Quite Ugly One Morning

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  He rubbed at his burnt ankles and knelt up on the mattress, at which point the revolving motion of his surroundings caused him to fall forward over the bottom of the bedframe and vomit voluminously on to the floor. The acid content of the puke burnt searingly into his cuts, but he had to stifle a cry of pain in case the old bat was listening.

  She must have drugged him. That’s what it felt like. Must have been her fucking rotten dinner. He could remember dying his hair – Christ, the smell – then eating his tea, then feeling hellish knackered and deciding on an early night.

  Cow.

  When he stood up, the room had slowed its rotations, but the hazy, heavy, lethargic feeling was back. He bumped drunkenly against the walls as he put on some clothes and gathered some vital belongings into his plastic satchel, such as his knife, wallet and portable – for fuck’s sake don’t forget the portable.

  Then he had staggered erratically to the door and thought about pulling the wardrobe in front of it, but reckoned in this state he’d only pull it down on top of himself. He settled for taking the key from the wardrobe door and jamming it into the lock so that the Filth would have to fuck around outside for that bit longer.

  The tiredness came in waves, washing over him and threatening every time to drag him under, but he had to fight it, had to stay awake and on his feet. He trudged sluggishly back across to the window, one foot slipping as another wave crashed into him, and staggered forward, putting his left hand out, palm-up, to steady himself. It crashed through the pane, ripping his shellsuit and the flesh underneath right up to the elbow, and leaving lots of twinkling little splinters sticking out of his palm and his sleeve.

  What the fuck. He didn’t even have time to worry about it.

  He climbed out of the window with his bag over one shoulder, and got halfway down the drainpipe before the next wave shook the world just enough for him to lose the grip of his four-fingered right hand and fall painfully to the ground below, putting both knees through the black material of his shellsuit and grazing them on the stone.

  Like an animal crazed by an irrational mix of pain and sheer survival instinct, he picked himself up and charged forward, bouncing off a couple of clothes-poles like a pinball until he made it to the wall at the back.

  Darren chucked the bag over and hauled himself up behind it, rolling off the top and on to the mercifully soft mud on the other side.

  It was comfortable there, despite the cuts and bruises and his aching bollocks and his broken nose and the sting of puke in the corners of his artificially widened mouth. He felt like he could just doze off, maybe just for ten minutes, then he’d be all right to carry on.

  But there’s no alarm clock can beat the sound of sirens for clearing your head and getting you on your feet, and as he heard the wail from maybe a couple of streets away, he was already grabbing his bag and picking his way through the bushes and trees behind the row of prissy little gardens.

  After about a hundred yards he came to a metal railing, which ran for about twelve feet where the muddy, wooded passage came to an end, hitting a pavement at ninety degrees. Directly across the road was a narrow little lane, leading up to some grim and decrepit-looking factories he had seen when he had been walking around trying to find a place to dump Ruffle. There was a gap in the railings where two bars had been bent, probably by kids going through to play on the rope-swings he had passed. Bless ’em. He stuck his head between the bars and made sure there was no one around, then squeezed through the gap and stopped between two parked cars. Another check, then he bent low and scrambled across the street and headed up the lane.

  To his enormous disappointment, the decrepit-looking factories turned out to be going concerns, and were securely locked up. One of them didn’t have bars on its windows, but even if he broke in, he didn’t want to be discovered by some fucker on the early shift in the morning.

  The lane wound around between the buildings, and he followed it desperately, breathlessly jogging along, occasionally losing his footing on the loose gravel or bumping into a wall as the tiredness nudged the earth a couple of feet to one side for a second.

  The lane bent hard around to the right for about thirty yards, flanked by the kind of huge, round steel bins he remembered from outside school dinners, and up ahead he could see that it was leading out on to another street. The centrifugal effect of running round a bend combined with the endless waves of nausea sent him sprawling to the floor, where he was wretchingly sick again. But then, looking up, he saw that there was a passage leading off the lane to the left, and more railings at the end.

  With a low grunt, he struggled back to his feet and meandered half-blindly down to the railings, from where to his grateful relief he could just make out a grassy bank leading down to what looked like a pathway, twenty or so feet below, which led off optimistically into the distance.

  Diamond.

  He was saved.

  With a burst of renewed energy, he climbed on to the top of the railings, then jumped down on the other side, whereupon he lost his footing and fell backwards, rolling at speed down the grass embankment and off the end of a four-foot wall he hadn’t noticed was at the bottom of it. By the time he hit the ground and came to a stop he was unconscious, flat out on the gravel at the edge of a council railway, five yards from the mouth of a tunnel, his left wrist resting on the metal line.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Parlabane should have been happy as a pig in shit. He was knee-deep in evidence of extremely unpalatable activities and had a porcine appetite for just such matter.

  Anna had called back within an hour. She worked at Companies House in London and still owed him a few favours. If Parlabane was being completely honest they were probably all sexual favours, but what the hell, this was payment in kind. She was an excruciatingly petite bluestocking with a fruitily upper-class accent; intelligent, educated, charming and almost irritatingly attractive, but with the inexplicable flaw of a sexual craving for short-arsed Glaswegian investigative journalists who could break into hotel rooms.

  Fortunately, she was way too smart to get involved any deeper than the physical with such a social, emotional – bollocks – all-round liability as Parlabane, for which he was fairly glad too. Anna was clever, sussed, streetwise, connected and going places, but he suspected that she was also – in a quaintly English way – completely fucking bonkers not too far beneath her exquisite surface.

  He had met her doing some unusually legit research, just checking out who owned what as he mentally assembled the players in his next front-page tragedy-cum-farce. He had been going through a document at a table in the public reading room when she came over to ask for it back. The librarian who had given him it had failed to notice a message on his computer saying that she required it instantly, and she had come down in person to retrieve it. Parlabane was, of course, suspicious as hell, the old conspiracy glands reflexively kicking in, wondering whether someone would be skewering him with a poisoned umbrella on the tube train home. However, his thoughts were totally sidetracked by what happened when their eyes met and stayed met for a few seconds.

  Parlabane believed a little in sexual chemistry; there had certainly been plenty of times he had looked at a woman and felt a primal urge that went way beyond mere aesthetic appreciation. When he looked at Anna, however, even aesthetic appreciation was tempered by the feeling that she was not only out of his league but unnervingly scary. What utterly derailed him, though, was the sudden awareness that she was feeling the primal urges and he was the object. Or should that have been prey?

  She said he could keep the document as long as he returned it to her in an hour. When he asked where she would be she told him the name of a bar two streets away.

  He couldn’t remember quite how the hotel thing started, even whose idea it was, only that it followed the weirdest conversation of his life and that the first hotel was the one across the road from the bar.

  After that they shagged their way around maybe a dozen hotels – different ea
ch time – and only got caught twice. Anna would watch at the front desk for people going out for the evening (or afternoon), spotting the room number on the key they handed in. Then she’d go and have a nonchalant drink in the bar while Parlabane nipped upstairs and picked the lock.

  The first time they got caught they managed to brass-neck it and convince the astonished elderly American couple that it was they who must have mistakenly got off the lift at the wrong floor and intruded on the room above them. Bloody locks must be useless if any key can open them. Watch for your valuables. By the time the oldsters had descended a floor and failed to open the door down there, Parlabane and Anna were in a Covent Garden pub.

  The other time was less smooth, and involved a naked sprint down an external fire escape in January and getting dressed in the back of a hackney speeding along Shaftesbury Ave, the lights of Piccadilly Circus briefly illuminating Anna’s elegant little breasts before they were covered up by her inside-out silk blouse.

  There was no financial reason for it. Just good, clean fetishism. It happened about once a month, though they met for drinks more often. Anna had two separate, ‘proper’ relationships throughout its duration, about which Parlabane felt vaguely guilty, but as she clearly didn’t it wasn’t worth getting too upset over. It ended when she decided to make the second of those relationships legally legitimate, but as many hotels had started using card-lock systems, Parlabane had observed that there wasn’t much future in it anyway.

  He got an invite to the wedding, though. He didn’t make the actual ceremony as he was in court that afternoon on one of his burglary charges, but he did catch the end of the speeches and most of the reception. He also nipped upstairs and broke into the bridal suite to leave his present on the bed.

  She liked that.

  He had found her in familiarly buoyant form when he called.

  ‘You only phone when you want something,’ she chided him.

  ‘Yeah, well so did you,’ he replied.

  ‘Now now.’

  He had fed her the names of all the companies who had won large supply contracts from the Midlothian NHS Trust, plus Capital Properties, and the names of Lime and his colleagues on the board.

  ‘Well, Jack darling, I’m sure you’ll be shattered as ever to hear that it’s another grim picture of sleaze and corruption.’

  ‘Talk dirty to me, baby. It hurts so good.’

  ‘You know I love it too. Anyway, I think I could work out the board’s power structure for myself just on the strength of who’s been awarded which pickings. At the shallow end you’ve got Elliot Michaels, poor lamb, who co-owns Evergreen Indoors – pot plant supplies and “maintenance” – through a holding company called Mainstay Ltd.

  ‘Up top you’ve got Mr Lime and Mr Winton, who both have large stakes in IT Systems, the computer supplier, which appears to have only begun trading shortly before the contract was awarded. Again, both are too smart to have their names listed directly as owners. Winton holds his share through Churchfield Ltd, Lime at two removes, through Greenbank, which owns Infotech, which holds the stake and which was set up very shortly before IT Systems.

  ‘In between you’ve got Toby Childs, Cedric Baker and Penelope Gainsborough, who indirectly own or have a major share in, respectively, Ladywell Mercedes, Icon Interiors and Red Letter Stationery.

  ‘All rather tawdry, really, and disappointingly familiar. That lot might get you a few inches in Private Eye or cause a small stir locally if you flog it to the regional rags, but it’s not exactly earth-shattering. It’s not even necessarily illegal. I do hope there’s more to the tale.’

  ‘Hey. It’s me, remember? What about Capital Properties?’

  ‘A merry dance, Jack, a merry dance. Four-Square Developments owns half, run by a chap named David Forbes. That part was simple enough. The other half can be traced back to your Mr Lime, but only through a tortuously complicated maze of ghost firms and front companies. I’d be most interested to see this chap’s tax returns, and I’d be rather astonished if he was actually paying any.

  ‘Basically, Jack darling, you can’t completely hide the fact that you own something – but you can certainly make sure no one notices it by accident. And there are a few tricks you can do to put people like your nosy self off the scent. Mr Lime has engaged a full repertoire of these, to the extent that if you had only given me his name or the name of Capital Properties, I would not have linked one with the other if I was here all night.

  ‘The other worthies on the board have covered themselves against accidental discovery or speculative angling, but with regard to Capital Properties, Mr Lime is hiding in some very thick undergrowth indeed. I trust you suspect he’s up to something truly disgusting?’

  ‘Disgusting enough for him to have had one person murdered so far. Look, can you fax the documentation to Duncan McLean at the Edinburgh Evening Capital?’

  ‘Of course. Consider it done. But do be careful, Jack,’ she said softly.

  ‘It’s me, Anna. I’m always careful.’

  ‘Hmm. Well just think about what it felt like to be barefoot in the snow in a Soho backstreet and remember that your idea of careful isn’t always enough.’

  The problem was Sarah, and another strange look.

  Not like Anna’s look, thank Christ, but a moment when their eyes had met that morning over her kitchen table, after he’d made them breakfast. They had returned from the hospital around half-nine, her on-call and his ‘research’ complete, and Sarah had taken a shower while he brewed some coffee and did his worst for their cholesterol levels with the grill and frying pan.

  Sarah had wandered back into the kitchen in a fluffy white dressing gown, patting at her damp red hair with a small towel. When he handed her the plate of good, honest, Scottish heart disease, she had leaned over in her chair, bending down to fetch some salt from a low cupboard. And he simply did not possess the mortal strength not to look as her dressing gown fell open enough to momentarily reveal her right breast. Mercifully, she didn’t catch him, as what he had seen had made him too fragile to even attempt to defend himself.

  It had caught him off-guard, had its impact before all his policing and defence mechanisms could kick in and neutralise it. Sticking to the task, concentrating on the matter in hand, trying to be professional and trustworthy had made him blank out how attractive he found Sarah, had denied him any real reaction to it. But now there it was, sneaking up on him and shouting ‘Boo!’.

  Breakfast helped him compose himself. He stole a few glances at her face as she tucked into her eggs, enjoying the strange thrill of seeing someone so familiar in a suddenly different light. And with each glance he felt better, more confident that he could deal with it, that it wasn’t going to be a problem.

  Aesthetic appreciation.

  Huh.

  ‘So is this it for you, Jack?’ she had asked. ‘Running around, breaking into places, finding out the big secret, catching the villain then disappearing again?’

  ‘You make it sound so irresponsible,’ he had replied.

  It was a clever joke. It made Sarah laugh politely and it deflected the question. Deferred the question? And acknowledged the question.

  Maybe it was even two questions: ‘this can’t last forever, so where are you going?’; and ‘who are you, Jack?’

  He had glanced up, suddenly found her looking at him and not looking away when their eyes met. The look was there when she knew he wasn’t watching, but she had not desisted when she knew he was. It was a look he had seldom, maybe never seen before. It was a look of interest, concern and affection, but was greater than the sum of these.

  Houston we have a problem.

  The sudden appreciation that she had feelings for him precipitated the even more dizzying realisation that he had feelings for her. So many other questions had occupied his conscious thoughts all the time they had spent together, but now that most of them were answered, it was as if his brain had backlogged an array of emotions that were now top of the pending pile.<
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  Nestling among them was the feeling of horrified guilt that he had unthinkingly embroiled her in activities that could leave her exposed before some very dangerous men. But what chiefly occupied his mind were re-runs of moments between them, looks, conversation, and meanings he had missed or deferred contemplating. He had known disastrous relationships that had started through some intensity, working together, misinterpreting a close professional relationship for something deeper and discovering the truth in an uncomfortable unravelling later on. This had been the opposite: working so closely on their investigation had obscured what was genuinely developing between them.

  It had been a long moment, that look. A moment of many possibilities. He had a great track record for reckless abandon in emotional and sexual matters. He could have walked around the table and kissed her. He could have acknowledged what might lie before them. Instead he talked about evidence and proof and the torture of knowledge and all that bollocks.

  Because in that same moment, when he sensed the possible depth of his feelings for Sarah, he realised that those feelings were also the reason why he shouldn’t pull her in any closer.

  She had offered a potential answer to ‘where are you going?’, but it was ‘who are you, Jack?’ that was the obstacle. She had no real idea who he was, and he hadn’t spent too much time contemplating that question himself of late.

  That was the other thing he had been too busy running around to think about. Or had kept himself too busy running around to think about.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  What was it, less than a fortnight?

  Just a matter of days. And another lifetime.

  Another city, half a world away. Remembered not as if in a distant past, not even as if it had happened to someone else, but as a scene in a movie, in that city of movies.

  Unfortunately the director seemed to have been Quentin Tarantino rather than, say, Zalman King.

  A strange scent in the nostrils, stronger all the time. The feeling of being on to something big but not knowing what it was. A lot of corpses and the broken traces of a connection; like discovering short stretches of an overgrown path through a dense forest, but not yet able to see where those stretches came from or were leading to.