Banks, Iain - Complicity by Banks Iain

Author:Banks, Iain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2003-01-19T21:56:37+00:00

Complicity

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Table of Contents

Chapter 8 : FRIENDLY FIRE

I head south after what I think's called a hearty breakfast and an even heartier cough. I fuel up at a wee petrol station just before the A9 and phone Fettes while the tank's filling. Sergeant Flavell sounds a little odd when I talk to him and tell him I've been to Jersey for the day but I'm on my way back to Edinburgh. I ask him if I can have my new lap-top back and he says he isn't sure. He suggests I come straight to Fettes; they want to talk to me. I say okay.

South on the A9, sound track Michelle Shocked, The Pixies, Carter and Shakespear's Sister. I catch a bit of radio while I'm changing cassettes just north of Perth and hear something called I'll Sleep When I'm Dead by Bon Jovi which isn't a patch on Uncle Warren's song of the same name and makes me more than reasonably annoyed. Into Edinburgh by late lunch-time, past the signs trumpeting the up-coming Euro-summit. I don't know how they've done it but the typography on the signs makes me want to pronounce the word Edin-burg, and I live in the place, for God's sake.

Christ in a bucket: independent bastarding deterrent, The Genuine Shit Article, cold fucking filtering, Edin-burg, Edin-borow, Sleep when I'm a de-rigueurly long-haired white-skinned head-banging high-pitched middle-aged sub-grunge light-metal Zep-clone. What a pile of shit everything is!

On Ferry Road, within sight of Fettes School's preposterous spire and only minutes from the police HQ, I have the first cigarette of the day, not because I really want it, just to feel bad. (Uncle Warren knows a thing or two.)

This turns out to be smart thinking in a way because when I get to Cop Central they promptly arrest me.

*

The hotel is dark and very quiet. The cellars are full of junk, most of which might have been useful once but all of which is now covered in water or mud or fungus. Some of the timbers under the floor are white with fuzzy rot. On the lower ground floor you pass through the snooker room, the ballroom and a store room. The table in the snooker room is waterlogged, its baize stained and its wooden sides cracked. The old motorbikes, tables, chairs and carpets in the ballroom look like forlorn toys in some long-neglected doll's house. Rain beats softly against the windows: the only sound. Outside, it is black dark.

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Complicity

The stairs from here to the top floor stretch upwards around the dilapidated grandeur of the stairwell. On the next floor up the reception area is dusty and bare, the bar smells of sour booze and stale cigarette smoke and the empty dining room is redolent of dampness and decay. The kitchen is cold and hollow and echoing. There is one old domestic stove, powered by bottled gas, and one sink. There's an apron hanging on a nail.

You take the apron and put it on.

The next two floors hold bedrooms.

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