"Brookmyre, Christopher - Country of the Blind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

Yes, Nicole had thought. Especially when the Prevention of Terrorism Act allows you to hold your suspects for six days without letting them talk to a lawyer.
7 "Although Roland Voss was best known in the UK for his newspaper and pay-TV interests," the strainingly stern-faced reporter continued, "it should be remembered that his empire spans many countries, many businesses and many industries, including arms manufacture. As a result, Mr Voss had no shortage of enemies, and seemed sometimes to publicly revel in the fact, playing up to what he liked to call his 'prizefighter image'. Indeed, you may recall that after the 1992 General Election, when his newspapers were accused of some very low blows in their campaign coverage, it was hinted by Labour sources that were they ever to win power, his would be one score they would not forget to settle. His words at that time were, famously, 'If the British Labour Party was the most dangerous enemy I had to worry about, I'd sleep easier tonight. In fact, if it was in the top ten, I'd sleep easier tonight.'
"That is perhaps why the police are anxious not to jump to any conclusions regarding the motives behind tonight's atrocities. As one police source told me, the fact that the bedroom safe appears to have been tampered with does not necessarily mean robbery was the principal objective, especially as at this stage it has not been established whether anything was in fact stolen."
Eventually, out of facts and out of quotes, they moved on to reaction, which in most cases was blank disbelief. You could see it on the faces of the few establishment grandees who could bring themselves to be interviewed: System error. Does not compute.
Ordinary people got murdered. Poor people got murdered. Black people got murdered. Women got murdered. We don't get murdered.
Occasionally one of us manages to off himself by mistake with the wife's knickers over his head or gets found upside-down in a septic tank after a share crash, but we don't get done in by the unwashed when we're trying to enjoy a spot of hunting and fishing in the countryside. We're safe from that sort of thing.
Aren't we?
One by one they struggled to make sense of it, in a repetitive litany of incredulity, confusion and white-faced horror solicited by
8 the noticeably unsettled anchorman, who was plainly wishing it wasn't Peter Snow's night off.
And as no-one could make sense of it, thoughts turned instead to retribution; the only way forward after such a senseless loss of precious human life was to. . . er. . kill someone else.
Rentaquote time.
"This is an outrage of unprecedented proportion," blustered one ruddy-faced Tory backbencher - perhaps forgetting about an awful lot of dead Irish people, perhaps not - "and if there was ever a stronger argument for the return of the death penalty, then I can't think of it."
No, I'll bet you can't, Nicole had thought.
lack of the death penalty as a punitive sanction in a case like this makes a mockery of British justice," said another apoplect, as one by one they hitched their agendas to the back of the bandwagon of indignation rolling out from Perthshire.
..... well documented that Roland Voss was a strong advocate of the death penalty and it would certainly be his wish that these men were made to pay that price for what they have done tonight..."
how long will we continue to listen to so-called liberal excuses over the death penalty as outrage follows outrage, atrocity follows atrocity, murder follows murder
And soundbite follows soundbite.
..... of course with the autumn party conference coming up soon in Blackpool, the annu~ calls for the return of hanging are bound to be all the louder, and all the more difficult to shout down."
Ah yes. There was the rub. Need something to resuscitate the party faithful at the last get-together before the election in the spring, if they can hang on that long.
By the time the first-edition front pages were flipped briefly before the camera at the end of the show, the mood of the lynchmob had reached hysteria.
"HANG THESE BASTARDS NOW!" led Voss's own flagship tabloid, one frothing voice amidst a baying clamour.
"SCUM FOUR MUST DIE!" screamed the next.
9 "FOUR LIVES FOR FOUR LIVES," demanded yet another, with a strap elaborating: "VOSS MURDERS: Nation calls for return of hanging".
It struck Nicole that The Nation must have called the paper directly, given the short time between the story breaking and its going to press, but who could say. The Nation had clearly made up its mind, and it would be a brave or foolish person who stood before it and argued the contrary.
"God help whatever poor bastard ends up defending that lot," she had muttered to herself as she switched the TV off, before taking her empty cornflakes bowl into the kitchen then going to bed.
Her radio alarm clock woke her up the next morning with the news that she was a poor bastard in need of divine intervention.
..... holding the men ovemight under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, with the approval and, indeed, we are told, concemed assistance of the Scottish Secretary, Alastair Dalgleish. Two of the men; Thomas Memnes and Robert Hannah, served seven-year sentences for their parts in what became known as the "Robbing Hood" break- ins, and police say they are investigating possible political motivations and exploring any links these men might have established with terror groups, particularly European left-wing factions, given Mr Voss's media interests on the continent."
Nicole sat bolt upright in bed, turning the volume louder and listening in frustration to more pompous conjecture as she waited for the names and their connections to be repeated, just to confirm she hadn't been confusing the remnants of her last dream with the words from the radio that had stirred her.
She remained glazed-eyed and entranced for a few more fuzzy- headed seconds as her just-woken brain struggled to cope with the pace of her thoughts. She reached over and switched off the radio with a tut, its tinny burbling an irritating distraction as she attempted to process the information she had just received.
Last night, like everyone else in the world, she just couldn't believe it, but had been gradually forced to accept the truth of this incredible development as the stark fact was coloured in with
10
I- details, quotes and human emotional response. Nonetheless, there had remained an unreality about it, in common with all truly momentous events, perhaps because the "news industry" had for so long made its living from over-dramatising the banal.
Disbelief was a reaction borne of so much wolf-crying, with the public so desensitised by the hyperbole with which the most tedious events were related (and the deceitful exaggeration with which the most harmless quote could be twisted or recontextualised to create "a sensation" where there was barely a story), that when something truly remarkable happened, you just couldn't deal with it. The media, having robbed every superlative of its meaning through misuse and over-use, did not have a vocabulary with which to convey such import. Once you've used up all your language of astonishment on Hugh Grant getting his cock sucked, how do you express the shock of thirty schoolchildren being gunned down in a gymball, or of one of the world's most powerful businessmen being forced to watch his wife bleed to death before having his own carotid opened as his bodyguards lie slain in the hall outside?
Usually, it all got more real in the light of day, as you woke up and found that you hadn't dreamt it, and (most importantly) as you realised that the world had failed to stop - and that apart from having to listen to tail-chasing discussions on the subject, it wasn't actually going to affect your life.
But this morning, the confirmation that it was all still there ("Voss still dead shocker") had been accompanied by the realisation that it was going to affect Nicole's life. Thomas McInnes. This was a man she knew, that they were talking about, no longer some face in the paper or a name on the radio. A man who had sat down in front of her only a matter of days ago, a man whose voice, clothes, face she could remember. And by extrapolation he was one of the men all those MPs and journalists last night had said they wanted to see hang. One of the perpetrators of the most audacious crime of the decade. One of the men who had slaughtered four human beings in cold blood.
11 Which was where it broke down.
And with his son involved, too - how could that possibly have come about? What was this, The Generation Game does armed robbery? Brucie: "Let's see, they got the toaster, the teasmaid, the fondue set, the cuddly toy. . . okay, they lose marks for the four dead bodies, but other than that, didn't they do well?"
She could not believe it.
Blank, staringly, simply could not believe it.
A mocking voice told her she sounded like a serial killer's nextdoor neighbour. "Eeeh, you'd never have thought. He was so quiet, you hardly knew he was there. Very polite to speak to..."
So she searched for something solid, some rationale that could support her instinct in the face of all the evidence that was already in the public domain and all the evidence that was bound to emerge in the coming days and weeks.
Exhibit A, your honour: one cup of tea. Milk and two sugars.
The defence rests.
God help us.
In mitigation, it had been a very good cup of tea.
After the self-doubt maelstrom of the first two days, she had thought that if she could get through the first week of the job she might find her stride, start to galvanise herself, get into the role and gradually remember the plans she had and the ambitions that had driven her this far.
And she did, battling through with her eyes fixed on Friday evening like a shipwrecked sailor's on the shore ahead. She had been most grateful not to know anybody in the city, because if she had begun to unburden herself, she feared she would crumble completely. She had gone out for a drink after work with her bosses on the Monday and with Ian, her fellow subordinate, on the Wednesday, but in a way she had still been in character. None of them knew her from any other context, so she could hide behind her mask until she felt confident enough to take it off.
Unfortunately, it's the second week that gets you.
12 That's when you realise that last week wasn't hell because you were new and inexperienced, but simply because that's what it's like to work here. When you see an eternity of all the things you hated most on that first Monday morning, priolled out towards the horizon: the dingy Portakabinesque offices, like a candidate for demolition in a street otherwise embarrassed by its wealth of architectural splendour; the musty smell of suspiciously damp books; the rows of hideously Seventies grey-metal filing cabinets, like a set left over from a Monty Python sketch; the flickering strip-lighting and the glowering low cloud outside the draughty windows. That's when you realise that this is not a game, but what you do when you grow up.
Thomas McInneshad appeared in the afternoon of that awful second Monday, right after her meeting with Mrs McGrotty.