Iain Banks: Dead Air

Ceel appears uninjured. She looks at Merrial, then Kaj, still holding the door open for her. She steps out, wrinkling her nose at the smell. She’s dressed in blue jeans, a thick red shirt and a yellow and black hiking jacket. Hair down, spread. Hiking boots. She looks calmly angry.

‘What do you think-?’ she starts to ask Merrial, then she seems to see me properly for the first time. Oh, Jesus, don’t blow it so soon, kid. She frowns at me. ‘That’s… that’s Ken Nott. The DJ.’ She glares accusingly at Merrial. ‘What the hell’s he supposed to have done?’ The question ends on what is almost a laugh.

Merrial stays where he is, sitting on the wing of the Bentley. Kaj quietly closes the door of the Range Rover and stands beside Celia with his hands folded over his crotch, bouncer style, eyes flicking about the scene. The two guys who kidnapped me stand still, one at each of my shoulders.

‘Let’s ask him, shall we?’ Merrial said pleasantly. He looks at me. ‘So, Ken, why do you think you’re here?’

‘Mr Merrial,’ I say, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you think I’ve done, but-’

Merrial shakes his head. ‘Ah, no, Ken. You see you’ve started lying already now, haven’t you?’ He looks genuinely disappointed in me. ‘I thought you were always saying on your show how people had to be truthful, how they had to be truthful even when it hurt, but there you go, you see, the first proper answer we’ve had from you so far and it’s a flat lie, isn’t it?’

‘If, if, if,’ I stammer, for the first time since I was four. I suck in a deep breath. ‘If I’ve done something you don’t like, I’m sorry, Mr Merrial. I really am.’

Merrial shrugs, raising his eyebrows and making a pouting motion with his lower lip. ‘Well, everybody’s sorry when they get caught, Kenneth,’ he says reasonably. ‘But I think you do know why you’re here.’ His voice is quite soft.

Nothing useful I can say at this point, I suspect. I stick to swallowing. The shit is starting to go cold around my backside on the front of the seat I’m tied to. Jesus, I stink. Oh, Celia, I wish you didn’t have to see, smell, experience all this. I wish you’d run, got away, just kept on heading north or anywhere as long as it was away from this man.

‘Kaj?’ Merrial says. ‘You have exhibit A, do you?’

Kaj nods and opens the Range Rover’s rear door.

‘John,’ Celia says. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t want to be part of it. I want to go home. Now.’ She sounds composed, unflustered, but still distinctly pissed off.

‘I’d like you to stay a while yet, Celia,’ Merrial says.

‘I don’t want to stay,’ she says through clenched teeth.

‘I’m sure you don’t,’ Merrial tells her. He swings one foot a couple of times, gently tapping the flank of the Bentley with his heel. ‘But I insist.’

Kaj is holding an opened laptop computer.

Celia narrows her eyes. She takes a breath. ‘There had better,’ she says slowly, ‘be a very good reason for this, John.’ She looks about the place, sparing me a brief, pitying, slightly disgusted look. ‘You’ve kept me away from… this sort of thing until now. I always assumed that was because you knew how I might react if I was brought into contact with it.’ Her gaze snaps back to Merrial. ‘This changes things between us, John,’ she tells him. ‘You can’t go back from this. I hope you realise what you’re doing.’

Merrial just smiles. ‘Show Kenneth the evidence, would you, Kaj?’

The big blond guy holds the laptop open a metre away from me. From this angle, Celia can see the screen too. Kaj presses Return and a big grey-blue window already open on the desktop flickers into life.

Oh shit. If I hadn’t already crapped myself, I would now.

It’s the interior of the Merrials’ house; one of the landings. Daylight. First floor; I can see down the stairwell to the front door and the loo I hid in later. Only the first quarter metre of each door is visible. The alarm controls aren’t visible. There’s me, coming up the stairs in jerky every-few-seconds lo-fi slomo, the sort of thing you see on TV real-life crime programmes when they’re showing a recording of a raid on a bank or building society or a sub-post office. No sound. Looks like the shot is taken from the ceiling.

‘The cameras are inside smoke sensors,’ Merrial tells me casually. ‘In case you were wondering.’ He glances at his wife. Celia takes in a deep breath, puffing herself up. ‘I had, ah,’ Merrial says quickly, ‘one or two suspicions about things; this was a way of-’

‘You put surveillance in my home?’ Celia says, rage overflowing. ‘You didn’t even think to ask me, tell me?’

Merrial looks almost awkward. ‘Security is my concern, Celia, not yours,’ he says, not looking at her but at me. ‘It’s only in the hall and landings, not anywhere else.’

‘Have you lost your senses, man?’ Celia breathes, almost more to herself than to her husband. ‘How could you? How could you?’

Merrial doesn’t answer.

Meanwhile, on screen, in living grainy Rubbish Colour, I try various doors then disappear upstairs. The clip switches to the next floor up, and me ascending the stairs. I go into the bedroom across from Celia’s. Not exactly good portrait-quality pictures, but good enough; easily sufficient to convince a jury that that was me, all right. Especially as I’m still wearing the same fucking clothes now as I was then.

‘Okay, Kaj,’ Merrial says softly. Kaj closes the laptop and puts it back in the Range Rover. ‘So, Kenneth,’ Merrial says. ‘What were you doing in my house?’

I look at him. Swallow. I say, ‘I was wiping the tape on your answering machine.’

He tips his head. He looks mildly surprised. ‘Were you, now? And why would you want to do that?’

‘Because I left a message on it that I regretted the instant I woke up the next morning, a message I thought would get me into trouble if you heard it.’ I look around at the two gleaming cars, the pallet island, the black, unseen waters. I gulp. ‘This sort of trouble.’

Merrial nods for a moment. ‘What did the message say, Kenneth?’

‘It was insulting to you, Mr Merrial.’

‘What exactly did it say, Kenneth?’

‘I honestly can’t remember the exact words,’ I say, closing my eyes for a few seconds. ‘I swear I can’t. I was… I was very drunk when I made the call. Very drunk indeed. I’d had a bit of an emotional sort of day, to be honest.’ I attempt a hopefully infectious smile, but it seems Mr M’s empathic immune system is proof against this. ‘A friend found out that I’d been, ah, seeing his estranged wife,’ I tell him, struggling manfully on. ‘But I also discovered I’d just got out of a court case I hadn’t exactly been looking forward to. So there was, ah, a sorrow to be drowned and something to be celebrated as well. I did both, and got very drunk indeed. Obviously I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to have made the call if I hadn’t been extremely drunk. But I was, ah…’ I lick my cold, dry lips. I clear my throat. ‘Listen,’ I say, trying to look appealing. ‘I don’t suppose I could have some water, could I?’

Mr Merrial nods his head. ‘You suppose correctly, Kenneth. Go on.’

I swallow on my dry throat, grimacing. ‘What happened was that I’d found out from another of my friends what you… what you were involved in,’ I tell Merrial. ‘What your, ah, profession was, what it involved.’ I shrug, look away. ‘I felt angry that I’d played you, your wife a record. I felt, um, complicit, dirtied up, you might say. I called you to tell you this and got, ah, a little carried away, you might say. I called you things I would not call you to your face now, Mr Merrial. I, ah, I’m sure you can fill in the blanks yourself.’