Macbeth

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘Will they go through Lennox and kill Tourtell?’

  ‘I use FMJ bullets, boss.’

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Then shoot the traitor.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Shh,’ Seyton whispered.

  ‘What?’ Sweat had broken out on the young officer’s brow.

  ‘Don’t talk and don’t think, Olafson. What you just heard was an order.’

  The driver had walked around the car and smiled as he opened the rear door. A smile which disappeared when he saw Tourtell’s expression. The boy walked to the rear door on the left-hand side.

  ‘Get in and duck,’ Lennox hissed. ‘Driver, get out of here. Now!’

  ‘Sir, what—’

  ‘Do as he says,’ Tourtell said. ‘It—’

  Lennox felt the shot to his back before he heard the thwack. His legs withered beneath him, he collapsed and automatically put his arms around Tourtell, who was dragged down as he fell.

  Lennox registered the tarmac coming up to meet them. He didn’t feel it as it hit them, but he smelled it all: dust, petrol, rubber, urine. He couldn’t move and couldn’t produce a sound, but he could hear. Hear the panting of Tourtell from underneath him on the tarmac. The driver’s shocked ‘Sir, sir?’

  And Tourtell’s ‘Run, Kasi, run!’

  They had almost made it. One more metre and they would have been covered by the car. Lennox tried to say something, the name of an animal, but still nothing came from his mouth. He tried in vain to move his hand. He was dead. Soon he would be floating up and looking down on his own body. One metre. He registered the sound of running feet quickly distancing themselves and the driver bending over them and trying to drag him off Tourtell. ‘I’ll get you in the car, sir!’ Another thwack and Lennox was blinded by something wet in his eyes. He blinked, so at least his eyelids could move. The driver lay beside them staring vacantly into the air. His forehead was gone.

  ‘Turtle,’ Lennox whispered.

  ‘What?’ Tourtell gasped from underneath him.

  ‘Crawl. I’m your shell.’

  ‘That’s got the driver,’ Olafson said, pushing another cartridge into the chamber.

  ‘Hurry. Tourtell’s crawling behind the car,’ Seyton said. ‘And the boy’s run off.’

  Olafson loaded. He rested the butt against his shoulder and shut one eye.

  ‘I’ve got the boy in my sights.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck about the boy!’ Seyton snarled. ‘Shoot Tourtell!’

  Seyton watched Olafson’s rifle barrel swing back and forth, saw him blink a bead of sweat from his eyelashes.

  ‘I can’t see him, boss.’

  ‘Too late!’ Seyton slapped his hand against the parapet. ‘They’re behind the car. We’ll have to go down and finish the job.’

  Lennox heard Tourtell groan as he extricated himself. Lennox rolled onto the wet tarmac. He was lying on his stomach, helpless, his legs sticking out past the rear of the car. Until Tourtell grabbed his arms and pulled him to safety.

  Rubber screamed on tarmac. A car was heading for them. Lennox looked under the car, but all he saw was the body of the driver on the other side. Tourtell had sat down with his back to the side of the car. Lennox tried to open his mouth to tell Tourtell to get in the car and escape, to save himself, but it was no use. It was the same old story, as though his whole life could be summed up in one sentence: he was unable to do what his brain and heart wanted.

  A car stopped and doors opened.

  Footsteps on the tarmac.

  Lennox tried to move his head but couldn’t. From the corner of his eye he saw the barrel of a gun parallel with a pair of trouser legs.

  They were goners. In some strange way it felt like a relief.

  The trouser legs came a step closer. A hand gripped his neck. He was going to be killed silently, strangulation. Lennox held his gaze on the shoes. They went out of fashion a while ago. Winkle-pickers.

  ‘This one’s dead,’ said a familiar voice from the other side of the car.

  ‘Tourtell’s unhurt,’ said the man holding him in a stranglehold. ‘Lennox isn’t moving, but he’s got a pulse. Where did they shoot from?’

  ‘The top of the multi-storey,’ Tourtell sobbed. ‘Lennox saved my life.’

  Saved?

  ‘Get over to this side, Malcolm!’

  The hand removed itself, and a face came into Lennox’s field of vision.

  Duff stared him in the eye.

  ‘Is he conscious?’ asked a woman behind him. Caithness.

  ‘Paralysed or in shock,’ Duff said. ‘His eyes are moving, but he can’t move or talk. We need to get him into the hospital.’

  ‘Car,’ a voice said. A young boy. ‘Coming out of the multi-storey car park.’

  ‘Looks like a SWAT car,’ Duff said, getting up and putting the shotgun to his shoulder.

  There was silence for a couple of seconds. The sound of the car engine faded away.

  ‘Let them go,’ Malcolm said.

  ‘Kasi.’ Tourtell’s voice.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve got to find Kasi.’

  Kasi ran. His heart was beating in his throat and his feet pummelling the wet tarmac, faster and faster. Until they were running as fast as the song that used to play in his head when he was afraid. ‘Help’. He had been getting in the car when he heard the thud and saw the shot hit the pale-faced policeman in the back. He had fallen over Dad and Dad had told him to run.

  He automatically took the road down towards the area where he had grown up, by the river. There was a burned-out house where they used to play, the rat house they called it.

  The burned-out house was white with patches of soot around the door and windows, like a decrepit over-made-up whore. Down by the river the small houses lay huddled together as if searching for shelter with each other. Apart from one, which was on its own, as though the others were shunning it. It was timber-framed and painted blue; and around it the grass had grown high. Kasi ran up the steps into the door-less hall to what once had been a kitchen but now was an empty, urine-stinking shell with names and dirty words scribbled on the walls. He continued up the narrow stairs to the bedrooms. A mouldy mattress lay on the floor of one. He’d had his first kiss on it among empty spirit bottles and the stiff carcasses of river rats scattered around the floor. One afternoon when he was ten or eleven he and two friends had sat on it and tasted their first cigarette – in between coughing fits – in the sunset, and watched rats come towards the house, padding across the cracked and litter-strewn mud of the dry riverbed. Perhaps they came here to die.

  Should he go back? No, Dad had said he should get away. And the other man, Lennox, was from the police, and there must be more of them there if they knew of plans to assassinate the mayor.

  He would hide until it was all over, then go home.

  Kasi opened the big wardrobe in the corner. It was empty, stripped of everything. He huddled inside and closed the door. Leaned his head back against the wood. Softly hummed the song in his mind. ‘Help!’ Thought of the film where the Beatles were running around helter-skelter and having fun in comic fast-forward motion, a world where nothing really horrible happened. And no one could find him here. Not unless they knew where he was. And anyway, he wasn’t the mayor, only a boy who hadn’t done anything bad in his life apart from smoke a few cigarettes on the quiet, share half a bottle of diluted whisky and kiss a couple of girls who had boyfriends.

  His heart gradually slowed.

  He listened. Nothing. But he would have to wait some time. He had got his breath back, enough to inhale through his nose now. He didn’t know how many years it was since clothes had hung here, but he could still smell them. The smell, the ghosts of lives unknown. God knows where they were now. Mum said
it had been an unhappy house, with alcohol, beatings and much worse. He should thank his lucky stars he had a father who loved him and had never laid a hand on him. And Kasi had thanked his lucky stars. No one had known his father was the mayor, and he didn’t tell anyone either, neither those who called him a brat, nor the other brats who never saw their fathers or even knew who they were. He felt sorry for them. He had told his father that one day he would help them. Them and all the others in difficulty after Estex closed. And Dad had patted him on the head and laughed, as other fathers would have done. He had listened attentively and said that if Kasi really wanted to do something, when the time came he would help him. He had promised. And who knows, one day Kasi might become mayor, greater wonders had come to pass, Dad had said and called him Tourtell Junior.

  ‘Help!’

  But the world wasn’t like that. The world hadn’t been made for good deeds and funny pop singers in films. You couldn’t help anyone. Not your father, not your mother, not other children. Only yourself.

  Olafson braked as the bus in front of them stopped. Young people, mostly women, streamed onto the pavement. Looking their best. Saturday night. That was what he would have done tonight: had a beer and danced with a girl. Drunk and danced away the sight of the driver. Beside him Seyton stretched out a hand and turned off the radio and Linda Thompson’s ‘I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight’.

  ‘Where the hell did they come from? Duff. Malcolm. Caithness. And the young guy I could have sworn was Banquo’s son.’

  ‘Back to HQ?’ Olafson asked. It still wasn’t too late for a decent Saturday night.

  ‘Not yet,’ Seyton said. ‘We’ve got to catch the boy.’

  ‘Tourtell’s son?’

  ‘I don’t want to go back to Macbeth empty-handed, and the boy can be used. Turn left here. Drive even more slowly.’

  Olafson swung the car down the narrow street and glanced at Seyton, who had opened the window and was inhaling the air, his nostrils opening and closing. Olafson was about to ask if Seyton could sniff out where the boy had run to, but refrained. If this man could heal a shoulder by touching it he was probably capable of smelling his way to where someone had gone. Was he afraid of his new commander? Maybe. He had definitely asked himself whether he preferred his predecessor. But he hadn’t known it could come to this. All he knew was that the surgeon at the hospital had pointed to an X-ray of his shoulder and explained that the bullet had destroyed the joint; he was an invalid and would have to get used to never working as a marksman for SWAT again. In a few moments the surgeon had deprived Olafson of all he had ever dreamed about doing. Then it had been easy to agree when Seyton said he could fix it if Olafson agreed to a deal. He hadn’t even meant it because who could fix something like that in a day? And what did he have to lose? He had already sworn allegiance to the brotherhood that was SWAT, so what Seyton wanted from him was in many ways something he already had.

  No, there was no point having regrets now. And just look what had happened to his best pal, Angus. He had betrayed SWAT, the idiot. Betrayed the most precious thing they had, all they had. Baptised in fire and united in blood wasn’t an empty phrase, it was how they had to be, there were no alternatives. He wanted this. To know there was some meaning in what he did, that he meant something to people. To his comrades. Even when he couldn’t see any meaning in what they did. That was a job for other people. Not for Angus, the bloody fool. He must have lost the plot. Angus had tried to persuade him to join him, but he had told him to go to hell, he didn’t want anything to do with someone who betrayed SWAT. And Angus had stared at him and asked him how his shoulder had healed so quickly – a gunshot wound like that didn’t heal in a couple of days. But Olafson hadn’t answered. He just showed him the door.

  The street ended. They had reached the riverbed.

  ‘We’re getting warmer,’ Seyton said. ‘Come on.’

  They got out and walked by the hovels between the road and the riverbed. Passing house after house as Seyton sniffed the air. At a red building he stopped.

  ‘Here?’ Olafson asked.

  Seyton sniffed in the direction of the house. Then he said aloud, ‘Whore!’ And walked on. They passed a burned-out house, a garage with a wrought-iron gate and came to a blue timber house with a cat on the steps. Seyton stopped again.

  ‘Here,’ he said.

  ‘Here?’

  Kasi looked at his watch. He had been given it by his father and the hands shimmered green in the darkness, the way he imagined wolves’ eyes did in the night, from the light of a fire. More than twenty minutes had passed. He was fairly sure no one had followed him when he ran from the car park; he had looked back several times and hadn’t seen anyone. The coast ought to be clear now. He knew the area like the back of his hand, that was why he had run straight here. He could go down to Penny Bridge and take the 22 bus from there, go west. Back home. Dad would be there. He had to be there. Kasi stiffened. Had he heard something? The staircase creaking? That was the only wood that had survived the fire, he didn’t know why, just that it creaked when the wind blew or there was a change in the weather. Or if someone came. He held his breath. Listened. No. Probably the weather changing.

  Kasi counted slowly to sixty.

  Then he pushed the door open with his foot.

  Stared.

  ‘You’re frightened,’ said the man standing outside and looking at him. ‘Smart thinking, hiding in a wardrobe. It keeps in the smell. Almost.’ He stretched his arms out to the side with his palms up. Inhaled. ‘But the air here is wonderful and full of your fear, boy.’

  Kasi blinked. The man was lean, and his eyes were like the hands on Kasi’s watch. Wolf eyes. And he had to be old. Not that he looked that old, but Kasi just knew that this man was very, very old.

  ‘Hel—’ Kasi started to shout, before the man’s hand shot out and grabbed him by the throat. Kasi couldn’t breathe, and now he knew why he had come here. He was like the river rats. He had come here to die.

  39

  DUFF LOOKED AT HIS WATCH, yawned and slumped even deeper in the chair. His long legs stretched almost across the hospital corridor, to Caithness and Fleance. Duff’s eyes met Caithness’s.

  ‘You were right,’ she said.

  ‘We were both right,’ he said.

  It was less than an hour since he had jumped into the car in 15th Street, cursing, and said Macbeth had got away. And that something was afoot. Macbeth had said the mayor wouldn’t live that long.

  ‘An assassination,’ Malcolm had said. ‘A takeover. He’s gone completely insane.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Kenneth Laws. If the mayor dies or declares a state of emergency, the chief commissioner takes over until further notice and in principle has unlimited power. Tourtell has to be warned.’

  ‘St Jordi’s,’ Caithness had said. ‘Seyton’s there.’

  ‘Drive,’ Duff had shouted, and Fleance stamped on the accelerator.

  It had taken them less than twenty minutes, and they heard the first shot from the car park when they stopped in front of the hospital’s main entrance and were on their way up the steps.

  Duff closed his eyes. He hadn’t slept, and this should have been over now. Macbeth should have been behind lock and key in Fife.

  ‘Here they are,’ Caithness said.

  Duff opened his eyes again. Tourtell and Malcolm were walking down the corridor towards them.

  ‘The doctor says Lennox will live,’ Malcolm said and sat down. ‘He’s fully conscious and can talk and move his hands. But he’s paralysed from the middle of the back down, and it’ll probably be permanent. The bullet hit his spine.’

  ‘It was stopped by his spine,’ Tourtell said. ‘Otherwise it would have gone through him and hit me.’

  ‘His family are in the waiting room,’ Malcolm said. ‘They’ve been in to see him, and the doctor said that’s enough fo
r today. He’s had morphine and needs to rest.’

  ‘Heard anything from Kasi?’ Caithness asked.

  ‘He hasn’t come home yet,’ Tourtell said. ‘But he knows his way around. He may have gone to friends or hidden somewhere. I’m not worried.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  Tourtell pulled a grimace. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Duff asked.

  ‘We wait a few minutes until the family has gone,’ Malcolm said. ‘Tourtell persuaded the doctor to give us two minutes with Lennox. We need a confession as soon as possible from Lennox so that we can get Capitol to issue a federal arrest warrant for Macbeth.’

  ‘Aren’t our witness statements good enough?’ Duff asked.

  Malcolm shook his head. ‘None of us has received death threats directly from Macbeth or personally heard him give an order to murder.’

  ‘What about blackmail?’ Caithness asked. ‘Tourtell, you just said that when you were playing blackjack in the private room at the Inverness Macbeth and Lady tried to force you to withdraw from the elections, dangling the bait of shares in the Obelisk and threatening to go public with a story of indecent behaviour with an underage boy.’

  ‘In my line of work we call that kind of blackmail politics,’ Tourtell said. ‘Hardly punishable.’

  ‘So Macbeth’s right?’ Duff said. ‘We’ve got nothing on him.’

  ‘We hope Lennox has something,’ Malcolm said. ‘Who should talk to him?’

  ‘Me,’ Duff said.

  Malcolm regarded him pensively. ‘Fine, but it’s just a question of time before someone here recognises you or me, and raises the alarm.’

  ‘I know how Lennox looks when he lies,’ Duff said. ‘And he knows I know.’

  ‘But can you persuade him to reveal his cooperation and thus . . . ?’

  ‘Yes,’ Duff said.

  ‘Don’t persuade him the way you did the Norse Rider patient, Duff.’

  ‘That was a different person who did that, sir. I’m not him any more.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Malcolm held Duff’s gaze for a few seconds. ‘Good. Tourtell, could you please take Duff?’