Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  The boat eventually moved off with a loud horn-blast and then the excruciatingly over-familiar opening chords of Prince’s ‘1999’. Steff hadn’t heard a song played so fucking much since every restaurant, supermarket, joinery, plumbing firm, tyre-fitter’s, DIY store and travel agent boasted to the world that they were ‘Simply The Best’. The Huns used it too, over the PA when the team took the field, further proof if it could ever be needed that individuality and original thought were largely incompatible with supporting Glasgow Rangers Football Club.

  He turned his head once more to look towards the door to the stairwell that led down to the elevator’s highest stop. His stomach was churning. His bloody stomach was churning. He hadn’t felt like this since he was about fifteen, and the worst of it was that it was for all the same reasons as back then. Thinking about what she looked like, what she smelt like, her smile, the sound of her voice. Excited by the very thought of seeing her, worried by the thought that she wouldn’t show, nervousness multiplied with every unfeasibly long minute that passed.

  This was daft. It was only a shoot, for God’s sake. Except that it wasn’t. Or at least it might not be. He tried to replay yesterday’s conversations, yesterday’s moments, re-analysing, dissecting, deciphering, looking for whatever had been done or said to make him think there was something between them.

  ‘I got a better offer,’ she said, didn’t she? But was she just being a good networker, knowing it was in her interests to get this shoot done, and going out of her way a little because she’d let him down last night? Or was there something really going on in those strange moments before Jo came back and knackered it?

  He knew he had walked out of this place on air last night, so why did he feel sure of nothing this morning?

  He looked at his watch again. The feeling of excited expectation had given way to nervousness, which in turn was stepping aside in deference to a hollow nausea riven with disappointment and an unmistakable sense of loss. Never mind just being a good networker – she wasn’t even coming. He sighed, a long, slow exhale, staring back out to the shrinking shape of the Moonstar boat as it headed for the horizon.

  Then he heard a door close, and there she was.

  She was dressed in beige deck shorts and a sleeveless top, her dark hair tucked under a skip-cap, bangles a-jingle as she walked towards him carrying a duffel bag over her shoulder. She seemed smaller than yesterday. Steff looked at her delicate shape, her skinny legs, waist, chest, shoulders and neat wee head, and it seemed incredible that everything he remembered about this person, everything he’d thought about her could be contained within this tiny frame. An exquisite noseful of perfume/bodyspray/whatever reached him half a second before her outstretched hand. Steff wanted to drop to his knees and worship before her.

  They went through the ritual of she apologising for being late and he pretending he hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Other clothes,’ she said, putting the bag down. ‘For later on.’

  ‘Where are you going later on?’

  ‘Taking you to lunch, if you’re free.’

  Steff tried too hard to think of the right reply and ended up saying nothing.

  ‘I thought I’d make up for running out on you so you don’t print the ugly shots. You a vegetarian?’

  ‘Eh, no,’ he said, before he could think about the diplomatic consequences.

  ‘Good thing. Place we’re going is so carnivorous, they eat the vegetarians. You up for that?’

  ‘Eh, ay,’ he managed.

  Oh gaun yourself Steff, he thought. Bowl her over with charm, confidence and erudition. Sam Shepard would be shiting himself.

  A phone was ringing as he entered the station house, Rankin telling him ‘Yeah that’s yours, Larry’ as he walked by, the younger cop looking once again like he’d had yet another fight with the wife and sacked out on the station floor. A lot of mornings when he came through the doors and heard a phone, Larry’d be hoping it didn’t turn out to be the one on his desk. On this morning, however, knowing it was the one on his desk, his hopes were pinned on the smell assaulting his nostrils not coming from too near the same place.

  As he approached his open office door he knew it was forlorn. Zabriski was sitting opposite, eating the stinkiest sandwich this side of a turd melt.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ Larry asked, eyes almost watering. Zabriski grinned, chewing faster so that he could empty his mouth and explain. Larry held a hand up. ‘Forget it. I don’t think I want to know.’

  He swallowed as Larry threw his jacket into a corner. ‘Hot tuna melt from across the street at Tine’s, but I added my own runny gorgonzola to pep it up.’ He held up a plastic tub with a tightly sealed lid. ‘I brought some in here. You want a free sample?’ He gripped the lid and began to pull it open. Larry drew his gun. Zabriski dropped the tub.

  ‘Ah, fuckin’ Philistine,’ he muttered.

  Larry picked up the phone.

  ‘Yeah, Freeman here.’

  ‘Hiya Larry, it’s Carol Adebo, Forensics.’

  ‘Morning, Carol. So what’d you catch on your boat trip?’

  ‘Well, the lab won’t be through until probably this evening, but if you just want the headlines, we found a shell.’

  ‘Congratulations. A shell on a boat. Who woulda thunk it? What, is the oyster a witness?’

  ‘A shell, Larry, as in powder casing for ballistic projectile, expelled from ejection port of firing device, known colloquially as a gun.’

  Larry dropped the attitude. In fact he did well not to drop the phone too. Everything was different now. Multiple homicide different.

  ‘Shit. Sorry, Carol. Wrong train of thought. Wait a minute, though. You found a shell yesterday, why are you only telling me this now?’

  ‘We didn’t know we’d found it yesterday. We flushed out the deck drainage sluices and collected all the gunk that came out for the lab to sift through. They found the shell among all the yuk pretty late last night. I’ve been trying your line for half an hour this morning.’

  ‘Sorry again. So, you typed it yet?’

  ‘It’s with Ballistics now and I haven’t heard back from them, but it was a high-calibre slug, I can tell you that much. We’re looking at a rifle, not a handgun, probably an automatic assault weapon. Ballistics are gonna run the shell through the system and see if they got any of its brothers and sisters in custody. But I’d say the bottom line is that you’re not looking at a boating accident any more.’

  ‘You got that right. Jesus. You find anything else?’

  ‘Not so far. But we’re pretty sure the aft deck’s been hosed down. There’s lots of watermarks on the foredeck, just what you’d expect from spray and from these guys walking around in wetsuits, but the aft is way too spick and span.’

  ‘Are we talking mopping up blood here?’

  ‘I doubt it. It’s a wooden deck and blood would leave a stain. Maybe not real dark, but you’d definitely get shading. More than you could wash out with just a hose-down.’

  ‘So what were theywashing out?’

  ‘Can’t even guess yet, Larry. But if you want my gut instinct, I’d say – among other things – more shells, and lots of them. We’d have to be real lucky if there was only one shot fired and the shell rolled right into that sluice for us to find. But if there were lots of shells scattered around that deck and someone was hosing them out into the sea, there’s a chance they might not notice one of them going down a grille instead of all the way over the edge. And if it was dark, they might not have noticed the sluice grilles at all.’

  ‘Christ.’

  He put down the phone and sighed. Zabriski had finished the sandwich and left the room, but what the hell, it hadn’t smelt half as bad as what the Gazes Also was starting to reek of. It was discoveries like this that pointed up the dichotomy between being a detective and being a cop: mind and body, theory and practice. The detective in him had never been satisfied by the hypothesis that four missing persons could merely have met with an unfortunate accident
and sunk to the bottom of the pond; maybe because the cop in him knew it was too much to hope that the explanation would be so simple. The discovery of the shell was the kind of thing the detective wanted to hear because it pointed towards a more familiar and tangible explanation, even though it posed a shitload more difficult questions. But for the cop it was confirmation that he now had a thousand times more trouble on his hands than when he woke up this morning. The detective gets to play questions and answers; it’s the cop who gets to play with the bodies and the baddies.

  Carol Adebo was right. They definitely weren’t looking at a maritime misadventure here no more, and gunpoint abduction didn’t have enough cred to be anything more than an implausible but as-yet-uneliminated possibility. Why abduct four scientists in the middle of the goddamn ocean? To take them where? To use them for what? Hostages? He sure hadn’t heard any ransom demands.

  Uh-uh. This was a multiple murder. Someone – and most likely more than one person – had got on to that boat, probably while these guys were finishing their Sunday dinner, and taken them out. Maybe lined them up against one side and shot them so they fell back into the water. Or maybe fired off a few threat rounds and forced them to jump overboard, hundreds of miles from dry land. Then they hosed down the deck to dispose of the spent cases.

  So he had a scenario, but what he didn’t have was the first hint of a who or why. Or where the shooter or shooters came from, how they got aboard, why their vessel and its approach weren’t noted by anyone on the Gazes Also. And what about the missing submarine? It certainly seemed to confirm that someone had forced Mitchell Kramer to record a dubious note about the sub in the ship’s log, the captain secreting his coded SOS in the terse entry. Did the bad guys ditch it to provide an explanation for the disappearances? Possibly, but that left him scrabbling around for a motive for offing four scientists whose research carried no more threat than boring the ass off anyone who wasn’t into rocks.

  Or seismology.

  He remembered with a shudder the brush-off he had given Arazon, when she’d suggested it might be more than a coincidence that this had happened only a few months after Sandra Biscane was murdered. Carol’s words were still rattling around his head – ‘probably an automatic assault weapon’ – and the spectre of the Southland Militia was beginning to rise from the waters around that mysterious goddamn boat. The idea excited the detective in him and scared the pants off the cop. But neither of them could venture a stab at what the hell interest those assholes could have in oceanography. To his knowledge their philosophy was ‘if you can’t fire it, fuck it’.

  However, there was one simple explanation, with an older, purer motive: theft. It could well have been the sub they were after. Janie Rodriguez had said it was valuable, state-of-the-art, but worth killing four people for? Dumb question. He’d dealt with guys who’d kill ten people to steal a fucking rowboat if they wanted it bad enough.

  So who’d want a submarine?

  As well as the Southland Militia, Steel had mentioned the possibility of the Gazes Also running into drug-smugglers or gun-runners. But what if it was the bad guys who had made a point of running into the Gazes Also,acting on information that it was trailing a piece of hardware like the Stella Maris?Drugs, guns, whatever, a submarine would be a lot less visible to the DEA or the Coast Guard than the usual launches – especially if no-one knew you possessed it, and no-one even knew it still existed.

  He would call Ballistics, tell them to start checking that shell against the DEA and the Coast Guard’s spent cartridge collections. He reached for the phone, but it rang as his hand gripped the receiver.

  It was a weird shoot. Occasionally you got subjects who were edgy and uncomfortable, depending on how used they were to this sort of thing. It was less normal for the photographer to be self-conscious.

  At the start there was a faint air of embarrassment about the proceedings. Steff’s problem was that he had lost the protective barrier of just being the man with the camera, there to do a job. He wore a security laminate with his name on it, which had meant nothing to most of the people he’d snapped that week; to them he was still anonymous. But not to Maddy. She asked if she could call him Stephen rather than Steff, saying she liked the name. From a professional point of view, he wished she hadn’t said that. The rest of him, however, shivered with pleasure every time the word fell from her lips.

  Maddy, who of all people he thought should be used to the camera, was a bag of nerves too, enough even to seem oblivious to Steff’s feeling like a shambling amateur.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m so self-conscious today,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it is. You must be wondering how someone who’s had my career can suddenly be camera-shy. I guess it’s like you said, it’s easier when you’re playing a part. I’m trying to be me today, and it’s making me feel a lot more naked than I did on any set.’

  ‘That’s okay. We can take a wee break.’

  ‘No. I’ll be fine. Wait, I know,’ she said, and jumped backwards into the pool.

  Steff was doubled up for a few seconds with surprise and laughter, recovering enough to start shooting as she swam to retrieve her cap and put it back on her soaking-wet head.

  ‘Yeah, that’s much better,’ she shouted, giggling. ‘I was nervous because I was worried about looking stupid. Now I don’t have to worry.’

  Steff clicked away as she trod water and smiled up from the pool, changing film as she climbed out. He shot her sitting on the far edge of the pool, arms around her knees, dripping with water, then standing up, her back to the ocean, arms out, looking skywards. He could make out every excruciatingly desirable curve and contour of her small breasts through the wet and flimsy material, and suddenly felt an unaccustomed desire to keep them out of the frame to spare her modesty. He realised this was as hypocritical as it was patronising (as well as probably being sexist in some hideously complicated ideological way), and made the best of the shot.

  She jumped back into the water, this time giving him notice, and splashed down, laughing as she surfaced, shouting things at him, smiling and smiling and smiling.

  And she was taking him to lunch.

  Steff was smiling too, fearful of doing anything that might break whatever spell was making all this happen. He tried not to hope, tried just to enjoy what he was doing.

  He tried not to think about the celebrities the press had linked her with, as confirmed when Jo asked her yesterday about who she’d been ‘seeing’. Seth Kolbeck, lead guitarist with Death Head, currently off on a stadium tour of Europe. Mike MacAvoy, star of TV ratings sensation There Goes the Neighborhood,currently shooting Close Action,his first above-the-line-credit, big-budget thriller for Warner Bros. Apparently neither of these relationships had worked out, but Steff feared it was long odds that this was because what the lassie really needed in her life was a big skinnymalink from Lanarkshire.

  However, if he wanted to indulge the daydream, it was worth remembering why the above hadn’t worked out. Who knew whether she needed big skinnymalinks from Lanarkshire, but she definitely didn’t need rock stars and adolescent sitcom actors.

  ‘We “went out” inasmuch as we attended a few movie premières and launch parties together, but these were not dates,’ she told Jo. ‘I can barely remember having a conversation with either one of those guys. I was little more than a walking photo-opportunity. Mike MacAvoy invited me out to a couple of things because he wanted to be seen with me on his arm. He was in the frame for Close Action, but the director wasn’t sold on him because of his boy-next-door image on TV. I was just part of his makeover. Instant notoriety: just add Maddy. Seth was merely maintaining his image. They wanted to be seen in the company of me the media phenomenon. Me the person wasn’t invited. I think they also both reckoned that with me having been a porn star I’d be an easy lay. I’m not.’

  She was taking him out to lunch. Him, not Seth Kolbeck or Mike MacAvoy. But then she did say that it was to make up for yesterday – the good little networker routine. And
then again, Steff reminded himself, she didn’t have to, and nobody he shot had ever done it before. He looked at her smile up at him again, giggling girlishly, a million miles from affectation or concerns about deportment. He thought of the way she’d responded when he said she looked prettiest in her civvies.

  There had to be something going on.

  It was a Catholic thing, this fear, this worry, this I-am-not-worthy pish. You could ditch the beliefs but you couldn’t quite repair the damage. Years of supporting Motherwell FC had been contributory too: he always got nervous when everything seemed to be going right, because that was usually when the roof fell in.

  Normally, this was just a figure of speech.

  ‘Arguello here,’ said a voice – firm, quiet, controlled, direct and totally out of character. ‘Drink your coffee, Sarge, sit down and listen up.’

  Pedro Arguello was on babysitting detail at the Pacific Vista for the second week of the market, replacing Tommy Andrews. Pedro had been monitoring the bomb-threat phone tap (thirteen hoaxes and counting) among other hand-holding duties, such as convincing a Legion of Decency delegation to abandon their lie-down blockade protest at the front of the horseshoe drive. He had gone for the practical and diplomatic tactic of pointing out how the glare meant that drivers might not even see the protesters and would just roll right over their fundamentalist asses. That was him all the way: a cool, cheerful, smooth operator. He’d even laughed when one of the protesters said, ‘Never mind your badge, let’s see your Green Card.’