A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  It’s not just pictures they send, though. There are usually questions, requests for updates. She answers to the best of her knowledge and tells them almost everything she knows, in case any of the queries are a test of her obedience and reliability. Their claim of having other sources in the police is not something she’s about to call their bluff on, especially if they are ‘sources who do not even know they are sources’ and thus unaware what information they are betraying. If they decide she’s no use to them, or that she can’t be trusted, then it’s over.

  She has consciously suppressed only one thing, but it being the single most salient development to emerge from the investigation is the reason her heart jumps every time she hears that chime. Every new message could be the one telling her they’ve discovered she is holding out on them. This risk, though, she has ruled smaller than that of telling them that Darcourt has only months to live, as she has no inkling how this might change the plan their end.

  The first herald of Darcourt having broken his blood fast had been the discovery by Gary Nailor, upon returning from training yesterday lunchtime, of the bodies of his wife’s publicist, her personal trainer and her make-up artist, with Charlotte Westwood herself missing. A few hours later, Norfolk police found two more bodies in a car on the edge of Ravenheath Moor, the corpses turning out to be the personal publicist and the chauffeur of Katie Lorimer, also missing. All five victims had been shot once at close range through the centre of the forehead.

  The new Darcourt website had been uploaded later the same day, in time for the late evening news programmes and the print media’s first-edition deadlines. Meilis had known about it immediately, having set up a software script to trigger an alert whenever the site’s structure was altered. Angelique, like just about everyone else still in the building, had rushed to the Operations Centre where the alpha geek routed the output on to the big monitors. The page displayed an embedded video beneath a constantly refreshing still frame from the existing Anika live feed (which clicking on the still would link you to), and a small panel, white digits out of black, displaying a one-hour countdown in progress.

  The video showed Charlotte and Katie – as well as Britain’s favourite family-friendly racist, Danny Jackson OBE – climbing into the same black limo, followed by a montage of contemplative interior shots as they were driven away. Then each was shown looking directly into the camera and speaking, Charlotte first: ‘It could have been any of us, Anika.’

  Followed by DJ: ‘So we’re not just thinking of you, we’re with you. We’re part of this. ‘

  Then, lastly, Katie: ‘And we’ll do anything it takes to get you back alive.’

  Within half an hour, a squad car dispatched to Jackson’s house in Finchley found the place empty and a woman’s body in the downstairs hall, executed the same way as the others. Within two further hours, the woman was identified as Carrie Kendall, a prohibitively pricey call-girl with an exclusive client list and previous for dealing cocaine, a substance subsequently located in abundance inside her shoulder bag.

  When the countdown reached zero, the page began to animate itself. The self-updating grab from the Anika feed remained in place at the top, but the video panel multiplied itself until there were four identical copies of it, showing the final frozen image of Katie Lorimer’s painfully concerned face.

  All four images faded to black, then one by one, the first three changed to host self-updating grabs from three new feeds: three new rooms, three new prisoners. Finally, after a short delay, the last panel altered to show a fourth room, unoccupied, the image overlaid with a grey shadow in the shape of a question mark.

  ‘Room for one more inside,’ Dale muttered grimly.

  There followed a few seconds of silence, as though the room – and perhaps even the country – was collectively taking a moment to fully register the enormity of what had just been revealed. Then it sounded like every phone in the building – landline and mobile – was ringing at once.

  Angelique looked at Dale. ‘What we gonna say?’ she asked him, the ‘we’ part in truth merely a gesture of solidarity.

  He sighed, the words ‘let this cup pass from my lips’ all but etched upon his weary expression.

  ‘I don’t suppose “move along, nothing to see here” is worth a try?’ he had asked.

  There’s a knock at Zal’s hotel room door, and he springs from the bed, turns off the TV, checks the mirror, inadvertently patting at his clothes. This is what she does to him: the moment she shows up, he feels like he’s just walked onstage unprepared, and a magician never walks onstage unprepared. He thinks of a hundred nights he must have lain awake onboard the Spirit of Athene, wondering what if, and imagining a moment just like this, imagining Angelique de Xavia knocking on his hotel-room door. In the fantasies, it was fair to say, he was a lot cooler. They worked out far closer to what happened in the dressing room, whereas right now he’s doing a passable reconstruction of his conduct in the hour preceding that, when he spotted her sitting by the edge of his stage and blew his trick.

  He had flown in that morning, caught a flight from Malaga to Gatwick, sharing an airplane with two hundred people who had been sold some bad advice regarding UV-protection. Poor bastards had evidently spent the previous two weeks under the impression that ingesting alcohol for eighteen hours a day was an effective prophylaxis against sunburn. They really ought to sue somebody.

  After Toulon, he had gone back to the ship to put a few matters in order, not least straightening things with Morrit. Prior to them hitting the evidence repository, Angelique had expressed her concerns about the timescale of what she was asking, not wishing him to drop everything just to end up sitting around indefinitely. He had therefore assured her that he could be in London inside twelve hours from anywhere on the ship’s schedule, even the open sea, the cruise company having a helicopter at their disposal for emergency transfers.

  ‘If it makes you feel easier, I can work my ticket, see out my contract, but I’d be on permanent standby, ready to move whenever you pick up the phone.’

  It seemed a mutual, unspoken understanding that such a mercy dash might never be required, and he had wondered darkly about that: how the weeks and months might pass, their communication fading away with Angelique’s hopes. There might only be a call, or just a message, to say the worst, and that would be the end – of everything. All would be as it was, with him playing the ballroom each night, sometimes looking at the table where she sat and remembering a dream that died. But what she had found in Lydon Matlock’s medical file meant that, for better or worse, her quest would end soon, and with a bang, not a whimper.

  He decided he had to come clean to Morrit. He owed it to him: not just because he had so suddenly dropped everything and gone off at zero notice; not just because he had left the old man hanging on in recent months, waiting for Zal to make some kind of decision; and not just because he had kept so much of himself secret throughout the whole of their past. He owed him as a down-payment on what he still hoped would be their future; and by way of ensuring that he had a future, Zal had to come clean because he needed Morrit’s professional advice. As he saw it, this whole game would come down to how they played a hostage exchange. Essentially this was the ‘cup and balls’ routine, literally the oldest trick in a very, very old book. It dated back thousands of years, documented in ancient Greece, Egypt and Sumeria before that. There was even a name in Latin for its practitioners: acetabularii. But the soul of magic is in finding a new way to perform an old trick.

  Standing backstage among their props, Zal tells him everything: about his dad, about the Escobars, the bank, Angelique, right up to Toulon. He explains what he thinks he needs to pull off, shaping Morrit’s advice according to what he has learned from another old-stager: that when it comes to any kind of heist, you plan the job backwards.

  ‘The first thing you have to put in place is how you’re getting out,’ Zal explains.

  ‘And I take it that goes for the girl too?’

&nbs
p; ‘Getting her out? Of course it goes for . . .’ he replies, before reading Morrit’s scrutinising face and absorbing what he really means.

  ‘I’ll slip away quietly, suffice to say. Save her any awkward shit. She’ll have enough to deal with... either way.’

  Morrit is shaking his head. ‘Should never end on a vanish, son. It leaves the audience uncomfortable. You have to take your bows.’

  Zal sighs. He has just given Morrit a potted history of his relationship with Angelique; how could he expect the guy to understand in five minutes a conundrum Zal is still struggling with after five years?

  ‘This audience won’t be looking for an encore, Dan. She didn’t come because she wants me. She came because she needs me.’

  ‘And what do you want, lad?’

  ‘What I want doesn’t really play here. This isn’t about me, it’s about her.’

  ‘Bollocks. You’re just setting up your out, clearing the obstacles so it’s easier to leave. What is it you’re running from? Are you afraid if you ask her, she might give up everything for you? Aye, that would really scare you, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he offers sheepishly. Devastating comeback. Yeah, that would really put him off the scent.

  ‘I know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s called love, and you’re arse-deep in it. Look at you: you’re dropping everything for this girl, running off to put yourself in harm’s way and asking nothing in return. Admirable, son, admirable, but ask yourself this: if she’s worth all that, isn’t she worth the wooing, too?’

  ‘I told you, Dan: she doesn’t want me, she needs me. Big difference. She only came because she’s in trouble.’

  ‘Aye, you say. But there’s two folk get married every day in this world on account of a girl being in trouble.’

  Zal opens the hotel-room door and Angelique steps inside, bringing a whiff of perfume and the smell of clothes that have been outdoors in the cool, more pronounced to an olfactory sense that has been holed up in an air-conditioned room for several hours. He closes the door and turns, expecting to see her back as she makes her way into the room, but instead finds her stepping into an embrace, which she holds, wordlessly, for ten, maybe twenty seconds. When at last she pulls back, it is to look into his eyes, and at this point, for some reason he speaks before it can turn into another kiss.

  ‘It’s good to see you.’

  She nods, looking a little unsure of herself. ‘Thanks for coming, Zal. For everything. In fact, I don’t think “thanks” really covers...’

  ‘Let’s worry about that shit if I actually prove useful,’ he interrupts.

  She shrugs a little, and Zal goes on before she can say he’s already been useful simply by holding her, or anything else that might confuse both of them as to what she really wants. ‘Because it looks like quite a game we’re getting into.’ He grabs the remote and turns on the TV. It looks natural, logical, getting down to business, but really it’s just easier than talking about the other stuff. The TV defaults to BBC1, showing a news report, the faces of the three new abductees inset in the top-right-hand corner.

  ‘No kidding,’ Angelique says, moving into professional mode also. ‘He just scooped up three of the most famous people in the country, a major escalation from glorified talent-show contestants. There’s going to be fifty million eyes on this, which is why I appreciate having a secret confederate, not to mention one with a gift for misdirection.’

  ‘It’s escalated further than that in the last half-hour,’ Zal informs her. ‘He’s added sound, and he’s letting them mingle.’

  ‘He’s what?’

  Angelique stares at the TV, while Zal thumbs the remote until he finds Sky News, the channel he just switched off.

  ‘Just happened while you were on your way over here. Waste of having big stars if they can’t talk to—’

  Angelique’s phone rings before he can finish. She holds up a hand by way of apology/explanation that she must take this call. He understands. It’s everything that’s impossible between them in a solitary gesture. He cuts off speaking, won’t make even a sound that the person on the other end might ask about.

  ‘I was on the tube,’ she says. ‘No signal. Yeah, I’m watching it now.’

  A couple of news channels are streaming the feed, no doubt on a delay in case anything truly unbroadcastable suddenly transpires. His flip through the networks showed that all the news bulletins are carrying at least a bit of this footage, same as they all showed brief clips of hostage videos, but Zal thinks Sky News may be kicking the ass out of the public-interest justification. This isn’t reportage: they’re filling their schedule with a celebrity reality show, one infinitely more compelling and thus ratings-boosting than any predecessor, and it ain’t costing them a cent.

  The three new captives are shown in a central area, doors off it leading to their individual rooms. The inset feed is too small for the type to be legible, but the newsreader confirmed earlier that each door bears a nameplate, with one displaying merely a line of question marks. The room has, like the one holding the Anika kid, a microwave and a (larger) fridge, plus the addition of a sink and a stack of crockery. Other than that, the only items of furniture visible are two chaises longues and a widescreen TV mounted on one wall, upon which they can see a live feed of the original remaining hostage, who appears oblivious of their presence.

  Angelique finishes her call and continues to gaze at the screen, sighing gently as to suggest a controlled outlet of far greater rage.

  ‘This won’t stop at extended bulletins on Sky News,’ she says. ‘The networks will be carrying this live after the watershed.’

  ‘After the what?’

  ‘Don’t ask. You’d have to be British, and even then it doesn’t make sense. But they’ll give him everything he could want: national prime-time broadcasting. The digital networks will be able to dedicate a whole channel to this, twenty-four/seven.’

  ‘Didn’t they do that before?’

  ‘No. Not enough to see – just miserable human beings festering in cells – and nothing to hear.’

  ‘Why weren’t they miked last time?’

  ‘Darcourt’s sick joke – they got famous by miming, so he denied them a voice. He also denied himself an angle of interest, but he’s learning as he goes. This part’s new to him, but he’s proving expert at the abduction bit. He took three high-profile individuals in one day and left us with nothing. Killed all the witnesses, left nobody alive to talk.’

  ‘What about the limo, the Merc?’

  ‘Sore point. We had high hopes for some kind of triangulation telling us roughly where he’s operating from; we figured he had to have dropped each one off before hitting the next, unless he had them in the boot, which is unlikely given the number of hours they’d need to stay sedated, not to mention still breathing. We assumed he must therefore be based somewhere within a reasonable radius of London – like everything and everyone else in the fucking media. Find him on one camera, suss the plate, pick it up wherever else it surfaces on the system and trace his routes to a common source.’

  ‘But . . .’ Zal prompts.

  ‘Exactly. Despite us having more CCTV cameras than anywhere else on the planet, turning the whole bloody country into a reality show, the only footage this Mercedes popped up on is in the clips of those three willingly climbing into it. It’s like a ghost car.’

  ‘Or maybe a Transformer. Have you put out an APB on giant killer robots spouting macho dialogue?’

  ‘We’re not that desperate yet, Zal, but give it time. We’ve bugger-all else. He was smart. Hit three in one day, got the last one in the bag before anyone had raised the alarm about the first. Though with every celeb in the country battening down the hatches, it’s going to leave him a challenge filling that last slot.’

  ‘Unless he’s already got number four and wants to have a little fun with the speculation before revealing who it is.’

  ‘That’s certainly his style, though it
would have to be someone nobody has noticed is missing.’

  ‘You ask me, I’d rule nothing in or out regarding that question mark. From a showmanship point of view, that blank slot is worth more to him than the other three, A-list as they are, because right now it could be anybody: top of the bill, more famous than all of them. But speaking as a magician, what worries me about this is that it’s a perfect means of misdirection. Everybody’s focusing here, focusing on what’s going to fill that window. Which ensures his next move will be something none of you sees coming.’

  Angelique’s phone rings again, and she gives Zal a strain-faced look by way of saying she must take the call. He gestures with a single open palm: don’t sweat it. She speaks briefly then hangs up.

  ‘Gotta cut it short, I’m afraid. Boss has had to call a press conference and he wants a wee huddle beforehand, see if between us all we can cobble together enough waffle to make it sound like we’re anything other than caught with our pants down. Again. I’m sorry, Zal. Just got here, too.’

  ‘Hey, I got a hug: big night for me. I’ve been assigned the lone wolf role on this one, and I’m cool with that. You go lie to the media, sell ’em back some of what they’re usually shovellin’.’

  ‘Okay. You work on this thing us polis won’t see coming.’

  He sits staring at the door for a long time after she’s gone, the TV still burbling in the background but so distant from his attention as to be in the next room or even the next hotel. He’s wondering whether it was his imagination or did she seem in a hurry to get out the door? Shit, leave it, man. She’s in the eye of a storm here, not to mention being in the situation he chose to spare her all those years ago: of a police officer fraternising with a suspect wanted for armed robbery.

  Her leaving felt odd, though. Incomplete. They had hugged in Toulon, at least, before saying goodbye. Tonight she just put her phone back in her pocket and walked. Was it because she had stolen time for a visit in the midst of what had to be frenzied police activities? Was it because they were now at any moment only a few minutes away from each other? Or was it that, despite their proximity, they were now moving apart by degrees? If so, then why did he, supposedly clearing obstacles from his path in preparing his out, fear that explanation so much?