The parcel was about four foot high and about two foot by two foot at the base. It was wrapped in gaudy pink paper and tied up with ribbons of shimmering red silk. The ribbons came together at the top in a large elaborate bow. Tucked under the bow was a card in the shape of a large red heart. The whole package resembled a nauseatingly soppy Valentine's Day gift.
Currently the box was sitting on a table in a grimy, low-lit backroom of a warehouse long given over to activities on the wrong side of the legal spectrum. Four men stood around the table and regarded the box with suspicious stares. They had the hard, craggy faces of men accustomed to violence and brutality on a day-to-day basis.
The box didn't belong. It looked like there had been a mix-up in the Props department, like an oversized gift box meant for a glutinously saccharine romantic comedy had somehow found its way onto the set of a grimy, low-budget British gangster film.
Love Actually
spliced into
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
.
"What does the card say?" a man in an expensive suit asked. He had the authoritative manner of someone used to their instructions being carried out without question.
"'From your American friend'," the tallest man, a man with broad shoulders and a face like a leather punching bag, read off the card.
The man in the expensive suit nodded. "It would be," he said.
"A bomb?" the youngest man in the room asked. He also wore an expensive suit, but lacked both the taste and resources of the other man.
"Not 'is style," the fourth man said. He was the oldest man in the room and had short white hair and a face like weather-beaten crags.
"Yeah, but he is a mother-fucking lunatic," the youngest man said. "Right, Mr Herbert?"
"Our American friend is eccentric, but a lunatic would not be able to command the respect or build the empire this man has. And certainly not maintain it for as long," the man in the expensive suit, Herbert, said. "Open it," he ordered the youngest man.
The youngest man hesitated. He was clearly afraid of the unknown contents of the mysterious box, but that fear was an unknown quantity while the man's fear of disobeying the man in the expensive suit was both known and considerable. He stepped up to the table and took out a switchblade knife from his pocket. The blade popped open with a click and he used it to slice away the ribbon tied around the parcel. The shimmering silk drifted down to the dusty table counter and lay there like a blood splat. The man cut through the lurid pink wrapping paper and peeled it away to reveal a plain white box with a lid.
The man put his ear to the box.
Did bombs tick or was that just Hollywood bullshit?
The man heard nothing. Holding his breath, the man gingerly slipped the blade of his knife under the lid and began to slide it off. When the lid had moved enough for the contents of the box to be visible the man paused. He looked up at the others and his face cracked up in a broad grin.
"Look at this and tell me you still don't think that fat fucker is insane," he said.
* * * *
Griff Sharpe looked inside the cardboard box. The first thing he saw was the long black hair and his breath caught in his throat. His initial thought was that someone had taken a dead body and squashed it down inside the box. Then he noticed the shiny plastic sheen of the too-pink skin and the empty stare of the glass eyes and let out his breath. It was a doll, he thought, a silly blow-up doll with a mannequin head.
What the Dickens was it doing here? Griff had returned from a late vote at parliament and the parcel had been waiting outside the door of his London flat. "Special Delivery," Tommy Tuchner, the doorman, had told him. Parcelforce had dropped it off late that afternoon.
There must be some mistake . . . but no, the paperwork on the lid was all in order. His name, his address, even though he'd never ordered it.
Why was it here? A practical joke? Or something else?
Griff took out his phone and rang Rhys Smith's number. It was just the kind of prank he'd play.
Rhys had to be more careful. They weren't at university anymore. Griff was a junior minister in the government. As funny as the gag might have seemed, politics was not exactly a profession renowned for its sense of humour. This was exactly the kind of thing the gutter press liked to take and twist into stories that demolished careers.
The phone went straight through to the other man's voicemail and Griff left a message.
Griff had learnt that the hard way after an offhand comment he'd made on twitter had been spun out of all proportion in the opposition papers, giving him an extremely uncomfortable first week in office. Griff hated the guarded attitudes of most politicians as he believed it contributed to the current state of cynicism amongst the public, but he quickly learned the necessity of it.
"You get used to it," Jack Newman told him.
Newman was a good man. It was a shame he was on the other side of the Commons. Griff would rather have him in the government than their current esteemed idiot of a leader, that was for sure.
He grabbed the black hair of the doll and pulled it up out of the box.
* * * *
The gangsters looked at the crumpled form of the pink plastic doll as it lay, unrolled, on the table. The solid mannequin head with shiny, painted-red latex lips stared up at the shadowy ceiling with glass eyes. It was a blow-up sex doll, a higher quality one than the usual open-mouth type favoured in ribald comedies, but a sex doll nonetheless.
"'E must be 'aving a fucking laugh," the old man with white hair and a face like a rocky crag said.
"Fucking round the bend," the young man said.
