Looking Good Dead

Moderate or good,’ he continued.

He talked quickly, his mind not really on the forecast and his brain busy crunching through algorithms for a new program he was designing for work. It would make half the current system redundant, and there were people who would be pissed off at that. But then they shouldn’t have spent all that taxpayers’ money on crap hardware without knowing what they were doing in the first place.

Life was a learning curve, you had to understand how to deal with it. Q in Star Trek had it sussed. ‘If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.’

The Man Who Was Not Timid continued his journey, marching uphill through the lunchtime throng of Brighton’s West Street, past a Body Shop, a Woolwich Building Society, then SpecSavers.

Thin and pasty-faced, he had a gawky frame, a clumsy haircut and eyebrows furrowed in fierce concentration behind unfashionably large glasses. Dressed in a fawn anorak, a white nylon shirt over a string vest, grey flannel trousers and vegan sandals, he carried a small rucksack on his back containing his laptop and his lunch. He walked, pigeon-toed, in a loping stride, stooped forward with an air of determination as if forcing his way through the steadily increasing south-westerly blowing in from the Channel. Despite his age, he could have passed for an insolent teenager.

‘Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, north-west seven to severe gale nine, backing south-west four or five, occasionally six later. Showers then rain later. Moderate or good.’

He continued reciting aloud the updated regional shipping forecast for the British Isles which had been broadcast at 05.55 hours this morning, Greenwich Mean Time. He had learned them by heart, four times a day, seven days a week, since he was ten. It was, he had discovered, the best way to get from A to B – just recite the shipping forecast all the way, it stopped the heat from everyone’s stares from burning his skin.

And he had found it a good way to stop other kids laughing at him at school. Also whenever anyone had wanted to know the shipping forecast – and it was surprising how often the other pupils at Mile Oak school had wanted to know – he was always able to tell them.

Information.

Information was currency. Who needed money if you had information? The thing was most people were completely crap at information. Crap at pretty well everything really. That’s why they weren’t chosen.

His parents had taught him that. He didn’t have much to thank them for, but at least he had that. All the years they had drummed it into him. Special. Chosen by God. Chosen to be saved.

Well, they hadn’t got it quite right. It wasn’t actually God, but he had long given up trying to tell them that. Wasn’t worth the hassle.

He passed an amusement arcade, then turned left at the Clock Tower into West Street, passing Waterstone’s bookshop, a Chinese restaurant and a FlightCentre, heading down towards the sea. A few minutes later he pushed his way through the revolving doors in the fine Regency facade of the Grand Hotel, entered the foyer and walked across to the front desk.

A young woman in a dark suit, with a gold badge pinned to the lapel engraved with the name arlene, watched him warily for a moment, then gave him a dutiful smile. ‘Can I help you?’ she said.

Staring down at the wooden counter, avoiding eye contact, he focused on a plastic dispenser full of American Express application forms.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked again.

‘Umm, well, OK.’ He looked even harder at the forms, feeling even more indignant now he was here. ‘Can you tell me which room Mr Smith is in?’

After checking a computer screen she replied, ‘Mr Jonas Smith?’

‘Um, right.’

‘Is he expecting you?’

Yes, he sodding well is. ‘Um, right.’

‘May I have your name, sir. I will phone his room.’

‘Um, John Frost.’

‘One minute please, Mr Frost.’ She lifted a receiver and dialled a number. Moments later she said into the phone, ‘I have Mr John Frost in reception. May I send him up?’ After a brief pause she said, ‘Thank you,’ and replaced the receiver. Then she looked at the Weatherman again. ‘Number seven one four – on the seventh floor.’

Staring down again at the American Express forms, he bit his lower lip, nodded, and then said, ‘Um, OK, right.’

He took the elevator to the seventh floor, walked along the corridor and rapped on the door.

It was opened by the Albanian, whose real name was Mik Luvic but who the Weatherman had to call Mick Brown – all in his view part of a ridiculous charade in which all of them, including himself, had to go under assumed names.

The Albanian was a muscular man in his thirties with a lean, hard face set in a cocksure expression, and gelled spikes of short, fair hair. He was dressed in a gold-spangled black singlet, blue slacks and white loafers, and sported a heavy gold chain around his neck. His powerful bare shoulders and forearms were covered in tattoos, and he was mashing gum with sharp little incisors that reminded the Weatherman of a piranha fish he had once seen in the local aquarium.

Staring down at the eau de Nil carpet, the Weatherman said, ‘Oh, hi. I’ve come to see Mr Smith.’

The Albanian, who had once made a living by illegal bare-knuckle and cage fighting but now had a cushier gig, stared at him for several seconds in silence, chewing continuously with his mouth open, then gestured him into a large suite which reeked of cigar smoke and was furnished in plush, ersatz Regency, and closed the door swiftly behind them. Pointing disinterestedly towards an open doorway, the Albanian turned his back on the Weatherman, strutted across the room, sat down on a chair and resumed watching a football game on a television.

The Weatherman had met the Albanian on several occasions now, and had yet to hear him speak. He wondered sometimes if he was deaf and dumb, but didn’t think so. Walking through the doorway as he was bid, he entered a much larger room in the centre of which the grossly overweight Mr Smith was seated on a sofa, his back to the French windows which overlooked the sea, concentrating on a bank of four computer screens on the coffee table in front of him and biting at a fingernail as if he was chewing a chicken bone.

He was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt open to the navel, revealing folds of hairless, pale flesh that made him look as if he had breasts. The top of his blue slacks stretched across stubby legs the width of mature tree trunks. By contrast, his tiny feet, in monogrammed velvet Gucci slippers, without socks, seemed dainty, like dolls’ feet, and his head, coiffed with immaculate silver, wavy hair bunched into a short pigtail at the back, was even more out of proportion, as if it belonged to someone twenty sizes smaller. He had so many chins that until his minuscule mouth opened and the muscles around came into play it was hard for the Weatherman to see where his face ended and his neck began.

‘You want lunch, John?’ Jonas Smith said, in a sharp Louisiana drawl that contained not an ounce of warmth. He jabbed a porcine finger, the skin around the nails bitten raw in places, across at a room-service trolley laden with plates of sandwiches and aluminium food covers.

Staring down at the eau de Nil carpet, the Weatherman said, ‘Actually, I have my sandwich.’

‘Huh. You want a drink? Order yourself a drink and sit down.’

‘Thanks. Um, OK. Right. I don’t need a – um, drink. I – um…’ the Weatherman looked at his watch.

‘Then fucking sit down.’

The Weatherman hesitated for a moment, contained his anger and moved towards the nearest chair.

The American resumed gnawing on his nail and fixed his small, piggy eyes on the Weatherman, who unhitched his rucksack and perched himself on the edge of a chair, his eyes scanning the pile of the carpet as if searching for a pattern that was not there.

‘Coke? You want a Coke?’

‘Umm, actually, umm.’ The Weatherman looked at his watch again. ‘I have to be back by two.’

‘You’ll go back when I fucking tell you.’

The Weatherman was hungry. He thought about his tofu and bean-shoot sandwich in the plastic box inside his rucksack. But the problem was he didn’t really like people watching him eat. He took a deep breath and closed his