Ian Rankin - The Impossible Dead

‘Business requires a touch of ruthlessness,’ Pears seemed to agree. ‘But accommodation is always preferable.’

‘And you’re a reasonable man?’

‘Unless pushed too far.’

Fox stayed silent, pretending to weigh things up.

‘We need to meet face to face,’ he eventually stated.

‘Why?’

‘We just do.’

‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’

‘The Wallace Monument. Five this evening.’

‘I have plans for this evening.’

‘Five o’clock, Mr Pears.’ Fox ended the call and stared at his phone. He found that his heart was pounding, the blood whistling in his ears, and there was a slight tremor in his hands.

Other than that, he felt fine.

‘I don’t like this,’ Joe Naysmith said. ‘It’s too quiet.’

Fox had to agree. He was seated in his Volvo, phone pressed to his ear, listening to his colleague. He looked out at the car park. The last time he’d been here, it had been the middle of the day and there had been a few tourists about. Now the place was almost deserted. Two other cars – belonging to the staff, most probably – plus, at the far end of the car park, the unmarked white van with Naysmith and Tony Kaye hidden in the back. It was their surveillance hub, filled with listening and monitoring equipment. Mostly, it didn’t stand out from the crowd, but there was no crowd here.

‘Could we park further away?’ Fox heard Tony Kaye ask.

‘Signal’s not brilliant as it is,’ Naysmith answered.

Fox pressed his free hand to his chest. Beneath his shirt, a sticking plaster fixed the tiny microphone to his skin. Naysmith preferred plasters to ordinary tape – sweat was less likely to affect them. The microphone wire ran to the battery pack in Fox’s back trouser-pocket.

‘Is he sitting on the aerial?’ Kaye was asking.

‘Tell him I’ll strap it to my head if that’ll help,’ Fox commented. Joe Naysmith passed the message along.

It had taken an hour’s paperwork before they were okayed use of the van and its contents, but that was fine – just a matter of box-ticking. Fox was adept at box-ticking. At some point, someone further up the ladder would see the completed form and maybe wonder about it, but that was for later. The van’s fuel tank was nearly empty. Fox had handed Naysmith fifty quid and told him to stop at the garage on Queensferry Road.

‘Your own shilling?’ Kaye had asked.

‘That’s the way I want it,’ Fox had confirmed.

‘Why here?’ Kaye was now asking. Meaning: why the Wallace Monument?

‘Resonance,’ Fox responded. His rear-view mirror showed him that the tables were being wiped down in Legends, the lights turned off at the end of another working day. It was ten minutes to the top of the hour. They’d been in position since half past four. Fox was trying to guess which car Pears would arrive in – the Maserati or the Lexus. He had his answer a couple of minutes later, the black Maserati emitting a low growl as it entered the car park.

‘He’s early,’ he said, ending the call. He watched as Pears passed the van without seeming to pause. The two other cars were empty, so he drew to a halt next to Fox’s Volvo, but left the engine idling. He lowered his window, so Fox did the same.

‘Get in,’ Pears ordered.

‘Why not my car?’

Pears shook his head. ‘I know mine better.’ Fox could hear music from the Maserati’s stereo: jazz piano. Something similar had been playing at the house in Stirling the night he’d visited.

‘This is a deal-breaker, Inspector,’ the financier added.

Fox hesitated, then slid the window shut, pulled the key from the ignition and got out. He walked towards the Maserati, his eyes fixed on its driver. Pears was studying the car park in his mirrors. Fox opened the passenger-side door and got in. Pears was wearing leather driving gloves, old-fashioned-looking things with stud fasteners. The moment Fox was in his seat, Pears put the car into reverse. Once out of the parking bay, he started forward, engine roaring. As they made to pass the white surveillance van, he slammed on the brakes.

‘Want to say goodbye to your friends?’ he asked, sounding the horn. Then they were off again, careering towards the main road. As the engine noise increased, Pears pumped up the volume on the stereo.

‘Think I’m that stupid?’ he yelled, baring his teeth as he pulled out to overtake traffic.

‘Stupid enough to get us killed,’ Fox retorted, reaching for his seat belt. The car was already up to eighty, and Pears showed no sign of easing off. He kept glancing in his rear-view mirror, until satisfied that no tail could have stayed with him while remaining unseen.

‘You’ve made your point,’ Fox conceded. He unbuttoned his shirt and started to tug at the wiring, hauling the battery pack from its hiding place. ‘See?’ He removed the batteries and tossed everything on to the back seat, then started doing the buttons of his shirt up again.

‘No gun?’ Pears asked.

‘No gun.’

‘And just that old van for back-up?’

‘I wasn’t expecting Wacky Races.’

Pears took the hint and eased his foot a little from the accelerator, checking again in the rear-view. Eventually, he turned the music down.

‘Are we headed anywhere nice?’ Fox asked. He didn’t recognise the road at all.

‘We’re just driving,’ Pears said. ‘Driving and talking.’ He glanced at Fox. ‘I want you to understand why it’s all turned out like this.’

‘Do I need to know?’

‘Maybe you’ll see things in a different light.’

‘So you’re going to tell me why you killed Francis Vernal?’

‘You have to go back further. You have to understand how things were in the eighties.’

‘I was there,’ Fox said.

‘Were you, though? Or did you sleepwalk through it? All those newspaper stories you looked at – did you remember half of it happening at the time? The marches and protests, the fear?’ Pears glanced towards Fox. ‘Be honest now.’

‘Maybe I was too busy getting on with life.’

‘You and a few million others. But some of us wanted to change the world, and we knew politicians weren’t going to be much help to us… unless we prodded them.’

‘With letter bombs and anthrax?’

‘You don’t think terrorism works? Have you looked at Northern Ireland lately?’

‘Okay, so you wanted to smash the system – right up until the minute you saw all that cash in Vernal’s car.’

‘Francis was becoming a problem. He was drinking too much, shooting his mouth off. MI5 were all over him.’

‘You were following him that night?’

‘I was watching the house in Anstruther. Two minutes after he turned up, so did another car. Pretty obvious who they were. If Francis had drunk a bit less, he’d have been wise to them.’

Fox thought for a moment. ‘When he left, you started to follow them – Vernal and the spooks both?’

‘By the time I caught up, the crash had already happened. I saw them searching his car. They weren’t especially good at it.’ Pears paused. ‘When they’d gone, I went over. Maybe Francis thought I was one of them. He was coming round, and pointing a bloody gun at me. I made a grab for it and it went off. There wasn’t much I could do after that.’

‘Except empty the boot of the DHC kitty.’

‘Okay, so I took the money.’

‘You did a lot more than that. Those two agents swear there was no gun in the car. That’s because the gun was yours, not Vernal’s. And it was no accident – it was a clean shot to the side of the head, identical to the way Alan Carter was killed. You assassinated Francis Vernal and I’ve only just realised why.’ Fox paused, waiting to see if Pears would say anything, but Pears seemed to be concentrating on the road ahead. ‘You said it yourself – you were watching the house in Anstruther. Meaning it was Alice Watts you were interested in. Either because you suspected her, or you had a thing for her. I’m guessing the latter. You had a thing for her, yet for some reason she preferred going to bed with the overweight drunken lawyer. I can see how that would rankle – you in your leather jacket and sunglasses, Mr Outlaw, losing out to Francis Vernal. Put a bullet in his head and Alice would think MI5 had done it. Maybe she’d want your shoulder to cry on.’