All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘I just tried him. It’s switched off.’

  ‘Must be the signal. Try him again.’

  ‘I will, honey.’

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘The wrong place. I’ll tell you later.’

  Jane disconnected the call and began dialling Tom’s mobile again. As before, a recorded voice informed that it was switched off. She’d keep trying.

  ‘He’s with my husband,’ she reported. ‘My daughter said Tom knows someone there, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘Rebekah,’ Bett said with a nod. The girl got up from the table and made for the door.

  Jane hit the redial button. Still no joy. She felt her heartbeat speed up, echoing the urgency she felt to get connected now that she knew Ross was also at the other end of the line. What she didn’t know was how the hell Tom could have a friend in Barcelona that he’d never mentioned, and why of all places Ross should choose to pitch up in that particular city in his time of trouble. It was quite a coincidence, as was Nuno having suggested it not five minutes ago.

  She glanced again at the young Catalan. He looked pissed off rather than vindicated. Bett’s stone-set countenance was showing cracks too.

  ‘Why did you think he’d go to Barcelona?’ Jane asked.

  ‘I saw the photographs from his apartment. Posters on the wall. Celtic.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with Barcelona?’ Bett asked.

  ‘They’re playing there tomorrow night. They bring thousands of their supporters. Los Verdiblancos. Where better to blend in, maybe find friends, get help.’

  Bett’s eyes flashed, anger now unconcealed. ‘Well, why the bloody hell didn’t you say this before?’

  ‘I did say.’

  ‘You didn’t say why.‘

  ‘You weren’t prepared to listen.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. If you had something to say, you knew it was your duty to—’

  ‘Ah, bullshit,’ Nuno retorted. ‘You’d already made your mind up that she would have all the answers. She knows nothing. It’s her husband we should have tailed. And the scariest thing is that maybe someone smarter has.‘

  ‘Ross phoned home last night,’ Jane said accusingly to Bett. ‘If you’d just let me be, instead of all this cloak-and-dagger crap, I’d be with him by now.’

  ‘Mrs Fleming,’ Bett replied, the control in his voice hinting at the anger it held back. ‘If I hadn’t dispatched Alexis and Rebekah to carry out this “cloak-and-dagger crap”, as you put it, then the men who attempted to abduct Rachel would have returned last night, as they intended, broken into her home, kidnapped her from her bed and murdered everyone else in the house.’

  She looked to Alexis, who was staring down at the table. Reluctantly, she lifted her gaze, and Jane saw the truth written there indelibly.

  Jane kept redialling. Still she could not connect. Still the announcement said it was switched off. But Tom’s mobile was never switched off.

  ‘Oh shit,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ asked Bett.

  Celtic.

  They bring thousands of their supporters.

  Dad said he knew someone over there …

  Jane lifted the phone and called Michelle again.

  ‘Michelle, who is it that Dad was meeting in Barcelona?’ she demanded, trying to keep her voice from trembling, though she couldn’t tell if it was from anger or from fear.

  ‘I don’t know, Mum. The name didn’t mean anything to me, I don’t remember.’

  Jane bit her lip, controlling her growing ire. Michelle had first lied to her when she was two, standing at the top of the stairs and announcing, ‘I haven’t done a poo in my nappy, Mum.’ Two decades later, she was more sophisticated but no less transparent.

  ‘Michelle, you said before that Dad didn’t mention the name. Now you’re saying you don’t remember. Come on, the truth.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum. Dad made me promise not to tell you.’

  ‘Well, you’ve told me now, just by saying that.’

  A man with connections who Tom knew would be in Barcelona right then for the Celtic game. A man who travelled to all the European matches, money no object, well-earned respite from the arduous treadmill of flogging drugs. And a man Tom was deluded and desperate enough to trust.

  That said, looking around at who she’d run away to team up with, perhaps she shouldn’t rush to judge. What was it they said about the devil you know?

  Bhoys n the hood

  Ross hadn’t intended to tell his dad so much. He’d just wanted to speak to him and Mum for a while, to hear their voices and try to keep the emotion from his own. But he’d barely managed hello before his dad began babbling anxiously about what happened to Rachel, and about Mum taking off from under the police’s noses before they could talk to her. He knew then there was nothing to gain from keeping his own story back: the fear, the worry, the danger had already made it home. Poor Rachel, poor Michelle. The kid had come through all right, but he felt sick that she should be targeted to get to him. This was about more than just his own safety now.

  He told his dad the bare bones, that was all. He didn’t tell him everything – he couldn’t tell anyone everything – but he gave him the salient parts. What he divulged he did so with the proviso that Dad must not inform the police. Arms firms’ security contractors – sneaks, spooks, fixers and enforcers – were rife with ex-cops, and the information trafficking back and forth was as constant as it was insecure.

  His dad asked him what he planned to do. Beyond reaching his next intended destination, he had to admit he had no idea; he didn’t know who exactly was after him nor who he could trust. He was reluctant to divulge what that destination was, but reckoned it was just a little too paranoid to believe they’d have the clout to organise a tap on his parents’ phone.

  ‘I’m going to Barcelona,’ he’d said. ‘Tonight. I figure it’ll give me a few days’ grace to think things through. Even if they tracked me down to there, it would be like finding a needle in a haystack, just one more Tim among thousands.’

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. ‘Dad?’ he asked.

  ‘Let me make a couple of phone calls, Ross,’ Dad said. ‘I know somebody who might be able to help. A guy who’ll be out there for the game. He’s got connections.’

  ‘What kind of connections?’

  ‘Dodgy connections.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Tony Connelly.’

  ‘The drug dealer? Are you kidding?’

  ‘I know the bloke, Ross. He’s bent as a nine-bob note, but he’s the kind of guy you’d want on your side.’

  ‘And what would be in it for him? Why would he want the grief? These are dangerous people on my back, Dad.’

  ‘He’s one of us, Ross. And his people are pretty dangerous too.’

  Ross slept a few hours on the first leg of the journey, which was just as well, because he was never going to get a wink on the train from Marseille. What had appeared a quiet carriage when he boarded, had piled up with Celtic supporters a few minutes before departure, and none of them had brought a book or a flask of cocoa.

  From their noisy conversations he gathered that they’d flown to Marseille, finding as his dad had last night that all flights from the UK to anywhere near Barcelona were fully booked. Dad was heading to Madrid via Heathrow, then making the rest of the trip by road. With a fair wind he’d be there by tea-time, for a rendezvous with Connelly at his hotel.

  Ross kept his head down, sitting by the window, occasionally flipping through a French newspaper to put them off the scent. It was tempting to talk to them, and even at that time of the morning he could have used one of the beers they’d doubtless have offered, but he thought it safest to avoid any entanglements. Glaswegians were as nosy as they were garrulously indiscreet. He didn’t want to give out his name, nor was he confident of remaining consistent if he chose to lie about that or any other detail they asked for.
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  One hour and several beers into the trip, the songs inevitably started up, which was what banished all chance of kip. It was intrusively distracting enough to take his mind off other matters for a while, but there was only so much vicarious Oirishness he could stomach. By the time they were approaching Barcelona, Ross had heard The Fields of Athenrye so many times that he’d have happily swapped places with the poor bastard on the transportation ship to Oz if it meant he never had to listen to that fucking dirge one more time.

  It was an aspect of supporting Celtic he’d never been able to identify with, and the source of not a few arguments in his time. ‘It’s wur roots, but, man,’ was usually the gist of the justification offered when he suggested they were maybe over-egging the soda-bread. Roots, to his knowledge, did their job best when they remained buried. Tooth or tree, overexposing them was never healthy.

  His main objection, however, was that they weren’t his roots. You had to go back three generations to find any Irish blood in his family, and that was probably still closer than half the bhoys singing ‘Soldiers are we’ on that train. The reason it so set his teeth on edge was that it echoed what his dad had been trying to do since he was old enough to notice: shape him into something he didn’t want to be, and in the face of this plainly failing, paint him as something he was not.

  Arthur Koestler called it the Dual Mind: the ability of the religious to protect their faith by keeping their beliefs separate in their thoughts from the facts and practical knowledge that contradicted all of them. Thus a doctor could profess to believe Jesus rose from the dead when he knew, from the studies he had dedicated his life’s work to, that this was complete mince. Or thus Tom Fleming could be in a shouting match about his son’s – and indeed his daughter’s – stated atheism, then ten minutes later describe them as ‘a Catholic family’.

  This was another reason Celtic had become such an important bond between them: it was one way his dad could pretend to himself that his son was still ‘one of us’. That was what Dad meant about Connelly. Not that he was local, not even that he was a Tim, but that he was a Catholic. Ross couldn’t picture him on his knees of a Sunday, but that wouldn’t have mattered. To some people – to too many people – it was a pseudo-ethnicity rather than a belief system. Dad saw it as reason enough to trust this guy, despite everything else he knew about him. Ross wasn’t so sure, but neither was he spoilt for options right then. Crooked help was better than no help, and maybe he could do with having someone scary in his corner. Being in the guy’s debt wasn’t something he was looking forward to, but right then it wasn’t the worst problem he was facing.

  When the train pulled in, he waited in his seat a while until the Verdiblancos had departed, then got up and made for the door. He spotted a scarf one of them had dropped beneath a table that was almost creaking under the weight of empties. He picked it up and draped it around his neck, figuring it would help him blend in.

  About a quarter of a mile outside the station, he took it off and stuck it in his pocket, having been accosted four times to be asked: ‘Any sperr tickets, big man?’ The place was already hoaching with Celtic fans. They were wandering every pavement and spilling out of every bar, café and restaurant. He’d banked on the security of becoming a needle in a green-and-white haystack, but the sharper eye might yet pick him out as being conspicuously sober. At least his anxious expression wouldn’t be unique whenever they got to seriously contemplating their chances in the forthcoming game. The biggest danger would be if they got a result and he was the only Tim in the city not kicking his height, but Barca’s formidable current form didn’t make that look very likely.

  He made his way to Connelly’s hotel on foot, stopping at a few places on the way to enquire after vacancies. The hotel receptionists did well not to laugh, he thought. It was a disadvantage of his home-from-home plan that he’d failed to anticipate. Well, if he couldn’t offer anything else, perhaps Connelly might at least be able to sort them out with a bedroom floor to kip down on.

  The place was called the Hotel Gran Havana, on a wide sunny thoroughfare running east-west just north of the city centre. He’d passed the Ritz a couple of blocks back on the other side, smiling momentarily at the thought that it just might be the one place in the city that had a spare billet.

  Having located the Gran Havana, he took a walk around the block, found a pavement café with a view of the place, pulled up a chair and waited. He managed to string out two coffees to almost ninety minutes before he saw a blue Passat pull into the quarter-circle plaza in front of the hotel. Ross almost laughed out loud as he saw his dad step out of the vehicle and speak to the approaching concierge. It was so typically him, same as on holiday: he always hired the same model car as he drove at home. ‘It’s safer driving something you’re used to,’ he’d explain. This time even the colour was the same.

  Ross scanned the surroundings. He’d seen only very light traffic on the wide vie throughout the late afternoon, and was satisfied to note there’d been no vehicles following behind the Passat at any visible distance, nor any drivers suddenly deciding to park further back at the same time as Dad pulled in. It had worried him that his dad could have been tailed all the way from home, whether by an individual or by relay, but it looked clear. No one could have maintained line of sight unless they were half a mile back and carrying a telescope.

  Ross watched the concierge give his dad directions, most likely to where he could safely and legally leave his car, then called for la cuenta as the Passat pulled away again.

  He entered the lobby of the Gran Havana and looked around. It was cool inside, in every sense of the word. The walls curved around him in an elegant kidney shape, climbing dramatically to a glass ceiling to create a plunging well of light. There were sofas and tables dotted around a sunken area in the centre, before a short bar hosting a sturdy brass espresso machine and a host of brandies. Slightly spoiling the art-deco ambience was the sight of ten or twelve tipsy Tims in matching hoops, lounging around and sipping San Miguels. Nobody looked twice at him when he walked in. He didn’t know what Tony Connelly looked like, but guessed none of them were him. A guy like that wouldn’t be wearing a football jersey, no matter how much he loved the team. It made you look like a foot soldier, and he was bound to consider himself officer class.

  From the corner of his eye, Ross spotted the concierge pull open the doors, and turned around to see his dad walk through them. They ran towards each other and hugged tightly, something they hadn’t done since he was a child. He faintly remembered Dad moving to do so at Glasgow Airport when he was leaving for the job at Marledoq, and Ross stepping away in subtle rebuff. That day he had felt the old man was doing it because he reckoned it decorous in marking the occasion, like it was in the big Fishell Book of Catholic Family Conduct. Today, though, it was warm, genuine and mutual. They held each other for a long few seconds, then finally broke apart and exchanged the usual breathless greetings, Dad sniffing back tears. He always looked smaller and a little rounder than Ross was somehow expecting. This, he suspected, was because the image he kept in his mind was not of the most recent time he’d seen his father, but of a younger man he used to look up to.

  He wore his business suit, like it was a day at work, and was even carrying his briefcase. Ross ordered him a drink while the old man called Michelle on his mobile to let her know everything was okay; at least as okay as it could be at that point. Ross took a shot on the phone himself while his dad went to the reception desk to ask for Connelly. There was no news from Mum, though he did get to hear Michelle reiterate first-hand that she’d definitely been alone, wherever she was, when she called last night. Ross wasn’t sure he didn’t find this more of a worry than had she been abducted. He couldn’t picture Mum going further than the Centre West shopping mall on her own, never mind away overnight or blanking the polis.

  Connelly gave Dad the room number and told them to come on up. Ross urged him to have a seat and finish his tea first, but he insisted on going straigh
t for the lift. Ross was as instinctively reluctant to bring this guy into the equation as his dad was nervously eager. In his dad’s case it was because it was the only way by which he thought he could help; in Ross’s, the fear that tying himself to one plan might close out all others.

  The door was opened by a man-mountain in a casual suit and a white polo shirt underneath. He was easily six-four, broad in the shoulders and no doubt muscular, but carrying plenty of baggage around the middle too. Ross guessed it wasn’t Connelly but a minder, and his cursory nod for them to go on through confirmed it. He noted the absence of hoops or other overstated Celtic regalia on Big Bhoy, he presumed at Connelly’s insistence, the bodyguard’s appearance unavoidably reflecting on the principal.

  They found Connelly on a mobile phone, standing by the window on the other side of the room’s king-size bed. Ross figured it a safe bet Big Bhoy had more modest quarters down the hall against ten billion to one that they were cosying up of an evening.

  He waved hello while continuing to talk, like their arrival and its circumstances were barely incidental. He was Dad’s age, Ross knew, but looked younger, mainly due to the designer threads, expensive haircut and wiry build. Big Bhoy handed them beers from the mini-bar, squeezing off the caps with his bare hands and passing them over without asking whether they wanted any. Ross was relieved to observe that they were twist-off tops. The minder noticed him examining the neck for this very feature and gave him a grin as if to say: ‘Aye, but I could’.

  Connelly finished his call and turned to greet them. He shook Dad’s hand and patted him on the back familiarly. Ross didn’t think they knew each other that well, and took it to be the kind of gesture gangsters enjoyed bestowing, knowing nobody would ever object to it.

  ‘Thomas, good to see you. Pity about the circumstances. Shame it wasnae just for the game, eh? And you must be young Ross,’ he said, offering a hand. Ross shook it tentatively. ‘Sorry to hear about your troubles, son, but let’s see if we cannae sort something out.’