The Last Day of Christmas: The Fall of Jack Parlabane (short story) by Chris Brookmyre

Author:Chris Brookmyre [Brookmyre, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408706480
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2014-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

Conspiracy Theory

I called Kay and we met the next day: same time, same place was the drill, though I was starting to wish our first heart-to-heart had been somewhere indoors. Again, I was left shivering on the bench for a while before she showed: long enough to wonder whether ‘same time’ actually meant the same time as yesterday, when she was a good fifteen minutes later than the first time we had sat here.

I watched a young couple in business attire stop to kiss in the gardens: tender and intimate, in contrast to yesterday’s Tube exhibitionists. This time I felt like a voyeur, or that I was somehow intruding, even though they were twenty yards away.

I couldn’t stop myself. I pulled out my phone and called Sarah. I just wanted to hear her speak. All I got was a generic automated voicemail recording, not even her voice.

Kay saved me from my misery, striding into the gardens with a gait so demonstrably hurried as to be a physical apology for her tardiness.

She was easy to forgive.

I told her I had worked out a way to expose Mead’s affair and bring the name of his lover into the public domain without me even learning it.

‘I was thinking that what’s needed is for something to happen that causes them to be discovered together, or that leads to Mead’s movements being investigated and the affair emerging as a result. Thereafter, a leak about an internal investigation could plausibly have come from anywhere.’

‘This is good,’ she replied, unsmiling, eager but serious. ‘That kind of investigation would take place well above my pay grade, so I would be out of the frame. But what might precipitate it?’

‘A break-in at the flat where they’ve been having their trysts. Or rather, not a break-in. If I had keys to the place, the story could be that Mead and his mistress were so keen to get at it that they forgot to lock the door behind them and then failed to notice somebody rifling the place.’

‘How does that come out, though?’

‘MoD documents taken from Mead’s briefcase get “passed on” to a journalist, who of course never names his source. The journalist very responsibly returns the documents, and by doing so is assumed to have scored some points with someone senior at the MoD, because he then seems to have the inside track on Mead’s affair. It is interpreted to be a deliberate leak so that Mead is forced to fall on his sword and thus make the scandal go away.’

Kay frowned.

‘Does that not sound plausible to you?’ I asked.

‘Yes, it sounds exactly like how it would play out. The problem is that I’m not so sure Mead takes documents away at night.’

‘Shit.’

Her face then brightened as something occurred to her.

‘He does take his laptop, though.’

And suddenly we were in business.

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