Reconstruction (14 page)

9.45. What time did nurseries open? – 9.00, probably; he wasn’t an expert. Whatever, for matters to have come this far – for Ben’s name to have whipped through the channels; for Ben himself to have been loaded on to a helicopter and shipped halfway to Oxford already – this must have started before the nursery doors opened, which prompted two immediate questions, though more might follow. What was the hostage taker after? Occupying a nursery was headline news, but lost impact if no children were involved. And how come Eliot Pedlar, local resident, was there so early? There might be an innocent explanation, but innocence was something Tina & Co. got round to eventually; not what they expected from the outset.

Office business for the duration . . . That was the kind of thing Ben had meant.

The third e-mail, he now saw, was labelled
delete
immediately
.

After reading it, Ben assumed. Not that it contained much of use:
C&C target was level-3 confidential. Chapman
will advise.

C&C: collect and comfort. Whoever Chapman had tried to pick up presumably hadn’t been aware of the essentially non-harmful definition.

But then, non-harmful wasn’t what Bad Sam Chapman radiated. Chapman had questioned him about Weiss, of course: he was Head Dog, and Weiss’s disappearance was Big Trouble. Though even when big trouble wasn’t involved, Chapman’s bad-tempered intensity managed to suggest it might happen anyway. You saw him in a bar, you’d sit on the other side of the room. He wasn’t necessarily about to start a fight, but if one happened to occur, you could bet he’d be involved.

So you were just colleagues?

Yes.

Nothing closer?

No.

You gay, Whistler?

Fuck off.
But self-preservation had held Ben back:
fuck off
was exactly what Chapman wanted him to say. He’d peel an angry man like a banana.

Not as far as I know
, he’d said.
But maybe I’ve just never
met the right man.

He didn’t really think that – who did? And there was little chance Miro Weiss could have engineered a lifestyle-altering epiphany. Miro Weiss: the Mirror Man to some, though Ben didn’t know how
that
started – Miro wasn’t vain; had nothing to be vain about. Prematurely balding, with washed-out watery eyes, and a hunched physique that never seemed to relax, as if he’d constantly been guarding secrets. Miro was the type who might sit facing you through nine halts on the underground, and the second he got off, you wouldn’t remember his gender. And just now, sitting in this helicopter, the reason for Mirror Man struck Ben – Miro; mirror. No more than that. One of those connections you’d never admit to missing, because that would be tantamount to explaining how dim you were.

Sometimes, the obvious took a little longer.

Glad you’re finding this funny, Whistler.

A missing quarter of a billion pounds had ruined a lot of senses of humour.

Neil Ashton had been there too, in lieu of a dictaphone, which Bad Sam would never have lowered himself to. Deniability was Bad Sam’s lodestone. He probably regarded a birthday card as a breach of security.

. . .
C&C target was level-3 confidential. Chapman will
advise.

Yeah, right. Ben had level-1 clearance, which meant he had his own shredder, but his phone calls were monitored. Whatever had happened this morning, Chapman wasn’t going to tell Ben about it, regardless.

There were a lot of things Chapman didn’t talk about. A lot of bodies whose locations only he knew.

The helicopter dipped, and Ben’s stomach with it. He turned to the pilot, who was pointing down. They’d reached Oxford. Those things below them – not far enough below for comfort, actually – would be the famous spires: from this perspective they looked less dreaming than sharp, carrying a not entirely academic promise of impalement. Ben’s future was in the hands of this stranger beside him, whose features were obscured by goggles and headset, and while it was true that every plane or train ride you took, you placed your life in another’s keeping, it wasn’t often that you sat right next to him, able to observe that he hadn’t shaved this morning, and that there was a smear of oil on his left wrist – man couldn’t wash his hands: what did that say about his ability to land a helicopter? Nothing, it turned out. They scooted over the last of the big buildings, crossed the river, then descended on to what looked like a recreation ground. The road alongside it was cordoned off, and lined with police cars stationed at haphazard angles. As he watched, a big white lorry lumbered to a halt by a junction, and was flagged through by an officer. It was like watching a circus being set up, he thought. Send in the clowns.

Ben deleted the e-mail, and turned his BlackBerry off.

Some days, it would be better if you’d stayed in bed.

No, there was a level deeper than that – some days it would be better if, the night before, you’d reached some previously unattainable plateau of drunkenness; a level at which you didn’t simply sleep through the following day, but it didn’t technically exist – it was a hole in your calendar, forever out of reach.

Superintendent Malcolm Fredericks, who’d been drunk on precisely three occasions in his life, and remembered each in embarrassing detail, was having one of those days now. He was well aware of the burgeoning gun culture – even Oxford had its violent underbelly. The handgun laws didn’t mean they were impossible to get hold of: it just made them more expensive. So last thing he needed was some cackhanded spook handing a lethal weapon to a ‘witness’ . . . And witness to what, anyway? Nothing pissed a policeman off more than being told there were things he didn’t need to know. A prick like Chapman would have ruined his day even without the gun. And the gun turning up in a nursery had a nightmare edge.

Especially today.

‘How many have you got?’

‘We have a full complement of AFOs.’

‘I’m not talking about who’s authorized to use firearms. I’m talking about marksmen. How many officers do you have who can take a target out from a distance? And who’ve been here before?’

Fredericks had suppressed a sigh. ‘One.’

‘Fucking hell.’

This had been four, no, five minutes ago: one of those phone conversations you didn’t want to have. Chief Constables swore like any other rank – better than most; they’d had more practice – and when this CC swore, the swearee tended to wind up on his grudge-list.

‘But we’ve got two more who’ve done most of the train-ing, and –’

‘Whose idea was it to send them on a course anyway?’

‘I assumed it was yours, sir.’

Had he really said that?

No: he’d said, ‘The instructions came from head-quarters, sir. All distance marksmen with two-years’-plus experience to attend the refresher in Yorkshire. I’ve sent an alert out, but –’ But as of this moment, he had only one Authorized Firearms Officer on-site who’d actually worked a hostage situation.

This was what was meant by economies of scale. Pack ninety per cent of the team off on one forty-eight-hour course: two days later, you had a team with all the boxes ticked on the latest Home Office questionnaire. Looked great on the paperwork.

What could happen in forty-eight hours?

‘You’ve passed word to the Met?’

‘I was about to, but –’ ‘And how would that make me look?

Like a Chief Constable who couldn’t control a firefight in his own back yard. Sir.

‘With all respect, sir, we need –’

‘Who’s your scratch man?’

‘DS Bain.’

‘Bain’s back on full duty, then.’

It wasn’t a question, but could hardly be left to dangle.

‘Yes.’

As of fifteen minutes ago.

‘So no major effects from the last outing.’

Again, not a question. And that
outing
sounded like a picnic, which it hadn’t been: DS Bain had shot a man, just as – the inquiry had determined – there was cause to believe he’d been about to turn a gun on his family. It had been an incredibly difficult kill: through a window. Then again, that’s what Bain had been trained for.

‘It was deemed an appropriate response,’ he said.

‘Not really the issue. Training and reality, don’t you see?’ Which was a question, but didn’t require an answer. ‘Doesn’t matter how many bull’s-eyes you drill on the range, when the target’s flesh and blood, it has an effect on any normal person. Even an AFO.’

He said, ‘I’m sure you’re right. But there’s been a lot of evaluation, a lot of psychometric testing –’

‘A lot of trick cycling.’

‘– all of which indicated that Bain is fit for duty.’

‘Even if that duty might involve killing another man.’

‘All of which indicated that Bain is fit for duty,’ he repeated.

‘Well, I hope to God you’re right.’

That
you’re
didn’t escape him. A lot of evaluation, a lot of psychometric testing – but in the end, putting Bain in the shotgun seat was Fredericks’ decision.

Didn’t matter who’d signed the paper putting every other trained officer out of reach; didn’t matter who’d just told him not to seek help from outside forces –

‘Keep me informed. Minute by minute.’

‘Sir.’

Five of those minutes had passed. Now Fredericks was at the scene, which at least had the decency to be close by the station, and DS Peter Faulks, qualified negotiator, was reciting numbers through a megaphone, trying to establish contact with whoever was inside. But Fredericks didn’t believe in coincidence; there was statistical evidence some-where that they never really happened. He might not know precisely who was inside the nursery, but he knew where the gun came from – a cack-handed spook.

If you don’t have a phone, we’ll supply one.

The area was locked down. From where he stood, just outside the main nursery gate – there was nobody left on the nursery grounds, barring hostages and gunman – he could see the door to the annexe, and the metal shutters over its windows. There were no windows on the footpath side; nor facing the adventure playground. Another set of railings, six foot high, cut the nursery grounds in half, and their gate was locked. The woman had locked it, before going back inside. Unlocking it, or going over the top, wouldn’t take two seconds, but that was substantially longer than needed to squeeze a trigger. There was a sky-light, but the roof was metal, so a silent approach impossible. A flash-bomb through a window wouldn’t work, because of the shutters, and there was only one door, which was the same as the number of guns inside . . . The acceptable level of casualties here was zero. He hadn’t needed to hear the Chief Constable not say this for the message to come through loud and clear.

He wondered why the woman had gone back inside, when she’d had the chance to escape. Hero or idiot? Was there a difference?

Or did she know the man involved?

Someone said, ‘Sir?’

‘What is it?’

‘There’s someone coming out.’

Every day she stepped through this door: how many times? A dozen, twenty. In the time she’d been here, she’d seen the view it presented in every season, and once – late afternoon, long after the kids had gone – had surprised a fox examining a stray scent. It had looked at her with obvious disdain, then taken one last breath of whatever intrigued it, and trotted off towards the railway line. There’d barely been an occasion since that she’d come through that door without a memory of the fox nudging her. Certainly, she’d never expected to see anything wilder.

But the world that met Louise this morning was one she’d never stepped into before.

It was the lack of children, for one thing – sure, this time of the morning, the children were all inside, but you were never in doubt of their presence. Children en masse exerted gravity, and their absence here tainted the air. To anyone but an expert, it would have registered simply as an unpindownable oddity: the colour blue, missing from a landscape oil. And there was more . . .

Beyond the nursery grounds were police cars: eleven, her mind suggested, though she didn’t count them. And there’d be more she couldn’t see. Several were blocking the road at the junction, and the various figures stationed around them were all looking her way. From being her place of work, the nursery had turned into a focal point: a crime scene in progress. Louise had never seen one from this perspective before. She’d always been on the safe side of a TV screen, or staring up from a cinema seat. Now police officers were clustered by the nursery gate, and might be elsewhere too: hiding round corners, or on the roof of the nursery – and what did they know, other than that a man with a gun was in the building behind her? They might suspect her of complicity. She’d suspect her-self, in their shoes. She’d walked back in, when she could have walked away.

The Dalek spoke.

Miss Kennedy?

For some reason, she’d put a hand up to shield her eyes, though it wasn’t so bright they needed protection.

Miss Kennedy? You are Miss Kennedy, aren’t you?

So why had she walked back in – what answer would they accept?

She said, ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

Miss Kennedy, would you come out now, please?

She said, ‘We need a phone. You promised us a phone.’

Would you come a little closer, please?

She wished she could – last thing she wanted was to go back into the annexe. But events had come too far for her to walk away.
If you do not come back, if you let them come in
– I will use the gun
. She’d seen no reason to disbelieve his words. There’d been truth in his eyes. The dizzying image struck her of that perfect circle, the hole in the plaster where his bullet had struck. Dust had issued from the wound. What shape would his bullets make in flesh? Whatever: dust wouldn’t be the issue.

‘You promised us a phone,’ she repeated. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded disconnected.

Miss Kennedy, would you raise your arms to shoulder level,
please?

They thought she had a gun.

But they couldn’t be that stupid. What would she be doing with a gun? She said, ‘A phone. We need a phone inside. So you can talk to him.’ She stayed exactly where she was, two yards outside the door. ‘If I don’t go back, he’ll use the gun.’