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I was never caught. Only betrayed.
Walter Norval
One hears it said, ‘I call that inhuman’, the reference being
to the fact that there is no dining car on the train. ‘It’s degrading for
the poor man’, one hears with reference to an employee
who is being given the unpleasant jobs. ‘It’s absolute torture to me’,
and what the speaker means is having to sit
through a boring lecture or sermon. There is a lesson to
be learned here on the potential danger of hyperbole.
Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, from his minority judgement
in the European Court of Human Rights ruling on the
case ‘Ireland v. United Kingdom’, 18 January 1978
MR AMBROSE’S PREDICAMENT
Murricane was bored, but tense.
In this kind of situation, boredom was bad, tension good. One blunted your senses, blinded you to the fine detail of your surroundings; the other pumped the blood with adrenalin, prepared you for fight, flight or a final goodnight. Tension. He needed more tension. He tried to think of worrying things, tried to upset himself. Strutting through his mind came salmon farmers in blue boiler suits, clanging along the gangways of industrial sea cages, cackling with laughter as they shot innocent seals. Upsetting, yes. Angering, even. But wholly inappropriate. He was in the Gaza Strip, for fuck’s sake. Being kidnapped.
Well, sort of. His hands were behind him, cuffed with that cheap but effective piece of terrorist hardware, a plastic cable tie. He had flexed his wrists fiercely as his captors pinioned his arms, leaving him a tiny bit of leeway when he relaxed them. On the whole, though, he wasn’t relaxed. He was bored because he had been through this sort of thing before, he knew exactly the level of fanaticism and stupidity he was facing and he was truly fed up with it. He was sick of Muslim extremists, ticked off with Jewish fundamentalists and had grown seriously fucked off with the Christian variety decades previously, during a Scripture Union mission at his school that had ended badly. For the Christians. And for him.
But he was tense, too. Just not tense enough. Salmon farmers. They were almost as bad as al-Ghurabaa or those muscle-bound pricks at Premillennial Security, who only recruited Southern Baptists. Big bastard Baptists with heavy steroid abuse problems. Then there were the atheist fundamentalist ranters, like that dickhead Dawkins: I don’t believe and you can’t either, you moron. Whatever happened to live and let live?
This wouldn’t do. He was becoming distracted: aquaculture and theology did that to him. And several other things, too, had that personal potency. Too many things. He blinked behind his blindfold. Lack of concentration, his teachers had agreed. Prone to wandering. Focus, boy, focus. He tried to do just that.
They had him walking slowly along what sounded like a bare concrete corridor, a cheap Syrian copy of an AK47 jabbing painfully into his back. He knew it was that particular variety of ersatz weapon, not because of the barrel’s feel, but because that was what these guys, this particular band of thieves and murderers, were known to use. He had seen the research. He had handled that kind of gun, often, in many forms and national variations. Fired, field-stripped, re-assembled. He literally could do it blindfold, if necessary. But it probably wouldn’t come to that.
There was the noise of a door being unlocked. A chain, padlock, two deadbolts. Sounded like something really solid, possibly reinforced with steel. Then he was pushed into the room, the door slamming behind him. He heard it being locked again. But he could also hear breathing. Laboured, nasal breathing. There was a terrible smell – shit, sweat and dirt. Pop festival toilets at the end of a hot July weekend. T in the Park in the old days. Only with a hint of cinnamon and garlic. Rock the fucking Casbah.
‘Who . . . who’s that?’ The voice was hoarse, gritty with lack of use. English, upmarket. Just short of public school. Grammar with knobs just about still on.
‘I’m sure God appreciates your gratitude, Mr Ambrose. You can leave Him a tip later. Or Her. Once you’ve decided whose God to reward properly. If you’re in a position to do any thanking, that is.’ Bored. He was already bored with Ambrose. ‘Can you see?’
‘No, no I can’t . . . yes, blindfolded. Don’t know, maybe I’ve forgotten how to see. Haven’t had this off for . . . how long? I don’t know. Who are you? It’s so good to hear an English voice . . .’
‘You can call me Mark. And this is not an English voice.’
‘Christ, I’m so sorry.’ Desperate to please, apologetic. Ambrose probably sneered at Jocks, Jockos, Seeyoujimmies, when he was in his cups, Boris Johnsoning his way along Kensington High Street. ‘Scots . . . Scotch. I’m so sorry.’
‘No, not Scottish. But close.’ Murricane stopped himself saying more, clamped down on the distraction. Concentrate, focus. He crouched down, cautiously. If he knelt, his bound hands could just reach the millimetre edge of the razor blade carefully inserted into the crêpe rubber heel of his left desert boot. Cable ties are very strong, but they can be cut remarkably quickly. Within a few minutes, his hands were free.
Murricane massaged his wrists, then removed his blindfold, blinking slowly in the fading light of the evening. There was a small, barred window high up on one unrendered, breeze-block wall. The dipping sun laid a shadow grid on the floor, which was rough concrete. A plastic bucket sat in one corner. It was the source of that rock festival latrine aroma. The spicy perfumes coming from outside mocked the cell’s squalor.
‘Close your eyes, Mr Ambrose. I’m going to take off your blindfold. Don’t screw them shut. Just keep them lightly closed, then open them when I tell you.’
Ambrose’s voice was firming up, some desperate grasp for lost authority creeping in.
‘Who are you? Mark, you say? They’ll kill me. They said they would. If the money didn’t come. We should sit tight, wait for the money to come. My company will pay. They always do. They said they always did. They said . . .’
‘Open your eyes, Mr Ambrose.’ He was getting really pissed off now. Dangerous. Short attention span. It had always been his curse when other people were around. Alone, he could sit for hours, prone, sometimes for days. Had done, had entered a trance-like state of complete contentment. Watching. It was dealing with people that threw him. Life in the normal sense of the word. He remembered that line from Repo Man, Harry Dean Stanton to Emilio Estevez, out of their brains on speed: ‘Ordinary fucking people – I hate ’em!’ And he did. He really did. Salmon farmers, especially. Though who could say if they were really ordinary? Why, remember . . .
Concentrate.
Ambrose was dressed in a thin orange boiler suit, a cheap parody of the ones used by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay. His feet were bare, his face, that of someone in his late 50s, was filthy and fatigued. Unshaven for all of the six weeks he’d been in here, or elsewhere in the Strip. He had probably been well-groomed, once, the thinning hair cut to his best advantage. Murricane knew he was 47 years old. His hands were cable-tied, too, but loosely. There was a bloodstained bandage around all that remained of his left little finger.
‘Money,’ muttered Ambrose feverishly, his eyes, inflamed and watering badly, fixed on the face of his unexpected companion. ‘We should wait for the money.’
‘I am the money,’ said Murricane.
The job was dangerous, complicated and, in the more inflamed corners of the Middle East, fairly commonplace: kidnapped company executive, extreme Islamic group nobody had ever heard of, ransom demanded, often with a cornucopia of more or less irrelevant political stuff attached (prisoners to be released, American president to stand trial for war crimes/be castrated, that sort of thing). In almost every case, the people responsible were simply bandits, extortionists taking advantage of local conditions. Capitalising. It was, Murricane always thought, capitalism in a very pure sense: you see a market, you move in, acquire your product, market it. He himself was simply responding to demand. He’d often thought that he’d be better doing the kidnapping himself, rather than being faced with retrieving the kidnappee. It would be a kind of wholesaling. He could offer discounts.
Ambrose was in telecommunications. Cellular telephones were essential to every variety of official and illegal activity in the Gaza Strip, and Ambrose worked for a service provider called Fontokk. He and two colleagues had been finalising an agreement with the Hamas administration in Gaza on installing an extended and much more reliable mobile phone system, an officially sanctioned role which should have given them both adequate protection and immunity from any kidnap attempts. But the bodyguards provided by Hamas had been bought or threatened, or there had been collusion at a higher level. Anyway, backs had been turned and all three Fontokk executives had been lifted at gunpoint from a supposedly safe hotel lobby. No shots fired. A statement from the Populist Front for Islamic Direct Action took 24 hours to reach a local Reuters stringer by email, demanding the release of 20 Palestinians held in Israel. Outraged Hamas officials had applied pressure and two of the men were almost instantly, and suspiciously, released unharmed. For Ambrose, the price went down to ten prisoners.
‘They’ll go off the record, ask for ten mill, drop it to five, making threatening noises the whole time,’ Murricane had told Fontokk’s Middle East VP, a dumpy Virginian in his 40s with buzz-cut hair and knife-edge creases in his short-sleeved, cotton shirt. ‘They may cut something off just to show they mean business. Hopefully, nothing essential. An ear lobe, or a finger, maybe.’ They were in Fontokk’s regional office, in Dubai. The air conditioning would have solidified nitrogen.
‘Fuck,’ said the Virginian, whose name was, allegedly, Smith. His over-muscled jaws worked all the time on what smelled like Juicy Fruit gum, even, Murricane imagined, when eating meals or drinking coffee. ‘Gentleman Bobby fucking Ambrose knew what he was getting into when he went out to the Palestine boondocks. Marginal exposure area supplement, insurance, bonus on safe return. But it’ll play fucking hell with hiring personnel if we don’t get him back. I mean, I’m comfortable with them chopping chunks outta his unnecessaries, man, but I draw the line at dick. How would I explain that to his wife? Think five’s a bit hefty for us in current cash flow circs, though. Hey, we got the others back gratis. Hamas were, like, totally embarrassed. I oughta be grateful, listen, I am grateful, they signed the deal, sorta shamed into it.’ The rhythm of those masticating jaws never faltered. How many strips of Juicy Fruit were in there? Four? Five? Did he spit or swallow? Someone had once told him that if you swallowed chewing gum, it could block your appendix. Even kill you. Wrigley syndrome, it was called. Supposedly.
Marginal exposure area supplement. Hell’s teeth. How much? Probably more than he was getting from Fontokk. Or rather, how much M&P Consulting were getting. Not that it made much difference. The P in M&P, Dennis Peterson, was dead, had been dead for over a year. Murricane supposed he could change the name to Murricane Consulting, but somehow it felt wrong. Everyone he worked for knew it was just him, a one-room office in Nicosia and the lovely but intensely sullen Alexandria, secretary, sometime lover and fluent curser of tardy payers. In five languages.
‘Tell you what,’ he said, looking around the luxurious office on the 21st floor of the unquestionably penis-shaped Akhbar Building. He could have sworn there was frost settling on the desktop . . . a cold front over by the drinks cabinet, threatening snow. ‘Make it a bottom line of two mill in dollars and we’ll work it out with them. I think they’ll settle for that. Though it could still get a bit messy.’ Two mill. These jokers could afford that for an extended lunch.
‘Messy?’ Smith laughed, an odd glutinous squelching noise coming briefly from his mouth, the smell of Juicy Fruit strong in the air. ‘Hey, for two mill, I can live with messy. Deal done. Let’s call it overheads.’ He leaned forward, offering one stubby, scarred hand.
Two days later, a fingertip arrived in Dubai by UPS, via its Gaza affiliate. Courier services have to function, one way or another. Everywhere.
That left Murricane some leeway. They probably had a few more fingers, toes, ears in mind before killing the poor bastard. And assuming Ambrose had the full assortment of physical attributes, there was time to make arrangements. He couldn’t do this kind of thing alone and, in this particular situation, that meant hiring a couple of old, occasionally trusted, friends.
Their names were Moshe and David. He liked them, or thought he did. Didn’t always trust them, but sometimes affection was better. And they had clout, they had form, official form that extended to the wearing of genuine uniforms when necessary. He’d paid them. Would pay them again. But one thing was for sure. He wasn’t paying the bastarding Populist Front for Islamic Direct Action. It was a point of principle. And it was business. He was sure clients like Fontokk knew what really happened to the so-called ransoms. They weren’t stupid. Maybe they even approved. They believed in private enterprise, which was what all of this was: the ‘terrorists’, himself, Moshe and David, Fontokk and their ilk. All were cash-fuelled.
‘You’re the money?’ Ambrose was staring at him, his eyes lidded with sweat and dirt. A lot of the foul smell in the room was coming directly from him, Murricane noticed. ‘What, have you got a traveller’s cheque tattooed on your bum? Diamonds up your arsehole? What the fuck do you mean, you’re the money? That some Scotch thing? What’s that fucking accent about, anyway?’ He was talking smart, now, to hear himself, thought Murricane. After all that enforced silence.
‘Never heard that expression? It was big in Hollywood a few years ago.’ Murricane reached for the softpack of Marlboro Lite he’d carried in his breast pocket until five years ago and hadn’t ever got used to not having. ‘It’s money, babe. You’re money. Means that something’s solid, sorted out. And it’s not a Scottish accent. Scotch is a drink, by the way. A term only ever applied to whisky. The word is Scottish. And I’m not, precisely, that. Shetland. Shetlandic. Halfway to Norway. It’s an island group. Viking heritage. I mean, look at me.’ It was a joke. He was dark and wiry. Pictish genes, if anything. He inhaled an imaginary cloud of carcinogens. ‘So, anyway, what I’m saying is, it’s cool. Kosher, in a manner of speaking. And to be completely literal, I am not just money, but THE money. Or I was until I handed your Populist Front of Fucksville friends a briefcase fifteen minutes ago.’
‘Jesus.’ Ambrose let out a long sigh of relief. ‘They did pay up. But how come . . . how much, anyway?’
‘Three mill. Dollars. If we’d held out for one and a half, we could probably have got you out OK, maybe minus another finger and/or ear. But your pal Smith crumbled.’ Untrue, but Murricane thought he ought to try and ease Ambrose into the realities of his situation. He warmed to the fiction. ‘They seemed set on five at first. Not as hard as he likes to think, old Smithy, or whatever his name is. He seemed perfectly willing to let them cut your dick off at first. First two joints of your pinky was enough, though. I thought he was going to faint.’ As if.
‘Yeah well.’ Tears welled in Ambrose’s eyes. ‘Pair of wire cutters. Pricks. Disinfected it with iodine, though. That’s when I . . . I thought that was hopeful.’ His voice cracked. He began to sob. Murricane took off the boot with the hidden razor blade and began sawing with the heel at the plastic holding the man’s hands. Terrorism without cable ties: unthinkable.
‘Thing is, Mr Ambrose, there is one little . . . well, problem with the money. Or some of it. It depends on just how observant and aware the members of this so-called Populist Front really are.’ Ambrose’s hands came free. Murricane did not put the desert boot back on his foot. He held it in his right hand, loosely.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, in actual fact it’s not real money. Not all of it.’ There was a silence. Ambrose seemed to have forgotten how to sob. Or breathe. ‘When I say your Mr Smith crumbled, he was only prepared to crumble so far. To two mill, to be precise. Time being of the essence, I took an executive decision to pad out the two mill with some . . . padding. Put it this way, it’s printed in colour. Well, photocopied. On both sides. And there’s two million in real 100-dollar notes, right enough. So there’s bulk. It’s initially impressive. But they could, they just might, smell a rat.’
‘But . . . then they’ll come back here.’
Murricane smiled for the first time. It was a very powerful, brilliant smile, displaying the dental work he’d had done in Poland, part of a favour he’d been owed. By a man who had returned to dentistry, eventually, after a colourful career in inflicting more extreme forms of pain than the merely oral. But Murricane’s grin was not reassuring. It was full of amusement and it was full of charm. And it was, once you got to know him, a very worrying sign indeed.
‘I certainly hope they do come back here. I’m rather depending on it. Otherwise, we’re going to have a lot of trouble actually getting out of that door.’ There was the sound of shouting and running feet. At first faint, then coming closer. ‘Looks like they do have someone perceptive on their staff when it comes to colour photocopying. I knew we should have used thicker paper.’ Without changing his tone, he spoke, absurdly, into the boot he still held in his hand. ‘About 30 seconds, Moshe.’ Wonderful thing, footwear, he thought. Adaptable. He made sure his smelt bad, too, which always discomfited prospective searchers. He moved to the hinge edge of the door. There was a faint rattling from the other side. The shouting, high-pitched, in a peculiarly guttural form of Arabic, grew louder. ‘Move over beside me, but leave me some room.’ Ambrose threw himself into a squatting position near Murricane’s feet. Carefully, he put his desert boot back on. No socks. Murricane wondered what Ambrose would have said if he’d known the truth: that there had only been a quarter of a million in real notes. And that only the first layer of padding had been photocopied at all. The rest was newspaper. And the Jerusalem Post, at that. It had been a question of provoking a reaction. Time. Timing.
The door flew open. Murricane caught it as two thin, white-clad arms, holding an AK47 in a very agitated way, came through the gap. Then he threw his entire weight against the door, closing it on the disembodied arms. There was a cracking noise, quickly drowned by a desperate scream of agony. The gun fell to the floor. It did not go off.
‘Safety catch,’ muttered Murricane to himself. ‘Dickhead.’ He dropped to the floor, rolled and picked up the Kalashnikov in a single movement, remaining tightly crouched in the gap between door and wall. Then several varieties of hell began breaking loose.
First, the door was blown back open by a burst of firing from whoever still had a pair of functioning arms. Screaming continued from someone who didn’t. Murricane glimpsed three men, all dressed similarly in suit trousers and white shirts, long sleeves carefully buttoned at the wrist. One had a checked shemagh wrapped around his head. He was the one lying on the floor writhing and trying to prevent his smashed arms from coming in contact with the ground. Injured seagull: the thought flickered through Murricane’s mind. A scorie, he would have said. Focus. He flicked off the safety catch on the man’s weapon, firing two short raking bursts up into the chests of his companions. At such close range, the result was, Murricane noted with a kind of interested indifference, extreme. Soft-nosed bullets, he thought, his mind seeming to turn the facts over slowly, almost lazily, as flesh and bone erupted around him. Illegal. International treaty. But when it comes to guns and bullets how can you say . . . and at that point the world exploded. The heady aroma of cordite filled the air and he felt that adrenalin zing of erupting blood pressure thrust through his skin. Fight or flight. Do or die. Better do, on the whole.
Claymores, he guessed. Good old Moshe. He was the supplies man. Moshe obtained the fuzzbox and David knew how to use it. What would Greater Israel do without them?
A thick fog of dust filled the room and corridor. It tasted of dried mud and death. Beyond the ringing in his ears, Murricane could hear coughing and a keening, moaning noise which had to be Ambrose. The use of the word ‘fuuuuuuuuck’ was a giveaway. Gentleman Bobby Ambrose. Some minor public school, or geographically privileged grammar. Fuuuuuck.
‘Come on,’ he shouted, or tried to. Nothing came out at first but a dry splutter. ‘Come on, Mr Ambrose. Time to go.’
AK47 in one hand, Ambrose’s arm in the other, he clambered over the bloodied mess in the corridor, pulling the groaning Englishman behind him. The man with the shattered arms was moaning weakly. They were a few feet past him, when Ambrose clutched at his shoulder.
‘What about him? Are you just going to leave him?’
‘Want to take him home as a souvenir?’
‘No.’ Ambrose’s face was a mask of dirt, snot and tears. ‘I want you to kill him. Bastard. Fucking bastard.’ So much for a civilised education.
Murricane dragged Ambrose away.
‘I don’t think the people responsible for that rather large explosion would be too pleased, Mr Ambrose. They’ll be hoping for someone they can politely ask a few questions about who the Populist Front for the Return of Fucking Baywatch really is.’ Moshe and David may have been operating at Murricane’s request, or rather $100,000 of Fontokk’s cash, but the beauty of this kind of activity for them was that their superior Israeli Special Forces officers rather liked having the chance to find out the whos and whys of Gaza kidnappings. They liked to make connections, to find out things like why bodyguards suddenly failed to guard bodies. Truth to tell, Dave and Moshe were supposed to do this kind of thing for nothing. Murricane just liked them to be happy in their work.
‘Who was right?’ The voice was pure Brooklyn and it came out of the dust. ‘Last chance: who was right?’
‘Sal Paradise!’ yelled Murricane. ‘Sal Paradise was right.’ A figure emerged. It was small, wiry, a white T-shirt and jeans wrapped in combat webbing and carrying an Uzi.
‘Little slow, Murricane. Thought you knew all those Hold Steady songs off by heart? Thought Craig Finn was your man, man?’
‘Boys and Girls in America . . . that’s the album,’ said Murricane. ‘Stay Positive is shit, man.’ He briefly touched closed fists with David. ‘Moshe outside?’
‘Ten four, babe. Wait till you see his wheels. He’s got an old Land Rover, armoured. British Army surplus, straight out of fucking Derry. You’ll feel quite at home, Murricane! Mind your feet. There’s some dead meat at the bottom of the stairway.’
‘Got a live one back along there. His arms are in a bit of a state, but he might be worth stroking nicely.’
‘Cool. I’ll listen for the screams. Take it easy. Hey, you shouldn’t have any trouble.’
They didn’t. Outside, in the cooling evening, Moshe, big and bulky where David was small and thin, was sitting at the wheel of a long wheelbase Land Rover, still in its Belfast green. It was as camouflaged in this environment as a Dayglo stretch limo. Blocking each end of the street were two Israeli Army Hummers. Beside both of them crouched two soldiers, Uzis at the ready, covering the doorway Ambrose and Murricane had emerged from.
‘Came mob-handed, I see.’ Murricane opened the Landie’s passenger door, shoved Ambrose inside, then climbed in after him. Less than a minute later, David was in the armoured back loading bay with his prisoner, who had been dragged screaming, but with surprising ease, by the wiry Israeli. Seconds after that, the three vehicles were roaring away.
‘Mob-handed. I like that,’ Moshe laughed. His teeth were immaculate. ‘We are the angry mob. Oh yeah!’
‘Kaiser Chiefs. Named after a South African football team. But you knew that.’ The glitter of those beautiful teeth once more. Murricane suspected some serious investment in Moshe’s dentition. Tel Aviv was jumping with cosmetic dentists. Dental tourism was a growth industry. He was developing a bit of a thing about teeth, he realised. Just something else to distract him.
‘Would we ever let you down?’ Moshe was pretending to be mortified. ‘Have we ever let you down? We are a peacekeeping force, committed to international good relations, you know that! Do you like my new vehicle? A symbol! It is a symbol of good international relations. And profitable relationships.’
Murricane breathed in the instantly familiar aroma of hot Land Rover. Despite the heat, the dust, the lack of rain and the absence of coal smoke from a thousand parlour fires, it took him right back. To a place he really didn’t want to go. He shut his eyes and, suddenly, there she was: Millie.
The tension was flooding away and the boredom was allowing his mind to drift. A bad sign. This job was over, bar the haggling. He would need to find something else to do, and quickly. Or perhaps it would find him.
PRECOGNITION
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, JANUARY 2009, INTERNET EDITION. WEEKLY UPDATE, SUBSCRIBERS ONLY. RSS AND ATOM ENABLED.
MARLOWE’S DIARY
Splendid to see my old friend Fergus Mellors in such good form at Soho House the other night. Of course, this is not an establishment I frequent out of choice. Merely, dear reader, out of duty. And since this fine organ has once again assumed its rightful position on the High Street news-stands, thanks to our esteemed new owner, Lord Morgan of Wapping, I have the expense account to deal with such exigencies!
At any rate, Mellors (a fine literary name for a PR flack, or public relations consultant, if you must) is verily in the pink, following rather a lean spell since he set up on his own. Many of his former clients fell by the wayside, or pitched themselves bodily onto said wayside after that sad little episode on Hampstead Heath. And one thought we lived in liberal times! At any rate, over a frosted glass of very nearly acceptable Cava, Mellors informed me, cheerily, that things were looking up and that he was now advising ‘a very sexy little client indeed’, someone with a timely tome to flog and ‘governments to bring down, careers to ruin, all the good and jolly stuff’. Someone he could not, alas, name.
‘Something from the dark side, old chap,’ he told me. ‘Coming in from the cold, if you know what I mean.’ Then he swore me to secrecy and told me all, as folks are wont to do! Well, he told me something, and, with joy, I hereby relay it. Such is my role in life.
It may all seem like ancient history, but Mellors assures me that the ’70s in Ireland were interesting times indeed. What could have been happening there? I’m much too young to know. ‘It’s going to be the Serpentine in my crown,’ he said, tapping his nose with his index finger in what I suppose was meant to be a meaningful way. ‘Little Johnny Serpentine, that’s my man.’ I understand this to be a reference to a song by an obscure beat combo known as The Television. I have never knowingly heard any of their so-called music. I am more of a Radio, ahem, head. And so, so ‘down’ with the ah, kids! Perhaps that Cava had gone to his head a little. At any rate, he implored me to say nothing, which I took to be in reality a plea to reveal all. Inasmuch as I know anything. Which I, of course, dear ones, am happy to do! More when I get it! Toodle pip!
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, MARCH 2009, INTERNET EDITION. WEEKLY UPDATE, SUBSCRIBERS ONLY. RSS AND ATOM ENABLED.
MARLOWE’S DIARY
Desperately sad news about the demise of old Mellors – no time to go into detail, as I am positively rushing, my dears, towards an electronic deadline down here in Deptford; but I am sure his many friends and colleagues in publishing will be raising a glass in his memory. A full obituary will of course follow. But to fall from the platform at Tottenham Court Road, after all these years, seems more than careless. And with such high hopes for the future, too!
We shall all miss him. Toodle pip, dear old chap!
A GOOD WALK IS RATHER SPOILED
The Turnberry Hotel – or the Westin Turnberry Spa and Resort, as its .management were schooled to call it – glittered on the Ayrshire skyline like a particularly elongated beach chalet. It sprawled, low and white with a red tiled roof, along the ancient raised beach that reared out of the surrounding linksland. Below the hotel, meticulously cultivated grass, gorse and pockmarked bunkers of yellow sand stretched to the shoreline, where a storybook lighthouse soared, guiding a ruffled, ice-blue sea to the horizon. There, a dome-shaped island glowered greyly back at the Scottish mainland.
It was 6.30 a.m. on a spring Monday and there were a few hardy souls braving the buffeting wind for their expensive shot at the legendary Ailsa course, one of the venues for the Open Championship and scene of triumphs by some of the greatest of golfing heroes. The hotel guests who had enrolled in the Colin Montgomerie Golf Academy’s special pre-Easter course were still hung-over and cosseted in their expensive linen sheets and so the other two, less desirable, courses, the Kintyre and the Girvan, were deserted. Except for the spry figure who could be seen striding away from the large, well-camouflaged complex of sheds and agricultural buildings next to the A77, the main road from Ayr to Stranraer.
He was carrying his own club-crammed Ping bag without apparent effort, but as he was now in the rough at the edge of the Girvan course, he had clearly gone well astray from the tee on the nearest hole, the long fourth. He was desultorily scything the grass and heather with what might have been a seven-iron, apparently looking, none too keenly, for his lost ball.
No one had asked him for green fees, or for a hotel pass, an hour earlier, when he had emerged from an innocuous rented Ford Mondeo in the Colin Montgomerie Golf Academy car park, dressed in Mizuno finery and ready, it appeared, to practise religiously what the master had taught him the day before. They came, after all, from across the world to learn at Monty’s feet and worship on the altar of Turnberry turf. An early rise was a small additional price to pay.
There were no staff around. Up at the hotel, only the breakfast crews were preparing for the morning appetites. His few practice swings on the first tee looked competent. He used an old-fashioned, linked-finger grip, which would have had the most successful golfer never to win a major wincing, but his tee shot was true and long. Considering he was playing ultra-cautiously with a seven-iron, its face tightly closed, for length. He drove like someone who knew what he was doing. His age was difficult to discern, but he was no longer young. White hair peeked from beneath his woolly Nike hat. The huge, packed Ping golf bag seemed something of an affectation. Surely it wasn’t strictly necessary?
His fairway shot on the fourth had sliced towards the maintenance buildings, which were empty at this time of day. The greenkeepers didn’t start work until 7.00 a.m., unless there was a championship looming. He seemed a little confused then, sweeping the thick grass and heather with . . . surely not still a seven . . . the heavy bag still on his shoulder. For about half an hour, he disappeared completely from view, as if he’d actually entered one of the buildings. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that his ball had snuggled into the lee of a greenkeeper’s bothy or a mower workshop, but there were no windows to break and it was unlikely that his brand new Titleist was anywhere but in a clump of gorse or plugged in sand or mud.
Nevertheless, a close observer might have noticed the tall, elderly man emerging from a steel-clad building, his Ping bag visibly lighter and less bulky. He appeared to lock the door behind him with some kind of key.
He played a new ball from the fairway, an open-faced seven-iron, to within three feet of the pin. After sinking the putt, he appeared to lose interest in playing further, striding towards his car, his studs crackling on the tarmac as he placed the Ping bag in the boot.
Only someone actually looking over his shoulder would have noticed that there now seemed to be only two clubs in the bag, a modern carbon-and-composite seven-iron and a wood-shafted putter.
As he drove away towards Ayr, no one noticed him go, except an eleven-handicapper from Surrey, making the most of his Turnberry package with an early round on the Ailsa course. He blamed the blue Mondeo’s revving engine for his missed putt at the first green. It would put him 21 over par, at the end of a frustrating round. He was not best pleased.
Golf courses when the paraphernalia of TV-covered championships is absent – no cherry-pickers, grandstands, tented villages or irascible security guards high on self-importance and high-handicap resentment – are deserted and easily accessible during the hours of darkness. Golf cannot be played under floodlights, despite attempts to make such blasphemy possible in city-centre driving ranges.
And no tall fences on traditional Scottish links courses, either. Just dry-stone dykes, traditional walls much coveted by the designers of imitation courses in America. There, they tend to be topped with brutally barbed, high-voltage electrical cables.
Not at Turnberry. Technically, access to the beach has to be open to the public at all times. Which meant the tall old man had no difficulty, having parked his car on the prom at Girvan, in walking along the high tide line and then up and over the dunes onto the Ailsa course.
Burdened only by a small rucksack, he was no longer dressed in golfing Gore-tex, but in what looked like lightweight black military fatigues and a ski hat with no brand name. The head torch was a military-issue, shaded Petzl. Once more, he disappeared into the clump of maintenance buildings next to the road, emerging with five short-shafted, apparently gripless golf clubs, all irons. They gave off a distinctive clanking rattle as he carried them in one large hand. In the other, he held a wooden mallet he had found during his quick search of the greenkeeper’s shed that morning. He had known something like it would be there. Hoped, really, having forgotten to bring one with him. But then, tents were a part of every golfing competition: tents for starters, finishers, guests and gophers. And where there was a tent, there were tent pegs needing to be hammered into the ground.
Tent pegs, he mused, had always been associated with death, ever since Ashkelon was killed with one in the Old Testament.
That ancient, murderous implement would also have required a hammer.
On the deserted 18th green of the Ailsa course, scene of so much final-round drama over the years, he knew that despite the darkness he had to move quickly. Lights blazed above him from the hotel, its origins as a destination for Victorian railway travellers now usurped by a grandiloquent American vision of what a ‘golf spa’ ought to be. The modern clubhouse and golfing academy buildings were in darkness.
The threaded, identical heads of the golf clubs were unscrewed; choosing patches of rough grass and heather bordering the outer edge of the green, he used the mallet to sink each shortened steel shaft into the sandy, stoneless ground, circling the putting surface, covering the top of each with finger-fumbled sand and spittle. When he was done, there was no sign, under torchlight, that anything had been hammered into the putting surface’s outer lip. And this particular green’s dimensions had never been altered in the past six decades of competition, so there was no risk that they would be discovered. He used a small trowel he’d brought with him to excavate a hole three feet from the last shaft, in some short rough. There, he buried a small metal cylinder. A copper wire sheathed in black plastic led from a hole in the box, which he had sealed with silicone. He threaded it through the bottom stalks of heather, pushed it lightly down so it was just above the sandy ground.
He was a careful man. He put the club heads – genuine, from an old set of Wilsons – in his rucksack. He made his way back to the maintenance sheds and replaced the mallet where he had found it, next to a well-maintained Ransome’s 30-inch mower, locked the door behind him with the skeleton key set he had owned for the best part of 40 years, and then, silently, carefully, jogged back across the links to the beach. The adrenalin release made him run along the hard-packed sand to Girvan. By the time he was unlocking the Mondeo, stripping off his surgical gloves and preparing for the long drive north, his heart rate had returned to normal. He was, after all, still a very fit man indeed. For his age.
LAST SUMMER I WENT SWIMMING
Cable ties. They were available everywhere and in so many different styles. Colours, too. There were even re-usable, releasable ones. She knew they were available at Highland Industrial Supplies, out on the Longman estate. She’d once considered using them in some kind of art project, a statement about imprisonment, impotence, frustration. And boredom.
The ones on her wrists were not the reusable kind. Once ratcheted tight they could only be cut off. And her captors had been carelessly brutal, so her hands, she knew, were now bloated and purple behind her back. Her ankles were trussed together too. She was a package, an animal readied for slaughter. Hog-tied, she thought. Sow-tied, that was it. Pigmeat, trussed for killing. That they planned to kill her was obvious.
Her hands had been sore and now they were numb. Her feet had lost sensation almost immediately. They had hit her and gagged her. Once she realised she was not going to choke to death, she gradually calmed down. Now, she felt the same clarity she remembered from the last time something like this had happened. But that had been different. That had been training. This was very evidently real. From the attack until now, feeling the van moving over increasingly rough ground, had maybe been ten minutes. She needed to make a move. Fast. Not enough practice, she told herself. Slack. Too slack. She thought of Freya. Oh Christ. Oh sweet Jesus Christ Almighty.
They hadn’t attempted to rape her. Neither of them had shown any interest in her as a woman. Maybe that was significant. They had been casual, efficient, as if they had done this kind of thing many times before. Neither had said a word. The small one had stepped out onto the towpath from behind a rhododendron bush, she had swerved, fallen off her lovely little folding bike. Bromptons. She’d always had one, even Over the Water. Over the Water. Those wee wheels. ‘Inherently unstable,’ Mark had said. ‘And difficult to control. Like me. Like you.’ She felt herself smiling at his terrible, terribly untrue joke. Even now, even so far away, so long ago, he could make her laugh. All those jokes. All those tricks. She should have paid more attention. Her head spun. But she had, she remembered fuzzily. She had done that one thing, kept doing it, a kind of penance, a remembrance. Stupid.
The big one had picked her up, held her while his companion secured her wrists, then her feet. Not before she had caught the larger man’s instep with a ferocious downward stamp. He had breathed in sharply, that was all. That was when the smaller one had hit her.
She had tried to shout, managed a brief scream before a strangely soft hand had cut it short. That part of the canal, between the permanent clutter of berthed boats at Dores and the beginnings of urban Inverness, cut through woodland so heavy that the waterway almost became a tunnel. Too late for any yachts or cruisers to be motoring through. Too late, really, to be taking the route on her own. Even in the balmy midnight twilight of a Highland summer.
Risky. She’d been warned it was risky, to be on the towpath so late, a wee woman like her. Even in her lovely, adopted Inverness, so gorgeous, so secure, it was something Freya had told her not to do, but she’d shrugged it off. On a bike she could ride like the wind, she boasted. No one could catch her. She was free, she’d laugh, flipping the Brompton into the tiny package it became when she wanted to carry it, wheel under wheel, a mechanical wonder. Safer than running, faster, and there was room for shopping, too. She’d been picking up a Chinese from that non-MSG place they both liked. Her and Freya. Ah, fuck. Mark . . .
The hitting, the gagging, the trussing. So fast, so unexpected, and she cursed herself for her poor response. One kick she’d managed, one bite, maybe, and then the stunning blow to the back of the neck that had left her temporarily paralysed. She’d been dragged through undergrowth, along a rough path to a van, nondescript, not white, or maybe it was white . . . impossible to know the colour in the dim sodium streetlight. One of the alleyways that backed onto the great rash of new housing in Kinmylies. Searched, roughly – they took her purse and her keys. Thrown into the back, the bike, badly half-folded, chucked in beside her, a pedal catching her already battered head. And then they’d driven away, were driving. Now they were bumping along, off the road, somewhere stony and rough. Then the engine was switched off. When the reek of diesel and exhaust cleared, she could hear moving water and smell the harbour, the tainted freshness of the River Ness meeting the salt firth. There was a mustiness, a hint of rotting vegetation, chemicals, sewage. The outfall of the city. Nothing moved. Her captors were still in the cab. She could hear the quiet murmur of someone talking on the phone. She would need to be quick. Pain surged through her. She managed to kneel, reached her cable-tied hands towards her heel. Oh yes, one of Mark’s little tricks. She hoped it worked. She’d never had to try it out since those stupid macho manoeuvres in Cumbria. Force of habit had kept her doing it with every single new pair of shoes or boots she bought.
The two men were relaxed, unhurried, certain of what they were about to do and sure of their victim’s helplessness. The one called MacDougall got out of the Mercedes Vito’s passenger seat, closed the door carefully, and stood listening. The liquid rustle of the river overwhelmed everything else. Gradually, his ears detected the rumble and hum of distant traffic. Then there was the high whine of midges gathering, one of the perils of these Highland nights, especially near water. They were on a cleared site next to an old timber pier, a jumble of broken concrete and, by the yellow warning tapes they’d pushed aside earlier in the day to ensure access, asbestos. Hume thought what they were about to do was probably unnecessary, if not insane, but Billy Boy had assured him and MacDougall that they were hard bitches, nasty fucking perverted old cunts, and that leverage would be necessary. Leverage, that was the word he’d used. MacDougall had laughed. Hume wondered what he’d got himself into.
‘Well, if we’re to have some leverage, we’d better have a lever,’ MacDougall had said, with that Gaelic lilt of his.
Now Hume was standing beside him, smaller, more compact compared to the Hebridean’s hulking frame. They were both wearing latex gloves. MacDougall reached into one of his parka’s many pockets, checked the knife was there. His lever. The Randall he’d had smuggled in from America via Dublin. His pride and joy. In another pocket was a digital camera, a Sony Cybershot. He liked Sony stuff. It felt like it had some kinda history behind it. Heritage. Samurais and that.
‘Sure about this?’ Hume’s voice was soft, curiously high. ‘We’re going to get bitten to fuck if we stand out here for long.’ But he made no attempt to sweep the cloud of midges away from his face.
‘All right.’ MacDougall crunched over the uneven ground to the larger of the van’s two back doors and turned the handle.
There was a razor blade hidden in the heel of her trainer. In every right shoe she owned. A simple job. The tiniest edge protruding. She’d had to warn Freya not touch her shoes. They’d laughed about that. A fetish, Freya had said, how exciting. Cable ties didn’t stand a chance. Now her hands were agonisingly free. She flexed and rubbed them, but there was no time to do it properly. She hooked her fingers around the d-rings in the floor meant for securing bungee cords or cargo straps, then braced her bent legs against the right side of the three-quarter door, where the lock was. The pain was beginning to overwhelm her (Hurry up, you pricks) when she heard the handle turn. All the pent-up pressure in her diminutive body erupted outwards as the latch released and she straightened her fingers just in time to avoid breaking them on the d-rings.
Every nerve, every sinew was tuned to survival pitch. She had very little chance of getting away from two pros. She could only hope they had allowed themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security, just as she had been. But it had been much longer for her, before the attack on the bike path. It had been years. In just a few minutes, she’d had to reboot a long-unused operating system.
The edge of the door took MacDougall in the face, breaking his nose and cheekbone. He went down like a felled tree. She catapulted out of the van, landing like a crab, her feet on the ground, her hands behind her, fury and fear fuelling her as Hume, reacting very quickly, raised a clenched fist and began to bring it viciously towards her. But she was already rolling away, feeling the sharpness of broken concrete on her body. Her hands scrabbled for grip as Hume sprang, looming close above her just as she found a loose lump of broken breeze-block, lifted it and threw it without thinking. It caught his eye, hard enough to stun and briefly blind. He swung an arm, missed and stumbled. Kicking out, she caught his ankle and he fell, grabbing at her squirming legs. She could feel her heart drumming, could hear it, and somewhere, moving water. The river. Up, she had to get up. She managed two strides, then something told her she was at a drop, an edge. Momentarily, she hesitated, then jumped into the deep stillness of the Ness. The cold was brutal, instantly more agonising than anything she’d experienced that night. She felt a slow current take her, pull her, tumble her into icy darkness. She made no effort to fight it.
ROAMING IN THE GLOAMING
Another fine summer’s day had faded into a warm Highland gloaming when Liam Gunn launched his fibreglass punt out into the apparently still waters of Inverness Harbour. Midges, the dreaded biting Culicoides impunctatus, swarmed around his leathery head. He ignored them. They were attracted by the carbon dioxide in his breath, but Gunn had for many years been impervious to their voracious appetite for blood. Some of the Ferry kids whispered it was because he’d been sucked dry of the red stuff decades ago.