Free Big Boy Did It and Ran Away by Christopher Brookmyre

just Wells who couldn’t help but be fascinated by this shadowy figure, even if only because he posed so many questions. She was guilty of it too, though she might put that down to foreign terrorism naturally seeming more exotic than the version she was familiar with. In the UK, terrorism meant Ulster sectarianism, a repetitive cycle of violence in which the horror was the only thing greater than the boredom. From a professional perspective, if she was interested in moronic neds obsessed with Anglo‐
Irish history, she could always volunteer for Old Firm match‐
duty.
    Having said that, there were few better illustrations of terrorism’s perverse allure than the vicarious thrill‐
seekers and their braindead paraphernalia at Ibrox and Parkhead.
    She remembered overhearing some of James’s halfwit mates talking about a banner they had seen at the match one day. It had incorporated the tricolour and the Palestinian flag, and read: ‘IRA – PLO. Two peoples, one struggle.’ They thought it was ‘really cool’. None of them ventured to explain the cool part about nail‐
bombs and dead children, but there was no question this romantic‐
sounding ideal had some kind of aura for young and simplistic minds. Fighting for freedom, battling against oppression, blowing up the Death Star. The question was, would ‘the struggle’, any struggle, still have the same aura if guns and bombs weren’t involved? Well, nobody had ever turned up at Parkhead or Ibrox with a ‘Gay Rights’ or ‘Free Tibet’ banner. It was about boys and toys. No guns, no glory.
    However, the not so young and simplistic were fascinated too, so maybe it was something deeper, perhaps even something primal. In the uncertain, ever‐
changing adult world, was there something paradoxically comforting about believing there was a manifest embodiment of evil on the loose out there? Were we like the boys in Lord of the Flies, dreaming up ‘the beast’ because it was less frightening to believe in a malevolent being than to confront the chaos of the truly unknown? Perhaps the Black Spirit was a repository for our fears and insecurities about crime, violence and ultimately death: we could combine them all as one totem and fear that; rather than have countless numbers of them scuttling around our heads like hatching insects.
    Whatever he represented, in reality the Black Spirit couldn’t be all the things she, Wells, Sallas or Interpol believed him to be. What was certain, however, was that he did exist, he was out there, and according to Lexington, he was heading this way. Wells having mopped up his spilt jizz and sat down, the bossman was back at the lectern.
    ‘I know what you’re all thinking, so let me state as clearly as I can that you can’t afford to think it. General Thaba’s delirious remarks may have been cryptic, but remember that he traded his way out on the specific mention of a terrorist threat to the British state. Those were his precise words. “A terrorist threat to the British state.” All he gave us in the end was “the Black Spirit”, the meaning of which should now be frighteningly clear, and “an eye for an eye”, which, the Good Lord’s proprietary claims notwithstanding, is the war cry of those intent upon vengeance. General Mopoza, it is fair to say, falls into that category.
    ‘As I mentioned earlier, Mopoza has a proven fondness for historically significant dates. Had the late General Thaba been in a clearer frame of mind, he might have mentioned that Sonzola annually celebrates its independence from the British state on September the sixth. That’s this Saturday, ladies and gentlemen.’
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    ‘Well it still sounds like bollocks to me.’
    The band had left the stage with no clamour for an encore, only the sound of chairlegs squeaking on the floor as the gathering began to disperse. Wells had circulated briefing packs, the facts and figures padded out with speculatory analysis and a seriously reaching psychological