Portrait of a lost self
It’s three days later. She’s in a cottage six miles outside Chartres, lying in the bath, wishing she could remain there in a warm and bubble-covered state of suspended animation.
She had to get out of the city two days back merely to get some sleep. She remembers forcing herself to turn off the TV, with its endless looping of the same images, feeding the news cycle that was spinning inside her own head. Footage of the mosque, police gathering, worshippers running out, being corralled at what unavoidably looked like gunpoint, the sounds of shots, the wail of ambulances, the face of Raziya Souf, screaming her loss. The cycle evolved to include the first gatherings of masked youths in the suburbs and the earliest pronouncements of exuberant outrage from the Middle East. By dusk, there had been cries of vengeance: nauseatingly predictable demands for the deaths of those responsible for this affront to Islam and, in particular, the ‘murderer’ of Falik Souf.
‘He must pay for violating this holy place,’ raged some bearded twat in Saudi Arabia. ‘We demand his name and we demand his head.’
Time was when Angelique’s response would have been a wry smile at how much this windbag would enjoy meeting ‘him’ one-on-one to discuss matters, but not any more. All she could see was a wave of hate, pulsing out from an epicentre at which she stood over the body of the man who had fooled her into making him a martyr. The shockwave had already made it halfway round the world and back again. There were ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations being orchestrated throughout the more militant enclaves of the Islamic world; a good day for anyone with a stockpile of the Tricolore to sell. Buy your French flags here, free matches and lighter fuel with every purchase. And by nightfall in Paris, there was rioting on the streets: live footage of cars on fire, stones and petrol bombs arcing towards police lines, all against a soundtrack of sirens.
When she turned off the TV, she could still hear the same sirens from less than a mile outside her window. That was when she got in the car and left for the rural bolthole she co-owned.
‘Take some time off,’ Dougnac had said. ‘As much as you need.’
‘I reckon about twenty-five years should cover it,’ she had replied. ‘I’m serious, sir. I can’t do this any more. It’s over.’
‘This will all feel different in a week, maybe less,’ he assured her.
Three days on, what worried her most was that he would turn out to be right.
It had happened plenty of times before. She hadn’t actually announced her intention to quit before, but she’d been through the feeling that she couldn’t go on, couldn’t recover from what she had just been through sufficiently to pick herself up and head back into the fray. Yet, every time, she had: no matter what she had witnessed, no matter what she had been required to do, no matter the danger or pain she had endured. The scar tissue, she knew, would soon form over what happened at the mosque like it had formed over so many previous wounds. Each time she went through something like this, she emerged just a little bit tougher, which meant that she was able to feel just a little bit less. In this instance, perhaps a lot less, and that was why she feared Dougnac being right. In a few days, things would feel different, and in time she would be able to go back. But what would be left of her inside?
All those times before, when she had cried herself dry and then returned to the unit, it wasn’t because she was healed: it was because she had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, and certainly no one else to be with.
The job never loves you back. It chews you up and spits out a husk.
There was a painting she kept in a cupboard in the cottage, still protected and obscured by its swaddling of cellophane bubble wrap. It was painted by Zal Innez, a coded invitation to a rendezvous in another country (not to mention another legal jurisdiction) from the one where their paths, having been thrown into collision, would ever after have to remain parallel, never able to touch. There were no expectations or conditions attached, just a secret where and when, encoded in oils, allowing the possibility, despite their distant and secretive lives, of simply seeing each other again. The when was her birthday, a year on from the day they met. The where was the Musée d’Orsay.
When the day came, she was three time zones away, sitting in a damp wooden hut in Lebanon, surveilling a farmhouse on what had turned out to be bad intel, unless what her binoculars had shown her was actually the foundation of Al Qaeda’s first jihadi-goat training camp. The job saved her making a decision about whether to show up, and taught her what her decision always ought to have been anyway.
The closer the date had approached, the less sure she had become of whether she intended to appear, and she had barely dared contemplate the question of whether she believed Zal would.
When she was being most rational and least insecure, she was at least able to convince herself that what had happened between them was real. Zal, for all his abilities to deceive, had opened up to her, rendered himself vulnerable in ways that she refused to believe any man could fake, or would possibly wish to. He had exposed the scars on his soul for her to read and understand like she had read the tattoos on his skin. But it was that same tenderness, that same vulnerability, that told her how, even if she wanted to see him again, for his sake she ought not to.
If you love somebody, set them free, wasn’t that what they said?
She had no idea how much anyone else might have known about their relationship. DCS Jock Shaw had remained unreadable on the matter, both at the time and in the aftermath. He knew she had been secretly meeting with Zal even while half the Glesca Polis were out looking for him, but as the intelligence deriving from this had proven expedient towards nailing a far bigger target, Shaw hadn’t probed too deeply into what these meetings had involved or might imply. However, what he suspected about it – and what he might even have secretly discovered about it – was an unknown variable in an already very unstable equation. All of which was to say nothing of the fact that the Royal Scottish & Great Northern Bank remained eight hundred thousand pounds light and denied even the satisfaction of seeing a suspect in custody.
After everything Zal had endured in his life, through loss, through prison, through tragedy, through pain and fear; and the labours he had undertaken to extricate himself from the dangers of such things being repeated, she couldn’t see herself as anything but a risk, and one that she had no right to expose him to. What could she give him anyway, in exchange for that risk? The occasional off-chance of some time in the company of a knackered, stressed and increasingly alienated policewoman? It wasn’t like she was going to quit her job and run off with a fugitive, was it?
You knew it couldn’t last – maybe that was the attraction.
It was a week after her birthday when she got back from Lebanon. Some small part of her succumbed to wondering whether he might yet show up, having found out where she lived; or whether he might just appear, with typically magical showmanship, were she to go along to the museum several days late. But these were just the daft, girlish dreams that were hard to give up when reality required a difficult, adult decision. In this case that decision was to let it go: that it was best for both of them – and for Zal in particular – if she just let him think she didn’t want to see him again. That, in a way, would be the most loving thing she could do for him: let him forget about her, let him escape the last threat that might yet see him tracked down and lose everything again.
The painting remained wrapped up, never looked at it in all the years since its invitation expired, but she had not been able to bring herself to throw it out either. She had never considered hanging it, simply because she was too self-conscious to have a painting of herself staring back at her, but as the years had passed, she became more and more reluctant to even take it out from the back of the cupboard and have a peek at the thing. She was afraid to look at it, like it possessed an inverse version of the Dorian Gray effect: a face that would provide a disturbing contrast to the one that tended to pitch up on the mirror. The woman in the paint
ing was not just five years younger, but seen through the eyes of Zal Innez. It was a portrait of a woman she had once wished she could be: a happy woman, a hopeful woman, a woman who might be falling in love. Now, what worried her wasn’t just the fear that she’d never be that woman, but that she was no longer the woman who once wished to be.
‘This too will pass.’ That was one of Zal’s tattoos: a sentiment intended to give hope in times of hardship and sound a warning in times of joy.
This will all feel different in a week, maybe less, was how Dougnac had unknowingly echoed the same point.
The corollary to both, however, was the favourite of an elderly but sprightly neighbour when Angelique was growing up in Glasgow: ‘You’re a lang time deid.’
Enough.
Sorry, Gilles. This time she wasn’t coming back.
She hears the phone ring, ignores it. Probably for Mireille, with whom she co-owns the cottage. Angelique has given the number to very few people, and none that she’s prepared to speak to right now.
Her mobile rings, only moments after the landline gives up. She ignores that too. It rings twice more, each time diverting to the voicemail service. She decides to switch it off altogether so that she can enjoy her bath in silence. She gets up and wraps a towel around herself so as not to soak the carpet as she retrieves the phone from the coffee table in the living room. The bloody thing rings again just as she’s reaching for it, and she can’t help but see the caller’s name:
Jock Shaw.
She answers, some automatic reflex kicking in even though it’s been several years since she was answerable to him. Jock Shaw, for a long array of reasons, is the kind of guy you’d still take a call from if you were hanging from the window ledge of a burning building.
‘DCS Shaw. It’s been a long time. Sir,’ she adds.
‘Mademoiselle de Xavia. Playing hard to get.’
‘I was in the bath,’ she explains, simultaneously wondering why she feels the need to do so. ‘What can I do for you, sir?’
‘Ach, it’s just one of those late-night drunken phone calls, hen, you know? Had a load of bevvies with some pals and got reminiscing about an old, eh, acquaintance of yours, not seen round these parts for a good few years. Led to your name popping up, so I thought I’d give you a wee bell just for old time’s sake, you know?’
Angelique feels herself shudder and stiffen. Shaw sounds perfectly sober. Her mind becomes a zoetrope of possibilities, her pulse speeding up like the strobe light inside. Fear that her secret past is about to be exposed, fear that her beloved thief is in danger, the tantalising notion that she might see him again. So many flickering frames coalescing into one image: Zal.
She says nothing, a long nothing. At the other end, she hopes, it just sounds like she’s not in the mood for banter. She swallows, clears her throat.
‘What do you want, sir?’
‘Heard you quit.’
‘You heard right.’
‘How many times is that, now?’
‘Just the once, sir,’ she responds calmly.
‘Serendipitous.’
‘How so?’ she asks, then reads ahead. ‘Oh, no, don’t even begin—’
‘Monsieur Dougnac reckons you just need a break. They say a change is as good as a rest.’
‘I’m taking more than a rest. Dougnac’s in for a disappointment.’
‘I don’t doubt it. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve a need for your talents back here. Something has—’
‘When I said I quit, I meant the whole shebang, sir.’
‘Hmmm,’ he says, with the infuriating certainty of clearly having something up his sleeve. ‘You seen the news lately?’
‘I’ve not turned on the TV for two days. If you’ve spoken to Dougnac, you’ll know I am the news.’
‘I was talking about the big story back in Blighty. Thought that might pique your interest in a wee trip home.’
‘What is it? Are they abolishing the monarchy? I’d come back for that.’
‘You heard of Darren McDade?’
‘The wee prick that writes send-them-back and string-themup stuff for one of the tabloids?’
‘That’s the chap. Disappeared a few days ago. Turns out he’s filed his last column. Somebody killed him, and went to an awful lot of trouble about it.’
‘Not really registering on my heart-rending tragedy metre,’ she says. ‘In fact, I think I just felt the world get more tolerant by the weight of approximately fifteen stone of arsehole.’
‘Well, I’d hold off on the street party just yet. You got access to your email there?’
‘Yes, got a laptop.’
‘Good. Call me back on this number once you’ve checked out the links I’ve sent you.’
And with that, he hangs up before she can respond.
She boots up her laptop.
Forty minutes later, she calls back.
‘This stuff is all over the internet, then, I take it?’
‘Aye. McDade’s newspaper and the law have been busy getting the files pulled from various websites since about two hours after the videos first appeared, but they pop up elsewhere just as quick, spreading like plooks on a teenager.’
‘I believe the technical term is “viral”, sir.’
‘See, that’s why we need young officers who are au fait with modern technology and hip to the groove, daddy-cool.’
‘Aye, very good. So where do I come into your thinking? I’m assuming from the faux-Guantanamo clobber you reckon we’re dealing with an Islamist group.’
‘Well, my eldest suggested it could be somebody who really hates Slipknot. I had to ask him to explain that one.’
‘Was that before or after you asked him to explain what he was doing streaming execution videos?’
‘Well, it was him that alerted me to the situation, a good while before any of my fellow polis would have done, so I let him off.’
‘Joking apart, what’s the script? Anybody claimed responsibility for this?’
‘After a fashion.’
‘After a fashion? What the hell does that mean?’
‘It means you’re slipping in your old age, Angelique. I’m sending you a new link just now. Okay, we had to digitally enhance a detail of the video concerned, but time was you’d probably have spotted it with the naked eye.’
Shaw had a unique ability to flatter you and take the piss at the same time. It was probably one of the reasons he managed so effortlessly to command so much loyalty. She refreshes her mail client and clicks on the new link. This time it is to an encrypted police server and not some public web vault. Shaw dictates a username and passcode.
It’s from the final video, the actual execution scene. Angelique feels a knot in her gut as soon as it flashes up. She was hoping not to have to watch any of it again, but this part was in a whole other domain of sickening. At least the sound is muted. The killer had bound McDade but didn’t gag him. He wanted to hear his screams, his tears, his pleas for mercy.
Like all of the clips, the scene has been staged so that the killer never appears in shot, other than the occasional hand and, in one instance, his back from the shoulders down.
The scene pauses, leaving McDade dangling, his tied legs frozen in mid-two-footed kick. A cursor arrow appears in the frame and tracks to the right of the gallows, where it proceeds to describe a square of dotted lines around an area of what upon first glance had appeared to be merely a section of black wall. Now highlighted, Angelique notices a slight difference in light and texture, as well as some tiny specks of white against the black, which had previously resembled nothing more conspicuous than splashes of paint. The cursor arrow changes to a magnifying glass and begins to zoom. As the focus draws in, the difference in texture becomes more pronounced until Angelique perceives that she is looking at a reflection. Before the dotted square has filled the frame, it has become clear that the highlighted detail is a mirror attached to the rear wall, and she feels her mouth open as she recognises what it is ref
lecting.
‘You are fucking kidding me.’
Taking up most of the screen on her laptop now is a blurry but unmistakable close-up of the killer’s head, staring back towards the camera, having taken up position quite deliberately to supply this signature detail. He is wearing a small black cowboy hat, his face covered by a black sheet. Upon this are drawn two rows of grid-like white teeth for a mouth and two white squares above for eyes, oversize black pupils in the centre, doubtless concealing view-holes.
Rank Bajin: cartoon villain of a 1960s Glasgow cartoon strip, partial subject of a much-loved statue in bronze on Woodlands Road, and erstwhile calling card of the rampagingly egotistical mass-murderer Simon Darcourt.
‘Never did find a body, did they?’ Shaw asks rhetorically.
Angelique feels her mouth going dry.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she breathes.
‘Aye. They say he came back from the dead as well.’
Bar act (i)
Zal’s hands fan the deck along the bar top, faces up, then flip them back one hundred and eighty degrees, as though he pulled a cord and they were strung like Venetian blinds. The red-andwhite-checked backs of the cards form a continuous tessellation across a span of about twelve inches, broken only by the single all-white edge of the solitary card that is now facing the wrong way. The girl who chose the card blushes, gives the guy she’s with an elbow in the ribs in response to some remark Zal never heard above the chatter around the bar. Zal places a finger on the inverse card and nudges it forward just enough to expose the corner and confirm that it is the nine of diamonds. The girl puts a fist in her mouth and bites on her knuckles to stem self-conscious laughter as raucous applause breaks out among the onlookers. The boyfriend shakes his head in amused befuddlement, then slaps a fifty-euro note down on the hardwood and tells everybody to order what they like. Amidst the dozen or so shouts for various drinks, there is a clamour for Zal to show the patrons something else, but he tells them, ‘All in good time,’ while Katarina and he get busy dealing with the orders.
A Snowball in Hell Page 7
