Quite Ugly One Morning

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  Parlabane figured that as the intended purpose of the screen was to prevent the patient from seeing parts of his body being abused, then its subsidiary function – of preventing the surgeon from seeing the anaesthetists and ODAs making obscene gestures in response to his arrogant remarks – was merely a useful bonus.

  Sarah was leaning against a small chest of drawers, its yellow plastic veneer peeled away from the cheap chipboard on all surfaces. She looked like she would be pacing the floor if there had been enough space in the on-call room to pace in. That utterly remorseless and even vaguely proud look in Parlabane’s eye wasn’t helping her humour.

  ‘Calculated risk,’ he said, standing with his back against the paint-blistered door. ‘Computer experts fall into two categories: meticulous, anal-looking bastards with something extremely uncomfortable stuck up their arses, or shambolic, haggard individuals who look like they could use about a fortnight’s sleep. The former type will steep the keyboard in disinfectant if you so much as breathe on his computers, while the latter can always do with talking to someone who understands about how he’s pissing into the wind trying to run a fucked system against the odds etcetera etcetera, blah blah blah. Also, that Medway prick was very keen for me not to talk to him, which circled him as a possible ally right away.’

  ‘OK, very cute. But what if the systems manager had been one of the anal types?’

  ‘I’d have made out I didn’t even know how to switch a computer on, so that he wouldn’t be keeping an eye on me. Then I’d have popped my disk into an up-and-running terminal as soon as he was out of sight. I didn’t need the systems manager to get it running. I just told him that. The programme is written to automatically load itself into the system and launch immediately. After you’ve put the disk in, you’ve got roughly five minutes to access the programme and tell it specifically what machines to look at, otherwise it just goes ahead and records every machine on the network. That slows the network down slightly, which won’t be noticed by any of the workers but might make the systems manager jumpy.’

  ‘And where did you get this magic disk? I don’t imagine it’s on sale next to “Sonic the Hedgehog Meets the Monopolies Commission”.’

  ‘I came up with the idea and got a guy in Van Nuys to code it. Two years ago he was just a scuzzball coding freak at a firm in Silicone Valley. Now he’s senior VP in charge of something or other. Information is power and all that.’

  ‘So why did you bring Dempsey into it if you didn’t need him?’

  ‘Fair exchange. He’d given me some good information. Also, I knew he’d be grateful for what I was giving him, and you never know when a bit of gratitude might come in handy.’

  Sarah looked away and shook her head. Then she stared back at Parlabane. ‘You know, Jack, I’m beginning to understand why someone tried to kill you.’ She walked to the bed, kicked off her shoes and slumped down on it, propping her back up against the headboard with a pook-ridden pillow.

  ‘So what else did you learn?’ she asked. ‘Did you meet our glorious leader, the big boss?’

  ‘Stephen Lime? But of course. He was the highlight of the tour – as far as Clive was concerned anyway. I got a privileged five minutes with the great one, during which he talked a lot and said nothing, a very valuable talent in both senior management and politics. Lots of press-release jargon, phrases like ‘meeting the challenges head-on’, plus plenty of mission statements and pro-activity.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I once got caught in gridlock in LA for six hours, day after the last earthquake, and that day was more interesting than this one. I’ve never had to listen to quite so many suits talking bollocks to me over such a sustained period. I did pick up a few valuable snippets, but the ratio of useful information to corporate wanking was not exactly satisfactory. What about you – did you get to talk to the Prof yet?’

  Sarah rolled her eyes. ‘Eventually. He wasn’t being evasive, it’s just you’ve no idea how hard it can be for two doctors to be free at the same time for even ten minutes. I managed to get someone else to hold my bleep for a while and cornered him in Coronary Care. He told me the whole thing over Jeremy’s wages was organised between him and someone called Moira Gallagher in payroll. The only other person who was told anything would have been her boss, as she had to clear it with him. The Prof didn’t know his name, but he’ll be head of that department, presumably. But Gallagher was the only one he told about the reason for the debt, and he asked her not to divulge it.’

  ‘Was the Prof suspicious?’ Parlabane asked.

  ‘Obviously. I didn’t lie to him, I just said I needed to know but I couldn’t tell him why. I don’t think he wants to think about it too much, to be honest – he still looks pretty glazed – so he answered my questions and let it go.’

  Parlabane walked over and leaned against the chest of drawers, staring blankly for a second as he processed the information.

  ‘Right, I think that gives us eight people who could have known about it, then. Gallagher, her boss and the six suits with the Loud Labelling crap who could have intercepted a memo from her to the boss about the wages arrangement. Obviously this memo wouldn’t mention Jeremy’s wee problem with the gee-gees, and it might not have mentioned that he was in debt. But the revelation that a sizable slice of Ponsonby Junior’s wages were being transferred to Ponsonby Senior would have been enough on its own to attract some curiosity, and it wouldn’t be too difficult after that to work out the young doc owed Daddy money. Now, my guess of there being only eight does discount the possibility of gossip, but I don’t imagine the Prof would have approached this particular woman unless he thought he could trust her to keep her mouth shut. She could still have told her husband, for instance, but I’m convinced that this is all within the hospital. Whoever acted on that information had to know enough about doctors to have figured out a way to use a bent one.

  ‘Now, we don’t know what that use was, but as we found nearly two K and chances are Jeremy spent Christ knows how much more, then the return for the bad guy must be huge. Especially considering the risk in approaching a doctor to get involved in some kind of scam, however much debt he was in. This has to be big money or big politics, and maybe even both.’

  Sarah had a look of concentrated consternation on her face, wincing as she struggled to comprehend something.

  ‘What I don’t get, Jack, is why you’re so keen to get into the computer system, why you brought that disk along. I mean, if one of these suits or Moira Gallagher’s boss or even Moira Gallagher’s up to no good, they’re not going to write it all down on the office wp, are they?’

  Parlabane lifted his feet from the floor, letting the chest of drawers take his full weight. It gave a distraught creak and lurched drunkenly to one side, threatening to collapse completely if he didn’t remove himself. He stood off it, righted it and leaned against the wall.

  ‘It’s because computers don’t understand politics,’ he said, trying to thump a wooden bail back into its awl on the teetering construction beside him. ‘If you want to know what’s going on in a company, an office, get into the computers. They don’t always tell you secrets, but they do give you straight answers. From a trawl through the system you can find out what’s really going on as opposed to what people will tell you is going on: the power structure, who’s working on what, who’s likely to know about what, and who’s saying what to whom. The computer can be an instrument of politics within an office, but the computer itself is not political. It just calculates, computes, and most importantly, records. I’ll find out more in twenty minutes on that network than I did from today’s hours of guarded bullshit, where every statement had a motive.

  ‘But most importantly, when you ask a computer a question, it doesn’t wonder why you want to know that information and then go and tell the boss that someone is snooping around. I can personally vouch for the advantages of that, with specific regard to the ensuing lack of men with guns – or in this case knives – visiting your house later on.’
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  ‘Yes, I can appreciate the benefits of that myself,’ Sarah admitted. ‘But you said the terminals off the wards were no good, yeah?’

  ‘Afraid not. They’re running off the central server, but they’re only linked to the medical records database. Even if I booted up with Stephen Lime’s user name and password, I couldn’t get into the general system.’

  ‘So how are you going to get your twenty minutes on the network?’

  ‘Well, once I’ve broken into the admin block I’ll have all night, if I need it.’

  Sarah sighed. ‘You know, it worries me that I didn’t find that surprising,’ she said. ‘It means I must be getting used to you, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.’

  She pulled her legs up underneath her on the bed and adjusted the pillows at her back.

  ‘So how are you going to break in? Admin’s the one place in the RVI where they’ve spent money on security.’

  ‘I’ve already broken in,’ Parlabane replied. ‘At least, I’ve done all the difficult bits. All I really need to do now is show up. Their security is abysmal anyway. The only threat they’ve properly guarded against is someone actually making off with their expensive computers and trendy furniture. And to be honest, apart from one very guilty party, they’ve very little else to fear from a break-in.’

  He reached down and picked up the duffle bag he had given Sarah that morning before going to meet the lovely Clive.

  ‘I’ve been waiting all day to find out what was in there, but I’m not so sure I want to know now.’

  ‘Just the tools of my trade,’ Parlabane said, with a grin of near-satanic misanthropy.

  He took off his boring blue tie and unbuttoned the white shirt that he had worn to present a respectable and unsuspicious image to the admin staff, then quickly hopped out of his navy trousers and into a pair of black jeans which he produced from the duffle bag. Then he dipped into the bag again and laid out a number of small items on Sarah’s bed.

  She looked with minor curiosity at the mysterious pieces of hardware arrayed before her, but her attention was massively distracted by Parlabane’s enjoyably prolonged state of partial undress. His skin looked weathered by the sun rather than tanned, muckily dark patches around the neck and shoulders giving way to a more consistent hue about his back and chest, where the hairs appeared blonder than on his head due to their being shorter and finer. She had half-expected to find him rakishly skinny under his clothes, but although he was far from muscular, his arms and torso had a sinewy, taut look of fitness about them.

  From the bed he picked up an article of black canvas, punctuated with pockets and sections of elasticated loop, with two sturdy straps situated at equal distances in from each end. He picked up the one item Sarah recognised – the wallet of lock-picking utensils – and shoved it through two of the elasticated loops. Then he repeated the drill with a transparent plastic bag of computer disks and what looked like an extremely compact camera.

  ‘For interesting documents when the people you’re visiting haven’t been considerate enough to leave the photocopier on overnight,’ he explained.

  He put his arms through the loops and pulled the strapping around his back and chest like a bra, which he fastened with a plastic clip at the sternum, then attached a neatly folded length of climbing cord across the front. Finally, he reached back into the duffle bag and produced a black polo-neck, which he stuck his neck through and pulled over the whole affair.

  ‘Why can I hear the Mission Impossible music in my head?’ Sarah remarked. ‘Look, Jack, are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

  ‘Hey,’ he said, opening the window and standing up on the bed, ‘Parlabane’s back.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Parlabane was twelve years old, staying the September weekend at his cousin Moray’s in Nairn. All day Saturday they had been alternately playing and fighting with Heather and Stephanie, Moray’s wee sisters, in the house and round the garden while their mums drank coffee and blethered in the kitchen and their dads hit into a force eight on the links.

  In the evening, they were packed off to the living room to watch TV while their parents demolished four courses and plenty of dry red in the dining room, and hostilities had inevitably ensued when the girls’ choice of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang clashed with Parlabane and Moray’s preferred Ian Fleming adaptation on the other channel. Parental mediation was sought and produced the kind of compromise that illustrated why none of them ever got a job with ACAS: the girls could watch the first half of their film and the boys the second half of theirs.

  The boys elected to back down from this Mexican stand-off and retreated to Moray’s bedroom for the remainder of the evening, where they played the Escape From Colditz board game and at some point came up with an idea to even the score.

  Around one in the morning, half-an-hour after the last adult sound had been heard, they made their way downstairs and through the house silently. They used two pillows each, placing them in front of themselves, stepping on to the first and then taking the one from behind and bringing it to the front. There were no footfalls, and they could barely hear the sound of each other’s breathing.

  Moray opened the girls’ bedroom door. They both knew it squeaked, so it was a very slow and patient process, pushing it centimetre by centimetre, stopping and pausing awhile after each hint of a noise, until it was open just wide enough to squeeze through. Once inside, they stood perfectly still on the floor for a short while, thrilling to the silence and the sight of the girls obliviously asleep on the bunk beds. Thrilling to the feeling of being where they weren’t supposed to.

  Having steadied their breathing and recovered from the threat of giggling, they went to work. Moray had a rubber skull that glowed in the dark, and he attached it to the bedsprings of the top bunk, so that it dangled in front of Stephanie’s face where she lay on the bottom one. Parlabane quietly set about placing every object in the room upside down – apart from, obviously, the goldfish bowl – and arranging all of the girls’ dolls doing handstands along the wall.

  The next day, the girls quite victoriously got their own back by saying absolutely nothing about it, but that didn’t matter.

  They had a new game. The best game.

  That night he and Moray left their bedroom window open, crept downstairs and out the front door, went around the house and climbed back in via the extension roof and a sturdy black drainpipe. All told it took less than ten minutes, but the excitement kept them awake and talking about it for half the night afterwards.

  School disco a few months later, three days before the Christmas holidays. Parlabane had retreated to the first floor toilets to recover from the broken heart and devastating embarrassment of Alison Gifford knocking him back for a dance. All the other cubicles were full of second years drinking Woodpecker and smoking menthols, so he had to settle for the one at the end that no one liked to use because it had a frosted window above the cistern, and ‘folk might be able to see in’.

  He was hiding, really. Didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to be seen. It was stuffy in the gym hall where the disco was, but he didn’t want to go out to the playground for air because it was full of lucky bastards getting a snog. With all the illicit smoking going on, the toilets were even more oppressively smelly than usual, and as he wasn’t in there to properly use the facilities, he stood on the seat, opened the window and stuck his head out. There was a drainpipe running up the wall just outside, the west wing’s flat roof a few feet above.

  Guess what.

  Parlabane scurried along the roof, looking down through the plastic-domed skylights at the empty desks and chairs in the semi-darkness below. He was in a fairly distressed and nihilistic frame of mind, he would in later years tell himself to explain what he did next. It was as much to do with simply being twelve as being knocked back by Alison Gifford.

  He dreeped down backwards, stretching his legs below him and placing his toes at either side of the bottom frame of a window, then pulled hi
mself back up. His trainers scraped along the wood of the frame for a second and then the window came unstuck and slid upwards. He lowered himself back down until his feet were on the sill, then with one instep pulled the window up as far as it would go, and climbed in.

  He found himself in the English Base, where all the textbooks were kept and where the head of the department, Mrs Innes, had a small office, partitioned off by shelves and cabinets. Parlabane wandered around for a few moments, his heart still racing from the fear of falling, and now dealing with the fear of getting caught.

  But there would be no one to catch him. The half-dozen or so teachers mad enough to volunteer to assist with the disco were too busy policing the gym hall to even notice the various illegalities taking place in the toilets, so nobody was going to come up here.

  He had a seat behind Mrs Innes’ desk, just catching his breath, enjoying the silence and the thrill. Then he noticed that the pile of sheets on her desk were the first year pre-Christmas exam papers, with the marks circled on the top-right corners. He flicked through them until he found his own, which had earned him 88%, and a quick scan of the rest revealed him to be top of the year-group.

  There were no big secrets, no scandals, no revelations. These papers would be getting handed out the next day anyway. But as he climbed back out of the window, on to the roof, down the drainpipe and into the toilets, he felt invincible, knowing he had been where he should not have been, seen what he should not have seen, and knew something everyone around him didn’t.