Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (37 page)

'How many, did you say?' Emily asked.

'Three who know what they're doing and maybe a dozen would-be warriors.'

'And would coming in with everything entail more than swords?' enquired Rory darkly. 'I mean, if they're not taking any chances. . . '

'That's the doomsday scenario, yes,' Vale conceded.

'Wouldn't they have used guns already if they had them?' Emily asked, sounding desperate rather than optimistic.

'The prisoner claimed it was part of the trial,' Parlabane informed her. 'It doesn't mean they don't have any. But on the other hand. . . '

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Vale looked at him with genuine puzzlement. He seemed surprised not to know where Parlabane was going with this, but he shouldn't have been. Vale might be the one who understood tactics, combat and subterfuge, but when it came to comprehending outright deviousness, Parlabane was the ranking officer.

'The trial is a secondary consideration,' Parlabane explained. 'Number one is the hit, and getting away with it. They might be testing recruits and giving some psycho tourists the trip of a lifetime, but what's the gain to balance the added risk factor of blades over guns? It makes the hit harder than it needs to be, as we've amply demonstrated. Why the hell wouldn't they properly arm these guys? They've got the resources, so there has to be another reason, and I reckon it's that they've got an interest in making this look like something primitive, something utterly fucking medieval.'

'Why?' asked Emily, but Parlabane could see Vale was catching up.

'To disguise the motive,' Vale said, an answer that seemed to strike a disturbing chord with Rory.

'Confusion in the aftermath,' he said in apparent disbelief.

'Bullets make it a hit,' Parlabane went on. 'It's clinical, precise, calculated, so the intention is clear. Cops start asking the who and why, looking for links, connections; normal,
rational
fucking reasons for why someone wanted all these people dead. This way, instead there's a macabre mystery in a place with a blood-drenched past, carved-up corpses in a spooky house, murdered using swords pulled from the walls and display cabinets. No witnesses, no suspects, and no motive because it's clearly an act of insanity. Jesus, think about this: post-mortems would reveal that several of the guests had undigested human flesh in their stomachs. Mathieson's skeletal remains will no doubt turn up, proving that we ate the fucking chef. The attention of the whole country gets focused on the murders, but everyone is asking why the gothic bloodbath in the gothic mansion.'

'Instead of why us,' Emily observed.

'Precisely.'

'Yeah, well, even if you're right and they don't use guns,' Rory said, looking more rattled than the rest, 'there's still more of them than there are of us, and I doubt the swords they took from here are the only blades they've got.'

'True,' conceded Vale, 'but swords aren't the only weapons we've got.'

'Eh?' Rory asked. 'Am I forgetting something?'

'Yes. Who we're up against. They might have fancied themselves as assassins, some of them might even believe they've got what it takes to pass this so-called test, but there's no way these wannabes coughed up thirty grand for a fair fight. They paid for the chance to live out their sickest fantasies with minimal risk and no comeback. Well, let's find out what kind of appetite for 226

horror they've really got. If violence is indeed the only language they understand, I'd like to show them who's got the wider vocabulary.'

'Fuck yeah,' agreed Ger, lifting his bloodstained kitchen knife from the floor and getting to his feet. 'Vale's right: their trialists have been piss. I havenae seen a less promising line-up since Barnes and Dalglish. Enough aboot team building. These bastards killed Charlotte. I'm up for some team-demolition.'

Vale doled out the duties to anxious but willing volunteers, some sent on specific tasks, others on errands of information, replacing and reassigning those previously posted to the barricades. Parlabane remained without a stated purpose as this ferment got underway, an oversight he was not inclined to believe meant Vale needed him for tactical consultation or as a personal bodyguard. Vale glanced at him and then at the half-landing, by way of requesting a quiet word, and Parlabane suspected he knew what it was about. He responded with a nod and swiftly made his way up.

'You did well at rummelling up the troops, Tim,' he said, the pair of them sitting down together on a stair like it was a bench in a quiet pub. 'But what you didn't say was probably better for their morale than what you did.'

'Yes, well, I wasn't the only one holding back. We both know these guys will have a last resort.'

'No shit. And they're bound to engage it pretty soon seeing as their trialists didn't get on the scoresheet.'

'Maybe not right away, though.'

'Why the hell not? There's going to come a point when the job needs done and they need to get out.'

'Yes, but if you ask me, they budgeted for losing at least one of their own. They bet on it, arguably. We've even saved them the bother of lopping the head off.'

'Bet on it?'

'Fixed odds on the final score. They need an extra headless body for that aftermath you described.'

Parlabane got it. 'For Campbell.'

'Bit of a giveaway if everybody's dead and he's missing. Francis Campbell won't be his real name, but the non-resident staff could give a detailed description.'

'Plus a hunt for him points the investigation straight at UML,' Parlabane agreed.

'And that's why they decapitated the girl too. Leave some corpses headless and some not, and the cops are going to wonder why, and check that bit closer to confirm identities. But if all the corpses are headless and the heads never found. . . '

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'Lovely thought.'

'And here's another, regarding that last resort. If they're planning to take our heads and the fight gets too tough, they could just put a bullet in each of our skulls and still leave your mystery horror show.'

'The prisoner mentioned darts.'

'Could be tranquillisers. Same principle, same result: they put their target down from a safe distance, then it's heads you lose.'

'Safer from their point of view, too,' Parlabane observed. 'They can make as much mess as they want, but one telltale stray bullet, one overlooked shellcase even, and the charade is blown. Plus it's less risky if a weapon should fall into enemy hands.'

'Indeed. And the bad news is, darts or bullets, that's not the only part worrying me. Look at the kit bought just for UML's sham: clothes, paintguns, radios, badges. What's the chances their budget didn't stretch to a few pairs of night vision goggles?'

'Pretty slim,' Parlabane answered. Vale didn't have to explain: when the pros in charge decided it was time to mop up, they'd cut the power, leaving everyone else blind.

'If the lights go out, we're finished,' Vale confirmed.

'Do you reckon there's a backup?'

'I'm betting my life on it.'

'Yours, mine and everybody else's. Where's Sir L?'

'On his way. I sent Rory to relieve him.'

Sir Lachlan was indeed limping down the corridor when they descended the stairs. He had good news, bad news and, for Parlabane in particular, extremely bad news.

'There is a generator, yes. The bad news is it's down in the basement level. It's oil-fired, a bit of a relic.'

'But serviceable?' Vale asked.

'I couldn't honestly say. We've only had one power outage since I bought the place, and the electricity was restored before we managed to put it to the test.'

'That doesn't sound promising,' Parlabane observed.

'No, no, I mean we didn't get as far as turning it on. There was no fuel for it; I mean, none handy.'

'None handy? And is there any handy now?'

'It was one of those things that should have been done at the time, but, well, once the crisis was averted, you know, there's always something more pressing. . . '

'We'll take that as a no,' Vale said.

228

'There is fuel, though. There's cans of petrol in the outbuilding: it's where we keep the gardening machinery.'

'That outbuilding has to be seventy yards from the nearest outside door,'

Parlabane said grimly.

'More like fifty,' Vale estimated. 'But might as well be a mile.'

'I don't suppose there's a secret tunnel known only to the keepers of the ancestral family home?' Parlabane asked dryly.

'Not that the ancestral family thought to impart to me, no. Plenty of chambers and passages down below, but no way out except the way you go in. I suppose there is always. . . no.'

'What? Tell us anyway.'

'Well, the telephone cable passes over the outbuilding, but you'd need to be Spiderman to get up and down from there.'

Vale smiled. 'I know just the chap.'

229

Improvisation

Alison looked at her watch. It had been an hour and a half since the attacks at the stairwells, and the longer they went without a reprise, the more the tension grew. Nobody was about to start kidding themselves that the bloodied enemy might have run off with their tails between their legs; the growing delay just meant that they were regathering their forces and choosing their moment to strike. She remembered the unforgiving time-scale as calculated by the earliest possible discovery of the downed bridge. It was two fifteen, and these bastards had all night.

Waiting was the worst of it. Okay, obviously it wasn't worse than when they had been actually under attack, but that at least passed in a blur of reflex, panic and shock, over before she really knew what the hell was going on. When she looked back upon events, they played out in slow motion, certain moments stretched and suspended, whereas at the time, they had unfolded so quickly that she'd felt no more able to react and respond than she was able to dodge bullets. In retrospect, she could see Emily crouch, scrambling an eternity on the floor as the man with the machete loomed behind her, then her running, as though through knee-deep tar, before Ger told her to get down and launched his knife. Live, in real time, it had just been a staccato of snapshots, glimpsed in about two seconds: Emily, bad guy, Emily running,
zing
, bad guy dead. Not enough time even to take a deep breath, never mind a decision, but time enough for Ger to heft his knife, pick his spot on a moving target and bring the guy down.

I was a bit mental when I was younger.

'What
were
you inside for, Ger?' she asked him, when at last he looked her in the eye after the mutual shock of the kill.

'It wasnae tax evasion,' was all he would say.

He'd reacted very swiftly in Campbell's bedroom too. Alison only caught a glimpse of Charlotte's feet sticking over the edge of the bath before he'd grabbed her shoulders and wheeled her around.

Poor Charlotte. She was only eighteen, younger than Alison. She'd been planning to travel too: she was saving up to go to Australia. Her big sister had spent a year there and knew a few places in Cairns she could find work. They'd 231

talked about it some nights, when the two of them weren't both so knackered that they coveted even minutes of sleep-time. Charlotte had been trying to sell Alison the idea, intoxicated by her own enthusiasm to the point where she already had the two of them sharing a beach-front apartment. Cairns hadn't sounded like Alison's thing, but it had been fun to ride shotgun on someone else's dream. Now it would never be more than that. Ger's was a solid shoulder to cry on, but while she leant on it for comfort, the tears didn't gush the way she felt they ought. True cathartic grief took time and abandonment. Alison could afford neither.

She was grateful to have a task, grateful further that it hadn't involved lugging corpses up the stairs to the windows at the front of the gallery. She was assigned to the kitchen for her contribution, though it didn't completely spare her an eyeful of gore. Vale had warned her to wait outside for a few minutes while he and Ger took the body of the man Ger had killed and laid it on the island worktop in the centre of the kitchen. They emerged shortly afterwards, Ger with the body over his shoulder and Vale carrying something in a canvas bag. She'd expected the stainless-steel worktop to be more bloodstained when she went back in, but there were only a few smears, the corpse having bled all he was going to on the corridor floor. The smell, however, was revolting, causing her to gag and run to the sinks. She expected to throw up but didn't, which was when she remembered that she hadn't eaten anything since lunchtime.

Having something to physically get on with was a welcome distraction, but it wasn't as though she could exactly lose herself in her work. The possibility that they could come crashing through the windows any second was a hard one to lose sight of, and every time the wind gave the back door an otherwise familiar rattle, she was halfway to the corridor.

It could come any time, that was the truly horrible part. There were moments when she could almost - almost - concentrate so hard on the task in hand that she almost - almost - forgot what the task in hand was in aid of, and then the bigger picture would return to central focus. This was a temporary lull; the storm could resume at literally any second, and when it did, its rage would be terrible. She busied herself on the far side of the room from the windows as a precaution, gathering what she needed and performing the requested preparation with trembling haste, the sooner to get herself back out to the central reception area. Oven cleaner, hob-cleaner, caustic soda, anything that bore the legend 'Avoid contact with eyes and skin' was bundled into a cardboard box, then she took every chilli in the cupboard and whizzed them in a blender with wasabi powder and vinegar.

The crashes of breaking windows shuddered through her, reverberating unmistakably into the kitchen despite the sound of the blender. Alison ran from 232

the room, forgetting even to lock the kitchen door behind her, the very act she'd been rehearsing in her head every few seconds as she prepared herself for sudden flight. Not only had panic erased her awareness of vital procedure, but it caused her to run directly towards the source of danger, simply because that's where other people were.