Christopher Fowler - Personal Demons

Bax had been standing up at the window. He had seen the boy hacked apart, and was crying uncontrollably. Jack and the bouncer were opening the club's main entrance doors, trying to clear away the suffocating smoke. Woody stepped numbly down and walked off through the guttering fires of the club, toward the chill clean air outside. She pulled her vest over her head and let it drop, then tore away the strips of tape and released her breasts from their confinement. She looked back at Jack, who returned her rueful smile. They both knew that she wasn't one of the boys any more.

She didn't need to be.

She had her own army.

Celia wiped her forehead and checked her watch again. Sweat was dripping in her eyes. 'If the worst comes to the worst,' she said, 'we could go down to the crossroads and wait for the local bus. They're apparently quite reliable.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' said Trevor, 'the whole point of booking a cab is to avoid having to mix with the locals. I've seen enough locals to last a lifetime. All those deformities.'

Celia shuddered. A drip of sweat fell from the tip of her nose. 'That blind man with the flying snakes. Ugh.'

'Exactly. That's the whole point of staying in a five star hotel. They make their ice cubes with Evian. They have French chefs. Showercaps. Fruit baskets. Slippers under your bed. If it wasn't for the outside temperature you'd think you were at home. The beach and the bar are for the use of residents only. Safety is not in numbers, safety is in five stars. Ah.' Trevor looked up at the sound of the vehicle and tilted back the brim of his straw hat. 'Better late than never.'

The filthy taxicab that hoved into view was Russian in origin. It looked like a child's drawing of a car, a grey tin box with squared-off corners and bashed-up fenders. The dashboard was filled with every kind of gaudy religious icon imaginable, the centrepiece being a barebreasted madonna with a pale green wobbly head that looked suspiciously as if it might glow in the dark. The vehicle slewed to a stop in a spray of brown dust and its driver alighted. He batted his sweat-stained shirt with his cap and opened the trunk so that their Louis Vuitton luggage could be stowed beside the greasy pumps and jacks, then stepped back to watch while the couple struggled to fit their cases. He spoke good English but had no intention of revealing this talent, for if he did so he would inevitably be drawn into arguments about lateness, overcharging and the unavailability of change. Instead he picked his teeth with a match while the skinny pale English lady fussed and tutted around her useless-looking husband.

He knew at once that they were upper class. They had that pinched look the posh English so often had, a look created by a lifetime of making false economies. The upper-class English always found new corners to cut while clinging to the lavish lifestyles they felt were their birthright, as if a reduction in the porter's tip would somehow pay for their next trip to Gstaad or Glyndebourne. The woman was bitching at her husband now, something about getting grease on her dress, and he was just nodding apologetically. Poor bastard. If he was any kind of a man he'd shut her mouth with a slap. Wearily the driver reached in and adjusted his wooden-beaded seat cover before heaving himself back into the car. They trundled off and around the corner, surprising a goat who was searching the road for a cool spot to give birth.

'Well, check-in time is two hours before departure, which already makes us over half an hour late,' said Celia, checking her compact mirror for facial anomalies.

'That's for passengers in Economy,' said Trevor, staring from the window as they passed a herd of perilously undernourished cows. 'We can turn up mere minutes before the flight if we wish. They have to wait for us. We're the ones who keep the airline running by paying full fare, not those lager-swilling chimps you see on the bargain package tours. Christ, it's hot.' The sea was a wall of blue at their backs, the air stagnant and still beneath the sun. The taxi wound its way inland, past derelict mills and bleached fields of dead brown crops. 'If only we could have gone to the house in St Raphael,' said Celia, fanning herself, 'instead of having to come here.'

'You know very well we couldn't do that. The press would have been expecting it. We'd have had no privacy.'

'Do you honestly think things will be better back in England?' she snapped. 'I've had people come up to me in the street and make accusations to my face!'

'Darling, you'll be surprised how quickly people forget. They have the attention spans of goldfish. We're yesterday's news. Trust me.'

He knew he was right. Twenty-four days ago his name had been dragged across the front pages of all the national dailies, but by now the press had already moved on to the next big scandal. He'd been in some tight squeezes before, but damage limitation was easy if you knew the right people, and no minister worth his salt got far in the cabinet without making decent connections. He made sure that the rumours about his private life could never be confirmed. The call-girl who had sold her story to the press about their sexual escapades had been paid to recant her version of events, and the whole thing had been parlayed into a photo opportunity featuring Trevor Colson, stalwart Conservative MP, hugging the loyal wife who stood by him. There had been the exposure of his vested interests with the nuclear lobby, the accusation of insider trading, and the homes-for-votes cover-up, but all of it had remained innuendo, and any journalist who had dared to suggest otherwise was vigorously pursued into the courtroom.

But this last business was a little more serious. Colson had acted as financial adviser to a banking syndicate that had run foul of international trading barriers. As an MP he had been expected to foresee such problems and remove them for his partners. But he had failed to read up on the new laws and take appropriate action in time to prevent the bank at the centre of the syndicate from going bust overnight. Investors had lost fortunes, institutions had collapsed, and the Right Hon. Trevor Colson and his wife had decamped to the sun, to spend three weeks incognito in their five star hotel waiting for the fuss to die down.

The taxi swerved on to the two-lane blacktop leading to the centre of the island, and the airport came into view. It consisted of little more than one runway, an oblong white box which housed arriving and departing passengers, a few concrete sheds and an unfinished air traffic control room with rusted iron rods sticking out of one end. There was also a dead pelican. It had been lying on the verge of the runway when they arrived, and was still there.

As the cab pulled up behind a cluster of hotel minivans, Trevor watched the disembarking passengers with a scornful glare in his eyes. Looking at their sunburned faces, their smutty-joke T-shirts, their shoddy luggage, their hideous screaming children, he almost felt glad that many were returning to find their savings wiped out. It would teach them to invest more wisely in future.

The collapse of the bank had affected the common man in the street, about whom he cared not a jot, but it had also damaged some businesses it didn't pay to annoy; the collapsed bank was, after all, built on Russian and Sicilian money, and the further back you followed the paper trail the murkier the finance connections became. Still, he was confident that his long-term prospects were unharmed; a few lunches with the right people had seen to that.

There were holidaymakers sitting on the airport steps, which seemed odd. It looked as if they'd been there for quite a while. Inside, Trevor's worst fears were confirmed; their plane had failed to arrive, and the ground staff had no information as to the current whereabouts of the inbound flight. Stephanie, the hard-faced little airline representative who was striding around the check-in area with her clipboard, informed him in the most extraordinary nasal voice that it was likely the flight had not yet left London, so the delay would be considerable, and as there were no other flights available they would just have to sit tight. Leaving the vicinity of the airport was impossible once they had checked their bags, and if the plane failed to turn up within the next three hours they would probably all have to stay overnight as the airport was not licensed for flights during the hours of darkness – but, she promised, they would be issued with vouchers for a free lamb stew and complimentary glass of house red.