One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Davie reached down and helped Catherine to her feet, then put a silencing hand over her mouth as he heard the approach of footsteps in the hallway outside. He motioned her into the wardrobe and closed the door after her, then looked about for a chib, but it was too late: the footsteps had halted. The card-lock whirred and clunked.

  21:12 ballroom the uninvited iii

  ‘… ’an it’s still nothin’ each, right? They’ve hit the bar aboot six times, the posts are practically fawin’ doon wi’ the leatherin’ they’ve had, an’ that’s no’ the only thing fawin’ doon: they’re divin’ like fuck every time they get intae the penalty box. Except, the ref, he’s clocked how desperate they’re gettin’ an’ he’s giein’ them fuck-all, right? So they’re goin’ fuckin’ mental an’ their fans are wan decision away fae a pitch invasion. Noo, we’ve no had a shot at goal the whole gemme, an’ they’re the Ayrshire league champions, so the way we were playin’ that season, we’d have been happy comin’ away wi’ anythin’ less than aboot five-nothin’. But five minutes left, Ger Milligan punches it oot tae me an’ I first-time it up tae Billy Ross harin’ up the right wing. Tam Keenan’s makin’ a run through the middle, an’ their defence is chargin’ back like fuck. The ref’s a fuckin’ mile back an’ there’s nae linesmen in a wee first-round gemme like this. So Billy fires the cross in an’ Tam gets in ahead o’ the defender, except he’s no timed it right for the header, so he just sticks the haun oot an’ punches it intae the net. Ref saw fuck-all ’cause Tam’d his back tae him, so he gies the goal. They aw go mental, an’ the berrs roon the touchline are startin’ tae sharpen sticks, you know? So Franky, the manager, he goes tae the dressin’ room an’ just piles everybody’s gear intae the minibus an’ drives it right up behin’ oor goal wi the back doors open, wavin’ tae us tae aw pile in soon as the whistle goes. Trouble is, that stupit cunt Billy’s only gone an’ won us a corner, so we’re aw up the other end when the ref blaws the final whistle. Noo, by this point the berrs have noticed Franky’s escape plan an’ JESUS FUCKIN’ CHRIST—’

  Bursts of gunfire erupted deafeningly around the room. The sound was so loud it seemed to be everywhere at once. Then the screams started, and they were everywhere at once. The gunmen swept into the function suite from the main doors at the front, moving swiftly to encircle the gathering almost as soon as their initial discharges had rung out. People ran into each other, falling, tangling, totally and understandably losing it. There’d been no time for moments of disbelief, just an instantaneous transition from social discussion to mortal terror, erasing in less than a second all the evening’s events, words, context. It was probably the clothes, Ally reckoned, rather than the guns; more the semiotics than the semi-autos. Ski-masks and camouflage gear: paramilitaries. Terrorists. Real terrorists. Indigenous, unexotic, common or garden. Not fuzzy-picture-quality news-report towel-heads, but the green, green (or orange, orange) terrorists of home. And so what if their heyday was over, this was proof in action of ‘race-memory’.

  Plaster dust fell in clouds from the ceiling where the heralding bursts had struck. Ally swallowed. In real life, the bullet-deadliness quotient was always set to maximum. Around him was mayhem. People ran like sheep, erratically, unthinkingly, finding every direction blocked by gunmen. Still the shouting and screaming continued, amid occasional further bursts of machine-gun fire over their heads. At the front entrance, uniformed staff from the lobby, together with Jim Murray (who’d been at the bogs), were being prodded into the mêlée by still more bad guys.

  The hysteria would exhaust itself, he knew. Panic would give way to fear and resignation. He could hear it already as the screams and shouts diminished. A few more moments and all would be still. A few more moments and he would be a hostage. If he wanted to swap the Bonnie Bedelia role for the Bruce Willis one, he had to find a way of doing so now or never. The question was, did he? Never mind heroism – from a purely self-preservational point of view, making an undetected run for it didn’t seem quite the obvious option it did on celluloid. He wasn’t paralysed by any inability to think of what to do, but rather by an extremely vivid ability to think about the consequences. Take your chances among the no-threat extras as they wait – obediently and cooperatively – for rescue, or single yourself out for the seek-and-destroy treatment.

  Even the moral obligation aspect was greyed-out. If the opportunity arose, did he risk all in a heroic attempt to rescue the others, or did he have a greater duty to Annette and their unborn child to take whatever course would better assure his personal survival?

  He looked at the gunman closest to him. His head was turned away, towards the baffled and terrified ‘prisoners’ – Jim Murray et al – being escorted into the ballroom’s equally baffled and terrified throng. No-one, good guys or bad guys, was looking at him. There wouldn’t be another chance.

  Ally was no action hero, not even a hard-man. By his own admission, he couldn’t fight sleep. Stinging remarks and spectacular vomits had been his only sources of notoriety in youth, a smart mouth and a weak stomach ensuring the traffic of bile was constant in one form or other. Neither was going to be of much use here tonight. The only skills he had to offer were electrical, so short of botching a rewire on their houses, there was little threat he could present to these sturdily beweaponed adversaries. Nonetheless, instinct and experience told him the odds were always better in the field than in the abattoir.

  He dropped to his knees and rolled out of sight under the floor-length drape of the buffet tables, which ran almost the width of the room at one end, a couple of yards in front of the bar. The moment of action, of conscious, decisive defiance, sent his insides lurching in nauseous fear of detection and reprisal. Between that and three glasses of champers on an empty stomach, following a day spent on a coach, he felt imminently liable to surpass his legendary Linda Blair up-chuck in second-year RE, after Paddy Greig ate his own scab.

  Ally quietened his breathing, stilling himself on hands and knees as dozens of feet shuffled uneasily, inches away from the drape. When he’d first rolled underneath, he half expected to find a dozen others already cowering there, telling him to fuck off and find his own hiding place. So far, fortunately, this was not the case.

  The screams and shouts were giving way to a low babbling, which would inevitably be silenced when whoever was in charge announced himself. On the other side of the buffet, Ally could see a pair of heavy boots marching along the channel between the tables and the back wall, heading towards where he crouched. He shivered, holding his breath. The best he could hope for now was humiliation as he, the wretched and selfish coward, was dragged from his hiding place and thrown back among his despising peers, but even that seemed over-optimistic as he heard the sound of a machine-gun bolt being drawn back, and watched the boots stomp closer and closer.

  They stopped right beside him. Ally put his hands behind his head in a gesture of surrender, looking at the drape and waiting for it to be whipped back. Instead the boots turned on one heel and there was a crash as the gunman kicked at what Ally’s geography estimated must be the door leading behind the bar. There were two more loud crashes, but the door, not having seen any action flicks, refused to splinter open. A burst of small-arms fire ensued, followed by another couple of kicks and a lengthy volley of swearing. Still it remained locked and closed.

  ‘Fuck,’ the gunman said breathlessly. The boots backed towards Ally’s table again, their owner bumping against it and sliding the thing a few inches along the polished floor. Ally had to execute a nimble sideways bunny-hop to avoid contact and exposure. His heart rate was accelerating so much that he was weighing up whether surrender would offer better survival odds than the impending coronary.

  The boots moved away again, at pace this time, then disappeared with a grunt as the gunman dived over the bartop and into the room beyond. Here were squeals of ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, please don’t shoot’, accompanied by growls of ‘Unlock that fuckin’ door’, as the refugee barman was finally apprehended.
The bad guy’s accent was Northern Irish, sending another cold note of authenticity chiming through Ally’s head. He tried to deduce a plausible motive, a political cause-and-effect context that would make sense of the developing scenario, but precedent brought his speculation to a bleak, stomach-turning halt: IRA, UVF, whoever, they’d none of them ever gone in for hostages. They just murdered people. No tooling around with negotiators when everyone already knew their demands; the stake was always who they might kill next time.

  He watched the boots frog-march a pair of Adidas trainers past the buffet tables. Five or six feet away, the door to the bar remained open. The gunman had his back to it, but he’d probably turn around again once he had ushered his captive into the middle with the rest. Ally had very little time left to evaluate his options: the bar didn’t lead anywhere, otherwise the barman wouldn’t have been nabbed, but nonetheless, hiding under the table wasn’t much of a long-term strategy either. Besides, he thought, what better hiding place than somewhere they’ve already searched?

  He scrambled across the gap, stealing a glance to his right where the gunman’s back remained reassuringly in view. Behind Ally, the standing captives had their backs to him, facing the main entrance at the front, shielding him from the other bad guys’ lines of sight. He rolled inside the bar, away from the open door, the theft of those few more yards further lifting his cardiac tempo and sending another bilious aftershock shuddering through him. Ally felt sure he was going to puke, could swear it was rising in his throat. He put a hand to his mouth in anticipation, thinking he’d probably end up choking to death on the stuff at precisely the moment Gavin Hutchison revealed it all to be an elaborate wind-up.

  The feeling receded (or maybe just the boak did), and he looked at his surroundings. Bar, pumps, drains to the front. Shelves, optics, fridges behind. To his left was the way he’d come in, and to his right a second open door, leading to a compact storeroom, where the barman had no doubt been cowering less than a minute ago. He crawled into the store. Even without the music, the hubbub sounded like it could still be a party, dozens of excited voices talking loudly and quickly, all at once. Trouble was, the gatecrashers wanted to play party games.

  ‘Everybody sit down on the floor. Everybody down on the floor now.’ The bloke didn’t say ‘Simon says’, but Ally was sure everyone would comply. His accent sounded different from the last one, but it was hard to place with the guy just barking out an order like that.

  Ally looked up. There were crates of beer, boxes of wine, plastic-wrapped pallets of mixers, all littered unsystematically about the shelves and the floor, more like a giant carry-out than the stock of an organised bar. But then, that’s what this was: a party in an empty new-build before the residents moved in. Doesn’t matter if you mess things up a wee bit, long as you clear the place out later. Plus, there are no neighbours to call the polis if things get wild. Normally, that last part was considered an advantage.

  The thought offered a possibility beyond hiding and hoping. Polis. Assistance. Help. But wouldn’t these guys be contacting the authorities themselves? he wondered, before recalling with a wince his reflections on Ulster terrorist hostage-taking, or the previous lack thereof.

  Right. In that case, definitely get the polis. If bargaining was what they had in mind, then let it commence sooner rather than later, and hopefully they could all go home alive. And if it wasn’t, then all the more reason to call. They were sitting in the middle of the Cromarty Firth, he reasoned. If notifying the authorities wasn’t on the terrorists’ game plan, then the buggers might be forced to trade their hostages for a chopper off this bloody thing.

  He needed to get to a phone. Ally looked behind the bar again, like a phone was the kind of thing he’d have missed in a situation like this. Of course, there was nothing. In that case, he had to find a way out. He stood up, glancing down at the storeroom’s floor. This was a bar. Bars had cellars. He lifted the end of one of the pallets on the floor and slid it to one side, but as a trapdoor failed to reveal itself, it dawned depressingly on him that if there had been such a way out, then the barman would surely have made use of it. The entrance to the beer cellar was probably that door right next to the one he’d scrambled through from under the buffet table, but there was no point in mourning missed opportunities, because it would almost certainly have been locked.

  However, with the pallet moved to one side, he noticed for the first time the battleship grey of a ventilation shaft built into the wall, obscured by the shelves of booze as it rose from floor to ceiling. Ally frantically pushed cartons and boxes aside until he revealed a mesh panel between two shelves at about waist-height, at which point he almost took a step back in awe. Right in front of him was the sacred conduit of the lone action-hero, from John McClane to Duke Nukem: the Holy Grille. It even looked wide enough to fit inside.

  There were screws at each of the grille’s four corners, too tight to yield to even the most painful and stoically determined thumb-and-finger pinching. On a shelf behind the bar, however, there was a steel tray bearing a knife and some freshly sliced lemon wedges. Ally retrieved the knife, moving slowly and softly on the balls of his feet. The chatter continued outside, unaccompanied by any further orders or prompts. The bad guys’ main man, whoever he was, had presumably not put in an appearance yet.

  The first screw refused to budge as Ally applied pressure with the blade. He had plenty of elbow-grease in reserve, but was terrified of the thing giving off a squeak when finally it gave. The sweat oozing around his palm and fingers wasn’t doing much for his grip. He twisted a little harder and the screw loosened, emitting the tiniest metallic yelp. After that it wound out easily, and the other three reacted in kind. Mercifully, the panel began to fall away through sheer gravity once the two top screws were removed, so once all four were gone, there was no noisy heaving or scraping required to pull it free.

  Ally stuck his head inside. The shaft disappeared into darkness above and below, but he was sure he could make out a junction with a horizontal passage a few feet up, slightly higher than what he estimated to be ceiling level. It ran at ninety degrees to the back wall of the ballroom, heading away from it. Any route, however awkward, heading away from the bad guys, was an improvement on the status quo. He took off his jacket and hid it under a box of vodka bottles, then stuck the knife through one of his beltloops.

  He had to execute a sort of backwards limbo-dance to get in, squeezing his head, shoulders and then full torso inside the shaft as his bottom rested on the shelf beneath. It was one of those rare occasions when he was grateful for being a skinny short-arse who spent all day crawling about under floorboards. He pulled himself further up until his feet were on the edge of the open panel, whereupon he breathed in and rotated himself ninety degrees, so that he’d be facing the gap when he reached it. He pressed his hands to the walls of the shaft, palms-out at waist-level, taking his weight off one foot and then the other to see whether this was going to work. He failed to drop, screaming, into the blackness below, so began to climb by pushing his feet against the sides. His scuffing movements reverberated around him, his breaths echoing through the tight chamber with equal volume. Ally stopped still, his guts heaving once again, convinced the noise must have betrayed him. He waited for the sound of footsteps from the bar, but none came.

  Recommencing, he strained silently to haul himself into the adjoining passage, his left knee causing a dull thump as he rattled it sharply against the junction. He breathed in sharply between tight lips in lieu of a groan, tears coming to his eyes, but the pain was tempered by the relief of having made it to the horizontal vent, apparently undetected.

  A swimming motion propelled him forwards into the dark. There was no quick way of doing this, so he concentrated on stealth, keeping his movements as soft and fluid as the cramped space allowed. Soon he could see nothing, and the only sound beyond that of his own exertions was of one muffled voice. He couldn’t quite make out what was being said, but the directness of the tone suggested that
the hostages were being addressed, so he guessed the baddie-in-chief must have turned up. It would be the usual everybody-stay-calm-and-cooperate-and-this-will-soon-be-over shtick. Heard it.

  Ally’s fingers struck steel ahead of him. He flapped his hand around in panic to confirm whether he had succeeded in holing himself up in a dead end, but found free space before he needed to contemplate whether he was capable of reverse. The passage turned hard left, and further along it there was a dim glow of light, suggesting another grille-panel.

  In the darkness it was impossible to estimate how far he had travelled, but the door to the bar was only a few yards from the ballroom’s left-hand wall as you faced the back, so he had to be somewhere above the parallel corridor outside. He could no longer hear the muffled voice, which meant it was out of earshot, so at the very least he’d cleared the function suite. Maybe he’d even made it to the restaurant on the other side of the hall, Mariner’s, or whatever the fuck it was called. He’d see when he reached the grille.

  He edged further along, closer and closer to the glow of light. Initially, all he could make out was ceiling-tiles and the cross-hatching of another grille beneath. One more heave brought his face directly above that, and he was able to look through both grids at what was below.

  What was below was the ballroom, where the hostages were sitting in gun-enforced silence upon the insistence of their captors, several of whom were scanning the ceiling in one corner of the room to isolate the source of the loud, metallic thumping sounds they’d been hearing from above. Ally stopped still, halting even his intake of panicked breath. There was a gunman only four feet below him, but the double-grille and the darkness inside the vent meant he still hadn’t been seen.

  The fright and the ensuing tension proved more than his historically cantankerous alimentary canal could deal with. He barfed on a tidal scale. The two grilles filtered out what diced-carrot content there was, but that still left a bucketload of thick fluid to splash down on to the balaclava-clad head of the gunman standing underneath. There was an indecisive, will-he-give-a-penalty pause while the intruders watched the deluge cover their comrade, as though no-one was quite sure the whole thing – noise and all – wasn’t down to a plumbing problem. Then Ally sent down another volume, this time accompanied by an involuntary diaphragmic retch.