A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  The apparent flaw in this state of affairs was, of course, that the evidence repository was a police facility, but this was not something that particularly disquieted the lawyers. Angelique had first-hand experience of the place from two different operations that had gone down in Marseille, enough to understand that the red tape was harder to get past than the armed guards. Everything needed paperwork and every movement was logged, including who got admitted, what items they were granted access to, the works. Of course, a cop connected or desperate enough could call in a few markers or grease a few palms to get the right person to look the wrong way, but if your later prosecution hinged on anything the defence could demonstrate as sourced to the forbidden files, then your bad guy walked. Hence the bent lawyers’ sanguine attitude to the arrangement, and hence it was in the cops’ own best interests to make sure nobody – especially nobody in blue – got access to those files.

  That was why Angelique had no feasible resort to official channels, regardless of her connections, but then she wasn’t looking for a conviction: just anything that would let her get the drop on Darcourt before anyone else.

  She looks across at the repository compound, a couple of hundred yards away on the other side of the boulevard. She can’t see the two armed cops on patrol inside the perimeter, but she knows they’re there, and that they – or their relief – will be there all day and all night. Nothing’s changed since she was last here: same reinforced concrete walls, same barbed-wire rims, same brutalist low-rise bunker housing the goods, same power-locked electric gate. She’s even pretty sure she recognises the guard on duty at the gatehouse, squirrelly little grey goblin of a man with an exasperatingly fastidious attention to bureaucratic detail. She remembers once musing to herself whether he was armed principally to deter cops from shooting him, rather than anyone intent on raiding the repository.

  This time, however, though she would have no gun with which to threaten him, and even worse, no paperwork, he was going to lead her right inside without asking any questions.

  ‘You about ready to do this?’ Zal asks.

  ‘Make my debut as your sexy assistant? Sure thing.’

  Zal puts the van in gear and drives it around the corner to the spot they selected earlier, the backlot of a closed-down restaurant. Zal parks it with all the precision and care of an SUV-owner in a cramped multistorey; ie slewed diagonally across three marked paces so that it looks abandoned.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, turning off the engine. ‘Make the call.’

  Angelique gets out of the van and dials a number that will get her through to a central police switchboard from anywhere in France. She asks them to patch her through to the local nick in Toulon, where she verifies her police status and informs them she’s spotted a suspicious vehicle. Can’t spare the time to look into it herself and don’t want to tread on anybody’s toes (always worth throwing that one in when it isn’t costing you anything) but it looks abandoned and ought to be checked out.

  The local officer thanks her for the tip and she hangs up. Meanwhile, Zal has opened the rear doors and offers her a considerate but unnecessary hand to climb inside. She takes position, like he’s shown her. She looks up to see him scrutinising, but he’s not merely making sure she’s doing everything right. Something seems to strike him. Zal can always hide what he already knows needs to be concealed, but whatever this is, it came from nowhere and managed to play on his face for a moment before the curtains came down.

  ‘What?’ she asks. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Just thinking you better not sue me if you get deep-vein thrombosis.’

  Nah, Zal, that wasn’t it.

  ‘Get going,’ she says, a smile her way of concealing from him that she knows he’s lying.

  Zal closes the doors and walks swiftly away from the lot towards where their second, locally hired car is parked. He hardly expects they’ll come flying round the next corner with their blue lights flashing, but he wants to be out of sight quickly nonetheless. He hid it from Angelique, but he’s twitchy, disproportionately so. It could be because he hasn’t pulled anything illegal for such a long time, but who’s he trying to kid? It’s because it’s her, and she’s on her own now. It’s his plan, and it’s now out of his control, but what’s worse is, he hasn’t given her an alternative out if it goes wrong. Ordinarily, that’s a cardinal sin, but she insisted she wanted to go ahead, arguing that if it came to it, she did have a genuine ‘Get out of jail free’ card.

  He knew he’d have to mask his anxiety when she lay down in place, as he couldn’t let her see him look worried when she was the one about to be left on the line. Maybe that’s why he got blindsided by something else as he watched the grace and speed with which she climbed into position. It was a fleeting vision, a glimpse of a possibility that could change the whole... No. It was a dumb fantasy that he’d be embarrassed to recall, or just another way of pulling himself apart for nothing.

  His phone rings about forty minutes later. Jeez, he hopes he never gets mugged in this town, if that’s the cops’ response time when you hand them something on a plate.

  ‘Monsieur Innez?’ the cop says, same Anglophone from this morning. ‘We have good news. Our officers have found your van.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘A window is broken, and it has been, how do you say, “hotwired”, so there is some damage to the steering column—’

  ‘Forget the van, is my property intact? That trunk is invaluable to me, I cannot stress this enough.’

  At this, the cop pauses a moment, the bad news beat. ‘The box is still inside, but I must inform you: my officers have reported that they had a look inside, and unfortunately it is empty.’

  Zal lets out a laugh of precisely measured relief. ‘That’s okay, it was empty before. It’s the trunk itself that I’m concerned about.’

  The cop sounds twice as relieved as Zal pretended to be, at the sound of a major headache just vanishing from his casebook.

  ‘In that case, it sounds like we could have a happy ending. If you still have the vehicle’s keys, perhaps it would be best if you met the officers where the van has been found, and then you can examine both the vehicle and the—’

  ‘I’m in Marseille,’ Zal interrupts, sounding suddenly anxious and insistent again.

  ‘Yes, sorry. You told me this morning, you have...’

  ‘That’s right, a very important engagement which I can’t cancel, though I wish I could. I’d drive to you right now, but . . . goddamn it. I’m sorry, I’m just so paranoid now, I mean if something else happened, after... Look, is there somewhere safe – I mean really, really secure – where you can store the trunk until I get back?’

  Angelique holds off until she starts to fear her left bum-cheek is beginning to atrophy, the luminous dial of her wristwatch assuring her that the repository is long closed and well into its overnight regimen. Her fingers trace along the inside edge until they find the stubby release lever, operating it as Zal showed her, the double-catch mechanism designed to prevent it being triggered by accident. She flips up the hinged false bottom, then opens the lid the most delicate sliver to look out. She can see nothing. The vault is in darkness. Good. She slides a slim but powerful torch from her sleeve and uses it to scope her surroundings. The fine beam picks out an array of ugly adjustable aluminium shelving units, bearing the most randomly eclectic cornucopia of improbably juxtaposed objects this side of the Turner Prize. Not so much Aladdin’s Cave, more Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, or at least where the Arabian polis stored the Forty Thieves’ haul while they did Ali Baba for reset.

  Picking out and confirming that the only door (a steel, windowless affair, just as she recalled) is closed, Angelique climbs fully out of the trunk and finds herself among the heaving shelves of the repository’s claustrophobically cluttered – but methodically labelled and catalogued secure – vault. As she had confidently predicted, the local cops didn’t want something as bulky as the trunk clogging up their already cramped and
busy station, and had opted for the greater space and higher security of the repository, which also happened to be conveniently close to where the goods had been found anyway.

  They checked inside it when they first got to the van, which precipitated a discussion between the two investigating gendarmes as to what had been inside it and therefore whether both trunk and van would need to remain in situ and be dusted for prints. Shortly after, however, it was relayed to them that there was nothing missing and they got their orders to shift it just around the corner. There was a short wait for another vehicle, presumably one bigger than whatever they’d rolled up in, before it was transferred amid a reassuring minimum of huffing and puffing, and driven the short distance to the repository. Upon arrival, it was opened for inspection again, presumably by Le Goblin, before being deposited directly at Angelique’s intended destination.

  Her only real worry had been the weight, but even that, Zal assured her, was accommodated within the illusion. Despite being made of light (though sturdy) materials, the trunk looked like it ought to be heavy. It looked old, it looked finely carved and decorated, and most importantly, it looked expensive, which lent expectation of heft to any object.

  She had no such concern about there being any visual clue to the false bottom. When Zal first opened the trunk and let her see inside, she thought he was kidding, presumably having the real one ready to roll out once he’d had his fun. If there was a hidden compartment at the bottom of that box, then it couldn’t be any deeper than about three inches. She was petite and she was supple, but she wasn’t a fucking jellyfish.

  The secret, though, was in the skirts. As the ill-fated Aberdeen manager Ebbe Skovdahl once said of the mini variety, comparing them to statistics, they suggest much, but they hide more than they reveal. The woodwork around the bottom of the trunk was ingeniously constructed to suggest that the underside of the box sat higher than it really did. The illusion was further enhanced by the paintwork on the exterior, which confused the eye into perceiving the box shorter in height; and by even subtler paintwork tricks on the inside, which suggested upon a cursory glance that the outside edges of the bottom were in fact the bottom-most inches of the interior walls.

  She enjoys a near-orgasmic stretch, arching her back and extending every last sinew to work out the knots tied by her confinement. Then she gets to work.

  It’s a good thing she’s got all night. It takes long enough to locate the Bouviere files with only this tiny torch to search through the gloom, but that’s just the beginning of her quest. Bouviere’s practice had been running for more than two decades. There are hundreds of files to flick through, and nothing to immediately identify the ones she’s after, it striking her as just a little too much to hope that Darcourt would have presented under his own name. Given the nature of the surgeon’s speciality, an accompanying mugshot isn’t going to jump out at her upon a cursory glance either, unless there’s a ‘before’ picture included for reference.

  She has to pore over each file methodically, finding quick filters for elimination where appropriate, such as sex, ethnicity, age and extremes of height and weight. Beyond that, she has recourse only to her own memory of what Darcourt looked like, and to the printout of the police artist’s impression she had them email to her that morning. She got the sketch – and the latest – from DC Ishtar Mitra, Dale being unavailable.

  There had been no further developments since Darcourt released Sally Smith. The poor girl turned up on a tube train at Leicester Square, her distress and disorientation exacerbated by mobbing scenes reminiscent of a Beatles concert, before she was finally rescued by two officers of the London Transport Police. She was recovering in hospital but had so far been unable to tell the police anything unknown to anybody with a web browser. She remembered nothing about her abduction, other than feeling sleepy inside the limo. She never saw her captor, she said: not she never saw his face – she never saw him at all. She woke up in her cell after passing out in the limo, and stayed there for the duration of her ordeal before passing out again and waking up in central London. She had no information about Anika’s fate, said the cells were soundproofed so they couldn’t talk to one another. She knew Wilson was dead, because Darcourt told her, but there had been no such announcement regarding the third member of the group.

  She was at least able to tell them that the t-shirt she was dressed in when she was released was not her own, and thus confirm that the slogan it bore – ‘There cannot be sin’ – must be a message from Darcourt. Typically pompous, pretentious and self-indulgently cryptic, Angelique thought. Fortunately, the media hadn’t cottoned on to it – yet. According to Ishtar, Sally had her hands up over her face in fear during the initial camera-phone onslaught, her elbows obscuring the lettering on her chest, and in the subsequent paparazzi shots taken coming out of the tube station, she had a blanket draped around her by her police escorts.

  It was the end of her ordeal, but it had just been the beginning of the siege. Cops getting in and out of the hospital where she was taken had to negotiate a gauntlet not only of news media, but of the several hundred fans/rubberneckers who were keeping permanent vigil outside.

  Ishtar asked for Angelique’s tuppence-worth on the t-shirt. She told her it was most likely another red herring to waste police time and get the public speculating. Nonetheless, she passed on Ray Ash’s phone number anyway, telling Ishtar that if it was of any genuine personal significance to Darcourt, then he was the man who would know.

  If they were keeping the Great British Public in the dark about the slogan, Angelique hoped they were doing the same with the Baker sketch too. Based on a frightened man’s recollection of five-year-distant glimpses, it bore almost no resemblance to the Darcourt of Angelique’s memory, or of any existing images of the man. Unless Bouviere had carried out the greatest max-fax job of all time in altering his appearance beyond recognition, she couldn’t see how the sketch was going to help anybody, least of all her in this particular task.

  In the end, it’s not an image, but a name that stops her riffling fingers and causes her to catch her breath.

  Matlock, L.

  Its robustly percussive consonants stand out amid the mellifluence of so many southern European surnames, and something about the word itself triggers an association.

  She opens the file. The L stands for Lydon. Lydon Matlock. A self-indulgent Darcourt alias if ever she saw one. He had assigned both monikers as codenames at Dubh Ardrain, using the names of the remaining Sex Pistols and two other bands to address the rest of his team.

  It seemed even the needs of secrecy and discretion were not entirely paramount when Simon’s ego needed nourishment.

  She places the file down on the floor and plays the torch across its pages, spreading them out and immediately scanning the ones bearing art. Bouviere carried out extensive reconstructive work in September 2001, some of it restorative due to severe facial abrasions and other injuries. Seems poor Simony-wimony got a wee scrapey-poo and needed a sticking plaster or two, and got the surgeon to give him a whole new face while he was at it. It was a complex, staggered procedure. There were several operations, each detailed in print and accompanied in some cases by X-rays and printouts of computerised models. It’s impossible to know whether they show intended effects or intermediate stages of the process, just as the few close-up photographs of bruised flesh and open tissue could be from the operations or merely documents of Darcourt’s wounds. But having spied a few flakes in the stream, Angelique then discovers there’s gold in them thar hills. Clipped to the back of a previously overlooked page, she finds a black-and-white ten-by-eight of Darcourt – under anaesthetic, hence he never knew it was being taken – that is as good an ‘after’ facial shot as she could have hoped for. He looks almost as distinct from her memory as the Baker sketch, and the closed eyes don’t help, but it’s definitely him.

  Having uncovered one such nugget, she decides to mine deeper. She begins more carefully reading each page of the notes, starting with
the most recent, the mere date of which causes her to double-take, as it is only a year old, and bears the referral details of a major hospital.

  That’s when she hits the true motherlode.

  And now nobody’s going to have to call Raymond Ash. The message is suddenly very obvious, in light of what is now before her eyes in the file of Lydon Matlock.

  ‘There cannot be sin,’ the t-shirt said.

  When there’s no future.

  Zal’s displays of impatient anxiety at the police station, followed by effusive, relieved gratitude at the evidence repository, require very little acting. Presenting himself as an individual consumed by the need to be restored to what is most precious to him is something of a Stanislavskian performance.

  He spent a long night alone in a motel room. He knew it must have been pretty long for Angelique too, but at least she had a task to distract her from her worries. All Zal had to do was wait, and he found it a tough shift, with fretting that she was okay being only a part of it.

  Zal was used to being alone, sleeping alone, floating on an isolated island of himself as much as he was separated from the world aboard the Spirit of Athene. Angelique had only been back in his life a couple of days – and hardly a carefree and pleasant couple of days – but already her absence was an ache, like he was more used to the feeling of being with her than the years without her had ingrained.

  He told himself it was just an exaggerated feeling, symptomatic of his worry: worry that she was safe in the mechanism of his scheme, worry about what he was getting himself into, worry about what dangers they might both yet face. And while all of this was valid, it wasn’t what was most clawing at him.

  The truly disquieting thing, as he lay awake in the dark, was that he found himself starting to wonder if there perhaps was a way to be with her. It was a dangerous thought, a virus that had to be contained because it threatened to undermine his resolve and lay them both vulnerable. He had to concentrate on keeping them both alive, and in the event that he pulled that off, the only further consideration he could afford was in steeling himself to once more let her go. The effect of this virus was that every hour they spent together threatened to weaken that steel, and could only end in them both getting hurt.