A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  A knock at the door seems to render it all moot. He looks round the room, can’t see any belongings she forgot. He thinks: fuck the out. No matter how painful it gets, he’ll deal with that shit later. Right now, let it be complicated, let it be her returning to say goodbye with a kiss, a hug, anything.

  He opens the door and finds a gun stuck in his face instead. Okay, maybe not that complicated.

  There’s two men, middle-aged, just the chubby side of burly, both wearing grey suits, one balding but bullet-cropped and the other with a bad comb-over. They railroad him into the room, gun still pressed directly into his forehead by Comb-Over while Bullet-Head closes the door.

  ‘Mr Innez,’ Comb-Over says. ‘Welcome back to Britain. Her Majesty would like to extend her hospitality.’

  Bullet-Head turns around to face him, dangling a pair of handcuffs.

  ‘For a minimum twelve years,’ he adds.

  Angelique can’t think of anything that seems less important than this press conference as she leaves the Halton Court Hotel. It’s not even window dressing, more a fig leaf of an exercise to cover the polis’s collective nakedness. There’s nothing to report: the public have access to as much information as the cops, so if they want to know the latest, they can log on or, it would now appear, tune in. The only thing the police have an exclusive on is something they have no fucking intention of sharing right now, that being Darcourt’s insufficiently impending demise.

  She resents having to bail out on Zal, but truth is, she’s just so jumpy about this massive act of deceit she’s embarked upon that she feels she has to be super-keen little PC Shiny Buttons in order to allay suspicion. He only flew into town today, but she’s felt like she’s looking over her shoulder the whole time to see who might be watching. In fact, she finds herself literally looking over her shoulder as she walks away from the hotel. There were two men she’d have figured for cops walking towards her as she exited the building, but to her slight relief – if not complete comfort – they’ve gone.

  It is only as she is descending into the tube station around the corner that her surroundings trigger a recall of whatever her mind had subconsciously flagged on her way here. Like jumping back three chapters on a DVD, she suddenly sees the ticket hall at Holborn again, except this time she knows what to look for. Grey suit, pot belly, bad Bobby Charlton effort up top. She had seen him at Holborn, then seen him again outside the Halton Court. It just hadn’t clicked because there were – oh shit – two of them. They’d been walking towards her as she left, then disappeared: undoubtedly, she now realises, into Zal’s hotel.

  She turns and runs, full pelt, back to the Halton Court, where she storms up to the desk and sticks her badge in the receptionist’s face like it’s a revolver.

  ‘Two men, grey suits, little hair. They just came in here. Where did they go?’

  The girl looks utterly flustered and not a little confused, glancing from side to side like she’s expecting someone else to answer for her.

  ‘This is an emergency,’ Angelique all but yells. ‘Where did they go.’

  ‘I think they . . .’ she stumbles, long enough for her accented words to make Angelique worry she hasn’t mastered the local tongue. She curses the fact that having learned several internationally popular languages, Polish has come up on the rails and overtaken most of them here in the UK. ‘They said they were police too,’ the girl eventually volunteers. ‘They asked which guest you had been in to see.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Angelique is about to charge for the stairs, but stops and turns back to the receptionist.

  ‘Did they show you badges?’

  The girl looks apologetically helpless.

  ‘I do not...I cannot remember.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Never mind. Just gimme a swipe card for room two-twelve, please. Now.’

  The girl lifts a blank and slots it into the mag-strip dock, then begins tapping at the computer keyboard. Time passes. The girl stares at the screen, twitching a little, her cheeks hot with embarrassment.

  ‘I am sorry, the system...’

  Angelique remembers seeing a cart in Zal’s corridor, a maid in the middle of her turn-down duties: an invaluable service for those folk incapable of pulling their own sheets back or who can’t make it to the pillow without the incentive of a square of chocolate to go that final yard.

  ‘Forget it,’ she says, and takes off.

  She finds the cart one room along from where she last saw it, and flashes her badge at the maid.

  ‘I need this swipe card,’ she explains quietly, and lifts it from the tray at the side of the trolley.

  Angelique stops outside a moment and listens. She can hear one man’s voice, talking softly.

  ‘. . . no, meek as a lamb. So we should have him hand-delivered within the...’

  She swipes the card and steps inside. The guy with the Charlie Bobbleton is seated on the bed, his bullet-headed partner standing by the window at the far end, talking into his mobile. To her right, the bathroom door is open, and inside Zal is handcuffed to a towel rail. He raises his eyebrows in salute, looking sheepish to the point of embarrassment.

  ‘I’ll have to call you back,’ says Bullet-Head, as Bobbleton gets up from the bed.

  Angelique produces her badge and holds it up, by way of telling him to stay put.

  ‘Police. What’s the script, chaps? Let’s see some ID.’

  Bobbleton reaches inside his jacket with his right hand and produces a gun.

  ‘Will this do, Officer de Xavia?’ he asks.

  Angelique takes her eyes off his for a brief glance at the weapon. Looks like an HK Mark 23; the vanilla rather than the laser-aiming model, but the main thing is it’s not some Russian ex-military piece of shit, so it confirms these aren’t gangsters. She clocked what they were one foot inside the door: ex-cops, post-fifty-five, working private – and most likely corporate – security to fill the time and fill the coffers before retirement proper.

  She knows there’s no way this guy’s pulling the trigger. She’s a situation to be handled, an obstacle to get around.

  ‘It’s Detective Inspector, dickhead.’

  ‘Oh, not once this particular chicken has come home to roost, you won’t be. Don’t know what games they played at your school, darlin’, but the cops are supposed to jail the robbers, not fuck them.’

  ‘I went to school in Glasgow, bawbag. Let me show you what we played.’

  Approximately three seconds later, it’s Angelique who’s holding the gun, while Bobbleton is holding his face, lying on the carpet beneath her. She’s sustained some damage herself: prick had a sap stashed in his sock and got her a sore one just above the eye before she put him down.

  She was right about him not shooting, though: he had the safety on the whole time. There’s no loyalty bonus going to make it worth his while to shoot a cop.

  Bullet-Head remains where he was, observing developments with his arms folded and a bemused but calm look on his face.

  ‘Who are you working for?’ she asks.

  ‘Client confidentiality forbids me from answering that question,’ he says acidly, though there’s a smugness about him betraying the fact that he’d just love to tell her if it wasn’t more fun to dick her about.

  ‘Gimme your phone, and the keys to the cuffs. Throw them both on the bed. NOW!’

  He rolls his eyes and tosses the phone towards Angelique’s side of the bed. As it hits the duvet, Zal emerges from the bathroom at her back.

  Bullet-Head looks incredulously at Zal, then glares at Bobbleton.

  ‘I thought you cuffed him.’

  ‘Don’t fucking look at me. “Oh, if we’re going someplace, can I put my jacket on before you cuff me?”’ he mimics, crap American accent. ‘“Fine,” you said.’

  ‘Well, how was I to know—’

  ‘The keys,’ Angelique interrupts, lifting the mobile. ‘Toss them, come on.’

  Bullet-Head sha
kes his napper.

  ‘It would appear your boyfriend doesn’t need them.’

  ‘No, but you and your boyfriend will when I cuff the pair of you to that same towel rail. Give.’

  She toggles through the menu, looking for the outgoing-call log.

  Bullet-Head folds his arms. She glances from the end of the gun to the screen of the phone. The last, truncated call was to ‘D Holland’.

  Bullet-Head is nodding with undisguised self-satisfaction.

  ‘Get up, Arthur,’ he tells Bobbleton. ‘Officer de Xavia is going to stand aside and let us leave now, because Officer de Xavia really, really does not want to have to book us in at the station and explain any of this, now does she?’

  Angelique is present at the press conference in body only. She stands a few feet to the side of the backboards, out of the television cameras’ sightlines, her eyes on Dale and Aldwyn Keen. Kudos to the commander for sharing the stocks, the brass usually only making themselves available when there’s credit to be doled out, but nothing he or Dale says registers in her head, and not merely because it’s worthless.

  It’s a good thing she wasn’t asked to help front this latest excuse-and-apology showcase, as she can feel a swelling fast beginning to grow above her right eye. She managed to stop the bleeding before getting to HQ, but despite buying a bag of frozen peas at a Tesco Metro and applying it throughout the walk here, that prick with the lead sap has made his mark. It was noticed, too, Dale immediately asking what had happened. She said she walked into the back of someone carrying an easel on the tube. It sounded embarrassingly daft enough for it to seem genuine, but her paranoia imagined him divining all sorts of revelations from it.

  Debbie Holland, RSGN’s corporate zombie bitch: that’s who had sent the male-pattern-baldness brothers after Zal, and what made it all the more bitter was that it was Angelique who had put her on to the scent. It was impossible to know – and probably just self-harm to speculate – precisely how long they had been tracking her, waiting for her to lead them straight to him. Could have been from the minute she walked out of their corporate HQ in the city; certainly long enough to know she’d been abroad, no doubt, from which they deduced that she had made contact.

  Zal had begun packing his bag as soon as Holland’s rentacops left the room.

  ‘I’ll find someplace else,’ he said. ‘Drop you a text once I’m settled. You better get to your meeting.’

  Angelique would have shaken her head if it didn’t feel like it was close to falling off. ‘This isn’t going to work, Zal,’ she told him. ‘You’re here a day and they’re already on to you.’

  Her next line ought to have been that he should leave, that she couldn’t ask him to do this any more, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it in the face of an impossible choice. If he left, she would probably lose her parents. If he stayed, there was every chance she could lose all three of them.

  Zal looked at her with an amused sense of minor grievance, like he was insulted by the idea.

  ‘The last thing you need to worry about is those clowns,’ he said. ‘They shot their load too early. You only get one chance to take me by surprise, and they just blew theirs. There will not be a second.’

  ‘They could get lucky, Zal. We don’t know who else is out there. And given everything else I’m dealing with, I don’t think I could take the irony of being the person who precipitates you finally getting nicked for the RSGN robbery.’

  ‘Hey,’ he told her softly, ‘I always knew this was part of the package.’

  He said it as though it was no more an inconvenience of coming here than the weather being cooler and the beer being warm. She remembered the look on his face when he was cuffed in the bathroom: rather than fear or panic, it was like: ‘Sorry you have to see this’. But that was Zal all over the back, wasn’t it? If he genuinely was afraid, the last person he was going to confide that to right now was Angelique.

  At least she didn’t have to torture herself with wondering what would have happened had she not gone back.

  ‘Could you have undone those cuffs at any time?’ she asked him.

  ‘Not at any time,’ he answered. ‘Only when it was funny. Sorry, old joke. But there was no point doing it while they were watching over me with a gun. If you hadn’t shown up, I’d have chosen my moment. In magic, timing is everything.’

  She wanted to grab him, hold him. She wanted to tell him to come and stay at her place, her racing mind suddenly seeing a perverse logic to it being the last place they would now expect to find him: a triumph of emotion and desire over solid thinking. She just wanted to be near him, because everything felt better that way. Even if it was another of his illusions, she wanted to be lost in it, because it was far preferable to the reality.

  She stares blankly, barely focused at the seated rows of reporters, the bank of cameras hemming them in at the rear. There’s a clamour of questions, just white noise in her head, which is throbbing from tension. She places a delicate hand upon the swelling, traces a finger over the thin line of clotted blood.

  They’re dangerous for each other. That’s why this can’t work, why she was right to let him go five years back. With this thought, she realises that he hasn’t asked her about that day at the musée, and promptly deduces why: he didn’t go either. He knew it couldn’t work. He had to run, had to find his new life.

  Yet when she came and found him again, he dropped everything for her. He loved her – for what else is love if not what he is doing for her now? – but she knows it can’t work. Five years on, nothing has changed.

  Her phone chimes, signalling a text and prompting the usual internal responses to which she seems incapable of developing an immunity. Too soon to be Zal, she guesses, and guesses right. It’s another anonymous message. Her heart hammering, she presses the key to view it. It’s just two short lines: one a statement, the second an instruction.

  Having read them, she looks around at the cameras, the reporters, the cops, and nods to herself, for everything has become clear. She wasn’t cut out for infidelity. Those two weeks with Zal five years ago had been the most exciting but also the least comfortable of her life, and right now she is being pulled to pieces by what she is being forced to do. She doesn’t know how many people she is betraying, but she knows the figure is at least two too many.

  She feels suddenly calm, the calm of resolution. She knows, finally, what she must do. No matter how it works out for her parents and the hostages, there are two other lives beyond that fate for whom she has a responsibility.

  It has to end.

  So what do they say about this state of consecration, this ascension to an exalted echelon of renown? What is fame? According to Byron, it is ‘the advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little’. Ooh, grumpy trousers, but spoken nonetheless with the admirable contempt of one who had already scooped his fill.

  According to Socrates, ‘fame is the perfume of heroic deeds’. What would the most venerated of Greek philosophers think of Bedroom Popstars, or Big Brother, were he to witness the willing indignities of those seeking only that perfume, and who regarded its scent as an end in itself? But perhaps old Byron was protesting too much, and perhaps there’s nothing new under the sun. Tacitus said that ‘love of fame is the last thing even learned men can bear to be parted from’. So perhaps one’s deeds, whether heroic or in some other way remarkable, have never been entirely their own reward. And nor has that reward, that perfume, been dispensed throughout history with fairness or consistency, in any judiciously measured recognition of merit or dessert.

  ‘Fame is like a shaved pig with a greased tail,’ said Davy Crockett, ‘and it is only after it has slipped through the hands of some thousands, that some fellow, by mere chance, holds on to it!’ The honourable gentleman late of San Antonio, whimsical as his turn of phrase might be, is closest to the truth, particularly illuminating upon the arbitrary nature of this blessing as it is about to be bestowed upon my
subject tonight.

  I feel like Willie Wonka here, one last golden ticket to hand out. I hope its recipient is appreciative of how many people will be left disappointed once that last place is taken. Not merely because the lustre of endless, tantalising possibility always makes the announcement seem like a comedown, no matter how famous the celeb: an answer that can never be as exciting as the question. No, there will be disappointment also among those who have moved to exploit that excitement. The mere knowledge of there being one final celebrity to be abducted has itself provided a meal of carrion for the buzzards among the fame-hungry, those so ravenous as to have no concerns for their own dignity as they fall upon the maggoty meat. Such as those celebs who have, since yesterday, issued statements about going under protection – note ye, not merely gone under protection, but instructed their publicists to announce the fact – in order to stake a claim of being sufficiently famous as to be plausibly considered under my threat. And what is surely the greatest indictment is that more than one has had the same bottom-feeding idea.

  Appalling, you may think, but there’s worse: such as going into hiding, not telling anyone where you are and not answering your mobile, in order to get your picture on the TV news bulletins as ‘feared missing’.

  Oh yes. Step forward ubiquitous trash-icon ‘Cassandra’. Real name: Sandra Clark. Occupation: having tits. The feminists slagged her off, but in truth, seldom has the male of the species been so effectively humiliated as by this self-seeking bitch’s demonstration that a few pounds of strategically deployed silicon can blind them to an abject lack of charm, personality, intellect, talent or any glimmer of genuine sexuality.

  And step forward disgraced former MP Liam Cadzow, along with, as always, his ghastly fucking harridan of a missus, Annabelle. Since he lost his seat in parliament and narrowly avoided the clink along with Aitken and Archer, I had thought that the only publicity avenue left unexplored by this pair was hardcore porn, but now it seems Liam has played a cute card by effectively saying, ‘I’m Brian and so’s my wife.’