A Warming Death

By W.J. Blackwood

When man-made Global Warming becomes increasingly exposed as perhaps the greatest fraud ever visited on mankind, the anti-hero of this book lashes out recklessly at this threat to the foundation of his power and position. This is the story of a man of our time. An environmental champion committed to the fight against Global Warming with a perfect public image but a background of a dark and treacherous rise to power. Someone who routinely uses for his own purposes all whom he encounters, hides it cleverly but is despised by those he has crossed. A man with a debasing attitude to women who manages to ultimately pose as a tragic widower. 
With no understanding of the mechanics of Global Warming, he nevertheless uses it as the means of his self-promotion. He has no opinion as to the validity of the concept but accepts the growing absurdity and hysteria of its application. When he encounters evidence that others may be vastly more cynical and corrupt in their exploitation of the crusade to save the planet, his impotent fury results in an increasing retreat from reality.  
He becomes too wild for the Establishment to handle so, when he is murdered, they quietly abandon him. Set in London, the West of Scotland and several other global locations, it is a cautionary story of the seemingly invincible who ignore the fact that somebody may be keeping a tally.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: May 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789011326

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Contents

1

The Murder of Chalmers

In the town of Oban on the west coast of Scotland the local authority buildings stand just a little away from the town centre on a small elevation set back from the sea. They are clustered around the old town council offices which are now made humble by the growth of new additions. The old building is a mock baronial Victorian structure which was never distinguished and whose red sandstone ornamentation is beginning to give ground to the salt wind of over a century. Restoration is an act for which the council are not inspired to find the money. Yet in a world in which they contrive to interfere in every minor building alteration and slap innumerable restrictions on tampering with anything of the least antiquity, neither do they dare to tear it down and rebuild. That they do not restore it is not from a true appreciation of its lack of architectural merit, for such sensibilities are mostly beyond them, but arises from a feeling of total alienation from its ornamentation and stained glass. These windows contain things long gone from municipal fashion like the varied coats of arms and assorted classical links appearing in them. Such things also adorn the frieze of carved stone around the waist of the building. The Latin and Old French contained in them mean nothing to all but a few of the present elected representatives of the people and not very many of them can read and truly understood even the occasional example in Gaelic. The creators of this place evidently moved in a vastly different world from those present today.

Inside, it is and always was, a gloomy place of extensive varnished wood and further over ornamentation. The Council Chamber itself has some formal mock-gothic grandeur but the council has not done much to change it and what they have done is for the worse. The representatives of the people take all too readily to an adherence to the partially understood best taste of the age. Thus carpets have appeared where once polished floorboards were and these carpets are of the best. In a little while they will be ripped up and abandoned and the boards will be planed and polished again at some expense as the middle-class taste changes. Tables, lecterns, a throne like central construction and lesser seating have been ordered without thought to cost but the style is a strange modern interpretation of half Nordic, half Celtic design and the wood is some pale hardwood which is at odds with the dark panelling and roof beams.

In the surrounding areas it has also suffered from the cac-handedness of all actions planned by committee. The place is full of fire extinguishers and hand rails, large notices direct everywhere and proscribe and advise the most stupid on many topics. Random doors have been replaced by an assortment of modern styles through recent decades and odd sections of corridor have had panelling removed and replaced by plasterboard which has soon become cracked and worn. Their floors have been covered in thick non-slip plastic of some sort which also has prematurely aged. Self-congratulatory declarations of selective achievements and mission statements together with quality standard awards - each with the council logo and slogan (a stylised castle in five vertical black stripes over a stylised sea in four wavy horizontal blue stripes all under a stylised mountain in three receding triangles of purple and Together for the Future in the two languages) - are also prominently set before the visitor. There is everywhere the disguised but still tangible sense that this place is one with the whole tarnished realm of bus stations, hospital emergency areas and citizen’s advice centres.

It is a Friday lunch time on a warm day in July and the place is almost deserted. The breeze is in the east and uninterrupted sunshine beams in through open windows on workplaces with P.C.s , keyboards and monitors. Each place is adorned with personal accessories of small soft toys, postcards and an occasional potted plant. A scattering of secretaries and junior clerks sit around with their sandwiches while most are away at the canteen having their subsidised Thai-style chicken curry and chips. A significant contingent of financial controllers, I.T. operatives and planning officers of assorted rank are having a bar lunch in various nearby pubs before an afternoon of doing nothing. A mild air moves through deserted passageways and staircases from the open windows. It gently disturbs loose posters on the walls and causes a faulty fire door to knock softly and intermittently against its frame.

In a large office off a deserted corridor on the top floor of the newest part of this agglomeration of buildings is a tall and gaunt man seemingly in his late fifties and dressed in a smart but rather dated suit and still with the jacket on despite the warmth. He is pacing the room all alone and has the look of a narrow and harsh schoolmaster of an earlier age. His hair is almost completely grey but hardly thinning at all and his face is colourless without the weather-beaten tan of the outdoor man or the incipient rubicund blotching of the indoor drinking man. It is narrow with a long thin nose and small blue eyes which are anything but mirrors of the soul but stare blankly outwards at all times defying those who meet their gaze to guess anything about what is going on just behind them. He is perfectly at home in this world, this is Mr Colin Chalmers, head of the not-for-profit institution, Sustainable Development. His position combines power and a lack of responsibility for it in a ratio rarely exceeded in history. He has assumed, as a right, the access to this office as he knows its present occupant. He has borrowed it when he knows it will be vacant to make a call on his mobile for which he needs privacy. Its usual occupant, the present head of the council, a councillor McHardy, is in the Campbell Arms having a formal lunch in the dining room away from the professional employees in the lounge bar and while they guzzle their bar lunches and beer he is having seafood and white wine with a certain contact. It is no matter to Chalmers for he knows exactly who the Chief Executive is lunching with and has a very good idea of what they are discussing. It is a Dutchman who owns a hotel below a hill where they are thinking of building a lot of windmills. McHardy knows this but the Dutchman doesn’t, and they are quietly circling each other over the compulsory purchase which should emerge in a year’s time. Chalmers has always made a point of knowing such things. The door is slightly ajar and the window is open. The curtain waves in the breeze and beyond is a sunlit view over the roofs and out across the bay to the distant mountains of the Isles. An incoming ferry is manoeuvring to take the quay and the noise of activity at the fish dock and the traffic round the harbour only slightly intrude up here on the sixth floor. Chalmers continues to pace back and forward between the window and the desk and is dictating into his mobile rather than having any kind of conversation. He pauses at the window and then moves back towards the desk before turning to the window again and gazing blankly at the scene outside. He is impatiently bringing the call to a senior Civil Servant in Edinburgh to an end.

The site at Ardbreaknish that Anderson Industries are buying will shortly be classified for housing or we can find some excuse for making it a preservation area – find an iron age burial or decide it is home to some bird or flower – McHardy will see to that.

He pauses and the person he is speaking to gets in with some expression of doubt, but it is instantly quashed.

Because he will. You don’t have to worry why – he just will – that’s all OK? He just will and that leaves you to help with where Anderson will turn next. So in anticipation of him turning to Edinburgh and trying to get round all this you must do what’s required.

He is talking with restrained politeness and pauses again and seems to be going to go on in the same tone but before the other end can come in again he shrieks into the phone,Just do it – just damn well do it!

Without waiting for any come back he cuts the call off and replaces the mobile in his inside pocket.

He pauses just an instant longer at the window and his little blue eyes look up and over the scene like a CCTV surveying an underground car park. He turns with new impatience to leave in pursuit of the absent McHardy. The quick swivel on his heels brings the little eyes around the room and directly on to a man rushing towards him. A man, whom Chalmers dully reflects must have been keeping very quiet till now. He had thought that and only just started with why he should be running towards him like this without uttering a sound when the man contacts his chest with outstretched fists. His thoughts go to who this man is and although he seems familiar to Chalmers, his exact identity he can’t recall. The impact of the pushing fists propels him violently backwards and he contemplates the look of simple functional resolve on the man’s face as the window sill painfully contacts the back of his thighs and he begins to rotate through the opening. Only now, in an accelerating rush of thought, does he realise what is happening and recognises the terrible intent. He tries to reach out for the frame but by the time his hands extend that far he is almost upside down in space and his heels are just dragging free of the sill. He sees quite clearly that he has gone in one long drastically decelerating second from a moment of normality to one where the end is just under him and but a few more slow seconds away. The slowing of time continues as he starts a measured spin downwards and experiences true weightlessness and the accelerating air past his face. There is a brief effort to go back that second and to recall exactly who this man is. The why is instinctively but only generically understood and does not surface for further consideration, and even this is only half formed and cannot proceed to the who before it is displaced by an incredible kaleidoscopic deluge of half formed fragments of his life over a background of terror which boils up from panic then vaporises into pure insanity and …. but there is only so much that can be crammed into a space of a few seconds even when the internal clock has cranked up to this incredible pace in its efforts to compensate, and in normal time, the physics proceed, and he lands in a municipal rockery and fatally displaces most internal organs, breaks several major bones and sprays his brains over the litter among the miniature rhododendrons and heathers when his skull instantly decelerates against a large piece of ornamental quartz and spits wide open.

2

McIvor is Appointed

Fortunately for the prospects of justice, at that moment, a tourist from Sheffield was leaning back on the railings by the front. At the end of a direct line from the window, down a narrow lane between Victorian tenements which opened onto the promenade, this man was leaning on the railing above the sea facing back upwards along the lane. The wide high window with the curtain waving out of it had his attention for an instant as his eyes shifted lazily around. He saw very clearly what happened. He saw Chalmers fall. He then saw the figure of a man remain briefly in just the place that the victim’s image had occupied before he retreated back and down to hide himself. It was like an imprint peeled from its place to leave the form of itself as a shadow which at once faded back into the dark of the room leaving the curtains still waving and catching the sun outside. The visitor started running in a panic in no particular direction before he stopped a police car by simply standing in front of it and was driven round to the council offices without a thought for his wife or his rendezvous with the coach. He was already demonstrating a pride in ownership of the crime which was to be swelled when he found that he was the sole witness and would grow with him through all the interviews with the police to come. For ever after, he would have the sense that not only was he somehow shrewdly placed and observant rather that randomly stopping and chancing to glance upwards, but also that he should be proud of playing such a major part in the process of justice which was attempting to put right the social continuum after such an outrageous violation of his safe and contained world. He would tell this story over and over and would think it the most remarkable thing to have happened to him in all of his life.

When the police car had rounded the roundabout and entered the street of the Council Chambers it was apparent that the event had been discovered already. There was a small crowd around the entrance to the alley where Colin Chalmers has come to earth. This alley was a wide, smoothly paved and flowerbed-lined little stub of a street as far as the entrance to the council staff car park in the rear of the building, thereafter it was a litter-dotted cobbled lane all the way down to the front. A group of municipal accountants on the way back from the pub had made the discovery. It was evident even from the street what had happened and only one of them went forward to look closer. He recoiled and was sick in the bushes and reeled back and had the sense not to allow any others forward when the staff started to assemble. Some inside however had a better view than any when they came to the open windows to see what the commotion was below. Several junior secretaries had hysterics and could not be comforted. On the street, a little belatedly, someone thought to call the police. He was not much over twenty and was walking away very slowly, stunned by his only contact with mortality, when the police arrived before he was able to use his phone.

The two young policemen made the man from Sheffield wait in the car and went forward through the crowd to make the official inspection. They remembered their lectures from training school as they faced their first major crime, allowing that the witness was right. They do not approach too closely, just near enough that it becomes obvious to them in turn that there is no need for urgent action here. They were already well inured to the spectacle of the interior of the human body from experience of road accidents. They were thankful that all groaning, screaming and twitching was over with here and took the smashed head with a calm detachment which had already formed up as the barrier they need between such things and reflection. One of them stood guard over the corpse while the other went back to the car, attempting to disperse the crowd on the way, and called for help while assuring the witness that his statement will be taken in due course.

The town of Oban was instantly mobilised. The story rapidly spread and it reached Chalmers’ sister who still stayed in town but had not seen him since his father’s funeral years before and prior to that, not since the eighties. She took no interest in the circumstances of his end but merely noted that it had happened. She had no interest in him and no interest in knowing anything about him even to the nature of his death. Her only action was to take the ferry out to the island three day later to tell her mother who was in a home there. She was very old and frail but mentally alert. She saw her daughter appear unannounced when phone calls were the normal routine and guessed that something of note had occurred. As her daughter approached her bed, she anticipated her,

Is it Colin – has something happened to Colin?

On being told he had died she too had no interest in how it had come about as he had been dead for an age to her.

The police turned out almost all their force lest anyone later claim that any effort had been spared. The news was round folk inside the hour. The many who knew the remains as more than a name searched their heart to find some sympathy but could not manage it. Even the tourists were speaking of it and deciding that this was strange incident for such a picturesque corner. They noted to themselves how they would tell the story when they got home. They were all a little subject to the Sheffield tourist’s sense of propriety over the incident.

The local police set about things after consulting the book but there was no book to tell them how to deal with the looming connections upwards and outwards into the power structure and they were already contemplating an appeal for help such that, within a very short time, Glasgow had taken over. It was on the news instantly before even the simple notification calls from the local police had been able to be passed up to Chief Constable Bingham through the selected few in the various sub-strata who had been given the power to bother those above them. The Chief Constable was at a security conference at an isolated 5-star country house hotel where such affairs must be conducted. He liked being able to excuse himself from the other delegates on being quietly interrupted in a session. This was not because he shunned mixing with other important figures or doubted the utility of their convoluted drawn-out debates and therefore sought a chance to escape. If he had been of that frame of mind he would never have been promoted to where he was, indeed he had made a pointed decision at the start of his career to determine the way the wind was blowing, to know what those who mattered thought, and to follow that direction. His nature had dictated this as a simple practical method without any reflection whatever. Now, thinking of who was dead, he did not welcome the task ahead of him as it was a major breach of his comfortable regime of swimming cleverly with the tide and would involve work in having to make certain he could correctly read the signals as to how this event was viewed. He was going to have to read how the political tide would flood and accommodate itself around this new object and he would have to arrange that the investigation was seen to be done right in the eyes of those who had repositioned themselves slightly in accordance with this subtly altered flow. Not particularly that the investigation was effective or conclusive but just that it was acceptable and that no damage to his career would result. But these things disquieted him and were not behind his brief elation as he left the conference taking in the quiet murmur of speculation from the delegates, rather it was, and this remarkably for such a wooden man, the image of himself striding forward, definitely more important for the moment than all the other important people. This was all the shallow boost that his ego needed.

He went to his room and assembled his belongings and what sensitive material he had with him and crammed it into his briefcase in case some underling had to subsequently pick it up, for he was routinely obsessed by security matters, but he was even more obsessed with anyone having the least insight into his life as a mortal man. He then went quickly out to the waiting car and was driven off to the city. (There was no potentially embarrassing material to be dealt with as he was too unimaginative or cautious or perhaps both to have any skeletons in his cupboard.)

On the way back, D.I. Neilson who had come out with the car from Glasgow having declared it necessary to brief the Chief Constable as soon as possible, was plainly driven by his furious ambition and wanted to have this case and be first in with his pitch for it. He was however behaving at his calm and efficient best and believed he was betraying nothing whereas his eagerness was clear although the Chief Constable only slowly noticed it for what it was and started equally slowly to think that perhaps he would let him have his way and be in charge of whatever this turned out to be. D.I. Neilson still believed that the way to the top was to get the most difficult tasks and be seen to succeed at them. Throughout the journey, he kept up a continual commentary on the incident which he had assembled from several hurried calls before leaving. He had also put together a brief potted biography on Chalmers. It was scant as he had not even had time to dig into the databases and see what there was but he made it sound authoritative. He went on almost without a break all the way into town stretching out the absolute minimum he knew and forming it into the most profound and comprehensive sounding briefing, the kind that might be delivered were the case almost solved and a mere summing up being delivered before the decision to arrest was made. Bingham did not object and listened patiently putting in an obvious question at times for the sake of being seen to support and endorse. This was an act they were going through and they could not go through it at too great a length for Bingham. This was the whole process well begun. The whole process of ensuring that he came out ahead by following the procedures and the fact that it would perhaps come no nearer to deciding that Chalmers had indeed been propelled though the window far less even starting to determine who it was that had done the pushing, mattered not at all. There was also the political dimension but he knew that would have to wait for the office and some discrete calls which had to be made. The car arrived in the city and they used the blue light to get them though the jams on the motorway and eventually they swept into the most secure compound behind Headquarters and then hurried unannounced through the building and up to the Chief Constable’s suite of offices. He went in and gravely disappointed D.I. Neilson by not summoning a council of war, and instead telling him he needed some time alone and would send for him in due course.

He called Oban and determined what he already knew, that nothing new had emerged. He then put down the phone and sat in isolation. There was just a little vital time to pause and consider. He always took advantage of this when available. The beginnings of working out what to do were interrupted by a call put through to him although he had asked his staff not to disturb him. A surprisingly estuarine English voice on the other end announced itself as Webb of the Security Services. Bingham was at once almost elated and definitely relieved. Before the voice had got any way into its brief message he knew that he was going to be given the political indicators, not of course any insight into their causes and background, but that was of no account. At once he knew he was going to be directed; whether explicitly, or more likely obliquely, and the way to go was going to be indicated to him. He need only ensure the details and that he was quite good at. All this had flooded though his head and then the voice continued with a flurry of strangely over-familiar banalities which were delivered as if to one who was certain to agree with everything which was going to follow. But then what did follow was only that he was going to fly up immediately and would see him the next morning in the lounge of an Airport hotel. Bingham knew that there was now no panic.

Accordingly, to have on the record that there had been no delay, he at once began a flurry of directions on the case. He dispatched some uniforms northwards who were not really needed but were sent in order to be seen to be sent. And most importantly he issued a press statement covering in detail all this activity but not nominating anyone in charge of the operation, not D.I. Neilson and certainly not himself, he left that to be puzzled over and it was until the next morning. He went home late but much more content with the outcome so far. He was noticeably distracted through that evening at home and not by the meeting the next morning but by a growing aversion to the thought of D.I Neilson possibly being in charge of the practicalities. He thought him naïve because he maintained such a forward attitude. Genuine enthusiasm born of itself alone he was just about able to recognise but he could never understand enthusiasm which was thought to serve the same drive to succeed as he himself was subject too. He had never rated himself as particularly intelligent, only cunning enough, and so he had long ago decided that D.I. Neilson must be naïve and fundamentally stupid despite his growing track record. But he was also jealous of him. It was possible that he might succeed with this thing. Nothing was really known yet of the circumstances and Neilson might just pull off a coup. It might even overshadow him.

Still thus mentally engaged he drove himself, out of uniform, to the unlikely venue the next morning. He hung around the lounge for a minute or two and was beginning to be annoyed by the whole charade when an over-weight and slightly greasy man in his mid-thirties approached him boldly holding out his hand, introduced himself and incredibly addressed Bingham by his first name. He was casually but tasteless dressed, suggested a seat and called loudly to a waitress for some coffee in the same estuarine voice he had used on the phone; apparently familiar but essentially insincere and indifferent. He launched at once into what he was there for. In the manner he would use to deliver a monologue on the trials of getting a garage to deal with the faulty card that determined the ignition timing on his four by four, he rapidly explained that the ‘powers that be’ had decided to leave the investigation with Bingham. They trusted him and he need only report his progress through normal channels. He paraphrased this several times but added no more. Bingham got only one impression from this utterly informally delivered story, that there was nothing other in it than a declaration that all was his, but it said to him that those same powers seemed not to be overly concerned at the prospects of success. No demands that everything had to be thrown at the case as it was considered vital to have it solved. Nothing of that kind at all. One set of facts imparted and one impression apprehended – no more. And after a modest definition of himself as only a messenger he rose like an insurance salesman eager for a more profitable meeting and leaving the impression of Its all go! having been said without its actual utterance he dashed off to wherever he was dashing off to. The waitress arrived with the coffee just as Bingham was himself leaving and he paid her and told her it would not be needed before, as always, taking the receipt for expenses. He was lost in thought all the way back to the office but decided only one thing. As soon as he got in he put in motion a seemingly routine check on the man he had met and found that he was what he seemed. He was then over all anxiety. The case would go just as he desired for he had been told that in effect, nobody who mattered cared much how it went. That was why it was being left to him. It was all over bar the process. Nobody cared about this beyond the process. Except, he resolved, that naïve, dynamic idiot Neilson. He would never do for this one. But D.C.I. McIvor would fit. D.C.I. McIvor was good but had grown weary and cynical and had even stopped sniping at Bingham for giving all his time to going through the motions and for having spread downwards the same paralysing philosophy. He was good but only showed it now when there was a truly innocent victim. He did not stir his soul very much when one scum knifed another. He had grown to accept that this was the way of things and that he would soon be out again ducking under the crime scene tape on some other bleak urban wasteland. Bingham calculated that this victim would fall a long way short of that description of truly innocent and if McIvor did show a spurt of his old form and get on to the political scandal that he presumed he had been warned not to uncover, then some obstruction would just have to be thrown his way. It was Bingham’s nature to dread such an uncovering and in these cases instinctively he would not even speculate on any upward connections that were possibly there for the unravelling.

D.C.I. Roderick McIvor was on his way to just such a routine engagement. The passing of yet more cannon-fodder in the war of drugs or gangs or both. Or possibly just a simple spontaneous eruption of urban machismo. He had laboured under his improbably old-fashioned Highland name among the criminal sub-culture of Glasgow throughout his career. Now, his present customer base, noting his name when they noted it at all, mostly for purposes of revenge fantasies, had to do just that, they would write it painfully slowly and fold it carefully into a pocket. They were all a.k.a. themselves; dull or brutal or just stupid names. Mostly single syllable inventions without a hint of subtlety that seemed to revel in their base origins, celebrate the very nature of the empty image it was their purpose to support or the false boasts it was their function to advertise. They even spoke a language that had hardly existed when McIvor first dealt with their like all those years ago. They seemed to have developed a dialect which similarly celebrated its own gross limitations. This was no argot of wit or rebellion bred from forced circumstances. It was just crushingly vapid and ugly and repetitive. He told himself in more balanced moments of attempted reconciliation that language like everything else changed and swallowed the current wisdom that it was only different but could not get himself to believe it. The native humour of the City was not going to be extinguished by the encroaching blandness of the middle classes from suburbia nor was it going to fall to estuarine whinge and whine from the south east, it was going to be battered out of the people by the track-suited army of scum who bred too fast and were taking over the streets, the pubs, the malls. Such were the dystopian thoughts that ran through McIvor’s head as he drove to the scene of a body discovered on the edge of an estate to the east of the city. As the rows of public housing and tower blocks of the fifties and sixties went slowly by, half boarded up, covered with graffiti and with ghosts of former gardens showing as scraps of sickly hedges sprouting from beaten earth, the speculation surfaced briefly as to whether such surroundings bred scum. However, the iron returned at once and he thought of the blocks of half as solidly constructed flats which were going for £300,000 only two miles away and remembered the remainder of ordinary people behind the scattering of neat curtains above him who could not possibly afford them to get away from this place. He pulled up before the crowd which had formed and made his way through the ever-present army of children jeering a learned hatred in the usual volley of the usual curses to the uniforms around the line of tape flickering joylessly in the mild drizzle-smirring breeze. A tent across the scene had already been erected. McIvor negotiated the poor clumps of grass between patches of bare ground with a scattering of abandoned electric-soup bottles and high-octane lager cans. The tent was over against a high gable end of a block from which much of the roughcasting had fallen away. He paused and looked in through the flap of the tent, past a couple of white-suited forensics, for a glimpse of its contents. It now seemed quite natural in these surroundings to see a young thug bled white through many stab wounds and looking only pathetic, it had become no more odd than a corpse perceived in the chaos of a battlefield. He knew the man and woman in the white suits but only asked if there was anything obvious to report. He knew, and they knew that there would be nothing unusual here but he had to ask. He knew, and they knew that the victim had been dispatched almost casually with a blade, the form and depth of which, thousands in the city would match. Which vital organ or artery it had penetrated to complete its work would be carefully determined but would not matter. In the real world corpses are never poisoned in suburbia then multiply perforated as an afterthought and transported to Scumland for the improbably obscure reasons which make crime novels possible. From his pockets they already had an identity which eliminated the tedium of having to determine it. There was also a single bag of white powder. Left as a token that this was not just a random killing but one with real significance in Scumland? McIvor saw how little the monumental landmarks of that country mattered to those in all the mainstream worlds. For all they would rage against the circumstances or condemn the victim or empathise with the culture or despise the whole class, whatever extreme was the reaction, it would be a brief spasm, quickly forgotten. But this murder would be a culture defining event which would pass instantly into the mythology of Scumland to join a string of other sordid local happenings where no other touchstones existed; where even the idea of recognising anything at all from almost the whole range of humanity’s totems, whether of the right or left, religious or humanist, ancient or modern was not even considered. It was murders and feuds for history and trash TV and trash pop for culture. He wondered, as he had many times before, at the consequences of the collision should they ever get adventurous and go as far as knocking on the doors of the trendy west end or of materialist suburbia or the gentrified liberal towns roundabout in the country. What would happen when they turned up with no recognition of anything the citizens held inviolable in their mental world picture. What would they all do then. It would be worse than the arrival of little green men. In vague notions like this did McIvor find his only source of justification. He saw himself as contributing some very ineffectual effort towards separating that day from this.

McIvor went through the motions of command although most of it was so routine that it could already have been underway without him. He delegated two uniforms to find and inform the next of kin. They went off not overly dismayed by their task as they already anticipated what they would encounter from the usually present mother only; a loud but peculiarly resigned wailing. Once they left a vast assembly of absent family members would miraculously assemble. They would hardly be able to hide a pride that one of their own would forever be elevated to significance in that universe. This would be instantly followed by histrionics and vows of vengeance and a start at preparing an excessive and mawkish funeral. McIvor also started the routine of being seen to be doing something. Other uniforms were sent to trawl for witnesses. The scum he knew would have seen nothing even if they had, and the surviving net curtains would know absolutely nothing but would accuse a dozen likely names that McIvor could probably name himself and, amongst whom, he knew he would almost certainly find the wielder of the knife. Having done that he left it to others to oversee the removal of the body and anticipated the predictable post-mortem and crime scene reports. He suddenly felt both dismayed and irritated by the banal futility of the event and their response to it. Even if they had a result tomorrow it would simply happen again and again. Had he been a true drinking man he would have made some deception and headed for a licensed premises, but having reached late middle age still managing to associate drink with the celebration of good times rather than the suppression of bad ones, he went back to his car for a return to the office and anticipated an afternoon of foul temper being bloody rude to all those under him.

He went quickly through the front office and up to the detective’s suite which he also swept through before going on up the corridor and into his office, slamming the door after him. He sat at his desk and started the process of making up his mind how to occupy the rest of the day. Retreat into the tasks of bureaucracy which were the essence of being seen to play the game, or attempt something solid, no matter what, towards the present case. Not some tiny attempt at stopping the drugs trade, for initiatives like that were the product of much higher ranks than his and always ran into the sand after a little show of effort before they were replaced by some other latest scheme, but just a bit of effort to pretend effectively to himself that it was worthwhile and do something with the direct aim of finding who propelled the steel which went through the human flesh to rend a vital organ. Just to do his job as it appeared on paper and get the limited satisfaction that would come of it. But being seen to do something brought recognition, getting actual results was not so vital. The ways to be seen to do something were endless and there were levels of it for all ranks: paperwork for constables but much more diverse and complex paperwork for the higher ranks. Above all there was the universal contemporary obsession with examining, dissecting and analysing. The universal thinking that labelled every anguished scream for common sense and appeal to utility, as judgmental and opinionated. Having falsely drawn its sanctity from such labelling it was therefore untouchable and was free to analyse methods and techniques to an extent that was self-sustaining; it was always possible to find new levels that in turn called for further deconstruction for no end point could be reached as that called for a judgement which, as an article of faith, was now an evil thing, and therefore there was no alternative to endless dissection. There were a number of such projects current and participation in any one of them, especially those linked however weakly to the context of the latest corpse, would advance McIvor’s status. He was not completely immune from burying himself in such nonsense and that, unlike the more desperate moods the job produced, was always an occasion for drinking. He could leave the office celebrating in his head and in his own small way, the completion of something that really he knew was worthless. At such times he was prone to drowning not his sorrows, but his little fake elations, but at home and from the sideboard.

The sense of futility was gaining the upper hand as he anticipated the utterly predictable medical and crime scene reports and he was turning to a half-completed contribution to Urban Substructure and Streetscape Types and their effects on Drug Redistribution Methodologies when his phone rang and he was invited to see the Chief Constable right away. He wondered what he was going to get this time. He anticipated the latest long and rambling appeal, amiable enough but with the hint of malice, which would draw his attention to this or that newest scheme with an invitation to assist but never any specific instructions as to what was required of him, or none that McIvor could ever pick up on. Maybe they were there but he had just not learned the correct management language to detect them. This was his thinking as he went up in the lift to the top floor; but things rarely come about as we anticipate.

He was received surprisingly warmly by Bingham who, incredibly, called him Roddy and gently asked him to take a chair. McIvor was instantly embarrassed by this performance even before it had properly started. Bingham just about managed to pick up on his reaction but it was a feature of the man that he could neither adequately act a part he had set for himself nor abandon it when it occasioned awkward responses from his target. He just ploughed on and actually convinced himself of his sincerity which left his audience half converted to the point where confusion and embarrassment are replaced by mystification which has no resolution. He asked, obviously only as something to lead in to whatever was coming, for the latest on this morning’s corpse. While McIvor was going over the details in a voice that said the he knew it didn’t matter, he was thinking to himself that Bingham must want a big favour and was trying to prepare himself for the hidden drawbacks in whatever temptation was about to be laid before him. When it came Bingham was direct,

I am certain that you have heard of Colin Chalmers’ fall from the council offices in Oban the day before yesterday.

McIvor thought, what has this to do with me … what does he want .. he can’t possibly….

Well the local man is out of his depth and it has been indicated to me that somebody more able should take charge of the thing.

He must mean me and he is laying down flattery with that stuff about the locals not being up to it and what’s that bit about it being indicated – it was not his decision – but why would he let that slip. Does he mean to convey the importance of the thing or imply a threat by the fact that it came from above….

So I’ve decided to send you up there for a while to make sure everything’s being done right.

So it is me. Why would he let it be known that it came from above. A mistake or a deliberate attempt to draw us all in to one team directed from on high. And if that is the reason he must think it is hell of an important to sacrifice his bloody monstrous fucking ego in front of me to….

My first assumption was simple accident or at worst suicide which is bad enough..

Bad enough – so…………… murder?

But with him being a notable public figure with all his background and what have you there may need to be a certain amount of discretion shown - a great deal of liaison with myself before we reveal anything that may be behind things.

Behind what – so now he thinks he did jump?

Not as I say that I think there is anything to look into at all its just that we have report of a shadowy figure who may have pushed him.

Nothing to look into – the press is never going to believe that such a figure just fell out a window – I’m going to be forever the bastard that fronted the establishment cover up of….

"We do, as I said, need to send somebody who can be discrete about anything that may just come to light but I simply do not think that there is anything to come to light. There is nothing very definite about this figure in the shadows who could have pushed him at all. After all we can face facts here and say its most likely a suicide - though what he was doing in Oban is the thing- you’ll need to get that out of the way first. But just between the two of us, it is not in the nature of these people – almost politicians - to commit suicide over anything…

Christ you’re nothing but a petty politician yourself…

That might be in their background. These characters normally just brazen it out. But in this case of course as I’ve indicated it will be for you to look into - and see, explore what might be the reasons as it were. The local man.. and he paused to read his name at this point, Milne, ah yes, Inspector Alec Milne.

You should remember the poor bastard you sent him there to vegetate yourself after he crossed you over that case of…

I think you will remember him, didn’t you work with him at one point, he is competent enough but as I say I need somebody there I can trust.

Christ more and more flattery….you can’t bloody trust me …what’s going on is his little grey cells…

I’m giving your latest murder to Neilson. You can take the rest of the day off.

And I want you up there tomorrow. Just take the train and we can arrange a car for you there and somebody to drive you around for local knowledge."

Hells teeth…the V.I.P . treatment…and what makes him suppose that there is anything to find locally…surely London is where….

Here is all we have so far, and he almost flung a file of papers at McIvor, all the material, such as it is, is in there. I’m sorry but there is not much. Milne may have a little more for you tomorrow but I doubt it as he has been told to back pedal until you get there

And bloody glad of it he is no doubt…

Again, between you and me you can just look upon this as a bit of a diplomacy job. No need for any great work I would have thought. Nothing much to actually do as I’ve indicated. It is just that the right approach must be maintained and I want you to keep fairly close liaison with me here and no need to tell Milne absolutely everything after all….just look upon it as a bit of a break up there, after all its not undeserved after the hard slog I’ve seen you putting in on your various cadavers.

Fuck, a holiday now – a bloody holiday…and you’ve absolutely no knowledge how much work I’ve been putting in so this is all bullshit… what the hell is he on about…has he really gone mad that he can expect me to swallow this.

Just off you go home now and have a read at this stuff and I’ll expect a call from you later tomorrow when you get there.

The Chief Inspector rose and McIvor rose and they drifted towards the door. McIvor got a chance to speak at last but all he came out with were banalities which are not worthy of record as his mind was darting about among the possibilities which might be before him and could not allocate any time to composing any meaningful speech. He did not actually say that he would do his best or anything quite so humble but it did not matter as Bingham

did not actually listen to anything he said before they parted company.

McIvor went past his office briefly and assembled what little he had on his latest pierced corpse and handed it into the detective’s