All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Lex was grateful to be walking behind her charge, because that way he couldn’t see that she was almost as nervous as him. Once again, she had to rationalise. This was just her fear lending Bett absurd powers of interpretation. There was little he could have seen that would have caused him suspicion: Lex at a PC, tapping away. Even if it was after she’d supplied the codes, it wasn’t unusual that she’d be curiously poking about inside the system; that was what she did. Besides, if he’d been looking at the right monitor at the time, he would have given her a heads-up that she was about to be ambushed.

  Still, the rush of arguing voices and conflicting possibilities was growing cacophonic inside her head, which was why she ended up making small talk with the geek.

  ‘We’re not going to hurt you,’ she assured him. ‘Just taking you to see the boss.’

  ‘Aye, right,’ he doubted.

  ‘Hey, it could have been worse, man. You could have been watching the game with the others. You not a fan?’

  ‘I was taping it. Planned to watch it when I got home. That’s if nobody told me the score.’

  ‘No danger from me. I don’t know it. But I do know whatever happened, it didn’t end well for your security guys.’

  ‘So I gathered,’ he said bitterly. ‘And how’s it going to end for me?’

  The Security and Surveillance HQ doorway stood only yards ahead.

  ‘You’re just about to find out.’

  Lex overtook him and ushered him inside, where Bett was waiting next to the monitor console, a telephone ready in preparation. He offered the lab-geek an outstretched hand, which he shook half-heartedly with near-dazed uncertainty, then Bett told him what he wanted him to do.

  Bett hit dial. They heard the tones sound out twice from the speaker before it was answered.

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice: male. English accent. ‘Nicholas Willis here,’ he identified himself. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Sir,’ the lab-geek started throatily. He swallowed and began again. ‘Sir, this is Ross Fleming at Marledoq. I’m calling to inform you that it’s twenty-two eighteen hours and I am currently being held at gunpoint by intruders who have complete control of the facility. Sir, I’m sorry, they just came from—’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Mr Fleming, that will be all,’ Bett said, taking the receiver from him and turning the speakerphone off. ‘Hello, Mr Willis. Yes, reckoned I’d better do that in case you thought I was making this call from my living room. For the record, we had complete control at twenty-two eleven, that’s twenty-four minutes after entering the subterranean complex, forty-one minutes after first point of contact at your exterior perimeter and sixty-seven minutes after landing our helicopter. Indeed. I’ll be putting all of those details in my written report, along with my full list of recommendations and, of course, my invoice. No, I agree, it’s not good at all, Mr Willis. Well, that’s at your discretion, but, personally, my first step would be to fire anyone who is right now literally sleeping on the job. I’ll be in touch.’

  Bett put down the phone.

  ‘Who are you people?’ Fleming asked.

  ‘What’s called a Tiger Team,’ Lex told him. ‘We were brought in to carry out a Defence and Integrity test on the Marledoq complex. If you don’t mind me telling you the scoreline in advance, it didn’t pass.’

  ‘No kidding.’

  ‘I’d anticipate seeing a lot of changes around here, Mr Fleming,’ Bett said. ‘Your employers are about to seriously upgrade this facility’s security. I’m sure you know more than I about precisely why, but from precedent my guess is you’re working on something that certain people might be prepared to go to extreme lengths to procure.’

  Lex felt her hand move unbidden towards the pouch on her harness where the memory stick sat safe, storing her stolen digital cargo.

  Extreme lengths indeed, she thought.

  Sports cars and casinos

  Jane stopped dead in her tracks when she saw him approaching hurriedly in the smir under the low, grey, mid-morning sky. It was eleven in the morning, but passing cars still had their headlamps on and there had been no improvement in natural visibility since the street lights went off two hours before. He was in uniform, grim-faced as he clutched his gun. She stared, the consequences hitting home, and in that moment her hesitation cost her the option to hit the deck. He looked up and saw her. Eye contact had been made, so he knew she was there.

  If she’d been more alert, she could have spotted him earlier, she knew, and taken steps accordingly: changed her itinerary, used her time on areas his intrusion wouldn’t affect, or possibly just hidden her presence altogether. Kill all the lights, stay low, wait it out, and he’d move on; then a simple phone-call to relay the appropriate information would prevent his coming back. But all of that was moot now. She no longer had any choice but to let him do his worst.

  She walked reluctantly to the front door in her stocking soles, the delicacy of her imprint seemingly pointless in the face of what was about to be wreaked.

  ‘Morning. Here to read your gas meter,’ he announced.

  ‘Oh, sure, come on in,’ she said, faking a smile. It wasn’t his fault; he was only doing his job. It was just bad timing, really bad timing. If she’d held off on the hall for five minutes, it wouldn’t have made a big difference, or if she hadn’t just mopped the kitchen floor, she could have called him round the back door and let him in there.

  She led him down the full length of the hall to the cupboard under the stairs, at the far end next to the living room, where he pointed the gun and took his reading.

  ‘That’s me, thank you,’ he told her, then she escorted him back out again. A matter of moments, that was all it took.

  Jane closed the door and turned around, surveying the damage. Two sets of bootprints, one in each direction, tracked the meter-reader’s passage up and down her just-hoovered hall carpet. He’d not been particularly tall or heavy-set, but that didn’t matter: it was all in the soles. Flat spread the weight and left minimum markage, but his chunky, patterned rubberware had bitten into the pile like a Dobermann, and that Dobermann had drooled, too. Almost every step was damp on the inwards journey, and nearer the door there were dark streaks, an abrasive seasonal compound of earth, decayed leaves, gritter-salt and bark.

  She should have let him in the back door anyway, she thought ruefully. At this time of year, she should always and only let them in the back door. Mopping the kitchen again would take a fraction of the time, though at the cost of damp stockings (bare feet not being an option due to leaving prints that remained visible against the tiles after the floor was dry). The damp stockings were going to be unavoidable anyway as she had to get to the sink and the cupboard under it in order to begin working on the damage. Jane looked at the glistening kitchen tiles. Why was it they only looked that clean and shiny when they were wet, and why was it that you always had to go back into the kitchen for something as soon as the floor had been mopped? She could wait ten minutes for it to dry, she considered, already anticipating the feel of the cold wet on the soles of her tights, but that was ten more minutes for that sludgy compound to be drying into her carpet.

  Damn it. She took a step forward, bracing herself for the ick factor of that cold, spreading sensation, then stopped and remained at the edge of the carpet. For the resourceful operative, there were always other options. Jane leaned inside, her left foot still outside the door, her right held in balance in the air as her hands met the island worktop. She tipped herself further until the edge of the Formica pressed just beneath her chest, then reached her hands towards the far edge and pulled, her centre of gravity shifting all weight forwards. Both feet left the ground as she pivoted on her front on the edge of the worktop, before hauling herself and turning in one movement to leave her sitting on the island. Good to know all those aerobics sessions at the gym had a practical pay-off. Drawing her legs up to her chest and spinning on her bottom, she manoeuvred to the other side of the island, from where she was able to reach out with her righ
t leg and hook a dish-towel off the radiator with her big toe before transferring it to her right hand. Thus armed, she let the towel unfold and dropped it gently to the floor, then stepped down on to it with both feet. After that, it took only half a yard of the tied-foot shuffle to get her to the sink, the dish-towel providing a priceless protective membrane between soles and floor.

  Jane ran a basinful of hot water and added some washing-up liquid, before unlatching the cupboard below, where her heavy-duty chemical arsenal was stored. So many abrasives, detergents, poison warnings, death-heads, bio-hazard decals. She often wondered whether, if you put all these cleaning agents together in the right quantities, you might create something that could blow half the neighbourhood to Kingdom Come, or even just to Busby.

  They should never have gone for self-coloured, she thought, working carpet-mousse into the fibres with a sponge. It showed up everything; not just dirt, but each wisp of fluff from Tom’s socks, each discarded snippet of thread from clothing. Plus, they should have definitely, definitely chosen a twist rather than a pile that becomes churned-up and streaky if walked upon in anything more substantial than M&S nylons – and even that is enough to make it look bumpy and mottled after a while. What use was a carpet if it doesn’t look good after any modicum of pedestrian traffic? On occasion, she found herself watching visitors arrive and wishing she hadn’t invited them because they were about to violate this expanse of laboriously cultivated neatness. Then, once they were inside, her mind was drawn impatiently throughout their conversation to thoughts of combing it neat again as soon as they left.

  She finished with the mousse and returned the basin to the kitchen floor, then made for the hall cupboard and her trusty Dyson. Within a couple of minutes, most of the meter-reader’s tracks had been erased, with only the damp patches near the door testifying to his having visited. She surveyed this with the satisfaction she always enjoyed when it had been freshly combed: no streaks, no imprints, just an unspoilt virgin purity. If only people didn’t then have to go and walk on the damn thing.

  Okay, all of this was daft, she knew. The guys who painted the Forth Bridge understood that there was no end; like the river below them, their work was a constant flow. She understood that too, most of the time. Today, for goodness’ sake, she was hoovering every speck, and rendering the place immaculate when she knew Michelle was bringing Rachel and Thomas over in the afternoon – the pair of them capable of turning the place upside down in minutes. But she needed, every so often, to restore a kind of equilibrium. It reassured her to achieve this – the untrammelled carpet, the sparkling kitchen tiles, the empty laundry basket, no clothes on the horse or in the pile – because if that equilibrium had been restored, even for a short while, it meant that no matter what the subsequent disruption, it could be restored again.

  And this also, she knew, was daft. Very daft. She had to take a step outside herself to see it, however, which was a rarely glimpsed perspective, and sadly not one revelatory enough to free her. It meant she was still obsessive-compulsive, but self-conscious and embarrassed about her lot into the bargain.

  Obsessing over carpets and laundry. How on earth had it come to this? Tom said she was suffering some kind of mid-life crisis, though that was in response to her Private Hire work and her abortive mature student foray into academia. He didn’t really mean it. It was merely his way of discounting what she was doing as a phase he was impatiently awaiting her to get past. Men were good at that; Tom was anyway: filing your activities and enthusiasms away under Silly Female Behaviour, transient notions of a feeble and ditzy mind. Bide your time and she’ll be back to normal soon.

  But what if this ‘normality’ was her mid-life crisis? If so, she’d be extremely disappointed. She’d always imagined it would take a form considerably more dramatic than involuntary emotional investment in the condition of her floor coverings, and be precipitated by something significant, remarkable and halfway interesting. But maybe normality was what precipitated it. What bigger crisis was there at this late juncture in your life than finding yourself asking: Is this it?

  The ironing, dusting, hoovering, mopping, sponging and re-hoovering complete, Jane moved on to cleaning the bathroom and the downstairs toilet – temporarily gleaming china representing a few more brief licks on those river-spanning girders – before continuing her rich, full day with a jaunt to the shops.

  Apart from the major milestones of marriage, parenthood and bereavement, other people marked the passing phases of their adult lives by the cities they had lived in, stages in their careers, lovers they’d been with, projects they’d worked on. ‘Ah, yes, the Barcelona years. Those summers with Theo, before we grew apart. That controversial tenure with the Philosophy Department. My Impressionist period.’ Jane could break hers down by supermarket. Early Eighties: Presto. Late Eighties to mid-Nineties: Tesco. Late Nineties: Safeway. Early Twenty-First Century: her J Sainsbury period. This last she considered something of a belle époque, but strictly in terms of the shopping.

  Jane had never had a career. A succession of jobs, yes, interrupted by child-rearing, but never a career. She’d known only one city, and having lived on its periphery in East Kilbride most of her adult life, she couldn’t even claim to have known it that well. For more than twenty years she’d lived in the same house, and for longer than that had had the same lover. Well, the same man anyway. Projects? At least on that score she could say there’d been two. But they had both left home now, indeed one of them had left the country, and neither gave the impression they believed she’d done a bang-up job. On the plus side, one of them was still speaking to her.

  Being just up from Whirlies Roundabout, the Kingsgate retail park was yet another node in the EK traffic-generation-and-recycling system, but it was worth tolerating the congestion to shop in a comparatively calm and spacious environment, especially when you spent as much time in supermarkets as Jane did. Also, for Lanarkshire, they boasted more than the average number of aisles not selling oven chips and frozen pizzas.

  Jane enjoyed trailing along the shelves and counters, daydreaming about what she’d like to make if she wasn’t going home to cook for Tom, who thought that alternating between Indian and Chinese for his Friday-night takeaway meant he had an adventurous appetite. Tom’s favourite home-cooked dish was stovies, though ideally it would have been cooked in his previous home by his mother, whose culinary expertise had inexplicably failed to grant her international acclaim and whose secret recipe for her signature dish had gone with her to the grave, along with close to a hundredweight of rosary beads. It said a great deal about why Scotland was perennially referred to as the Sick Man of Europe that Tom considered home-made stovies a healthy and wholesome option, as opposed to, say, a deep-fried pizza supper or an intravenous injection of lukewarm, but rapidly congealing, pork-fat. Consisting of reheated Lorne sausage swimming in a watery stew of boiled carrots and disintegrating spuds, Tom’s-Mammy-recipe stovies looked like what you might find swilling at the bottom if a butcher, a greengrocer and a pet-store shared the same wheelie bin. Jane was of the belief that Lorne sausage was something people would get into trouble for feeding to animals in ten years’ time, and was pretty sure that in other countries, they wouldn’t even let you store stovies in the same wheelie bin as normal domestic waste. So, it being Thursday and her not having cooked it so far this week, guess what was on the menu tonight? A fillet of that tempting-looking sea bass on a bed of wasabi mash, with a spinach-and-coriander salsa? Some of that Gresham duck breast nestling on crisp salad leaves and drizzled with an orange-and-mango reduction? Or …

  ‘Half a pound of square sausage, please.’

  ‘Square? Right you are, missus.’

  Jane’s efforts at tempting Tom with more exotic fare had long since been abandoned. Minor variations on familiar dishes were met with queries as to whether she’d not been able to get the standard ingredients, and more ambitious undertakings had frequently been forsaken at the preparatory stage; Tom suspecting experimentati
on was afoot and venturing into the kitchen to inform her: ‘I’ll just have my steak/chicken/fish plain, with a few totties. Save you all that bother.’

  She should have spotted it from the start, and looking back, the evidence was all there, but when you’re young you sometimes project more than you actually see. The teen magazines of her youth should have offered less advice on make-up and period pain if it allowed space to pass on more useful wisdom, such as a warning that you were kidding yourself if you thought your young suitor’s less desirable traits would fade with time, while allowing the fairer ones to bloom. An old-fashioned streak in an adolescent can seem endearing, single-mindedness a sign of character. Add twenty years and the effect is considerably less charming.

  It wasn’t that he was cantankerous or miserable with his stone-set ways: what truly alienated Jane was that he was so satisfied by them. ‘Philistine’ was a term people used too freely to describe individuals they considered less cultured than themselves, even just people who didn’t share their tastes. (The supreme irony of this, she had learned, was that the original Philistines were about five hundred years more culturally advanced than the Israelites.) If Tom preferred stovies to a Nick Nairn creation, that was his shout. It wasn’t his taste that made him a Philistine. It was that he seemed, as one of her favourite books put it, content to live in a wholly unexplored world.

  The book, The Lyre of Orpheus, was about staging a new opera, from conception through to opening night. She’d read it no fewer than five times, savouring every word, its pleasures, like all of the best novels, bittersweet that it was a fiction. What wouldn’t she give to be part of something like that? Any part: a seamstress working on the costumes; a line-prompt; the librettist’s assistant, transcribing his flights of idea. To be working in concert with committed, remarkable people, giving the best of themselves to create something of such excitement and beauty – a fluid, living testament to the peaks of human aspiration. Who wouldn’t want to swap reality for the world between those pages?