Christopher Brookmyre [Jack P Country of the Blind (epub)

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.And if Swan insisted, the PM would either think he had gone mad, or worse, suspected he was being pressured from somewhere, and started asking questions.Either way, Swan drops it or he’s fired, and Voss doesn’t get what he wants.But the PM’s long been wary of Swan and Dalgleish together, and he’d fancy a head-on with the pair of them almost as little as he’d fancy the opinion-poll consequences of having to fire two senior ministers.”“Maybe,” said Gilmore, not sounding convinced.“But I’m not sure the Dutchman even believed the two of them could pull it off.Knowing Voss, it probably just amused him to play God with their careers, watching them squirm as he squeezed them from both sides in the inescapable dilemma from hell.He made them, gaveth them political life in the first place, so maybe he decided it would be a giggle to taketh away.It’s what his newspapers have always done: build ’em up then knock ’em down.”“Aye,” contributed Paul, “maybe you should get somebody to root through reports of government scandals across Europe in recent years.Might find a few weird sackings and resignations wi’ a hidden story behind them.”“Good idea,” Gilmore said.“Bear that one in mind, Ken.”“Sure, sure.But for now I think we’ll be pretty busy with events closer to home.Can’t wait to see the court artists’ impressions of those two bastards standing in the dock.”“That’ll just be one bastard,” corrected Parlabane, standing now behind Fraz and Nicole, holding the phone in his right hand.“That was Jenny Dalziel.Michael Swan’s dead, in a cottage in Yorkshire.Acute allergic reaction to a bullet.She just heard down the jungle telegraph; it’ll be all over the TV in about half an hour.Usual story, right now cops are only saying ‘a forty-four-year-old man blah-blah-blah’, but it’s him.One to the head, gun in own hand, no apparent signs of a break-in or struggle.”“Jesus, he topped himself,” said Fraz, gaping over the back of the settee.“Like fuck he did,” Parlabane sneered.“Even considering last night’s shenanigans and today’s media frenzy, Swan had absolutely no way of knowing anyone was actually on to him.Somebody took him out.”“Knight?” suggested Nicole.“Well nobody’s seen him today.Sounds good to me.Knight knows it’s all going to buggery but he doesn’t know he’s been named.He gives the world Swan as a suicide then waits for people to make the connection – Christ, he could even be the one who ‘discovers’ the link from the Voss end – and he thinks he’s in the clear.Then the only people who could incriminate him are his own men, who he’s pretty confident will keep their mouths shut, Mr Knight not being familiar with certain properties of our native woodland fungi.”“What about Dalgleish?” asked Nicole.Parlabane nodded, thinking, agreeing something with himself.“He could incriminate Knight,” she continued, “but only by incriminating himself.Of course if he was incriminated already.”“Mr McInnes?” Parlabane said loudly, cutting off Nicole’s musings.“Aye?”“Could I speak to you and your two erstwhile colleagues alone, please?”Tam looked around at the gathering, finding confused but interested nods of assent from Paul and Spammy, while Fraz stood up and Gilmore offered to lead Sadie and Nicole out of the room.Parlabane sat on the edge of Gilmore’s desk, waiting for the others to leave.The door to the ante-room closed and he looked around at the three of them, Tam and Paul on a settee, Spammy defying a chair’s attempts to support him.“Gentlemen, I realise you’ve all had a rather stressful few days what with one thing and another,” he began, a sparkle appearing in his otherwise tired eyes that would probably have scared the life out of Tam once; not now.“But I was wondering if I could enlist your specialist services for one last job.”He should have stayed at the Scottish Office.He should never have left the building.Bloody hell.Jesus bloody Christ.Dalgleish was crouched on the floor by the window in the semidarkness, only the glow of the streetlights below picking out the outlines of objects in the room.He sat with his back to the casement, four feet from his desk, on the polished wide floorboards beyond the last tassels of the edge of the carpet, lifting the glass to his mouth with two hands because either on its own trembled too much, and he had already spilled enough down his front to make his shirt cling to his chest.Or maybe that was just the sweat.There had been no gin left in the house, and that parasitic Frog diplomat had finished the last of the brandy yesterday.His drinks cabinet back home would never have been allowed to run so dry, but as he considered the townhouse little more than a dormitory extension of his office up here, he had rather lacked enthusiasm for stocking up.There had been nothing else for it.The only spirits left were the bottles of single malt whisky people kept giving him as “wee gifties”.Every time some bastard handed him one, he felt sure the sod somehow knew his publicised liking of it was a fraud.Christ.He had prised open the lid of the box, then mutilated himself trying to get the metal seal off the top of the bottle, a stiff sliver sliding neatly under his thumbnail and into the soft flesh below.Craigellachie, it said.Probably bloody Gaelic for agony.He had poured a large measure into a glass and then drowned it in Coke, which made it almost drinkable.Enough to have two.And three [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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