Chris Brookmyre has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, the Critics’ First Blood Award for Best First Crime Novel of the Year, and two Sherlock awards. In 2007, Chris was given the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award for Writing. He lives in Glasgow with his family.
Also by Christopher Brookmyre
QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING
COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
NOT THE END OF THE WORLD
ONE FINE DAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
BOILING A FROG
A BIG BOY DID IT AND RAN AWAY
THE SACRED ART OF STEALING
BE MY ENEMY
ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL SOMEBODY LOSES AN EYE
A TALE ETCHED IN BLOOD AND HARD BLACK PENCIL
ATTACK OF THE UNSINKABLE RUBBER DUCKS
A SNOWBALL IN HELL
PANDAEMONIUM
WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED
Copyright
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-74811-858-8
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 Christopher Brookmyre
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.hachette.co.uk
For Greg Dulli
Contents
Also by Christopher Brookmyre
Copyright
PART I
This Filthy Witness
Predator and Prey
King of Shadows
Easy Money
Trail of the Sniper
Bad Debts
Records
Fell Purpose
Circus Games
View from the Stage
The Phoenix and the Ashes
A Shot in the Dark
Just Because You’re Paranoid
Collision Course
Warlocks in the Mirk
Requiem for a Saint
Burned
Stings and Barbs
Mystery Guest
Convergence
PART II
Prelude to a Kill
Enemies
In the Blood
Version History
Rite of Passage
The Deceiver
Instruments of Darkness
Saturnalia
The Fugitive
Drug Culture
Hardware
Yellow and Blue
The Gift of Motive
Altered States
First Person Shooter
Moonlight Theatre
Horror Show
Point of Impact
The Fate of that Dark Hour
Stars, Hide Your Fires
The Tyrant’s Power Afoot
Multiplying Villainies
Dread Exploits
Cloistered Flight
Sniper Down
Delivered
PART I
This Filthy Witness
I took her life.
I cannot deny it, never have done, at least not to myself. Beneath a vast, black, star-spattered Highland sky, with our colleagues, our friends oblivious in the great house near by, I took her life.
I took her life, and my life was the better for her death. That is undeniable also; unpalatable, perhaps, an ugly truth but a truth just the same.
I have lived with this for three decades. I will not lie and claim not a day goes by that I don’t see her face; that may have been true once, during those first months, even first years, but in time the intervals between my recollections became greater, the fear incrementally diminished, the guilt more dilute. I can still see her now though, as vividly as on that night. I can still picture her face vibrantly alive, filled with colour and expression; and I can picture it blank and empty and drained, like a reflection of the full moon above. My memory of her is not faded, only stored away like the scene paintings from a struck set. Every so often something inside me calls for a revival.
No stage illusion, no theatrical artifice, no trick blood would ever look convincing enough to me again. That night I learned what death truly looked like.
I can still see the pale skin of her arms and legs in that short-sleeved dress, her limbs folded awkwardly about her where she lay, like a ventriloquist’s dummy or a marionette, a doll’s eyes locked forever in a glassy stare. It was not a stare that accused. It stared past me, focused on a place no longer in the same world as the one I inhabited.
She lay in the soft earth, the moon shining down to dimly light her funeral procession, trees her pall-bearers, the eyes of timid, fearful creatures blinking unseen as they bore witness (and one of those timid, fearful, unseen creatures would turn out to be human).
No words were spoken over her grave, no tributes and no tears. It was solemn, however, and silent.
I could hear music coming from the house. It sounded distant, disconnected from this place I was standing, an island in time where no one yet knew what had happened. And yet it was so close. All it would take was someone to come looking for me, for her, and that island would be engulfed. I had the chance to maintain that disconnection, but as it carried on the night air, the music reminded me that I had to act fast and remain resolute.
They say that justice, like love, is blind. I knew that I must deny both. She would not have justice. I would not have love. But for all that, I would live free. I would not spend my best years in prison as the price of one moment of desperation.
I knew the decision I was making, and I’ll tell you now that I would make it again. For all my guilt, from which I have never been free, I know that my life – and more importantly, my future family’s lives – were served better by my actions than any notion of ‘justice’ would have been served by the truth.
Each death changes the world. Not so much as each birth, true, but certain deaths change the world more than others. This death changed so many worlds, so many lives. At the time I saw only how it would change my own, but the roots and tendrils already intertwined between so many of us – though some of us had known each other mere weeks – meant that we would all be in some way transformed.
Ibsen said that ‘to be oneself is to kill oneself’. He meant that in order to truly become who you are, you must first kill off all the other possible selves you might be. If you don’t you become as Peer Gynt, like an onion, each layer peeling away to reveal another, but with ultimately nothing at its centre. None of us finds who we really are without sacrificing those other selves and cauterising the stumps where we severed the dreams that held them in place.
Sometimes we kill off those other selves, and sometimes they are killed for us.
A young woman’s life ended that night: all the selves she would ever be, and that is something I have never allowed myself to lose sight of. But so many other lives ended too: lives we might all have led, different people we might all have become, had that night played out differently. How many of us would go back and change it, though? There’s a question.
We were all transformed, for better or worse. Some of those transformations took time, but the greatest of them were instantaneous. Life into death; human into animal; morality into sheer instinct: how much can change irrevocably in a twinkling. Hers was the worst change, of course, the most horrifying, not only to the hands that wrought it and the eyes that saw, but to anybody. How could she, how could any of us, be in one moment a
human being – animate, warm, alert, responsive, infinite entities impossibly contained within a single form – and then in the next merely a discarded vessel, all those things it carried irretrievably lost?
And what is changed in the person who did this? Is he made something different by the act, or first made something different before he can commit it? Perhaps it is both. Either way, I knew that in killing I had been altered by the deed, but on that night saw a chance to prevent myself becoming the deed’s creature.
I took her life, covered up her murder and left everyone else to live their transformed lives beneath the slowly corrosive drip of unanswered questions. I left suspicion and bitterness, anger and blame, the hollow ache of absence and the gnawing agony of not knowing. For doing that, I feel regret and I feel remorse, but I feel no guilt. My guilt I reserve only for her.
I don’t like to consider how much the others would hate me if they learned the truth, but deep down they must all know that the blame is not for me alone to carry.
I was not the only sinner among us, and far from the worst.
Predator and Prey
Good things come to those who wait, Jasmine thought to herself. It had been a long time coming, and the road had been neither straight nor smooth, but after all these years she finally had an acting job in theatre.
Jasmine had wanted to be an actress since she was six years old. She knew the age exactly because she could pinpoint the precise moment – or at least the precise evening – when this ambition had taken hold. Her mum had taken her to the theatre from the age of roughly three and a half, from Christmas pantomimes at the King’s to children’s plays at the Traverse, some of which were interactive to the point of almost functioning as crèches. She preferred the pantos inasmuch as she preferred anything that took place under a proscenium arch, before circles and balconies, an orchestra pit and ladies selling ice cream. Even when Mum took her to a kids’ matinee performance of The Very Hungry Caterpillar featuring a cast of three and providing an early introduction to minimalism in terms of costume and production design, the fact that it took place at the Festival Theatre on Nicholson Street made it a spectacle in itself. Though the steeply towering layers of seating were spookily empty and the actors all but lost upon such a great wide stage, it felt more like a proper show than anything she had been sat in front of at any of the city’s more intimate venues.
She preferred it to her early experiences of the cinema too, which had been divided between the plasticky sterility of the multiplex at Newcraighall and the sticky-carpeted gloomy auditoria to be found in the city centre. At that tender age, however, these theatrical spectacles didn’t make her dream of treading the boards any more than the films she saw made her imagine life as a movie star.
Her epiphany came when she was taken to see a production of Juno and the Paycock at the Lyceum. It would be redundant to state that this was not really a production aimed at six-year-olds, but in a way that itself was the catalyst. Her mum was supposed to be going to see it alone, before meeting up with some friends she had in the cast and crew for a late supper. For a single mother with a full-time job, it was a rare and relished opportunity for an adult night out, but unfortunately the babysitter phoned to cancel less than an hour before she was due to turn up.
Her mum instantly accepted that her late supper was now a write-off, but dearly wanted to see the play. She elicited from her daughter sincere vows of good behaviour, balancing her solemn homilies about the importance of sitting quietly in her seat with promised rewards of ice cream at the interval and chips on the way home. Jasmine, in her ignorance, didn’t understand why her mum had such anxious reservations, never having sat through anything that wasn’t punctuated by singalong musical numbers and the tossing of bags of sweets into the audience.
In the event, Jasmine’s vows were never put to the test, as Mum bumped into her friend Kirsten front of house as she queued at the box office, intending to return her single seat in the stalls for two together wherever might be left. Railroading through Mum’s typical reluctance to inconvenience anybody or accept unearned favours, Kirsten escorted them backstage, where she said Mum could watch the performance from the wings, and where Jasmine might be found various things to amuse herself, to say nothing of being relieved of the requirement to sit still for the best part of three hours.
Jasmine thought Kirsten must be the head of the ushers, as not only was she allowed to go anywhere in the theatre, but she evidently had the power to grant Jasmine and her mum any seat they liked, even special ones to the side of the scenery. Jasmine learned later that Kirsten was actually ‘the director’ of the play, though it was several more years still before she had any understanding of what this meant.
Jasmine was brought a drink with a straw, a bag of sweets and a pad and pencils for drawing and colouring, and told she could play on the floor by her mum’s feet as long as she remained quiet and didn’t stray past a line on the floor marked out in yellow tape.
Her drawing efforts did not last beyond the gunshot that rang out at the beginning of the production. It gave her quite literally the fright of her life, calling her attention not only to the action on the stage, but the action all around her. Jolted away from the cosy little bubble of her sweets, her drink and the comfort of her mum’s legs, she suddenly noticed how the scenery and backdrops looked up close. She became aware of the platforms, ramps and stairways the actors were using to access different areas of the set, as well as the slides, pulleys and counterweights that were making elements zip in and out of place. And if the gunshot had initially summoned her attention, what held it thereafter was the actors themselves.
Prior to this, people she had watched on stage had seemed little different to the people she watched on TV. They inhabited this unreachable otherworld, barely more real or tangible than cartoon characters. That night, she saw not only that they were real people, brushing past in a waft of heat and smells, but she witnessed them each become something altogether different from themselves. They stood in the wings or behind the backdrop in their costumes, faces painted vividly with make-up so thick that close up they were like circus clowns. Some would chatter quietly to one another, some remained alone and withdrawn, but when they stepped on to the stage they instantly became other people. Their accents changed, their posture and manner changed; they even seemed taller or shorter than mere seconds before. Women in tears made their exits and then traded little smiles and jokes once they had cleared the sightlines. An actor stood alone: reflective, shy and even a little sullen, then stepped before the audience and was instantly a cheerfully drunken and voluble braggart.
Having been taken to all those pantomimes and other shows, six-year-old Jasmine was already familiar with spectacle. This, however, was magic. She knew that night that theatre was no longer something she merely wanted to watch. It was something she wanted to be part of.
When she played with her dolls thereafter, it wasn’t make-believe. Some of them were the cast, others the audience, and whatever the former were about – whether it be tea parties or hair dressing – it was all part of a play. She recalled gluing together kitchen-roll tubes and panels cut from cardboard boxes, placing them either side of her doll’s house, its front hinged open where it sat on her bedroom floor. It was no longer a doll’s house. It was a stage set.
She took part in children’s drama clubs, youth theatre groups, school musicals; and with her mum being a drama teacher whose time and duties were divided between two separate secondaries, when Jasmine wasn’t acting she was helping sew costumes, paint backdrops and fashion props.
When it came to her vocation, there was no question of Jasmine having a Plan B.
She recalled her mum’s pride, delight and no little relief when Jasmine got accepted into the Scottish Academy of Theatre and Dance, even though it would involve her daughter flying the nest and taking up residence through in Glasgow. Any fears Mum might have for Jasmine being on her own away from her vigilant eyes in a different city (and on
e whose darker side Beth Sharp was warily familiar with) would prove unfounded. She certainly didn’t have to worry about her little girl being seduced by the temptations of her student lifestyle. Jasmine had been seduced by a jealous suitor way back at the Lyceum and remained monogamously single-minded to the point of anti-social where it came to the study of her chosen craft. She relaxed and began letting her hair down a bit more during her second year, but admittedly even that had a vocational element to it, as she began to appreciate how important it was to be making contacts and getting her face known in certain circles. Whatever it took, she was going to do it.
Then Mum got sick.
It was around the start of Jasmine’s final year that Mum was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given her unmerciful, unthinkable, impossible prognosis. Jasmine dropped out of college and moved back in with her in Corstorphine, to be with her as much as possible during the time they had left. Mum only had months, and Jasmine only had months left to spend with the person who had raised her, alone, the person she was closest to in the world, the person she could not possibly do without. But eventually, inescapably, Jasmine would have to do without.
People talk about picking up the pieces, getting back on with your life, but the pieces scattered around Jasmine looked like grains of sand on a beach, and she spent a lot of time in her mum’s empty house contemplating them, unable to assemble them into any pattern that made sense. She didn’t feel like she had a life to get back on with. She had no job, no career, no studies any more, and barely an echo of her previously consuming aspirations.
Eventually, she decided to move back to Glasgow and the little flat she still rented, as a means of forcing herself to push forward, of making some attempt to re-gather the threads of her ambitions. And they were ambitions now, at best, not dreams. Dreams were what little girls had as they squatted in the wings at their mother’s feet.
All she had left were pragmatic necessities, amid the rather unsettling realisation that she had, as the phrase goes, her whole life ahead of her. This sounded to her a daunting and arduous prospect rather than a rallying cry for the passions of youth. Suddenly it didn’t seem so visionary to have spent her whole life in pursuit of a profession with an unemployment rate comparable with dinosaur obedience trainers and banking-sector humility advisers. To make matters worse, in a game where visibility was the key to opportunity, she had completely fallen off the grid. Nobody knew who she was, and among her former peers, those who hadn’t forgotten about her completely seemed to have assumed that she hadn’t merely dropped out of her course, but abandoned acting altogether.
When the Devil Drives Page 1