Iain Banks - Dead Air

How personally and professionally embarrassing.

I got lost in the traffic for a while, submerged in memories. A dispatch rider swept past on his panniered Bandit. Oh well, I thought, if I did get fired and I couldn’t get in anywhere else, I could always get a job being a bike courier again. Or maybe Ed would take me seriously if I said I finally really really wanted to be a proper club-type DJ. Fuck, yeah; the money was good, and just because I’d been dismissive about it in the past and gone along for the fun, drugs and women didn’t mean I couldn’t try to make a go of it as a career now. Boy George could do it; why couldn’t I?

We were drawing to a stop in the Mall, pulling in to the side near the ICA.

‘What’s the problem?’ I asked.

The driver glanced in the mirror, pressed the hazard warning lights, killed the engine and turned round, handing the keys to me. I looked at them lying in my hand, wondering what the hell was going on. ‘I’d like a word, Mr Nott,’ he said (this was itself enough to have me tense up and check that the door-lock buttons were in the unlocked position), ‘but I don’t want to alarm you.’ He nodded at the keys in my hand. ‘That’s why I’ve given you them. If you want to get out, you can.’

He was about fifty; a balding, slightly overweight guy with the sort of large-framed glasses last fashionable in the early nineties and a pinched, concerned-looking face; sad-looking eyes. Otherwise fairly nondescript. His accent sounded vaguely Midlands, like a Brummie born and raised who’d lived in London most of his life. He was neatly dressed in a light-grey suit that only now was starting to look a little too well cut to be that of your standard limo driver.

‘Uh-huh?’ I said. ‘I’ll just test the door, right?’

‘Be my guest.’

The door opened easily enough and the sound of traffic and the chatter of a passing gaggle of Japanese tourists entered the cabin. I closed it again. ‘I’ll just keep my phone open here, too,’ I said warily. The driver nodded.

He offered his hand. ‘Chris. Chris Glatz.’ We shook hands.

‘So what’s going on, Chris?’ I asked him.

‘Like I say, Mr Nott, I’d like a word.’

‘About what?’

‘A matter that has, umm, fallen to me to try to resolve.’

I screwed up my eyes. ‘I’m kind of looking for specifics, here.’

He looked around. On the broad pavement under trees in front of the colonnaded white splendour of the ICA, a couple of cops were walking slowly along, eyeing us. ‘Here isn’t perfect, frankly,’ he said apologetically. ‘You suggest somewhere.’

I looked at my watch. An hour and ten before the last possible time I could get to the studio for the start of the show. ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘I’ll drive.’

If he’d taken too long, or said no, I’d have walked, but he just looked a little surprised, nodded and opened his door. I made sure the two cops got a really good look at us, waving at them and saying, ‘Morning, officers!’ They nodded, professionally.

I rang the office en route but the lines were busy. Instead I left a message with Debbie’s secretary to say I’d be late.

I parked the Lexus behind the Imperial War Museum. We got some coffees from a mobile stall and walked round to the front, under the barrels of two colossal Naval guns. Mr Glatz pulled some gloves from his coat pocket and put them on. The air had an easterly tang to it and the clouds were grey as the paint on the giant artillery pieces above us.

‘Nice car,’ I said. ‘Yours?’

‘Yes, it is. Thanks.’

‘Should have known I wouldn’t rate a Lexus from the radio station.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘So, Mr Glatz; Chris.’

‘Well, Mr Nott-’

‘Call me Ken, please.’

‘Right. Ken. Well, I’ll come straight to the point. Oh; well, first, I’d better say, this is all off the record, right?’

‘I’m not a journalist, Mr Glatz, but yes, all right.’

‘Right. Good. Now then. You’ll remember you witnessed a road traffic accident a few months back.’

‘Mm-hmm. Guy in a blue Beemer Compact, talking on his mobile, came out-’

‘That’s the one, that’s the one.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘See,’ he said, ‘Mark – the gentleman involved, Mr Southorne – is a, an occasional business partner of mine.’

‘I see.’

‘You haven’t heard of him?’

‘No, should I have?’

Glatz teeter-tottered one hand. ‘He’s fairly well known in the City. One of these flamboyant types, you know?’

Well, no, I thought, but I could imagine. He hadn’t looked very fucking flamboyant standing holding his mobile in the rain looking down at a still stunned biker lying in the gutter, but maybe that had just been shock.

‘Thing is, you see,’ Glatz said, looking pained. ‘He’s sitting on ten points. On his licence.’

I nodded. ‘The poor soul.’

‘Twelve, and he’s banned. Sure you know how it is.’

‘Of course.’

‘And, well, the thing is, Mark really needs his car. He loves his car; loves his cars. But he does a lot of driving, which he enjoys, and-’

I’d held up one hand. ‘Hold on, Chris. That was a bog-standard two-year-old Compact he was driving. If he loves cars so much-’

‘Yeah, that was just a courtesy car. His M5 was being serviced. ’

‘Ah-hah,’ I said. Ah-hah, indeed. Served me right, I thought. There I’d gone, making assumptions about the man just because he’d been driving the sort of car people bought because they wanted to say they’d got a BMW rather than because of what it actually did. In fact he had an M5. That was different. I’d test driven an M5 about a year ago; a sleek brute with four hundred horse-power. A brilliant motor, but wasted in London.

‘Look, ah, Ken,’ Glatz said, smiling awkwardly at me. ‘Frankly, I think this has been mishandled. I think that the whole way this has been approached was pretty fucking stupid.’ Another stilted smile. ‘Excuse my vernacular.’

‘Well, obviously I am shocked, but all right.’

He smiled. ‘I’m going to level with you, Ken. Thing is, you see, we’d like you to retract your witness statement, especially the bit about Mark using the mobile at the time of the accident. ’

‘Oh?’ I said. I sipped my coffee. Actually I hated this new coffee culture; people wandering around with these pint-sized cartons full of a mild, warm, watery drug it takes about twenty words and five questions just to fucking order, turning some streets in London into nothing but a procession of Starbuck’s, Aromas, Coffee Republics, Costas and… but enough. Mr Glatz was making his point. ‘We’ll get a good brief, we’ll suggest that the biker guy was going too fast, and with a bit of luck and a following wind, like they say, we’ll get Mark off. But we do need you to retract that statement, you see, Ken, because that’s the really damning bit. Without that there we might be able to swing it; with it the prosecution can walk all over us.’

I nodded. ‘Right,’ I said. A very strange, disturbing but oddly relieving idea had occurred to me. It seemed grotesquely unlikely, but then when had that ever proved a problem for reality when it was determined to serve up a squid in your custard? ‘This occasional business relationship you have with this guy Mark…’

‘Yes, Ken?’

‘In terms of above-boardness, whereabouts would we be talking here?’

Chris Glatz chuckled. ‘You’re catching on here, Ken. Frankly, pretty well below the waterline.’

‘Right, and when you say,’ I started slowly, ‘that this has been mishandled, what exactly are you referring too?’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well. When – and I hasten to add here, Ken, that I was not personally involved at this point,’ he said, holding up one hand. ‘When it was decided that my colleagues might be able to help Mark with this problem, a – how’s best to put this? – a rather extreme plan was formulated to, well, to attempt to impress upon you the fact we were serious in our commitment to aid our friend and colleague.’