Iain Banks - Complicity

Andy takes the branch we hit the man with and wedges it under the grating; part of it sticks through but there's a stump where a smaller branch has broken off and the grating rests on that, held a half-metre or so off the stone rim.

Andy throws the man's rucksack into the shaft, then bends and takes the man under one armpit, trying to heave him up.

"Come on!" he hisses.

We haul the man up, his back against the stone of the vent, his head flopping down onto his chest. There's a little blood on the stones of the chimney. Andy takes the man's calves under his armpits and lifts; I get underneath and force the man's shoulders up; his head goes over onto the stone rim of the vent, beneath the grating. We both push and heave and the man's shoulders scrape over the rim; his arms drag up and over as Andy pushes, grunting, feet slipping on the old leaves and soil. I push the man's behind up, lifting with all my might. The man's trousers snag on the stone and start to come down again, then the branch holding the grating shirts and the iron grid falls down, thumping into the man's chest.

"Shit," Andy breathes. We struggle to lift the grating up and wedge the branch underneath again. The man's head is poised over the shaft, drooping down into it. We push his legs but they buckle at the knees, so we have to hold them up above our heads as we push to make them stay straight, then as we shove and his trousers are rolled down by the rim of stone, his arms flop over the far side of the shaft rim and it suddenly gets easier to push him. He slides out of our grasp, slipping into the shaft with a scraping noise. His trousers bunch round his ankles again, then catch round his boots and disappear over the edge of the chimney, kicking up at the last moment and hitting the grating; the branch slips and the grating slams down. The branch falls through it into the shaft and drops after the man.

We stand there for a second or two. Then there is — unless we each imagine it — a very faint thump. Andy suddenly jerks into motion and scrambles up onto the rim of the chimney. He stares through the grating, down into the darkness.

"Can you see him?" I ask.

Andy shakes his head. "But let's get some branches anyway," he says.

We prop the grating open with another branch and spend the next half-hour pulling fallen branches and logs from all over that part of the hill, dragging them into the clump of bushes and throwing them into the shaft; we snap dead branches off trees and bushes and haul and peel living ones off; we scrape together armfuls of dry leaf litter and throw those over the edge of the chimney, too; everything goes under the grating and down into the shaft. We still can't see anything down there.

Eventually a large branch with lots of other branches on it and lots of leaves — half a bush, practically — snags only a few metres down the shaft and we stop, breathless, sweating, trembling from exertion and delayed shock. We let the grating fall back and throw the last branch down into the darkness; it catches on the branches stuck near the top of the shaft. We sit on the dead leaves at the foot of the vent, backs against the stone.

"Are you all right?" I ask Andy after a while.

He nods. I put a hand out to him but he flinches again.

We sit there for some time but I keep glancing up, and gradually become terrified that the man is somehow not dead or has become a zombie and is climbing back up the shaft towards us, to push the grating up and put his already rotting hands down and grab us both by the hair. I stand up and face Andy. My legs are still shaky and my mouth has gone very dry.

Andy stands too. "A swim," he says.

"What?"

"Let's — " Andy swallows. "Let's go for a swim. Down to the loch, the river." He glances back at the stones of the air shaft.

"Yeah," I say, trying to sound cheerful and unconcerned. "A swim." I look at my hands, all scraped and dirty. There's some blood on them. They're still shaking. "Good idea."

We crawl out of the undergrowth into the bright day.

There are a few minutes, perhaps not more than three or four, when I exist in a bewildering storm of hope, joy, incomprehension and dread, when they don't find the body at the bottom of the shaft.

We walked here through the gardens and the woods, past the hill where Andy and I lay in the sunlight all those summers ago, into the little glen, then up through the bushes and the dead auburn wreckage of the ferns, to the trees at the summit of the small hill. A damp wind blew from the west, shaking drips off the high, bare trees and taking the sound of the main road away.

There are about twenty of us altogether, including half a dozen constables carrying the gear. I'm still very much attached to Sergeant Flavell. I'd naively thought they could mount some low-profile operation to catch Andy watching his own funeral; I'd imagined cops slinking through the undergrowth, whispering into radios, gradually closing in. Instead we're here mob-handed, crashing through the undergrowth towards a dead body.

Except it isn't there. I tell them it is; I tell them there's a man's body at the bottom of the air shaft and they believe me. It takes them long enough to cut a way through to the chimney of the air shaft, sawing through the rhodie branches and tearing away the brambles and other undergrowth; then they lever off the iron grating over the shaft without any difficulty, and one of the younger cops, in an overall and a hard hat, wraps the rope around himself — proper climbing rope they had in the back of one of the Range Rovers — and abseils down into the darkness.

McDunn's listening on a little radio handset.

It crackles. "Lot of branches," the cop on the end of the rope says. Then: "Down, on the bottom."

The helicopter clatters overhead. I'm wondering where Andy is by now when I hear the guy in the shaft say, "Nothing here."

What ?

"Just a load of branches and stuff," the cop says.

McDunn doesn't react. I do; I stare at the radio. What's he talking about? I feel dizzy. It did happen. I remember it. I've lived with it ever since, had it at the back of my head ever since. I know it happened. I feel like the woods are revolving around me; maybe if I wasn't still handcuffed to the sergeant, I'd fall over. (And I remember the man saying, can remember his voice perfectly, hear him again as he says, "I'm a policeman !)

Some of the other cops gathered round the air shaft are wearing knowing looks.

"Wait a minute," the cop in the tunnel says. My heart thuds. What has he found? I don't know if I want him to find him — it — or not.

"There's a rucksack here," the voice on the radio says. "Large day-pack size, brown… looks full. Fairly old."

"Nothing else?" McDunn asks.

"Just the branches… can't see to the end of the tunnel in either direction. Patch of light in the distance… eastwards."

"That's the other air shaft," I tell McDunn. "Back that way." I point.

"Want me to have a look round, sir?"

McDunn looks at the Tayside chief, who nods. "Yes," McDunn says. "If you're sure it's safe."

"Safe enough, I think, sir. Untying."

McDunn looks at me. He sucks his teeth. I avoid the eyes of the other cops. McDunn's eyebrows rise a little.

"He was there," I tell him. "It was Andy and I. This guy attacked us; abused Andy. We hit him with a log. I swear."

McDunn looks unconvinced. He peers over the edge of the stonework, down into the shaft.

I'm still feeling dizzy. I put a hand out to the stones of the air-shaft chimney, to steady myself. At least the rucksack's there. It did happen , for Christ's sake; it wasn't an hallucination. The guy was probably dead when we tipped him into the shaft — we just assumed he was at the time though the older I got the less sure of that I was — but even if wasn't, he must have been killed when he hit the bottom; it's thirty metres at least.