Iain Banks - Complicity

He shrugs, frowns. "The situation was a little different with Oliver, the porn merchant; that was partly to throw them off the scent and partly because I just despised what he was doing.

"And the judge, well, he wasn't quite so culpable as the others; I was comparatively lenient with him.

"The rest… they were all powerful men, all rich — several of them very rich indeed. All of them had all they could ask for in life, but they all wanted more — which is okay, I suppose, it's just a failing, you can't kill people for that alone — but they all treated people like shit, literally like shit; something unpleasant to be disposed of. It was like they'd forgotten their humanity and could never find it again, and there was only one way to remind them of it, and remind all the others like them, and make them feel frightened and vulnerable and powerless , the way they made other people feel all the time."

He holds the bullet up in front of his face, peering at it. "There wasn't one of those men who hadn't killed people; indirectly, the way the Nuremberg Nazis mostly did, but definitely, unarguably, beyond any reasonable doubt.

"And Halziel," he says, taking a deep breath. "Well, you know about him."

"Jesus, Andy," I say. I know I should shut up and let him talk on as much as he likes but I can't help it. "The guy was a selfish bastard and a lousy doctor; but he was incompetent, not malicious. He didn't hate Clare or anything or wish her —»

"But that's just it," Andy says, holding his hands out. "If a certain level of skill — of competence — translates into the gift of life or death it becomes malice when you don't bother to exercise that skill, because people are relying on you to do just that. But," he holds up one hand to me, forestalling, and nods, "I'll admit to a level of personal vengeance there. Once I'd done all the others and I reckoned I didn't have much longer to operate overground, as it were, well, it just seemed the right thing to do."

He looks up at me, a strange, wide-eyed open smile on his face. "I'm shocking you, aren't I, Cameron?"

I gaze into his eyes for a while, then look away out the doorway towards the water and the small white shapes of the circling, crying birds. "No," I tell him. "Not as much as when I realised it was you who'd spiked Bissett like that and it was you behind that gorilla mask and you who burned Howie —»

"Howie didn't suffer," Andy says matter-of-factly. "I stoved his head in with a log first." He grins. "Probably saved him from a terrible hangover."

I stare at him, feeling sick and close to tears at the off-handed way the man I've always thought of as my best friend is talking about murder, and also feeling pretty vulnerable and at risk myself right now, too, no matter what he's said and even though he has untied my hands.

Andy reads my expression. "He was a cunt, Cameron." He pauses, looks at the ceiling. "No that's not fair, and that's what he usually called women, as well; so let's say he was a prick, a dickhead; and a violent prick, a vindictive bullying dickhead, at that. Over the years he broke his wife's jaw, both her arms and her collarbone; he fractured her skull and he kicked her when she was pregnant. He was just an unmitigated pig-fuck of a man. He was probably battered as a kid himself — he never talked about it — but fuck him. That's what we're human for, so we can choose to alter our behaviour; he wouldn't do it himself, so I did it for him."

"Andy," I say. "For Christ's sake; there are laws, there are courts; I know they're not perfect, but —»

"Oh, laws ," Andy says, voice saturated with scorn. "Laws based on what? With what authority?"

"Well, how about democracy, for example?"

"Democracy? A two-way choice between tough shit and not-quite-so-tough shit every four or five years if you're lucky?"

"That's not what democracy is! It's not just that; it's a free press —»

"And we have that, don't we?" Andy laughs. "Except the bits that are free aren't read very much and the bits that are most read aren't free. Let me quote you: "They're not newspapers, they're comics for the semi-literate; propaganda sheets controlled by foreign billionaires who just want to make as much money as technically possible and maintain a political environment conducive to that single aim.""

"All right, I stand by that, but it's still better than nothing."

"Oh, I know it is, Cameron," he says, sitting back and looking slightly shocked at being so misunderstood. "I know it is; and I know that what powerful people can get away with, they will get away with, and if the people they exploit let them, well, in a sense that serves them right. But don't you see?" He jabs himself in the chest. "That includes me!" He laughs. "I'm part of it, too; I'm a product of the system. I'm just another human being, a bit better off than most, a bit smarter than most, maybe a bit luckier than most, but just another part of the equation, another variable that society's thrown up. So I come along and I do what I can get away with, because it seems fit to me to do it, because I'm like a businessman, you see? I'm still a businessman; I'm addressing a need. I've seen a niche in the market unfilled and I'm filling it."

"Wait, wait; hold on," I say. "I'm not buying this crap about fulfilling a need anyway, but the point about the difference between your authority and everybody else's is that you're just you; you've made up all this… this rationale by yourself. The rest of us have had to come to some sort of agreement, a consensus; we're all trying to get along because that's the only way for people to exist together at all."

Andy smiles slowly. "Numbers make the difference, do they, Cameron? So when the two greatest nations on Earth — over half a billion people — were so scared of each other they were quite seriously prepared to blow up the world, they were right ?" He shakes his head. "Cameron, I'd be prepared to bet that more people believe Elvis is still alive than subscribe to whatever flavour of secular humanism you currently think represents the One True Way for humanity. And besides, where has this consensus of yours brought us?"

He frowns and looks genuinely mystified.

"Come on, Cameron," he chides. "You know the evidence: the world already produces… we already produce enough food to feed every starving child on earth, but still a third of them go to bed hungry. And it is our fault; that starvation's caused by debtor countries having to abandon their indigenous foods to grow cash crops to keep the World Bank or the IMF or Barclays happy, or to service debts run up by murdering thugs who slaughtered their way into power and slaughtered their way through it, usually with the connivance and help of one part of the developed world or another.

"We could have something perfectly decent right now — not Utopia, but a fairly equitable world state where there was no malnutrition and no terminal diarrhoea and nobody died of silly wee diseases like measles — if we all really wanted it, if we weren't so greedy, so racist, so bigoted, so basically self-centred. Fucking hell, even that self-centredness is farcically stupid ; we know smoking kills people but we still let the drug barons of BAT and Philip Morris and Imperial Tobacco kill their millions and make their billions; smart, educated people like us know smoking kills but we still smoke ourselves !"

"I've given up," I tell him defensively, though it's true I'm dying for a cigarette.

"Cameron," he says, laughing with a kind of desperation. "Don't you see? I'm agreeing with you; I listened to all your arguments over the years, and you're right: the twentieth century is our greatest work of art and we are what we've done… and look at it ." He puts a hand through his hair, and sucks breath through his teeth. The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others."