Lie of the Land (10 page)

Carl slid his car key down the bar.

George picked it up and walked out, the councillor on his heels.

Gibbs went behind the bar and poured himself a brandy. He put some money in a shot glass and contemplated his drink.

‘For the first time in thirteen years, I'm about to drink while on duty.' He took a gulp of brandy, grimaced. ‘You're a journalist, Mr Shewan,' he asked. ‘Is that correct?'

‘Yes.'

Gibbs nodded, paused. ‘And you wrote some newspaper articles on this . . . SCOPE system?'

Carl had the feeling that that he was being probed. ‘A few years ago now, yes. But the articles covered how SCOPE and its budget were being hidden from Parliament. They were political, not scientific.'

Gibbs nodded again. ‘Uh-uh. And you have both managed to find your way to one of the few
notspots
left in the country, if not the whole of northern Europe.'

Carl stiffened.

‘That's very convenient,' continued Gibbs. He nodded to himself. ‘Quite remarkable, really.'

There was silence.

Brindley sighed. ‘I managed to get hold of a partial map of where the main transmitters were. I figured Inverlair Bay would be one of the biggest notspots, judging by where the nearest masts were. As for Mr Shewan, I thought he could help me stop it. I should have gone to him earlier.'

Carl rapped his empty glass down onto the bar. ‘We didn't do this, Gibbs. Surely to Christ you can see that? You heard what Brindley said. You guys had better get folk together. Set up a roadblock. Go house to house. Do something.'

Gibbs agreed, and Brindley went with him.

Carl sat at the end of the bar, staring into space.

There were distractions on which to focus the mind, blot out the impossible horror. Sun showing up the streaks of polish on the dark-veneered tabletop, or glinting on the pool table's coin slot; the movement of the clouds across the bay; stains on the carpet; swirling dust motes in the sunbeams. He sat and watched the sun and the dust and the high clouds crossing the windows.

After a few minutes, Carl got up, went behind the bar and took a bottle of single malt off the shelf and headed upstairs. Maybe it was absolute rubbish. SCOPE would stop working tomorrow and everyone would wake up. Yes, there would be deaths, but nothing exceptional, nothing that couldn't be boxed off and forgotten about. There would be an official inquiry, held in private of course, and some contracts would be reviewed. Normality would be restored.

11

He stirred after 10 a.m. the next morning, head pounding, stomach lurching. It wasn't just the hangover that hit him in the stomach. He stood up, shuffled around the room, wished he hadn't stopped smoking. There were a few sachets of coffee left, so he boiled the kettle, shut the window, made a coffee, had a shower, opened the window again, and paced the room. Birds were chirping away. Summer sun was warming the bay. The stirrings of perfection were there, all happening around him. But the view was poisoned. The prospect was desolation.

Eric. Lesley. Eddie. The girl from the Kelvingrove riot. Sarah. Jeff from ScotNet and most of the people he had ever known. His dad in a nursing home in Stirling. His sister: Brighton was bound to have it too.

No. He shook his head.

‘No,' he said out loud.

There was a soft knock on the door. It was Brindley. He had to be bringing good news.

‘Is it down? Can we leave?'

Brindley shook his head. ‘No. We, um, we held a meeting, last night. Not many turned up. A lot of family and friends, a lot of . . . I don't think they believe it. I don't think they're up to planning anything.' He leant against the bureau, clasped his hands together, and took a deep breath. ‘I was thinking we should map the delta signal, for fluctuations. Get a few readings over . . . however long it lasts. See exactly how big this notspot is. You could help me.' He shrugged. ‘If you feel up to it.'

Carl sat on the edge of the bed, hangover and fear making his voice and hands shake. ‘They will stop transmitting, the masts, the nodes. They might pack in tomorrow, right?'

‘They might,' said Brindley. ‘But SCOPE was designed with resilience in mind. It's robust. And the two-hertz harmonic is a standing wave, with a strong magnetic component. Impossible to shield against.'

Sitting on the bed, Carl considered the whisky bottle on the bedside table. Enough for a hair of the dog remained.

‘I heard someone crying. Or maybe I dreamed it,' he said, taking a slug from the bottle. ‘Maybe it was me. I'm not sure. But there was crying, somewhere. Everywhere. There's always someone crying somewhere.'

Brindley shifted his stance, pursed his lips. He sighed, standing awkwardly, breathing in the silence and sweat and alcohol fumes in Room 14.

‘I'll leave you to it then.' He opened the door to leave. ‘I'm in Room 22 now. It's down at the end of the corridor. Let me know what you think about mapping the area.'

The door closed. Carl sat there for a while, then went to splash his face in the bathroom. Another slug of whisky made him feel almost human again. He grabbed his jacket and the ignition key for the car.

It seemed like most of the villagers were out of doors, and they stared at him as he drove through the fine morning. Fair enough if they thought he was nuts. He would just drive on, drive on, drive on . . .

He went around the bay and up onto the southern headland. After turning inland for a short distance, he stopped. There were four cars up on the grass verge, and about thirty people standing at a line of traffic cones, a police roadblock sign lying flat on its back. Someone kicked one of the cones into the ditch.

Carl joined the crowd. Getting out of the car and walking
towards the cones he felt a sharp twinge of pain in his temple, and a faint clicking noise. A bit further and the faint clicking would become a sonic skewer that would make his nose bleed. Day 2 and SCOPE still hadn't packed in. How long can people live when they can't wake up, lying where they fell?

He laughed. One or two from the crowd glared at him. Just ahead of the roadblock was the road sign for the national speed limit, a fading black slash across white. 60mph had been enjoyed by the few of late, an unreachable pleasure. Now the sign may as well have been in a different universe.

Down the road. Where sleep ruled the airwaves.

A crow flew across his field of vision. The bird was already in the delta field when it veered further, deeper, where humans could no longer set foot. Animals seemed unaffected; Brindley said they had different brains. Or maybe it was just crows that had different brains. They could feast now, and the rats too.

‘They'll survive,' he said to the sky and hills. ‘Rats always fucking survive.'

He jumped the ditch and started walking at a right angle to the road, ignored by the crowd, up the green slopes that rose towards the heather and hilltops of bare rock. He left the crying and silence behind.

Late in the afternoon he returned, exhausted, to the hotel, his feet soaking, clothes and hands filthy, knuckle grazed from a fall. George was right about the conifer forest though: you couldn't really go through it because the trees were so densely packed. He was tired, worn out, limbs aching as he flopped onto the couch in the residents' lounge. Burned it off, he had. But the terror would be back. Even now he could feel it around his stomach, coils tightening. He lay there, dozed, imagined; tried to feel lucky. A car pulled up outside. Who was driving? He heard the hotel door open.

Footsteps. Silence.

Still lying on the couch, Carl opened his eyes, aware he was being watched. It was Brindley.

‘I've been looking for you,' he said, sitting down in a leather chair.

Carl turned away, faced the back of the couch. He just wanted to go to sleep, but his curiosity got the better of him.

‘How did you get here, Mr Brindley? To Inverlair, I mean.' His voice was level, expressionless.

The leather chair creaked.

‘With great difficulty. Friends of mine, they tried to get me to go with them, on their boat.'

‘Friends?' Carl sat up. Sleep could wait.

‘Yes.'

‘So where are they now?'

Brindley sighed. ‘West coast of Ireland, I hope. That's where they were headed. SCOPE was being trialled in Dublin – they had their own Civil Contingencies Secretariat – and down the east coast, and in the north, but parts of the west coast should be okay, I think.'

Carl turned to face Brindley. ‘So you did manage to persuade at least some people that SCOPE was a danger?'

‘Yes, close friends, my sister and . . .'

‘That all?'

Brindley narrowed his eyes. ‘Yes.'

‘So why didn't you go with them, these friends of yours?' Carl sat up on the sofa. ‘And why exactly did you choose to bring me up here?'

‘To save you, I suppose.'

‘Save me?'

‘Yes. Who else would follow a lead connected to SCOPE all the way up here? It was your job.'

That was something Carl didn't want to think about. Instead of thinking he could sleep, or walk. Being hungover didn't help
matters, made it harder for him to judge the truth of what he was being told. It had been his job to sniff around ugly secrets such as SCOPE. Exposing that kind of crap was supposed to be a calling, a vocation; at least that's what he'd believed. Maybe he'd failed to do his job properly. If there had been any saving to be done, he should have been the one doing it, in banner headlines over an exposé. But nothing like that had been possible.

‘Why didn't you try to stop it?'

Brindley folded his arms, his eyes flashing. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? You don't think I tried to stop this?' He jabbed a finger at Carl. ‘You must have known that SCOPE was more than a communications system. You knew that. You must have. You said you had the full spec – you mentioned bioactive frequencies for Christ's sake in one of your pieces. You must have known, at least suspected . . . you must have talked to Cobhill or Haarland or one of these guys.'

Carl heaved himself off the couch, anger rising in him. ‘I couldn't have stopped this any more than you.'

Silence.

The hint of a smile played around Brindley's thin lips. ‘You think I was any less impotent than you?'

Carl didn't answer. He headed upstairs without looking back.

•

Shadow marked the deepening evening, sun sinking behind the northern headland. Carl got up to sit by the window and look out across the sun-bright bay.

In the quiet, he could hear the sea stir against the bay, a background rush of water lapping on rock. The day moved into early evening and it was warm, and the smell of the sea was strong. He leant on the sill of the open window. There was crying somewhere, though he wasn't sure where, and a steady stream of people coming back from the edge of the delta field. He reached
for the cigarette he had been given by one of the locals. There was a big NO SMOKING sign on the back of the door, but he guessed that George Cutler would have other things on his mind apart from the smell of smoke in one of his rooms. The death of his wife would be fairly high on that list.

A knock at the door. He listened. It came again, louder. He heard a woman's voice, out in the corridor.

‘Are you there?'

He sat up, his lips parched, wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts.

‘Come in,' he rasped, rising from the bed.

The door creaked open and Simone Cutler looked in, her face pale, eyes red. Sleepless. Just like him.

‘We were wondering if you'd like anything to eat?'

She came into the room. Instead of her waitress whites, she wore a dressing gown. Her hair was loose.

‘No,' Carl said. ‘Thanks. I'm not hungry. How . . .' He stopped, unable to finish the question. There was no need to ask.

Simone started to shake. She was next to him now, and Carl could smell traces of perfume and, deeper, her true scent. She raised a trembling hand to her eyes. The next thing Carl knew they were holding each other, a full-on hug, in the summer stillness as the birds sang in the sun.

He stroked Simone's unbrushed hair, pressed her closer. They sat on the bed and, as her dressing gown parted Carl automatically slid his hand between her thighs. He felt himself harden, and he gave himself to an emotion that blotted out fear.

November

12

Autumn was on the move, flinging storms in a fusillade from the Atlantic. On the main road south Carl stopped in his tracks, sucking deep for air. He was pushing himself too hard, full recovery still some way off, evidently. How long would it take?

This is how it is and how it would be. Pneumonia had given him a glimpse of the future and he now existed as a weaker, older man. He'd never felt so tired and worn out. Was this to be his new peak fitness? Maybe he'd never fully recover.

Bed had suited him too well; it was as if he belonged in the hollow his dead weight had pressed into the mattress in Room 14. Try as he might, he couldn't make himself as strong as once he'd been, couldn't shake the disease. A deeper resting-place than his bed would have been no bad thing, one next to Howard and the German couple. But he wasn't going to die any time soon. There was here and now to consider; pressing concerns that demanded a response, even if it was jumping off a cliff or slitting his wrists. That was always an option.

Perhaps he'd pushed himself too hard, walking into the hills, following the invisible bars of his cage from one side of the bay to the other.

They were watching him, the villagers. Through binoculars they were scrutinising him as he plodded and puffed along the southern headland, on the road that curved up and out of the bay. He knew they were watching him because he was watching them. There were two pairs searching for him, he could see through his binoculars: the old woman in Bayview Cottage, standing at her
living-room window, and one of Cutler's boatyard crew down on the pier. Well, he'd give them a good show. He put one foot in front of the other, a feat of dexterity that was bound to amaze the observers.