Iain Banks - Complicity

Could Andy have decided since that the body wasn't well enough concealed, and come back and removed it; hauled it up, taken it away and buried it? We'd never talked about that day, and we never again came near this old air shaft; I don't know what he might have done since but I'd always assumed he was like me and just tried to forget about it, pretend it never happened.

Denial. Hell, sometimes it's best.

"— ear me yet?" the radio crackles.

"Yes?" McDunn says.

"Found him."

It will take a while to get the body out; they have to get more guys down there, take photographs; the usual shit. Most of us return to the house. I don't know what the hell to feel. It's finally over, it's out, people know, other people know; the police know, it's no longer just between me and Andy, it's public. I do feel some relief, no matter what happens now, but I still feel I have betrayed Andy, regardless of what he's done.

The man's body was under the other air shaft. The poor fuck must have crawled all that way, a hundred metres or more to that second patch of light; our bright idea of putting the branches down after him to cover him up was pointless; for all these years it would only have needed some more kids to have come along with torches or bits of burning paper to discover the body. They reckon there was a load of fallen branches lying under the air shaft before we pushed the guy down it; according to the young cop who first went down it looked like he'd crawled out from the middle of the pile. Even so, I don't know how he survived that fall; God knows what he broke, how he suffered, how long he took to crawl there to the other slightly brighter patch of light; how long he took to die.

Part of me feels sorry for him, despite what he tried to do, what he did do. God knows, maybe he'd have ended up killing Andy, killing both of us, but nobody deserves to die like that.

On the other hand there's a part of me that rejoices, that is glad he paid the way he did, that for once the world worked the way it's supposed to, punishing the wrongdoer… and that saddens and sickens me too, because I think that this must be the way Andy feels all the time.

It's strange to be in Strathspeld, to be in the house and not have seen Mr and Mrs Gould. Some of the cops have gone; there are only ten cars and vans on the gravel drive now. The chopper went to refuel, came back and buzzed around some more and then returned to Glasgow. Apparently they had road blocks and patrols on roads all over the area, and they searched the grounds of the house. Fat chance.

Back at the house, in the library, I tell a DI from Tayside all that happened that day, twenty years ago. McDunn sits in, too. It isn't as painful as I thought it would be. I tell it just as it happened, from where we ran up the hill almost straight into the man; I leave out what Andy and I were doing just before, and the man's line about dirty, perverted things. I can't tell that with McDunn sitting there; it would be like telling my father. Actually, I guess I wouldn't want to tell it to anybody, not so much because I'm ashamed (I tell myself) as because it's private; one last thing I can hide that's between me and Andy only, so letting me feel that there is one thing at least in which I've not betrayed him utterly.

Sergeant Flavell has been released from me to take notes; I'm attached to myself now, wrists cuffed together. The aged, respectable leather-bound tomes of the Gould family library look down upon the nasty tale I have to tell with musty distaste. Outside, it's dark.

"Think I'll be charged?" I ask the two DIs. I already know there's no time limit between committing a murder and being charged with it.

"Not for me to say, Mr Colley," the Tayside guy says, gathering up his notebook and tape recorder.

McDunn's mouth twists down at the edges; he sucks through his teeth, and for some reason I feel encouraged.

They've ordered food from the Strathspeld Arms; the same food the funeral guests would have eaten. A bunch of us eat in the dining room. I'm handcuffed to one of the London burlies now and we both have to eat with one hand. I'd kind of been hoping they'd take the cuffs off me altogether by now but I suppose they're thinking that the body in the shaft doesn't prove anything by itself, and that Andy could still be dead, or he could be alive and he — or somebody else — could have kidnapped Halziel and Lingary to provide cover for me.

McDunn comes in as I'm chasing bits of quiche around my plate with my fork.

He comes up to me, nods to the burly and unlocks the cuffs.

"Come here," he tells me, putting the handcuffs in his pocket. I wipe my lips and follow him to the door.

"What is it?" I ask him.

"It's for you," he says, striding across the hall towards the phone, where the handset's lying on the table and an officer is attaching a little device like a sucker to the phone; a wire leads from the sucker to a Pro Walkman. The officer starts the machine recording. McDunn glances back at me before stopping at the phone and nodding down at it. "It's Andy."

He hands me the phone.

"Andy?"

"Hello, Cameron."

It is his voice, urbane and controlled; until this moment some tiny part of me still believed he was dead. I get the shivers, and the hair on the nape of my neck prickles. I lean back against the wall, looking at McDunn, who's standing with his arms crossed a metre away. The young officer who turned on the Walkman hands McDunn a pair of earphones plugged into the machine. McDunn listens in.

I clear my throat. "What's going on, Andy?"

"Sorry to drop you in it, old son," he says in a conversational sort of way, as though apologising for some thoughtless remark or landing me with a mismatched blind date.

"Yeah? Are you?"

McDunn makes a circular waving motion with one hand; keep going. Oh, Christ, here we go again. They want me to keep him talking so they can trace him. One more betrayal.

"Well, yes," Andy says, sounding as though he's a little surprised to find he actually is sorry, albeit only slightly. "I feel a bit bad about that, but at the same time I felt you deserved it. Not that I thought you'd go to prison for it; wouldn't inflict that on you, but… well, I wanted you to suffer for a while. I take it they found that card I left in the woods near Sir Rufus's place."

"Yes, they did. Thanks, Andy. Yeah; great. I thought we were friends ?

"We were, Cameron," he says, reasonably. "But you did run away, twice."

I give a small, despairing laugh, glancing at McDunn again. "I came back the second time."

"Yes, Cameron," he says, and his voice is smooth. "That's why you're still alive."

"Oh, thanks very much."

"But anyway, Cameron, you're still part of it. You've still played your part in it. Like me; like all of us. We're all guilty, don't you think?"

"What is this?" I ask, frowning. "Original sin? You becoming a Catholic or something?"

"Oh, no, Cameron; I believe we're born free of sin and free of guilt. It's just that we all catch it, eventually. There are no clean rooms for morality, Cameron, no boys in bubbles kept in a guilt-free sterile zone. There are monasteries and nunneries, and people become recluses, but even that's just an elegant way of giving up. Washing one's hands didn't work two thousand years ago, and it doesn't work today. Involvement, Cameron, connection."

I shake my head, staring at the little window in the Walkman where the tape spindles are patiently revolving. The strange thing is, it is like talking to a dead man, because he sounds like the Andy I used to know. Andy the mover and shaper, the Andy from before Clare's death, before he gave it all up and became a recluse; it's that voice, calm and untroubled, that I'm hearing now, not that of the man I knew from that dark, decaying hotel, flat with resignation or audibly sneering with a kind of cynical despair.