All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Then she remembered why she was here. The disgust remained, but it would not, could not, turn to pity.

  Now Nuno drew a gun, Rebekah likewise, and gestured the two prisoners towards the petrol station’s dilapidated office. There they would be led downstairs through a maintenance passage to the aluminium chamber where the fuel used to be stored. Jane had been taken down herself earlier so that it didn’t freak her out when the time came. Despite its volume, it had looked pressingly claustrophobic in the low light of a single wire-muzzled bulb on an untidily snaking extension lead. What the chamber would look like with two bloodied casualties trussed up inside was something she was in no hurry to discover, but she suspected the view would be a lot worse from where they were sitting.

  Bett waited for her to catch up as Nuno and Rebekah forged ahead.

  ‘I’m guessing you’re not so sure about having five minutes alone with him now,’ he stated quietly.

  ‘Correct,’ she admitted, looking away before he could read any more of her thoughts. She gazed at the floor without focusing, just somewhere to direct her eyes.

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ he assured her.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘That’s normal. Go ahead. Just get it over with before you go downstairs to face them.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can.’

  ‘Well, like I said, he’s not going to tell us over a quiet drink. But if you’re feeling a little queasy, just consider how long it took him to decide to sell out your son when your husband came to him for help.’

  Now Jane looked up, her insides turning to steel.

  ‘My liberal estimate would be a heartbeat,’ she said.

  She waited outside the chamber, as instructed, after telling Bett what she’d overheard in the limo. From inside, she could hear Nuno continuing to rant in Spanish, intended to maximise their fear that there was nothing they could say, never mind do, to improve their situation.

  Bett went in first. She heard him conferring with Nuno in an ostensibly private discussion that was in fact entirely for the benefit of Connelly and friend. Following this, Nuno withdrew, emerging from the chamber and thus providing her cue. He also provided her with Big Chick’s chib, the blade-cum-knuckleduster, as a prop. She took it delicately, letting it hang from her index finger by one of the loops. This was initially because she was reluctant to take proper hold of the ugly thing, but as she stepped through the low hatchway and righted herself again, she realised it gave the appearance of a nonchalance that was far removed from what she was feeling. The shades helped too. Their affectation rating was now off the scale, but she had her orders.

  She stopped just inside and surveyed the scene. Connelly and Chick were tied to two sturdy tubular aluminium chairs, secured by their feet, arms and necks with fine but strong cord. The muzzle-framed lamp hung from above, taped to the metal ceiling, the lead dangling limply to the floor, where it was plugged into an extension socket. Bett leaned casually against a wall, arms folded, gun tucked into his waistband. He looked so slovenly and unprofessional that she knew it had to be part of the script. Rebekah was putting on less of an act, Jane guessed, standing vigilantly to attention behind the two prisoners, feet slightly apart, pistol in right hand, pointed down, left thumb over the safety catch.

  Nuno had done well. Connelly looked anything but defiant now: trying to hide his fear, but unable to conceal his confusion. Chick was less concerned with appearances. A big hard-case unused to being on the losing team, he looked like he was on the verge of tears. They both glanced anxiously at her immediately as she entered the chamber. She walked towards them very slowly, the blade still dangling from her finger, then she took a firm grip, feeding her digits through the rings before stroking the side of the blade with her left hand.

  All four captive eyes remained fixed upon her, and in particular the knife, as she continued her sadistically slow progress. Connelly looked pathetic, even his attempt to put on a blankly neutral expression faltering with each inch she drew nearer. She’d moved forward slowly at first out of her own reluctance and apprehension, but as she observed the effect on him, she grew in confidence with every measured step.

  When she was only a couple of feet from their chairs, she stopped and stood still, saying nothing for a moment, just looking back and forth between them with slightly exaggerated movements of the head. Now they were looking anywhere but at her, neither wanting to meet her shaded eyes lest they be chosen first for whatever was about to follow.

  She sighed, tiredly, then reached up and slowly removed the peaked cap, her hair spilling untidily from it. Turning away, she brushed the strands from her face with her left hand, then very gently and deliberately took off the sunglasses, placing them inside the hat and holding it out with her right hand. Bett stepped away from the wall obediently and took it without a word.

  Then she turned back and faced them.

  ‘Anthony,’ she said quietly, the walls absorbing and muting the sound.

  Connelly’s face registered puzzlement at first, the beginnings of recognition still scrappy while they awaited the more crucial details of why she was familiar and where he knew her from.

  ‘I’d have thought you of all people ought to recognise a driver,’ she said, helping him along. ‘Though these days I’m less picky about dropping off wee bags of shite.’

  And then, with a look of true shock and even greater confusion, he got it. She could see the processes whirring in his calculating little head, connecting points here, overlapping there, until he reached a verdict that ultimately appeared to give him some comfort. Now that he knew what this was about, or thought he knew what it was about, he could start to consider his odds, plan his strategies, evaluate the true nature of what he faced.

  He even managed a smirk. It was a you-got-me smirk, but it was a smirk nonetheless. And as such, a very expensive self-indulgence.

  ‘You sold out my son and my husband to this Felipe character,’ she said. ‘A wee bit of business. A quick deal. That’s all it was to you.’

  ‘Boo fuckin’ hoo,’ Connelly said. ‘Big bad me and poor wee you. So you’ve hired some muscle to find out where they went. If you’d a fuckin’ brain you’d have saved the dosh and just paid me to tell you. That’s how it works, hen, it’s aboot money.’

  She shook her head. ‘You don’t even have the first clue what it’s about. I mean, do you even know why Ross was valuable to this Felipe? You’re a long way from Lanarkshire and you’re in a lot deeper than you bargained, Anthony. Don’t flatter yourself, these people here aren’t interested in you, and I didn’t hire them. They came to me. Do you want to know why?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  Jane smiled grimly and gripped the blade. She walked slowly around behind Connelly’s chair, then leaned close to him and spoke in barely more than a whisper.

  ‘You’ve got kids yourself, haven’t you, Anthony?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Two, I know. Kayleigh and Michael. They go to Saint Aloysius, don’t they? Up in Glasgow. No rubbing shoulders with the lumpen proles. Oh, I’m not saying anything judgemental. You never know who they could be mixing with at the local comprehensive … there could be children of drug addicts there, for God’s sake. And you’d do anything to protect them, wouldn’t you? We’re both parents, we understand these things.’

  Still he said nothing, but she could see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.

  Jane leaned even closer and placed the tip of the blade on his cheek, just below the right eye. He strained his head back and away, as far as the cords would allow, but there was no escape.

  ‘So I ask you, Anthony. Do you think there’s anything I wouldn’t do …’ She applied pressure, pushing the tip of the blade up under his lower lid until his eyeball could feel it through the skin. ‘… any line I wouldn’t cross, to get my son back?’

  He made to speak but no words emerged. He swallowed again, finding saliva to lubricate his throat. ‘No,’ he managed, i
n a whisper.

  ‘No. So here’s what’s going to happen. My friend here is going to ask you some questions and you’re going to tell him everything he wants to know. Comprendes?‘

  He nodded. It was barely a movement at all, so desperate was he to keep his head thrust back against the pressure of the blade, but it was unmistakably there. She pulled the knife back and stepped away, Connelly slumping again with a jittery exhale.

  ‘Nuno,’ Bett called out, and a few moments later the Catalan reappeared, bearing a bucket of water, which he placed on the floor between the two prisoners. He went out again and retrieved two lengths of heavy rubber hose and a roll of thick silver tape, then a third time returned with a hefty car battery and some crocodile clips. All of this was laid out close to the prisoners, who eyed it with increasing agitation.

  ‘What the fuck’s this?’ Connelly asked Jane.

  ‘It’s to make sure you’re telling the truth.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, I said I’ll talk,’ he spluttered, squirming in his chair.

  ‘Talk then,’ she advised.

  He did.

  ‘Okay, set it up,’ Bett ordered, when he was satisfied Connelly had no more to tell him. Rebekah picked up the roll of tape and the lengths of hose, while Nuno knelt down and began attaching the clips to the battery.

  ‘Jesus God, I’ve told you everything,’ Connelly insisted, shaking and trying to jump the whole chair backwards, away from his tormentors. Big Chick expressed a typically blunt reaction to what he saw by simply passing out.

  ‘As Mrs Fleming explained to you, this is to make sure you’re telling the truth,’ Bett reminded him.

  ‘But I swear I mmmm-mmm.’ He was cut off by Rebekah tugging a wide length of the tape across his mouth, his eyes bulging in horror as Nuno stood up, electric leads held in his right hand, dipping a length of hose into the bucket with his left.

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, calm down,’ Bett said impatiently. ‘It’s not how it looks.’

  Rebekah took the knife from Jane and cut a small hole in the tape, then attempted to feed the hose through it into Connelly’s mouth. She was unsuccessful in the face of squirming and clamped jaws. Meanwhile, Nuno reached down to the floor and briefly plunged the chamber into darkness as he disconnected the lamp from the extension then reconnected it to a socket at the end of the leads running to the battery.

  ‘Thank you, Nuno,’ Bett said, as light was restored, though more dimly than before. Rebekah stepped across and began repeating the tape-and-hose procedure on Big Chick, who was too woozy to resist.

  ‘We’ll be going in a moment, Mr Connelly, but I’m afraid you and your friend won’t. There’s enough water there to keep you both hydrated for several days, maybe five at a pinch. We’ll send someone to let you out as soon as we’ve recovered the two Mr Flemings. Clearly, the sooner we do that, the better for you. So in the light of this, would you like to change any aspect of your story?’

  Connelly stared with renewed revulsion at his surroundings, joints testing the bonds and finding them sound, eyes scanning bare metal walls with no rough edges to use, and which would sound no clang beneath several feet of earth. His gaze alighted penultimately on the bucket of water, the only sustenance in the cell, and last on the lamp attached to a battery that promised maybe less than an hour of light.

  He gulped and shook his head.

  ‘Last chance,’ Bett stated.

  ‘I wizzit wyne,’ he mumbled through the hole in the tape, looking pleadingly towards Bett and Jane. I wasn’t lying.

  ‘Good,’ said Bett. ‘Then with any luck we’ll find what we’re looking for before your water runs out.’

  And with that he led them from the tank and closed the hatch.

  They were airborne again within two hours, after a couple of errands, the latter of which was dropping off the limo along with a sum in cash to cover the damage. The cash itself had been acquired during their first detour, a search of Connelly’s hotel room to see what material clues might be found to supplement the sparse details his interrogation had thrown up. Inside they found what Jane instantly recognised to be Tom’s briefcase, containing close to seven thousand euros. It was Bett’s guess that he not only sold out the pair of them, but that he got Tom to pay up front for the privilege, no doubt selling the credulous numpty a story along the way. She shouldn’t be too hard on him, though. It was easy to believe in a lie if it gave you hope, as easy as it was to open your wallet if you thought it was the only way you could help your son.

  Bett had spent much of the trip back to the helicopter on the phone, talking in a wide variety of languages and an equally broad spectrum of tones: sometimes officious, sometimes pally, sometimes appealing, sometimes turning the screw. The one word she could make out, common to all calls, was Felipe.

  ‘Who have you been talking to?’ she asked, after the chopper had made its initial, stomach-lurching vertical climb and reached a more comfortable cruising altitude.

  Bett looked almost incredulously irritated by the impertinence of her query.

  She’d been waiting in vain for someone else to ask some questions, hoping she could perhaps interpret from their threads of discussion. Perhaps they knew all they needed to, but from Bett’s reaction she suspected it more probable they merely knew not to ask. She had no such qualms. She didn’t work for the icy-arsed bastard and it had been his idea to bring her aboard. She might be a little overawed, thoroughly out of her depth and extremely scared for her son, but she wanted him to know she wasn’t going to play the deferential damsel in distress.

  ‘Is it the rotors, the engine, maybe?’ she demanded, provoking a look of puzzlement along with the displeasure that she was continuing to pester him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Too noisy: why you didn’t hear my question. I’ll ask you again. Who have you been talking to?’

  Bett frowned. ‘Contacts,’ he said, the intention of his brevity starkly clear.

  ‘And what were you asking them? Look, I know you like acting the Victorian schoolmaster with your wee gang here, but I’m not fucking playing, okay?’ The swearie-word really annoyed him, she could tell. And it was meant to. ‘My son and husband were taken away on board a boat more than twenty-four hours ago and could plausibly be anywhere in the entire Mediterranean by now. Meanwhile, despite your helicopters, your guns, your brutality and your, frankly, affected posturing, you have so far gleaned little more than the square root of bugger-all about what’s going on, so please try and understand if I’m a little less reticent than you’d ideally like and ANSWER MY FUCKING QUESTION.’

  Bett held her in the same impermeably cold gaze as before her outburst, and she feared for a moment that he would simply ignore it, which would have left her out of options and not a little humiliated. Across the cabin she saw Nuno hide a smirk with his hand, in a way that was actually intended to hide nothing. That tipped the balance. Bett could ignore it if he wanted, but the delighted onlooker’s verdict was that he’d just had his arse kicked.

  Bett took a breath to speak, then pressed his lips a moment, considering.

  ‘Mrs Fleming,’ he said at last. ‘I’m …’ then tailed off, another change of mind. Would the next word have been ‘sorry’? She’d never know.

  ‘I was speaking to a number of associates around the continent,’ he recommenced. ‘Mostly in law enforcement, but not exclusively. I gave them the name Felipe and as much as we know about him, and asked them to get back to me with some names, aliases and KAs. Chances are we’ll get the phone book, but we might get lucky with a cross-reference.’

  ‘KAs?’

  ‘Known Associates.’

  ‘And what can we cross-reference it with? This Felipe guy didn’t even give Connelly a surname.’

  ‘Well, I gave them Voormarten and Gelsenhoff, Connelly’s initial contacts. We know one of those put Felipe on to him, even if Connelly himself had no idea which. To be honest, if Connelly had known more, he might not have been alive to question. He’s small fry.
When we showed up, he shat himself because it made him think what he might have gotten into. He had no idea what Ross could be worth, and it’s my guess the price he asked for reflected that. Ten thousand euros, for God’s sake. Felipe was happy to pay it. The guy had a yacht, men with machine guns. He could easily have killed Connelly and taken Ross for nothing, but it was a cheap deal so not worth it.’

  ‘No price is cheaper than free.’

  ‘Killing carries risks. Danger, noise, witnesses, disposal of bodies, to say nothing of drawing attention to yourself. It’s a false economy to save ten grand if doing so jeopardises your main deal.’

  ‘You think Felipe’s going to sell him on again?’

  ‘I couldn’t say for certain until I know more about him and I know more about why Ross is so valuable.’

  ‘Why can’t you ask the people who’re paying you?’

  ‘Now there’s a bloody good question. According to Deimos, the reason they are so keen to get him back is to prevent people finding out what he’s working on. They’re closing the door after the horse has bolted and they know it. But they’re still clinging on to the hope that their secret is safe and there’s some other reason Ross ran.’

  ‘But that’s nonsense. Surely it’s the very fact that people do know what he’s working on that’s put him in danger, so it’s self-defeating to suppress information from the very individuals they’ve hired to help them.’

  ‘Well, you may think that, Mrs Fleming, but that’s because you’re not in possession of the full facts.’

  ‘And what would the full facts be?’

  ‘That Deimos are, like every arms manufacturer on the globe, paranoid, slippery lying bastards who fear we’re as devious and untrustworthy as themselves. So for now we have to follow the leads we’ve uncovered and, in the meantime, hope that our own Alexis can work some magic with your son’s home computer.’