A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  But maybe, just maybe, there was a subconscious reason I was so reckless. Maybe deep down, as I have often pondered, I knew my cover was irredeemably blown when Larry’s eyes met mine, so briefly but crucially, at Glasgow Airport. Perhaps I knew that it was the beginning of the end of that chapter of my life: that Dubh Ardrain was going to be the Black Spirit’s farewell performance, one way or the other. Nobody likes to bow out after a failure, but you have to ask yourself whether that failure is a sign that you’re not as sharp as you once were, and thus that the time for bowing out is in fact overdue.

  The silver lining was that the world believed me dead once more. It was a chance to begin again, to commence a new chapter; though necessarily a quieter and less dramatic one. I had always planned for this. You don’t go into any job without knowing how you plan to get out, and furthermore how you plan to get out if that route is suddenly cut off. Just like I had a back-up passport and route out of the UK for if Dubh Ardrain went sour, I also had my short-notice retirement package in place for if I didn’t have time to fade away on my own schedule. For years I had not just an identity, but a house, money, a life set aside, in stasis, ready for me to step into if it suddenly came time to disappear.

  The cops traced me to two houses in France and recovered around eight million euros from various accounts, but they recovered only what I intended them to if ever I had to invoke my emergency escape plan. The assets they got were the larger part of my holdings, but I had always understood that to be part of the price I might have to pay in order for them to conclude that there was nothing more to be found and I wasn’t coming back. However, merely being believed dead wasn’t going to prove quite the same talisman it had before. There had been only a handful of people who remembered what Simon Darcourt looked like when I ‘died’ the first time. After Dubh Ardrain – for a brief few days, at least – I was on every front page and television screen in the world. That was why I needed surgery, as were the police’s misapprehension to be corrected, my personal apprehension would surely follow. And make no mistake about this: it wasn’t being caught by the cops I was worried about.

  I have, in my life, once been in locked a jail cell, and once been a guest aboard a billionaire’s luxury yacht. It is the latter I am more concerned with ensuring never happens again.

  You don’t find a professional assassin via a sponsored link on Google. Nor was I out leafleting in ethno-political hotspots offering my services. There was a conduit, a very, very powerful conduit, a veritable ventricle through which an engorging volume of blood-stained commerce flowed back then, and no doubt still does. For a while I thought the way the game had changed might have impacted on him too, but it would have been like mere ripples beneath the hull of his vast, gleaming vessel. A man afloat on a sea of blood, always working to ensure that the flow is never stemmed, never missing an opportunity to siphon off some more, and inventively adaptable to an ever-altering environment.

  For instance, he had noted the emotional impact of suicide bombings in conveying the strength of feeling that apparently motivated such acts, and the bastard successfully marketed the idea by procuring suicide bombers for terrorist causes insufficiently inspirational as to compel any of their adherents to play the human party-popper. However, at that time, suicide bombing was rare enough to still make people stop and ponder the enormity of such a sacrifice. Since then, the impact had been somewhat diluted by what you might call the Gynaecological Proliferation Effect: every cunt’s doing it.

  He told me the volunteers were ‘those who were closest to their god’, by which he meant aged and terminally ill individuals ensuring their families were looked after by committing highly conflagatory euthanasia. He may, I realise in retrospect, have been lying about the whole thing. I knew him as Shaloub ‘Shub’ N’gurath, but he was known to seldom, if ever, give himself the same name to two contacts. He was a man who understood not only the importance of anonymity, but the further effect of concealing himself behind a miasma of myths, rumours, counter-impressions and outright fear. I met him once and once only, before the first job he subcontracted me for, which was when, for all the myths and stories, I was made to understand one thing as fact.

  ‘Professionals do not get caught,’ he told me, sharing champagne on one of the sun-drenched, golden wood decks of his ocean-going palace. ‘However, I am experienced enough to know that nobody is perfect. Accidents can happen. How is it your own poet puts it, Mr Darcourt? The best laid plans of mice and men ...‘

  ‘Gang aft agley.’

  ‘Go often wrong, yes. The professional knows when the situation is retrievable and when it is not. If it is not, he knows when to walk away, and he knows to clean up the mess. If you compromise yourself, as far as I am concerned, you have compromised me. If you fear you are contaminated, it is your responsibility to amputate and cauterise before the infection spreads. You find yourself on the run? You do not run to me. If you can stay hidden, stay hidden, but always remember my people will be looking for you too...

  ‘If the authorities reach you first, we will get to you wherever you are held. We will break you out if possible, to find out what you told them. If that’s not possible, we can get to you inside. There’s a lot of things we can do inside too, but ideally we’d bring you back to the boat.’

  Did you spot the ellipsis? That’s the occasion of some quality curtain-twitcher hypocrisy right there. Yeah, let’s just leave it at three little dots, shall we? Because that’s the part where he turned on the telly and showed me the hospitality I could expect if I ever found myself on board again. Go on, pretend you’re relieved. You can tell yourself it was something best left to the imagination, meaning your sensitive wee self wouldn’t even be capable of beginning to picture it. But truth is, you’re disappointed that I was coy. You don’t want three little dots. You want the gory details.

  I saw, on video, a naked man strapped to a steel table, propped upright against a wall, while two guys in plastic coveralls bored holes in every part of his anatomy, using power drills so heavyduty even these colossi needed two hands to heft them. Let me I assure you that those details remain the goriest I have ever witnessed, but time is marching on, otherwise I’d spare you – spare you? Ha! Deny you – nothing.

  Suffice to say, it provided a compelling motivation, after Dubh Ardrain, to keep playing dead, and for the most part I did. I didn’t entirely keep myself to myself, as any good serial killer’s neighbour might attest, but I was careful – usually – to leave no clues suggesting that Simon Darcourt was the author of those deeds. For the truth is, when you possess certain abilities, it is difficult to sit back and watch when you know they would make a difference. Sometimes, a sense of duty prevails. If there are things that truly need to be done, for the common good, and you have the wherewithal to accomplish them, then you could say there is little choice but to step off the bench. There were things that truly needed to be done, in as much as there were people who – let’s be brutally fucking honest about it – truly needed killing. And don’t even begin to argue with me over whether it was for the common good.

  However, for me to step fully out of retirement has taken the inspiration of a very special individual, and though I can’t truthfully present the common good as a central motive, it does feature as an auxiliary beneficiary. I can’t reveal that person’s identity quite yet, but I should at this point give a special mention to another remarkable individual with a figurehead role in this affair. There is one overseer, one mastermind of this game, operating at a far higher level than even Shub, who can seek you out when the time comes, no matter how well you’ve covered your tracks and regardless of where you’ve chosen to hide. Pale and skinny cunt with a very wicked sense of humour, on whose behalf I have carried out a lot of work over the years, and from whom I have accepted one final contract.

  All those jobs, all those hits, all those years, and I never once received a death warrant in the form of a dossier in a manila folder like you see in the movies. Yet that was my cu
e to commence my current project: an A4-size file, containing every detail I needed, complete with ten-by-eight photographs. Small scale, really: single subject, just one individual who had to die, and it would be hard to find anyone who’d argue that this fucker didn’t have it coming.

  This is bigger than anything else I’ve ever attempted, and I’ll have to cope with all of it alone; no back-up, no infrastructure, no second chances. Thus the planning has been exhaustive, the preparation meticulous and the inventory all but bankrupting, not that that will be a consideration in the end. For this is the most important job I’ve ever undertaken, as well as being undoubtedly the last. I know that what I am commencing will blow my cover again, and how that must ultimately end, but I know also that it will be worth it. And besides, this time I’ll have one hell of an out.

  He wakes up in a hotel room, feeling very woozy. His throat’s dry as a camel’s fart, breath to match. He’s got a bastard of a headache, though he can’t remember what he may or may not have drunk last night – if in fact last night it was: he feels like he may have been asleep for days. He can’t recall anything about the last time he was conscious, or even when that was.

  Something feels wrong, something disorientating about his immediate environment. He places his feet down delicately on the floor, at which point he registers that it’s a laminate and not a carpet. He squints, his eyes still blurry and not a little sticky from sleep. That’s when he screws up his face, registering that the hotel room is not the one he remembers checking into. He looks at the bed, confirming it’s a double, checking the far side for evidence of a second occupant, but it’s not been slept in, the covers still neatly tucked under the mattress just south of the undisturbed pillows. So that’s not it.

  He’s thirsty like never before in his life. There’s a glass of water on a nightstand built into the headboard, and it’s as he reaches for it that he notices a folder and a folded copy of a newspaper, his newspaper, as well as a remote for the TV. He takes the glass in his right hand and drains it in a parched chain of pulsing gulps, unfolding the tabloid with his left to reveal the front page. His face screws up again and he inadvertently dribbles some of the last gulp from his mouth as he takes in the headline, the picture, the splash bar trailing another story inside. This paper is from last year. What the fuck? He discards it and reaches impatiently for the remote, wincing as the suddenness of his movement exacts a price from somewhere in his skull.

  His thumb tries several buttons before the TV responds, coming to life with a high-frequency static ping that causes his eyes to tighten shut for a moment. The TV is showing Strictly Come Dancing. He squints at it, checking for the marquee along the bottom with the time and a channel sig that would contextualise the clip as part of a morning news show. There is nothing, just two dancing figures filling the whole screen. That’s when he looks to his wrist, then around the room for where his watch might be. He has no idea what the time is. There’s light behind the curtains, though his head isn’t ready to have the sun blazing into his eyes, so he’s not going to open them yet. He paws at the remote again, changing the channel. It shows the same thing. Maybe he just pressed the button corresponding to the channel that was already on. He locates the Channel Up button, gives it a push, then another, and another. There’s nothing on but Strictly Come Dancing.

  He ceases the frantic switching, now paying closer attention to what has been established as being the only programme available on the television. His mouth opens just a little, sign that he’s realised more specifically what he’s watching, and that it’s not the new series, it’s a repeat. It’s the last series. The series he was on.

  He doesn’t like this. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that someone of his make-up would be happy that he’s on every channel, but instead he seems to find it disconcerting. Pity. He’ll be on every channel again soon enough, for real, but he won’t be watching when that happens.

  He reaches for the folder now, his hand tentative in its final approach, like he’s expecting a static shock from it. He’s afraid of what he might find inside. He places it on the bedsheets and delicately takes hold of the top right corner, opening it like it’s some centuries-old tome that might disintegrate. He uncovers a sheaf of A4 papers. They’re all copies of his columns: mostly photostats, some printouts of the online versions. Paragraphs, individual sentences and isolated phrases are picked out in yellow highlighter. He looks at the pages like they’re in Sanskrit or might be some alien artefact. He doesn’t seem very reassured by such a familiar sight, familiar words. Starting to get scared now, which is odd, because the clippings all say he’s fearless: Darren ‘The Daddy’ McDade, Britain’s Most Fearless Columnist.

  He’s the scourge of scroungers, pummeller of paedophiles, a one-man border patrol repelling asylum-seekers, the valiant rearguard resistance waging a guerrilla war against political correctness, the toast of white van man and the last advocate of that oppressed minority: the white middle-class heterosexual male. We’re going to hell in a handcart, but it’s our own fault for listening to the do-gooders and not being tough enough. Tough and fearless like The Daddy.

  Some of the blockbusters that he found picked out in yellow in the clippings file:

  Muslims are to the new century what Germans were to the last. It’s not about a non-representative minority, it’s about the majority’s eager appetite for what this supposed minority is selling. The Germans bought into this myth of their destiny, time and again, until it was bloody well knocked out of them by John Bull. The Muslims are doing the same thing, with the same visions of world domination, and the same solution is called for. Like the guy who gets too mouthy down the pub, the earlier you give him a slap, the quicker he learns his place and the less chance of him trying it on later.

  The inescapable truth nobody likes to bring up about asylum seekers – and I mean the precious few genuine ones – is that if they caused so much trouble in their home countries that they were forced to leave, why the hell would we want to let them start rabble-rousing afresh in ours? If you saw some drunken thug getting ejected from a pub for being out of order, you’d hardly invite him round to your house and tell him to make himself at home, would you?

  It’s ridiculous, but I’m not laughing.

  They keep telling us ‘Islam’ means Peace. Well, I wish they’d all bloody well give us some.

  I’ve come over all liberal. I’ve realised the true, genuine plight of the asylum seekers I’ve previously been so tough on. They’re on the run from a regime they can’t live under: the regime of putting in a hard day’s work for a hard day’s pay. Happily for the oppressed, Britain offers asylum from such archaic, non-PC practices. The Land of the Free Handouts is their hope and salvation, a land where they will no more face the threat of having to break sweat.

  It’s ridiculous, but I’m not laughing.

  ‘Generalisation’ is a word liberals use as a distraction to obscure the bleeding obvious. It’s ridiculous, but I’m not laughing.

  My heart was truly moved this week by the footage of those manacled prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. And the more of the bastards I see manacled, the more I’m moved. Apparently we’re supposed to be concerned about their human rights. Seriously. It’s ridiculous, but I’m not laughing. If it’s all right with the muesli-munchers, we’ll worry about preventing these scum from blowing up any more tube trains before we worry about their human rights. The truth is, loath as the hand-wringers are to admit it, you don’t end up in one of those orange jumpsuits without a bloody good reason.

  As far as I can remember, there has been no end of fat, sweaty, pish-stained, prematurely middle-aged arseholes seeking the cheap route to notoriety and populist approval by acting the keyboard hardman in a tabloid. Some of them were sad enough to believe their own shite, some thought they were just playing the game, posturing for effect or, even more pathetically, playing cheerleader for their proprietor’s agenda. They were a pitiful breed of attention-seeking inadequates, little more than drunks sho
uting at the rain, deluding themselves that they were as tough as they talked. And like drunks, they were largely ignored. Best to give them their space and let them make tits of themselves, because they’ll get moved on soon enough, only for an even more revolting specimen to take their place.

  That was how it was meant to work, anyway, but that was before Darren McDade. That was before The Daddy inexplicably turned his very loathsomeness into a marketable commodity that made him a regular fixture on TV chat shows, comedy panel games, political discussion programmes – Question Time, for fuck’s sake – and even, consecrating his loveable rogue status, as one of the celebrity contestants on that fossilised turd from television’s Mesozoic stratum, excavated and resurrected to stink anew: Strictly Come Dancing.

  He had pulled off the audacious cake-and-eat-it strategy of acting like he was a knowing, wink-to-camera self-caricature when he was in TV-personality mode, yet still being able to deliver the hard line straight and true in the next morning’s paper. ‘String me up, it’s the only language I understand’: that was his signature hey-it’s-all-just-showbiz quip, delivered with what was supposed to convey a good-humoured self-awareness but in practice barely masked a seething contempt for those to whom he clearly felt he owed no apology.

  It wasn’t a seamless transition between media and between personae, however. Prior to SCD, he had generally been confined to later-scheduled shows, so the decision to ratify him as a fitting personality for family entertainment drew quite a bit of flak, particularly coming shortly after his ‘Muslims are the new Germans’ article had succeeded (and let’s not sell him short by suggesting it was anything less than his intention) in getting him reported to the Press Complaints Commission. However, it could be argued that the BBC would be on shaky fucking ground rejecting McDade for a family show while they continued to vomit cash all over that horrible little cunt Danny ‘DJ’ Jackson. Despite having built a career on pandering to sub-literate bigots, the Beeb were happy to let the Cockney mutant loose all over Saturday teatime, presumably on the understanding that he wouldn’t be spewing out remarks about niggers and pakis in front of the kiddies. Thus it followed that McDade could be trusted to keep quiet about poofs and asylum seekers in between bouts of gracelessly hauling his pot-bellied little frame around a ballroom, all the while trying to see down his unfortunate partner’s frock.