It’s like the back of a roadie’s t-shirt, I’m not kidding.’
‘So what are they doing here, working for you? Were they kicked out or something?’
‘No. They went freelance. They got bored. Too many cease-fires and peace agreements, not enough action. They’re not really interested in politics. They just like the pointing-guns-at-people part.’
‘And presumably you feel you - or rather we - can trust these pyro-Paddies?’
Connor’s frequency of sighing was starting to make him sound like an asthmatic. He’d heard there was now a particular form of torture named after Dawson in the Middle-East; presumably it had to do with the rectal region.
‘Look, I’ll come clean with you right now,’ he told him. ‘Yes, I’ve hired ex-terrorists. And yes, before you ask, there’s more republicans than just those two in the unit. There’s guys in there with loyalist paramilitary backgrounds, as well. Ex-terrorists, get it? Not interested in politics - like action. What they’ve done before doesn’t matter - it’s just previous employment, if you like. No longer relevant. They work for me now. And yes, I do trust them, because I know I’m uniting these guys like no politician ever could, by offering them the chance to get well paid for doing what they do best and enjoy most: threatening unarmed civilians.’
Dawson closed his eyes and exhaled at length, a hint of a smile finally appearing at the corners of his mouth.
‘All right, Bill, my man,’ he said, slapping Connor on the shoulder. The gesture was nauseatingly insincere, but he was grateful nonetheless. At least it meant he’d knock off moaning for a few minutes. ‘It’s been a while, a damn long while, but I’m still me and you’re still you, right?’ Dawson continued. ‘If you trust them, that’s good enough for me.’ He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. Connor doubted he’d managed it. The moaning would resume soon enough.
‘So what about the rest of them?’ Dawson asked, lighting a cigarette.
‘A few ex-army. Worked with them in various African shitholes, the usual cycle of coups and rebellions. Gaghen in there has got the record, I think. He helped Matsutu to the presidency, then joined the rebels and deposed him, then got the contract to put him back on top. An exemplar of mercenary professionalism. Absolute ideological detachment at all times. He’d be back with the rebels again now except he got Triso- Trypaso- Tryoso - Ah, fuck it, that nasty business with the tsetse flies - you remember, McGoldrick got it that time.’
‘I thought McGoldrick got elephantiasis.’
‘Maybe that’s what it was. Whatever, Gaghen says he’s feeling a lot better now. Anyway, there’s a few more from either side of the Ulster bomb-tennis match and a couple of Yanks, used to be in one of those militia capers until their particular Brownie pack got forcibly disbanded. A Norwegian, too. Roland something. Can’t pronounce his surname.’
‘And what about the bloke with the video camera?’
‘Oh, that’s Glover. He’s shooting our promotional video.’
‘Your what?’
‘Promotional video. This is the future, Finlay. The mercenary market’s a busy place these days. If you want the contracts, you’ve got to be able to show people what you can do. Things have changed while you were sunning yourself in that wee Arabian sinecure. The competition’s absolutely fierce, and so many of them are complete fucking cowboys. All these ex-Soviet and Stasi guys for a start - wouldn’t trust them to kill your budgie, neither you would. And the worst of it is they’ve had a knock-on effect for the reputation of the business as a whole. People are very nervous of dealing with a new outfit, so we’re filming the crew limbering up here, handling the toys. Then when we tender for a job in future, we can show them what they’ll get for their money.’
Dawson made no attempt to disguise a sneer. ‘So you see this - crew, as you called them, as a long-term venture? I thought you were complaining to me two seconds ago about only having five minutes’ notice?’
Connor was determined not to sigh, frequent exposure to Dawson’s haughty expression having cultured in him a certain immunity to it. Unfortunately, his recent years of apparent good living meant there was more of Dawson’s face for the expression to take up. If offered a choice between a million quid or Dawson’s head stuffed with fivers, it would be a tough call.
Connor sighed. ‘I wouldn’t say this is my envisaged first-team line-up,’ he admitted. ‘I wanted Gerry Thomson, for instance, but it turns out he’s in jail in some place hot and sticky. Got involved in drug running, silly boy.’
‘Drugs,’ Dawson said with obvious distaste, flicking ash from the end of his fag. ‘He should have known better than that.’
‘And Nigel Dixon was meant to be here too, but the Sonzolan air force went in the huff and bombed the army’s HQ, so he reckons the coup’s going to take another couple of weeks at least. He says hello, by the way. Truth is, a few of these guys are really only stop-gap appointments, but they’ll get the job done, don’t worry.’
Dawson shrugged his shoulders, about as uncharacteristic a gesture as Connor could imagine. ‘Well, it’s a fish-in-a-barrel affair, I suppose,’ he reflected. ‘As long as they know one end of a gun from the other, there’s not really a lot can go wrong.’
He did seem to be lightening up. Connor was evidently doing a remarkable job of masking his own misgivings about the patchwork assembly he’d thrown together. But, like the man said, it was a fish-in-a-barrel deal.
‘So do many of these guys know each other?’ Dawson enquired, incidentally pinpointing the very aspect of the assembly about which Connor had his misgivings.
‘Some,’ he managed, half-heartedly. ‘A few have worked together before, a few haven’t but know who each other are, and a few have never met in their lives. But in my experience, it’s amazing what the smell of cordite and the promise of a few bob can do to generate team spirit. This time tomorrow they’ll be ready to name their children after each other.’
Dawson gave that laugh of his, that wheezy, gravelly effort, like jackboots coming up your garden path. Connor could never tell whether it was amusement or dubious derision.
‘Well, I suppose you’d better introduce me to this elite unit of yours,’ he said. ‘Then we can get on with explaining our evil masterplan.’
‘Soon as you’re ready, yeah.’
Dawson paused a moment, looking quizzically at the half-smoked cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Never know what to do with these things when there isn’t a dissident to put them out on.’ He shrugged and dropped it to the ground, grinding the dowt into the mud beneath his boot. Connor looked to the heavens, thinking, Count the hours, count the money. They walked back towards the cattleshed, slaloming the voluminous country pancakes that lay scattered about the yard like an infestation of some cold, damp, parasitic alien species. Just as long as they didn’t attach themselves to your face.
‘I thought you said this place was disused,’ Dawson grumbled. ‘There’s shit everywhere.’
‘It is disused. But the area around here is still farmland. There’s cows all over the place, and they come wandering through whenever they fancy. There’s one there.’ He pointed to an impressively horned specimen about fifty yards away, watching the munitions truck with bored disinterest. Dawson drew a pistol and pointed it at the beast. It glanced his way for a similarly disinterested moment, then back at the truck with uniform ennui, then dumped splatteringly with a jaded absence of enthusiasm.
‘Not much sport to stalk, are they?’ Dawson commented.
‘No, but they make some size of trophy. Come on, white hunter.’
A second later there came the unmistakable sound of a shot being fired from inside the cattleshed, followed by a crash of splintering wood. Dawson looked at Connor accusingly. ‘I know we’re out in the middle of nowhere, Bill, but do the words 'clandestine' or 'discreet' mean anything to you?’
Connor bit his tongue and stomped purposefully towards the entrance, almost grateful to have some idiot to take it all out on.
‘This isn’t a bloody firing range,’ he began shouting, then had to dive for the floor as a volley of bullets pinged through the massive, side-rolling corrugated iron door, puncturing whatever bombast he’d worked up but fortunately nothing else. He lifted his head and looked up from where he lay on his stomach. Inside the shed there were men lying similarly flat on the ground, while others sheltered behind crates and still others scurried frantically for the exits. He noticed that one of the men on the floor was missing the back of his head, the crate he’d presumably been carrying lying smashed open beside him, polystyrene packing shapes spewing out of it.
Glover came crawling out on his hands and knees, camcorder slung around his shoulder, as several more shots echoed through the dilapidated structure.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Dawson demanded, arriving at Connor’s rear.
Glover gestured to the pair of them to back up further from the doorway.
‘I was doing interviews, like you asked,’ he said breathlessly. A couple more fugitives scrambled out the doorway and into the yard, one muttering something about ‘fucking mad Irish bastards’.
‘I was filmin’ McKelvie. He were carryin’ in a crate, and I got him to talk to the camera a little, you know: name, experience, bit of background. Anyway, another of the Irish blokes must have overheard. McWatt, his name was. He come up to me and asks - fuck’s sake!’ Glover flinched as another shot tore through the corrugated wall, leaving a hole less than six inches above his head. Dawson slapped a mag into his pistol and slid the bolt. Connor pulled his own handgun from the back of his trousers, a relief as it had been no friend to the palinodal sinus he’d been inadvertently cultivating between his arse-cheeks.
‘He asks whether the guy I’d been talking to was Antony McKelvie,’ Glover continued. ‘I goes: 'Yeah, mate, d’you know ’im?' Cunt says, 'Sure, he shot my fuckin’ cousin', then walks up behind him and blows the back of his fuckin’ ’ead out through his face. So McKelvie’s mate, Dailey, or Mailey, or whatever the fuck his name is, he sees this and has a shot at McWatt. Then McWatt’s mucker joins in as well and suddenly it’s the fuckin’ OK Corral in there.’
Dawson glared at Connor, who thought for a brief second about shooting him rather than suffer the inevitable onslaught of withering remarks.
He signalled to Pettifer, the last of the evacuees. ‘Who’s left in there?’ Connor asked.
‘Dunno. There was one or two stranded in the crossfire, I think. Apart from that, just the shooters.’
‘Right,’ Connor said, standing up and flipping off the safety as five more rounds were loosed inside. There were times when death seemed preferable to sheer embarrassment.
He dived through the doorway into a practised roll, righting himself against an empty water-storage tank. None of the gunmen was in his line of sight, and presumably not in each other’s either, given the temporary lull in firing. From where he squatted, he could more clearly see McKelvie’s outstretched arms a few yards in front and his brains another few feet in front of that. It was a profligate waste of talent. He’d have McWatt’s balls in a blender for that. Just beyond the cerebral purée, Jackson was lying flat with his arms around his head. He noticed Connor and gestured with his empty hands that he didn’t have a weapon, the look in his eyes communicating further that Connor was a considerable distance from his good books at that moment.
‘Yeah, okay,’ Connor mouthed, tutting. Why was everything always fucking his fault? He took a deep breath. ‘All right, this is Connor,’ he called. ‘Cease firing and safety your weapons now. That’s a fucking order.’
Four bullets drummed into the side of the water tank in instant reply.
‘I mean it,’ Connor shouted. ‘Anybody fires one more round and they’re off this team. We’ve got a job to do here - a very lucrative job, I’d remind you - so put your bloody toys away and save your parochial tantrums for your spare time.’
This time there was no hot-lead riposte, which he took to be an encouraging sign. ‘Come on, guns on the floor, now. Throw them into the middle, there, where Mr Jackson is waiting patiently to collect them. Then we can all walk outside and cool off. DO IT!’
There followed an age of silence, throughout which Connor tried not to think of phrases like ‘Hume-Adams’, ‘decommissioning’ and ‘Dayton-style peace agreement’. Eventually, a Glock came arcing from the shadows and landed next to Jackson, kicking up a foot-high spray of dust. The motes continued to swirl in the sunlight and silence as the weapon waited for a companion. A Nagan clattered into it a few seconds later, in a Nobel Peace Prize kind of moment. Finally, and with more than a suggestion of begrudging defiance, a Browning automatic was lobbed accurately at Jackson’s head. With the safety still off.
The Browning discharged a shot into the dust, inches from Jackson’s right temple, causing him to howl in pain and spring reflexively on to his knees, holding a hand to his ear. Blood was trickling out of it by the time the first of the shooters edged tentatively from the shadows. It was Mailey, his hands held either side of his face, his eyes looking to the doorway for assurance that someone was coming in to mediate. Dawson, Pettifer, Glover and others quickly took position around him, while at the other end of the cattleshed, several more men moved swiftly inside to circle McWatt and his fellow loyalist, who turned out to be Kilfoyle.
‘All right, children,’ announced Dawson acidly, ‘I want everybody’s firearms on the floor over there and I want all of you standing to attention in three seconds. Everybody,’ he repeated, coldly eyeing a few who hadn’t grasped the newcomer’s role in proceedings. Guns began thudding into the dirt amid a grumbling spate of sighs, shrugs and ‘fuck’s sake’s. Dawson gestured to Connor to collect them, doing so with an I’ll-see-you-about-this-later headmasterly glower.
‘And you’ll get them back when you’ve learned how to play with them properly,’ he continued. The disarmed troops eyed Connor balefully as he marched past their dishevelled line, carrying their beloved playthings outside in a wooden box. Dawson began to address them in parade-ground register.
‘For those of you who don’t know, my name is Finlay Dawson. I am the man ultimately in charge of this operation, which means in short that I and only I tell you who to kill and when. What you do in your own spare time has nothing to do with me, so if any more of you feel like killing each other or indeed killing yourselves, you’re perfectly free to do so when your shift finishes tomorrow morning. But right now, it’s office hours, got it?’ There were a few grudging ‘yes, sir’s, their lethargy causing Connor to wince. Dawson was used to a degree more effusiveness, his man-management style being based on somewhat hierarchical principles.
‘Okay, which one of you is McWatt?’ he enquired casually.
McWatt lifted a hand shiftlessly. Dawson took a step towards him and shot him through the forehead.
Kilfoyle made a lunge for Dawson but found himself nose-to-barrel against his automatic. ‘What’s this one’s name, Mr Connor?’ he barked.
‘Kilfoyle.’
‘Kilfoyle. Well, Mr Kilfoyle, is there any business between yourself and Mr Mailey that you feel can’t wait until after office hours?’
Kilfoyle swallowed. ‘No,’ he said, his word barely a whisper.
‘No what, Mr Kilfoyle?’
‘No, sir,’ he corrected, his would-be defiance wilting predictably in the heat of Dawson’s unflinching stare.
‘Stand down,’ Dawson told him. Both men took a step back. ‘All right, now that everybody’s 'on-message', perhaps we can get on with unloading the gear. Then, if we pull that off without any further casualties, we’ll maybe move on to the challenge of an inventory. And if we complete that mission successfully, who knows? I might even progress to debriefing you on this evening’s itinerary. But let’s not get carried away with our ambitions, given that fatality-free freight-loading proved beyond us at the first attempt.’
Connor chose this moment to step in and attempt to recover some remnant of authority. ‘Dobson, Fleming,’ he ordered tartly. ‘I want small arms and ammunition in that corner. Pettifer, Jardine, all explosives over there. Quinn, McIntosh, comms equipment..’ ‘What about the bodies, sir?’ asked Glover.
Dawson intervened before Connor could speak. ‘Messrs Mailey and Kilfoyle will place them in the truck once it’s been emptied. We can’t bury them around here - we’ll dispose of them later.’ The pair moved off towards their respective fallen comrades, but Dawson stopped them. ‘No. Back you come. Mr Mailey, I’d like you to take charge of the late Mr McWatt, and Mr Kilfoyle, I’d like you to look after the late Mr McKelvie. If you both pay close attention to the state of the bodies you’ll observe that Catholic or Protestant, a bullet to the head has much the same effect. On you go.’
‘What was that?’ Connor asked him. ‘Your attempt at reconciliation?’
Dawson tutted. ‘Merely reminding them they’re both on the same side today, seeing as this esprit de corps you were waxing lyrical about has manifestly failed to materialise. Never mind esprit de corps, even plain old mercenary materialism seems beyond these morons. I just hope the rest of your shower turn out to have some idea of what they’re doing. Especially as we’re now two men down.’
‘Well you’re the one who shot McWatt.’
‘And if I hadn’t, Mailey’d have popped him, first chance he got. Then Kilfoyle would have popped Mailey, and so on. There are more nationalists here, aren’t there?’
Connor nodded reluctantly. ‘Different faction. Can’t remember which one. But they didn’t get involved back there, I hope you noticed.’
‘Yes, but that’s because they’re used to shooting at people who can’t shoot back.’
Connor had had enough. This prick had breezed in at the eleventh hour needing his help, after all.
‘Look, Finlay,’ he said angrily. ‘Don’t fucking kid yourself that I don’t know exactly how many options you’ve got right now. What else are you going to do, eh? Who else are you going to go to? You came to me looking for an outfit, and I got you one. So it’s not been a dream start this morning, so fucking what? Don’t judge me on one screw-up, and don’t judge these guys until you’ve seen what they can do.’
Dawson shrugged. ‘It’s a fair point, Bill,’ he said patronisingly. ‘Consider my judgement 'reserved'.’
Arsehole.
Dawson walked off to talk to Jackson, who was squatting on the ground, still holding his ear. Connor headed for the door, reckoning a dose of fresh air was in order if he wasn’t going to punch somebody. He passed Kilfoyle, who was crouched between McKelvie’s corpse and the crate he’d been carrying when he got shot. He was staring at Dawson with emotions not too different from Connor’s own. The Ulsterman looked like he’d dearly love to have his gun back.
‘Save it till after payday, pal,’ Connor advised, checking his stride and moving to one side as Pettifer and Jardine approached from the truck, supporting a cumbersome box between them. He noticed Kilfoyle reach a hand into the broken crate and pull some polystyrene shapes from it, staring fixedly at what was beneath. Suddenly unfixed, Kilfoyle pulled out the rocket launcher that had been contained within, momentarily eyeing the tailfins and hefting it to his shoulder to point the other end directly at the man who’d executed his comrade. There were several shouts in that moment as Kilfoyle pressed the button, all but two of them too-late warnings to Dawson and Jackson to get out the way. Of the two dissenters, one was Connor’s too-late warning to Glover to get out the way, having noticed that Kilfoyle’s tailfins were in fact forefins and that therefore the launcher was back to front. The other was Glover going ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!’ as the rocket hit him in the chest, picked him up bodily, flew him thirty metres across the yard and detonated against the concrete wall of the barn opposite.
Connor ran uselessly after him. He made it through the gaping doorway in time to see Glover’s head and arms fly off in different directions, and a few seconds later for his sautéed insides to pay their due respects to the late Isaac Newton.
Dawson was so intent upon getting to Connor to express his disgust that he almost forgot to stop and shoot Kilfoyle on his way past.
09:09 - kilbokie brae - return of the macFormer Lothian and Borders Police Inspector Hector McGregor took a deep, satisfying breath of the Cromarty Firth air and looked at his watch, which told him he was officially about ten minutes into his retirement. He hadn’t actually worked a shift for three weeks, but that had, strictly speaking, been holiday time, most of it spent organising and executing his and Molly’s move from Islay. Yesterday had been his last day of paid leave, and he’d toyed with considering himself a gentleman of leisure as of tea-time then, but an August Saturday at nine had sounded far, far more satisfying. Somewhere in Edinburgh right now, a copper was turning up to start that shift, with the Festival in full swing, Princes Street mobbed, and Rangers due at Easter Road.
The morning was cool and clear, with a warmth in the wind that seemed to promise the sun would get stronger and that a hot summer day was in prospect.
Lovely.
Perfect, in fact. Another half an hour’s brisk walk and he’d be at the kitchen table, enjoying one of Molly’s no-holds-barred fry-ups, before deciding how to spend the rest of this momentous day. A leisurely eighteen holes, perhaps, or possibly a seat by the water, meditating in anticipation of the unmatched pleasure of a tug on his line; perhaps even phone his brother-in-law in Portmeddie, see if he was taking his boat out later. Or maybe he’d just sit on his arse in the sun-trap back green, pipe in one hand, can of export in the other, contemplating the fact that if anyone in the vicinity decided to do something unpleasant to anybody else today, it was no longer any worry of his.
The smell of pine filled his nose, the twitter of birds his ears; that and the wind the only sounds to be heard, it seemed, in the whole world.
He was due this. Christ knew he was due this.
His posting on Islay hadn’t turned out to be quite the peaceful valedictory sinecure he’d hoped. First of all, there’d been that horrible stooshie over the wifie in Ballygrant with MS who was growing her own cannabis in her greenhouse. Having spent three decades policing a city whose name had become synonymous with heroin and AIDS, McGregor’s perspective on both drugs and disease had prompted him to be forever too busy to investigate rumours of something that seemed common knowledge throughout the island and something no-one in the community wanted to make a fuss about. Even the occasional pointed suggestion that it was ‘a helluva big greenhoose, right enough’ remained insufficient to pique his professional curiosity, until a ‘concerned citizen’ made a formal complaint and he was obliged to take action.
The concerned citizen, a Mr Charles McGinty, was not in fact a resident of Islay, but owned a holiday home there, which he visited most weekends. Through a telephone call, he furnished McGregor with the information not only that Stella McQueen was growing cannabis for personal use, but also that she was selling the excess to the island’s impressionable youngsters. When he arrested her, the whole thing turned into a three-ring media circus, with reporters, photographers and news crews descending instantly on the place, closely followed by a waftingly stinky mob of long-haired protesters in the most life-endangeringly ramshackle convoy of motor transport outside of a Mad Max picture. The dictaphone-and-flashbulb brigade only tarried long enough to interview Stella and file their ‘senseless victimisation’ stories, buggering off again before the real senseless victimisation began.
The crusties kept pelting him with lumps of rancid bacon (him being a pig - ho fuckin’ ho), which he thought might have more usefully been fed to the diseased-looking mutts that followed them around. Some farmer friend of Stella McQueen (McGregor had no witnesses, but everyone knew fine who it was) sprayed slurry all over the front of his wee station in the middle of the night, and he was even hit with the time-honoured jobbie-inside-a-blazing-newspaper-left-on-your-doorstep routine. Time-honoured it may have been, but when the bell rang and he opened the door to find flames licking his trousers, he automatically began stamping on it - in his bloody slippers - before remembering.
As if that wasn’t enough, he also had the islanders on his back, complaining about the mess and general nuisance the crusty encampment was causing, and practically a pitched battle on his hands when the locals decided to confront the visitors over whether Jock Gibson’s missing sheep and the barbecue they’d had the night before might be in some way related. Having been thus aggravated by the indigenous population, the crusties rightly anticipated that the most damaging response would be to announce their intention to stay even longer. McGregor successfully persuaded them otherwise using a phoney ferry timetable, with which he pointed out that if they didn’t piss off on the next boat they were going to be marooned there during Glastonbury.
Nobody said thank you. In fact, the only civil gesture he received came in the form of a cake baked and sent to him by, of all people, Stella McQueen, with a note to say sorry for all the bother he’d had. He and Molly polished it off between them for dessert, and very tasty it was too, but he did begin to fear the worst a wee while later when he realised the pair of them were laughing away at an ITV sitcom. Stella sent another note the next day to tell him exactly how much gear had gone into the cake, her idea of a practical joke. At least someone on the island still had a sense of humour. That sense of humour was doubtless painfully tested when the less-than-understanding sheriff imposed a custodial sentence, but for McGregor at least it seemed to draw some kind of line under the matter.
Being in jail - on top of being in a wheelchair - meant Stella McQueen therefore had a stoater of an alibi for the night Charles McGinty’s house had all its windows shot out by an estimated three hundred rounds of ammunition, evidently intended to harm more than just glass. Traces of blood were found in several locations along a trail leading from McGinty’s back garden to the Kilchiaran road, despite the inhabitant himself not being injured in the attack. This tended to suggest one of his would-be assassins had come to some harm, but Mr McGinty was unable to furnish McGregor with any explanation as to how this might have come about, nor why the policeman had found a number of spent shotgun cartridges around the premises’ back door.
It was around this time that McGregor discovered his concerned citizen to be better known around Glasgow as ‘Mad Chic McGinty’, currently holding the strongest hand at the West of Scotland’s drugs-and-doings table. He’d grassed up Stella McQueen partly to maintain his duplicitous public image, but mainly because he didn’t want impressionable teenagers wasting their money on cannabis when his boys could be supplying them with something that was more of a long-term investment.
The word from Glasgow was that a rival player had attempted to destabilise McGinty’s operation via the direct and often effective decapitation method. For a while McGregor wished they had succeeded, but that soon gave way to wishing plain old murder was all it had been about.
As the Islay nights became ever more frequently lit up by small-arms fire and, on several spectacular occasions, exploding boats, it became inescapably apparent that some kind of territorial battle was being bloodily fought, with McGregor handed the blue helmet and the role of useless UN peacekeeper. Of course, it wasn’t long before Strathclyde sent reinforcements, followed by cops from London and Amsterdam, plus a small army of customs officials. But his Edinburgh fireside fantasies of being a one-man police force with nothing to do evaporated into a blurred haze of gunplay and politics as his poky wee station became the hub of an international narcotics investigation.
McGinty hadn’t bought a holiday home on Islay simply because he liked the place. The knuckle-dragging bampot was hardly the scholarly type, but had evidently been a keen student of local history, and of that subject’s incorrigible tendency to repeat itself.
Think Islay, think whisky. Rich, dark, peaty stuff. The place was hoaching with distilleries, and once upon a time there’d been even more. The reason for this was not the excellent quality of its fresh water, the aforementioned peat or any other factor conducive to fine malt-making. It was that for a period during the nineteenth century, there wasn’t an exciseman posted there, so every bugger had started his own still.
In more recent times, the customs men’s numbers had been slashed back to save money, with attention centred on certain high-profile airports and harbours, ‘intelligence’ rather than diligence relied upon to thwart the smugglers. McGinty had reasoned that nobody would be paying much attention to Strathclyde’s most westward point, and had cultivated links with European exporters to land heroin at a wee jetty just north of Portnahaven. From there the gear was transported to Port Ellen for the ferry to Kennacraig, then driven off the boat, uninspected, on to mainland British soil.
It had been the key to McGinty’s bludgeoning progress through the Scottish drugs underworld, and his local power was such that it turned out the battles on Islay hadn’t been instigated by any native rivals but by a major European firm who fancied making use of his trade route and wanted both ends of the incumbent arrangement out of the way. Hence the small-arms fire. And the exploding boats. And the mortar attack on McGregor’s polis station, forcing him to work out of a Portakabin for the rest of his attachment.
But that was over now. It was all over now. Edinburgh was behind him. Islay was behind him. The future was the undisturbed tranquillity of the Cromarty Firth, and it had only just begun.
He took another satisfied breath and resumed walking. The sound of gunfire erupted suddenly from somewhere beyond the cover of the trees. One shot, then, moments later, a few more. Then a lot more. He caught himself panicking, peering nervously into the woods, then stopped, remembering both his geographical location and the date. It was August the 12th - the glorious 12th - and here he was in the highlands. The grouse season started today. He laughed aloud, relishing the moment for its timely symbolism. From now on, shooting meant sport. Loud bangs meant hunting. And none of it was his problem.
He strode contentedly down the path for another quarter mile or so, following the trail until it passed close to a couple of rather run-down farm outbuildings, occasionally visible through breaks in the trees. Another glance at his watch told him he was still officially less than half an hour into his retirement, and it just seemed to be getting better and better.
A few seconds later, barely preceded by the startling blast of an explosion, a severed arm came hurtling down upon him from the sky, its clenched fist knocking him unconscious with a solid blow to the side of his head.
09:17 - AUCHENLEA - THE START OF A GREAT ADVENTURE
Dear Alastair McQuade,
‘Let’s meet up in the year 2000!’Your former classmate Gavin Hutchison cordially invites you to an unmissable reunion event. Join your fellow ex-pupils from St Michael’s Auchenlea in the incomparably luxurious surroundings of Delta LeisureTM’s Floating Island Paradise Resort on Saturday, August 12th, for an evening of food, drink, dancing, reacquaintance, reminiscence and nostalgia...'
August 12th. Today. Now. Annette pulled the Audi over about a hundred yards from the entrance to the school car park, where the coach would pick everyone up. She was seriously taking no chances about being seen as she dropped him off. He looked across at her and they both laughed.
‘Last chance,’ he said.
‘Yeah, right.’
The invite had arrived about three weeks back, which at the time had seemed indecently short notice. Not in terms of clearing a space in his social diary, which generally worked on a free-form improvisational basis, but in terms of growing up, which was something Ally felt you were optimally supposed to have achieved before attending a fifteen-year school reunion. Even if you hadn’t achieved it, you were at least supposed to have given it a shot.
It was Annette’s fault, really. They’d been living together for nearly two years now, throughout which she had been neglectfully remiss about her duty to nag him incessantly on the subject. No whining about his immaturity, no accusations of childish self-indulgence, no tutting disapproval of his alcohol and fast-food consumption, no arguments about the part his disposable income was playing in propping up the Hollywood studio system, not even a tantrum when her mother had to be rescued by helicopter from the foothills of his sell-through video collection. And this woman expected him to marry her?
Still, give the lassie her due, after this growing-up deadline came through the letterbox last month, she had done her belated best to assist him by declaring herself irrevocably up the jaggy. That the announcement should have come as a complete surprise had ramifications for his otherwise reliable powers of observation and deduction: Annette drinking Virgin Marys on a Friday night was barely less ambiguous than if she had come home with a Silver Cross pram.
It would be inaccurate to say it wasn’t planned: that would give the impression that it had actually been discussed. They hadn’t even talked about the possibility in a yes/no/don’t know/let’s-have-this-conversation-in-six-months kind of way. That was entirely symptomatic of their relationship to date, right enough. They weren’t much given to state-of-the-union summits, in keeping with the ‘pleasantly winging it’ philosophy that characterised what they had between them. The upside of this was that it always felt new, it always felt like they hadn’t been together long, despite the calendar stating its regular, irrefutable objections. The downside was that Ally occasionally entertained a fear that Annette would wake up one morning with a sudden clarity of vision, take a deck at what was around her, scream ‘Jesus Christ, I’m living with Ally McQuade!’ and run directly for the street in her goonie and slippers, never to return.
Admittedly, this wasn’t exactly the manifestation of a crippling inferiority complex that stood in the way of their mutual emotional development. And that. It was just a thought Ally had from time to time, to remind himself of his status on the shortlist of the world’s jammiest men. All the reasons and all the scenarios by which it would become obvious why the two of them could not possibly work out had serially presented themselves and inexplicably failed to produce the logical result. Even at the beginning, their relationship had been founded on enough misunderstandings, misconceptions and misapprehensions to fuel a dozen ugly break-ups and as many straight-to-video Jennifer Aniston vehicles.
They met at the opening ‘reception’ for a new art gallery just off Great Western Road. It was a champagne and canapés affair, attended by local journos, PR smile-a-whiles and a populous delegation of the effetely pretentious goatee-and-navel-ring types who gave rise to an indigenously Glaswegian application of the word ‘poof’ that was entirely indifferent towards sexual orientation. Ally was standing before (according to the card) a ‘post-cubist’ triptych entitled Love, Honour and Obey, which he decided had less to say to him about marriage than it had about the artist’s unspoken sufferings at the hands of a deranged geometrist. He was bursting to say something crude, ignorant and uninformed, but he didn’t know the gallery owner well enough for it to be worth embarrassing him.
That was when Annette appeared at his elbow, attracting his attention with a wave of her fingers and saying: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name, but we’ve met before, haven’t we?’
Recognising her now that she was separate from the throng, Ally put her unguardedly warm approach down to her inability to recollect also where they had met before, which was St Michael’s RC Secondary, Auchenlea, Renfrewshire. Geographically, it was only a few miles from an art gallery on Great Western Road, but sociologically, it was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Her name was Annette Strachan. Ally could have rhymed off the names of everyone who was ever in one of his classes, but even had he not been what Annette referred to as ‘the human database’, it was unlikely he’d have forgotten hers. Every year-group had its beauties, and in his, Annette Strachan and a girl called Catherine O’Rourke walked head and shoulders above female-kind. Not that thoughts of them kept Ally awake at night in those days: Annette and Catherine existed in a different dimension, so the notion of a crush on either was as hopelessly abstract as fancying Phoebe Cates or Victoria Principal.
It was a slight relief, if hardly a surprise, that she did not so vividly remember him, as his distinguishing characteristics throughout the awkward age had amounted to little more than a smart mouth and a weak stomach. Memories of an irritating wee bastard who puked when he got nervous would hardly have proven an enticement to the sort of informal approach she had just made.
He came clean on their previous connection, which had roughly the opposite effect to the undignified retreat he’d anticipated. Maybe that was actually what hooked them together: if you did traverse the galaxy and you met someone from your home town, you were likely to find them twice as fascinating as all the punters with three heads and eight tits, if only because they’d made the same epic journey. Arthur Dent travelled not just the universe but to either end of time, and three books on he was still fixated by Tricia McMillan - but then Londoners always were very parochial that way.
They got blethering, small-talk and smiles, with maybe even a hint of mutual flirting, and soon blew the gallery for a pub round the corner. Ally was just placing the first round of drinks on the table when Annette casually asked what he was doing at the reception. Her failure, once again, to cool her interest upon the revelation that his invite was a courtesy after rewiring the place, suggested he might be the one carrying the misconceptions.
He’d admit that a small, sour part of himself was disappointed by her reactions. Both when he told her the St Mick’s link and when he told her he was a spark, the inverted snob in him was looking forward to seeing her embarrassment, her discomfiture, as a confirmation that as well as retaining her looks, she had held on to the other aspect he well remembered her for. Annette Strachan had, throughout her schooldays, been somewhat aloof in the company of her peers, or in the local parlance, ‘a fuckin’ snooty bitch’. She’d lived in one of the big ‘bought hooses’ up on the Springwell Road, and neither her socio-economic status nor the benefits of her physical attributes had made her particularly disposed towards sharing much time with the likes of Ally.
It was, Ally grew to learn, nothing personal. Annette had simply hated being at school and spent the whole time counting the days to when she could spread her wings. She detested the miniature totalitarianism enforced by the staff, the mentality that punished the whole class if one culprit wouldn’t own up. She found the curriculum frustratingly restrictive as well, with everything so geared towards exam syllabuses and exam technique that learning for its own sake seemed a decadent luxury. But mostly she hated the junior fascism among the pupils, the way the wee buggers mercilessly cracked down on every minuscule transgression of a social code that only its adherents knew. From the make of your school-bag to the colour of your lunchbox to the type of wallpaper covering your workbook, you never knew what might mark you out as a leper tomorrow. (Ally didn’t remember Annette ever having to ring a bell herself, but then you didn’t have to be on the receiving end to abhor it.)
She knuckled under big-time in fifth year, making sure she got the Highers she needed to access Glasgow Uni, the West End and as much student bohemia as she could lay hands on. After that she ‘did the London thing’, and sought work as a journalist. She started off on one of the temps’ weekly giveaway mags, writing features and advertorials, as well as laying out ads and even selling space when things got tight. In time she made it up to the glossies, got the big-city lifestyle she’d long aspired to, and after a few years a bidey-in ‘partner’ to share it all with. He was handsome, ambitious, sophisticated, connected, the works. He was also, she inevitably discovered, just about the most shallow human being ever to exist in the three-dimensional world. Annette made it a considerate policy not to talk to Ally about him, but he still picked up the gen here and there: the lying, the backstabbing, the mistrust and, of course, the cheating. This last Ally had some difficulty getting his head around: previously he’d thought the male tendency to stray was symptomatic of a fundamental dissatisfaction caused by not sleeping with someone like Annette Strachan.
The break-up was very messy, and her work was contaminated by the fall-out. This precipitated ‘the life-crisis thing’, which in turn gave way to a year or so doing ‘the travel thing’, at the end of which she decided she was utterly scunnered with London. In defiance of Dr Johnson, she was not correspondingly tired of life, but she did feel she needed to scale things down a little, so opted to move back to the West End, somewhere she’d often returned to for weekends even during the height of her metropolitan phase. She’d been living back there a wee bit less than a year, working freelance, when she went to that art gallery, ran into Ally, and commenced their unlikely but confoundingly successful relationship.
Ally hadn’t lacked for female company before that. The cheeky wee bastard of youth had evolved to be a charming wee bastard when appropriate; and the evidence suggested that women actually found him either quite cute or at the least too short to be threatening. However, it still required a steeply descending lack of subtlety in Annette’s overtures for him to grasp that she didn’t want them to be just good friends.
The morning after they first slept together, she said that she had been one date away from asking if he was gay, as he had set a new heterosexual record time for not making a pass at her. He confessed he’d been slightly intimidated because of how inaccessible he’d regarded her in their youth. Fortunately, he drew short of sharing the Phoebe Cates and Victoria Principal comparisons, as Annette was finding it hilarious enough already. He decided then that their relationship might just have a chance, provided, of course, she at some point stopped laughing at him.
Ally knew what her friends thought of the situation, mainly because early on he’d been wary of it himself: she was on the rebound. Not from her ex-partner, but from her ex-life, so Mr Down-Home Spark - the genial skilled tradesman who could read books and knew who Krzysztof Kieslowski was - would be both lap-dog and bit of rough until she’d sorted herself out; upon which he’d be humanely put down to make way for someone who read books and actually liked Krzysztof Kieslowski.
There were some who still thought that way, or at least, in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, adapted to discreetly sympathise for poor Annette’s downfall. These tended to be - ironically or significantly, according to your individual regional prejudices - her Glasgow friends rather than those she knew from her London days. Perhaps this was because the former, being closer to the reality, were that bit more afraid of a similar disastrous fate befalling themselves.
The others’ sympathies were often surrogately lavished upon Ally. They tended to be so pleasantly surprised by his literacy that they were always trying to suggest ways to unshackle his gifts from the chains of his workaday existence as an electrical contractor. The notions that he quite liked what he did and that he might be making more money than any of them were thoughts that he patiently resisted sharing. This was only fair, as he knew he was occasionally guilty of encouraging them. It hadn’t escaped Annette’s notice that company from the big smoke often provoked in him the familiar Scottish working-class ostentation of wearing your esoteric intellectualism on your sleeve. This worked best in conjunction with an uncompromising refusal to refine your accent for mainstream consumption, and often piqued an entertaining reaction in those who’d never heard the names Plato or Aristotle pronounced with a glottal stop.
Not much escaped Annette’s notice, right enough. For instance, in company, Ally could no longer get away with showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of Woody Allen scripts or De Niro’s oeuvre, because she knew he also had an encyclopedic knowledge of South Park scripts and Van Damme’s oeuvre. That she didn’t consider either of these reason enough to dump him was, he considered, a true miracle of modern living.
And in return for this saintly degree of tolerance, Ally provided - well, he wasn’t sure. He had to be doing something right, he knew, but he wasn’t aware of it being anything he consciously went out of his way to achieve. He would occasionally reason to himself that he must, on the whole, be a pleasant and considerate guy to have around, but this always led inevitably to the question of why none of his previous girlfriends had noticed this. One of his more observant (if admittedly unreconstructed) pals had reasoned back then that his girlfriends did find Ally pleasant and considerate: the problem was that having landed such a rare specimen, they very quickly decided he would do as a husband, then became frustrated when he didn’t, with reciprocal haste, advance matters along those lines. This in turn, Jake reasoned, had Ally reaching for the ejector seat.
Ally tended to take most of Jake’s sexual-political theories with a pinch of post-modernism, but a retrospective analysis of his break-ups did unearth certain recurrences in the preceding days or weeks, notably a tendency on his girlfriends’ parts to dwell in front of estate agents or Pronuptia outlets. It was very possible, therefore, that he and Annette had made it so far because for so long he’d have found it hard to believe she could have such designs on him.
Christ, maybe she hadn’t, but it was moot now. She was pregnant and glowingly happy about it. That, in fact, was the greatest compliment Ally had ever been paid: that when she told him about it, she did so with a big, cheeky, bad-girl grin. Whatever fears she was naturally bound to have for how he’d take it, she masked them behind a show of assumption that he’d be as astonished but pleased about it as she was.
And she was right. He’d have to confess that his initial unmanly show of emotion was partly in response to the shock of the news and partly in ecstatic appreciation of its long-term ramifications (principally those affecting the likelihood of that sudden-clarity/dressing-gown/slippers/street scenario). However, in the week that followed, when he actually had time to consider the reality of what he was facing, he was even more surprised to find that he was unreservedly, uncomplicatedly, utterly fucking delighted about it.
None of which made sense. In fact, for about four days, nothing in his head made sense. Responsibility suddenly sounded like a fourteen- rather than four-letter word. Parenthood sounded like a great adventure rather than a waste of Steve Martin. And growing up sounded plausibly achievable.
Once his whizzing brain had calmed down a wee bit and he discovered that such ludicrous thoughts were actually there to stay, he appreciated that he shouldn’t really have been so amazed at the strength with which his paternal instincts had suddenly kicked in. It was hundreds of thousands of years of genetic programming against a brief decade or so of late-twentieth-century pseudo-individualism. Besides, bottle feeding a wean at three in the morning would provide a unique opportunity to revisit the Moonlighting back-catalogue. At the end of that week, Annette asked him to marry her. It was the sort of moment that made him think the real secret of their relationship might lie in ‘McQuade’ turning out to be Gaelic for ‘Faust’. Ally knew this was largely down to his Catholic upbringing and the guilt it made you feel over anything good that life allowed you. However, he was able to counter his fear with the rationalisation that, as an atheist, he hadn’t accounted for having a soul anyway, so Meph was welcome to whatever was going. Eternity seemed a price worth paying for one lifetime of what he was signing up for when he said yes to Annette.
Of course, she did very openly add the proviso that this meant he’d have to sell all his CDs, videos and computer games, and that they’d never have sex again, but he’d taken that as read: marriage is marriage. Similarly sticking with tradition, it was decided that they should proceed to the main event fairly swiftly in order that Annette should not be ‘showing too much in the photies’, and the date was accordingly set for a month hence.
Annette sympathetically observed that this didn’t leave much time to organise a stag night, sympathy that Ally considered misspent as he had never expressed any desire to put himself through such a thing. His now-fiancée (oh, how he loved that word) elaborated that it was an important and time-observed custom for the groom-to-be to undergo a night out so thoroughly ghastly and traumatic that he would wish to spend the rest of his life exclusively in the company of someone who hadn’t been there. She then concluded that she could think of no occasion more convenient or appropriate than Gavin Hutchison’s school-reunion party. Ally took this to be a final confirmation - as if there had been any ambiguity - that Annette would not be joining him on the Floating Island Paradise Resort. ‘It sounds like the most bloody awful nightmare I could possibly imagine,’ she’d said, after her email invite was forwarded from the London offices of a magazine she still strung for. Ally’s, via plain old snail-mail, arrived at the flat, being his registered business address. He found her print-out and his postcard lying side-by-side on the kitchen table when he came in from work, Annette washing dishes at the sink.
‘I honestly can’t think of anything worse. If there’s one thing in my life I have never looked back on, it was getting out of Auchenlea, getting out of that school and getting away from those people. Now this clown, who I don’t even remember, is suggesting getting together with all of them - overnight - on a place you can only escape from by boat! It would be like - like - actually, I can’t come up with a metaphor. In fact, in future, people will use this as a metaphor. How awful’s that? That’s as awful as cooping yourself up on a bloody oil-rig with thirty or forty people you’ve never stopped hating in all the fifteen years since you last had the misfortune of sharing a room with them.’
‘So,’ Ally had ventured, ‘not up for it then?’
She laughed, but Ally knew she wasn’t kidding. Realistically, apart from visits at her parents’ place, the only thing likely to reunite Annette and Auchenlea was a bad Monday, a tower and a high-velocity rifle.
‘And I take it you are?’ she stated, almost accusingly. The almost-accusation derived from Annette finding Ally ‘irritatingly well balanced’ when it came to his schooldays, or indeed anything; he never having confided the sudden-clarity/dressing-gown etcetera scenario. ‘Of course,’ he said, feigning a wounded look. ‘This could be my only chance to tell all those people that I’ve shagged Annette Strachan.’
Ally had to dodge a wet handful of water and suds.
‘See, I know you’re joking about that, but that’s what these things are about,’ she told him. ‘That’s the single reason anyone would go: the only people who turn up will be the ones who think they’ve done quite well for themselves one way or another and want to compare scores with the rest. This Gavin Hutchison idiot obviously wants to show off this ludicrous holiday resort he’s built, probably to compensate for the fact that he was so anonymous at school. I can’t even remember who he was.’
‘You can never remember who anyone was, Annette,’ Ally reminded her. ‘I’m surprised you remember the name of the school.’
‘That’s not true,’ she countered, grinning. ‘I remember Matthew Black. And Davie Murdoch.’
‘Oh, well, we’ll just call you Miss Mnemonic, then. Imagine bein’ able to simply pluck those names out of the ether.’
‘Easy for the human database to say. And besides, you remember everyone because you liked everyone.’
‘I did not.’
‘You did. You do. You get on with everybody. You don’t have many character defects, Ally McQuade, but that is definitely one of them. And don’t argue with me, I know you too well - you’ll already be looking forward to this thing because you genuinely want to know what happened to everybody, what they’re all doing with themselves. You can’t help it: you’re a people person. If I didn’t love you, it would make me sick.’
So there they were, three weeks later, parked a short walk from the St Mick’s school gates on a dry Saturday morning.
‘You’ll be the only one there, I’m telling you,’ Annette said once more. ‘I’ll pass by again on the way back from my mum’s, and I’ll bet there’s just you and the coach driver, both looking lost. If you look pathetic enough, I might stop and offer you a lift home, but I’ll need to see some big puppy-dog eyes.’
Ally leaned over and gave her a kiss, then opened the car door. ‘I will not be the only one there,’ he told her, climbing out. ‘Because there were two crucial words near the bottom of the invite that you have obviously failed to take into account.’
‘And what might they have been?’
‘Free drink. I’ll see you tomorrow, baby.’
Ally closed the door and began walking towards the car park. Annette caught up with him in the Audi a few seconds later, the electric window sliding down as he turned to see her. ‘Remember,’ she called out. ‘Ghastly and traumatic.’
‘I’ll do my best.’