As opposed to the reception area for one of Scotland's greatest engineering feats. Three hundred thousand tonnes of concrete stacked high in the buttress above, quarter of a million cubic metres of rock removed from the mountain below. Thirty kilometres of tunnels and aqueducts. Miles of road widened and strengthened merely to accommodate the construction traffic and the transport of the giant internal components. A man-made cavern you could fit Hampden Park inside, housing the twenty-metre-high turbines that pumped out six hundred megawatts of electricity, generated by harnessing the dual powers of water and gravity.

It wasn't internationally recognisable, like the Forth Rail Bridge, probably because power stations didn't sell many postcards; in fact, its existence wasn't even widely known throughout Scotland, never mind beyond. But once Simon was finished with it, it would be the most spoken place name on every television channel, every radio station and every newspaper on the planet.

After about ten minutes, the backshift's cars began to leave. There would be eight of them. Simon counted them all away and then picked up his radio.

'May, this is Mercury. Come in.'

'Reading you, Mercury, this is May.'

'Okay, they're all out. You've got two coming your way heading for Crianfada; the rest went off towards Cromlarig. A Ford Mondeo and a Honda Accord. Once they're past, do your thing. Everybody else, that's your cue too. Mercury out.'

Simon screwed the silencer on to the end of his pistol, 344.

eyeing the security guard's kiosk. A few moments later, a paunchy old man emerged and ambled lazily across the concrete to the gate.

'Time to rock'n'roll,' Simon declared.

Taylor put the Espace into gear and drove the last hundred yards to the entrance, causing the security guard to stop halfway through sliding the gate closed for the night. Simon got out and walked towards him, hailing him with a wave.

'Can I help you?'

'Aye. Would you mind holdin' on to these for me?' Simon said, producing the gun from behind his back and shooting the guard twice in the head. 'Cheers.'

The man had barely hit the ground before Taylor was out of the Espace, pulling polythene from the backseat to shroud him in. Simon slid the gate open again before bending to retrieve his spent shells, while behind him Taylor rolled the corpse on to the sheeting. Taylor lifted the body into the vehicle, leaving a few drops of blood glistening on the tarmac underneath. They each grabbed a handful of earth from the landscaped flower bed next to the booth, sprinkling it on the ground to absorb the moisture and cover up the stain.

Murder, concealment of the victim and removal of evidence: it was all over in less than a minute, expertly and emotionlessly executed. Simon felt nothing, not even excitement. Well, perhaps a frisson, but nothing compared to what was to come. When you knew you were about to fuck a girl six ways from Sunday, the first grope of her breast didn't really set the heart thumping, did it?

Not like it did when that was all you knew. Not like it did the first time.

345.

Revenge, they said, was a dish best served cold. Simon would concur, having burned his mouth on his first home- cooked effort, which had been thoroughly overheated but still half-baked. It was a recipe etched in bile and marinated in poison, a naive attempt to sate a craving that could never know satisfaction if it was fed for a thousand years. Trying to stem an anger like that with one death was like trying to drain the ocean with a sponge.

What restitution could possibly be enough for the death of his father once he knew the hideous truth behind it?

Simon had always understood the symbiosis between the simultaneous failings of both his father's health and his father's business; the vicious circle of debt, stress, illness, absence and further debt. But what he only learned at his dying mother's bedside was that all of it had been precipitated by some wee parasitic ned who was mercilessly bleeding Darcourt's Brasserie for protection money. His father had requested that Simon never find this out, due to his shame at facing death in failure and ignominy, not wanting to pass such a psychological debt on to his son as an inheritance. Simon's mother, however, told him she felt guilty that Simon had been forced to sacrifice his aspirations so young in order to bail her out, and was aware how miserable his life in Aberdeen was making him. Her growing fear was that he was nonetheless inheriting the legacy of failure his father wanted to save him from, but because of what he didn't know, rather than what he did.

'I don't want you to think your dreams can only end in failure because of what happened to your dad,' she said, before telling him the truth.

Frank Morris was the cunt's name, at the time just another of the pitiful apologies for gangsters Glasgow had to put up with; guys who'd last less than a 346 day in a real underworld, and whose vision barely extended beyond their postal district. He ran protection rackets on half the restaurants in the city (or more accurately half the non- Chinese restaurants, as they had their own breed of leeches), and attached himself to Darcourt's when his dad moved the brasserie from where it started on Victoria Road to a larger prime site on Sauchiehall Street.

Simon's dad had arrived from France in the Fifties, with just the shoes on his feet and the promise of a chef's job at the Central Hotel. He worked his arse off and saved every penny until he was able to open a place of his own, and built up his business from nothing over almost thirty years. Frank Morris took less than eighteen months to demolish it.

The protection payments started off huge and got bigger. His dad worked harder to keep up, but according to the first rule of protection rackets, the more money he made, the more money Morris took. In attempting to stay afloat, he pushed up prices, which drove away custom; he laid off staff, which meant service was poor; and he was forced to cut corners in the kitchen, which quickly destroyed the place's priceless reputation. Three decades of excellence, three decades of skill and endeavour, all eaten away in no time by this piece of council-scheme trash and his team of wee hard men.

Because of Frank Morris, his father had died broke as well as broken. Because of Frank Morris, his mother had to face cancer without the companion she most needed. And because of Frank Morris, Simon was stuck in Aberfuckingnowhere, whoring for Sintek Energy, instead of lying in an LA hotel suite, watching some blonde groupie lick coke off the end of his dick after a sell-out gig at the Hollywood Bowl.

347.

After his mother's death, Simon found himself descending into the darkest depression of his life, consumed by thoughts of anger and frustration, compounded as he learned how much kinder the fates had been to Frank Morris over the intervening years. Having already exerted a grip on the city centre's entertainment sector, he'd been well placed when the drug trade moved from the housing schemes to the nightclubs during the 1990s. It was said by some that he was seeing a slice of every fourth Ecstasy tablet consumed in Strathclyde region; others said every second. And he ran it all from his 'Castle', a detached sandstone villa on the periphery of the Marylea housing scheme where he had grown up.

Simon entertained revenge fantasies, naturally, but these only served to reinforce the sense of hopelessness that must have tinged his father's humiliation. He was an oil-biz marketing exec. What the hell could he do to a drugs baron, even if it was only an ageing, neddish, Glasgow one?

His mum had wanted to save him from thinking that his dad's failure had been his own fault. His dad had wanted to protect him from knowing that he'd been brought to his knees by a wee lowlife he was powerless to fight back against. Both had done so because they didn't want this knowledge proving a psychological hindrance to the pursuit of Simon's own ambitions, but it was already too late. His dad's legacy of debt had banished him to the northern wastes, and by the time his responsibility to his mother was finally lifted, the damage was long done. He was stuck in a wage-slave job, watching his life trickle away, and he couldn't act against the man responsible because he was too intimidated, just like his father before him. His inheritance was therefore complete.

The greatest insult, and surely the one that had stung 348.

his father all the way to his grave, was that all of this should be visited upon him by a piece of scum not fit to look him in the eye. Frank Morris was a nothing, a wee toley shat out of an alcohol-and-nicotine-ridden whore of a mother, raised on chip fat and superlager in some council-scheme gulag. Anybody can be a hardcase when there's a whole team of you picking on one guy. Simon's father was a thousand times the man Morris was, and Simon dearly wanted to prove it.

So dearly, in fact, that it reached the stage where he could barely think of anything else, until one evening, sitting in the life-sapping traffic, he asked himself what was really stopping him? The answer, he realised, came down to two fears: death and prison.

Yeah, he thought, what a towering threat: to lose everything he had now. Would killing Morris really be worth sacrificing this idyllic existence?

It was a moment of absolute liberation, when he understood the true value of the choices before him; understood, perhaps for the first time, that he had choices. Even consumed by grief and anger, he had been ready to accept that there was nothing he could do, there was nothing someone living this suburban suit-and-tie life could do, because people like Morris existed in a different world, beyond the people carriers and the privet-bordered concentration camps.

But there was something he could do. He could kill the bastard. If that was what he really wanted, he could kill the bastard. If he was a better man than Morris, and of that he had no doubt, then he could find a way, no matter what the guy's reputation and no matter how many knuckle- dragging neds were under his command.

His depression lifted immediately, leaving his mind like 349.

a clear-blue dawn after a month of storms. When he woke up each morning, he found himself springing out of bed, powered by the energy of suddenly having a purpose to his life after so many sleepwalking years. Unfortunately, he still had work to go to, but it was a lot easier to get through the days when there was something else beyond them other than the slow drive home, a microwave ready meal and a couple of hours' mindless telly before bed. Besides, his job was to prove invaluable in realising his plan, devised after several weeks' research and a couple of weekend reconnaisance trips to Marylea.

The point of greatest vulnerability, he was quickly able to identify, was 'the Castle', Morris's solid stone edifice of self- congratulation. The proud old building had stood there for decades before the council planners decided to infest the surrounding area with the vermin decanted by Sixties inner- city slum demolition, and the rat colony that was Marylea had gradually expanded to encroach upon it. Morris had grown up there, and, like all the other wee urchins, came to regard the house as the last word in grandeur, unaware that their very presence was decreasing its value at the rate of the altimeter on a nose-diving jet plane.

When he made his grubby little fortune, instead of shipping out to Milngavie or Eastwood like the rest of the nouveau-riche schemies, Morris bought the home of his pitifully limited dreams (after sufficient vandalism and intimidation forced its previous owners into an unplanned sale). Not for him the upmarket neighbourhood and the veneer of respectability down at the local golf club. He was a ned to the last, and wanted to live in 'the big hoose' overlooking the Marylea estate, so that the scum he came from among could see him as the lord of the manor, king of the castle.

350.

The rear of the property backed on to woods, affording some privacy in marked contrast to the uninterrupted view the front offered to the nearest rat-cages sitting across Marylea Road. The back garden was where Morris liked to relax by spending time with his pigeons, accommodated in a large dovecot that ran almost the length of the back fence. Everybody's hobbies seemed silly to the uninitiated, but this one had to be among the daftest. The things didn't even race. The 'sport', if you could call it that, between competitors was for your own birds to seduce someone else's back to your dovecot, whereupon they became your property until such time as their fickle affections were bought by still another flea-bitten doo.

Morris was said to be out there every night, talking to and preening his favourites. Simon's reccy trips to the woods behind the Castle bore this out, each occasion witnessing Morris stand at the dovecot, holding birds in his hands and, bizarrely, putting his mouth to their beaks and blowing until they puffed up like feathered beachballs. Morris was a scrawny, scruffy little man, wearing a hideous and manky old flannel jacket that presumably had some kind of effect on the birds, because no-one above the gutter would even approach the thing without tongs. He looked somehow too small to be all the things he had come to mean to Simon, but that merely served to underline the insult that had to be corrected. This little prick looked like he ought to be cadging the money for a tin of Special Brew in George Square, and yet he had ruined the lives of everyone in Simon's family.

A rifle would have been easiest, but not ideal, as such weapons could be as difficult to get hold of as they were easy to trace. Noisy, too, unless he could acquire a silencer, something else to put him at the mercy of another crook 351.

who could pass on what he knew to the cops or the gangsters, whoever he most needed to keep sweet.

He remembered that during their uni days the little drummer boy had been part of an archery club. Simon's contention that such weapons were obsolete had kicked off a discussion about the stealth factor and their possible use in the perfect crime. The LDB's idea for an untraceable murder weapon was a crossbow bolt made of ice, fired through the eye into the brain, as the shot would be silent and the evidence would just melt away.

The flaw, as far as Simon could see, was that unless the shot was perfect, the ice would shatter if it met any substantial resistance. He also remembered reading about a hunter in the States getting a real, steel-tipped bolt through the eye but still surviving, having been lucky about which part of his brain it embedded itself in. Simon knew he would only get one shot at this, so he couldn't afford any such margin of error. The method, however, had a lot to recommend it, crossbows not being so difficult to come by; and while the purchase could still theoretically be traced, that would only happen if the police had a clue what the murder weapon had been.

Simon's solution was a variant on a technique already well known to the sniping assassin. While hollow-pointed bullets had been used to maximise damage since their spectacularly effective introduction by the British Army at Dum-Dum in India, an even messier effect was to be had by filling the cavity with mercury. What happened was that, upon impact, when the bullet itself slowed, the mercury didn't, instead exploding forward and outward with devastating consequences. A shaft of mercury suspended in ice would have the same effect on Morris's brain as bunging it into a Moulinex, as well as allowing 352.

for silent delivery and leaving no explanation as to how it got there.

To construct a number of these little deathsicles, he enlisted the unknowing assistance of the Sintek lab, on the premise that he was organising a photoshoot to create a new image for a forthcoming trade ad campaign. Columns of metal suspended in ice, representing the oil locked in stone beneath the North Sea, something like that. No bother, they said. They had a freezer capable of rendering temperatures below minus fifty, so they could not only produce what he was requesting, but make sure it would tolerate the hot studio lights for a good while before there was any danger of it melting. Nor was it too much trouble to supply him with a cryogenic flask to transport the slugs in, keeping them immersed in liquid nitrogen.

Covering all the bases, Simon even went to the bother of organising the supposed photoshoot, and it tickled him that Sintek were still using the image in corporate publicity to this day. 'Unlock the power' was the slogan.

Simon unlocked the power at dusk on a balmy late- summer Sunday evening. As on his reconnaissance trips, he parked his hired car on the other side of the woods, near the on-ramp for the eastbound M8, and made his way on foot to the spot he'd picked, overlooking the rear of the dovecot. The crossbow was an appropriately French-made Eigle- Hawk, capable of firing its bolt at more than three hundred feet per second, and was fitted with a fifty-yard parallax scope, through which Simon viewed Frank Morris's last living movements. The ned emerged from the house as before in the appalling flannel jacket, and showed his true class as he nipped the fag he'd been smoking, popping it into his pocket before approaching the birds. The guy was a millionaire, but was still saving the rest of the dowt for later.

353.

Simon removed one of the deathsicles with a small pair of plastic tongs and placed it into the slide. Having been practising the shot for weeks from various ranges and angles, he had achieved a one hundred per cent accuracy record from distances of less than forty yards, and he estimated his current range at around thirty. However, those figures had been achieved when his hands weren't sweating or his heart banging like a Lambeg drummer outside a chapel. It wasn't fear he was feeling, just tension. As he looked through the scope at Morris's head, there was no moral dilemma, no questioning the path his life might be about to take. His only worry was that he'd miss.

Simon watched him pick up a bird in both hands and lift it slowly to his face. Morris took a deep breath and so did he.

Morris put his mouth to the bird's beak and blew, remaining motionless, eyes closed, like it was the tenderest kiss between lovers. In that moment, Simon's heart was suddenly stilled and his hands steadied.

This was his becoming.

Simon pulled the trigger and Morris was dead before he had breathed out. His head jerked once, his arms each gave an involuntary shake, like a marionette, then he fell backwards and the pigeon took flight.

Simon watched him for a moment, lying flat on his back on the unkempt lawn. It looked as though he might spring back up again any second, but for the blood seeping from his eye socket and the twitching of his feet.

He had done it. It was over. And he felt... he felt...

'Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?'

Was that it?

No swell of emotion, no rush of catharsis, no euphoria, no regret, no revulsion. Just a dead guy on the grass, whom 354.

no-one had even noticed yet, and the sounds of birds still tweeting among the trees in the darkening twilight.

It wasn't right. He had been cheated, and the worst of it was, he had cheated himself. Morris was dead, but that was all. He hadn't known why, he hadn't known who, and he hadn't even suffered. He didn't deserve this instant, clinical, silent death; Simon should have been in his face, pulling his still-living brains through his eye socket with a crochet needle, looking him in his good eye and making sure the last words he ever heard were the name of Francois Darcourt.

After which, he later understood, Simon would still have felt the same. It was just another of the many ways in which murder was like sex. All that effort, all that planning, all that panache in going about the deed, but in the end it all leads to one final moment, after which there is only emptiness. It is then that there is some consolation to be had in knowing that you took precautions, so at the very least your sense of anticlimax won't be compounded by unwanted consequences.

It being his first time, Simon was naturally paranoid about what clues he might have left, what amateurish mistakes he must have made; concerns that were multiplied on the Monday morning, when his boss ordered photos of the murder weapon blown up to poster-size for their stand at the forthcoming OilExpo at the Aberdeen Exhibition Centre. But there were no consequences; not legal ones anyway. Only a hollow feeling and the signs of his depression returning, now that his energising project had failed to deliver what he'd expected of it.

He was soon to realise that nothing could have delivered what he'd expected, because his expectations had been unrealistic. What he ought to do was more accurately evaluate 355.

what killing Morris had delivered, which was the best few weeks of his life. More immediately, however, he found insult added to his sense of disappointment when he learned from the newspaper that someone else had bagged the credit - and not just the credit - for his work.'It is understood by police that Sunday night's murder of Glasgow gangland figure Frank Morris was ordered by a rival drug dealer. Police say their sources have indicated that there was a contract out on Morris worth as much as 30,000, which is already believed to have been paid to the hitman responsible.'Incredible. Truly incredible. If Simon had waited another couple of weeks, someone would have beaten him to it and saved him all the bother. It said a lot about what a tinpot gangster Morris was, too. Glasgow was a small place, its underworld even smaller. Morris was bound to have known there was a price on his head; and yet Simon was able to sneak up on him in his own back garden. Typical narrow-minded ned complacency. He was safe as long as he was in the Castle, because in front of it was his scheme, his turf, and no enemy would dare try taking him on there.

But talk about fucking cheek! All that effort, all that ingenuity, just for some chancer to say 'Aye, it was me, big man. Thirty thousand sheets, soon as you like, please.' The point was, Simon hadn't waited another couple of weeks and he hadn't been saved the bother. He had done it himself, and somebody else was coining it in as a result. It was The Arguments and Chambers of Torment all fucking over again. In both those cases, he'd had all the ideas, all the vision and done all the work: taken a bunch of no-hopers and moulded them into something they could never have been without 356.

him; only for them to enjoy all their success and take all the credit once he was out of the picture.

Well, it wasn't happening a third time. This was a matter of honour and a matter of principle. It was also, as it turned out, a matter of thirty Gs, and he was fucked if some ned was tucking a greenback meant for him into his Kappa jogging trousers.

The phrase 'a rival drug dealer', to anyone who had read a Scottish newspaper in the past ten years, meant Bud Hannigan: another jumped-up schemie, but one with sufficiently more brains and ambition to make him a far bigger player than Morris could ever have hoped to be. If it was true that the contract had been redeemed, there was little question it would have come out of his pocket.

He decided to hire another car and take a drive down to see Hannigan at the snooker club he owned, where he was known to hold court of an evening. Simon told the goon on the door he had information that someone was ripping off his boss, but would only divulge exactly what he knew to the man himself. He was patted down for wires and weapons, but the only thing he was carrying was the cryogenic flask and plastic tongs. It was probably curiosity over these that got him an audience, as Hannigan was too important to be entertaining any scrote who walked in claiming to have information. No doubt these were normally paid off by underlings if their gen was up to much, and given a good kicking by the same if it wasn't.

Hannigan received him from behind a large mahogany desk in his office, a room preposterously lined with oak panelling despite being in a two-storey, Trumixand-chip- board, Seventies-built dump. It was like the castle-insidea-condo from that Steve Martin movie, with the motif Thirties Gangster rather than Medieval Gothic.

357.

'Mr Smith,' Hannigan said, without getting up.'

'Common name in my business. What do you have for me?'

Simon opened the flask, releasing a suitably mysterious plume of smoke as the nitrogen evaporated, then removed the remaining four bolts with the plastic tongs. He placed them on the desk, one by one.

'What are they?'

"The question is not what are they, but where is the fifth one?'

'Do tell,' Hannigan said impatiently.

'Well, the water part is long gone, but the mercury part is in the Royal Infirmary morgue, being scraped off the inside of Frank Morris's skull.'

'What would Frank Morris's skull have to do with me?' Hannigan asked, ever the cagey gangster.

'I could think of thirty thousand things it had to do with you.'

'I'm sorry, you've lost me,' he said, with the same smug smile he probably turned on for the cops when they asked him questions they both knew the answer to.

'Sorry to waste your time, then,' Simon said, picking up the bolts again and replacing them in the flask. 'I just thought you might want to know about it if somebody had taken you to the cleaners.'

'I got what I wanted, Mr Smith. From where I'm sittin' it looks like you were the wan who got taken to the cleaners.'

'True enough, but it's not me who's got a reputation to consider. I mean, I wouldn't like to think there were people in this city who thought I was fair game to take the piss out of.'

That got Hannigan on to his feet.

358.

'What do you want?'

'My money.'

'You're talkin' to the wrong guy, then.'

'So who should I be talking to?'

Hannigan sighed, thinking it over. He was trying to remain as confidently blase as before, but it was obvious the insult and the repercussions Simon had hinted at were starting to boil inside. Hannigan looked at the goon who was manning the door, giving him a steady nod.

'Come on,' the goon said, taking Simon by the arm and leading him out of the office into the corridor.

'Wait there,' he told him, then disappeared back into Hannigan's absurd oak-lined sanctuary. He re-emerged after a couple of minutes.

'Mickey Fagan,' the goon said. 'Used to be quite high up in Morris's crew. Got his jotters for skimmin' even mair than the other thievin' wee wanks that work for him. He tell't us he was gettin' his ain back, but the fat bastart just needed the money.'

'I'm not takin' the piss here, but what proof did he offer before you gave this chancer thirty K?'

'He was the first to tell us it had happened. We knew before the polis. Mickey said he stabbed him through the eye, oot the back where he keeps his pigeons. Mickey's still got friends on the crew, obviously.'

'Where does he live?'