One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (37 page)

Matt would then confess to countless acts of apparent forgiveness throughout his childhood and later life, occasions when he sought and obtained a diplomatic solution, as being nothing to do with strength of character and everything to do with weakness of body. ‘Maybe that was Gandhi’s big secret: he just didnae want to get into it with anybody. Look at the fuckin’ size of the guy, for Christ’s sake. He couldnae have fought an infection.’

Like most of his material, there was a disarming honesty about it that sounded self‐
deprecatory until you realised how widely it applied. With Matt Black, cotton wool usually concealed fish‐
hooks. He said he turned the other cheek because he was too scared to hit back, ‘forcing me to confront my anger and my grievances, forcing me to make peace with myself and then search for alternative paths, so that I might eventually discover a non‐
violent way of … [big, long, reflective pause] … fucking the guy’s life up forever. And I’m not alone – I think that’s why there are so many lawyers in this world …’

Matt was admitting that he had to pursue non‐
violent alternatives because violence had never been an option open to him; but the barb in the candyfloss was that whether it was down to cowardliness or weakness rather than wisdom or vision, it didn’t make it any less right.

Davie had an uncommon, even opposite, perspective on the pacifism routine, but one which far from negated it. To Davie, violence had
always
been an option, and the ability to fight meant that he hadn’t needed to consider alternative responses, even when he knew they were available. However, his facility for violence wasn’t always what dictated his recourse to it: sometimes – often – it had felt like there were no alternatives. Childhood and beyond, whenever he felt threatened, violence had seemed like the only possible response. Changing that hadn’t merely been about learning the alternatives, but about learning not to feel threatened in the first place, learning when no response was required.

However, what Matt Black knew as well as he was that not everyone in this world
was
as cowardly as Matt: there
were
wars, and violence did exist. Davie had learned not to see a challenge in every face, a gauntlet in every remark, but there were still times when he had good reason to feel threatened. Tonight, it was fair to say, fell into that category. The big question – the question in which there might even dwell some of that absolution he did not seek – was whether sometimes there
were
no alternatives to violence. He’d admit he hadn’t paused to think of any as he wired that door handle to the mains, but what if, indeed, there were none?

Honest to the last, it was a question Matt Black didn’t pretend to be able to answer, acknowledging that circumstance had thus far never asked it of him. ‘I really don’t know what I’d do,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you this, there cannae be many things more tragic than bein’ a martyr to pacifism. You die
and
you lose. In fact, I’d say if you’re a pacifist, you’ve got a fuckin’ ideological obligation
not
to die from violence. And like all ideological obligations, unfortunately no guidance is offered as to practical application. Actually, if you’re a pacifist and you do find yourself in that situation … let me know how you get on.’

Cotton wool and fish‐
hooks again. The cotton wool was admitting he didn’t know the answer. The fish‐
hook – and indeed the gag – was in the possibility that there might nonetheless
be
one. Perhaps, Davie thought, that was the true measure of a pacifist: someone who would always find a non‐
violent solution, no matter what the circumstance. In that light, the deeds of his past sank all the further into shadow, and his action in that bedroom tonight flinched also from the glare.

(
Offer no excuses, seek no absolution.
)

As Davie watched the black‐
and‐
white surveillance images on Tim Vale’s laptop, it came as quite a surprise, then, to observe that the pacifist comedian had at last been forced to address that big, no‐
longer‐
hypothetical question. His answer involved grabbing a 9mm machine gun and spraying bullets around like it was a garden‐
hose.

Presumably, Matt’s latent pacifism was manifest in his apparent inability to hit a coo’s arse with a banjo.

They had heard footsteps approaching the laundry room. Davie instructed Catherine to hide as the sounds grew louder, taking up position himself to the right of the door. He’d looked around for a chib, but the only thing to hand was a thick pile of fluffy towels, and despite PE teachers’ dressing‐
room warnings that ‘you could take somebody’s eye out with one of those’, he didn’t think they constituted lethal weapons, even when rolled up and wet.

The door opened and Davie leapt upon the emerging figure with all his weight. The man’s form seemed to disappear from beneath him, and Davie felt his own momentum carry him helplessly, spastically forward into a stack of shelves. He threw up his arms to cushion against the impact, crumpling to the floor as his feet skidded, slipped and tangled with each other. Davie scrambled to turn and face, all the time expecting a blow to arrive, or as likely a bullet. None came. He looked up at his assailant. It had been several long years since he was at the peak of both his skills and his activity in the field of personal harm, and Davie had not expected his abilities to be instantly restored, but nonetheless he was a little alarmed to see that he’d just been effortlessly brushed off by someone of retirement age.

He hadn’t even managed to ruffle the guy’s hair, and to further rub it in, the bloke was actually holding a briefcase. Whatever he’d just done, he’d done one‐
handed, and looked sufficiently cool about it to suggest even that hadn’t required special effort or concentration.

The man walked over, still holding the damn briefcase, and offered him a hand up.

‘Sorry about that, old chap,’ he said. ‘Bit of confusion was inevitable, I suppose, what with all that’s going on. I’m Tim Vale, by the way. Security and surveillance consultant.’

What with all that’s going on, he sounded like they had plumbers in or something.

Davie felt the power in the man’s grip as it pulled him to his feet. Vale was, yes of course, smaller than him, but he was also clearly in far better shape. Not that Davie’s being out of practice made any difference: he was instantly sure this guy could have utterly owned him at any time in his life. He didn’t know what career path had taken Vale to being a ‘security and surveillance consultant’, but he was confident it hadn’t involved slave‐
wage night shifts on a building site.

‘Davie Murdoch,’ he offered deferentially.

‘Mr Vale,’ said Catherine, emerging from behind a table, evidently familiar with the newcomer.

‘Ms O’Rourke. Good to see you. Quite a party so far, I understand.’

Gavin’s hands and then flushed face appeared above the rim of the laundry hopper. ‘Christ, Vale, what on earth’s going on?’ he asked, climbing clumsily over the side. Davie was reminded of a toddler escaping from a barred cot.

‘Ah, Mr Hutchison. I was going to ask you much the same question.’

Vale spoke like this was a business meeting. Davie wondered momentarily whether the man was missing something – such as the presence upstairs of armed maniacs in ski‐
masks – but strongly suspected otherwise.

‘And where the hell have you been?’ Gavin demanded. Presumably, as security consultant, terrorist disposal was Vale’s remit and Gavin’s tone suggested two hours was an unacceptable delay in discharging his duties. Davie wouldn’t have spoken to the man like that from behind a cannon, but he guessed Gavin’s vocation had moved him in circles where sharpness of tongue was not checked by the real and immediate threat of burst nose.

‘I’m sorry, I rather missed out on things,’ Vale remarked. ‘I was working on ironing out some of the bugs in this new surveillance software. I needed somewhere quiet, away from the noise of the party, so I retreated to one of the admin suites on sub‐
level two. Time just dissolves when you’re working with computers, I find. You get caught up in the most pernickety little operations and before you know it, it’s the middle of the night.’

‘Are you
aware
of what’s going on here right now?’ Gavin asked.

‘Latterly, yes. I only decided to boot up the system about half an hour ago, to see what difference my dabblings had made. I almost shut it straight down again – there was no response at all from the spider‐
deck cameras, which at the time I assumed to be a software fault. You’re lucky I toggled through a few of the others or I’d still be in there, trying to reconfigure the compatibility settings.’

‘Didn’t you hear all the gunfire?’

‘Not a thing. I had my discman on, you see. I need to be mainlining Prokofiev while I work with computers, otherwise I’m terribly inclined to put my fist through them.’

‘Computers?’ Davie asked.

‘Yes,’ Vale said, holding up the ‘briefcase’, which turned out upon closer examination to be a laptop PC. ‘It’s our pioneering, frightfully clever and right now deeply flawed Nodal Network Video Surveillance System. It’s really just closed‐
circuit TV with knobs on, except most of the knobs don’t work at the moment. That’s why I’m stuck here, instead of shooting in the Highlands. Of course I might get some shooting done yet, by the look of things.’

‘How does it work?’ Davie enquired.

‘Well, I’ll have to fire this up to check the coast’s still clear, so I might as well show you.’

Vale flipped open the laptop and set it down on a nearby work surface, elbowing a pile of bedsheets to one side to make room. He then squatted down next to one wall, scanning along the skirting board for something. What he was looking for turned out to be a small junction box, similar to a telephone socket. Vale plugged a cable into it and attached the other end to the back of the laptop, then began working the keyboard.

‘Instead of all the security cameras connecting directly to one big surveillance room full of TV screens,’ he explained, ‘the nodal system allows you to monitor activity from any point on the rig.’

‘Resort,’ Gavin corrected. ‘We don’t call it a rig,’ he explained to Davie.

‘The signals go to a central server and get converted into digital feeds,’ Vale continued, opening up a window on the colour LCD screen. ‘You can plug into the network at any “node” on the ri– resort. The place is simply far too big to rely on one central observation room.’

‘So could any of the punters plug into this?’

‘Not without this cursed software.’

‘What about the terrorists?’ Gavin asked. ‘They’ll be able to access the computers in the surveillance room upstairs.’

Vale shook his head. ‘The system’s up just now, but you can’t see anything without a username and password.’ He keyed the aforementioned into a dialogue box. ‘Now, this is how I knew to come and let you lot out of here.’

The window he had opened now displayed a black‐
and‐
white image of four figures hunched around a laptop. At the top of the window was a blue bar with white text reversed out of it, stating ‘hotel a/
laundepot/
sublev3/
23:02:36’. Davie looked up and noticed a lens staring back from high on the wall behind them.

‘It defaults to the nearest camera,’ Vale explained. ‘But you can switch to any image in the place – apart from the Carlton, where the electricity’s off, and apart from the gantry decks, where I’m just getting static. Probably vandalised by our visitors. You should, in theory, be able to remotely pan and refocus the cameras using the laptop’s track‐
ball and the shift keys. The fact that you can’t was merely one of the faults myself and the late Mr Prokofiev spent the evening attempting unsuccessfully to remedy. ‘Anyway, as I was saying earlier, I rebooted the whole system and was toggling through the cameras when I noticed Mr Hutchison here, lying face‐
up in a laundry hopper. I noticed Ms O’Rourke too, but the presence of yourself, Mr Murdoch, alerted me that something was mysteriously amiss.’

‘What? The fact that we were stuck in the laundry room wasn’t suspicious enough for you?’ Gavin protested. ‘Isn’t that rather credulous on the part of a security specialist?’

‘Well, you see, Mr Hutchison, my cameras have on occasion spotted you and Ms O’Rourke tarrying together in quite the oddest locations.’

Catherine blushed deep red and closed her eyes. Gavin’s peepers, for their part, threatened to burst from his skull.

‘For future reference, the lure of adventure aside, I’d advise restricting such activities to the bedrooms, unless of course the pair of you tend towards exhibitionism. No cameras in there, you see. As opposed to the lifts, for instance. Or the Laguna’s indoor pool.’

‘I think I want to die,’ Catherine groaned, mortified.

‘Well, you certainly picked the right night for it. A quick scan of a few other cameras showed me a number of heavily armed individuals whom I suspect would be only too happy to oblige you. What they are doing here, I cannot even begin to speculate, but I’d find it hard to imagine their intentions are benign.’

‘Do you know where they are?’ Gavin asked.

‘Only where they’re not. I used this to make sure my route down here was clear. So far, so good.’

‘What about the others,’ Catherine said. ‘Can you show us the ballroom on that thing?’

‘It was the first camera I called up as soon as I suspected something was wrong. There was no‐
one there.’ Vale stared sternly at Gavin. ‘My credulity didn’t stretch to accepting total desertion as being entirely plausible, even given the quality of your house champagne.’

‘Can’t you rewind the footage?’ Gavin asked. ‘Find out what happened?’

Vale sighed, barely tolerant. ‘Again, that’s one of the features I …’ He made a dismissive gesture with his free hand.

‘So where the hell are they?’

‘I
am
looking,’ Vale replied, hitting the tab key. Each time he did so, the window blacked out for a second, then picked up the digitised feed from a new camera. The images were summoned and dismissed, heralds with no news. Empty corridors, stairwells, walkways. Then they saw a perspective upon part of the Lido, the absurd complex of interconnecting swimming pools and water‐
channels that was gouged into the platform’s surface deck like a crude respiratory system. There were three masked men walking along the terrace, carrying the standard complement of automatic weaponry.