Schiehallion

I stood atop the barren and snow cursed mountain and wondered how I was going to get back to the west end from here. I’d already considered the desolation and decided that Donald Findlay’s claims of Peter Lawwell having a secret mountain top hideout were just a load of paranoid bunkum, nothing survived up here without layers of fur and goretex which we were all wearing save for Stuart Cosgrove who persisted in dressing up as a bat. Our little mountaineering party consisted of Cosgrove, Findlay, Martin Bain and yours truly, the greatest pioneering journalist in Scotland according to Celtic Quick News and who am I to doubt their wisdom?
Things had been going fine for me since the exorcism of Neil Lennon: I’d somehow slipped away from that one with plaudits from Richard Gough and Jorg Alberz Demon Hunter but had to watch myself save the psychotic Lawwell considered my involvement there as collaboration; my pieces were still appearing in the Times thanks to the janitor and cleaning staff at Queen Street who were writing them – who was going to notice since no one reads the damn thing these days anyway? And I’d got wind that my wife was back in Glasgow which was interesting not because I wanted her back, no I was content to wank over my Martin O’Neil scrapbook but I did have a debt of honour to revenge myself against the drunken old goat, Tom Devine and I should’ve known he was back in town considering he’d been wheeled out by BBC Scotland for the election to sit and burp port sodden platitudes about sectarianism much to the amusement to fellow panellists who wondered why he was talking about a completely different topic from the rest of them during an election. So when Donald Findlay told me to meet him on a rooftop on St. Vincent Street I thought he was going to give me the opportunity to boot Devine a few times in the balls and didn’t think for one moment that Tam Cowan would launch me over the edge. Thanks to Cosgrove though I survived and after the cool headed murder of that beast, the Traynor, we got together with Findlay and Bain and set off in a small convoy to a mountain just north of Aberfeldy. The last time I was up this way was a wedding when Keith Jackson mistook me for a bridesmaid or so he says, and rogered me a good ‘un in the honeymoon suite but that’s another story.

This story though is concerned with Peter Lawwell and how he’d retired with John Reid to a supposed secret base atop Schiehallion to launch the Final Solution, whatever that was but knowing Lawwell’s Nazi tendencies, it wasn’t going to be an apology for employing Neil Lennon and the gift of an olive branch to all of Scottish society who wasn’t Celtic Minded. I was just considering this while watching Cosgrove struggle to take a leak by a rocky outcrop when something moved in the distance and I was just about to bring it to Findlay’s attention when I realised that my companions were standing with their hands in the air looking at me in consternation. I’d been the only one not to notice Lawwell’s arctic stormtroopers rise from their positions in the snow and level their rifles at us.

A lift that appeared out of nowhere was the first thing that amazed us and it took us deep underground into a space age headquarters similar in style to Jack McConnell’s moorland media centre – I suppose, no one saw McConnell build that monstrosity so who was going to notice Lawwell put this thing together?
We were escorted down a tunnel and into the Eye, an enormous room where a dozen men sat around monitors watching CCTV images from all over Scotland – so this was how Lawwell knew everything that was going on. Worryingly though, several of the screens showed images from inside Ibrox Stadium.
‘Did you know?’ I asked Bain.
‘Think we’d have allowed Celtic to get away with this if we did?’ retorted Bain.
‘Why yes, I think I do.’ I replied only to be interrupted by everyone standing to attention as in walked a man resplendent in brown shirt with death’s head insignia cufflinks and jackboots.
‘Welcome to Schiehallion gentlemen,’ said Peter Lawwell.