When the Devil Drives

by Christopher Brookmyre

‘How?’

  Finnegan shifted a little in his chair, stealing a glance at his watch, his thoughts still partly on that outbox.

  ‘It was early in his movie-making career,’ he said, ‘maybe around the time of his second picture coming out. He was living in London in those days, trying to make a name for himself, get noticed. He gave an interview to some foreign underground horror cinema magazine – German, maybe, or Italian – in which he said he was in possession of a snuff movie. The journalist might even have claimed to have seen it, I can’t remember. It gave him a certain cachet anyway, among film-makers and audiences alike. The more you’re in touch with the darkness, the more scary a person you’re perceived to be, then the scarier your movies are going to seem. That was the logic, and it worked for him for a while, but there was a sting in the tail, in the shape of the video-nasties hysteria. You’re too young to remember this, but it had the British tabloids in their element.’

  ‘I remember it,’ said Fallan with a curious smile. ‘Served me well, in fact. A friend and I had a pirate-video rental racket going on, a dial-a-film deal: used to drive them around to folk’s houses in this dilapidated van. The tabloids were in a state of high dudgeon and suddenly all these cheesy old horror movies nobody previously wanted to rent were like gold dust because the press were demanding they be banned.’

  ‘It was a convenient distraction for the Thatcher government too,’ Finnegan added. ‘Nothing like a moral panic to take people’s minds off mass unemployment and riots on the streets. I’ll admit I have my own reservations about these films, but I also know what it is to have the authorities decide what you’re selling for other people’s private recreation is a gross threat to the moral order.’

  This was met with a wry smile from Fallan, something Finnegan acknowledged by briefly tipping his glass to him before taking another sip.

  ‘There was a witch-hunt, and inevitably in the midst of it some hack stumbled upon this foreign article about Darius. The Department of Public Prosecutions had already got involved in the fiasco, so suddenly he had Scotland Yard kicking his door in, searching for this snuff movie.’

  ‘Did they find anything?’ asked Jasmine.

  ‘Of course not,’ Finnegan scorned. ‘These days you can find executions and beheadings and all manner of real death with a few clicks of a mouse. Back then, though, the myth of the snuff movie was one of the things that helped drive the hysteria: people are being killed for entertainment! But for all the raids and confiscations, funnily enough, nobody ever produced one in court.

  ‘That didn’t bother the tabloids, of course. Darius ended up their poster-boy for everything that was evil and depraved about the video nasties. That’s why he doesn’t give interviews and won’t be returning your calls. He got the notoriety he had wished for and found he couldn’t live with it. He went off to make movies in America after that.’

  ‘Does he still live there?’ Jasmine asked, aware that this would take him out of the equation for recent events.

  ‘No, he lives down in the Lake District, I believe, out in the wilds.’

  ‘For the privacy,’ Jasmine suggested.

  ‘Yes. That and the fur and feathers. I gather his time in the States made him very adept at the hunting and shooting.’

  Hardware

  The weapon sat isolated on a sterile worksurface in the forensics lab, like the table was a display plinth for the world’s ugliest cultural artefact. It was a sculpture in black metal, a little over a metre long, resting on bipod legs and a spike at the rear, a study in lethality from its butt to its muzzle. It even looked dangerous to brush against, the serrations of the picatinny and forend rails above and below the barrel looking like razor wire.

  ‘We found it in the river,’ Laura had explained. ‘About a quarter of a mile from the layby where Andy Philips saw the Range Rover.’

  ‘Someone was sharp-eyed,’ Catherine replied.

  ‘Jammy too. The hydroelectric power station a few miles upstream was undergoing a maintenance procedure and they dammed off the water. The river level dropped two or three feet as a result; less churned up as well, so the riverbed was visible. You’d normally see nothing.’

  Finally they had caught a break. Now she was going to find out whether it could tell them anything and, given how this case had panned out so far, she wasn’t taking that for granted.

  At her request she had been met at the lab by Sergeant Mark Brooks, who had instructed her when she did her firearms training. As well as a police marksman and instructor, he was also the resident weapons anorak, all of which added to the incongruity of Catherine’s previous contact with him outside the job. His two daughters, Amy and Rosie, had gone to the same nursery as Duncan and Fraser. It was going back a few years now, though it felt like a heartbeat. She hadn’t seen Amy and Rosie since Fraser started primary school, but the sight of Mark in civvies, these two delicate little princesses clambering all over him in their lilac-print dresses, was about as far removed as she could imagine from the world of the device that sat before them right now.

  He was carrying a long black tube, which she assumed to be some kind of gun-tech equipment that he would be geekily excited to demonstrate to her later.

  Boys. She bet he’d let his kids play Trail of the Sniper if they’d been sons not daughters. Probably caught himself wishing his kids were the opposite gender as often as she did. Maybe they could organise a trade.

  ‘It’s an AX338,’ Mark said. ‘British-made. Rifle of choice for the army sniper programme these days. It’s made by a firm called Accuracy International, and they’re not kidding. It’s tested to be first-shot accurate at six hundred metres, and useful for harassing fire at ranges well above a thousand.’

  ‘At the risk of asking a daft question, is this definitely our murder weapon?’

  ‘It’s a fair one to ask, given that you don’t have the slug yet.’

  ‘No. It passed right through the victim’s head and we don’t yet know where it ended up.’

  ‘Still some distance away, probably, given this thing’s stopping power. It fires a .338 Lapua round, with a muzzle velocity of more than three thousand feet per second. This rifle only entered production in 2010, though, so it’s not like some hunter accidentally dropped it in the water several years ago and it’s lain undisturbed ever since. This is your gun, no question.’

  ‘So what can it tell us?’

  ‘For starters, that your killer is a pro. This scope is zeroed for nine hundred metres. The guy is taking a night shot at almost a full click, using a Zeiss optic lens: no black-light infrared imaging. So that means you can rule out the possibility that Sir Angus McCready was the intended target.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because a sniper capable of shooting someone from close to a kilometre doesn’t miss and hit the guy standing three feet away. Given the range, the conditions and the hardware, you’re looking at a highly skilled operative.’

  ‘A professional assassin?’

  ‘Possibly. Unless you come up with a plausible motive connecting Queen to someone with sniper training and access to this standard of firearm, then it could well be a contract hit.’

  ‘Shit.’

  This was a worst-case scenario in development. A hired third party put them at one more remove from the truth, because any evidence they found pertaining to the shooter was unlikely to tell them much about who hired him.

  ‘So why did he drop the weapon in the drink?’ Catherine asked. ‘I mean, even allowing for our stroke of luck in the water level dropping enough for us to spot it, why chuck it in the river less than a mile from the murder scene? Why not a river a hundred miles from here? Why chuck it at all?’

  ‘If you’re getting paid enough it’s no great loss to discard the weapon rather than risk getting caught with it later. From that we can also assume it won’t have been used in any previous hits. If a guy was to use the same rifle on multiple jobs, then we could match the shell cases to the weapon and put a signature to his work.
Whereas if you ditch the weapon each time, as long as you haven’t left any prints you’re preventing the murder weapon ever being connected to you.’

  ‘As opposed to it being found in your house – or in your black Range Rover.’

  ‘You’ve got it.’

  ‘Christ. Have you any good news for me?’

  ‘Yeah. You don’t need to worry so much about finding the shell casing because you already know which gun fired the shot.’

  ‘Would it just make you laugh out loud if I said: “Yes, but there might be a print on it”?’

  ‘I would exercise discretion,’ Mark replied, meaning yes. ‘But I can help you find it anyway. We know the range, so we can work out where he took the shot from. I’ll take a drive up there later, but I’ve had a look on an OS map and I already think I can narrow it down.’

  With this, he popped the cap off of the long black tube and revealed it not to contain anything gadget-tastic after all. The geeky excitement part she called dead on, however. He unrolled the aforementioned Ordnance Survey map of the Alnabruich and Cragruthes area and weighted its corners down with reference texts on a nearby worksurface.

  ‘At a distance of nine hundred metres you’re never getting an unbroken line of sight through all those trees,’ he said, pointing to the woodland bordering the castle gardens where the play had ended. Then he indicated an area to the north-west, not far from the layby.

  ‘Up the slope here the gradient is steep enough that you would have a clear view over the trees. There are a few rocky outcrops that would be ideal for cover too. If I was taking this shot, that’s where I would set up.’

  Yellow and Blue

  ‘Slasher movies are synonymous with innocence to me,’ said Fallan.

  Had it been anyone else, it might have seemed a bizarre thing to say. Coming from Fallan it seemed to make its own kind of paradoxical sense even before he explained himself.

  He had driven home to Northumberland and returned with several Russell Darius DVDs from his apparently extensive horror movie collection, and they had been watching them together so that Jasmine could at least acquaint herself with Darius’s work while the man himself remained out of reach.

  ‘They remind me of innocent times, back in my teens.’

  ‘Before the killing became real?’ Jasmine asked, trying to sound merely curious but not quite succeeding in keeping the accusatory acid from her tone.

  ‘A lot of bad things were already real. I preferred to spend as much time as I could out of the house. My pal Flea’s family had a Betamax video recorder, first VCR I’d ever seen. Flea’s mum worked nights a lot and so did his dad, in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He was a burglar. Hence the VCR.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘When we had the telly to ourselves we used to hire pirate tapes off the ice-cream van, always a horror if you could get them, because these were films you wouldn’t be allowed in to see at the pictures. We’d watch them over and over again, rewinding the gory bits – and the dirty bits,’ he added with a sheepish expression so unfamiliar it was like seeing a different person, or at least a different aspect of this person for the first time.

  ‘You could tell there was a good bit coming up, blood or nudity, because the tape went all fuzzy from folk doing the same thing, winding it back and re-playing over and over. People talked about them being corrupting, like you couldn’t tell the difference between the films and what was real. Mary Whitehouse should have come round my house of an evening. I knew all too well what was real.’

  He spoke quietly, trying to sound merely reflective, but he couldn’t hide the bitterness and a fragility she had only glimpsed in him a precious few times.

  ‘The slasher movie was the sub-genre in vogue, so that’s what we saw most of, and that’s what I associate with escapism, with simpler times, with innocence.’

  ‘And what about now? Do you have all these movies because they remind you of those times?’

  ‘Partly, yes, but partly because they’re still escapism to me. I’m not like Sammy Finnegan. I got what he was saying but I like them because they’re a million miles away from the things he mentioned, from puddles of blood on the pavement and stabbings in your hometown streets. The killing is theatrical, ritualised, stagey, spectacular: all the things that killing isn’t in real life. But it’s the motives that make it truly innocent for me. The motives aren’t real either. They’re abstract, Gothic, just a cheesy back-story to explain a maniac with a knife deciding to go on a rampage: bereaved mother killing summer-camp attendants as surrogates for the ones who were negligent when her son drowned. Vengeance played out to absurdly extrapolated degrees. Not someone getting their face opened and bleeding to death on a pub floor because they did the same thing to the assailant’s mate two weeks ago.’

  The motives in Darius’s movies were as unconvincing as Fallan described, to the point where they struck Jasmine as being perfunctory. As a film-maker he seemed less interested in what drove a person to kill than what made them capable of doing so. From the movies she had seen, and the synopses of others that she’d read, he kept coming back to the questions of whether you had to become something else in order to kill, or whether killing itself transformed you; whether to kill you had to tap into a source inside yourself, or whether what was inside you was forever destroyed by the act of killing.

  She felt like a student again, sitting there in a T-shirt and jogging bottoms, watching DVDs for hours on end. She wondered guiltily whether it was billable: technically, it was research, and she had her laptop open on the couch, scouring websites for what she could learn about Darius. It was this exercise that made her appreciate what the over-used terms ‘cult movie’ and ‘cult director’ truly meant. There were dozens of websites and fan forums either dedicated specifically to Darius’s movies or at least paying their dues to his place within the genre. The content ranged from the excitable spoutings of fan-boys and gore-hounds, to serious and even academic appraisals of his work.

  There was also some eye-opening material on one site regarding the video-nasty hysteria of the early eighties, leading to the infamous Director of Public Prosecutions list and ultimately the Video Recordings Act of 1984. In among the web pages covering this, she found a video clip more jaw-dropping than anything that had played on her TV screen that day. It showed the then MP Graham Bright, who was campaigning for stricter censorship, confidently telling a television news reporter: ‘I believe that research is taking place, and it will show that these films not only affect young people, but I believe they affect dogs as well.’

  Jasmine had to play it again to make sure that he really had said that, all the while trying to decide whether anyone who said in advance what research ‘will show’ was shamelessly dishonest or just plain stupid. She was coming down on the side of ‘both’ when she suddenly spied a link at the side of the page that stopped her breath.

  The link read: ‘The infamous snuff interview: Giallo magazine, September 1983.’

  She called Fallan over and together they read the piece, the English translation side by side with scans of the appropriately yellowing pages from the original magazine. Finnegan’s memory hadn’t failed him regarding the nationality of the interviewer. The journalist was German, by the name of Jan Neumann, but the magazine itself was Italian. Giallo was the native term for a particular class of lurid and exploitative movie, in reference to the distinctive yellow covers sported by the films’ pulp-fiction predecessors.

  The tone of the piece was giddily enthusiastic, more towards the fan-boy than the academic end of the critical spectrum. It recounted conversations from a day spent with Darius in London, starting off with a trip to Smithfield market to watch butchers at work, followed by a pub crawl around significant locations from his then two movies to date, The Ritual and The Birth. This led on to a coyly non-specific account of drug-taking back at Darius’s place in Fulham, and ultimately to the moment when, in his inebriated and unguarded
state, Darius showed a video tape to his equally intoxicated interviewer.

  Neumann described a grand, high-ceilinged room: dimly lit, close-curtained. There were many paintings on the wall but the ones the camera lingered on were all themed around hunting or conflict: an eagle taking a fish from the waters, a shooting party on the moor, two stags locking antlers. Then the camera lit upon two figures in hooded robes, their faces never seen, standing before a table, or perhaps an altar, upon which a naked woman was restrained. There were sheets on the floor, crudely daubed with occult symbols, the outside edges dotted with burning candles.

  Neumann then described watching in revulsion, disbelief and not a little awe as one of the robed figures murdered the woman, stabbing her several times with an elaborately designed sacrificial dagger.

  These were images Jasmine had seen already that day, aspects and details of them revisited several times in the Russell Darius movies she had watched.

  Neumann claimed that Darius had then precipitately become altogether less hospitable, switching off the VCR and insisting that the journalist had to leave. ‘He was like a girl who has realised she’s let you go too far when she hears her father’s key in the lock,’ Neumann put it. ‘She can’t get rid of you fast enough. Or perhaps I was the girl who had gone too far, as I later felt a little squalid and ashamed.’

  At the end of the translation a further link took Jasmine to a 2003 retrospective piece by Neumann twenty years on. From the perspective of distance and maturity he questioned what he had really seen. He had been drunk and high, and wondered whether the whole day hadn’t been set up by Darius to put him in the position of maximum susceptibility. The man was, after all, an expert at creating convincingly gory visual effects. The format may have played a part too: the immediacy of video gave an authenticity, a live-ness to it, a sense of true events being captured, whereas graded film tended to put a polish on what it depicted and thus render it more obviously a fiction.