by Heide Goody
“Thank you, Rich,” said Sam, with a surge of warmth. It felt as if the typical British Christmas was being played out here, as it no doubt was throughout the rest of the country. Everyone had different expectations of the day and was probably living through a series of mild disappointments. Social pressure forced them all to interact as cheerfully as they knew how, at least until someone broke ranks and either stormed out or pretended to fall asleep.
“When do we get to hear your speech, Sam?” asked Marvin.
“Oh, yeah.” She’d put that from her mind, and had failed to prepare something uplifting or amusing. She thought for a moment. “As temporary queen of Valhalla gas platform—”
“It’s a post for life, I reckon,” said Rich.
“Fine, as your ruler until death, I would like to start by celebrating our pioneering North Sea Christmas. Let us raise a glass to a Christmas that will never fail to provide future anecdotes and cautionary tales.”
They all solemnly raised a toast.
“The year ahead promises to be a startling one for Valhalla,” continued Sam. “I do hope we haven’t set back the programme for the introduction of the woolly mammoth by eating the sample, but it won’t be long before Doggerland is restored, and Rich can introduce the world to a long lost ecosystem.”
“With the addition of a luxury hotel and casino,” said Rich.
“I suppose modern sensibilities will forbid the use of hostesses in animal skin bikinis?” Marvin asked, turning to Rich with sudden interest. “Raquel Welch carried off the look quite well in that film about cave men, as I recall. Lovely girl, I met her once at the Birmingham Alexandra.”
“No dad,” said Sam firmly. “Now I wanted to wish us all a very merry Christmas and a safe return to the mainland when the storm dies down. In the meantime, we will return to the board game tournament this afternoon. May the odds be ever in your favour!”
“It’s not about the odds, it’s about the skills,” said Marvin with a wink. “The most masterful players of any game are the ones who make it look as though someone else is in control.”
“You might very well be right there, dad,” said Sam.
It was true in life as well. There were people who rushed around, busily messing with the everyday detail, when unseen players were engaged at a higher level.
73
Turkey and all the trimmings had been eaten, followed by extra trimmings, Christmas pudding with brandy sauce, an unexpected cheese course and several more glasses of wine. Crackers had been pulled, paper crowns put on, and more than a couple of belts loosened to ease the indigestion (or a dressing gown cord in Bernard’s case).
Polly groaned and plucked a crumb of dark pudding from her cardigan.
“Eaten too much?” said Margaret, who seemed to have only picked at her food like a fussy bird, but who had an empty plate nonetheless.
“I regret nothing,” Polly said.
“Life’s for living,” nodded Strawb. “That said, it might be time to fall asleep in front of the Queen’s Speech.”
Jacob tapped his watch. “I think we’ve missed the Queen’s Speech.”
“We can watch it on catch-up.”
“And then sleep through it,” said Polly.
“And then sleep through it,” agreed Strawb.
“Before we do…” said Bernard. He looked left and right along the long table. Several diners had already excused themselves and most of the others were engaged in private conversations. Apart from the three social committee members and Polly there was no one within earshot of Bernard. He pushed the narrow package he had put on the table earlier over to Polly.
Polly looked along the table just as Bernard had done. “Is this a secret present?” she asked.
He nodded.
“It’s the wrong shape to be an engagement ring.”
“Open it.”
She peeled open the neatly sealed ends and opened it up. “A used toilet roll! How thoughtful!”
Bernard tutted. “Within.”
She teased out the plastic and wire thing within the tube. It looked a bit like a TV remote, or a car component. One of those weird conjunctions of black plastic and LEDs that seemed to lurk behind dashboards these days. There were two lights on it and a toggle switch. Neither of the lights were lit.
“Careful with the switch for now,” he said.
“What is it?”
Bernard leaned across Margaret, an act she clearly didn’t appreciate, and tapped the lights. “That one comes on if your niece’s e-cigarette is turned on and within range of this controller.”
“My … my niece?” She remembered him coming to her a door with e-cig pictures. “Is this some sort of tracking device?”
“This light comes on if she is sucking on it and the heating plate is activated. So when she’s got it in her mouth.”
“I don’t quite follow…”
He tapped the switch. “And this detonates the device inside it.”
Polly sat back, drawing the control device out of Bernard’s reach. She stared at it for some time. “You put a bomb in my niece’s e-cig.”
“It’s a tiny device. Grams of explosive and a one cent euro coin that will deform into a projectile. It will fire up the barrel and into the mouth, sort of like a dum-dum bullet. Probably quite a powerful splatter effect. The controller, twenty-seven megahertz, kind of neat, came out of a garage door controller. Real small and—”
Polly pushed herself away and stood, the chair scraping on the floor. She could feel nausea welling rapidly inside her along with the prospect of chucking up the wine, the cheese, the pudding, the trimmings and the turkey.
“Enough, Bernard,” said Margaret.
Polly blinked and stared from each of them to the next. Bernard, Margaret, Jacob, Strawb.
“Strawb…?”
“It’s your decision, darling,” he said.
“You knew about this?”
“I was aware of the plans. We help each other out. We look after one another.”
She felt light-headed: the combination of shock and too much wine. “You think I want to kill my niece?” she whispered.
“You don’t have to do it yourself,” said Bernard, totally failing to understand her.
“I…” She reached out to the wall for support. Strawb stood to take her arm. She violently shrugged him away. “She has made me so miserable. She has cheated me. I think.”
“She has,” said Margaret.
“She’s shut me out and shut me off and…” She stared at the remote in her hand, fully aware that she had slipped into a ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?’ piece of over-acting. “But kill her? I have a grand-niece and a grand-nephew. Children.”
“Who would be better off without her,” said Jacob.
“Have you seen their dad?” Polly scoffed. “A pathetic incompetent.”
“At least he actually loves them,” said Strawb.
Polly shook her head, not because she disagreed, but because there was an unpleasantly attractive note of truth in that.
The nausea and horror and the stares were too much. “You evil murdering fucks,” she gasped and fled from the room as fast as her legs would carry her.
74
The suggestion they go for an afternoon walk to blow away the cobwebs and work off their lunch had been derailed almost instantly. The three of them had crowded round one of the external doors and looked through the window. Storm Wendy’s gale force winds shrieked and whistled through the platform structure. Wordlessly, they agreed a walk around Valhalla would probably blow more than the cobwebs away, and they’d have to work off their dinner in other ways.
A games tournament was decided upon.
“Checkers!” said Rich as Marvin pulled out the box.
“Draughts, please,” said Marvin.
“Whatever. Same difference. I haven’t played this since I was a kid. Pretty sure it’s like riding a bike though. It will all come back to me.”
“Don’t be so sure,” sa
id Marvin. “A game like draughts favours the stage craft of the magician. Planning moves in advance, with a little misdirection thrown in for good measure. You don’t see me coming for you because I’m always one step removed from the kill.” Marvin made an exaggerated pouncing movement with his hands, then set up the board, inviting Rich to be his opponent.
Sam sashayed across the social room with the wine and three tumblers. “Who’s for a drink while we play?” she asked.
A few minutes later, as predicted, Marvin executed a killer move, jumping over three of Rich’s playing pieces to capture them. He swirled his wine in his tumbler and gave Rich a cool look, as if he’d just beaten a supercomputer at chess, and not a mildly sozzled millionaire at draughts.
“Beginner’s luck,” said Rich, good-naturedly.
“No, not that,” said Marvin. “Possibly the exact opposite.”
“Best of three then.”
While the draughts battle raged. Sam opened the Cluedo box. Sadly a good proportion of the cards were missing, along with a number of the counters and murder weapon props. That was disappointing but not a disaster. There were three character cards and most of the weapons still. If she could improvise with counters and make her own cards.
Her eyes alighted on the selection of porn magazines that had been cannibalised for cracker material. She picked up a copy of Honkers (“Chelsea is more than a handful!”) and flicked through. She just needed some pictures for suitable suspects and implements of murder.
As Sam set to work with scissors, she listened to the men play. Rich’s growls and groans were ample commentary on how well he was doing in his attempt to defeat Marvin ‘King Me!’ Applewhite. In the quiet isolation, she felt a faint but sustained Christmassy sense of time pleasantly spent among loved ones.
“Maybe we should watch a film,” said Sam once she’d finished her Cluedo creation. She walked over to the DVD collection and picked up a box. “Ah, we have Die Hard. A Christmas classic. Shall we start with this?”
“Fire it up,” said Marvin. “I’ll have this whippersnapper beat in a trice.”
“I don’t think so,” said Rich. “I think I’ve got the measure of you this— Hey, you can’t do that. That’s … that’s…”
“King me,” said Marvin.
The Die Hard DVD box was empty. “Oh, no Die Hard. So it’s The Great Escape maybe…”
Sam found that box was empty too. She worked her way through all the boxes. They were all empty.
“Well, that’s rubbish,” she said, holding up two empty boxes.
Marvin grunted. “I remember when we had a DVD player at home, you’d just take a DVD out and put it in whatever box you had left over. Lion King in the Little Mermaid box. Little Mermaid in the Cinderella box.”
“A bit of a Disney girl were you?” said Rich.
“Ah, she was also a fan of older films,” said Marvin. “I seem to recall a fondness for Inspector Clouseau.”
“Once I got over the disappointment that the Pink Panther never actually appeared in any of the films,” she said.
They all flopped back into their chairs.
“No telly then, I guess,” said Rich. “I’ll get satellite put in at some point, but that doesn’t help us now.”
“Hang on. I do have something we could use,” said Sam. “In terms of entertainment value, we might have to get creative, but let’s have a look.”
She went back to her room to fetch her laptop, then sought out the right cables on the side of the television so she could connect the two.
“Technically, this is your material anyway, Rich,” she said.
“What is it?”
“A dozen body cameras and their recordings from the animal escape drill. So – let’s play a game where I show a chunk of film and then stop it. I’ll ask you questions and you have to guess what happens next. Yeah?”
They both nodded. Sam had already reviewed the footage, so she had a pretty good idea of how it flowed. The software package had spliced the various pieces together using the timestamps and it was an unexpectedly coherent narrative.
She clicked on the video player program and the TV came to life, showing a paused image of the rear lawns of Otterside retirement village.
“We start with the escape of a mammoth.” She played a few seconds of the mammoth coming down the path. “You will see this mammoth is ably represented by a local am-dram player. Now my question to you is this: how many casualties will the mammoth cause before being captured?”
“Hmmmm,” said Marvin, having found a notepad and pencil so he could look like he was being studious and professional. “Looks like a sturdy sort. I once did panto with Beefy Botham, did I tell you that? Ninety-three, Theatre Royal in Bath. He has the same sort of build. I’m going to say eight.”
“Well there’s the thing, Marvin,” said Rich. “I say a big target’s easier to hit. I reckon it’s going to be more like six.”
“Well, let’s watch the film then!” said Sam, aware she sounded like a game show host trying to ramp up the fun. She counted them down as the mammoth reached out and tapped people before being sedated. “What do you know? That was actually fourteen! Marvin’s our winner for that round.”
She paused the film. “Now for the next scenario, we have a wolf and a caribou. I’m going to introduce a multiple choice element to this round. You need to choose from answer one, two or three when I ask you how this scenario ends. Answer one: the wolf and the caribou are both tranquilised and caught by the zookeepers. Answer two: the wolf kills the caribou and is then captured by the zookeepers. Answer three: the wolf is neutralised by a member of the public, and the caribou is captured separately.”
Rich nodded thoughtfully. Sam knew he had actually witnessed this part of the action, and however distracted he’d been by Peninsula’s excellent picnic, he couldn’t have missed the spectacular intrusion of the child. He was keeping up the pretence of ignorance for Marvin. “I’m going to say answer one. What do you think Marvin?”
“I’d better go with answer two,” said Marvin.
Sam played the film and enjoyed the expression on Marvin’s face as the action played out and the girl with the teddy bear kicked the wolf between the legs.
“Well I never!” said Marvin.
“No points awarded for that round,” said Sam. She played the film for a few more moments. “Now, you are both aware that things took a colourful turn at the end of the final scenario. The question you need to answer, because I’m not sure that either of you saw this part, is this: what happened to the zookeepers in this final scenario?”
They watched the film. Sam wasn’t sure if it was the wine they’d all drunk, but they all laughed uncontrollably at the footage captured from the bison. There were snippets of audio that had escaped them all on the day, but which revealed the flustered panic of the bison as he turned this way and that as the sabre-toothed tiger chased him. There were oohs and aahs and (most memorably) several oh shits as the incensed tiger wrenched the Nerf tranquiliser gun from a zookeeper and shot down several would-be captors.
“Well, that’s better than an Only Fools and Horses Christmas special,” said Marvin, wiping tears of laughter. “Couldn’t ask for better entertainment!”
The footage automatically cut between participants inside and out as the tiger and bison crashed through the skylight of the residents lounge. A blur of rapid cuts filled the screen.
“I swear I saw your face there,” said Rich.
“Mine?” said Marvin.
Sam rewound and replayed it a frame at a time. In between a flash of white and a scene from outside, there was a split second shot, mostly a blur of sabre-tooth tiger fur, but in which Marvin and his temporary stage assistant simply stared as magic props and fragments of table flew up into the air.
“I don’t even look surprised,” said Marvin.
“Surprise comes later, when you actually work out what’s going on,” said Sam.
“That the doctor lady?” said Marvin, point
ing to an out of focus face in the background. “It was her little girl who was assisting us. I think she thought she’d conjured the costumed characters. The mother wasn’t impressed though.”
“Dr Hackett,” nodded Sam.
“She seemed a very tightly wound woman. Barely concealed rage. I’ve known stage performers like that. There was one I was doing the cruise ships with, back in the nineties. He wasn’t happy with his room and got so het up that he threatened to throw the purser overboard.”
“Who was that?” said Rich.
“My lips are sealed,” said Marvin. “But let’s just say he’s no longer on this planet and he’s not mourned.”
“I bet we could guess.”
“Who am I!” Marvin declared loudly.
“That’s it,” said Sam. “His mind’s gone.”
Marvin threw up his hands irascibly. “We play Who Am I. We’ll get—” He grabbed his pencil and paper. “Each of us comes up with a name, a famous person and—”
“Twenty questions,” said Rich. “Stick the names on each other’s foreheads and ask yes-no questions.”
“This requires more alcohol,” said Sam and reached for a fresh bottle of wine.
Sam scribbled a name down for Marvin. Marvin passed one to Rich. Rich passed one to Sam which she licked and slapped on her forehead.
“Right,” said Rich, taking a tumbler of wine from Sam. “Am I someone who got so angry on a cruise ship that I threatened to throw the purser overboard?”
The name on Rich’s forehead was Nana Mouskouri. Sam couldn’t imagine the woman had it in her.
“Nope,” said Marvin.
“But you said…” Rich’s frown was almost enough to dislodge the paper on his brow.
“It was the inspiration for this game, but as I say, my lips are sealed.”
Sam pointed at the name Rich had given her. “Am I a beautiful international celebrity?”
“No,” said Rich.
“Oh, then that forestalls my follow up question – have you slept with her?”