A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Morrit’s starting to get it. ‘A new magician,’ he says, thoughtfully.

  ‘Exactly right. Now, the ship’s putting in at Casablanca for two nights. I figure we can be ready by the time she sails again. Henderson sees we’ve got a big crowd, that changes everything. Weather forecast for the next week is not good – lot of cloud, lot of rain, lot of people stuck indoors on this hulk. Word gets around, pretty soon they’ll be blowing the cobwebs off the House Full sign, you wait and see. I’m betting by the time we hit the return leg after the Canaries, we’ll be in the big suite next door, which is just as well, because it’s got a trapdoor and this room doesn’t, and I wanna start with the Expanding Die. You up for that, Mr Morrit?’

  Morrit’s growing grin heralds his answer. ‘Bloody right I am. What have I got to lose?’ he asks Lizzie, whose face is urging caution, afraid an already fragile man is getting carried away on false hopes.

  ‘You talk a good show, Mr McMillan, I’ll grant you that,’ she says. ‘But it begs the question, if you’re that good, how come you’re out of work?’

  Zal thinks of the countless hours he spent practising in jail. He thinks of robbing a bank in broad daylight and in front of a legion of cops; of what he pulled off later under the noses of just as many police and a few dozen gangsters. He thinks of how amazing his dad was onstage, and he thinks of his dad’s words, the ones he always discarded or threw back in his face: that he had a natural gift for reading the audience, that he had timing, grace and touch ‘like I can only dream aboot, son’.

  ‘Let’s say I had a sabbatical,’ Zal replies. ‘But yeah, I’m pretty good.’

  ‘You’d better be,’ she says, extending a hand for him to grip, the welcome sign of her assent. ‘Especially as your first trick will be selling us back to the man who just dumped us.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not going to tell Henderson a thing. The first he’s going to know about it is when he comes to investigate why there’s a packed house in a lounge where nothing’s scheduled. We’re going to present him with a fait accompli.’

  ‘But how are we going to get a crowd?’ Morrit asks. ‘I’ve every fear I’ve already stifled any appetite there was for a magic show on board this ship, and if we’re doing it hush-hush and without official sanction, how are we going to advertise the bloody thing?’

  ‘That’s why we’ll pull a crowd,’ Zal tells him. ‘Because we’re gonna advertise our show the old-fashioned way.’

  Morrit’s eyes narrow conspiratorially.

  ‘I like your style, Mr McMillan. Tell me, what should we call you, professionally?’

  Zal pauses a moment, gives a smile to suggest he’s taking a beat to build anticipation. Truth is, he hadn’t thought. First thing that comes into his head is his dad’s stage name, which he can’t use for any number of reasons. Second thing is what his mum used to call him sometimes, her Mexican playful corruption of McMillan, the middle name his dad gave him.

  ‘Maximilian,’ he says.

  Morrit nods approvingly, but Lizzie still seems perturbed.

  ‘You don’t like it?’ Zal asks her.

  ‘I like it fine. Just...forgive me: I dropped out of a business degree, so maybe I didn’t learn enough marketing and advertising theory. Can you tell me what the old-fashioned way entails?’

  The Spirit of Athene is three hours out of Casablanca and sailing in heavy rain, as forecast. The larger of the ship’s indoor swimming lidos is extremely busy, not a spare plastic chair to be had, never mind a reclining lounger. Families have set up camp for the day, parents sitting amid piles of toys and towels. It hasn’t been warm enough for any but the most dedicated swimmers to brave the outdoor pools on this cruise, but many of the older passengers have been content to sit by the sides reading their papers and books, wrapped up in jackets and sweaters. Strangely, they always face inwards around the pools rather than out towards the ocean, almost as though they’re just waiting to finish one more page before they suddenly strip off and dive right in. Today, though, the decks are awash, but the hypnotic draw of chlorinated water has endured, and thus dozens of those with no intention of taking a dip have opted for the indoor poolside as their preferred spot to pass the rainy day.

  Two men dressed in black dinner suits enter the lido carrying a large trunk between them, preceded by a petite and shapely woman in the eye-catching if impractical combination of a gold bathing costume and matching high heels. She sashays in like the poolside is a catwalk, one arm held aloft and her palm bearing a pair of handcuffs which dangle around her wrist. She’s smiling, making eye-contact with as many observers as possible as she proceeds around to the deep end, where the two men stop and deposit the trunk about a foot from the edge of the water.

  While the two men lift the lid of the trunk and gently swing it open on its hinge, the woman skirts the row of sunloungers nearest the deep end, scanning the observers. She sees a likely candidate and extends her free hand, inviting a bashfully grinning bloke to take hold of it. No sooner have his fingers touched hers than she has brought around her other hand and cuffed herself to him. She walks away, forcing him to his feet and leading him across to the trunk amid laughter, whistles and cheers. One of the men by the trunk proffers a set of keys, which the woman takes, using them to free herself and then cuffing both the grinning man’s hands together. His daughter, a little girl of about three, runs up and hugs his legs with a look of confused concern. This elicits further laughter, then an appreciative ‘aaaw’, better than anything they could have scripted, as the woman surrenders the keys to the little girl in order to free her daddy. The man takes the keys from his daughter and unlocks himself, to much applause from all around the pool. He offers the cuffs back to the woman, who takes them from him and presents her cheek for a kiss, which he blushingly delivers. Then he walks away, or rather attempts to, before realising she has cuffed herself to him again.

  The bloke sportingly endures another bout of laughter before being freed a second time, and is about to make his way back to his sunlounger when the woman beckons him towards the trunk, where the younger of its bearers is undressing from his DJ down to a pair of black swimming shorts. He has close-cropped blond hair and, denuded of his clothes, reveals himself to be athletically built and heavily tattooed. The older man then enlists the help of the new recruit to remove a number of items from the trunk: a length of heavy chain, two formidable-looking padlocks and a beige sack with aluminium eyelets puncturing its neck. The recruit is then invited to fasten the handcuffs behind the tattooed man’s back. The tattooed man slowly rotates himself three hundred and sixty degrees in order that everybody around the pool can see how thoroughly he is restrained.

  The older man then opens the sack and the tattooed man steps into it. He crouches so that the neck can be pulled all the way over his head, then the heavy chain is passed through the eyelets and the sack pulled closed. The recruit is directed to lift one of the padlocks and uses it to secure the chain. Next, the two of them take hold of the man in the sack and lift him into the trunk. Once he has been placed inside, the lid is pulled closed and the recruit invited to attach the second padlock to the hasp on the trunk’s front.

  Finally, the recruit is asked to take hold of one of the handles on the other side and help lift the trunk off the ground. He looks extremely unsure of himself as the older man indicates that the next task is to drop the trunk into the swimming pool, but the woman is already priming the crowd to count one-two-three in time with their swings.

  The crowd counts, the pair lets go on three, and the trunk splashes into the water where it sinks swiftly to the bottom, air bubbling almost angrily from it for a few seconds after it comes to rest.

  Many of the crowd get to their feet with the intention of getting a closer look, but the woman warns them to stay back from the pool. They obey, automatically investing the woman with imperative authority. Maybe it’s the heels, or more likely the need for reassurance that somebody is in charge of this and by extension that all of those involved kno
w what they’re doing.

  The woman asks the crowd to hold their breath. It’s only when she says this that some of them realise they’ve done so already. She tells them that it’s the best way of knowing when they ought to think about intervention. A minute passes. Two minutes. There are exhalations all around the lido as vital capacities are tested and found wanting. Laughter turns to silence as each panting proof of failure further builds the tension. The surface of the pool is calm, no movement disturbing its slow re-establishment of equilibrium since the submersion of the trunk.

  Unseen inside, the tattooed man is checking his watch, for timing is everything. The quintessence of every escape trick is that it should seem last-gasp, thus he must let the tension grow and the seeds of fear be sown, but he should not stretch credulity nor scare the audience so much as to render the tone macabre or tasteless. There’s air enough for a few minutes more, but it’s also crucial to remember that a box at the bottom of a swimming pool is not a very interesting sight.

  He was free of the cuffs even as the sack was being pulled over his head, free of the sack before the trunk was lifted off the tiles. He had to be, in order to press the switch releasing the air that generated all those bubbles, so vital to conveying the impression that the trunk had flooded.

  He decides it’s time. He engages the concealed hinges on the padlocked side where the lid meets the trunk, then slides the switch that releases the hinges on the opposite wall. A few seconds later, he is climbing out of the pool, each of his hands then gripped by one of his companions, before all three of them take a bow, enthusiastic applause echoing all around the lido.

  He announces to the gathering that if they wish to see more, he will be performing that same afternoon, with the details to be found on the cards his two companions are now passing out to a multitude of eagerly extended hands.

  ‘And that,’ he tells the woman in the gold bathing suit, ‘is the old-fashioned way.’

  Not safe for work

  Angelique is standing next to the stage inside the Tivoli nightclub, where the TV crews are starting to dismantle their equipment and the last of the hacks are drifting away. She finds there’s something unsettling about being in a nightclub during the day, with the house lights up and the music off. It’s not the disappointment of being behind the scenes, of an illusion dispelled, to which the access-all-areas pass of her police warrant card has often exposed her. There is undoubtedly something that kills your dreams, that extinguishes an enduring ember of childhood wonder when her investigations take her backstage at the theatre, or through the sets of a theme-park ride with the machinery stopped and the lights on full, but that’s not the sensation here this morning. Instead, far from dispelling the illusion, it seems all the easier to imagine the place in full swing, to hear the music, see the gels and strobes, the bottles and glasses, the pulsating throng on the dancefloor and the tentative couplings discreetly and palpitatingly progressing in a dozen dusky recesses.

  What’s gnawing at Angelique is a sense of missing out: an awareness of other people’s good times she can’t be a part of, and not merely another grass-is-greener self-torturing fantasy. It’s a memory, a recall of the way it felt to be inside a place like this, twenty years and fifty corpses ago. She remembers the promise of such places, as thick in the air as the perfume, pheromones and cigarette smoke: the tantalising possibility that tonight you might meet someone, and it would be perfect. It was a promise from the time before knowledge and experience could corrupt the fantasy, before her imagination could vividly exhibit in advance all the ways in which any potential relationship wouldn’t work out.

  The press conference is long since wrapped up, but she’s waiting here for someone. She’ll be glad when the last of the media shower have bailed and the cops have the place to themselves again, as she’s been feeling understandably self-conscious. When it’s been an agreed strategy to make sure the cameras and the eyes of everyone present are fixed upon you, it’s hard not to feel a little on-the-spot. Her moment under the limelight, the orchestrated part deliberately intended to make her the focus of so much attention: that was the easy bit. Ironically, it was like being undercover, a paradoxical sense of refuge and anonymity to be found in the act of being in character, playing a part. What she wasn’t used to was this new experience of not being able to exit the stage and take the mask off. Growing up in small-town Scotland with a brown face had given her plenty of early experience of what it felt like to be stared at, but there was never any chance of becoming inured to it, and happily in adulthood it had seldom been a problem. Today, though, there was no escaping this curious scrutiny, the awareness of remaining the focus of curious glances long after the spotlight was back on Detective Superintendent Dale during the press conference, or indeed after the whole show was over. It came with the unspoken words: ‘That’s her’, and an unsettling awareness that people felt such casual spectating was their right, that she had somehow just become public property.

  Even more vertiginous was the inescapable sense of certain unstoppable processes having been initiated, over which she would now have little if any control. A juggernaut with no brakes had just rolled over the brow of a hill, and she was not so much being handed the wheel as being strapped to the front and used as a hood ornament. On the upside, if she really was serious about getting out of the police, then this was, at least, an irreversible step towards the exit in as much as it precluded any future undercover work. Taking away the thing she did best and felt most comfortable with wasn’t going to leave much reason to stay. Maybe that was one of the reasons she agreed to come over here. That and the opportunity to absent herself from Dougnac and the drip-drip war of attrition he habitually conducted against her resolve at times like this.

  There was also the trifling matter of a mass murderer she had thought long dead apparently still walking the earth and practising his forte with renewed alacrity.

  Shaw, it turned out, wasn’t part of the investigation. He had just been the conduit, a friendly voice on the other end of the phone to keep her from hanging up. David Dale was running the job, largely on the back of his success in several high-profile, publicity-intense cases, including breaking the Stockbroker Belt kidnap ring last year and nailing Marjorie Petitjean for offing both of her husband’s parents, Reginald and Harriet, also known as Lord and Lady Lambton. Crime affecting rich people always got a lot more play in the media, and in such cases the ability to deal with that was just as important as your skill at handling the investigation itself. Dale had kept his nerve most impressively in the face of fierce public scrutiny (as well as misinformed but unrestrainedly mouthy press criticism) throughout the kidnap-ring investigation; in particular with regard to suppressing information that might have sold a lot of newspapers had the press known it, though only at the unacceptable expense of further endangering the life of the ten-year-old girl Dale’s men were eventually to rescue. However, as well as having the fortitude to keep the hacks at bay when he deemed it necessary, he had also played a virtuoso hand in inviting them all over the Lambton case, firing up the arclights until the ‘distraught’ aspiring heiress wilted under their glare.

  According to Jock Shaw, it had been asserted at the most senior levels as ‘imperative’ that Angelique be brought into the investigation, but it had been Dale’s idea to make her involvement so demonstrably public. It had also been Dale’s idea to have the press conference here at the Tivoli. She was unconvinced of the thinking behind this, but her doubts about that were nothing compared to the reservations she was harbouring over the wisdom of his parading her like London Met FC’s new star signing.

  Nonetheless, she had agreed to it, partly because she couldn’t argue with Dale’s record, and more significantly because Shaw had vouched for him. She knew Shaw well enough to tell the difference between him endorsing somebody because it was professionally dutiful to do so, and genuinely anointing Dale as worthy of his own – and therefore Angelique’s – trust. It was a measure of her esteem for Sha
w more than a leap of faith in Dale that she was finally assenting to a role she had been resisting for most of her police career. It was also perhaps another sign that said career was finally gleaming in its twilight.

  Angelique had fought to keep herself off the front pages after Dubh Ardrain, when the police were desperate to use her as their good-news face, and had spent many of her years in the force fending off various inventive attempts to make her their ethnic recruitment poster-child. She was never the face at the press conference; she preferred being the hands on the collar and the body beneath the armour.

  From here on in, however, her job would be to draw attention, like drawing fire in a gunfight. It wasn’t exactly Big Brother: her name would be merely a caption on a few TV news reports, quoted in the print media’s deeper coverage well down the page from the juicy stuff and only bumped up beyond that on slow days. Nor was she being played as bait; more a red rag to this particular bull. But to have a role so exposed, so deliberately out in the open, was a new and alien experience. Standing here in this nightclub, from where seven pop stars had been abducted, four of them already known to be dead, she had to wonder: who the hell chooses this for themselves? Who sets their aspirations upon a life permanently under the gaze of inquisitive strangers?

  Dale’s decision to host the press conference at the Tivoli was an understandable (though for Angelique, potentially ill-judged) declaration of intent to play their enemy at his own game. ‘He wants it showbiz, we’ll keep it showbiz,’ Dale said. ‘We can’t afford to give the impression that we’re downplaying anything, like we’re ignoring an attention-seeking toddler, especially knowing what provoking a tantrum entails. Besides, playing these things out in the limelight is a risky business for him. He can’t retreat to the shadows for his next move without losing face, looking like he’s peaked and on the retreat.’