‘Darcourt survives the disaster in Scotland, then sensibly stays buried for all these years but for – if in fact Lombardy was him – one piece of work. Indeed, Lombardy would only emphasise that which perplexes me, because he left no clue or claim to its authorship, and vanished once more. Four years after that, more than six years after the Scottish calamity, all of it spent in perfect anonymity, why suddenly break cover, and in such an ostentatiously, spectacularly public way?’
‘I share your perplexity, sir. He could not have done any more to bring attention to himself, yet it is difficult to see what motive would lie behind such a sacrifice of exposure. The risk-benefit equation simply does not compute, which suggests an erratic aspect that is dangerously, dangerously volatile. But be assured, we already have operatives in place...’
‘I am assured of that, Bernard. I assume that kind of assurance, otherwise I would employ someone else. My disquiet remains, however. Something here does not add up, and thank you for pinpointing it: the risk-benefit equation. What is Darcourt about? What has brought him so careeringly into the open after all this time? What could be so valuable in order that he would expose himself with such apparent recklessness, that he would so heedlessly risk... Unless...Oh my. Oh my.’
‘Sir?’
‘A moment, Bernard. Hmm. Unless my instincts are wrong – and they seldom are – then this could be entirely as bad as we might imagine. It is imperative that we intercept Darcourt.’
‘Yes, sir. I will inform the operatives that the mission is now live.’
‘Standard operatives will not suffice. I believe Simon has a secret: a secret that makes him the single biggest danger on our radar. The potential for damage cannot be underestimated. We will need to engage a guarantor...’
First contact
It’s day four in the Black Spirit house, and things aren’t looking good for Anika. She’s slumped on the floor with her back to the wall, eyes closed, her matted hair stuck to her cheeks, sweat-soaked clothes clinging to her frail frame. She hasn’t moved in close to an hour. Her breathing is so shallow, it’s hard to tell whether she’s doing it at all; only the beads of fresh sweat on her face indicate that she is still alive.
Angelique feels a swelling in her throat. She can’t afford this, can’t let herself feel this, not now. It’s too soon, and if she lets it happen once, she’ll be fighting against it the whole time. She needs the distance, the detachment. Needs a couple of drinks and some sick jokes to put it all at a remove. Instead, it’s inescapable. There’s monitors everywhere, the three largest of them suspended from one wall, each permanently dedicated to one of the live streams.
‘Can’t we turn those fucking things off?’ she asks rhetorically, spinning on a heel to at least face away from the triptych for a moment. She finds herself facing Dale, who is standing beside alpha geek Julian Meilis, watching his monitor over his shoulder. Dale looks up in response to her outburst, gives her a sympathetic grimace. He understands, he feels it too; so much so that his solidarity makes her feel self-indulgent. It’s like a siege, and nobody can afford the luxury of histrionics.
They’re in the Operations Centre; no mere Situation Room on a case like this. It’s a place she’s been doing her best to avoid, due to the widescreen views of the ongoing snuff feature that dominate the centre of the room, three open grates upon a sewer of the mind. Right now, however, attendance is mandatory, as they watch and wait and the geeks ready themselves, finally, to act.
Anika has finished bottom of Darcourt’s publicity tally for two days in a row and has therefore received the least oxygen. Nobody is sure how he is regulating it, but it is believed that the contestants’ allowance is released gradually, so that the levels remain consistent, with Anika’s consistently lower – then lower again – than her erstwhile colleagues, now competitors.
He has also allowed them each a bottle of water per day, and two Mars bars. Someone suggested that the choice of food was supposed to maintain their energy levels, but Dale was keen enough to observe that Mars was the official sponsor of Bedroom Popstars. ‘They should all be grateful it wasn’t Ryvita,’ he remarked. Similar speculation focused upon the consistent choice of Evian as their sole source of hydration, and the product’s current, previous and even tangential associations were analysed for significance until Angelique pointed out that the name spelt ‘naive’ backwards.
Wilson bottomed out on the publicity score the first day, but has subsequently rallied, leaving Anika in her current and worsening plight. The op-ed commentators are saying it’s because she’s not from an articulate and photogenic middle-class family, and thus her friends and relatives are less adept at procuring those now life-giving column inches. However, said commentators are themselves redressing the balance by generating this copy, much as they did after day one, when they opined that Wilson had found himself bottom of the heap because he was black. Commentary and posturing around this issue certainly helped rally Wilson’s fortunes, to the extent that the message-board Darcourt set up is now full of comments from white van man, decrying Wilson’s improved fortunes as evidence of positive discrimination within the politically correct and liberal-dominated media.
For all that, Wilson still lags behind Sally, the consistent leader in the publicity stakes and thus the favourite to survive the longest. Numerous theses have been postulated to explain Sally’s favoured status, but the message-board consensus is apparently that it’s because ‘she’s not wearing a bra so you can see more of her tits’.
Yes, Darcourt is getting his dark circus, his 24/7 live gameshow in which everybody is participating, whether they intend to, whether they even realise it, or not. Every piece of watercooler gossip is a contributory factor, the beat of butterfly wings that can affect the prevailing wind and ultimately determine how much of the air finds its way into each hermetically sealed cell.
But of course, as well as butterfly wings, there are also giant turbines, for nothing is so capacious in generating hot air as the British tabloids. They can even blow off about their self-righteous efforts not to blow off. One of them claims to have been doing an official Coverage Count before going to press each day, and amending copy so that all three of the contestants get an equal tally of column inches. ‘We’re not playing the Black Spirit’s sick game,’ they announced, while amending their own content as dictated by the rules of the Black Spirit’s sick game, and covering said sick game on more than a dozen pages. One could at least admire this particular paper’s moral fortitude in attempting to avoid influencing Darcourt’s lethal gauge, and only a cynic could suggest that this self-righteous posture was a sour-grapes response to three rival titles having signed up each of the victims’ families on exclusive deals.
The contestants’ own efforts to tip the scales in their favour have been understandably limited; in fact, their lack of means to communicate has already caused Darcourt to liven matters up with the very innovation Meilis and his fellow geeks are waiting for as their cue. The three inmates, bereft of voice and denied anything with which to write, have all independently (though on varying timescales; Sally a full twenty-eight hours behind Anika, herself half a day behind Wilson) arrived at the realisation that someone watching out there must be able to lip-read. Experts have subsequently been brought in to interpret from recorded footage, but yielded nothing constructive in terms of assisting the police search, nor individually compelling from a publicity point of view. Expressions of fear, growing desperation, disorientation and various messages of love to family members have been the extent of their visemally conveyed contributions. The irony of their having effectively nominated themselves for this horror via their lip-synching abilities has remained unremarked upon in the media, presumably on grounds of taste and sensitivity rather than it failing to strike anybody, as it is clearly a point Darcourt intended to convey.
Angelique feels her phone vibrate. She takes it from her pocket with the sort of reflexive swiftness she normally reserves for blocking an incoming blow, and
holds it up like she’s flashing her ID. It is, after all, a form of pass: her ticket out of the Operations Centre for a moment or two.
‘Hello,’ she says, to underline that it’s an incoming call.
‘Ah, ha ha!’ cackles a voice with a sense of triumph as amused as it is mischievous. ‘Got you at last.’
Oh shite. It’s her mum.
‘I’m out with Arlene and I thought I’d give you a try on her mobile,’ Mum explains, still giggling. Angelique winces to herself. Her mum’s unspoken implication is that she took the call because she didn’t know who it was from, and she’s right. Mum shouldn’t take it personally; or at least not quite as personally. It wasn’t that she’d rather take an unknown call than one from her mother; not always anyway. It was a matter of cop life, the opposite of a social one. Normal people take calls from the numbers they do recognise and give a reduced priority to ones they don’t. Angelique, however, could never ignore that unknown number in case it turned out to be the source of her next inquiry: the anonymous tip, the ransom demand, the breakthrough lead. Never mind the unwary public: the mobile-phone scam artists would really clean up if they could get a list of coppers’ numbers. They’ll take any call, ring back any number, especially in a situation like this one.
What’s even more annoying than her mum’s successful subterfuge is that right now is the one time Angelique would have happily – gratefully – taken her call: any excuse to get away from those monitors.
‘I won’t keep you, darling, I realise how busy things must be – not to mention how horrible – but I had to try and get in touch before we go.’ ‘I’m sorry, Mum, as you can maybe appreciate, it’s not been easy to... hang on, go? Go where?’
‘That’s what I’ve been trying to get in touch about. A round-
the-world trip, for three months.’
‘You and Mrs McDougall?’
‘No, not Arlene, me and your dad. We’re leaving tomorrow, first leg is to Egypt. I’m out with Arlene shopping for some last-minute holiday clothes.’
‘Tomorrow? For three months? When did you book this?’ Angelique asks, hoping not to register any disapproval or indeed envy in her voice. Three months of escape from the everyday insanity of her world sounds damn good right now.
‘We didn’t book it,’ her mum says with a chuckle. ‘We won it.’
‘Wow. How? A competition?’
‘A raffle. One of those charity prize draws, you know, somebody’s always coming round the doors selling tickets for Cancer Research or whatever. Probably shelled out as much in tickets over the years, but finally our number came up. Well, strictly speaking we didn’t win it. Turned out the poor chap who did had a heart attack and died a few days ago, no family either, poor soul. We didn’t even still have the tickets but the charity had the name and address and it turned out we were second reserve. First reserve couldn’t go at such short notice, but well, we’re both retired, you and James long since flown the nest, and...’
Angelique’s in-built sense of suspicion begins to tingle. She recalls a scam from a decade or so back, whereby the con artists were phoning people up and telling them they’d won a cruise. It would be all-expenses except they had to front a hundred quid for insurance. Once that was banked, every so often they’d get back in touch saying some new technicality required another small payment. Smart psychology: the marks kept shelling out because they had already made several non-refundable payments and, hey, there was a cruise at the end of it. By the time it all added up, they had paid roughly what the cruise would have cost down at Thomas Cook, but the real sting came a week before departure, when the company suddenly ceased trading and all the phone numbers vaporised.
‘Wait a sec, Mum. Somebody just phoned you up with this? Have they asked you for any money?’
‘No, no. Switch off your paranoia for a moment, Angel, save it for work. It’s all legit. The documents are on our mantelpiece, including business-class flights the whole way.’
‘Well, congratulations.’
‘Thank you. We won’t be seeing you for a while, but that won’t exactly be a change, will it?’
Yeah. Had to get that in, didn’t you, Mum.
‘I’m overdue some time off,’ Angelique says. ‘Maybe I’ll fly out and meet you somewhere when this business is all over.’
‘That would be lovely,’ Mum says, and to her credit she doesn’t make it sound like, ‘That will be right.’ They both know it’s not going to happen.
Angelique feels relieved, though: with her parents out of the picture, it’s one less thing to feel a guilty failure about. Maybe by the time she sees them again, she’ll have that elusive horizon-man in her life and the future worked out. Mind you, it was only round the world, so perhaps not. If it was all the way around Jupiter, brief stop on Io, that would maybe give her enough time.
Angelique checks her watch as she re-enters the room: still ten minutes to go.
She stands behind Dale and Meilis, the latter’s widescreen monitor displaying a kaleidoscope of images and information: numbers, read-outs and scrolling code as well as reduced versions of Darcourt’s sado-cast.
‘FPS is starting to drop off faster,’ Meilis states. ‘Starting to see the beginnings of some image stutter. Signal integrity is declining across all mirrors.’
The traffic on Darcourt’s video feeds has been growing steadily over the past hour because of a growing rumour that Anika is in fact dead. The story started on the Dying to be Famous message-board, backed up by a claim that the authorities have somehow engineered a half-hour delay on the transmission because they already know there’s been a fatality. Dale has taken a call from Sky News inquiring about this and has said ‘No comment’ rather than deny anything, with an off-the-record nod to the reporter that she should broadcast his response as ‘the police have refused to deny’. This is because the police planted the rumour. It’s not true, but the surge in network traffic will assist what Meilis and his team are about to attempt.
Up on the suspended monitors, the three involuntary competitors continue to suffer in silence. There are only two audio enhancements to their dumb-show. One is when Darcourt announces the day’s final publicity league table, which he heralds by playing that fucking Jean Michel Jarre instrumental, which Angelique now has looping in her brain; and the other is what everyone in the Operations Centre is waiting for right now: Mime Time.
After the shock and curiosity effect of the first day, the traffic on Darcourt’s voyeur peepholes dropped off, with subsequent surges coming in response to chatter across the various media. Thus instead of the media reacting to people’s interest in the show, it’s increasingly become the other way around. The problem has been that there isn’t much to see: just three people suffering in confined spaces. They can’t interact: can’t argue, can’t form allegiances, can’t betray, can’t flirt, can’t lust. All they can do is sit around and try not to use too much air. Simon isn’t interested in putting on a show because the real entertainment, for him, is the media’s response. Hence, it’s reaction to the story in the media that fuels interest in looking at the ‘contestants’. They are supplementary now, figureheads for a thousand surrogate battles being fought on their behalf, though only one of those battles stands a chance of saving any of them, and that’s the one the geeks are waging.
However, this means it’s a burst tyre for Simon if his wee project gets bumped down the news agenda. He has timed the daily announcement of the publicity tally so that it is fresh for News at Ten and its late-evening competitors, but with no developments to report throughout the rest of the day and just the same inert views to look at, the situation has been overtaken as the lead item on the twenty-four-hour channels. Darcourt therefore decided to play a new card, and he knew precisely when to play it, too. Early on day three, he announced that there would be something special worth logging on for at six o’clock, when people are getting in from the day’s graft and have access to internet content otherwise diligently blocked in the workplace of ev
ery respectable employer. Thus at teatime yesterday, there were more hits on Simon’s servers since at any point since the beginning.
The upside for Meilis and his colleagues is that if it was repeated today, the resultant surge in traffic would give them plausible cover to effect a crash of all the mirrors due to apparent overload. This would give them a window to work some kind of baffling techno-voodoo under Darcourt’s radar and – with favourable fortune and a strong following wind – hopefully allow them to pinpoint a geographic location for the source of the streams. (In this case, ‘pinpoint’, Meilis stressed, was merely a figure of speech: ‘elephant’s-foot-point’ being more accurate but less established in the lexicon.)
Hence the rumour leaked to the message-board, hence Dale’s ‘refusal to deny’. Traffic was already building, which would make it less suspicious when Meilis and his geek squad began knocking over the servers.
Simon doesn’t keep his audience waiting; it doesn’t do when the next test of their attention span is a mere mouse-click away. Bang on six o’clock, a sound feed accompanies the videos, and all three contestants look up in reaction to the music that has begun playing at their end as well as ours. This is the first time in more than an hour that Anika’s eyes have opened. She looks around, opens her mouth, suddenly daring – or able – to breathe deeper. The same thing happened twenty-four hours ago: Darcourt has released a brief oxygen boost in order to pep up all three of them ahead of what’s coming.
The music is at this stage merely a thudding bass-drum beat: as yesterday, it’s Darcourt’s knowingly Eighties-style twelve-inch mix of ‘Hurts Like Dynamite’, the extended intro allowing him to set the scene and the contestants to prepare themselves as best they are physically able.
‘Hello again, all you insatiable vicarious thrill-seekers and hypocritical lying cunts, and welcome to another edition of Mime Time.’
The voiceover is a recording: Darcourt has persisted with redubbing his digitally disguised speech. Angelique had harboured half a hope that he’d save himself the bother now that the truer version was in the public domain, but quickly realised it was still well worth his effort. If the manipulated speech remains the most familiar, remains the voice people associate with Darcourt, then it dilutes the public’s memory and awareness of the real thing. Dilutes it to almost homeopathic levels, in fact, given how frequently people are hearing the disguised version compared to the samples Ray and Gary laboriously collaborated to produce.
A Snowball in Hell Page 18