She’s embarrassed to feel a pang of jealousy; it’s fleeting, just pops into her mind like a fly landing on her face: she bats it away as absurd but the fact that it appeared at all is unsettling. This guy, this one-time ducking-and-diving quintessential dodgy geezer, had the happy marriage and the kids and the house and the garden and that air of contentment. Changed by life, or maybe that just happened to you, maybe that was growing up. You quit chasing rainbows and tilting at windmills and realise what will really make you happy. Angelique has realised it herself, albeit too late, the job already having taken the best of her.
‘So what is it I can do for you, my dear?’ he asks, all self-confident Cockney charm.
‘I thought you might be able to tell me where you last saw Zal Innez,’ she replies. She reckons this ought to knock him off his stride a little, but it’s she who is almost derailed. She stumbles over the name, her voice threatening to choke. It’s the first time she’s said those two words aloud in years, and merely speaking them feels like breaking the seal on something highly potent and tightly suppressed.
Fleet eyes her very cautiously for a moment. Perhaps he’s thinking about giving her the old ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about’ routine as the first gambit in haggling a price, but it’s mutually obvious that they both know exactly what she’s talking about. If she had any doubts at all over whether Fleet was bluffing to the RSGN, they are now dispelled. She might have stumbled over the name, but when she said it, Fleet looked like he was afraid his pocket was being picked. This guy has seen Zal, and no mistake.
He settles for: ‘Now what makes you think I might know something like that?’
‘You offered his last known alias and whereabouts to the RSGN. That’s where I got your name. Let’s not waste time, Mr Fleet, I know it’s going to cost me and I’m prepared to pay. You went after him, didn’t you? But you didn’t get him. That’s why you offered the bank information rather than offer them the man himself. And that’s why you rejected their counter-offer of a reward contingent upon your information leading to his apprehension. You didn’t fancy anyone else’s chance of bringing him in either.’
Fleet holds up two fingers. Angelique hides her anxiety behind a poker face: she always knew she’d have to negotiate, and with an arch-haggler no less, but she’d told herself she wouldn’t go above one thousand and the bugger was starting at two. She had the money, but she didn’t know what else she was going to need it for in her secret little quest.
She’s about to lie that it’s not worth that to her, fearing that this will tell him it’s worth at least that to her, when he reveals he wasn’t indicating a price at all.
‘Twice I went after him,’ he says. ‘First time, I had him handcuffed to a pillar; hands and feet. Thirty seconds later, it’s my hands, my feet that’s chained to the same pillar. Second time, I didn’t fare any better. Not against him, anyway. That’s why I didn’t fancy the bank’s chances, or anyone else’s.’
‘Who else did you offer this information to?’
‘The notorious Mr Bud Hannigan’s people put me on to Innez in the first place. But by the time I got back from me travels, as you’ll know, Mr Hannigan had changed his titular prefix from “the notorious” to “the late”, and his successors had different priorities. Besides, I had different priorities myself by that time. My second encounter with Mr Innez convinced me to get out of that whole game. You live and learn, I always say, and if you don’t learn, you might not live.’
‘I realise it’s going to cost me,’ she states, taking his meanderings to be a means of dangling the goods. ‘I’ve got five hundred in cash right here.’
‘Listen, darlin’, I will happily take your wonga to give you the name he was using and the place I last saw him. But the most valuable thing I could give you would be to keep this shut. That way, I’d be sparing you a lot more than just your money.’
Angelique takes out a roll of notes from her bag. ‘I only want to talk to him.’
Fleet pauses to think for a second, then to her surprise accepts the roll.
‘I sincerely hope that’s true, love,’ he says, flipping through the notes to count them. ‘Because even if you go after him with the whole of the SAS, he’ll find a way of vanishing. Just when you think you’ve got him, you find you’re left holding sand. But then you know that, don’t you, because I’m guessing he’s vanished from you before.’
Angelique tries not to betray any affirmation, but she’d be as well nodding like a car ornament. They both know.
‘See, when he had me handcuffed, I drew on a bit of the old bravado and told him I’d catch up with him again. I am thus compelled to ask you the same question he put to me at that point, which was this: what makes you think it’ll be any different next time?’
Angelique feels a bullet to the heart, for this is the question she’s been asking herself since the night Zal slipped silently from her flat while she slept.
‘I don’t have an answer,’ she admits. ‘But same as you, I need to find out first hand.’
Fleet nods, understanding but regretful, like he knows from his own experience that this is a mistake she has to make for herself, and from which she cannot be dissuaded.
‘Second time I went after him, that was what did it for me,’ Fleet says, unbidden. ‘He was on a cruise ship, working as a magician. Watching him perform, I thought I knew his tricks, thought I could suss him out. Instead, I learned that this guy would always be one step ahead, and I’d never suss him. Course, I only worked that out in retrospect. At the time, I thought he was in my grasp. One minute I was watching him onstage – being handcuffed to a pillar, which was what tipped me off things might be going a bit hooky. Next thing I know – I mean literally, next thing I know – I wake up in a lifeboat in the fucking Atlantic. Scuse the language, my dear, but it still gives me the shivers thinking about it.’
‘How long were you adrift?’ she asks, wondering how ruthless Zal was prepared to be. She already knows he’s killed when he had to.
‘Long enough to precipitate a career change, I’ll say that much. Nah, he’d hidden a transmitter on the boat, hadn’t he? He never abandoned me to the fates, but he did give me a very long dark night of the soul before salvation arrived: as it happened, in the shape of Señorita Yolanda Gomez and her colleagues on the Islas Canarias coastguard.’
Angelique thinks of the olive-skinned woman in the back garden. She gestures with her head towards the house. Fleet grins.
‘That’s right. Another reason you have to tread cautiously with this geezer: weird things happen around him. You sure you wanna do this? Because I went after him a time-served Jack the Lad, and came back bleedin’ married.’
Angelique laughs politely, but his words remind her that she has barely dared envisage what she even hopes for from this mooted reunion.
I could live with that, she thinks.
She’s back in the car, allowing herself the respite of a smile as she muses over Zal’s choice of stage name, and pondering the likelihood of him still being on board the same cruise liner. Either way, it’s more than a start. Even if he’s moved on, she knows he was working and she knows where. That means payrolls, that means tax records, and if he’s as good as Fleet claimed and has sought opportunities elsewhere, he’ll have taken the name with him. Even in her strung-out and tortured state, she finds herself taking a moment to feel happy for him, wishing she was watching him do his show in some parallel world where there was no Simon Darcourt and her parents were still safe at home with nothing more to worry them than their daughter’s inexorable submersion in the quicksand of spinsterhood. But the moment fades, the glimpse vanishes, and she wonders what right she has, if Zal is finally happy, to bring all this chaos to his door. She had decided she was too much of a threat to him way back when it was only her job that complicated things: now she was bringing serial killers and organised criminal conspirators to the party. However, she also knew she had little alternative, and that Zal Innez of all people u
nderstood the lines you sometimes had to cross in order to protect the people who had once so invaluably cared for you.
She recalls being on holiday, in Mallorca, when she was five years old. She couldn’t swim, but she spent most of the time in the hotel pool propelling herself around, kept afloat by this rubber ring with yellow flowers printed on it. There’s still a photo in an album somewhere in her parents’ house, showing her standing with it tight around her middle, the pool’s surface glinting aqua blue in the background. James could swim at that stage, and he’d spend ages just jumping in at the deep end: jumping in, swimming back to the side, climbing out then jumping in again. She thought it looked like fun, looked easy, and she had her ring to keep her afloat, so she gave it a go, leaping in right behind her brother. She went straight through the ring and down into the depths of the water. She remembers an enduring feeling of fear and panic, her eyes open but seeing only a stinging blur of blue. Then she felt arms around her, drawing her to the surface, hauling her out of the pool. Her dad had dived in, still wearing his shorts, t-shirt, sandals and watch. He hadn’t hesitated, just launched himself immediately to her rescue.
The engine is idling as she sits in a traditional London tailback, which at least spares her any fannying about putting on a Bluetooth headset when her mobile rings. It’s Dale. And at last, at long fucking last, it’s a lead: an eyewitness who has seen Simon Darcourt since Dubh Ardrain.
Of course, in keeping with the grudging and glacially slow nature of what little one could stretch a point as to call progress on this case, it isn’t being laid out on a plate for them. More a ‘catch and cook your own’ offer.
‘We got an anonymous tip, via email,’ Dale explains. ‘Well, ostensibly anonymous: the ISP trace shows it was sent from the company the guy’s wife works for. Says the guy has seen Darcourt but is reluctant to come forward because he’s scared. Clearly, she wants him to speak up but doesn’t want him to know it was her who put him on the spot. We need to tread very lightly on this one, which is why I reckoned a woman’s touch...’
‘Got you. Text me the name and address.’
‘On its way.’
The transformed man
Well, haven’t I just got them all guessing? Ooh, the tension, the suspense, the deliciously tantalising frustration of not knowing. More speculation – not to mention genuine excitement – over the result of this poll than the last two General Elections. And what’s got them dancing on a string, struggling to contain themselves, like kiddies outside a locked bathroom door after way too much skoosh, is that unlike those elections, right now there’s no guarantee they’ll ever be told the outcome, and that’s just fucking killing them. Wonder how much money I could auction the answer for at the moment, what any of the tabloids, or maybe Sky News, might pay for this particular exclusive.
Truth is, I’m looking at the winner right now. She’s lying next to the bag I’m about to fit her body into: one of those big nylon affairs with several pairs of rollers, for taking your golf clubs on holiday. What a prize she’s bagged, too, if you’ll forgive the indulgence of a little pun. The country’s never been so interested in her throughout the entirety of her cheap and desperate little life. Wasn’t that what she wanted? And not forgetting the runner-up prize, that’s a beauty too. Come on, Bully, let’s show her what she could have won: a nation’s sincerest concern for her welfare. Promises that they’d do anything and everything in their power to save her. Oh, the fucking humanity. Stop it, I’ve got something in my eye.
So who gets what? Who was the winner? Oh tell us, Simon, please, please, please just tell us.
Fuck’s sake, what does it matter? Flip a coin: that’s what I did. Jesus, did these cunts really think I sat totting up what was in all those papers, or fast-forwarding hours of Sky-Plus recorded telly coverage in order to gauge who was getting the most play? Did I fuck. And if I was interested, I wouldn’t have had to bother, given the number of estimated (if contradictory) running totals that were being kept by the media themselves.
Utterly fucking pitiful, and nothing more than a procrastinatory distraction to focus upon in the absence of any apparent purpose to the whole thing. But now I’ve closed that option, and it’s time for them to really embarrass themselves by filling their pages and their airtime with stabs in the dark as to what it all means, both for me personally and – God spare us – for society as a whole.
In short, what they are looking for is a motive, a grand scheme to explain why I have visited this upon them. It was easier back in the days when they could just use labels like ‘sick’, ‘monster’ and ‘evil’ (all the more convincing reversed out of black in full caps and a massive font size), but in the information age, even the average Sun reader knows emotive labels still don’t actually tell you anything.
What is the bigger picture here, they demand to know. Why is he doing it?
Happily, I can assure them that there is a bigger picture and a very grand scheme; grander than they can anticipate, anyway. But as for motive? Tsk, tsk, tsk. I’m very disappointed that they’re still struggling with that one, when the answer is so obvious. A little longer and I really will have to spell it out.
My motive is the oldest and simplest one known to humankind. It is the same as motivates every man who is mindful of his responsibilities and aware – rather acutely aware, as it happens – of his own mortality. Like everybody else, I simply want to make the world a better place before I leave it, and I want to make provision for what will remain once I’m gone. After all, I don’t have only myself to look out for, and I won’t be around to do that for much longer.
Surprised? Why should you be? Allow that life can change a man, even a man such as me, and especially a life such as mine. I don’t have my hand out here, by the way: I’m not saying it’s changed me into something that normal society would wish to include, but I am no longer the man I once was. I don’t even look like him. I haven’t been the same man since Dubh Ardrain, and not quite for the reasons you might anticipate. It wasn’t some Damascene epiphany either: more of a slow burn, a cumulative result of a number of factors gradually coalescing. Nobody is ever fully aware that they’re changing while that change is under way. At best you only notice it once it is a fait accompli, and even then it usually comes long after the fact, but I came as close as you can probably get to realising that some process was under way: some chain of events to which I could respond but which I could neither control nor affect. The only way to describe it is go back there, and to look at how the world appeared through my eyes at that time.
It was summer of 2002: almost a year had passed since my personal Waterloo, but there were ways in which I was still reeling from it. Physically I was back to full fitness, but mentally I was suspecting certain damages were done from which I would never recover.
Put more eloquently, indeed put as eloquently as any wright of the language has thus far proved possible, I had of late, but wherefore I knew not, lost all my mirth.
There were a number of evident and plausible reasons for this.
When I looked in the mirror, I no longer saw the face my mind expected. This wasn’t any pretentious and self-pitying psychobabble, I should stress: I paid a maxillofacial surgeon a shitload of money to ensure that I no longer saw the face my mind expected; and that more importantly, I no longer saw the face so very many people in so very many countries would dearly love to get into with a floorsander and a bucket of hydrogen chlorate. I didn’t look radically different. With the bruising and swelling gone, the features and proportions were halfway familiar, but the lines and contours seemed softened; blurred almost, so that I resembled what could best be described as a Japanese anime version of myself. I looked different enough, though, let me tell you. Walk into the bathroom for a pish in the middle of the night, catch a sideways glimpse of that in the mirror and you’re swapping your cock for a Glock, if you haven’t already jumped backwards into the bath. When it comes to undermining your sense of identity, having your own coupon repl
aced would do it every time.
But that wasn’t it.
I was sitting, as I did most days, outside a bar overlooking the beach. Resting on my table were a beer and a book, though again, like most days, I was too distracted by what was going on in front of me to read it. This day, however, unlike most days, my attention was enticed by something other than the cornucopia of sun-worshipping females parading between the terrace and the sea. These last had captured my eye but not my mind, a pleasant and picturesque backdrop to my necessarily ugly reflections; soothingly incongruous, disposably irrelevant. I didn’t go there for the reasons everyone else does. I wasn’t on holiday and I wasn’t looking for parties, romance or even just sex. I needed to be somewhere fluidly transitory, where people come and go and the locals don’t bother learning your face because you’ll be history in a fortnight. I also needed to be in a place where wearing sunglasses from dawn to dusk did not look suspicious or even affected.
That was my life: for the time being, and for as long as needed be. Forever, if necessary, as long as I lived modestly, which was in any case a necessity for purposes of discretion. Not so bad, you might think, and I was always prepared for the possibility, every day, on every job. However, I never considered it an eventuality, and certainly not an aspiration. I didn’t do the things I did merely so that I could afford to loll in the sand for the rest of my days. You lie in the dirt long enough later on; what good’s a head start? I did what I did because it electrified me every moment I was awake, and I did what I did because I was the best in the whole wide fucking world.
I had killed more people than I could accurately count: four hundred at a rough guess. I had brought down aeroplanes, sunk cruise liners, even trashed a fully armed military base. I had the police of half the planet trailing in my wake, presidential sphincters tweeting at the mention of my name. So all things considered, it was not my idea of the good life to be just another nobody vegetating there in the sun, my back resting against a pile of cash, like some Cro-Magnon Cockney gangster. That was my new life and it represented, to say the least, a bit of a comedown.
A Snowball in Hell Page 23