Craig Russell - The Deep Dark Sleep

‘No. He’ll be fine. He might not be as bright as he was, but, hey, that’s brain damage for you. Now, listen. I reckon he’s out for a couple of minutes tops. If he starts to come round while I’m still here, I’m going to have to send him bye-byes again, understand? And that could mean he’ll spend the next fifty years pissing his pants and dribbling on his shirt. So, unless you’re not a true Glaswegian and actually do have a fondness for vegetables, you’ve got two jobs to do. The first is to put those photographs into my hands, and I mean everything: every print, every negative, everything . The second thing, and this is going to be by far the more difficult, is to convince me that I have got everything there is to get. Because, if I’m not convinced, then I’m going to get tetchy with you and Veronica here. And if I find out, after I’ve gone, that I haven’t left with everything, I will find you and your chum again, but next time I’ll come with some friends, and we’ll all have a real party.’

Again he nodded furiously and I knew from the look on his face that he would do exactly as I told him.

‘They’re in there …’ He nodded down the hall to a closed door at the far end. I grabbed him by the shirt front and heaved him down the hall, tearing the shirt in my fist. He fumbled with the keys he took from his pocket and I snatched them from him.

‘Which one?’

‘That one …’ he pointed and I saw how much his hand shook. I was beginning to get a bad feeling about this. Paul Downey just did not seem the type to mastermind this kind of blackmail scam. Nor did his boyfriend, for that matter, despite the muscles.

I opened the door and told Downey to put on the light, which he did, bathing the small room with red light. A darkroom, but my first inspection revealed it to be a swiftly improvised one. There was a table with developing materials and trays against the wall next to a small plan chest and a cupboard, and prints hung on clothes pegs from a makeshift drying line.

‘Okay, Paul, hand them over.’

He opened the cupboard and took out a shortbread tin, all red tartan and photographs of Edinburgh Castle — the Scots were the only nationality I knew that bought their own tourist tat.

I tipped out the contents: prints of the photographs Fraser had shown me and a few more, plus a blue airmail envelope stuffed with strips of acetate. The negatives. But the Macready photographs weren’t all he had in the box: there were two more sets of photographs, each partnered with a blue airmail envelope of negatives. I spread them all out on top of the plan chest. One set featured a prominent Glasgow businessman whom I recognized instantly, despite the fact he wasn’t exactly showing me his best side in the pictures. An upstanding member of the Kirk involved in charity work, which he publicized widely. In the black and white images, he appeared as a bleached mass of pale flesh in between a thin boy whom I recognized as Paul Downey and another youth.

The third set troubled me. No sex, no illegal activity, nothing that I could see would warrant payment of blackmail money. All the photographs were simple shots of a group of well-dressed men leaving what looked like a country house. The photographs had been taken from a distance and several were close-ups of one man in particular. The closeups had been taken with a zoom lens and were grainy, but from what I could see the man looked in his fifties and vaguely aristocratic in a foreign sort of way, with a goatee beard and skin that was a tone darker than his companions, even in the black and white pictures.

‘Is this everything?’ I asked Downey.

He nodded. I took a step towards him. ‘I swear!’

I looked again at the picture of the well-dressed, vaguely-aristocratic-vaguely-foreign-looking man.

‘What’s all this about?’ I asked. ‘Who is this?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Downey. He was telling the truth: I could tell from the quiver in his voice and his obvious fear that I would not be convinced by the truth. ‘I was paid to take photographs of these men. I had to hide out in the bushes. I was told to take photographs specially of the man with the goatee beard. I don’t know what it was all about.’

‘Who paid you?’

‘A man called Paisley. But I think he was working for someone else, I don’t know who. And I don’t know why anyone would pay what he paid for these photos.’

‘You’ve already delivered them?’

Downey nodded.

‘So why…?’ I nodded towards the prints and negatives.

‘We thought we could maybe make some more money out of them. There was obviously something important about these photographs and we thought there might be a chance to make a bob or two in the future.’

‘Where were they taken?’ I asked, leaving for the moment the fact that every time Downey said ‘we’ I got a funny feeling ‘we’ was more than him and Frank.

‘The Duke’s estate. The same place where we took the Macready photographs.’

I slipped the best of the close-ups into my pocket. Downey had now started to shake quite violently: the shock setting in. With some it takes all a battlefield can throw at them, with others a raised voice and the threat of worse.

There was a wooden chair in the corner of the darkroom and I told him to sit. It only took me a minute to cast an eye over the rest of the apartment, as well as checking on sleeping beauty in the hall. Truth was, I was getting a little worried about him and decided to make sure he came to before I left.

When I came back into the darkroom, I had an ordinary one hundred watt bulb that I had taken from the bathroom and I replaced the red light with it, flooding the small room with brilliance. I tipped out every drawer, tray cupboard and cubby-hole I could find, checking as I went. John Macready and his aristocratic playmate were clearly not the only subjects of Downey’s artistic bent.

I decided to do some pro-bono work and gathered every print and negative I could find, other than the ones I had been contracted to deliver, placing them in an enamel developing tray. I tossed the other two sets in and started a small bonfire, that made sure Downey and his muscle-bound chum would not be making any more from fat Glasgow businessmen or foreign-looking aristos.

‘Okay, Paul,’ I said as the photographs and negatives burned and I hauled him back to his feet. ‘I’ll take the rest with me and that will be an end to the matter, unless you want me to come back, that is.’

He shook his head.

‘But before I go, I want to know how you set it all up. The cottage and everything. It was an elaborate set-up. You plan it all?’

‘I needed the money. I owe money and I have to pay it back. I can’t now …’ He started to cry. ‘They’ll kill me.’

‘Who? Who will kill you?’

‘I owe money to loan sharks. Local hard men.’

‘So you came up with this scheme all by yourself?’

‘No. It was Iain’s idea.’

‘Iain? Iain as in bent-over-obligingly Iain? Iain the toff in the photographs? Iain, the Duke of Strathlorne’s son?’

‘We used to be close . For a while. He needs money almost as badly as I do and he came up with the plan. He knew about Macready and he came up with the idea.’

‘Why on earth would he need money desperately? His family own half the country, for God’s sake,’ I said incredulously. ‘And anyway, doesn’t he have as much … more … to lose than Macready if this all comes out? His family name … The connections …’

‘Iain said that that was exactly why they would cough up. It would be such a scandal that they would pay anything to stop it coming out. And if it did come out, I don’t think Iain would be that worried. It would destroy his father, more than him. And he hates his father.’