Iain Banks: Complicity

Sweat runs into your eyes as you stand there.

"D'you get a thrill from this, do you? Is that it?" He spits. "Closet queer, are you?" He coughs, then twists his head, trying to look back at you. "Are you still there, are you? What are you doing now? Having a wank, eh? Are you?"

You smile behind the mask and fold the toilet tissue back over the vial and the needle, leaving them in the box. You slide the lid shut again and put it back in your jacket pocket. You take a couple of steps back towards the door, where he can see you.

"You filthy bastard!" he spits. "You filthy, fucking bastard! I served the best I could for thirty years! You've no right to do this! This doesn't prove anything, d'you understand? It doesn't prove anything! I'd do it all just the same if I had my time again! All of it! I wouldn't change one sentence, you fucking little cunt !"

You rather admire the old fellow's attitude. You slip through to the other room to make sure his wife is all right. She's still trembling. You leave her hanging there in the mothball-scented darkness of the old wardrobe. You go downstairs, pack the Elvis mask back into the day-pack with the rest of the stuff and leave by the back door you arrived through.

It's still light and the evening is only just starting to turn chilly as you walk down the back path beneath a deep blue sky ridged with high, dark clouds. A cool wind comes in off the sea and you pull your jacket collar tight.

Your hands still smell of rubber, from the gloves.

I turn in the whisky story, with a teaser paragraph at the end promising further revelations concerning arm-twisting moves being made by the big corporate booze-barons to silence the brave little whisky wizards. Meanwhile I try to work out what's going on in the long-running mole story; the Ares story (Ares the god of massacre, according to the mythology dictionary in the paper's library). I throw «Jemmel» at the databases but they draw a blank. Even Profile throws up its silicon hands in defeat.

"Cameron! It's yourself!" Frank informs me, indubitably. "So you thought you'd put in an appearance; well, well. Hey; guess what the spell-check thinks Colonsay should be?"

"No idea, Frank."

""Colonic"!"

"Hilarious."

"And Carnoustie?"

"Hmm?"

""Carousing"!" He laughs. ""Carousing"!"

"Even funnier."

"By the way, Eddie wants to see you."

"Oh."

Eddie the Ed is a wee, wizened sandy-haired man of fifty-five or so who wears half-moon glasses on his pointy nose and always looks like he's just briefly tasted something extremely sour but is finding it actually quite amusing because he knows you're about to taste it too, soon, and for longer. Technically Eddie is only acting editor while our real Great Helmsman, Sir Andrew, is away for an indefinite period recovering from a heart attack (presumably brought on by that common editorial affliction of having too much heart).

Our resident cynic in the sports section pointed out that Sir Andrew's heart attack occurred only a short decent interval after the murder of Sir Toby Bissett back in August, and hazarded that it was a kind of pre-emptive strike to take him off the target list of what a few editors at the time half-suspected was some editor-offing loony whose next target was them personally. Well, blame a host of guilty consciences, and the confusion caused when the IRA apparently claimed responsibility for Tobe's murder, and then retracted it. No other editors were spiked (though at least that showed our assassin had a sense of humour), and anyway Eddie seems not to worry about such threats to his temporarily elevated position.

The editor's office of the Caledonian probably has one of the best views in all newspaperdom, looking out over Princes Street Gardens to the New Town, the river Forth and the fields and hills of Fife beyond, with a side-window view of the castle's best profile thrown in, just in case the occupant ever gets bored with the frontal aspect.

I have kind of a bad association with this room after an unsuccessful foreign trip last year which resulted in a visit here to see Sir Andrew. I left with my ears singed; if displaying editorial outrage was an Olympic sport, Sir Andrew would undoubtedly be on the British team and saddled with the crushing burden of being a Medal Hope. I'd have resigned there and then except I got the impression that was just what he wanted me to do.

"Cameron, come in, sit down," Eddie says. Sir Andrew is into furniture politics; Eddie is sitting on — no; housed within — a throne of a chair, all black carved wood and buttoned red leather and looking like it's supported more than one royal rear. I'm perched on the class equivalent of an honest artisan, one fabric-covered step up from stackable plastic prole. Eddie did have the decency to look uncomfortable in this piece of power-seating when he first took over the job last month, but I get the impression he's grown to like it.

Eddie leafs through a print-out on his desk. The desk isn't quite as impressive as the chair — only single-bed size rather than the king-size I suspect Sir Andrew and maybe Eddie would prefer — but it still looks fairly impressive. There's a terminal on its surface but Eddie only uses that to spy on people, watching the system as we type notes, input a story, fax outside or e-mail insults to each other.

Eddie sits back in his chair, taking off the half-moon glasses and tapping them against the knuckles of one hand. "I'm not sure about this whisky story, Cameron," he says in the perpetually pained tones of Kelvinside/Morningside Refined.

"Oh? What's wrong with it?"

"The tone, Cameron, the tone," Eddie says, frowning. "It's a tad too combative, you know what I mean? Too critical."

"Well, I'm just sticking to —»

"Aye, the facts," Eddie says, smiling tolerantly and sharing what he thinks is a private joke. "Including the fact that you obviously don't like some of the larger distilling concerns, by the sound of it." He slips his glasses back on and peers at the print-out.

"Well, I wouldn't say that's how it comes across," I say, hating myself for feeling defensive. "You're bringing the fact that you know me to this, Eddie. I don't think somebody coming cold to —»

"I mean," Eddie says, slicing through my waffle like a steak knife, "all this about the Distillers Company and the Guinness take-over. Is that strictly necessary? It's old news, Cameron."

"But it's still relevant ," I insist. "It's in there to show the way big business works; they'll promise anything to get what they want and then renege on it without a second thought. They're professional liars; it's only the bottom line that matters, only the shareholders" profits; nothing else. Not tradition or the life of communities or the people who've worked all their lives in —»

Eddie sits back, laughing. "There you go," he says. "You're writing an article about whisky —»

"The adulteration of whisky."

"— and you've got stuff in here basically saying what a lying wee shite Ernest Saunders is."

"Lying big shite; he's —»

"Cameron!" Eddie says, annoyed, taking off the half-moons again and tapping the print-out with them. "The point is that even if this wasn't very possibly libellous —»

"But nobody recovers from senile dementia!"

"It doesn't matter , Cameron! It has no place in an article about whisky."

"… adulteration," I add, sullenly.

"There you go again!" Eddie says, standing and heading to the middle of the three big windows behind him. He half-sits on the window-ledge, hands on the wood. "My God, laddie, you're a terrible one for getting bees in your bonnet, so you are."

God, I hate it when Eddie calls me "laddie'.

"Are you going to print it or not?" I ask him.

"Certainly not, as it stands. This is supposed to grace the front of the Saturday supplement, Cameron; it's for hungover people in their dressing-gowns to scatter their croissant crumbs across; the way it reads at the moment you'd be lucky to get it into the back of Private Eye ."