I can't help it; I laugh. It's not much of a laugh; more of a gasp with pretensions, but it raises my spirits. "Oh yeah?" I say. "Like you were going to give back Halziel and Lingary unharmed."
He shrugs. "Cameron, that was just tactics," he says reasonably. "They were always going to die." He smiles, shaking his head at my naivety.
I inspect him. He's clean-shaven and fit-looking. He looks younger than he did; a lot younger; younger than he was when Clare died.
"So if you're not going to kill me, Andy, what?" I ask him. "Hmm? Give me AIDS? Chop off my fingers so I can't type?" I take a breath. "I hope you've taken into account the advances in computer voice-recognition which are making keyboard-free word processing a realistic possibility in the near future."
Andy grins, but there's something cold in it. "I'm not going to hurt you, Cameron," he says, "and I'm not going to kill you, but I need something from you."
I stare meaningfully at my taped-together ankles. "Uh-huh. What?"
He looks down at the bullet again. "I want you to listen to me," he says quietly. It's as though he's embarrassed. He shrugs and looks me in the eye. "That's all, really."
"Okay," I say. I flex my shoulders, grimacing. "Could I listen with my hands untied?"
Andy purses his lips, then nods. He takes a long knife out of his boot. It looks like a thin bowie knife; the blade is very shiny. He squats while I turn round and the knife slices slickly through the tape. I tear the rest off, taking some hairs with it. My hands tingle. I look at my watch.
"Jesus, how hard did you hit me?"
It's half nine in the morning, the day after the funeral.
"Not that hard," Andy tells me. "I kept you under with ether for a while, then you just seemed to sleep."
He sits back where he was, sliding the knife back into his boot. I put one hand out and lean to the side, looking out the doorway. I squint into the distance.
"Christ; that's the fucking Forth Bridge!" Somehow it's a relief that I can see the bridges and know home's only a few miles away.
"We're on Inchmickery," Andy says. "Off Cramond." He looks around. "Place was a gun battery during both wars; these are old Army buildings." He smiles again. "You get the occasional adventurous yachtsman trying to make a landing, but there are a couple of bolt-holes they can't find." He pats the wall behind him. "Makes a good base, now the hotel's gone. Mind you, it's under the flight path for the airport and I suspect the security boys'll want to give it the once-over before the Euro-summit, so I'm bailing out today, one way or the other."
I nod, trying to think back. I don't like the sound of that "one way or the other'. "Do I remember you bringing me here in a boat?" I ask.
He laughs. "Well, I don't have access to a helicopter." He grins. "Yes. An inflatable."
"Hmm."
He looks to each side, as if checking the gun and the phone are still there. "So; sitting comfortably?" he asks me.
"Well, no, but don't let it put you off."
He gives a small smile that disappears quickly. "I'm going to give you a choice later, Cameron," he says, sounding calm and serious. "But first I want to tell you why I did all those things."
"Uh-huh?" I want to say, It's perfectly fucking obvious why you did them, but I keep my mouth shut.
"It was Lingary, of course, first," Andy says, looking younger still now, and staring down at his hand and the bullet. "I mean, I'd met people I despised in the past, people I had no respect for and who I thought, Well, the world would be a better place without them. But I don't know, maybe I was being naive and expected that in a war, especially in a professional army, it would somehow be better; people would rise above themselves; stretch their own moral envelope, you know?"
I nod cautiously. I'm thinking, Moral envelope? Coast-speak.
"But of course it's not true," Andy says, rubbing the little copper and brass shape of the bullet between his fingers. "War is a magnifier, a multiplier. Decent people act more decently; bastards get to be even bigger bastards." He waves one hand. "I'm not talking about all that banality-of-evil stuff — organised genocide is different — I mean just ordinary warfare, where the rules are obeyed. And the truth is that some people do rise above themselves, but others sink beneath themselves. They don't gain, they don't shine the way some people do in combat and they don't even muddle through the way most people do, scared to death but doing their job because they've been well trained and because their mates are depending on them; they just have their faults and weaknesses exposed, and in certain circumstances, if that person is an officer and his flaws are of a particular type and he's risen to a certain level without ever encountering a real battlefield, those faults can lead to the deaths of a lot of men."
"We all have moral responsibility, whether we like it or not, but people in power — in the military, in politics, in professions, whatever — have an imperative to care, or at least to exhibit an officially acceptable analogue of care; duty, I suppose. It was people I knew had abused that responsibility that I attacked; that's what I was taking as my… authority."
He shrugs, frowns. "The situation was a little different with Oliver, the porn merchant; that was partly to throw them off the scent and partly because I just despised what he was doing.
"And the judge, well, he wasn't quite so culpable as the others; I was comparatively lenient with him.
"The rest… they were all powerful men, all rich — several of them very rich indeed. All of them had all they could ask for in life, but they all wanted more — which is okay, I suppose, it's just a failing, you can't kill people for that alone — but they all treated people like shit, literally like shit; something unpleasant to be disposed of. It was like they'd forgotten their humanity and could never find it again, and there was only one way to remind them of it, and remind all the others like them, and make them feel frightened and vulnerable and powerless, the way they made other people feel all the time."
He holds the bullet up in front of his face, peering at it. "There wasn't one of those men who hadn't killed people; indirectly, the way the Nuremberg Nazis mostly did, but definitely, unarguably, beyond any reasonable doubt.
"And Halziel," he says, taking a deep breath. "Well, you know about him."
"Jesus, Andy," I say. I know I should shut up and let him talk on as much as he likes but I can't help it. "The guy was a selfish bastard and a lousy doctor; but he was incompetent, not malicious. He didn't hate Clare or anything or wish her —»
"But that's just it," Andy says, holding his hands out. "If a certain level of skill — of competence — translates into the gift of life or death it becomes malice when you don't bother to exercise that skill, because people are relying on you to do just that. But," he holds up one hand to me, forestalling, and nods, "I'll admit to a level of personal vengeance there. Once I'd done all the others and I reckoned I didn't have much longer to operate overground, as it were, well, it just seemed the right thing to do."
He looks up at me, a strange, wide-eyed open smile on his face. "I'm shocking you, aren't I, Cameron?"
I gaze into his eyes for a while, then look away out the doorway towards the water and the small white shapes of the circling, crying birds. "No," I tell him. "Not as much as when I realised it was you who'd spiked Bissett like that and it was you behind that gorilla mask and you who burned Howie —»
"Howie didn't suffer," Andy says matter-of-factly. "I stoved his head in with a log first." He grins. "Probably saved him from a terrible hangover."