A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  The hardest thing is the everyday. The hardest thing is that she just has to get on with it. Nobody stops all the clocks, nobody dismantles the sun. As people are wont to remark around someone else’s bereavement, life goes on. When you want the world to stop, when you want the world to acknowledge the enormity of what you are enduring, life indifferently goes on. At least with bereavement, you usually get cut the slack of a few days off work. Angelique’s greatest trial is that she still has to show up, put in her shift and act like there’s nothing wrong. Fortunately she’s had more practice at wearing a mask to fool her colleagues than to fool her suspects, but she preferred it when her big secret was that she was shagging the guy her fellow cops were seeking. There was, at least, a constant exhilaration about that, a sense of never having felt so alive. This time, it’s a permanent, grinding sense of grim dread, and the only familiar feelings are the terrible ones: the constant paranoia that everybody must be able to see right through you, to read what you’re trying to conceal like it’s printed on your forehead.

  And what’s truly, depressingly awful about it is that it’s endless: the days pass, she gets on with work, her secret remains just that, and soon enough it starts to feel almost normal. The sick joke is that nothing’s changed: she’s still doing the same horrible job and if she’d never received those texts, she’d still have been steadfastly avoiding calling her parents. All that’s different is she no longer has the option, though as a further twisted taunt, she is sent a new picture of them to her phone every day, usually accompanied by a request for updates on her progress. There has been little danger of her suffering Texter’s Thumb in composing her replies.

  In practice, it’s not difficult to hide her inner turmoil from her colleagues, as a depressed look of resignation and hopelessness is practically uniform these days. Another young victim murdered, a policeman ragdolled by the media machine, and their whole operation donkey-punched by Darcourt. There’s so much gloom and despond that she and Dale can barely muster any mutual awkwardness about what (almost) happened between them. Why pick out one particular turd when you’re floating on a sea of shit?

  There is a growing stench of defeat about the place. It’s unspoken but unmistakable: cops know it when they smell it, particularly the more experienced ones. They’ve all worked cases where they have inescapably come to realise that there can be no winning, only degrees of losing, and with every mistake – indeed every news cycle that passes without progress to report – magnified and scrutinised by this thousand-eyed watcher that never sleeps, this case is the gorgon-headed bitch to top them all.

  Every day, in some new aspect, it seems to get worse, seems to hurt that bit more. After the frantic but disastrous search (which at least had felt like they were doing something), had come the blame-and-shame bonanza of the aftermath. The siege effect at least had the benefit of pulling everyone together rather than looking for scapegoats or turning on each other, but they do feel shame, they do know they’ve failed, and they’ve been left not just looking powerless, but humiliatingly chastened as Darcourt’s diseased show goes triumphantly on.

  With Anika and Sally looking equally endangered, Darcourt announces that the following will be the final twenty-four hours of the competition. This leads to one of his servers crashing without any help from Meilis, as the traffic surges in the lead-up to this appointed but tantalisingly unspecified conclusion. It also leads to a face-off between Dale and the head of the Met himself, Commander Aldwyn Keen, who has ordered that there should be no further attempted computer traces. Dale orders Meilis to disregard this directive and unleash everything his geeks can muster, figuring they have nothing to lose. Meilis, having been placed in an impossible position, refuses the order until it is referred up. Angelique would have to admit to harbouring a slight suspicion that Dale is trying to engineer his own dismissal from the investigation, but when Keen turns up in person to have it out toe-to-toe, there are no histrionics. Dale argues his case, calmly and logically, and he wins.

  ‘We know he isn’t bluffing,’ Keen states. ‘If he detects another trace, he’ll just kill one of the girls, and quite probably both.’

  ‘Not today, sir,’ Dale argues. ‘He’s been working on this for ages, and now it’s the climax. He’s got some big finale planned, and he’s not going to cancel that. There’s only two girls left. If we wait until a few hours before his deadline, there’s no way he’s going to pull the plug on his own big moment by prematurely ending the competition.’

  Keen concedes the point, though Meilis predicts his team’s efforts won’t yield anything anyway.

  ‘Ever since the debacle of the first trace attempt, I’ve strongly suspected he’s got hold of a GOG,’ the alpha geek opines. ‘And a state-of-the-art one at that.’

  ‘What’s a gog?’ Angelique asks.

  ‘Gee-Oh-Gee. Hacker-speak again. Stands for gottle o’ geer. It’s something – can be hardware or software, and I suspect his combines both – that disguises the source of a signal.’

  ‘But if you know what he’s using, is there any way of, I don’t know, detecting that?’ Angelique suggests, none too hopefully.

  ‘Not this time, I fear. Used to be like virus and anti-virus apps, a constant arms race. You could retro-engineer a solution as long as you had a copy of the virus code, just as you could develop a new virus if you knew the algorithms being used by the latest detectors. But I’ve been looking into this since the last trace, shook a few trees. What fell out isn’t good news. There’s GOGs available now that would allow you to upload from the next room and you wouldn’t be able to detect it from where we’re sitting, and it doesn’t stop with internet feeds. There’s signal-shielding hardware out there that would let you transmit all kinds of stuff without giving away your position. It was developed for military application, but it was developed by tech geeks, and in tech geek circles, nothing stays exclusive for long. We’re not going to find this bastard by sourcing these feeds, and we’d better hope he doesn’t decide to start his own TV station, because if he’s got the kind of kit I think he has, we won’t be able to find that either.’

  In the event, both Meilis and Dale are proved right, albeit to no-one’s satisfaction. Darcourt doesn’t respond to the attempts to trace his signal, and the efforts prove futile anyway. The appointed deadline is reached without Darcourt bringing a premature end to the proceedings. It is only in what happens next that Dale’s assessment and prediction fail him.

  There is no big finale. There is nothing at all. The feeds simply go blank, and shortly after that, the whole site goes offline. Darcourt doesn’t even, to the tangible but unvoiced frustration of the entire UK media, announce who won.

  They stare at the blank monitors, waiting with an animated dread for them to kick back into life with some new depravity. Every one of those first few seconds seems to bring closer some inevitable revelation. But the seconds become minutes, the minutes hours and the hours days.

  Though Angelique hadn’t believed it possible, for about forty-eight hours there seems to be even more coverage of the story than while the Dying to be Famous competition was live and online. Rumour and speculation pour out of journalists and TV reporters even more incontinently than the previously endless slurry of comment and redundant description. Darcourt has killed himself and both girls, that’s one. Aye, right. Pipped only in Angelique’s bitter-smile stakes by the theory that the police have secretly rushed in and shut the whole thing down but are keeping it quiet; this reticence being for reasons undisclosed, certainly reasons the reporters are unable to deduce.

  Others suggest the whole thing is a giant hoax, a mammoth publicity stunt facilitated by the widespread complicity of relatives, not to mention some very realistic special effects. Sure. Forget Simon Darcourt: has anyone braced Chris Morris?

  It’s said that nature abhors a vacuum, but not as much as the media. By day three, the story is off the front pages. Lia Wilby, Coronation Street starlet and lads-mag lacy-undies-but-no-nipples photo-s
hoot regular, announces her engagement to Karl Howard, Man City’s heart-throb goalkeeper, and that is more than enough to satisfy the tabloids, particularly during a time when a good-news story seems at a premium. (Angelique suspects it is more than mere serendipity that the announcement is made on the first day that it wouldn’t get buried way back in the papers, but this job could make one terribly cynical.) As for the broadsheets, well, another MP has crossed the floor, with timing just as fortuitous and therefore as suspect as the Wilby-Howard engagement, and George Bush has bombed somewhere else, continuing to strive for as many last shots on the swings as possible before getting finally booted out of the Pennsylvania Avenue playpark.

  Only the Express stands firm, with a front page pondering whether it was actually Simon Darcourt who killed Diana, but in their own unique way, even that is an admission that they have nothing new on the story.

  From a police point of view, despite being very likely a mass-murder investigation, it is more immediately now a multiple missing-persons case. The only real crime scene has reopened to clubbers, while the warehouse near Walsall has yielded nothing. Despite Darcourt leaving them in no doubt as to his identity, he hasn’t left them any DNA evidence to even prove he’d been there. They have no bodies, no evidence, no witnesses, and no solid leads. Or rather, strictly speaking, the investigation has no solid leads. Angelique has a very strong one, sent to her phone a couple of days ago along with the latest e-postcard from hell, but she is keeping it to herself until the timing is right. To that end, this otherwise depressing absence of anything more constructive to be getting on with at least allows her the time to pursue certain other, more private, lines of enquiry.

  In looking for a bank robber, she decides that the first route is to follow the money, even if the only clear path is the one leading back to where the money came from in the first place. Knowing where the police investigation had begun and ended, she speaks to the RSGN, whom she rightly anticipated had been less content to let the case go cold.

  She meets with a woman named Debbie Holland at the RSGN’s head offices in Broadgate. Angelique tells her she is looking back at the case because of a possible overlap with something else she is investigating, but which she is not at liberty to disclose. As nobody outside the force (and very few inside it) knows about Angelique’s involvement in the bizarre events of that day on Buchanan Street, she doesn’t inform Ms Holland that her knowledge of the robbery extends somewhat beyond a cursory perusal of the police file. As it turns out, it is sufficient merely to be on the force and aware of the case in order to be getting the stink-eye from this particular RSGN executive, and Angelique is made unambiguously aware that as an institution they are still very sore about having their pants pulled down by – literally – a bunch of clowns.

  Holland is one of those corporate types who acts as though it was personally her money that was stolen. It reminds Angelique of the discussion she had with Zal only days after the heist, regarding the morality of what he had done.

  ‘RSGN could lose the same amount if one of its stock traders had one beer too many over lunch,’ he’d argued. ‘There are worse crimes than what happened on Saturday. Worse thefts. I ain’t saying it’s right, but I’m... morally at peace with it.’

  Angelique had gone ten rounds with him over the issue back then: pointing out how they’d only pass the loss on to the customer or lay off some more staff. Listening to Holland saddle up her high horse in her plush corner office, kitted in her thousand-quid suit and her shoes worth Angelique’s monthly rent, she finds herself wishing Zal had stiffed them for ten times the amount.

  ‘I understand that the bank put forward a substantial reward for information leading to a conviction,’ Angelique says, over two paper cups of barely chilled water from the cooler; she figures you don’t get offered hot beverages if you work in the public sector. ‘Did anything precipitate from that? Because what I’m really interested in here is anything that might have been overlooked, or perhaps the significance of which might only reveal itself now we’re further down the line.’

  ‘The RSGN did offer a reward, yes,’ Holland confirms. She only ever refers to her employer as ‘the RSGN’, never merely ‘the bank’. She is so on-message, it’s like she is on a bonus for mentioning the name a minimum number of times. ‘We were forced to, truthfully, by the apparent inertia on the part of the police. We know, through channels the RSGN is not at liberty to disclose [woo, touché], that the police had a suspect, but they refused to tell us his name. You’ll no doubt know more about this than I do.’

  ‘In case we miss something by taking it as read, assume I know nothing.’

  ‘Oh, I can certainly do that. When it comes to the police on this case, we at the RSGN have had plenty of practice, after all.’

  Angelique patiently endures this dig with a thin smile that says: ‘Sticks and stones – just give up the skinny.’ The smile may also add ‘bitch’, but that is for the observer to interpret.

  ‘Whoever this suspect was, he had links to organised crime in the US. The robbery, I am reliably informed, was somehow connected to a major police sting in Glasgow shortly afterwards, involving American and Scottish criminals. Unfortunately, the police seemed far more interested in the fall-out from that than in pursuing our case. We’re not wet behind the ears, officer de Xavia, we work in a more cut-throat world than the crooks do, so we at the RSGN had little doubt that some deal or compromise must have been struck.’

  ‘I’d need to be much further up the food chain to know anything about that,’ Angelique replies.

  ‘I don’t doubt it, and nor do I envy you the task of unravelling the tangled web they probably wove to cover it up. The Procurator Fiscal himself told us that even if the police apprehended this suspect, there was simply not enough evidence to mount a case – not without a confession or recovering the cash from his direct possession. That was why we put up a reward: we knew the official channels had been exhausted. We intended – and we still do intend – to bring a private prosecution if we could track the culprit down, but if we were able to get some of our money back, it would have been a start.’

  ‘And what did you get?’

  ‘The anticipated deluge of cranks, nutters, attention-seekers and opportunists. People effectively buying a raffle ticket in case their stab in the dark could later be connected to the solution and provide them with a claim to the reward. I can give you the file, if you’ve got a dump truck parked outside.’

  ‘What about the criminal fraternity?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Well, forgive me if you think I’m impugning your institution’s integrity, Ms Holland, but as you informed me you’re not wet behind the ears, I’m assuming we can cut the formalities and acknowledge what a reward like this was really aimed at. You said official channels were exhausted. I think we both know what the corollary implies.’

  Holland says nothing for a moment, pursing her lips in affected silent indignation. Angelique wonders how long corporate policy has stipulated it appropriate to sustain a postured huff when coughing up a distasteful truth might prove beneficial. Turns out to be about eight seconds.

  ‘There was this one guy,’ she says. ‘Some kind of mercenary or... what would you call it?’ ‘Bounty hunter?’ Angelique suggests. ‘Yes, that’s it. Said he knew where the suspect was and could tell us his old name, new name and precisely where to find him, but he wouldn’t give us anything unless we paid upfront. We said we’d give him some money if what he told us led to the suspect’s apprehension, and more if it actually led to a conviction. He wasn’t prepared to accept those terms. He walked away empty-handed rather than even buy his raffle ticket by giving us the info. We reckoned he was bluffing. If he was a bounty hunter and he knew where this guy was, why didn’t he bring him in?’

  Angelique could think of a few reasons.

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Can’t remember,’ Holland replies. Angelique feels herself slump inside but maintains h
er posture. ‘Hang on though, I’m sure the card he left is still on file.’

  Albert Samuel Fleet, the card said. All the numbers on it were long dead, but, naturally, he had a jacket. Petty crime, moving up to gangland runner and fixer, as well as, significantly, police informant. A proven ability to play both ends against the middle had served as a valuable apprenticeship for striking out on his own in the shadow world of the ‘procurer’, as his card described it with almost charming euphemism. He had channels of information on either side of the law, and had evidently proven useful to both at various times, on a strictly-no-questions-asked basis.

  These last few years, however, the sheet was blank. He was running a private surveillance firm, in partnership with a couple of ex-coppers, and unless her sat-nav really was on the blink, it looked like he’d gone respectable as well as legit.

  Angelique sees him shortly after getting out of her vehicle, coming from around the back garden in response to the sound of the car door closing. She’d phoned him to make an appointment – best play it courteous, she figured – so he is expecting her. He’s wearing an old West Ham top, flecks of grass dotting his face and a pair of gardening gloves on his hands. A little girl appears at the gate barring the path running behind the building, and is led away by an attractive, olive-skinned woman a good ten years younger than the man of the house.

  They exchange polite greetings. He takes one of the gloves off and offers his hand. His smile is boyish but his eyes wary, ready to evade and ready to defend. He’s been around the block. She doesn’t know what she’ll get here, but she’s got to give it a shot.