All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  The first plane to London was to Heathrow. She had it in her head that Gatwick would be closer for getting to the coast, but it certainly wasn’t ninety minutes closer, which was how much longer she’d have to wait for a flight there.

  It was the first time she’d ever just walked up to the counter and bought a ticket, most of her previous flights being package charters booked months in advance by Tom.

  ‘Return?’ the girl had asked, with unknowing poignancy.

  ‘No,’ Jane stated firmly. ‘One way.’

  She paid with her credit card. It went through her mind that the transaction was traceable, but it was only a ticket to London, and besides, the guy hadn’t asked her to disappear, only to get there. She was starting to think like a fugitive, perhaps even a criminal, and was surprised to consider this was no bad thing.

  She had about forty minutes before boarding, which she put to use planning the next leg of the journey. Ten minutes or so on a walk-up internet terminal outlined her options for crossing into France by train, either on foot at Ashford via Eurostar or by car at Folkestone via Eurotunnel. The good news was the services ran late enough that she should be able to make the trip that night. The bad news was both websites’ boasts about passenger screening and security. Neither option was going to be simple without a passport, which was the issue she addressed during the remainder of her wait.

  She went to an autoteller and lifted the maximum two hundred pounds in cash, figuring the next fare she paid might present a discrepancy between the card-bearer’s name and that of the passenger, especially given that she didn’t know what that passenger’s name was yet. Then she went back downstairs to the check-in area and looked at the screen listing international departures. She took position by a pillar and watched the queue for a Tenerife charter, carefully observing each party as they approached the desk. Looks and age wouldn’t matter, as nothing she could effect was going to withstand close scrutiny. It was all about opportunity, and she’d know it when she saw it.

  It came in the form of four pensioners, all women, who took an unfeasible time to accomplish the relatively simple process of depositing their luggage and handing over their documents. Jane checked her watch. She’d have ten minutes at the most, and at this rate the group she was watching would still be arguing over who would sit where well after that had expired. Nonetheless, patiently but anxiously she waited, because they represented the best chance. It was nothing to do with their disorganisation or any prejudiced notion that their age would make them a more distractible target for pocket-picking. It was quite simply their hand-luggage: three of them were carrying open-topped, twin-handled bags, presumably all the better to tote more duty-free, into which they had popped their tickets, boarding cards and passports.

  Jane watched them bumble their way up the escalator and then followed at a distance of a few yards. They made their way predictably to the shopping mall on the upper level, where one of them broke away in stated search of the toilets, leaving the others, as Jane had hoped, to browse in John Menzies. The three of them tarried around the women’s magazines, all but blocking the lane, which provided plausible cover for Jane to edge past, close-up against each of them, looking down for the most attainable glimpse of burgundy vinyl. The unlucky candidate had her bag slung over her shoulder by one strap, rather than held at arm’s length, which put it at a convenient height for Jane to reach inside as the woman stretched for a copy of the People’s Friend.

  She walked unhurriedly out towards the domestic departure gate, unable to stop herself thinking of the fact that her actions had just denied some poor old wifey her holiday. There had been a horrible couple ahead of them in the queue, a wee nyaff in unacceptable grey slacks and an absurd beige canvas jacket, haranguing the check-in girl with affected incredulity about there not being a smoking section on the plane, while his wife stood with her arms folded, nodding her ‘aye, aye, that’s right’s in torn-faced agreement. Jane would have been happy to torpedo their holiday, but the wee nyaff had taken both their passports and zipped them into one of at least a dozen pockets on his appalling outerwear. It was a pity, but pity was one more thing she was going to have to get over. Before this thing was through, she feared she’d have to be a lot more ruthless than this.

  Jane stole her second car within forty minutes of touching down at Heathrow. It would have been half that time, but she had an important bit of business with a photo booth she’d needed to conclude before moving on. She acquired herself a rather tasty green new-model Volkswagen Beetle on the first floor of the Terminal One short-stay car park. A quick recce having established that it was a pay-on-foot arrangement, she was not surprised to observe that, in keeping with practices in Lanarkshire, most drivers who had forgotten to pay opted not to re-park and walk to a machine. Instead, they generally drove to the nearest pay-station and left their cars on the yellow chevrons in front while they nipped behind the glass partition – engines running to emphasise the intended brevity of their stop. Jane had waited less than five minutes for her chance, bearing her own ticket that she’d gone downstairs to the entrance barrier to procure before nipping up a level and paying, as the signs instructed, on foot. On this occasion she’d seen the owner re-appear in the rear-view mirror, running hopelessly after her stolen pride and joy, before disappearing from view as Jane accelerated down the curving ramp.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Where you at, fly girl?’

  ‘Somewhere close to the sea, either Norfolk or Essex, not sure precisely. I followed the coast, kept me away from the busiest ATC flight paths. Right now I’m in a field, so there ain’t much to see.’

  ‘What are you doing in a field?’

  ‘Waiting. Air Bett doesn’t fly as fast as a BA 757, but nor does it require one-hour check-ins and it doesn’t need to circle in the stack above LHR.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘How’s our girl?’

  ‘Oh, so far so good. She’s now standing at two counts of GTA, plus one of larceny. Given it was a passport, that probably comes into a higher category than petty theft. Pretty clumsy lift, to be honest, but she got away with it. Need to hope they don’t go checking the CCTV tapes from the store where she made her move, but that’s not likely. The old lady she swiped it from probably thinks she dropped it someplace.’

  ‘She’s robbing old ladies now, huh?’

  ‘Yeah. What have we created here? She’s a one-woman crime spree. And to her running total I think we can probably add forgery. She stopped at a twenty-four-hour supermarket a ways back. I didn’t follow her in, but she was pretty busy in the car for a while before hitting the freeway again.’

  ‘I think they call them motorways here.’

  ‘Well hark at you, Lady Rebekah. One day in England and you’re an expert.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Folkestone. Channel Tunnel rail terminus.’

  ‘You called that right, then.’

  ‘Easy enough. I logged on to the web terminal she’d used at the airport and checked what she’d been looking at.’

  ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘I can do that.’

  ‘Figures. Easy for some, huh?’

  ‘Tricky part was Heathrow. I booked a hire car online before boarding the flight, but I couldn’t collect until I knew what she was driving. Had to stand right by and watch while a vehicle was stolen in front of my eyes. The scandal. Good job she helped herself to something distinctive. I caught her up after about forty minutes. She was sticking to the limit to avoid the cops. But so far so good, and now we’re going underground.’

  ‘Only if her forgery skills pass muster.’

  ‘A condition that couldn’t be more prominent in my mind right now, Reb. Or hers. Looks like they examine your docs at a drive-through checkpoint. She’s two cars away from finding out. Correction, one car now.’

  ‘You got a contingency if this goes belly-up?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m gonna step in as a Sco
ttish cop and say she’s already wanted north of the border.’

  ‘They got a lot of Canadian cops over here, then?’

  ‘I’ll fake the accent.’

  ‘Sounds like her forgery skills really are our best hope.’

  ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence. Oh, hang on. Here we go. Her turn.’

  ‘Fingers crossed.’

  ‘Come on, come on, come on. Drive forward, girl, drive forward. Go on, man, wave her through. Wave her … oh shit. Oh fuck, this don’t look good. She’s getting out of the car. He’s coming out of the booth. Reb, I gotta go.’

  Jane had done a lot of scary things already that day, but none of them had made her feel as anxious as this, because none of them had made her feel so literally hemmed in. At all other junctures and dilemmas, there had been options, the safety net of alternatives. That, in fact, was really why she’d driven past the Ashford off-ramp and carried on to Folkestone. Ashford was for walking passengers only, and the literature promised airport-style security measures. Passport control was these days the least stringent aspect of such regimes, but it would most likely still be enough to rumble her Blue Peter effort, and the means of distraction she had in mind could only be pulled off if she had space and privacy to work. Folkestone and its drive-on channels offered that, but the moment she entered one of them, it felt very much like a last resort.

  There’d been one final alternative before this, which she’d also had in mind as she ignored the Ashford exit on the M20, one that might eschew the need for a passport at all. With it being a popular alternative to the ‘booze cruise’ (the Chunnel funnel?) she reckoned there would be a few transit vans with empty storage compartments on their way to the Calais hypermarkets. Stow away in the back of one of those, then get driven on to the train and she wouldn’t even have to spring for the fare. On the other hand, she didn’t know whether the first thing the officials did was throw open the doors and check there weren’t six fare-dodgers inside. In the event, the opportunity hadn’t arisen. She’d only encountered a single such van that was parked, and didn’t think she could sneak aboard one waiting in the queue without the driver hearing noises from the back. The stationary one was outside the terminal complex, and she had given the doors a try as she passed on her way to buy a ticket, but they were locked. It was unsurprising. People were bound to be extra vigilant these days, everyone terrified of returning to HM Customs and finding half-a-dozen Somalians lying in the back, pished out of their faces on your Euro-bevvy.

  So that had left her exercising her final option, here at the terminus, the end of the line. She knew it was all or nothing when she guided the Beetle into the approach lane, but the real ice-in-the-gut sensation had come when a car pulled up behind her, meaning there was no way out but forward.

  She waited until there were only three cars to go before opening her bag and removing some of her recent purchases. There had been an all-night Tesco just off the motorway, where, in addition to some clean knickers and a toothbrush, she picked up some scissors, a transparent plastic wallet and some Pritt-stick, as well as clearing their entire shelf-stock of red food colouring. The photo page on the passport wouldn’t bear any kind of close inspection, though she hadn’t done too bad a job of switching the pics. The first thing they were there to establish was that you were carrying a passport at all. After that, the degree of vigilance could be reduced under the right circumstances, or at least that’s what she was relying upon.

  She removed a couple of hankies from the packet and then began emptying some bottles of food colouring on to them. She surveyed the results. It had been a veritable cochineal-beetle bloodbath, but not bloody enough for her satisfaction. The stuff just didn’t run properly, and looked too damn pink as soon as it hit any kind of material, even under the artificial light of the terminus’ floodlamps. Worse, on the flesh of her hand, it looked like nothing other than dye. She’d thought about beetroot back at the store, but the smell was potentially too much of a giveaway.

  The Audi two places in front moved on, taking her one car length closer to the booth.

  There was only one way to do this properly, and it wasn’t going to be pleasant. She bent down out of sight, balled her right hand into a fist and drove it against her nose.

  Ow.

  It hurt like buggery, bringing tears to her eyes but no blood to her nostrils.

  Shit. She tried again. Sorer, cumulatively, but probably more tentative than the first attempt and thus no more successful. She looked up. The car in front was being waved forward to the window.

  Jane bent forward again with renewed determination. She’d been through a sight more pain than this for Ross: thirteen hours’ labour to deliver just over eight pounds of baby, most of it head. This was nothing.

  She remembered accidentally bursting Margaret Heron’s nose at netball in third year, her horrified insistence to the victim and the teacher that she hadn’t thrown the ball hard. Don’t worry, Miss Kane had said. It wasn’t the force, it was the angle.

  Jane turned the heel of her right palm towards her and brought it upwards on to the bridge. The running sensation commenced almost immediately. Her nose began streaming blood from her left nostril, dripping messily on to her hands and the bunched-up hankies. She lifted the passport and tickets and let it trickle on to those too, then looked up to see her car being waved forward by the man in the booth, an older bloke with white hair and a matching moustache.

  Jane brought the Beetle in line with the window, holding the hankies up to her nose with her left hand, gripping the steering wheel with her right. She gestured with a single finger – give me a minute – then held her head back against the seat. The man in the booth was mouthing ‘Are you all right?’, which reminded her that her window wasn’t wound down. Instead of reaching for the button, she undid her seat belt and climbed right out of the car, holding the passport, tickets and hankies together against her face with her left hand as her right worked the handle. Blood continued to drip from her face and hands as she stood next to the Beetle.

  ‘Are you hurt, madam?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s okay. It just came on like that. Usually an early warning sign of a bad cold, with me. Typical timing.’

  She offered him the ticket and passport, blood still running among her fingers and on to the documents as she held them out. His hand hesitated visibly, signalling his queasy reluctance to even touch them, never mind take hold. He delicately pinched the passport at a blood-free corner, the ticket falling to the ground. They both went to lift it, but he got there first.

  ‘No, no, keep your head back,’ he advised.

  She did, but tilted it slightly to look down as the inspector bent to retrieve the ticket. He pulled it partially out of its paper wallet as he stood up again, gripping both parts where there were no smears. The passport remained pinched between his left forefinger and thumb.

  ‘Maybe I should get someone to take a look at you.’

  ‘I’ll be fine in a minute, honestly,’ Jane assured him. ‘Besides, I don’t want to hold everybody up.’ She glanced back along the queue, as did the passport inspector, still holding both documents extremely gingerly.

  ‘All right, well, just take your time, dear,’ he said. ‘If any of ‘em toots their horns, I’ll sign ‘em up for full body-cavity searches.’

  Jane laughed through the hankies, eyeing the passport. He still hadn’t checked it.

  ‘I think it’s easing up,’ she said, pinching her nose with her right hand. She offered her left to take the documents. ‘Sorry about the mess.’

  ‘Just you look after yourself,’ he told her. He seemed about to hand her the documents, then pulled back. A well-practised flick of the wrist opened the passport at the photo page, at which he grimaced, blood having been splattered across both sides of the hinge like a Rorschach test. He let it close on itself and placed it into her waiting hand with another queasy grimace.

  ‘Thank you,’ she told him, and took a step back
towards the car.

  ‘Have you got your vehicle papers, madam?’ he asked.

  Jane felt her eyes widen before she could do anything to compose herself.

  ‘In … in the glove compartment,’ she recovered enough to suggest, though she had no idea what, if anything, lay in there, only that none of it would be in the right name.

  ‘Okay. It’s just a reminder in case people have forgotten. Going to the continent and all.’

  ‘No, I’m all present and correct.’

  ‘All right, then. I’d say mind how you go, but it looks like I’m too late,’ he added with a little laugh.

  Jane got back into the Beetle and dropped the documents on to the passenger seat. Her instinct was to put the foot down and drive away immediately, but she had to quell it. Instead, she sat with the hanky at her nose for another few seconds, offering the man a smile and a thumb-up gesture, then pulled slowly forwards, one hand still pinching her snib, towards where a girl in a brightly coloured jumpsuit was waving cars into slots aboard the train.

  In her rear-view she could see the passport man, back in his booth, leaning out to greet the next driver. Sigh was too short a word for the exhalation that followed.

  Jane opted to stay in the Beetle rather than take a seat on the train. She could have seriously done with a coffee right then, but considered it more circumspect to remain out of view. A sudden, in-progress nosebleed explained her condition to the passport officer, but her appearance might prove disturbing – memorably, remarkably disturbing – to her fellow passengers.

  Weird. There’d been clothes at the all-night supermarket, but it hadn’t occurred to her to lift any, just the spare undies. All her thinking was pared down to essentials. She didn’t know how much money she might need, and was even less sure how much she actually had, liquid or credit, so spending any of it on even cheap jeans and a T-shirt seemed an unaffordable luxury and possibly a reckless financial gamble.