Darcourt is commencing his endgame, of that Angelique has little doubt. The haematologist she showed the file to confirmed as much. Lymphoma, leaving him functional but imminently doomed; just not imminently enough. If the bastard had just assumed the lump on his neck was a big plook, the late onset of other symptoms might have ensured he was too sick to engage in this valedictory undertaking. Nonetheless, his time is running out. The haematologist said, going by the dates on the file, he should be hitting the debilitating phase in a matter of weeks, if it hasn’t begun already. That, in fact, might be what has heralded the commencement of what she is sure will be his final play, and though she yet has no idea what form it will take, she knows for certain that it signals her parents’ time is fast running out.
The thought of them is like a low hum in her head, ever constant even if she can relegate it to the background some of the time. It is a unique aspect of this torture that she has to keep tuning them out: that the only way she can maintain the composure required to have any chance of helping them is by banishing them from her mind, or at least drowning her thoughts of them in a deluge of more immediate concerns.
Her most immediate concern right now, as she sits on the Piccadilly Line, is an unsettling, goosebump-pricking suspicion that she is being followed. It’s not some indefinable sixth-sense nonsense, but a combination of trusted instinct and experience. She hasn’t specifically seen anything to set off her sensors; rather, it is like a belated, subconscious awareness that something in the background may have been more significant than it registered at the time. Something glimpsed back on the platform at Holborn, perhaps, a furtive look or movement that some corner of her mind took note of while the larger part of it was busy contemplating the latest celebrity abductions.
However, she also knows that it could instead simply be down to the paranoia attending the purpose of her journey: her first clandestine meeting with Zal back on British soil, to ponder how best they might obstruct or at least illegally divert the course of justice.
As she rides the up escalator, she hears the chime announcing a text message, a sound that has come to elicit a Pavlovian quickening of her pulse and gut-churning, dry-throated dread. The woman in front of her dips into a handbag and produces a mobile, same model as Angelique’s, same default alert. Angelique sighs quietly, her breath lost in the roaring of a train as it thunders away from one of the platforms below. That text wasn’t for her, but there will be another winging her way soon enough, her puppetmasters continuing to remind her that they have seen the same straws in the wind, or at least the same news reports and images on the internet. The latest photo of her parents showed them holding a printout of Darcourt’s homepage, just to underline the point. They looked ill. She tries not to stare at these attachments, these little digital cluster-bombs, wishes she could force herself not to view them at all, but the desperate thirst for news, for information, always overrides this. Each new shot shows them more anguished, more gaunt, more tired, thinner, and so much older.
It’s not just pictures they send, though. There are usually questions, requests for updates. She answers to the best of her knowledge and tells them almost everything she knows, in case any of the queries are a test of her obedience and reliability. Their claim of having other sources in the police is not something she’s about to call their bluff on, especially if they are ‘sources who do not even know they are sources’ and thus unaware what information they are betraying. If they decide she’s no use to them, or that she can’t be trusted, then it’s over.
She has consciously suppressed only one thing, but it being the single most salient development to emerge from the investigation is the reason her heart jumps every time she hears that chime. Every new message could be the one telling her they’ve discovered she is holding out on them. This risk, though, she has ruled smaller than that of telling them that Darcourt has only months to live, as she has no inkling how this might change the plan their end.
The first herald of Darcourt having broken his blood fast had been the discovery by Gary Nailor, upon returning from training yesterday lunchtime, of the bodies of his wife’s publicist, her personal trainer and her make-up artist, with Charlotte Westwood herself missing. A few hours later, Norfolk police found two more bodies in a car on the edge of Ravenheath Moor, the corpses turning out to be the personal publicist and the chauffeur of Katie Lorimer, also missing. All five victims had been shot once at close range through the centre of the forehead.
The new Darcourt website had been uploaded later the same day, in time for the late evening news programmes and the print media’s first-edition deadlines. Meilis had known about it immediately, having set up a software script to trigger an alert whenever the site’s structure was altered. Angelique, like just about everyone else still in the building, had rushed to the Operations Centre where the alpha geek routed the output on to the big monitors. The page displayed an embedded video beneath a constantly refreshing still frame from the existing Anika live feed (which clicking on the still would link you to), and a small panel, white digits out of black, displaying a one-hour countdown in progress.
The video showed Charlotte and Katie – as well as Britain’s favourite family-friendly racist, Danny Jackson OBE – climbing into the same black limo, followed by a montage of contemplative interior shots as they were driven away. Then each was shown looking directly into the camera and speaking, Charlotte first: ‘It could have been any of us, Anika.’
Followed by DJ: ‘So we’re not just thinking of you, we’re with you. We’re part of this. ‘
Then, lastly, Katie: ‘And we’ll do anything it takes to get you back alive.’
Within half an hour, a squad car dispatched to Jackson’s house in Finchley found the place empty and a woman’s body in the downstairs hall, executed the same way as the others. Within two further hours, the woman was identified as Carrie Kendall, a prohibitively pricey call-girl with an exclusive client list and previous for dealing cocaine, a substance subsequently located in abundance inside her shoulder bag.
When the countdown reached zero, the page began to animate itself. The self-updating grab from the Anika feed remained in place at the top, but the video panel multiplied itself until there were four identical copies of it, showing the final frozen image of Katie Lorimer’s painfully concerned face.
All four images faded to black, then one by one, the first three changed to host self-updating grabs from three new feeds: three new rooms, three new prisoners. Finally, after a short delay, the last panel altered to show a fourth room, unoccupied, the image overlaid with a grey shadow in the shape of a question mark.
‘Room for one more inside,’ Dale muttered grimly.
There followed a few seconds of silence, as though the room – and perhaps even the country – was collectively taking a moment to fully register the enormity of what had just been revealed. Then it sounded like every phone in the building – landline and mobile – was ringing at once.
Angelique looked at Dale. ‘What we gonna say?’ she asked him, the ‘we’ part in truth merely a gesture of solidarity.
He sighed, the words ‘let this cup pass from my lips’ all but etched upon his weary expression.
‘I don’t suppose “move along, nothing to see here” is worth a try?’ he had asked.
There’s a knock at Zal’s hotel room door, and he springs from the bed, turns off the TV, checks the mirror, inadvertently patting at his clothes. This is what she does to him: the moment she shows up, he feels like he’s just walked onstage unprepared, and a magician never walks onstage unprepared. He thinks of a hundred nights he must have lain awake onboard the Spirit of Athene, wondering what if, and imagining a moment just like this, imagining Angelique de Xavia knocking on his hotel-room door. In the fantasies, it was fair to say, he was a lot cooler. They worked out far closer to what happened in the dressing room, whereas right now he’s doing a passable reconstruction of his conduct in the hour preceding that, when he spotted her sitting by the edge of his stage and blew his trick.
He had flown in that morning, caught a flight from Malaga to Gatwick, sharing an airplane with two hundred people who had been sold some bad advice regarding UV-protection. Poor bastards had evidently spent the previous two weeks under the impression that ingesting alcohol for eighteen hours a day was an effective prophylaxis against sunburn. They really ought to sue somebody.
After Toulon, he had gone back to the ship to put a few matters in order, not least straightening things with Morrit. Prior to them hitting the evidence repository, Angelique had expressed her concerns about the timescale of what she was asking, not wishing him to drop everything just to end up sitting around indefinitely. He had therefore assured her that he could be in London inside twelve hours from anywhere on the ship’s schedule, even the open sea, the cruise company having a helicopter at their disposal for emergency transfers.
‘If it makes you feel easier, I can work my ticket, see out my contract, but I’d be on permanent standby, ready to move whenever you pick up the phone.’
It seemed a mutual, unspoken understanding that such a mercy dash might never be required, and he had wondered darkly about that: how the weeks and months might pass, their communication fading away with Angelique’s hopes. There might only be a call, or just a message, to say the worst, and that would be the end – of everything. All would be as it was, with him playing the ballroom each night, sometimes looking at the table where she sat and remembering a dream that died. But what she had found in Lydon Matlock’s medical file meant that, for better or worse, her quest would end soon, and with a bang, not a whimper.
He decided he had to come clean to Morrit. He owed it to him: not just because he had so suddenly dropped everything and gone off at zero notice; not just because he had left the old man hanging on in recent months, waiting for Zal to make some kind of decision; and not just because he had kept so much of himself secret throughout the whole of their past. He owed him as a down-payment on what he still hoped would be their future; and by way of ensuring that he had a future, Zal had to come clean because he needed Morrit’s professional advice. As he saw it, this whole game would come down to how they played a hostage exchange. Essentially this was the ‘cup and balls’ routine, literally the oldest trick in a very, very old book. It dated back thousands of years, documented in ancient Greece, Egypt and Sumeria before that. There was even a name in Latin for its practitioners: acetabularii. But the soul of magic is in finding a new way to perform an old trick.
Standing backstage among their props, Zal tells him everything: about his dad, about the Escobars, the bank, Angelique, right up to Toulon. He explains what he thinks he needs to pull off, shaping Morrit’s advice according to what he has learned from another old-stager: that when it comes to any kind of heist, you plan the job backwards.
‘The first thing you have to put in place is how you’re getting out,’ Zal explains.
‘And I take it that goes for the girl too?’
‘Getting her out? Of course it goes for . . .’ he replies, before reading Morrit’s scrutinising face and absorbing what he really means.
‘I’ll slip away quietly, suffice to say. Save her any awkward shit. She’ll have enough to deal with... either way.’
Morrit is shaking his head. ‘Should never end on a vanish, son. It leaves the audience uncomfortable. You have to take your bows.’
Zal sighs. He has just given Morrit a potted history of his relationship with Angelique; how could he expect the guy to understand in five minutes a conundrum Zal is still struggling with after five years?
‘This audience won’t be looking for an encore, Dan. She didn’t come because she wants me. She came because she needs me.’
‘And what do you want, lad?’
‘What I want doesn’t really play here. This isn’t about me, it’s about her.’
‘Bollocks. You’re just setting up your out, clearing the obstacles so it’s easier to leave. What is it you’re running from? Are you afraid if you ask her, she might give up everything for you? Aye, that would really scare you, wouldn’t it?’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he offers sheepishly. Devastating comeback. Yeah, that would really put him off the scent.
‘I know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s called love, and you’re arse-deep in it. Look at you: you’re dropping everything for this girl, running off to put yourself in harm’s way and asking nothing in return. Admirable, son, admirable, but ask yourself this: if she’s worth all that, isn’t she worth the wooing, too?’
‘I told you, Dan: she doesn’t want me, she needs me. Big difference. She only came because she’s in trouble.’
‘Aye, you say. But there’s two folk get married every day in this world on account of a girl being in trouble.’
Zal opens the hotel-room door and Angelique steps inside, bringing a whiff of perfume and the smell of clothes that have been outdoors in the cool, more pronounced to an olfactory sense that has been holed up in an air-conditioned room for several hours. He closes the door and turns, expecting to see her back as she makes her way into the room, but instead finds her stepping into an embrace, which she holds, wordlessly, for ten, maybe twenty seconds. When at last she pulls back, it is to look into his eyes, and at this point, for some reason he speaks before it can turn into another kiss.
‘It’s good to see you.’
She nods, looking a little unsure of herself. ‘Thanks for coming, Zal. For everything. In fact, I don’t think “thanks” really covers...’
‘Let’s worry about that shit if I actually prove useful,’ he interrupts.
She shrugs a little, and Zal goes on before she can say he’s already been useful simply by holding her, or anything else that might confuse both of them as to what she really wants. ‘Because it looks like quite a game we’re getting into.’ He grabs the remote and turns on the TV. It looks natural, logical, getting down to business, but really it’s just easier than talking about the other stuff. The TV defaults to BBC1, showing a news report, the faces of the three new abductees inset in the top-right-hand corner.
‘No kidding,’ Angelique says, moving into professional mode also. ‘He just scooped up three of the most famous people in the country, a major escalation from glorified talent-show contestants. There’s going to be fifty million eyes on this, which is why I appreciate having a secret confederate, not to mention one with a gift for misdirection.’
‘It’s escalated further than that in the last half-hour,’ Zal informs her. ‘He’s added sound, and he’s letting them mingle.’
‘He’s what?’
Angelique stares at the TV, while Zal thumbs the remote until he finds Sky News, the channel he just switched off.
‘Just happened while you were on your way over here. Waste of having big stars if they can’t talk to—’
Angelique’s phone rings before he can finish. She holds up a hand by way of apology/explanation that she must take this call. He understands. It’s everything that’s impossible between them in a solitary gesture. He cuts off speaking, won’t make even a sound that the person on the other end might ask about.
‘I was on the tube,’ she says. ‘No signal. Yeah, I’m watching it now.’
A couple of news channels are streaming the feed, no doubt on a delay in case anything truly unbroadcastable suddenly transpires. His flip through the networks showed that all the news bulletins are carrying at least a bit of this footage, same as they all showed brief clips of hostage videos, but Zal thinks Sky News may be kicking the ass out of the public-interest justification. This isn’t reportage: they’re filling their schedule with a celebrity reality show, one infinitely more compelling and thus ratings-boosting than any predecessor, and it ain’t costing them a cent.
The three new captives are shown in a central area, doors off it leading to their individual rooms. The inset feed is too small for the type to be legible, but the newsreader confirmed earlier that each door bears a nameplate, with one displaying merely a line of question marks. The room has, like the one holding the Anika kid, a microwave and a (larger) fridge, plus the addition of a sink and a stack of crockery. Other than that, the only items of furniture visible are two chaises longues and a widescreen TV mounted on one wall, upon which they can see a live feed of the original remaining hostage, who appears oblivious of their presence.
Angelique finishes her call and continues to gaze at the screen, sighing gently as to suggest a controlled outlet of far greater rage.
‘This won’t stop at extended bulletins on Sky News,’ she says. ‘The networks will be carrying this live after the watershed.’
‘After the what?’
‘Don’t ask. You’d have to be British, and even then it doesn’t make sense. But they’ll give him everything he could want: national prime-time broadcasting. The digital networks will be able to dedicate a whole channel to this, twenty-four/seven.’
‘Didn’t they do that before?’
‘No. Not enough to see – just miserable human beings festering in cells – and nothing to hear.’
‘Why weren’t they miked last time?’
‘Darcourt’s sick joke – they got famous by miming, so he denied them a voice. He also denied himself an angle of interest, but he’s learning as he goes. This part’s new to him, but he’s proving expert at the abduction bit. He took three high-profile individuals in one day and left us with nothing. Killed all the witnesses, left nobody alive to talk.’
‘What about the limo, the Merc?’
‘Sore point. We had high hopes for some kind of triangulation telling us roughly where he’s operating from; we figured he had to have dropped each one off before hitting the next, unless he had them in the boot, which is unlikely given the number of hours they’d need to stay sedated, not to mention still breathing. We assumed he must therefore be based somewhere within a reasonable radius of London – like everything and everyone else in the fucking media. Find him on one camera, suss the plate, pick it up wherever else it surfaces on the system and trace his routes to a common source.’
‘But . . .’ Zal prompts.
‘Exactly. Despite us having more CCTV cameras than anywhere else on the planet, turning the whole bloody country into a reality show, the only footage this Mercedes popped up on is in the clips of those three willingly climbing into it. It’s like a ghost car.’
‘Or maybe a Transformer. Have you put out an APB on giant killer robots spouting macho dialogue?’
‘We’re not that desperate yet, Zal, but give it time. We’ve bugger-all else. He was smart. Hit three in one day, got the last one in the bag before anyone had raised the alarm about the first. Though with every celeb in the country battening down the hatches, it’s going to leave him a challenge filling that last slot.’
‘Unless he’s already got number four and wants to have a little fun with the speculation before revealing who it is.’
‘That’s certainly his style, though it would have to be someone nobody has noticed is missing.’
‘You ask me, I’d rule nothing in or out regarding that question mark. From a showmanship point of view, that blank slot is worth more to him than the other three, A-list as they are, because right now it could be anybody: top of the bill, more famous than all of them. But speaking as a magician, what worries me about this is that it’s a perfect means of misdirection. Everybody’s focusing here, focusing on what’s going to fill that window. Which ensures his next move will be something none of you sees coming.’
Angelique’s phone rings again, and she gives Zal a strain-faced look by way of saying she must take the call. He gestures with a single open palm: don’t sweat it. She speaks briefly then hangs up.
‘Gotta cut it short, I’m afraid. Boss has had to call a press conference and he wants a wee huddle beforehand, see if between us all we can cobble together enough waffle to make it sound like we’re anything other than caught with our pants down. Again. I’m sorry, Zal. Just got here, too.’
‘Hey, I got a hug: big night for me. I’ve been assigned the lone wolf role on this one, and I’m cool with that. You go lie to the media, sell ’em back some of what they’re usually shovellin’.’
‘Okay. You work on this thing us polis won’t see coming.’
He sits staring at the door for a long time after she’s gone, the TV still burbling in the background but so distant from his attention as to be in the next room or even the next hotel. He’s wondering whether it was his imagination or did she seem in a hurry to get out the door? Shit, leave it, man. She’s in the eye of a storm here, not to mention being in the situation he chose to spare her all those years ago: of a police officer fraternising with a suspect wanted for armed robbery.
Her leaving felt odd, though. Incomplete. They had hugged in Toulon, at least, before saying goodbye. Tonight she just put her phone back in her pocket and walked. Was it because she had stolen time for a visit in the midst of what had to be frenzied police activities? Was it because they were now at any moment only a few minutes away from each other? Or was it that, despite their proximity, they were now moving apart by degrees? If so, then why did he, supposedly clearing obstacles from his path in preparing his out, fear that explanation so much?
A knock at the door seems to render it all moot. He looks round the room, can’t see any belongings she forgot. He thinks: fuck the out. No matter how painful it gets, he’ll deal with that shit later. Right now, let it be complicated, let it be her returning to say goodbye with a kiss, a hug, anything.
He opens the door and finds a gun stuck in his face instead. Okay, maybe not that complicated.
There’s two men, middle-aged, just the chubby side of burly, both wearing grey suits, one balding but bullet-cropped and the other with a bad comb-over. They railroad him into the room, gun still pressed directly into his forehead by Comb-Over while Bullet-Head closes the door.
‘Mr Innez,’ Comb-Over says. ‘Welcome back to Britain. Her Majesty would like to extend her hospitality.’
Bullet-Head turns around to face him, dangling a pair of handcuffs.
‘For a minimum twelve years,’ he adds.
Angelique can’t think of anything that seems less important than this press conference as she leaves the Halton Court Hotel. It’s not even window dressing, more a fig leaf of an exercise to cover the polis’s collective nakedness. There’s nothing to report: the public have access to as much information as the cops, so if they want to know the latest, they can log on or, it would now appear, tune in. The only thing the police have an exclusive on is something they have no fucking intention of sharing right now, that being Darcourt’s insufficiently impending demise.
She resents having to bail out on Zal, but truth is, she’s just so jumpy about this massive act of deceit she’s embarked upon that she feels she has to be super-keen little PC Shiny Buttons in order to allay suspicion. He only flew into town today, but she’s felt like she’s looking over her shoulder the whole time to see who might be watching. In fact, she finds herself literally looking over her shoulder as she walks away from the hotel. There were two men she’d have figured for cops walking towards her as she exited the building, but to her slight relief – if not complete comfort – they’ve gone.
It is only as she is descending into the tube station around the corner that her surroundings trigger a recall of whatever her mind had subconsciously flagged on her way here. Like jumping back three chapters on a DVD, she suddenly sees the ticket hall at Holborn again, except this time she knows what to look for. Grey suit, pot belly, bad Bobby Charlton effort up top. She had seen him at Holborn, then seen him again outside the Halton Court. It just hadn’t clicked because there were – oh shit – two of them. They’d been walking towards her as she left, then disappeared: undoubtedly, she now realises, into Zal’s hotel.
She turns and runs, full pelt, back to the Halton Court, where she storms up to the desk and sticks her badge in the receptionist’s face like it’s a revolver.
‘Two men, grey suits, little hair. They just came in here. Where did they go?’
The girl looks utterly flustered and not a little confused, glancing from side to side like she’s expecting someone else to answer for her.
‘This is an emergency,’ Angelique all but yells. ‘Where did they go.’
‘I think they . . .’ she stumbles, long enough for her accented words to make Angelique worry she hasn’t mastered the local tongue. She curses the fact that having learned several internationally popular languages, Polish has come up on the rails and overtaken most of them here in the UK. ‘They said they were police too,’ the girl eventually volunteers. ‘They asked which guest you had been in to see.’
‘Shit.’
Angelique is about to charge for the stairs, but stops and turns back to the receptionist.
The girl looks apologetically helpless.
‘I do not...I cannot remember.’
‘Shit.’
‘I am sorry.’
‘Never mind. Just gimme a swipe card for room two-twelve, please. Now.’
The girl lifts a blank and slots it into the mag-strip dock, then begins tapping at the computer keyboard. Time passes. The girl stares at the screen, twitching a little, her cheeks hot with embarrassment.
‘I am sorry, the system...’
Angelique remembers seeing a cart in Zal’s corridor, a maid in the middle of her turn-down duties: an invaluable service for those folk incapable of pulling their own sheets back or who can’t make it to the pillow without the incentive of a square of chocolate to go that final yard.
‘Forget it,’ she says, and takes off.
She finds the cart one room along from where she last saw it, and flashes her badge at the maid.
‘I need this swipe card,’ she explains quietly, and lifts it from the tray at the side of the trolley.
Angelique stops outside a moment and listens. She can hear one man’s voice, talking softly.
‘. . . no, meek as a lamb. So we should have him hand-delivered within the...’
She swipes the card and steps inside. The guy with the Charlie Bobbleton is seated on the bed, his bullet-headed partner standing by the window at the far end, talking into his mobile. To her right, the bathroom door is open, and inside Zal is handcuffed to a towel rail. He raises his eyebrows in salute, looking sheepish to the point of embarrassment.
‘I’ll have to call you back,’ says Bullet-Head, as Bobbleton gets up from the bed.
Angelique produces her badge and holds it up, by way of telling him to stay put.
‘Police. What’s the script, chaps? Let’s see some ID.’
Bobbleton reaches inside his jacket with his right hand and produces a gun.
‘Will this do, Officer de Xavia?’ he asks.
Angelique takes her eyes off his for a brief glance at the weapon. Looks like an HK Mark 23; the vanilla rather than the laser-aiming model, but the main thing is it’s not some Russian ex-military piece of shit, so it confirms these aren’t gangsters. She clocked what they were one foot inside the door: ex-cops, post-fifty-five, working private – and most likely corporate – security to fill the time and fill the coffers before retirement proper.
She knows there’s no way this guy’s pulling the trigger. She’s a situation to be handled, an obstacle to get around.
‘It’s Detective Inspector, dickhead.’
‘Oh, not once this particular chicken has come home to roost, you won’t be. Don’t know what games they played at your school, darlin’, but the cops are supposed to jail the robbers, not fuck them.’
‘I went to school in Glasgow, bawbag. Let me show you what we played.’
Approximately three seconds later, it’s Angelique who’s holding the gun, while Bobbleton is holding his face, lying on the carpet beneath her. She’s sustained some damage herself: prick had a sap stashed in his sock and got her a sore one just above the eye before she put him down.
She was right about him not shooting, though: he had the safety on the whole time. There’s no loyalty bonus going to make it worth his while to shoot a cop.
Bullet-Head remains where he was, observing developments with his arms folded and a bemused but calm look on his face.
‘Who are you working for?’ she asks.
‘Client confidentiality forbids me from answering that question,’ he says acidly, though there’s a smugness about him betraying the fact that he’d just love to tell her if it wasn’t more fun to dick her about.
‘Gimme your phone, and the keys to the cuffs. Throw them both on the bed. NOW!’
He rolls his eyes and tosses the phone towards Angelique’s side of the bed. As it hits the duvet, Zal emerges from the bathroom at her back.
Bullet-Head looks incredulously at Zal, then glares at Bobbleton.
‘I thought you cuffed him.’
‘Don’t fucking look at me. “Oh, if we’re going someplace, can I put my jacket on before you cuff me?”’ he mimics, crap American accent. ‘“Fine,” you said.’
‘Well, how was I to know—’
‘The keys,’ Angelique interrupts, lifting the mobile. ‘Toss them, come on.’
Bullet-Head shakes his napper.
‘It would appear your boyfriend doesn’t need them.’
‘No, but you and your boyfriend will when I cuff the pair of you to that same towel rail. Give.’
She toggles through the menu, looking for the outgoing-call log.
Bullet-Head folds his arms. She glances from the end of the gun to the screen of the phone. The last, truncated call was to ‘D Holland’.
Bullet-Head is nodding with undisguised self-satisfaction.
‘Get up, Arthur,’ he tells Bobbleton. ‘Officer de Xavia is going to stand aside and let us leave now, because Officer de Xavia really, really does not want to have to book us in at the station and explain any of this, now does she?’
Angelique is present at the press conference in body only. She stands a few feet to the side of the backboards, out of the television cameras’ sightlines, her eyes on Dale and Aldwyn Keen. Kudos to the commander for sharing the stocks, the brass usually only making themselves available when there’s credit to be doled out, but nothing he or Dale says registers in her head, and not merely because it’s worthless.
It’s a good thing she wasn’t asked to help front this latest excuse-and-apology showcase, as she can feel a swelling fast beginning to grow above her right eye. She managed to stop the bleeding before getting to HQ, but despite buying a bag of frozen peas at a Tesco Metro and applying it throughout the walk here, that prick with the lead sap has made his mark. It was noticed, too, Dale immediately asking what had happened. She said she walked into the back of someone carrying an easel on the tube. It sounded embarrassingly daft enough for it to seem genuine, but her paranoia imagined him divining all sorts of revelations from it.
Debbie Holland, RSGN’s corporate zombie bitch: that’s who had sent the male-pattern-baldness brothers after Zal, and what made it all the more bitter was that it was Angelique who had put her on to the scent. It was impossible to know – and probably just self-harm to speculate – precisely how long they had been tracking her, waiting for her to lead them straight to him. Could have been from the minute she walked out of their corporate HQ in the city; certainly long enough to know she’d been abroad, no doubt, from which they deduced that she had made contact.
Zal had begun packing his bag as soon as Holland’s rentacops left the room.
‘I’ll find someplace else,’ he said. ‘Drop you a text once I’m settled. You better get to your meeting.’
Angelique would have shaken her head if it didn’t feel like it was close to falling off. ‘This isn’t going to work, Zal,’ she told him. ‘You’re here a day and they’re already on to you.’
Her next line ought to have been that he should leave, that she couldn’t ask him to do this any more, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it in the face of an impossible choice. If he left, she would probably lose her parents. If he stayed, there was every chance she could lose all three of them.
Zal looked at her with an amused sense of minor grievance, like he was insulted by the idea.
‘The last thing you need to worry about is those clowns,’ he said. ‘They shot their load too early. You only get one chance to take me by surprise, and they just blew theirs. There will not be a second.’
‘They could get lucky, Zal. We don’t know who else is out there. And given everything else I’m dealing with, I don’t think I could take the irony of being the person who precipitates you finally getting nicked for the RSGN robbery.’
‘Hey,’ he told her softly, ‘I always knew this was part of the package.’
He said it as though it was no more an inconvenience of coming here than the weather being cooler and the beer being warm. She remembered the look on his face when he was cuffed in the bathroom: rather than fear or panic, it was like: ‘Sorry you have to see this’. But that was Zal all over the back, wasn’t it? If he genuinely was afraid, the last person he was going to confide that to right now was Angelique.
At least she didn’t have to torture herself with wondering what would have happened had she not gone back.
‘Could you have undone those cuffs at any time?’ she asked him.
‘Not at any time,’ he answered. ‘Only when it was funny. Sorry, old joke. But there was no point doing it while they were watching over me with a gun. If you hadn’t shown up, I’d have chosen my moment. In magic, timing is everything.’
She wanted to grab him, hold him. She wanted to tell him to come and stay at her place, her racing mind suddenly seeing a perverse logic to it being the last place they would now expect to find him: a triumph of emotion and desire over solid thinking. She just wanted to be near him, because everything felt better that way. Even if it was another of his illusions, she wanted to be lost in it, because it was far preferable to the reality.
She stares blankly, barely focused at the seated rows of reporters, the bank of cameras hemming them in at the rear. There’s a clamour of questions, just white noise in her head, which is throbbing from tension. She places a delicate hand upon the swelling, traces a finger over the thin line of clotted blood.
They’re dangerous for each other. That’s why this can’t work, why she was right to let him go five years back. With this thought, she realises that he hasn’t asked her about that day at the musée, and promptly deduces why: he didn’t go either. He knew it couldn’t work. He had to run, had to find his new life.
Yet when she came and found him again, he dropped everything for her. He loved her – for what else is love if not what he is doing for her now? – but she knows it can’t work. Five years on, nothing has changed.
Her phone chimes, signalling a text and prompting the usual internal responses to which she seems incapable of developing an immunity. Too soon to be Zal, she guesses, and guesses right. It’s another anonymous message. Her heart hammering, she presses the key to view it. It’s just two short lines: one a statement, the second an instruction.
Having read them, she looks around at the cameras, the reporters, the cops, and nods to herself, for everything has become clear. She wasn’t cut out for infidelity. Those two weeks with Zal five years ago had been the most exciting but also the least comfortable of her life, and right now she is being pulled to pieces by what she is being forced to do. She doesn’t know how many people she is betraying, but she knows the figure is at least two too many.
She feels suddenly calm, the calm of resolution. She knows, finally, what she must do. No matter how it works out for her parents and the hostages, there are two other lives beyond that fate for whom she has a responsibility.
It has to end.
So what do they say about this state of consecration, this ascension to an exalted echelon of renown? What is fame? According to Byron, it is ‘the advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little’. Ooh, grumpy trousers, but spoken nonetheless with the admirable contempt of one who had already scooped his fill.
According to Socrates, ‘fame is the perfume of heroic deeds’. What would the most venerated of Greek philosophers think of Bedroom Popstars, or Big Brother, were he to witness the willing indignities of those seeking only that perfume, and who regarded its scent as an end in itself? But perhaps old Byron was protesting too much, and perhaps there’s nothing new under the sun. Tacitus said that ‘love of fame is the last thing even learned men can bear to be parted from’. So perhaps one’s deeds, whether heroic or in some other way remarkable, have never been entirely their own reward. And nor has that reward, that perfume, been dispensed throughout history with fairness or consistency, in any judiciously measured recognition of merit or dessert.
‘Fame is like a shaved pig with a greased tail,’ said Davy Crockett, ‘and it is only after it has slipped through the hands of some thousands, that some fellow, by mere chance, holds on to it!’ The honourable gentleman late of San Antonio, whimsical as his turn of phrase might be, is closest to the truth, particularly illuminating upon the arbitrary nature of this blessing as it is about to be bestowed upon my subject tonight.
I feel like Willie Wonka here, one last golden ticket to hand out. I hope its recipient is appreciative of how many people will be left disappointed once that last place is taken. Not merely because the lustre of endless, tantalising possibility always makes the announcement seem like a comedown, no matter how famous the celeb: an answer that can never be as exciting as the question. No, there will be disappointment also among those who have moved to exploit that excitement. The mere knowledge of there being one final celebrity to be abducted has itself provided a meal of carrion for the buzzards among the fame-hungry, those so ravenous as to have no concerns for their own dignity as they fall upon the maggoty meat. Such as those celebs who have, since yesterday, issued statements about going under protection – note ye, not merely gone under protection, but instructed their publicists to announce the fact – in order to stake a claim of being sufficiently famous as to be plausibly considered under my threat. And what is surely the greatest indictment is that more than one has had the same bottom-feeding idea.
Appalling, you may think, but there’s worse: such as going into hiding, not telling anyone where you are and not answering your mobile, in order to get your picture on the TV news bulletins as ‘feared missing’.
Oh yes. Step forward ubiquitous trash-icon ‘Cassandra’. Real name: Sandra Clark. Occupation: having tits. The feminists slagged her off, but in truth, seldom has the male of the species been so effectively humiliated as by this self-seeking bitch’s demonstration that a few pounds of strategically deployed silicon can blind them to an abject lack of charm, personality, intellect, talent or any glimmer of genuine sexuality.
And step forward disgraced former MP Liam Cadzow, along with, as always, his ghastly fucking harridan of a missus, Annabelle. Since he lost his seat in parliament and narrowly avoided the clink along with Aitken and Archer, I had thought that the only publicity avenue left unexplored by this pair was hardcore porn, but now it seems Liam has played a cute card by effectively saying, ‘I’m Brian and so’s my wife.’
I know exactly what they’re all up to, being the one person who can say for sure that they haven’t been abducted by me. They’ll be keeping their heads down for as long as they dare, long enough to remind everybody of how famous and important they are, then they’ll pitch up with some excuse about going off to the wilds seeking solitude. ‘No idea all this fuss was going on. Slightly embarrassed, but it’s very touching to know everybody cares...’
Part of me is curious to see who blinks first: Cassandra or the Cadzows; how many days they’d each be prepared to lie low, knowing the longer they’re missing, the bigger the story, but that the first to break cover will scoop the most publicity. Unfortunately, I’m unavoidably about to pull the plug on the three of them by bagging my final public figure.
I’m standing in the hallway outside the apartment, my golf bag waiting on the floor, my invisible vehicle parked nearby. It’s a pitiful little dwelling for an ostensibly successful professional at this stage in life, so telling to have an existence that can be comfortably accommodated within such a conveniently compact space.
It will be a simpler affair than the other three. I can’t take any chances: this is not someone I want to be tangling with at close quarters, especially not a man in my condition. It’s also someone more likely to recognise me than Charlotte, Danny or Katie, so I can’t allow my quarry the chance to scamper.
There will be no cameras or limos or dangling of bait. No publicists, chauffeurs, make-up artists or even hookers to worry about. Tragically, no lovers, partners or spouses either: the price of being married to the job, giving the best years of your life to your career so you’re left eating M&S ready-meals for one in front of Newsnight before sloping off to your lonely bed. Still, look on the bright side. I will very soon be introducing you to some very interesting new people, a big chance for matchmaking.
That’s half the appeal of these shows, isn’t it? Who fancies who, who’d like to do what to whom, the vicarious excitement for the audience of seeing their own desires manifested by proxy, whether that might be sexual gratification or beating the show’s most annoying cunt to death. All right, that’s a bit more than previous celeb-reality productions have actually seen fit to broadcast, but if you ask me, that’s where they’ve been going wrong.
It is pitch dark outside, a little after three in the morning. I consider it appropriate that I’m turning the police’s favoured witching hour upon one of their own. They prefer to stage their snatch raids in the wee small hours when the suspects are sufficiently heedless of the impending danger as to be sound asleep, catching them unaware, disorientated and as unprepared to do a runner as anyone in their pants and stocking soles can imaginably be. I am appropriating their scheduling but modify my tactics as to eschew blue lights and battering rams. A gentle finger on the doorbell will suffice.
Angelique is dreaming that she heard the doorbell and has got up to answer it. In her dream, she’s in the hall, fully dressed but in her first police uniform, then in her primary school uniform, and the door she’s approaching is now the one from her parents’ first house in Leeside, in front of that swirly carpet James used to pretend was a pond spotted with lily pads. She hears the doorbell again, and this time the sound is enough to evaporate the dream and tell her that what prompted it was a genuine first ring.
It takes a couple of goes but I am patient. I know it was a long day for the poor dear, with much to keep a troubled mind awake despite the fatigue, too. I hear the sound of footsteps and conceal the gun behind my back, its tranquilliser payload prepped and ready.
Angelique lifts her head to look at the clock, feeling the swimmy-headed, extreme grogginess of being pulled from the most profound depths of a sleep it took a frustratingly long time to fall into.
The knackered part of her suggests she ignore it and go back under, woozily conjuring up images of drunks at the wrong door. Who would be looking for her at this hour? This in its own fuzzy-logical roundabout way prompts the first coherent thought to strike her slowly waking brain: that it might be Zal. It’s enough to get her sitting up, though she needs another moment to haul her body fully upright. The old t-shirt she’s wearing barely covers her pants, but her intention at this stage is only to stick her head around the door sufficiently to establish the identity of her visitor. If it’s him, she won’t be worried about what she’s wearing, and if it’s anybody else, they can fuck off.
She opens the front door, still squinting as her eyes adjust to the brightness of the hall light after the dark of her bedroom. That it isn’t Zal is the first thing to register. She finds herself looking into a male face. It is familiar, but in her bleary, halfdazed state and in this unexpected, dislocated context, it takes her a moment to recognise him. When she does, she feels a sudden, horrified fear, accompanied by the sensation of falling.