Reading between the lines, it sounded like Dale had reached the same grim conclusion as Angelique regarding the chances of the three remaining abductees. When he talked about the killer’s next move, she knew he accepted that this part of the game was already lost. She couldn’t criticise his judgment in how he chose to approach such a near-impossible situation; her doubts were largely around the wisdom of attempting to play Simon Darcourt at his own game when they had no real idea of what Darcourt’s game might be; or indeed for sure if even Darcourt it was.
One indisputable benefit of Dale’s thinking, however, was that it brought them back physically to one of the investigation’s most important loci. Having come in a little late, Angelique was grateful for the opportunity to get a feel for the place. There was plenty of footage, naturally, and it was all being analysed pixel by pixel, but there was some fundamental polis instinct that could only be satisfied by getting a first-hand feel for places. She dealt in evidence and logic, so she wasn’t talking about emotions or images metaphysically adhering to the surroundings, but she had a need to know what it felt like to be standing inside and outside of the Tivoli: walking where the victims walked, looking where the perp was looking. Seeing what he was seeing was, unfortunately, a more elusive matter.
The most analysed footage had been that from the CCTV cameras on Shatfesbury Avenue. Even with the images enhanced, all they had were a couple of fuzzy close-ups of a face wearing sunglasses (at night) and a chauffeur’s cap, the shots extracted from the half-seconds of tape showing the limo pulling up and later driving away. Those were the only times that a camera was pointed face-on to his windscreen. He had needed to park in front of the Tivoli in order to block Vogue 2.2’s real limo and present his own instead, but he must have taken the camera positions into account. He had parked a little back from the red carpet, his vehicle’s nose just about in line with it, meaning that all the time he was sitting there, the closest camera only had a view from the rear, and the nearest facing camera had its view of the windscreen obscured by the awning. The two shots lifted from when the vehicle was in motion were useless: they could have been showing a shop-dummy in shades and a peaked cap. It had been suggested that he might actually be wearing some kind of blank plastic mask, and even that he had treated the windscreen with something in order to reflect very little light from within, but Angelique didn’t consider either ruse particularly probable or even necessary.
Bottom line: he wasn’t going to drop a bollock and he wasn’t going to throw them any bones.
They did get a plate: a French one, which was initially considered a valuable lead until a cross-Channel trace revealed it to be the same as on the Mercedes carrying Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed on their final high-speed journey through Paris. The registration was a fake, but it certainly had Darcourt written all over it.
There had been a veritable ant-colony of forensics personnel and SOCOs crawling all over Nick Foster’s mansion in Kent. There was no evidence of a break-in or a struggle, and indeed consequently no evidence that it had even been this house that he’d been abducted from. Even attempts to narrow the window on when he had been taken had been fogged by apparently crucial information disintegrating before their eyes. The last known contact, it had been established, was a text to his PA, Susie Russell, the afternoon before the party. The police were already constructing a possible timetable of events placing this as the earliest possible starting point, when somebody had the presence of mind to take a closer look at what the text message actually said:
Off for a detox down-payment in advance of the shindig. Doing some penance upfront. Plan to get into a shocking state! Take tomorrow off. I’ll get to Tivoli by alternative means. Stand by for a surprise entrance. ;)
The apparent comic prescience of the wording retrospectively suggested that Foster never composed the text, so he could have been abducted any time up to twenty hours before that, when he last actually spoke to his PA on his mobile.
In the meantime, however, the Forensics team had, against all expectation, pulled out a plum. Concentrating very specifically on the shelves housing Foster’s CD collection, as highlighted in Darcourt’s video (as well as his computer, as suggested by the mention of his playlists), they had found a partial fingerprint that didn’t match Foster’s own dabs on the spine of an album. The fingerprint analysis lab had then undertaken a laborious elimination process, checking the partial against prints volunteered by Foster’s friends, relatives, employees and anxious ex-lovers (anxious as in anxious to eliminate themselves as suspects). They were on to their third day without a match when one of the analysts, perhaps inspired by working late into the evening, demonstrated sufficient musical knowledge as to suggest that there might be more than incidental significance to the identity of the album that the elusive partial print had besmirched. It was Rust Never Sleeps, by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Track six, understandably well known among the analyst’s profession, was ‘Powderfinger’.
Blind fate seldom hands you such neatly packaged anecdote material, and sheer luck seldom gifts you a solitary print at a locus around which the suspect has been vigilant in leaving no other traces. The analyst took the hint, and on more than a hunch tested the partial against a comparison set lifted from the home of a person no one had previously thought to check against, due to the normally compelling eliminating factor of being dead.
It matched.
The print had been left by Darren McDade’s finger. Crosschecking confirmed that it was the middle one.
Indeed.
It was concluded as most likely that the killer brought along the CD for the purpose, complete with print, rather than taking along the finger itself. He hadn’t been shy of distributing McDade’s body parts, as the late pundit’s former employers could attest, but by consensus it was agreed as simply too implausible that Foster would own something as musically substantial and enduring as a Neil Young album.
The disappearance of McDade hadn’t yielded any worthwhile material so far either. Initially it had been believed that he was abducted from the Birmingham hotel room he was booked into for the night, after taking part in a TV show filmed at Pebble Mill. However, this theory had proven valuable only by way of illustrating the cops’ suggestibility in the absence of real evidence. In the videos, McDade is seen waking up in a hotel room, and as they knew he was checked into one, they automatically began reconstructing the events as bookended by these two facts. Security images from the hotel lobby and the street outside showed McDade leaving the hotel and getting into a car later confirmed as having been sent by the production company, but there was no footage of him ever returning. Witnesses stated that after filming the programme, he proceeded to tan the Green Room for all the red wine they had and all the canapes he could physically keep down, before adjourning to a nearby pub called the Cap and Gown. He was last seen, very drunk, on the street outside the pub, apparently in search of a cab. It was now widely speculated that he may have found a limo instead.
Angelique is listening to her voicemails – three queued up from having her phone off during the press conference – when she sees him making his way hesitantly into the main body of the club. He’s looking like he’s expecting to be stopped and asked to explain himself, but the people he passes are too busy dismantling and removing either their own equipment or the backdrop and tables from the press conference to pay him much heed. He’s in jeans and a leather jacket, small satchel slung over his shoulder, and sporting a goatee beard these days. Perhaps he thinks it makes him look more grown-up and august; she’d need to see it with the collar and tie he wore Monday to Friday. She tries to picture it. Nah. It would only serve to emphasise how his professional attire didn’t quite work. You could put a suit on a geeky grebo but he’d just be a geeky grebo in a suit, as conversely so many born-in-a-suit types simply looked wrong if you bumped into them over the weekend. He is now the head of the English department at Burnbrae Academy, but he looks like he just walked out of Forbidden Planet; given th
at there is a branch less than a hundred yards away, chances are he has.
She waves subtly, then with a full, arm’s length arc when he fails to spot her amid the ferment. He grins, making more eagerly and directly towards her.
‘Angelique, hiya. Long time no see.’
‘Ray. Thanks for coming. Really appreciate this.’
‘Gets me out of school. Feel like I’m doggin’ it but I’ve got a letter from my mum.’
‘Flight on time? Have you come straight from Heathrow?’
‘Pretty much. I mean, I stopped in at a shop along the road there, but otherwise...’
‘Forbidden Planet?’
He grins shyly.
‘Aye. Buying for the weans these days, though. The wee yin’s easy enough: Turtles and Star Wars, get it in Tesco’s. But Martin’s very into Captain Scarlet. And I mean old-school Captain Scarlet. Has to be the Gerry Anderson original stuff, no’ the new CGI version. To think when I was twelve I gave away a Dinky Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle to my wee cousin. Bastard’s probably cleared fifty quid for it on eBay.’
‘Turtles and Gerry Anderson. Your kids were in nappies when I last saw them. How long was that?’
‘Dunno. Five years, maybe six? You took a job in France, didn’t you? When did you move to London? What brought you back?’
‘I haven’t moved here, not permanently. I got here two days ago. Which should answer your other question.’
He nods, his face immediately taking on a hunted look that had been only temporarily masked by their mutual pleasure at seeing each other again.
‘Aye,’ he says simply. She can tell he’s been worried sick for days.
‘When did you hear? I mean, when did you start to think it might be...?’
‘Two possible answers to that question. One would be when your colleague in the Glesca Polis came round to the house and asked me to fly down here, because prior to that I knew he was dead, right? The other would be when I heard about the McDade videos. One of the kids in my class had one on his fucking mobile, would you credit it?’
‘Virally spreading as intended.’
‘I had my thoughts when I read transcripts of what was in the videos, but these are thoughts I’ve been having ever since Dubh Ardrain, you know? I would remind myself – and Kate would remind me too – that I saw him get sucked down into a whirlpool with umpteen million gallons of water when that tailrace opened. But because they never found a body... Once you allow the possibility into your head, you start thinking every weird act of bloodletting that happens in the world might be him. You just cannae go there. It became a running joke in our house. We’d be watching a movie, or Lost or whatever, and any mysterious malignant presence, one of us would say: “Maybe it’s him.” Like I said, cannae go there. That way madness lies. So yeah, I thought about him when I learned about Darren McDade, but as always I told myself not to give it any credence. Same deal when I heard about Nick Foster. Then your man appeared at my door yesterday. He didn’t give much away, but enough to make sure I didn’t sleep too well last night, fair to say. How do you know it’s him?’
‘First thing to say is we don’t, not for absolutely sure, and we’re hoping you can help us with that. But if it’s not him, it’s somebody who wants us to think it’s him. There was a clue, one we believe we were intended to find, on the McDade hanging video. The executioner was visible in a mirror.’
‘You could see his face?’
‘No. He was in a hat and mask, dressed to look like a noted comic-strip malefactor late of a parish known as Calton Creek.’
Ray sighs.
‘Rank Bajin,’ he states. ‘His calling card. How well was that known, though?’
‘Sparsely. We suppressed the “Black Spirit” icon as much as possible back in his heyday: it was a valuable way of verifying that an atrocity was his handiwork and not some other nutter using it to cloud the waters. Even after Dubh Ardrain, when we thought we’d seen the last of him, we still kept it quiet, never gave that part to the press, neither the image nor what its original identity turned out to be. But still, these things leak. There were a lot of those calling cards left fluttering in the dust and rubble after his attacks, sometimes hundreds. I know of at least one occasion when the image appeared in a newspaper, but it was a Spanish one, and nobody picked up on it at the time.’
‘I take it I just missed a press conference. What have you told the public?’
‘The point of the press conference was not about informing the public of anything, but of informing him that we got the message. Apart from just the standard updates – ie we still know shag-all – the principal announcement was that I had been brought on board, officially as an expert on counter-terrorism. We know that’ll get the media’s wheels spinning, but the main point is to send him a signal. If it’s someone just trading on his name, he won’t clock the significance because he won’t know who I am; but if it really is him, it bats it back to his court.’
‘I have to say, it’s not like Simon to leave any ambiguity about who deserves the credit.’
‘That’s why we’re not rushing into anything. We’ve got to be very careful in working out what we think his game is. On the one hand, he’s imprinting the Black Spirit calling card on the McDade killing, and yet he’s masked. He never appears fully in shot, and when he pulled up outside here in a limo, he made sure nobody saw his face. We’re left asking ourselves: why would he do that if we already know what he looks like?’
‘Maybe he doesn’t look like that any more. Surgery, damage, whatever.’
‘Yeah, and we’re looking into that. Though even if he’s had surgery, I’m one hundred per cent sure I’d know him if I looked the bastard in the eye. However, the other explanation remains that he’s hiding his face simply because he’s not Simon Darcourt. I’m hoping your input is going to help us eliminate that possibility, so that we can be more certain of what we’re dealing with.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
Angelique puts a hand gently on his shoulder by way of indicating that they’re on the move. She leads him towards the exit, gesticulating briefly to Dale on her way past to communicate ‘This is him’ and ‘We’re off’. Dale nods. He knows where she’s headed.
‘We’re going just round the corner,’ she tells Ray. ‘An audio post-production house in Soho. Firstly, we need you to have a listen to some tapes.’
They emerge into the daylight, watery spring sunshine belying a chill in the air that catches in your throat as you walk into it. It seems surprisingly bright. The lighting in the Tivoli was anything but subdued, especially with the TV gear boosting it, but she’d been in there two hours, and something about the surroundings subconsciously told her to expect darkness outside.
‘Your man up in Glasgow left me a DVD-rom with the videos,’ Ray says. ‘I watched about as much as I could stomach. Audio quality isn’t brilliant, but I have to say, the voice didn’t sound like him at all. Weird accent, for a start, but the thing is, when I saw him at the power station, even though his accent had changed vastly from our student days, it was still unmistakably his voice. The voice on the videos is nothing like him.’
‘That’s why we’re going to Soho,’ she assures him. ‘We’ve had some experts run the rule over the videos. They say the soundtracks have been overdubbed. They reckon he spoke in his own voice at the time, then dubbed a new, altered voice over it. Mostly they assume the new voice is saying the same thing, but there’s a few points on the tape where changes in the background levels indicate what was put in didn’t entirely cover what was removed.’
‘But I thought the Foster thing was a live feed.’
‘Everybody assumed that because it was interjected into a live event, but it was a recording.’
‘So if he’s overdubbing it with someone else’s voice, what do you think I—’
‘They don’t think it’s someone else’s voice,’ she interrupts. ‘Who would you get to record something like that? Plus, fair to say we don’t want t
o begin to contemplate the possibility that he’s not alone in this deranged enterprise. No, they reckon he’s digitally altered his own voice. They’re trying to reverse-engineer the process, which is where you come in. They need someone who remembers his voice to give them the pointers they need to tweak the settings.’
‘What, so they can make the recording sound like him? But what if it isn’t him? Won’t that just create a huge red herring?’
‘No, no. The digital effects can’t put something on the tape that isn’t there already. They can’t record you and make you sound like James Earl Jones. If it is Simon Darcourt, then at some point, they’re going to twist the right knob or tweak a certain slider just precisely the correct amount, and you’re going to suddenly sit up and say: “Fuck, that’s him.” But if it’s not Darcourt, then they could try every setting, every configuration... basically, you could be there a while, and the longer you’re there, the more chance it’s a negative.’
‘You’ll understand when I tell you I’ll be hoping it’s a long shift,’ says Ray.
‘I know. You don’t need to tell me how the idea of him still being alive isn’t the most welcome one.’
‘We didn’t really part on the best of terms. I think he might consider that I pissed on his chips a wee bit, what with wrecking his masterplan and sending him to his apparent death.’
‘I know this is not the most consoling notion, Ray, but in my opinion, if he is alive and he had a mind to come for you...’
Ray nods with a thin smile.
‘I’d already be dead. I know. Happy thoughts.’
‘To which I would add that making you part of his plans was what led to his downfall last time.’
‘You’re ranging Simon’s ability to learn from his own mistakes against his capacity to hold a grudge. That’s quite a face-off. I’m aware that even though he was a bampot, he wasn’t an idiot, but I also know that he was one of the most self-righteously vindictive people ever to set foot on the planet. Not much of a one for the relativistic perspective. Once he’s decided you’ve “disappointed” him, there’s not really a lot you can do to get back into his good books. I think if you dedicated the rest of your life to some form of personal penance for whatever slight he perceived you to have committed against him, he’d still feel you owed him two more lifetimes’ worth before you even got close to the forgiveness waiting list. So I’m inclined to think it can’t be him, because if he was still alive, he’d have come for me by now.’
A Snowball in Hell Page 15
