A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  It fairly grew on me, I must admit, though not as much as what grew on Miko.

  I stood back when I was done, waiting for Miko’s hysterics to exhaust themselves. There was a strong smell of burnt meat filling the room. I’d read medical staff distastefully describing the odour of charred flesh, and I imagined it must be pretty rank by the time you got it down to Casualty, but right then it wasn’t a kick in the arse off barbecued chicken.

  The steel in the lower half of Miko’s left leg was now fused with my table. It wasn’t a very professional-looking job, and the table would never be the same again, but Miko was going to have a bugger of a time going anywhere without it.

  ‘So, Miko. Bearing in mind that you have a lot more metal in those legs of yours, do you feel like telling me where Risto is holding the boy?’

  He was hyperventilating wheezily, but I could tell he was summoning the breath to speak. I leaned closer and he told me the name of a villa outside Fornel, about forty minutes away on the road to the airport. I got him to repeat this, then reached for a drawer under the table.

  ‘Time for me to leave you, then,’ I said. ‘But before I do, one more thing. Don’t take it personally, but it struck me that you just might be lying, you know, maybe to buy yourself time so that you could forge an escape. No pun intended.’

  I produced two syringes and lay them on the workbench where he could see them: one containing clear fluid, the other a pale blue liquid. I picked up the clear one and injected its contents into a bulging vein in his forearm.

  ‘This is dihydromertile silicate,’ I told him. ‘It’s slow-acting, so you won’t feel anything for a while, but it will stop your heart and your lungs completely in about two hours. I know you weren’t paying much attention on the trip here, so I should let you know you’re in an abandoned farmhouse in pretty much the middle of nowhere, and I’m afraid there’s little chance of someone stumbling across you and coming to the rescue inside the time you’ve got left. However, on the upside, the blue syringe contains a neutralising antidote: monohydrate dosamide, and I’m going to leave it here. This is the deal: I go to Risto and, to avoid an unseemly squabble, I offer the location of this farmhouse in exchange for the kid. He saves you, I save the boy, and we’re all happy. Unless, of course, you’re lying, in which case I administer the antidote and we listen to Neil Young all night long.’

  Miko closed his eyes, steadied his breathing, then in a broken whisper told me where Risto really was.

  The villa was set, rather picturesquely, in a sprawling vineyard, with high hedges thoroughly obscuring the building and its gardens from the road. As I turned into the vine-flanked avenue, the headlights of Miko’s Beamie flashed across a curtained window. Thus pre-warned, Risto emerged impatiently from the front door just as I pulled up, silenced Glock out of sight beneath my open window. I shot him in both legs before he could speak, then stepped out of the car and knelt on top of his writhing body, patting him down for weapons. I found a nine-mil and a stiletto.

  ‘Were you expecting someone else?’ I said quietly to him. ‘Anxious times when family goes missing, aren’t they? Where’s the boy?’

  He looked up at me, his eyes barely able to focus for the pain. ‘Fuck you,’ he managed to splutter.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll find him myself. Can’t expect you to help me with a bullet in your balls, can I?’

  I let the remark register for a second. He pulled a single key from his trouser pocket and let it drop on the flagstones.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I found the boy tied to a bed, gagged and urine-soaked. He flinched as I approached, and I remembered I was carrying the Glock.

  ‘It’s okay. I’ve come to take you home.’

  I removed his bonds. He looked uninjured but remained terrified. When he spoke, his voice was lower and more croaky than I expected, due to dehydration.

  ‘What about the bad men?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re very, very sorry. They won’t be doing it again.’

  ‘I want my mummy.’

  I lifted him up with my left arm, raising the gun again with my right.

  ‘I’m sure they do too,’ I said.

  I carried him with his face rested on my shoulder, and told him to keep his eyes closed until we were in the car. I fastened his seatbelt and turned on the engine, then climbed back out again.

  ‘I’ll just be a second. I’m going to get you a drink, okay?’

  The boy nodded, still trembling.

  I dragged Risto inside the house and out of sight. With the lights on in there, he was able to get a better look at me. The surgery was still making me hard to place, but I obliged him with a lingering stare into his eyes until he recognised mine.

  ‘My God. You’re... you’re...’

  ‘Not any more. I’m just a concerned parent.’

  I put four bullets in his brain then headed for the fridge to grab a Coke for the kid.

  The boy obediently kept his head down as we neared the agreed rendezvous. I donned the shades and cap again as I drove past the bench where we spoke that morning, then doubled back, checking the dimly lit side-streets for any concealed cop cars ready to swoop in. It looked as though the father had been true to his word. He was sitting there, looking expectantly at the Beamie, as he would have done at every other car that had passed since he arrived.

  He sprang to his feet the moment his eyes met mine. I stopped the car but didn’t get out, merely reached back and undid the kid’s seatbelt. The father opened the door and hugged his son, both of them crying. I looked away.

  ‘There must be something I can do for you,’ he said.

  ‘There is. I told you.’

  When I got back to the villa, the first rays of sun were still loitering with intent behind the hills, the air pleasantly crisp before the heat started to build once more. I dropped Miko’s bargain charlie in my safe then went down to the cellar to find the man himself. The scene did not disappoint. He was dead, face-down on the floor, an empty syringe lying discarded beside him. As I anticipated, he had freed himself from his restraints through brute-strength and desperation, but with his leg welded to the table, was only able to reach the hacksaw, not the hypodermic. He had proceeded, therefore, to amputate his own foot, before injecting himself with weed-killer in a misinformed attempt to neutralise the harmless saline solution I gave him earlier.

  It’s uncool to laugh at your own jokes, but I couldn’t help it. Maybe I was getting whimsical now that I was technically a generation older; and I know I wasn’t around for the punchline, but you have to admit it was a belter.

  I went back upstairs, grabbed myself a cold one and sat outside to watch the sunrise. It felt like a new beginning...but just for a moment.

  What I couldn’t get out of my head was how I felt towards that child’s father: even when I saw him in his earlier anguished state, I realised that I envied him. I would never, could never have the life he had, but that wasn’t it, Christ, no. He was still just another Suburban Sad Cunt, but to my surprise I suddenly understood the SSCs’ secret. All that guy wanted was the kid back, and not because losing the kid had changed anything. All he wanted the day before the kid went missing was to be with the wife and weans. I didn’t envy what he had, or what he wanted. I envied him that he wanted it. I envied him that it was all he wanted.

  I envied him that it was enough.

  The oldest motive

  His name is Neil Baker. He agrees to meet Angelique at a motorway hotel on the M25, a place where he frequently convenes with business clients in one of its smaller conference rooms. It takes some persuading, and a lot of reassurance, but she manages to secure his assent to work with their artists, though again, this will take place in another hotel conference room, to which nobody will arrive in a marked police car. At last, they’ll have an image, but they’ll give no indication as to its source. It will be a charcoal sketch based on five-year-old memories of a partially disguised man only glimpsed for two short moments during which the guy’
s brain was in meltdown, but it is that kind of case. The very fact that they will have it at all appears to be the sole tangible return on the only previous clue they’ve been able to offer the public.

  ‘It was the voice,’ Baker says. ‘As soon as I heard it on TV, I went rigid. I can remember everything he said to me, and I hear it replaying in my head any time I think about what happened. I remember his voice far more vividly than I remember what he looked like, maybe because after our first encounter, I kept repeating his words in my mind, kept going over and over what he had said, like you analyse every fibre of anything that might offer hope.’

  Angelique doesn’t find it necessary to ask why he hadn’t come forward.

  ‘I was terrified,’ he volunteers. ‘Christ, once I realised who Josh’s angel of mercy had been, I was physically sick. I spent years wondering who this scary character was, concocting b-movie notions of rogue vigilante cops and gold-hearted villains policing their own. I took it as reassurance that there existed in the darkest hearts some innate sense of decency. Then I heard that recording, and I’ve barely slept since. I don’t understand why he took it upon himself to help us, but I know for bloody sure I don’t want him taking me to task for ingratitude.’

  He doesn’t ask who tipped them off. Doesn’t need to, she guesses.

  Angelique, in accordance with the man’s request, walks away and heads for the car park, allowing him to exit alone later, once she is gone. She thinks he’s going a wee bit too belt-and-braces with the anonymity measures, but she can relate to why: if you’ve had a one-on-one with Simon Darcourt, you generally wouldn’t be in a hurry for a reprise. Not unless your parents’ lives depended on it, anyway.

  You had to give this to Darcourt, he was always good for a mindfuck, and this one, for Angelique’s money, topped the lot. Going out of his way to help out a complete stranger was, in its own way, the most perverse thing he had ever done. Darcourt never did anything without a very strong personal motivation, even if that motivation was electronically transferred into a bank account in Lichtenstein. This guy had neither given nor offered any reward, so what had driven him to rescue a kidnapped child? Insane as it sounded, Baker had perhaps stumbled on to a truth with his previous speculation about an innate sense of decency in the darkest hearts. There was no heart darker than Darcourt’s, and no sense of a value system that anyone else would recognise as decency. But as Ray had put it, ‘he was one of the most self-righteously vindictive people on the planet’: thus, he did have his own skewed, inconsistent, self-serving and hypocritical but very rigidly enforced morality.

  Something about the kidnapping had offended that morality. Darcourt’s conscience had previously been untroubled by the welfare of the many young children who had died in the atrocities he had engineered, so something about this was different. Either that or something about him was different.

  Ray.

  Climbing into the car to escape the blustery drizzle, she reaches for her mobile and listens to it ring as the rain warps her view of the passing traffic. Ray takes a little while to answer; he’s probably in class.

  He confirms as much when finally he picks up, asks if it can wait. It can’t.

  ‘At Dubh Ardrain, did you tell Darcourt he had a son?’ Angelique asks.

  Ray pauses. ‘Yeah,’ he confirms grimly, clearly appreciating the altered significance of this, given that Simon is still alive. ‘He was about to shoot me,’ he explains. ‘He was milking the moment, asked me how it felt to know I’d never see my son grow up. I just said: “You tell me.” I was trying to mess with his head, to distract him, buy myself some more time. Christ, I hadn’t thought about it till now. Somebody’s got to warn Alison and Connor.’

  Angelique assures him that they will be protected. In a way, they always have been: there were a few ‘I slept with terrorist monster’ chequebook kiss-and-tell pieces after Dubh Ardrain, which had largely satisfied the press’s appetites regarding the Black Spirit’s personal background, but in case these didn’t, there was an injunction in place to prevent Alison and Connor McRae from ever being named in connection to Darcourt.

  She terminates the call quickly but politely, then flicks through her contacts list, deciding who best to phone regarding the immediate surveillance and protection of the McRaes, in case Darcourt comes looking for them.

  That’s when it strikes her that he already has.

  ‘I can’t see Simon tuning in via satellite from some mainland European bolthole just so he can stoke up his rage,’ Ray had argued, back when he was still trying to convince himself that the new killer wasn’t his old flatmate. ‘Can you picture him getting the Sun or the Daily Mail delivered to his underground lair or wherever he’d have been hiding?’

  Now she could see the consequences of that same logic, once it was inverted. He wasn’t in some European bolthole; not all the time, anyway. He had spent time – maybe a lot of time – back on his native soil, in order to get close to his son: disguised, unsuspected, assumed dead, watching secretly from a discreet distance, maybe outside school, the swing-park, the sidelines of a football pitch. Near as he dared, perhaps, but no closer than risk allowed, which was why, though she would still call in the warning, she understood Connor and Alison were in no danger. If he was going to snatch the kid, he’d have done it by now, before anyone discovered he was still alive. He knew he could only watch Connor’s life like it was on the other side of glass. Not only could he not risk making any kind of direct contact with the boy, if there was any residual humanity in him, he would understand that he couldn’t do anything that increased the likelihood of his son finding out who and what his father really was.

  In Darcourt’s distorted mind, it was thus possible to imagine him finding a surrogacy in acts of vigilantism such as the Baker child’s rescue.

  You only had to peruse the letters pages of any newspaper, or these days, any internet forum, to discover the extent to which the average bampot considered parenthood both a justification of and a sanctification for their own self-righteousness. What would it do to ‘one of the most self-righteously vindictive people on the planet’? What other deeds might he consider proxies for the actions of a concerned father unable to directly shape and protect his offspring’s development? Every sad dad tries to make up for his own broken dreams by living vicariously through his children. So wouldn’t he want a fairer world, in which the truly talented, like him, got rewarded with riches and acclaim, while the mere attention-seeking mediocrities had their wings melted for even daring to fly close to the sun?

  This new perspective potentially altered the time-line too. The big question they’d been asking since he made his theatrical reappearance was why now? It had only been lately that he had revealed his survival and reclaimed his name, but what if they were wrong to assume that this was the beginning? Maybe it was merely the next phase. The Baker kidnap had been more than five years ago. What else might he have done in that time by way of moulding a better world for future generations, in between visits back to the mother country to steal a glimpse of his son and heir?

  And with this question, another, older, unsolved mystery may suddenly have a new solution. Angelique remembers a case Dougnac was called to investigate, in Lombardy, four years back: one the public got to know nothing about. The official story, as reported briefly in the press, was that half a dozen ‘aviation industry’ executives had died on a corporate junket when a yacht went down in the Med off Genoa. There was no such incident: the ‘maritime tragedy’ explanation was concocted at the behest of high-level influence, the shipwreck scenario chosen because it accommodated the absence of any bodies to fill the coffins at the six respective funerals. In truth, for ‘aviation industry’, read ‘arms trade’, and the reason their coffins were buried empty was that, short of DNA sampling, there was no way of knowing which particular puddles of viscera belonged in each casket.

  Dougnac was brought in to explore any possible terrorist angle, but the absence of any claim of responsibility or disc
ernible ideological motive had him quickly rejecting the idea. The execs all worked for arms manufacturers, and it was his opinion that the incident represented the sharp end of industrial relations. These firms were often in bed with some extremely dangerous people, and the political influence brought to bear in order to conceal the true nature of the murders was proof of how far – and how high – they were prepared to go to prevent their dirty laundry being aired in public. Dougnac’s suspicion was that the murders had been ordered and orchestrated by none other than Marius Roth, for business and power-broking reasons that only the highest-placed within the European arms trade would ever know.

  Angelique had reckoned her boss’s logic was sound, but maintained private reservations regarding his conclusion, on the grounds that Roth had always been the madman in Dougnac’s attic: his bête noire or, perhaps it would be more revealing to say, his white whale.

  Marius Roth was a quite squalidly wealthy arms industry maven, mogul and manipulator. He exerted overt and covert influence in the boardrooms of countless ‘defence’ companies, brokered deals involving arms firms and governments around the globe, sanction-evasion and embargo loopholes a speciality, and couldn’t have had more politicians in his pocket if they were miniature-sized and made by Playmobil. All of which, of course, was merely his public, ‘respectable’ face. It was what remained shady and occluded (and the ways in which the shade was cast) that led to such mystery and rumour, not to mention myth-making, as proved fascinating to the point of obsession for Dougnac. Roth’s greatest value to the arms trade was said to be his equally influential manoeuvrings in ensuring that consumption of its products remained high. He was believed to be just as senior a power-broker, fixer and facilitator in the world of the freedom fighter, guerrilla, rebel, insurgent or, if you were to be so crude, terrorist, as in the world of the executive and the politician.