Chris Brookmyre [Brookmyre - Fallen Angel

Chris Brookmyre was a journalist before becoming a full-time novelist with the publication of his award-winning debut Quite Ugly One Morning, which established him as one of Britains leading crime authors. His Jack Parlabane novels have sold more than one million copies in the UK alone, and Black Widow won both the McIlvanney Prize and the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award.

Quite Ugly One Morning

Country of the Blind

Not the End of the World

One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

Boiling a Frog

A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away

The Sacred Art of Stealing

Be My Enemy

All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil

Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks

A Snowball in Hell

Pandaemonium

Where the Bodies are Buried

When the Devil Drives

Flesh Wounds

Dead Girl Walking

Black Widow

Want You Gone

Ebook only

The Last Day of Christmas

Siege Mentality

Published by Little, Brown

ISBN: 978-0-3491-4321-7

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

Copyright Christopher Brookmyre 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Little, Brown

Little, Brown Book Group

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www.hachette.co.uk

For Marisa

Human beings find it impossible to make sense of death. The sum of our civilisation and learning has left us uncomprehending of its finality, stalked by its inevitability and yet stunned by its caprice. It is surprising then that we do not take greater solace in the knowledge that some people truly deserve to die.

In such circumstances, death can seem magical, killing a liberation. A figure who loomed so large as to sometimes dominate all my thoughts, instantly rendered null. A once terrifying threat extinguished, an unforgivable wrong avenged. And the greatest transformation of all is that there is no reason for me to be afraid of him any more.

Undoubtedly, his memory will echo, but that is all he can now do.

He is slumped over his desk, his right hand extended as though reaching for one of the documents piled next to his monitor. This was his sanctuary, a place he must have imagined he was untouchable. But such was the hubris of one who so clearly disdained other people for being as stupid as they were powerless.

There are books and papers all around, as befitting a learned individual with a busy mind. Framed certificates on the walls, conspicuous badges of achievement. They are trappings of respectability, part of the faade that disguised the man he truly was, what he was capable of and how low he was prepared to sink.

If someone walked in they might think he had fallen asleep on the job, or perhaps read a particularly depressing email. You would have to come close and look in his eyes to see that he is dead.

It will look like a heart attack. They will not find the tiny needle mark. They will not know to test for insulin. For what he had done, for what he had taken away, he did not deserve that it should have been so quick or merciful.

There is no noise from outside, a sense of respectful stillness surrounding the building, like the world itself is acquiescent of the deed. It feels strange that killing should be so quiet, particularly when that killing is both an act of vengeance and in defence of what is right and true. In real life it is not accompanied by a swell of strings or, in this case, even a cry for help. There had merely been that gasp of horrified astonishment, followed by a look of resignation. It was as though only in this moment did he understand the inevitability of it ending like this, the crushing knowledge that he had brought such a fate upon himself.

What were his last thoughts as he slumped forward onto the mahogany, before the light faded in his eyes and darkness descended for ever? Were they of those he had loved, those he had betrayed? Were they of his life, his career, his achievements, his regrets? Or did his fading mind allow him one last picture of blue skies and a sparkling sea: a place he once believed he was king, but where he had sown the seeds of his destruction?

The most effective conspiracy has the smallest number of participants. By definition the minimum is two. That is also the ideal maximum.

Max Temple

Rain is lashing down as she emerges from the Tube station, gusts of wind angling the deluge almost to the horizontal. A tenaciously brutal winter had relinquished its grip only with grudging reluctance, giving way to some unseasonably hot and sunny late spring days, but this meant that it caught everyone off-guard when the heavens opened this morning.

Ivy had overheard a woman in the carriage talking about the recent warm spells contrast to the Beast from the East, saying she had almost forgotten what it was like to feel the sun on her shoulders. Ivy realises this is true of her too, but that doesnt mean she has missed it. Living in London, she seldom spends much time out of doors. Her office and her apartment are climate controlled to within a decimal point of perfection. What does she need sunshine for?

Sunshine is a disinfectant, people say, as though bringing simply anything into the light is an unambiguously wise and healthy thing to do. As far as Ivy is concerned, the only value of sunshine is that it casts shadows, and that is where she operates.

The problem with sunshine is that it makes people believe everything is going to be all right, and in her area of PR, that isnt good for the bottom line. It isnt good for clients welfare either, to be honest. Clients need to be able to envisage an approaching worst-case scenario, so that they can take appropriate steps to avoid it, and the most appropriate step, always, is to retain her services.

She reaches Lincoln House on Remnant Street, where the Cairncross Partnership occupies two floors, hurrying through the revolving doors out of the downpour. There is a trail of water on the floor ahead of her, leading to where a woman has stopped to shake off a dripping umbrella, this action complicated by one of its spokes having bent. Ivy estimates her to be in her forties, probably a mother of teens from the look of her; lower-to-middle-tier management, if that. Her body language is cowed as though apologising for her very existence: someone who has reached that point in life at which she realises all the things she once thought she might achieve or experience are never going to happen. Probably been kidding herself for the past decade and a half that the kids would make up for it, telling herself that raising them was a worthy achievement in itself before coming to realise too late just what a wretched con that was.