A Snowball in Hell Read online

  Also by Christopher Brookmyre

  QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING

  COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

  NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

  ONE FINE DAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

  BOILING A FROG

  A BIG BOY DID IT AND RAN AWAY

  THE SACRED ART OF STEALING

  BE MY ENEMY

  ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL SOMEBODY LOSES AN EYE

  A TALE ETCHED IN BLOOD AND HARD BLACK PENCIL

  ATTACK OF THE UNSINKABLE RUBBER DUCKS

  A SNOWBALL IN HELL

  PANDAEMONIUM

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 9780748131921

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 Christopher Brookmyre

  The moral right of this author has been asserted

  Part of the chapter entitled The Transformed Man first appeared, in slightly different form, as a short story called Mellow Doubt, in the charity anthology Magic, published by Bloomsbury in 2002.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Also by Christopher Brookmyre

  Copyright

  I: The Great Grease-Tailed Shaven Pig Hunt

  Death notices

  Glitterball shards (i)

  Cover story

  Glitterball shards (ii)

  Portrait of a lost self

  Bar act (i)

  Audition

  II: This Insubstantial Pageant Faded

  This rough magic

  Not safe for work

  The good ship black & decker

  First contact

  Bar act (ii)

  The tyranny of normal

  The transformed man

  The oldest motive

  Parental advisory: explicit purpose

  Push the ghosts

  Should maybe have worn her jeans

  Thieves like us

  III: The Perfume of Heroic Deeds

  Living will

  Prey

  Rescue

  The invisible pass

  None of his trinkets wanting

  Constabulary et acetabularii

  Chase this light

  The one that got away

  The inescapable

  Liberation

  Spirit of Athene, one month later

  For Marisa

  I

  The Great Grease-Tailed Shaven Pig Hunt

  Death notices

  Ladies and gentlemen, roll up! Roll on up! Step inside!

  You’ll find it all in here, you’ve never seen anything like it, I promise you.

  Oh, what a show awaits you, roll up!

  You want sick jokes? You want vicarious excitement? You want prurient voyeurism? You want emotion-by-proxy? You want the morally insulated buzz of seeing other people behave appallingly? You want sex? You want clashing egos? You want bitching, scheming, clawing, back-biting? You want deceit? You want betrayal? You want violence? You want horror? You want balletically choreographed and spectacularly executed brutality? You want anguish, suffering, humiliation? You want blood? You want death? You want murder?

  And you want all of that delivered neatly in a package that lets you lap it up but still feel good about yourself?

  Course you fucking do! You’re British!

  So step right this way! Roll up! Log on! Download the podcast! Tune in! Sky-Plus it, so you can replay the best bits!

  It’s all here, I tell you. A freak show like nothing you’ve seen before.

  But don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe. The weirdos, the psychos, the nutters and perverts are all safely insulated on one side of the glass, one side of the CRT, the TFT, the LCD.

  Yeah.

  Your side.

  Napoleon really nailed the British psyche with his ‘nation of shopkeepers’ remark. He didn’t merely mean to disparage our modest ambitions and cowering insularity: he truly understood that what went on in those shops defined us more than what went on in our parliaments, palaces or places of worship. His perceptiveness and indeed outright prescience is vindicated in that the quintessential shop he envisaged hadn’t even come along yet: the local newsagent, wherein we purchase our beloved tabloids, and over whose counter, accompanied by smiles and please-and-thank-yous and self-satisfied civility, passes the judgmental gossip, envy-driven spite, petty-minded prejudice and that secret delight, that most deliciously savoured hypocrisy, a wee bit of postured outrage.

  A nation of shopkeepers, yes, serving a nation of curtain-twitchers: hermetically sealed behind the glass as they spectate upon an absurdly hallowed elite whose lives mean more to them than their own timorous limbos. Never really doing, never really being, always merely looking on, watching other people fight, watching other people fuck. Vicariously living their lives through the attention-gluttonous conduct of the crass and vulgar, and worse, of cyphers just as dull as themselves, but upon whom this latter-day sanctified status of ‘celebrity’ has been conferred merely by the act of being spectated upon, after which every aspect of their future lives is considered valid and eligible for presentation to the watchers behind the glass.

  And listen, listen to that sound this nation of curtain-twitchers makes as it gazes, rapt. It’s like the humming of tens of millions of little cicadas in concert, so get yourself close to just one window and concentrate: isolate the sound. Hear it? Yes, there it is: tut-tut. Tut-tut. For disapproval is the keystone: the pitifully unconvincing façade behind which they hide their pallid cowardice, the means by which they try to fool themselves that this emotion they are feeling is something other than jealousy. Tut-tut. It’s the talisman that protects them from confronting the truth: that they also have all of the appetites, the lusts and hungers they profess to be disgusted by: they just don’t have what it takes to feed.

  That’s why I’ve never exactly been inclined to hang my head in shame any time the newspapers called me a monster. I was a monster. I am a monster. But let’s not pretend for a second that they anything other than fucking loved me for it. I’d have more respect for the cunts if, the next time a serial killer embarked upon his squalid pursuits, one of the tabloids officially sponsored him. They could be honest for a change, have a champagne celebration every time he killed again, in anticipation of their sales going up. Your Soaraway Sun: Proud Sponsor of the Summer 2007 Derbyshire Prostitute Slaughter Spree. In tomorrow’s Mirror: the only official coverage of the New Gay Ripper. They could run competitions, like the old spot-the-ball grids you used to get: ‘Put your cross in the square on the map showing where YOU think the next mutilated corpse will be abandoned, and you could win a white Escort van, the vehicle of choice of several top serial kiddy-murderers!’

  Those ridiculously excitable little midgets pulled the head off it every time I pulled off a job. For an industry that practically runs on moral opprobrium, I wasn’t merely a tanker of fuel, I was an oil strike, a gusher of the black gold, a gift that kept on giving. They competed to say who hated me the most. I particularly relished the keyboard vigilante types, the ones who called me cowardly and wanked on about how much they’d like to be left alone in a room with me. (Careful what you wish for, children.) But deep down, I knew, they were grateful. Christ, look at where they’re reduced to getting their mo
ral impetus when I’m not around to provide it. Witch-hunting Jade Goody, I ask you. Almost as much invective spunked out over her as was ever expended on me, not to mention three times as much column acreage, when all she did was be herself – her charming, charitable, literate, intelligent and highly photogenic self – and in the process give the nation a collective showing up. I killed several hundred people, but I think I’d have won a popularity poll against her after Shettygate.

  They called me a monster, but they lapped up my every performance. No show without Punch, after all, and my goodness, doesn’t this nation of curtain-twitchers love a show.

  So roll up, roll up, roll up! Ladies and gentlemen, step this way, and the best part is it won’t cost you a thing. The only price is what you’re admitting about yourself, and that’s no price at all, because we both already knew that about you anyway.

  Inside is the reality show you really want to see, the star-studded entertainment you’re truly craving when you’re forced to settle for all that insipid fly-on-the-wall tedium.

  It’s called I’m a Celebrity and I’m Never Getting Out of Here.

  I really believed I had given up all this sort of thing, you know. A retirement self-imposed largely, I admit, for reasons of self-preservation.

  I had a very disastrous and very public failure back on September the sixth, 2001, since which I have endeavoured – most of the time, at least – to maintain the extremely low profile that a widespread belief in one’s being deceased affords. The mercy for me, I suppose, was that five days after my snafu at Dubh Ardrain, it was wiped off the news pages and consequently all but erased from public consciousness by events that told me unarguably that the whole game had changed anyway. Talk about burying bad news – New Labour’s spinmeisters couldn’t possibly compete with the way serendipitous happenstance delivered me my consolation prize. A thwarted terrorist attack on a remote hydroelectric facility in the middle of salmonshire was a big story, especially accompanied by the revelation that it had been the work of the notorious terrorist-for-hire known to police across the globe as the Black Spirit. But there was more: it also emerged that the international contract killer’s true identity was that of one Simon Darcourt, Glasgow-born oil-industry executive believed to have perished in the ScanAir Flight 941 bombing over Norway, a terrorist atrocity subsequently attributed to the Black Spirit and thus preceding the Madrid cinema bombing as his acknowledged major-league debut.

  Clearly a rather cringe-worthy few days to be me. But once somebody had gone to the bother of hijacking four passenger jets, using two of them to bring down two of the most globally recognisable buildings in one of the most populous and absolutely the most famous city on the planet, killing upwards of three thousand people, before belly-flopping a third airliner into the single largest and most heavily defended building in the known universe for an encore, I realised my own recent travails had been relegated to chip-wrapper status.

  I realised also that, even if I had pulled off Dubh Ardrain, it would have been merely a high note to bow out on. September the eleventh would have brought down the curtain upon my stint on the world stage either way.

  I was a professional: contract terrorism, some called it; my services available to any individual or organisation who had the contacts to procure them and the budget to meet the price. I’ll admit the bottom line was important, but my most compelling motivation in those days was the challenge of pulling it off. I had professional pride, yet it might be more accurate to say, like the Victorian gentleman-amateur, I played for the love of the game. There was no place for me in that game after September the eleventh. The field now belonged solely to the new breed of Islamist fanatics, and they didn’t need hired help when they had a host of disposable brainwashed drones to deploy as nonpayment-seeking mayhem-delivery systems.

  What also became dishearteningly clear in the aftermath was that from here on in, the Incredible Exploding Arabs would be the only show in town. The USA, having finally endured the indignity of terrorism curling a very large jobbie in their fridge for a change, belatedly decided it was unequivocally a Bad Thing. As opposed to an Occasionally Useful Thing when the CIA were trying to destabilise or prop up any given regime in the Middle East or Central America, or a Romantic Misty-Eyed Thing when Noraid were filling buckets to aid ‘the struggle’ back in the Oul’ Country.

  I had worked for a variety of, frankly, interchangeable ethnic and political separatists, usually with more money than they had any sense of what they might plausibly ever achieve. Half of them were just playing at soldiers, kidding themselves they were part of some great destiny. The other half knew deep down that their struggle was futile, but in the red-misted tantrum of their frustration, wanted to get a few kicks in at Mummy before they inevitably got their bottoms smacked and sent early to bed. I don’t know which constituency was the more pathetic, but I did know that the smarter ones would realise it was now time to cash in whatever chips their armed struggle had accrued and start playing politics with them.

  As a theatre of war, terrorism was no longer going to have roles for such minor players.

  I did once carry out a contract for an Islamist cell, when I bombed the US Embassy in Madrid. (It was described as ‘a cowardly attack via the back door’ – or more accurately the back wall, which conveniently abutted a cinema complex.) Back then, so many such groups were disparate, discrete and frequently conflicted, each in dispute with all the rest over whose strain of fundamentalism was the most pure. This particular faction wanted to strengthen their hand at the Islamist nutter table, and reckoned a high-profile attack would be the very dab. They had the funds but not the infrastructure, which was where I came in.

  Al Qaeda is usually described as a network, but with 9/11 it was obvious that they had discovered global branding, corporate synergy and vertical integration. They would not be outsourcing any more, would not have dealings with anyone who was not a fellow fundamentalist headcase, and had in any event no need for mercenaries when there were thousands of idiots willing to do the work for free.

  My skills were not only redundant, they were arguably anachronistic. Any fucking lunatic can take out a target if he’s prepared to sacrifice himself to do so. But never mind the skill, where’s the fucking fun in that? The real talent, the real panache is in being able to pull off the job then get away clean and clear so that you can trouser the greenback and read the headlines.

  I kept reading about the daring and mental fortitude of the 9/11 pilots, but point of fucking order: mental fortitude implies a cogent decision-making process, which is patently not going on if you believe that flying a jetliner into a skyscraper is your fast-track portal to paradise, where you’ll get to pump six dozen assorted teenage virgins. They weren’t mentally strong, they were deluded beyond the point of insanity. And what is it with these fucking people and teenage virgins anyway? Have they ever actually shagged one? I have, more than once, and none of the encounters would appear on my list of sexual highlights. Why wouldn’t they rather their paradise be hoaching with women who genuinely know how to fuck? Unless, of course, it’s that they’re holding out high hopes for that first-time tightness, due to their dicks being so small that shagging an experienced woman is like flinging a sausage up a close.

  I digress, however, putting off the contemplation of my own embarrassment. My hubris: the sin of pride. Professional pride is a guarantor of discipline, of protocol, checks, balances and downright fastidious attention to detail. Personal pride, however, is a decadent luxury that I ought to have known better than to indulge during anything other than my spare time. In striving to pull off my greatest achievement, I took my eyes off where they needed to be and suffered instead my calamitous, career-ending fuck-up.

  It all came down to a chance encounter with someone from my student years, someone who, like everyone else, believed me dead. Larry the Little Drummer Boy, I called him, aka Raymond Ash. I’ve had several years to contemplate just how statistically unlucky was this fleeting glimpse w
e shared at Glasgow Airport, but it’s how you respond to the unexpected, even to the astronomically unlikely, that makes the difference between the professional who gets the job done and the whining loser who bitches about his luck. I know that now and I fucking well knew it then. I didn’t panic: in a way, it would have worked out better if I had. Instead, I got cocky.

  I knew I couldn’t afford to let him live, but I should simply have put a bullet in him before he could tell anyone he’d seen me, then disappeared his corpse. Instead I tried to get cute, used him to mislead the authorities, telling myself that this was an integral part of the plan, when it was really an act of reckless arrogance that I couldn’t afford. He saw me at the airport, but I made sure he never saw me during his consequent abduction, which I ordered. I guess I was relying upon the cops thinking he was deluded about having seen me, just shaken up by the other things that had subsequently happened to him and pointlessly linking one to the other without any evidential foundation. I let him escape in order that he might lead the authorities to decoy information, and planned to tidy him up as a loose end later, while the cops were busy picking through the wreckage at Dubh Ardrain. But I underestimated him, and certainly underestimated the risk of putting myself in the arena with someone who knew just a little too much about how I think. Foolishly, arrogantly, I handed him the advantage, and he handed me my arse. Him and that cop, the X Woman.

  I lost every one of my crew and was lucky – extremely lucky – to escape with my life. Worst of all, my identity was compromised. The police and very soon the whole world knew my real name, my face, and the fact that I did not, after all, perish in the ScanAir bombing.