Angelique is standing next to the stage inside the Tivoli nightclub, where the TV crews are starting to dismantle their equipment and the last of the hacks are drifting away. She finds there’s something unsettling about being in a nightclub during the day, with the house lights up and the music off. It’s not the disappointment of being behind the scenes, of an illusion dispelled, to which the access-all-areas pass of her police warrant card has often exposed her. There is undoubtedly something that kills your dreams, that extinguishes an enduring ember of childhood wonder when her investigations take her backstage at the theatre, or through the sets of a theme-park ride with the machinery stopped and the lights on full, but that’s not the sensation here this morning. Instead, far from dispelling the illusion, it seems all the easier to imagine the place in full swing, to hear the music, see the gels and strobes, the bottles and glasses, the pulsating throng on the dancefloor and the tentative couplings discreetly and palpitatingly progressing in a dozen dusky recesses.
What’s gnawing at Angelique is a sense of missing out: an awareness of other people’s good times she can’t be a part of, and not merely another grass-is-greener self-torturing fantasy. It’s a memory, a recall of the way it felt to be inside a place like this, twenty years and fifty corpses ago. She remembers the promise of such places, as thick in the air as the perfume, pheromones and cigarette smoke: the tantalising possibility that tonight you might meet someone, and it would be perfect. It was a promise from the time before knowledge and experience could corrupt the fantasy, before her imagination could vividly exhibit in advance all the ways in which any potential relationship wouldn’t work out.
The press conference is long since wrapped up, but she’s waiting here for someone. She’ll be glad when the last of the media shower have bailed and the cops have the place to themselves again, as she’s been feeling understandably self-conscious. When it’s been an agreed strategy to make sure the cameras and the eyes of everyone present are fixed upon you, it’s hard not to feel a little on-the-spot. Her moment under the limelight, the orchestrated part deliberately intended to make her the focus of so much attention: that was the easy bit. Ironically, it was like being undercover, a paradoxical sense of refuge and anonymity to be found in the act of being in character, playing a part. What she wasn’t used to was this new experience of not being able to exit the stage and take the mask off. Growing up in small-town Scotland with a brown face had given her plenty of early experience of what it felt like to be stared at, but there was never any chance of becoming inured to it, and happily in adulthood it had seldom been a problem. Today, though, there was no escaping this curious scrutiny, the awareness of remaining the focus of curious glances long after the spotlight was back on Detective Superintendent Dale during the press conference, or indeed after the whole show was over. It came with the unspoken words: ‘That’s her’, and an unsettling awareness that people felt such casual spectating was their right, that she had somehow just become public property.
Even more vertiginous was the inescapable sense of certain unstoppable processes having been initiated, over which she would now have little if any control. A juggernaut with no brakes had just rolled over the brow of a hill, and she was not so much being handed the wheel as being strapped to the front and used as a hood ornament. On the upside, if she really was serious about getting out of the police, then this was, at least, an irreversible step towards the exit in as much as it precluded any future undercover work. Taking away the thing she did best and felt most comfortable with wasn’t going to leave much reason to stay. Maybe that was one of the reasons she agreed to come over here. That and the opportunity to absent herself from Dougnac and the drip-drip war of attrition he habitually conducted against her resolve at times like this.
There was also the trifling matter of a mass murderer she had thought long dead apparently still walking the earth and practising his forte with renewed alacrity.
Shaw, it turned out, wasn’t part of the investigation. He had just been the conduit, a friendly voice on the other end of the phone to keep her from hanging up. David Dale was running the job, largely on the back of his success in several high-profile, publicity-intense cases, including breaking the Stockbroker Belt kidnap ring last year and nailing Marjorie Petitjean for offing both of her husband’s parents, Reginald and Harriet, also known as Lord and Lady Lambton. Crime affecting rich people always got a lot more play in the media, and in such cases the ability to deal with that was just as important as your skill at handling the investigation itself. Dale had kept his nerve most impressively in the face of fierce public scrutiny (as well as misinformed but unrestrainedly mouthy press criticism) throughout the kidnap-ring investigation; in particular with regard to suppressing information that might have sold a lot of newspapers had the press known it, though only at the unacceptable expense of further endangering the life of the ten-year-old girl Dale’s men were eventually to rescue. However, as well as having the fortitude to keep the hacks at bay when he deemed it necessary, he had also played a virtuoso hand in inviting them all over the Lambton case, firing up the arclights until the ‘distraught’ aspiring heiress wilted under their glare.
According to Jock Shaw, it had been asserted at the most senior levels as ‘imperative’ that Angelique be brought into the investigation, but it had been Dale’s idea to make her involvement so demonstrably public. It had also been Dale’s idea to have the press conference here at the Tivoli. She was unconvinced of the thinking behind this, but her doubts about that were nothing compared to the reservations she was harbouring over the wisdom of his parading her like London Met FC’s new star signing.
Nonetheless, she had agreed to it, partly because she couldn’t argue with Dale’s record, and more significantly because Shaw had vouched for him. She knew Shaw well enough to tell the difference between him endorsing somebody because it was professionally dutiful to do so, and genuinely anointing Dale as worthy of his own – and therefore Angelique’s – trust. It was a measure of her esteem for Shaw more than a leap of faith in Dale that she was finally assenting to a role she had been resisting for most of her police career. It was also perhaps another sign that said career was finally gleaming in its twilight.
Angelique had fought to keep herself off the front pages after Dubh Ardrain, when the police were desperate to use her as their good-news face, and had spent many of her years in the force fending off various inventive attempts to make her their ethnic recruitment poster-child. She was never the face at the press conference; she preferred being the hands on the collar and the body beneath the armour.
From here on in, however, her job would be to draw attention, like drawing fire in a gunfight. It wasn’t exactly Big Brother: her name would be merely a caption on a few TV news reports, quoted in the print media’s deeper coverage well down the page from the juicy stuff and only bumped up beyond that on slow days. Nor was she being played as bait; more a red rag to this particular bull. But to have a role so exposed, so deliberately out in the open, was a new and alien experience. Standing here in this nightclub, from where seven pop stars had been abducted, four of them already known to be dead, she had to wonder: who the hell chooses this for themselves? Who sets their aspirations upon a life permanently under the gaze of inquisitive strangers?
Dale’s decision to host the press conference at the Tivoli was an understandable (though for Angelique, potentially ill-judged) declaration of intent to play their enemy at his own game. ‘He wants it showbiz, we’ll keep it showbiz,’ Dale said. ‘We can’t afford to give the impression that we’re downplaying anything, like we’re ignoring an attention-seeking toddler, especially knowing what provoking a tantrum entails. Besides, playing these things out in the limelight is a risky business for him. He can’t retreat to the shadows for his next move without losing face, looking like he’s peaked and on the retreat.’
Reading between the lines, it sounded like Dale had reached the same grim conclusion as Angelique regarding the chances of the three remaining abductees. When he talked about the killer’s next move, she knew he accepted that this part of the game was already lost. She couldn’t criticise his judgment in how he chose to approach such a near-impossible situation; her doubts were largely around the wisdom of attempting to play Simon Darcourt at his own game when they had no real idea of what Darcourt’s game might be; or indeed for sure if even Darcourt it was.
One indisputable benefit of Dale’s thinking, however, was that it brought them back physically to one of the investigation’s most important loci. Having come in a little late, Angelique was grateful for the opportunity to get a feel for the place. There was plenty of footage, naturally, and it was all being analysed pixel by pixel, but there was some fundamental polis instinct that could only be satisfied by getting a first-hand feel for places. She dealt in evidence and logic, so she wasn’t talking about emotions or images metaphysically adhering to the surroundings, but she had a need to know what it felt like to be standing inside and outside of the Tivoli: walking where the victims walked, looking where the perp was looking. Seeing what he was seeing was, unfortunately, a more elusive matter.
The most analysed footage had been that from the CCTV cameras on Shatfesbury Avenue. Even with the images enhanced, all they had were a couple of fuzzy close-ups of a face wearing sunglasses (at night) and a chauffeur’s cap, the shots extracted from the half-seconds of tape showing the limo pulling up and later driving away. Those were the only times that a camera was pointed face-on to his windscreen. He had needed to park in front of the Tivoli in order to block Vogue 2.2’s real limo and present his own instead, but he must have taken the camera positions into account. He had parked a little back from the red carpet, his vehicle’s nose just about in line with it, meaning that all the time he was sitting there, the closest camera only had a view from the rear, and the nearest facing camera had its view of the windscreen obscured by the awning. The two shots lifted from when the vehicle was in motion were useless: they could have been showing a shop-dummy in shades and a peaked cap. It had been suggested that he might actually be wearing some kind of blank plastic mask, and even that he had treated the windscreen with something in order to reflect very little light from within, but Angelique didn’t consider either ruse particularly probable or even necessary.
Bottom line: he wasn’t going to drop a bollock and he wasn’t going to throw them any bones.
They did get a plate: a French one, which was initially considered a valuable lead until a cross-Channel trace revealed it to be the same as on the Mercedes carrying Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed on their final high-speed journey through Paris. The registration was a fake, but it certainly had Darcourt written all over it.
There had been a veritable ant-colony of forensics personnel and SOCOs crawling all over Nick Foster’s mansion in Kent. There was no evidence of a break-in or a struggle, and indeed consequently no evidence that it had even been this house that he’d been abducted from. Even attempts to narrow the window on when he had been taken had been fogged by apparently crucial information disintegrating before their eyes. The last known contact, it had been established, was a text to his PA, Susie Russell, the afternoon before the party. The police were already constructing a possible timetable of events placing this as the earliest possible starting point, when somebody had the presence of mind to take a closer look at what the text message actually said:
Off for a detox down-payment in advance of the shindig. Doing some penance upfront. Plan to get into a shocking state! Take tomorrow off. I’ll get to Tivoli by alternative means. Stand by for a surprise entrance. ;)
The apparent comic prescience of the wording retrospectively suggested that Foster never composed the text, so he could have been abducted any time up to twenty hours before that, when he last actually spoke to his PA on his mobile.
In the meantime, however, the Forensics team had, against all expectation, pulled out a plum. Concentrating very specifically on the shelves housing Foster’s CD collection, as highlighted in Darcourt’s video (as well as his computer, as suggested by the mention of his playlists), they had found a partial fingerprint that didn’t match Foster’s own dabs on the spine of an album. The fingerprint analysis lab had then undertaken a laborious elimination process, checking the partial against prints volunteered by Foster’s friends, relatives, employees and anxious ex-lovers (anxious as in anxious to eliminate themselves as suspects). They were on to their third day without a match when one of the analysts, perhaps inspired by working late into the evening, demonstrated sufficient musical knowledge as to suggest that there might be more than incidental significance to the identity of the album that the elusive partial print had besmirched. It was Rust Never Sleeps, by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Track six, understandably well known among the analyst’s profession, was ‘Powderfinger’.
Blind fate seldom hands you such neatly packaged anecdote material, and sheer luck seldom gifts you a solitary print at a locus around which the suspect has been vigilant in leaving no other traces. The analyst took the hint, and on more than a hunch tested the partial against a comparison set lifted from the home of a person no one had previously thought to check against, due to the normally compelling eliminating factor of being dead.
It matched.
The print had been left by Darren McDade’s finger. Crosschecking confirmed that it was the middle one.
Indeed.
It was concluded as most likely that the killer brought along the CD for the purpose, complete with print, rather than taking along the finger itself. He hadn’t been shy of distributing McDade’s body parts, as the late pundit’s former employers could attest, but by consensus it was agreed as simply too implausible that Foster would own something as musically substantial and enduring as a Neil Young album.
The disappearance of McDade hadn’t yielded any worthwhile material so far either. Initially it had been believed that he was abducted from the Birmingham hotel room he was booked into for the night, after taking part in a TV show filmed at Pebble Mill. However, this theory had proven valuable only by way of illustrating the cops’ suggestibility in the absence of real evidence. In the videos, McDade is seen waking up in a hotel room, and as they knew he was checked into one, they automatically began reconstructing the events as bookended by these two facts. Security images from the hotel lobby and the street outside showed McDade leaving the hotel and getting into a car later confirmed as having been sent by the production company, but there was no footage of him ever returning. Witnesses stated that after filming the programme, he proceeded to tan the Green Room for all the red wine they had and all the canapes he could physically keep down, before adjourning to a nearby pub called the Cap and Gown. He was last seen, very drunk, on the street outside the pub, apparently in search of a cab. It was now widely speculated that he may have found a limo instead.
Angelique is listening to her voicemails – three queued up from having her phone off during the press conference – when she sees him making his way hesitantly into the main body of the club. He’s looking like he’s expecting to be stopped and asked to explain himself, but the people he passes are too busy dismantling and removing either their own equipment or the backdrop and tables from the press conference to pay him much heed. He’s in jeans and a leather jacket, small satchel slung over his shoulder, and sporting a goatee beard these days. Perhaps he thinks it makes him look more grown-up and august; she’d need to see it with the collar and tie he wore Monday to Friday. She tries to picture it. Nah. It would only serve to emphasise how his professional attire didn’t quite work. You could put a suit on a geeky grebo but he’d just be a geeky grebo in a suit, as conversely so many born-in-a-suit types simply looked wrong if you bumped into them over the weekend. He is now the head of the English department at Burnbrae Academy, but he looks like he just walked out of Forbidden Planet; given that there is a branch less than a hundred yards away, chances are he has.
She waves subtly, then with a full, arm’s length arc when he fails to spot her amid the ferment. He grins, making more eagerly and directly towards her.
‘Angelique, hiya. Long time no see.’
‘Ray. Thanks for coming. Really appreciate this.’
‘Gets me out of school. Feel like I’m doggin’ it but I’ve got a letter from my mum.’
‘Flight on time? Have you come straight from Heathrow?’
‘Pretty much. I mean, I stopped in at a shop along the road there, but otherwise...’
‘Forbidden Planet?’
He grins shyly.
‘Aye. Buying for the weans these days, though. The wee yin’s easy enough: Turtles and Star Wars, get it in Tesco’s. But Martin’s very into Captain Scarlet. And I mean old-school Captain Scarlet. Has to be the Gerry Anderson original stuff, no’ the new CGI version. To think when I was twelve I gave away a Dinky Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle to my wee cousin. Bastard’s probably cleared fifty quid for it on eBay.’
‘Turtles and Gerry Anderson. Your kids were in nappies when I last saw them. How long was that?’
‘Dunno. Five years, maybe six? You took a job in France, didn’t you? When did you move to London? What brought you back?’
‘I haven’t moved here, not permanently. I got here two days ago. Which should answer your other question.’
He nods, his face immediately taking on a hunted look that had been only temporarily masked by their mutual pleasure at seeing each other again.
‘Aye,’ he says simply. She can tell he’s been worried sick for days.
‘When did you hear? I mean, when did you start to think it might be...?’
‘Two possible answers to that question. One would be when your colleague in the Glesca Polis came round to the house and asked me to fly down here, because prior to that I knew he was dead, right? The other would be when I heard about the McDade videos. One of the kids in my class had one on his fucking mobile, would you credit it?’
‘Virally spreading as intended.’
‘I had my thoughts when I read transcripts of what was in the videos, but these are thoughts I’ve been having ever since Dubh Ardrain, you know? I would remind myself – and Kate would remind me too – that I saw him get sucked down into a whirlpool with umpteen million gallons of water when that tailrace opened. But because they never found a body... Once you allow the possibility into your head, you start thinking every weird act of bloodletting that happens in the world might be him. You just cannae go there. It became a running joke in our house. We’d be watching a movie, or Lost or whatever, and any mysterious malignant presence, one of us would say: “Maybe it’s him.” Like I said, cannae go there. That way madness lies. So yeah, I thought about him when I learned about Darren McDade, but as always I told myself not to give it any credence. Same deal when I heard about Nick Foster. Then your man appeared at my door yesterday. He didn’t give much away, but enough to make sure I didn’t sleep too well last night, fair to say. How do you know it’s him?’
‘First thing to say is we don’t, not for absolutely sure, and we’re hoping you can help us with that. But if it’s not him, it’s somebody who wants us to think it’s him. There was a clue, one we believe we were intended to find, on the McDade hanging video. The executioner was visible in a mirror.’
‘You could see his face?’
‘No. He was in a hat and mask, dressed to look like a noted comic-strip malefactor late of a parish known as Calton Creek.’
Ray sighs.
‘Rank Bajin,’ he states. ‘His calling card. How well was that known, though?’
‘Sparsely. We suppressed the “Black Spirit” icon as much as possible back in his heyday: it was a valuable way of verifying that an atrocity was his handiwork and not some other nutter using it to cloud the waters. Even after Dubh Ardrain, when we thought we’d seen the last of him, we still kept it quiet, never gave that part to the press, neither the image nor what its original identity turned out to be. But still, these things leak. There were a lot of those calling cards left fluttering in the dust and rubble after his attacks, sometimes hundreds. I know of at least one occasion when the image appeared in a newspaper, but it was a Spanish one, and nobody picked up on it at the time.’
‘I take it I just missed a press conference. What have you told the public?’
‘The point of the press conference was not about informing the public of anything, but of informing him that we got the message. Apart from just the standard updates – ie we still know shag-all – the principal announcement was that I had been brought on board, officially as an expert on counter-terrorism. We know that’ll get the media’s wheels spinning, but the main point is to send him a signal. If it’s someone just trading on his name, he won’t clock the significance because he won’t know who I am; but if it really is him, it bats it back to his court.’
‘I have to say, it’s not like Simon to leave any ambiguity about who deserves the credit.’
‘That’s why we’re not rushing into anything. We’ve got to be very careful in working out what we think his game is. On the one hand, he’s imprinting the Black Spirit calling card on the McDade killing, and yet he’s masked. He never appears fully in shot, and when he pulled up outside here in a limo, he made sure nobody saw his face. We’re left asking ourselves: why would he do that if we already know what he looks like?’
‘Maybe he doesn’t look like that any more. Surgery, damage, whatever.’
‘Yeah, and we’re looking into that. Though even if he’s had surgery, I’m one hundred per cent sure I’d know him if I looked the bastard in the eye. However, the other explanation remains that he’s hiding his face simply because he’s not Simon Darcourt. I’m hoping your input is going to help us eliminate that possibility, so that we can be more certain of what we’re dealing with.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
Angelique puts a hand gently on his shoulder by way of indicating that they’re on the move. She leads him towards the exit, gesticulating briefly to Dale on her way past to communicate ‘This is him’ and ‘We’re off’. Dale nods. He knows where she’s headed.
‘We’re going just round the corner,’ she tells Ray. ‘An audio post-production house in Soho. Firstly, we need you to have a listen to some tapes.’
They emerge into the daylight, watery spring sunshine belying a chill in the air that catches in your throat as you walk into it. It seems surprisingly bright. The lighting in the Tivoli was anything but subdued, especially with the TV gear boosting it, but she’d been in there two hours, and something about the surroundings subconsciously told her to expect darkness outside.
‘Your man up in Glasgow left me a DVD-rom with the videos,’ Ray says. ‘I watched about as much as I could stomach. Audio quality isn’t brilliant, but I have to say, the voice didn’t sound like him at all. Weird accent, for a start, but the thing is, when I saw him at the power station, even though his accent had changed vastly from our student days, it was still unmistakably his voice. The voice on the videos is nothing like him.’
‘That’s why we’re going to Soho,’ she assures him. ‘We’ve had some experts run the rule over the videos. They say the soundtracks have been overdubbed. They reckon he spoke in his own voice at the time, then dubbed a new, altered voice over it. Mostly they assume the new voice is saying the same thing, but there’s a few points on the tape where changes in the background levels indicate what was put in didn’t entirely cover what was removed.’
‘But I thought the Foster thing was a live feed.’
‘Everybody assumed that because it was interjected into a live event, but it was a recording.’
‘So if he’s overdubbing it with someone else’s voice, what do you think I—’
‘They don’t think it’s someone else’s voice,’ she interrupts. ‘Who would you get to record something like that? Plus, fair to say we don’t want to begin to contemplate the possibility that he’s not alone in this deranged enterprise. No, they reckon he’s digitally altered his own voice. They’re trying to reverse-engineer the process, which is where you come in. They need someone who remembers his voice to give them the pointers they need to tweak the settings.’
‘What, so they can make the recording sound like him? But what if it isn’t him? Won’t that just create a huge red herring?’
‘No, no. The digital effects can’t put something on the tape that isn’t there already. They can’t record you and make you sound like James Earl Jones. If it is Simon Darcourt, then at some point, they’re going to twist the right knob or tweak a certain slider just precisely the correct amount, and you’re going to suddenly sit up and say: “Fuck, that’s him.” But if it’s not Darcourt, then they could try every setting, every configuration... basically, you could be there a while, and the longer you’re there, the more chance it’s a negative.’
‘You’ll understand when I tell you I’ll be hoping it’s a long shift,’ says Ray.
‘I know. You don’t need to tell me how the idea of him still being alive isn’t the most welcome one.’
‘We didn’t really part on the best of terms. I think he might consider that I pissed on his chips a wee bit, what with wrecking his masterplan and sending him to his apparent death.’
‘I know this is not the most consoling notion, Ray, but in my opinion, if he is alive and he had a mind to come for you...’
Ray nods with a thin smile.
‘I’d already be dead. I know. Happy thoughts.’
‘To which I would add that making you part of his plans was what led to his downfall last time.’
‘You’re ranging Simon’s ability to learn from his own mistakes against his capacity to hold a grudge. That’s quite a face-off. I’m aware that even though he was a bampot, he wasn’t an idiot, but I also know that he was one of the most self-righteously vindictive people ever to set foot on the planet. Not much of a one for the relativistic perspective. Once he’s decided you’ve “disappointed” him, there’s not really a lot you can do to get back into his good books. I think if you dedicated the rest of your life to some form of personal penance for whatever slight he perceived you to have committed against him, he’d still feel you owed him two more lifetimes’ worth before you even got close to the forgiveness waiting list. So I’m inclined to think it can’t be him, because if he was still alive, he’d have come for me by now.’
‘Given the capacity for grudges and vindictiveness you just alluded to, it might be flattering yourself to think you’re a priority. Maybe he’s got a long roster to get through, and you’ll have to wait your turn.’
‘Oh, you’re full of all the cheery thoughts of the day, Angelique. But here’s my question, even allowing for what you just said: if he survived Dubh Ardrain, and somehow got away, maybe with another new identity, why would he break cover now, after all these years? And what’s he been up to in the meantime?’
‘I’ve asked myself the same thing. The scary answer is “planning”.’
They reach the Charing Cross Road and turn right, crossing away from Burleigh Mansions where one Thomas Stearns Eliot used to keep a crash pad. ‘Humankind cannot bear too much reality,’ he once wrote. Unfortunately, its tolerance for reality TV is proving less fragile. As they pass Borders bookstore, Angelique observes that there’s no place in the window for the one-time local boy: the inset bay is taken up with a display promoting Darren McDade’s book, Who’s the Daddy? He got paid a shudderingly huge advance for his cobbled-together compendium of populist rantings, only for the very public that was believed (at least by one literary editor, after a catastrophically good lunch) to be hanging on his every word, to widely baulk at the prospect of paying to read the same columns they had already coughed up for when they bought their papers. Perhaps this was a measure of his success in dissuading them from the tree-hugging practices of recycling, global warming being a muesli-eaters’ myth, apparently. Now, however, he was finally earning those imprudently generous royalties.
A few yards further on, the music section has all three Four Play albums (debut, flop follow-up, greatest hits) prominently stacked close to the doors, and one of their tracks playing on the in-store stereo. Needless to say, it isn’t ‘You’re Dynamite’. It’s going to be a bugger of a long time before a radio station, a shop or any publicly accountable organisation ever plays that again. The bookies have stopped taking bets on their ‘new’ single going straight to number one on next week’s chart. The song is called ‘Gone But Not Forgotten’. It’s a previously uncelebrated number from the less successful second album, a cue to hit the skip button on most fans’ CD players, now elevated immeasurably by the sheer marketing potential of its unintentionally poignant title.
‘I don’t know, Angelique. I’m aware I’m trying to talk myself out of worrying, but the other thing that doesn’t quite fit for me is the targets. He was a mercenary – he killed for cash and, let’s not forget, because he liked it – but he didn’t choose the targets. This psycho we’re dealing with now strikes me as being about something very, very heartfelt and personal.’
‘There’s some classified stuff I can’t divulge, Ray, but believe me, Simon killed people for his own heartfelt, personal reasons as well as for professional ones. How do you think he started? He didn’t wake up one morning and decide to try his hand at being a hitman.’
‘Okay, granted, but allowing for that, what do the targets say about the perpetrator? Because I don’t think they say “Simon”. I mean, Nick Foster? Crappy teeny-pop bands? It’s a bit of a comedown from taking out power stations, cruise liners and military bases, is it not?’
‘You told me yourself how ridiculously serious Simon was about music, as well as how angry about the world not quite falling at the feet of his own talents. Don’t you have any recollections of him ranting about the Nick Fosters and Four Plays of the time?’
‘It was the Eighties, and the Nick Foster of the time was Nick Foster. But no, not really. The kind of music Foster churned out was literally beneath contempt. Saying you hated manufactured bands was like saying you hated wasps. Us music-obsessives had our prejudices and irrational dislikes, but it took ‘serious’ music to pique serious hatreds. Simon really, really fucking hated The Smiths. If it was Morrissey strapped to that giant amp, you’d have a positive ID on Simon right there. Or maybe the guys from Chambers of Torment, because they truly represent the boat he missed. Back when I knew Simon, Nick Foster wouldn’t even have registered on his radar.’
‘Foster’s been a lot harder to miss in recent years,’ Angelique reminds him. She doesn’t want Ray getting entrenched too deeply in his understandable attempts to convince himself that Darcourt has not returned, as she needs his mind to be open when he gets to the post-production house. She’s got a more compelling argument in her armoury, but she’s saving it for the right moment.
‘Not so hard to miss if you don’t live in the UK,’ Ray counters.
‘Don’t be so sure, Raymond. Christ, I’ve been living in Paris for five years: it doesn’t guarantee you an escape from hearing about Big Brother and Bedroom bloody Popstars. If anything, being somewhere else makes you even more resentful that it’s still able to find you. Can’t you see someone as deranged as Simon deciding this was one way of stopping the rot?’
‘I can’t see Simon tuning in via satellite from some mainland European bolthole just so he can stoke up his rage. And that’s one of many reasons why McDade doesn’t add up either. Can you picture him getting the Sun or the Daily Mail delivered to his underground lair or wherever he’d have been hiding? Plus, look what was done to the guy – that was a lefty-liberal revenge fantasy come true. Revenge fantasy might be Simon’s style, but the lefty-liberal part...’
‘Sure,’ Angelique agrees. ‘I appreciate that if you wanted to plot the human spectrum of social conscience, you’d stick Mahatma Gandhi at one end and Simon Darcourt at the other, with maybe the distance between him and Donald Rumsfeld being how you calibrate the scale, but—’
‘No,’ Ray interrupts. ‘What you don’t appreciate is that Simon wouldn’t be on the scale, because the scale would be irrelevant to Simon. The only political leader you could identify him with would maybe be Margaret Thatcher, simply because she said there was no such thing as society. That’s pretty close to Simon’s perspective, though it would be more accurate to describe the way he sees it as there’s one person who matters and six billion supporting players of varying levels of minor relevance. Simon only reacted to issues when they directly affected him, and even then he never saw it as politics, but as a personal affront. He wouldn’t give a fuck what Darren McDade said about penal codes or asylum seekers, so he wouldn’t be concerned with driving home any points about either of those issues.’
‘Granted, but I think you could be missing the point he was driving home. It wasn’t about penal codes or asylum seekers, it was about humiliation, and this “lefty-liberal fantasy” as you put it was the means by which he felt McDade would be most humiliated.’
They take a left and they’re on Wardour Street. The postproduction facility is in sight, only three pubs and four porn stores away. Time for the money shot.
‘The lefty-liberal part was incidental,’ she continues. ‘But the revenge part was genuine. McDade wrote some strong stuff about Darcourt.’
‘So did every columnist in the country.’
‘True, but only one wrote about Darcourt’s father.’
Ray turns his head sharply and slows his stride. Impact confirmed. Angelique follows up the blow.
‘I had someone search through all of McDade’s rantings post Dubh Ardrain, and as well as the standard outrage, he uses it as an angle to vent one of his many personal prejudices. “Simon Darcourt was born in Scotland,”’ she quotes. ‘“But the Jocks don’t need to apologise for him. His father was French and a failure, though the latter part goes without saying once you’ve established the first . . .” Then blah blah, planting trees on the boulevards to let the Germans march in the shade, surrender monkeys, etcetera, etcetera.’
Ray says nothing for a few moments. They stop outside the audio house.
‘Are the targets saying “Simon” now?’ Angelique asks.
‘Let’s find out.’
Angelique’s mobile vibrates and she glances at the LCD before excusing herself, leaving the suite to take the call while the sound engineer prepares another sample for Ray. She was planning to bail once Ray was ensconced, having been warned that the process could take a while. She just had to deliver him and explain what was required; he wouldn’t need a babysitter the whole time. Nonetheless, she had sat there and observed for the best part of an hour, turning down the exit opportunities afforded by two previous calls. However, as both of these had been from her mum, she couldn’t say whether she had stayed put out of curiosity or convenience.
Two of the three voicemails left while her phone was off during the press conference had been from her mum too. The first had been an excited call to say she had just seen her on Sky News, the words ‘live press conference’ failing to register any implications for Angelique’s availability to take any calls at that particular moment. The second, left less than ten minutes after the first, was more familiarly accusatory and unsubtly guilt-laying, starting off by asking why she hadn’t phoned back regarding the first message, then moving on to slating Angelique’s failure to inform her she was back in the UK, before inevitably demanding to know when she’d be up to Glasgow for a visit.
What a great idea, mum. A trip to Glasgow: that would help fill in some of the countless hours she had spare and didn’t know what to do with. And what a morale-booster it would be too. She and her parents could gather round the dinner table and have a special celebration to mark the five-thousandth time of her mum sympathetically – ie not remotely optimistically – asking her whether there was ‘someone special on the horizon’. Then they could all drink to commiserate with Angelique upon the ongoing loneliness and futility of her life without companionship or the even distant prospect of ever hearing the patter of tiny feet. Angelique had tried just as many times to explain how her job hadn’t made it very easy to meet prospective partners, nor was it the most stable base for young family life.
‘There will always be crooks, there will always be police and there will always be jobs, Angelique,’ her mum would respond. ‘But some things won’t wait forever.’
As if she needed any more pressure in her life, she had been getting her own biological countdown thrust in her face like it was the old Irn Bru clock above Central Station.
It used to piss her off because she thought her mum didn’t appreciate what she was involved in and didn’t understand what she wanted from life. Now it pissed her off because she realised her mum had always known better than she the precise value of what she was involved in compared to what she really needed from life.
She hadn’t told her parents she was coming over to London on this attachment, far less that she was planning to quit the force. Angelique still felt equipped to handle Simon Darcourt one more time, but having to hear her mum say ‘I told you so’ was a prospect she was nowhere near strong enough for.
The call is from Dale. She’s about to tell him it’s early days on the voice-work with Ray Ash, but he doesn’t even ask.
‘Get to a computer,’ he says. ‘Our boy’s back online.’
‘Just gimme a minute,’ she tells him. ‘I’m down in the basement. I need to get upstairs to the main office. More videos?’
‘Oh, we’re going way upscale now. It’s a fucking multi-media extravaganza, and speaking of media we’d better brace ourselves for a force-ten shitstorm. He’s unleashed a multi-headed hydra on us.’
‘Less girly squealing, more details, please,’ she says, walking into the office. ‘Sir,’ she belatedly adds. She glances at one of the engineers and gesticulates towards a free monitor by way of asking permission. He gives her a nod and she hits the on button. A fan starts to whir and the hard drive lets out a fart as the system boots. Sounds like an old man waking up in the morning.
‘He has indirectly made the Black Spirit claim public,’ Dale continues, ‘while simultaneously setting his cap – or should that be black cowboy hat – at a place on next week’s hit parade.’
She thinks of her words to Ray earlier, reminding him how angry Simon had been about the world not quite falling at the feet of his own talents.
‘He’s released that track, hasn’t he?’ she says. ‘His version of “Hurts So Good”.’ Low-quality rips of the song lifted from the videos and from recordings of PV1’s party coverage were already in circulation on the net. Its sick-joke value, combined with a sense of the forbidden, gave it an iconoclastic kudos that had guaranteed its proliferation. Those properties would be multiplied tenfold in an ‘official’ cut, released by the artist himself.
‘He’s called it “Hurts Like Dynamite”, and it’s credited to “The Black Spirit versus Nick Foster and Four Play”. It’s a polished-up version of the combination of the two songs that formed the soundtrack to the Nick Foster and Four Play murders. Their vocals are still on there, as are Foster’s digitally manipulated, in-key cries of pain, though he’s faded down the Four’s descent into hysterical screaming and replaced the explosions with cymbal crashes.’
‘Going all soft on us?’ she says bitterly.
‘No. You ask me, he’s done it so that it’s more listenable. He doesn’t just want a few sickos checking it out for thrills – he wants people playing it on their iPods, dancing to it in the fucking clubs. He’s simultaneously released it on to several mainstream download services.’
‘How can he do that? He doesn’t have a record company or a music publisher.’
‘You don’t need one to license your track for download; not a legitimate one anyway. Just the online semblance of a company and an account for your share of the take to be deposited. Our people have been all over it since the track appeared. The company is a phantom, but the account is the real kicker: the bastard’s set it up so that every penny goes to a bona fide youth music charity.’
‘Does he think that will stop us pulling the plug on the downloads?’
‘No, he’s covered that part elsewhere. I think this is about him ramming the point home. There’s a warped self-righteousness running through everything he’s doing. Naturally, the charity will be mortified, but they won’t be able to refuse the money as it’s going straight into their bank. They can take it out again, of course, but they can’t exactly give it back to him, so Christ knows what will happen there, other than a lot of public debate, discussion, publicity; in short, everything this headcase wants.’
‘So how has he covered the issue of us—’
‘You got web access yet?’
‘Just about. Haven’t seen anything start so slowly since Rangers sold Mikhailichenko.’
‘Okay, launch the browser and key in the following.’
Dale dictates a numerical address. Angelique keys it in and is routed to a black web page displaying the Rank Bajin image at the top above an embedded video window, which immediately begins to buffer its content. Beneath this are three thumbnail images, identified with underlined hyperlink text as Anika, Sally and Wilson. There is also a button marked ‘Forum’. She clicks on each image in turn, launching new embedded video tabs, all of which also begin buffering.
‘I’m not seeing anything yet,’ she says.
‘Which should tell you how many people are already drawing on the same bandwidth. Give it a moment.’
Angelique clicks through the tabs, and after a few seconds they begin to successfully stream silent video. She sees the three members of Vogue 2.2: each looking tired, scared, tear-streaked and sweatily dishevelled, each isolated in a small, identical cell, fully in shot. Apart from the human occupants, each cell contains only three items: a thin, pale grey mattress in one corner of the floor, a bucket, placed as far from the mattress as space allows, and, mounted high on one wall out of reach, a tubular canister.
‘Are these live streams?’
‘Far as we can tell. All except the main page, which is a recording – more overdubbed vocals from our host.’
‘It still hasn’t loaded.’
‘Yeah, it’s drawing the most traffic – everyone goes there first before selecting any of the streams.’
‘Oh, here it comes.’
The video window displays a short montage of Vogue 2.2: miming onstage as a trio, ‘performing’ individually on Bedroom Popstars and glimpsed in a fast-edit moving scrapbook of their countless tabloid and magazine clippings. Then the killer’s now-familiar altered voice comes through the speakers.
‘Welcome, all you insatiable, amoral, vicarious thrill-seeking voyeurs. You’ve come to the right place. Though, can I just offer a big apology to all of you out there who don’t fit that description, and who have only logged on out of genuine concern for the plight of my three contestants. You’re not voyeurs, or amoral vicarious thrill-seekers. I acknowledge that. You’re hypocritical lying cunts. Accept what you are or log the fuck off, right now.’
‘Christ, how long does this keech go on for?’ Angelique asks Dale. ‘Can’t you just talk me through it, bring me up to speed with a non-self-satisfied gloating prick version?’
‘Might as well hear it from the horse’s arse, Angelique.’
She sighs, keeps watching the screen. The view cuts between the three cells, showing earlier footage of Anika, Sally and Wilson.
‘. . . very special guests, all of whom have proven themselves real champions on another televised popularity contest, so who better to take part in my new, higher-stakes reality game show? A big welcome to Wilson, Anika and Sally, who are, as of now, the first contestants on Dying to be Famous!’
‘Oh no,’ Angelique breathes.
‘The rules are simple. Each contestant is locked in an airtight cell with, as you can see, a tank on the wall. In the tank is their air supply – let’s call it the Oxygen of Publicity. To keep getting oxygen, they need to get publicity, which should of course be a piece of piss for these three, especially under such terribly moving circumstances. But here’s the catch: the one who gets the fewest mentions on TV, who clocks up the fewest column inches dedicated to him or herself over each twenty-four hour period, gets the least oxygen. There’ll be enough so that they can each recover from a bad day and maybe rally the next, but three, maybe even two days at the bottom of the vacuous-gossip chart, and it’s off to the big talent show in the sky. But don’t worry, it won’t all be in the arbitrary hands of those self-important wankers in the media: this is a British popularity show, after all, so you can get involved too. Go to the forum below, and give us your opinion on who should die first. But remember to give a reason, otherwise your vote won’t count. Any reason you like – don’t worry if it’s just blind and irrational prejudice – that’s good enough!’
The screen fades to black, then the Rank Bajin cartoon figure appears, approvingly holding one thumb up to camera. A triangular play icon appears in the centre, offering the option to view the video again. Angelique wants to hit it with a hammer.
‘I am assuming the only reason this fucking abomination is still live is because you’re running a trace.’
‘Yes and no. We received a message, via email, telling us...’
‘Same deal as the Tivoli. I get it. If we don’t play the game, he takes his ball and goes home.’
‘That’s it. If the site or the feeds get pulled, he kills the hostages; same deal with the music downloads.’
‘He’s going to kill them anyway.’
‘And he knows we know that, but he also knows we can’t act on it. We have to let him have his fun.’
‘What about the trace?’
‘The message claims that he has monitoring in place to detect any attempt to trace the source location. If his detection measures pick up any trace activity, he kills one of the hostages.’
‘He’s bluffing. Is that kind of detection possible?’
‘Our geeks are on it. They say just from a cursory look at the set-up that he knows what he’s doing: tentative initial traces show the signal coming simultaneously from a hundred nodes on five continents. Christ, even the email he sent was carrying the digital equivalent of a postmark from half the major cities on the globe, and appeared to have originated – get this – from Cromlarig, in the north of Scotland.’
‘Nearest town to Dubh Ardrain,’ Angelique acknowledges. ‘Very fucking funny. So if he can spoof trace-route signatures, can he do what he’s claiming?’
‘Detecting our attempts? Geeks say not likely. Not theoretically impossible, but chances are he’s bluffing to deter us from trying to sniff him out.’
‘Would he chance being traced just to keep his show live? He could as easily just upload more videos on a regular basis. Less risky.’
‘Frankly, I don’t have a clue. I’m just going with what the geeks—’ There sounds a double-beat tone on the line. ‘Sorry, have to stick you on hold.’
Angelique is left staring at the screen, just a regular electronic pulse on her mobile to reassure her that it is still connected to something. As the seconds turn into minutes, she can’t help but click on the open tabs, and finds herself gazing at the three prisoners. Perhaps it’s the camera angle, but they all look somehow really small. They also look bedraggled, disorientated and exhausted, indicating they have barely slept in days. The sense of voyeurism is curiously enhanced by the absence of sound, making it seem like security footage of people oblivious of the watching cameras, though the three of them seem not so much oblivious as ignoring. The occasional glance indicates that they know about the cameras – so they’re not hidden – but they seem indifferent towards them, like they offer intrusion but not communication. That’s when it occurs to Angelique to wonder about the lack of sound. Is Darcourt scared they could communicate something about their location or about their captor? But then she gets it: another of the bastard’s sick jokes. They got where they are through miming. They never wanted a voice then, so he’s not giving them one now.
Dale’s call resumes on her mobile. Dale sounds younger than he looks, a certain energy and enthusiasm in his voice that shaves a few years off, particularly in a profession with a tendency to advance world-weariness in anybody’s register. Of course, it’s always possible his voice is bang-on for his age and it’s the strains of the job that have made him look ten years older. Even if so, that extra ten still only makes him look early forties, and good for it. But let’s not even begin to go there...
‘Sorry about that. That was the head geek, looking for my green light to commence some hopefully very gentle probing. They’re running whatever it is right now, proceeding on a steady-as-she-goes basis. If they encounter anything they don’t like the look of, they’ll hold off. But as you say, he’s going to kill them anyway. It’s a chance we have to take. It’s not like we can... fuck. Fuck.’
‘What?’
‘How is it your end?’ he asks hurriedly, anxious. ‘Have you lost it as well?’
‘Lost what?’ Angelique asks, then notices that the video window has gone blank. She clicks through the other tabs: they’re all dead; hits Refresh on the main page, just gets a ‘connecting to . . .’ message.
‘Feeds have all dropped,’ she reports. ‘Index page is getting ready to 404 me any second now.’
‘Jesus Christ. I’m calling the geeks again. Keep refreshing. And hit Shift-F5 to clear the cache and fully reload.’
‘Sir,’ she affirms.
The on-hold beep becomes like an electronic echo of her own pulse as she hits Shift-F5, Shift-F5, except her own pulse does not stay at such a digitally calibrated steady oscillation. She thinks of the three scared faces she has just been looking at, images so vividly ordinary they could each be in a room next door.
Shift-F5. Connecting to...
Shift-F5. Connecting to...
Then all of a sudden her whole body jolts in her chair as the index page reappears: the Rank Bajin logo where it was at the top, the main video window below, and underneath that, the explanation for the downtime: he’s added three mirrors underneath each of the hyperlinked names, adding more bandwidth to cope with what he anticipates will be an ever-increasing load.
She issues a steam-vent sigh, almost laughs at the relief, but it’s relative. The situation remains merely dire, as opposed to fatally irretrievable.
‘I’ll be doing well to get through this without a heart attack,’ Dale says. ‘Though at least an MI would save me from issuing a new statement on all of this. The news channels are about to go insane. I’d like to hold off for a few hours, but I’ve got to get the message out ASAP to any would-be hackers not to attempt any private investigations. It would look a sight better if we had something to offer by way of suggesting we have a lead, other than merely a corroboration that this guy really is Darcourt.’
‘I’ll go downstairs and see how we’re doing on the voice.’
‘I expect I’ll be making a statement within the hour, but if you get something, call me, even if I’m on-air at the time.’
‘You got it, sir. Oh, but one thing before you go: corroboration? Do you mean the Cromlarig link in the email? Because that’s even more public domain than the Rank Bajin picture.’
‘Shit, can’t believe I forgot to say. I meant the email, yes, but not the Cromlarig part. There was a hotlinked image at the bottom of the text. Photo of Halle Berry.’
‘Christ. From her best-known role?’
‘His way of saying he got our message.’
Angelique knew what the image on the email would show without having to see it: a dark-skinned female in a skin-tight black bodysuit, a similar sight being one of the last things Darcourt and his men clapped eyes upon before being taken down at Dubh Ardrain.
Halle Berry: most famous as Ororo Munroe, aka Storm.
The X Woman.
Angelique walks near silently down the stairs. She’s not making an effort to be stealthy; it’s just the way the place has been designed to absorb and muffle sound. The carpet on the stairs is hard-wearing and feels stiff beneath her shoes, but it cushions every footfall, and the walls either side hug the narrow passage so tightly as to prevent much reverberation. As she turns into the corridor at the bottom, she can see Ray through a double-glazed window. He looks precipitately drained, like he’d have been fine if she came down here twenty seconds ago, but now the colour has just been flushed out of him as if somebody pulled a plug. The description that would leap to most observers’ minds is that he looks like he’s just seen a ghost. Angelique is better informed: she knows it’s that he’s just heard one.
She waves to Gary, the engineer, requesting permission to enter. He gives her a nod and she reaches for the door. As soon as she pushes the handle and breaks the rubber seal around the frame, she can hear the voice all around. Ray turns to look at her, his face a mixture of fear, uncertainty and not a little accusation: what have you done to me? He looks like he might be sick. Angelique doesn’t have time to offer assurances, as within moments she’s busy dealing with her own reactions to the voice, now uncloaked of its digital camouflage and stalking her memory like a predator.
Her hand goes to her chest, because that’s where she suddenly feels it, all over again, like somebody just opened the vault where her subconscious had locked up what it couldn’t deal with in that terrible moment. Physically, she’s standing in a sound-editing suite in Soho, but her mind is back at Dubh Ardrain, lying on the floor in agony and shock. The Kevlar stopped the shotgun pellets from penetrating her skin, but the blow itself had been point-blank and it was her ribs that absorbed the force. She never actually lost consciousness, but felt swamped, overwhelmed by brutal sensations: pain, disorientation and a deafening ringing in her ears from the muzzle-blast. She remembers his voice – this voice, this voice she can hear now in Soho – becoming audible and intelligible as those sensations gradually dissipated. She cannot hear it without experiencing a sense-memory of that pain and fear, but buried a layer beneath there is also a sense-memory of what came immediately after: of hate, of anger, of burning resolve. Here in the editing suite, she feels the bile rising, her heartbeat that bit more insistent.
‘I’m going to have to hurry you, Nick. I realise the lyrics are utterly vacuous and probably indistinguishable from a thousand other shitty songs you wrote, but you did write them, so why not take a stab.’
There it is: that narcissistic conceit and self-satisfaction in the voice, that detestably smug arrogance. As they used to say when Angelique was wee, if he was made of chocolate he’d eat himself. All but chuckling at his own cleverness.
He had stood there with Angelique flat on her back and Ray on his knees, the situation back under his control, the whip hand his again, yet the fucker still felt the need to sing when he was winning:
‘And what have you got to wank about, in your ordinary, anonymous little life? Tell me that. What the hell have you achieved? A fucking school teacher. Wife, mortgage, and a kid now, I understand. You really shine out in the crowd, Ray.’
He hadn’t changed. Same sadism, same gloating, same complacency, same weaknesses. And when she got hold of the fucker, same result.
This time, though, she’d make sure there was no escape. She was going to slap the cuffs on him personally, and she was going to make sure he was in no state to resist, far less disappear again. Before she clapped him in irons, she was going to see him on his knees. See him humbled. See him defeated.
See him bleed.
Angelique calls Dale. In the background she can hear a hubbub of chatter and the scrape of large objects being hauled around a polished floor. The Tivoli. She hopes she’s not too late.
‘You’re a life-saver,’ he tells her, though she suspects they both know that this is a purely metaphorical compliment. The influence of the new voice recording on the fortunes of Anika, Sally and Wilson is unlikely to be so decisive, and she says as much.
‘We have to take encouragement where we can find it in a shitstorm like this,’ Dale responds. ‘This at least lets us change the agenda for the next news cycle. The latest angle becomes positive progress about our new lead, us getting somewhere rather than looking literally clueless against a background of hysterical reaction to this latest horror show. Like it or not, this gig is going to be as much about managing the news as about investigating the leads. Playing the media is not a strategy, it’s a necessity, because the fucker we’re up against has made the game so, and we have to make sure we play it better than him.’
‘I know,’ she concedes. ‘It’s just a hell of a culture shock after several years of covert operations.’
‘Never knew when you had it good, huh?’
She gives a short, wry laugh. ‘I’m firing over an initial sample of Darcourt’s voice for immediate broadcast,’ she tells him. ‘Ray and Gary, the sound engineer, are fine-tuning the settings just now so that they can issue a complete set of all the recordings, but a rough-cut preview should suffice for the press conference.’
‘Good work. When they’re all done, we’ll get them online for download, get the link on to the news, Crimewatch and hope fully the front page of the BBC website.’
‘Speaking of websites, any news on tracing those live streams?’
‘No, and don’t be checking regularly for updates, because I’m informed it will be slow going. They’ve encountered firewall after firewall; not so much a needle in a haystack as like trying to find a particular strand of hay when each wisp leads to another entire haystack.’
‘There must be something they can do: Darcourt’s smart but he’s not a computer genius. Surely their command of the technology ultimately has to be better than his.’
‘There is something they can do, but it’s what the alpha geek called BFI. That’s hacker jargon, stands for Brute Force and Ignorance, meaning in programming terms a solution that gets the job done, but in an unsubtle, messy and haphazard fashion. The problem is, we need them to be stealthy, so BFI is not an option. They’re working on alternatives, but it’s not going to be swift or elegant. “Like kicking dead whales down the beach,” was the phrase he used.’
‘Sounds almost as much fun as manning the phone lines when we get the public response to the voice tapes. Commiserations to the officers on nutter-fielding duty.’
‘Agreed, but where this could prove more useful is that it might make it harder for him to operate. If we can get the public familiar with his real voice, then they’ll recognise it if they subsequently hear it for real. It’s not going to stop him from being able to grunt a few words to the cashier when he’s paying for his petrol, but if he wants twenty Regal King Size or a new order of oxygen canisters...’
‘Then he just has to put on a different accent.’
‘Shit. True enough,’ he concedes. ‘But on the bright side, all it would take is one person to genuinely recognise that voice and the whole game could change.’
‘A big if, though. The problem is, how many people will have heard Darcourt’s voice recently enough to recognise it? This is not someone who makes a lot of new friends. No matter how solid a new identity he’s created for himself since Dubh Ardrain, he’ll have been laying very low. We’re not going to end up interviewing some next-door neighbours who’ll say how normal he seemed, very polite, wouldn’t have suspected a thing, always made sure his rubbish was out on time. More the extreme end of the “kept himself to himself” part of the public-profile spectrum. I can’t think there’s many people left alive who’ll have heard his voice since his first supposed death, over a decade ago.’
‘Like I said, Angelique, it might only take one to change everything.’