Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre Page A

accept. I was out there in a matter of days.’
    ‘And who did you upset out there? The Cripps?’
    Parlabane laughed. ‘No. I played it straight for a long time. I had some fun, made some very good contacts on the LAPD, one of whom I owe . . .’ he looked briefly, blankly out of the window . . . ‘a lot.
    ‘I saw lots of crime scenes, lots of bodies, wrote lots of worthy prose about the decreasing value of human life, the too-high price of America’s gun culture. Pissed off the NRA on a regular basis. Learned that you don’t need a southern accent and a pick-up truck to be a redneck. You also don’t need a brain to be a gun-owner.
    ‘But the old reportage thing could only take me so far. My instinctive, fundamental, primal need to cause trouble inevitably kicked in. I still kept my head down, let the cops put the two and twos together when I followed up a murder. But I suppose I noticed a pattern emerging among certain of the resulting fours, and I believed there might be a motive to a number of apparently motiveless killings. I had nothing concrete to go on, just a gut feeling, the kind that used to serve me in Glasgow before I got duped into being hand-fed in London. I had very little, not even a theory. Just the feeling I get when I’m sure there’s something wrong with the picture. I was just fishing around, but I had no idea how deep I was casting, which makes investigating either very hard or very risky. When you ask someone a question, you don’t know who he’s going to run off and tell about it.
    ‘And in LA the baddies don’t burgle your apartment andplant some marching powder. As is common with Americans, they tend to be a bit more direct.’
    ‘Someone tried to kill you?’
    ‘Someone paid someone to kill me. You wanted to know what my angle was here? Wasn’t a good story enough? Well, you’ve got it now. Someone I didn’t even know paid to have me killed. Just like that. A simple business transaction. And someone who had never even met me was prepared to murder me just for money. Believe me, you can’t even begin to imagine how angry that makes me.
    ‘So I know I can’t get to whoever was responsible in LA, but I’m prepared to make do with a couple of surrogates.’

TEN
    Maybe it would all blow over.
    Maybe the cro-magnon moron had actually pulled it off. Maybe the sheer, breathtaking stupidity of his actions had indeed thrown the police off the scent. They had no witnesses, no descriptions, and they did seem to have believed that it had been a burglar who had killed Ponsonby. In fact, they had brought one in for questioning, according to the paper.
    Still, they had to sit it out for the time being, and that bloodthirsty oaf would have to stay where he was until the coast was definitely clear. His initial thought was to get him the hell out of the city, back to Dagenham on the first train, but the thought that things might be about to get tricky and complicated meant that it was best to have Darren at his immediate disposal.
    He couldn’t afford any more slip-ups, any more risks. Killing Ponsonby was supposed to tie up the last loose end, but it also had the potential to unravel and fray the whole thing.
    So near and yet so far.
    The visionless, the ignorant, the blinkered – the clinical staff and the general public, basically – had said it was madness, that it was entirely wrong to place the Trusts in the hands of people with no medical experience. What could people who had run biscuit factories and textile firms possibly know about running hospitals, they asked. This isn’t about profit and loss, but about medical care, they bleated.
    They just couldn’t see, could they. It was people who had medical experience who were precisely the wrong candidates for NHS senior management, as they brought along so much obstructive sentimental baggage. They didn’t have the experience to deal in hard facts and harsh realities, and couldn’t help letting their hearts rule their cheque-books.