One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

by Christopher Brookmyre

  It was only a four-, maybe five-foot jump to the next balcony, but the forty feet of fuck-all underneath added an unwelcome note of excitement. Davie counted to three and dived across the gap, landing with a palm-grazing tumble on the concrete of the next terrace. He picked himself up and pushed the handle of the patio doors, which remained fastly closed.

  ‘Fuck.’ He’d assumed this keycard-override business downstairs would open everything, but he’d forgotten that the sliding panels were on a plain old manual lock. There were a couple of one-time petermates of his who’d be pissing themselves if they could see this, career housebreakers who lapped up tales of burglary incompetence. He decided he wouldn’t begrudge them their laughter if he actually lived to tell them the tale.

  Two more jumps, two more balconies, one lightly sprained wrist and a bloodily stinging collection of grazes later, he made it to an unlocked portal and charged inside.

  As he neared the end of the corridor he failed to spot any kind of hatch for a laundry chute, and he remembered with growing alarm that Catherine had said it was ‘round the corner’. His route had taken him three rooms along, so it was possible he was in the wrong hallway altogether. Worse than that, there was a stairwell just a few yards away, and he could hear the sound of footsteps from it, though he couldn’t be sure how far above or below they originated.

  He looked around again. The door nearest him was marked Private, and lacked the brass fittings that distinguished the residential rooms. It opened to reveal a cupboard packed on one side with cleaning utensils – mops, brushes, buckets – mostly still wrapped in Cellophane, and on the other side sat a blue canvas laundry cart. Right in the centre was the hatch he was looking for, sunk into the wall, four feet back from the door. The shaft itself sat behind a good six inches of concrete, which was why he hadn’t heard anything from within. Neither, he hoped, would the pursuers.

  Davie climbed inside and pulled the hatch closed behind him, supporting himself by pressing his feet and one hand against the sides. The darkness was total, for which he was grateful. The drop was twice what had been beneath him on the balconies, and this time there were two people for him to hit on the way down. He began his descent very slowly, edging his feet lower by tentative increments and nervously pulling his hands away from the sides, only to replace them quickly each time he felt the sensation of gravity upon his body weight. A yard or so down, his feet encountered one of the braces that held the chute’s sections together, and after finding another one the same distance down again, he had the confidence to move more easily, allowing himself to slide until reaching the next indentation. This allowed swifter and more assured progress (admittedly unmeasurable in the dark), the slides soon becoming more like bounces in a pseudo-abseiling descent. He’d therefore built up both a rhythm and a momentum by the time his feet landed on fingers and his exposed groin crunched into the corresponding head.

  The obstruction instantly disappeared from beneath him, then he also began to fall, his legs temporarily unable to apply pressure after the blow to his testicles. His arms were forced uselessly above his head by the drop, and he slid for several terrifying yards until power returned to his thighs, upon which he was able to brake with the outsides of his feet. He thumped hard into the next brace and came to a halt there, breathing fast and heavily with fright.

  Looking below for further sign of whoever he had struck, he saw only a bright white square at what had to be the bottom of the chute. He granted himself a few more seconds to let his balls recover, then bounced quickly down the final few yards, dropping out on to a soft bed of linen and towels. At the other end of the laundry hopper lay Gavin, semi-conscious and groaning incoherently.

  Catherine’s face appeared, peering over the side. ‘Is he all right?’ she asked, keeping her voice low. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I think he’s just sore and a bit pissed. I landed on his head comin’ doon the shaft. I reckon my balls got the worst of it, but he lost his grip and fell the last couple o’ floors.’ Gavin gave out a muffled moan, his face half buried in towelling cotton. ‘Lucky for him this thing wasnae empty, or he’d have broken his legs. Come to think of it, why isnae it empty? I thought this place wasnae open.’

  ‘I’m sure Gavin’s made, ehm, a few overnight stays,’ Catherine explained, her cheeks glowing a little, perhaps from her exertions.

  ‘Well, at least he didnae fall into someone else’s dirty laundry, eh? Anyway, do you want to gie me a hand gettin’ him out?’

  Catherine shook her head. ‘We might as well leave him be if he’s comfortable. We’re not going anywhere.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘The doors are locked from the outside. I’m sorry. The only way out of here is the way we came in.’

  Davie gripped the top of the hopper and pulled himself over the side, dropping to his feet on the floor beside Catherine. The aqua-blue of her dress was streaked with dust, and was ripped around her left shoulder, where a little blood also stained the fine material.

  ‘Thank God for lycra, eh?’ she said, acknowledging his concern. ‘If I’d gone for a taffeta ballgown I’d be stuck in that chute till doomsday.’

  She looked back at Davie’s attire, grime and bloodstains smearing his white shirt where he’d been wiping his grazed hands. Both his trouser legs were torn below the knees, and he could consider his new shoes thoroughly ‘christened’.

  ‘Don’t know how James Bond manages it,’ he said.

  ‘At least you kept your tie on,’ Catherine observed.

  ‘Forgot I was wearin’ it.’ He patted at it with one hand then pulled the thing free. ‘Miracle I didnae strangle masel’.’ Davie dropped the tie to the floor, which was when he noticed that Catherine was in her bare feet.

  ‘Dropped the shoes and tights down the chute first,’ she explained. ‘Mother Bridget in RE always said high heels would be the ruination of us St Mick’s girls, but I don’t think this was the outcome she had in mind. Of course, the bloody things landed in all this laundry, and there was me at the top listening for them hitting the ground, to hear how far down it was. Endless bloody silence. I started wondering whether the chute went right down and opened out into the sea.’

  ‘It must have taken some bottle, goin’ first too. You did well.’

  ‘Oh yeah, David, I did great. Led us all into a locked room.’ She walked away from the hopper to the heavy double doors, demonstrating with a push that they were locked.

  Davie looked around the room. Apart from shelves stacked with clean linen, and a small fleet of laundry carts, there wasn’t a lot to the place. ‘Where’s all the machines?’ he asked.

  Catherine looked apologetic again. ‘This isn’t actually a laundry as such,’ she said, sitting down deflatedly on the bare floor. Davie squatted beside her, his back to the wall, still scanning the room for possibilities. ‘It’s a “laundry depot” or “laundry station” or something, I can’t remember the term. The resort’s got one big central laundry servicing all the hotels; it’s on this level somewhere. This place is where the Laguna’s dirty stuff is supposed to get sent from and returned to. So the good news is that there are corridors on this deck linking all parts of the resort via the central laundry. The bad news is that the corridor leading from this one starts on the other side of these doors. I’ve dropped us in it. Literally.’

  Davie looked at Catherine as she sat and stared miserably into space. Interrupted upstairs before she could unburden herself, the woman was sure hell-bent on taking the blame for something tonight.

  ‘I don’t remember anyone else havin’ any brilliant suggestions,’ he told her. ‘We needed a hidin’ place and that’s what you gave us. Plus, they’re less likely to look for us somewhere that’s locked from the ootside. You kept the heid up there. I’d say I owe you one.’

  ‘No, David.’ Her eyes lost their blank glaze and focused sharply upon him. ‘I’m about the last person on this earth that you owe anything.’

  Catherine turned her head tow
ards the back of the room, glancing at the hopper wherein Gavin lay. There was no sign of him stirring, which Davie considered a mercy for all parties. When the poor bastard did wake up, it would be with a family-size variety pack of headaches. Then he’d remember that they were the least of his worries, and wouldn’t that be a fun moment.

  She looked back at Davie. ‘That night,’ she said with a resigned sigh. ‘The night of the Easter disco, when you, I mean, when Derek Patterson—’

  ‘Saturday, March 24th 1984. I don’t normally have a great memory for dates, but for some reason that one sticks in my mind. That’s the night you’re talkin’ about, isn’t it?’

  She nodded. Davie smiled, trying to let her know it wasn’t sacred ground. He knew what she was going to tell him.

  ‘You were the girl,’ he said, saving her the strain. It was a rough enough night already.

  ‘You knew?’ Her voice was a horrified whisper, her eyes reddening again. ‘You always knew?’

  Davie took one of her hands in his own, gently shaking his head. ‘Not until tonight. I never saw your face. I don’t think I even looked. It wasn’t a priority at the time.’

  ‘I was so scared,’ she whispered. ‘I was so, so scared. I was coming back from the toilets and he just appeared from behind and pulled me into the art room. I think I’d knocked him back for a dance; he was in the year above, I didn’t even know who he was. He’d some kind of art knife in his hand, and he said he’d cut me if I made any noise. “I’ll mark you, hen,” he kept saying.’ Catherine twisted her expression in an angry parody. ‘“I’ll fuckin’ mark your face.” Then he began touching me. To this day I don’t know how far it would have gone if you hadn’t appeared.

  ‘When the two of you started fighting I just ran. I went back to the toilets and locked myself in and sat there crying, for ages. I tried to cry quietly so’s no-one would knock on the cubicle asking what was wrong. By the time I came out, everyone was in the car park. There were police cars, an ambulance, God, all the lights. But when I heard what happened, I said nothing. I didn’t tell anyone. I was too ashamed.

  ‘There was a policeman and a policewoman came round the classes on the Monday. They split up the girls from the boys and she asked us to come forward at lunchtime if any of us “knew anything” about what happened on the Saturday night. They were looking for someone to back up your story, and presumably Derek Patterson wasn’t going to own up to his part. But I couldn’t come forward. I didn’t want anybody to know what had happened to me, what he’d done. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’

  Catherine wiped away her tears, sniffing a little. ‘As time went on, every time I heard or read about what was happening to you, I always felt so guilty. You’d barely turned sixteen by that night, and maybe you wouldn’t have ended up on that … downward spiral if, if …’

  She ran out of words, sighing, closing her eyes. When she opened them again she was looking away. Davie felt banjoed by the sheer weight of what she’d been carrying around with her all this time. He watched her blink away more tears, then reached into his pocket for a paper hanky.

  Seek no absolution: his penance and his protector; his pain and his strength; and, most of all, his guide. But still, it didn’t say anything about dishing it out. The very least she deserved was the truth, the substance of which forced out a small laugh.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘I think you must have gone aboot school wi’ your eyes shut, Catherine,’ he told her. ‘Do you no’ remember who I was? The way you’re talkin’, it sounds like some storybook act of chivalrous gallantry, for which the hero was unjustly imprisoned. It wasnae. I was a fuckin’ nutcase, an absolute class-A bam. I was on aboot ten last warnin’s fae the polis an’ the panel an’ everybody else by the time that happened. An’ if I hadnae been sent away for that, then it would have been for somethin’ else no’ long after.

  ‘Get this straight: I wasnae comin’ to your rescue that night. I was in the art room because I was bored o’ the disco an’ I was lookin’ for glue to sniff. When Deek dragged you in, I didnae see your face, because all I needed to see was an excuse. Bang: you were my maw, he was my da, if you want some cheap retro-psychology. I just waded in. You’d nothin’ to do wi’ it.’

  Catherine looked even less sure of herself, but that was understandable: he’d thieved her sackcloth, so now she was naked. She tried to steal some back.

  ‘But you must have hated me – hated whoever the girl was.’

  ‘Oh Christ, aye. Fuckin’ bitch. This was what I got for tryin’ to help somebody. If I’d just left that lassie tae her fate, nane o’ this other shite would’ve happened. All that stuff. Loads o’ that stuff. Damn right I hated whoever she was – it was a big comfort to have somebody else to blame for everythin’. Better that than if I’d got sent away just for hammerin’ some poor bastard who never deserved it.’

  Davie shifted position on the floor, turning to face her more directly.

  ‘See, the biggest fuck-ups you meet inside are the guys who cannae stop hangin’ on to one wee thing that wasnae their fault, one wee thing that they think, if it hadnae been for that, everythin’ would be different. “If that tube had just minded his ain fuckin’ business, I’d never have ended up glassin’ him, an’ I wouldnae be in here.” Because no matter how long or short you’re inside for, you never really get out – up here, I mean – until you cut all that shite loose.

  ‘I did terrible things, Catherine, believe me. Inside an’ out. I tortured people. I mutilated people. I inflicted damage an’ pain like it was a fuckin’ religion. I could’ve improvised a lethal weapon oot a bag o’ marshmallows if it was the only thing to hand. That’s who I was; and I know that that’s who I still am and always will be. But the difference now is that I can choose not to do those things, a choice I couldnae make until I’d accepted that the person makin’ it was me. I could blame the prison system for a lot of it – an’ I still do blame the fuckin’ prison system for a lot of it – but it had to be me that changed. Otherwise I’d still be there, in the endless circle of gettin’ fucked by it, retaliatin’, then gettin’ fucked again.’

  Catherine squeezed his hand. ‘I feel kind of daft now,’ she said. ‘But it’s been with me for so long. Now and then I’d forget about it, but something would always bring it back, so when this reunion thing came along …’

  He returned the squeeze. ‘Cut it loose,’ he told her. ‘Cut all the shite loose.’

  She nodded, even managing half a smile.

  ‘Okay. Consider it cut.’

  ‘Good. Now all you need to worry aboot is gettin’ oot o’ this place alive.’

  21:44 laguna hotel hunt the cunt

  This stuff went all the way back to his schooldays, he knew. He’d never been able to shake it off, it had always transmogrified itself to become part of whatever he was doing; in fact, when he looked back now, he saw that it had probably dictated what he was doing. Since he was eleven years old, William Connor had been striving to impress Finlay Dawson. The stupidest thing was that he didn’t even fucking like him.

  He and Dawson had met at Craiglethen College, south of Edinburgh, where mere alphabetical juxtaposition threw them together in their first class, seating Connor, last of the Cs, at a double desk next to Dawson, first of the Ds. It was as arbitrary as that. Very few of the boys knew each other, so for the eternity of that first morning, the person you’d been plonked beside was the only one you could talk to.

  Dawson was probably as lost and apprehensive as everyone else, but Connor found himself looking up to him almost immediately. He always had just that little bit more: a few centimetres taller, a few months older; he was a boarder while Connor was a day-boy; his father was a colonel while Connor’s was a farmer; he’d been to Murrayfield while Connor had only been to the Melrose Sevens.

  Thus began the unfulfilled life-long quest for his approval.

  Connor made schoolmates that he got on better with, that he had a better laugh with, but if anyone asked w
ho his best friend was, he’d have told them Dawson, even though he knew Dawson was unlikely to give a reciprocal answer. It wasn’t that Dawson had better friends; more that Dawson wouldn’t have a ‘best friend’ anyway. He was always very self-sufficient and even slightly aloof, which in retrospect Connor could see made his endorsement all the more desirable. It was also, however, eternally unobtainable.

  In later years he heard someone say of Dawson’s haughtiness, ‘If he hasn’t eaten it, he’s fucked it’, but that expression usually carried the inference that the subject was lying. In Connor’s experience, Dawson had always been hard to impress because he usually did have something that beat your hand. For instance, when Connor finally persuaded his parents to buy him a Chopper like Dawson’s, with its nifty three-speed stickshift in the middle, he returned after the summer to find that Dawson had moved on to a racer, with drop-handlebars and a ten-speed lever-gear system.

  And, of course, when it came to their shared fascination with and ambition of soldiery, Dawson, with his family’s military background, was always at an advantage. Connor owned a Dinky model of a Chieftain tank; Dawson had been inside a Chieftain tank. Connor had been to the Imperial War Museum; Dawson’s house was the Imperial War Museum.

  Even on the rare occasions when he was bested, Dawson had a way of making you feel that the things you were good at mattered less than the things he was good at. Connor may have won the mile race, but it was the sprint that was the big one. Connor might be better at the javelin, but the discus, well, that was the event that took real skill.

  Military life had been much the same. As things worked out, they didn’t see that much of each other down the years, but when their paths did cross, Dawson was always that rank higher; his unit had always seen that bit more action. Then when later they both turned mercenary, Dawson always seemed to be making that bit more money, operating that bit higher up the chain.