Stockholm Syndrome [01] - Stockholm Syndrome (4 page)

"Gimme that," Lindsay says, then thrusts the bottle back at Valentine after taking a massive swig and spitting it out over the side of the car, twisting his face up in revulsion. "What the hell is it? Tastes like polecat piss."

"Yeah, though, that's how you know champagne's well good quality, when it tastes like catpiss."

"You've already had a bottle, you've killed your taste buds stone dead."

"Not a
whole
bottle, most of it fell out."

"That's because you shook it up. You're not a Formula One driver."

"Can I drive?"

Lindsay just smiles and slams his foot down, taking a hairpin bend at seventy, easing the car back onto all four wheels with impeccable control when the road goes straight again. He glances at Valentine, eyebrows raised. "Can you do that?"

The kid's clutching himself and laughing, champagne everywhere, dribbling down his chin and bubbling out the open bottle, soaking darker patches into the blue and grey stripes of his t-shirt. "Can you teach me?"

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C H A P T E R 3

"Maybe. We could use another driver."

"I wanna learn
everything
." He lifts the hem of his t-shirt up to wipe off his face, exposing a too-pale, too-skinny torso for a couple of seconds, damp with spilled drink. "Driving, yeah, but how to shoot a gun, too. And, like, rewiring alarms and stuff. Art forgery? Do you do that? I can paint a bit, that'll be wicked, I'll do you a dead-on Chagall, we'll make a mint. What about fiddling the races? My uncle works on the dogs, we can have a go on him. He's thick as pigshit, though, he probably won't even realise he's being had. No fun if it ain't a challenge."

"Hey, slow down. We're not a crime tree, you can't go swinging off all these branches. We only do banks."

"And jewellers."

"Well, sometimes. Quick fix. It's so vulgar, though."

"Oh. Right. You're a crime
log
, then?"

"If you like."

"You do kidnappings too." When Lindsay glances at him, the kid's grinning like a maniac, like he's having the time of his life and everything that came before was just the overture to the real stuff. He turns his eyes back on the narrow road, winding round the base of Snowdon, chuckling quietly, unable to help himself. The kid's enthusiasm is infectious. It's ridiculous. He should have shot the little tosser days ago. He's going to be trouble, he can already tell.

"
Fake
-kidnappings. And there's only been one of them."

"Yeah, I reckon it's still a crime, though." He leans back in his seat and drags a knee up to his chest, the sole of one pointy-toed silver boot pressing against the dashboard; Lindsay reaches over and slaps his ankle and the kid huffs and sighs, but complies without mouthing off. Surprising. Instead he just asks,

"So, what are we doing out in the middle of nowhere?"

It's something Lindsay's been asking himself for the last couple of hours.

There are quicker, easier ways of getting home, even avoiding the motorways.

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S T O C K H O L M S Y N D R O M E

Driving up through the mountains in a scarlet sports car on a sticky, blazing summer day when there are tourists everywhere and you've got a missing person, several million pounds and a couple of guns as cargo, well, that's a bit risky. The kid seems aware of that as well, it's obvious from the nervous jiggling of his legs every time they've had to stop at traffic lights or give-way signs.

He's never been good at resisting that rush, the one you get from doing something incredibly stupid and dangerous. He's quite sure he's going to end up dead or in prison from all this, possibly quite soon, but it'll be worth it for the way he's feeling right now. It's like ecstasy without the headache or coke without the sneezing. Racing past crowds of people in a car that screams
look at me
and knowing that if any one of them
does
look properly it'll all be over...

"Hello?"

"What? Oh. I'm going home. You're coming with me because the others think you're a whingeing little berk and it's my turn to babysit you."

"Home?
Here
?"

"Yeah. Well, down the road a bit."

"As if you're from round here! I ain't
deaf
, you're from Bradford!"

"Well, yeah. I came with my parents, they retired here."

Valentine goes to put his foot on the dashboard again, and again Lindsay smacks his ankle. The kid just smirks at him. "So, do your parents know you're such a bad boy?"

"No," he says, shortly.

They drive for a long time in what
would
be silence if the kid didn't insist on shoving a Gary Numan disc in the player and turning the volume-dial until it won't go any louder, clapping and singing and chairdancing like a marionette. He only stops when they crest a hill and get their first glimpse of sea and then he's suddenly five years old, bouncing and shrieking and babbling on about old holidays to Clacton and Broadstairs, buckets and spades and donkey rides and cones of chips where you can't tell if the gritty bits are salt or sand.

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C H A P T E R 3

Change of plan, Lindsay decides, and instead of heading towards town and home he turns the car the opposite way, up a tiny dirt track you can only see if you already know it's there, winding between trees and zigzagging up the little peninsula until they break clear of the ceiling of leaves and emerge onto what feels like the top of the world. Nothing on three sides except sea and sky, glowing so blue it doesn't look real. It's enough to shut Valentine up, blessedly.

Lindsay kills the engine, cutting Numan off in the middle of a word, and the silence beats down on them as hard as the sun.

"You got any more wonders up your sleeve?" Valentine finally asks, all wide-eyed and reverent like he's just been given keys to the front gate of the Garden of Eden.

"Oh no, you're not ready for my sleeves. Go on, get out, have a look round."

"This ain't some elaborate murder, is it? You ain't gonna shove me over the edge?"

"Might do. Come on."

They get out the car and watch some windsurfers muck about in the distance, down the bay. Lindsay points stuff out, from the edge of the cliff –

towns, castles, Anglesey, clouds that look like things that aren't clouds. It's the first time in years he's brought anybody up here and he can't quite decide whether he regrets it or not.

He falls into silence and goes to lean again the car, just watching the kid take everything in. He doesn't regret it. He thinks.

"So," he says, when Valentine's had his fill and turns round to beam at him, then fumbles for a topic because you don't say 'so' without following it up with something. He settles on, "Tell me about your parents, then."

Valentine screws his face up. "Open this first," he says, fishing out a wine bottle from behind his seat and unclipping the corkscrew keyring dangling off his belt. He crouches down next to the wing mirror to fiddle with his hair.

He's clearly wasting time, Lindsay thinks, like he was eight days ago, the day

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S T O C K H O L M S Y N D R O M E

they first met, when he thought he was about to get shot in the head. He'd wrapped his arm tight around the kid's waist to hold him still there in front of him, a skinny pointy little human shield between him and the police – even so, the little shit managed to bruise all up and down Lindsay's shins, kicking out with his heels in a panic until Lindsay shoved the end of his gun right in his ear and told him to stop, and then he went limp like a cotton ragdoll and started babbling madly about the t-shirt he was wearing, an old Roxy Music shirt, and how he'd never realised until somebody pointed it out at the party last night that Bryan Ferry sometimes looks like Terry Wogan in the wrong light, except Ferry would never go to Eurovision. Lindsay couldn't shoot him after that. You can't blow out a brain mad and beautiful enough to come up with something like that at the point of death. He just didn't feel
right
shooting someone who'd made him crack up laughing in the middle of a botched robbery.

Lindsay forces the cork out with a hollow pop and gives him the bottle.

"You don't have to, I'm just asking."

"Yeah. I don't mind." Valentine stands, using the car door and Lindsay's trouser leg to drag himself back up. "They're just wankers, ain't they?" He's sloshing the wine around the bottle, he's not drinking yet. Just sort of frowning slightly, like he's thinking. "Like this. Being fucking wine snobs. Opera boxes and stuff. Getting shoes handmade to fit. Acting on like they're French aristocracy when they're really just Dalston dolebeaters who got lucky with a Lottery ticket. They're dicks."

"They must love you, though." The kid comes to lean next to him, just close enough that their elbows touch when they breathe. "Else why'd they shell out a massive ransom to get you back?"

Valentine sniffs and gives him a dirty look sideways, not even bothering to turn his head. "Who the fuck're you, Jiminy Cricket?"

"Lindsay Brown, sir. I believe we've met before."

"Oh yeah, that gig in Canterbury, I remember now." He takes a long drink of wine, smiling at Lindsay with his eyes while his mouth's otherwise 35

C H A P T E R 3

occupied. When he's done he smiles with his mouth, too. His lips are wet and stained dark, and he wipes them on the inside of his wrist. "Poor innocent me, just going about my business, then you raped me down the ear with your gun."

Lindsay nicks the wine bottle, smirking just slightly, and says, "You loved it, you tart."

"Oh, yeah, that's the only reason I'm still hanging round you, I really get off on being frightened out my fucking mind."

"Why
are
you, then? I mean, really?" He's honestly curious. "You're free to go any time you want. They paid up. Fair's fair. Why won't you fuck off?"

"Cos I don't want to." Valentine's looking at him like he's thick, which is a bit rich. "I ain't going back to that... fucking dead-end life, no
way
, not after all this."

The wine's good, like spicy liquid velvet. It's a bit hilarious, this sparkly little dickhead with his highlights and painted fingernails knowing how to choose wine. Clearly something's rubbed off from the pretentious parents he claims to hate so much. Or maybe he just grabbed something at random and got lucky. He looks like he should be drinking Bacardi Breezers, really. Red Bull and vodka.

Pernod and black. Chavvy, girly drinks, not this.

"What makes you think I'm letting you stay? Maybe I
did
bring you up here to shoot you and push you over the side." He passes the bottle back, and watches the slow slide of Valentine's throat as he drinks.

"You ain't gonna shoot me," the kid says, completely straightfaced, "cos I'm offering to be your personal slave. Who's gonna turn that down? Your wife, if you like. You can nick me a nice diamond ring if you wanna make it official.

I'll wash bloodstains off your shirts and stuff. Make you a wholesome little packed lunch when you're off on a job. Course, that means you'll have conjugal duties in return, but I swear I ain't
too
needy, twice a night's fine."

Lindsay steals the wine back to distract his mouth from laughing. "Get out my way," he says, and elbows Valentine in the ribs so he can get back in the car. He tugs the lever under the seat and slides it back as far as it'll go, stretching

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S T O C K H O L M S Y N D R O M E

out his long limbs and sighing when his joints all crackle like bubble wrap, leaving him feeling deliciously boneless and a bit like a basking cat, supine here on the car seat with the sun hammering down on his closed eyes. He finds it a bit weird that he
doesn't
find it a bit weird when Valentine throws a leg over him, shifting and shuffling until, miraculously, they're both comfortable in a sports car seat made for one.

"That wasn't an invitation," he says, without bothering to open his eyes.

Valentine takes the bottle. Lindsay can hear him drinking, then feels him lean over to put it somewhere out the way. Seconds later Numan flicks back on, but more quietly.

"I'm gatecrashing."

Lindsay's not hard, but Valentine is and that gets him started. It feels alright. Natural, kind of. He supposes it's been building up, this thing. Like tension, but not really, because tension implies you don't know whether you'll be getting it or not at the end. This has been on the cards from the beginning. It's not tension, it's just the way things are. It's like going up a hill and knowing you'll reach the summit sooner or later.

"Fuck, I bet you even
think
in proper sentences, don't you?"

He realises he's been tracing gentle, idle patterns on Valentine's skin with his fingertips, just under the damp hem of his shirt; he stops, then starts again when Valentine makes a spoilt little noise and covers one of Lindsay's hands with his own, urging him on. Lindsay has a fleeting fantasy of getting back out the car, throwing the kid face-down over the bonnet, and fucking him until he cries. Maybe he'd start taking things a little bit more seriously then.

"What?"

"I can almost hear your brain working. Wheezing like a steam train.

What're you thinking about?"

"Oh, I don't know," Lindsay murmurs, sliding his fingers higher up Valentine's back. "I'm thinking this is stupid and I should have put that bullet in your tiny brain before I got to like you so much."

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C H A P T E R 3

Valentine can't seem to decide whether to look pleased or worried, finally settling on a coy half-smile, bottom lip caught gently between his teeth.

His eyes are very, very green. Lindsay's noticed before. They've just never been this close until now.

"You're gonna be rubbish, you know," he goes on. "You should be a pop star or something. Bartender. Work in a shoe shop. Elbow into Radio 1 as a tea-boy and work up til you're running the joint. Anything except this."

Valentine's arms snake around his neck. Lindsay feels his two forearms rumpling the back of his hair, the brush of a studded wristband against the top of his ear. "Why should I?"