He flicked with his middle finger, and another image came up. A big square, with the ghostly shape of a pistol wedged diagonally across it.
‘Drone shot of your jacket pocket,’ the man said. ‘Taken moments before you dropped into the gully. You can practically read the serial number. No question of it having been chucked before you entered the tunnel. No question at all of some piece of misdirection, like, say, one of the coppers picking it up on the way out. Every detail of every one of their movements was logged in real time on their lapel cameras.’ He snapped his fingers, and the screen went white. ‘Gone. Just like that. So where is it?’
Misdirection, Hugh thought. Like a magic trick. Maybe there was something there he could work with, but first…
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to provoke you or anything, but why does it matter so much? We’re talking about a thing that can kill a rabbit, or put an eye out if you’re careless. From the way the other guys were shouting, it was like they thought I’d set up some kind of, uh, dead drop, isn’t that what you call it? For some terrorist or spy to pick up later. Well, I can see that could be worth doing with explosives or actual guns, but – an air pistol?’
The man clicked his tongue. ‘You’d be surprised what can be done with an air pistol. Take what you’ve just said. Shoot a soldier’s eye out from ten paces, get your timing right, and you can relieve him of whatever weapon he has. And you’re off. People have built armies that way. And you’d be surprised how important it might be, in some circumstances, to shoot a rabbit. No smoke. No explosive traces to worry about. Very little sound. Stuff like that. Just a thought. But that isn’t what’s worrying the chaps, and what’s worrying me. Proof of concept, that’s the worry. If you’ve found, or been shown, a way to disappear a chunk of metal in full view of half a dozen people, what else is possible?’
Hugh took a deep breath. ‘I can see that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t understand that before. Maybe if they’d explained… but anyway. Can I tell you how it seemed to me, in the culvert?’
‘Oh, please do. And do stop cringing. I promise not to hit you, or even yell at you.’
‘All right. I didn’t see a pool of water. It was like the tunnel ended with an opening on a steep hillside. I saw a landscape, like the real one but at a different time, maybe in an ice age. Or maybe just after one, you know? In the sunshine beyond winter.’
‘In the sunshine beyond winter?’ The man seemed a little surprised, and to be turning the phrase over in his mind.
‘Yes. And when the police came, I threw the air pistol and the box of pellets out of the opening and… into that landscape. I threw them hard, but it wasn’t like… a good strong fling.’
‘Indeed not,’ said the man. ‘You threw like a girl.’
‘I couldn’t get my arm back,’ Hugh said, defensively. ‘I heard them fall, like on scree, not far down the hill. And I’m sure if you have such good images as you say you have of what happened, they’ll show how my arm moved, the speed of it, the force. They might even show the trajectory of the gun and the box leaving my hand.’
‘As it happens,’ said the man, ‘they don’t. They show the throw. They also show the steep, sloping roof of the culvert right in front of you. They don’t actually show the objects bouncing off, but your hand is in the way and the imaging is far from perfect.’
‘Do you have these images?’ Hugh asked. ‘Can you show me them?’
‘Of course.’ The man snapped with several fingers in succession. The screen lit up with a view, jumpy but clearer than Hugh had expected, of him and Nick and Hope, crowded together and bending over in the low, narrow space, seen from behind. It perturbed Hugh to see the light reflected off the water in front of his feet, and the sloping ceiling a metre and a half or so in front of his face. He saw his struggle to get something out of his pocket, Hope’s grab, his throw. No glimpse of what he’d thrown. Then the figures turned around, Hugh first, getting between Nick and the end of the tunnel, Hope momentarily obscuring the view of both of them. They began to move forward. The viewpoint backed off. They remained in view all the way up the tunnel. Then the light, and blurred images as Hope was grabbed.
‘That was from one camera?’
‘Yes.’
‘Show me the others.’
The man did. They were much the same; different angles, different obscurities, each sequence ending with a blur of motion as Nick and then Hugh were grabbed.
‘Well, there you are,’ Hugh said.
‘What?’ The man looked at the final still, bright and blurry.
‘It’s obvious,’ said Hugh. ‘I don’t know about you, but I can just about get my head around the idea of second sight. But not Tir Nan Og.’
The man looked puzzled.
‘Call it fairyland,’ Hugh explained. ‘Or another dimension. Or the past or the future as places you could walk into, or throw things into. Would you agree?’
‘I’m with you there,’ the man said.
‘OK. And to be honest, I don’t buy the second sight either.’ He tapped his forehead, and discovered another bruise. He winced and went on. ‘I may get hallucinations, but I’m not crazy. Not now. In there, in the culvert, I maybe was crazy. In some kind of delusional dwam.’
Another puzzled look.
‘Altered state of consciousness. I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t remember what I did. But think what must have happened. I threw the air pistol and the box hard. They must have hit what was right in front of me and bounced off. They might not have fallen in the water. They might have landed at my feet. The box wasn’t strong or tightly closed, so a couple of pellets might have fallen from it, the ones the probe found. Anyway, there I am, stooped over, turning around, behind Nick and Hope. You can’t see my arms, you can’t see much of me at all in any of these. So I have a moment to kick the pistol and the box forward, snatch them up, maybe stick them in my pocket or up the sleeve of my jacket. I don’t know. It’s what you said about misdirection that got me thinking this.’
‘Misdirection!’ the man said, sounding pleased. ‘Now that you mention it, what evidence do we have from these images that the pistol and box left your hands at all?’
‘Exactly,’ said Hugh. ‘I might not have let go.’
‘So one way or another, you could have had them on you when you came out of the culvert. Then what?’
Hugh shrugged, painfully. ‘Ask the guy who grabbed me. Local copper, a Leosach – a Lewis man, I know that from his voice. For all I know, he might know my father. He might even have known me, when we were both kids. Anyway, he’d have seen the gun from the probe images, know how seriously the authorities take that, but still have the Leosach laid-back attitude about guns himself. He might have tried to get me off the hook.’
‘Interfering with evidence? Perverting the course of justice? Serious accusations to make against a police officer.’
‘I know,’ said Hugh. ‘And I don’t want to get whoever it was into trouble. But the thing is, it does happen sometimes. And things vanishing into thin air… that doesn’t happen, ever.’
He didn’t believe a word of it.
The man stared at him for a moment.
‘Don’t go away,’ he said, as if making a joke, and left the room. Hugh didn’t watch him go. He could have vanished into thin air. He sipped the remaining Coke, now flat. More than once his head fell forward, jolting him awake.
The man returned, with the marine sergeant.
‘Sorry, old chap,’ the man said. ‘They’re not buying it. I did my best, but…’