Reconstruction (23 page)

Jaime said, ‘I do not know. He keeps secrets. He always know things he do not tell me.’

‘Well, that’s all very well, Jaime. But it doesn’t help me a lot.’

‘Were you watching him?’

‘Me?’

‘You are spy.’

‘I’ve told you, Jaime. I work in an office. Like Miro. They clock us in, they clock us out. We don’t drive fast cars and we don’t spend our nights in casinos. If you’re thinking James Bond, you’re way off mark. I wasn’t watching him. I don’t even know where he lived.’

‘Is there any chance you’re going to tell us what this is about?’

And there was her voice again: less exotic than her soap, but every bit as controlled as her body.

But he said, ‘Please. Let me deal with this.’

Louise said, ‘You think we’re not involved?’

‘I know you’re involved, it’s –’ ‘We’re here. We’re stuck in here. You don’t think we have a right to know what’s going on?’

‘I think you have a right to get out, and that means –’ The noise that interrupted them didn’t at first sound organic.

Ben broke off, looking first at Jaime, then at Jaime’s gun – but no gun made that high-pitched noise; few things shot made that high-pitched squealing noise, which rose swiftly from unpleasant to ear-splitting, like a smoke alarm. Jaime’s eyes lit with shock; he turned, and the hand holding the gun dropped – that was the moment to jump him, if Ben had been the right kind of spy. It passed. Jaime stepped back, and raised the gun again. One of the small boys screamed, but this was lost in sudden movement as the heap that was Judy Ainsworth became a mobile flurry on its way to the door, still wailing.

‘Oh God,’ said Louise.

‘Stop!’ said Jaime, aiming the gun.

Judy didn’t stop.

‘What’s that?’

‘The woman,’ said Faulks. ‘The older one. Shit.’

Stop!

‘Send them in,’ said Faulks. ‘He’s going to shoot.’

It wasn’t the being there; it wasn’t the talking – it was something she couldn’t put into words. No: it was the sense of becoming less and less important, as if the forces that had squeezed Judy out of her old life were intent on finishing the job. There she was, trapped in a nursery by a crazed gunman, and still she didn’t matter; still she was peripheral . . . None of this was about her. She shouldn’t be here. She should be safe outside – the thought didn’t form so much as take over; expressing itself first as noise, then pulling her off the floor and propelling her towards the exit.

‘Stop!’ said Jaime, aiming the gun at her.

She couldn’t stop.

Though it was mad how the door got no nearer.

‘Sir, there’s no time to –’

‘Yes. Go.’

Before Fredericks had finished, Faulks was echoing the word down his microphone.

Go.

There were fences here that to the children they penned might as well have been giants’ fortresses; a grassed distance between gate and annexe door that stretched wide as a football pitch. To the black-clad officers who moved on
Go
, both were negligible: it would have taken too long to go through the gate, so they went over it, clear-ing the grass in less than two seconds. Impossible to say whether they registered a rainbow-crayoned sign reading
The Palace
. To the watchers in the van, they were a well-oiled team; to the press on the street, a blurred event – proof that something was happening frustratingly out of focus.

Go.

One either side of the door. A third kicking it open.

To the people inside the annexe, they were avenging angels, or devils, or both.

Some words:

you fuck, you bastard

stop shut up I shoot you now I shoot you

don’t

boys

mummy

ungh

everybody down!

everybody down!

Everybody down . . .

The door got no nearer because an arm had wrapped around Judy’s waist, so her legs stopped propelling her forward – they wheeled crazily above the floor like a car-toon woman’s, and then she was tumbling backwards, not screaming but shouting – ‘You fuck, you bastard’ – and her fall was broken by Jaime’s body, though that was neither safe nor comfortable, because his arm shifted, his hand was at her throat, his gun pressed to her temple.

‘Stop! Shut up! I shoot you now! I shoot you!’

‘Don’t!’ Ben shouted. He’d raised his hands, stepped away from the wall; the only one there who knew what was going to happen next.

Eliot Pedlar said, ‘Boys,’ and hugged them closer . . .

And both boys, that same moment, said, ‘Mummy’ . . .

Only Louise had nothing to say. She opened her mouth, but all that came out was
ungh
. It was the noise she’d have made if punched in the stomach, and made as much sense as anything else she might have come up with.

And then the door burst open, and sudden light framed a black-clad man, and a second, and a third, each with ugly sticks in their hands which made no sense because sticks weren’t allowed inside, except for nature-table purposes . . . They weren’t sticks. They became guns as Louise watched, and one of them covered the hostages against the wall as the other two trained on the motionless pile on the floor that was Judy and Jaime.

‘Everybody down!’

‘Everybody down!’

Everybody down . . .

In the moment that followed there was silence in the annexe, but for the squeaking of the wheel in Trixie’s cage. Maybe something about the sudden noise and movement had convinced the hamster that life was back to normal; maybe this was more the sort of thing she expected. Children were huge, and wielded toys. Big men with guns weren’t such a departure. It was a matter of degree.

The wheel squeaked. Round and round she ran, getting nowhere.

Ben dropped, followed by Louise. Eliot crouched, pulling his children with him until they began pulling him: attempting to squash themselves into the floor; to make themselves a puddle that could soak through the boards, reassemble in the earth beneath, then edge into the freedom of the outside air. They liquefied in his embrace. And he wanted to find words that would com-fort them, but the only word in his head was the one they’d just banished him with:
Mummy
.

Everybody down . . .

‘Target is on the ground, repeat, target is on the ground.’

‘And has a hostage,’ Ben said loudly. His hands were on the back of his head – he knew what you did; you made yourself a non-combatant. Guns plus excitement equals accidents. A friendly bullet ripped exactly the same size hole in you. And a hostile one would punch through Jaime’s head, smearing whatever he knew, or thought he knew, across the boards of a nursery floor.

‘Be quiet!’

‘And has a hostage,’ Ben repeated loudly. ‘Call them out. He’ll kill her.’

‘Target is on the ground. He has the woman.’

A faint crackle from a headset; a question relayed from a hundred yards away.

‘No.’

Do you have a clear shot?
Ben translated.

‘They can’t shoot without hitting the woman,’ he said clearly.

More crackle.

‘
Be quiet!

’ More crackle.

The hamster wheel squeaked, slowed, squeaked . . . stopped.

There’d be instructions flowing through those headsets, but things weren’t going right. The annexe should have been crawling by now; the innocents dragged out to freedom; the gunman disarmed and either docile or dead. Instead there was a new stand-off, and unless someone made a decision soon, someone else was going to be dead. More crackle . . .

‘Pull them out.’

‘They’ve just got in!’

‘Pull them out. They’ve lost the moment. Whistler’s say-ing they can’t shoot without – ‘ ‘Whistler is not part of this operation!’

‘He’s the only one keeping his head. How old are those kids? Pull them out.’

But for another few seconds, Fredericks hesitated.

Peter Craven was twenty-seven, stood just over six foot; had recently asked Tasha to marry him, and was spend-ing more free afternoons leafing through colour swatches than booting a football around South Parks – just reach-ing that point, in other words, when the difference between training and the real thing kicked in. So here he was, real weapon in hand, real sweat on his forehead, real villain in front of him, gun to the temple of the hostage on top.

Another hostage saying,
Call them out. He’ll kill her
.

All very different from the practice runs.

‘Target is on the ground. He has the woman.’

Do you have a clear shot?

Did he have a clear shot? On the training ground, there was only one answer, and it was always
yes
, even when it should have been
no
.
Can you hit the target from here?
, said target being the size of a peanut. But
yes
was the right answer, because you never let anyone know there were things beyond you, not if you wanted to earn your stripes, climb the ladder, make Tasha proud. So you said
yes
and took the shot and the worst that happened was the wrong dummy lost its head . . . Well, not quite. The worst that happened was the bawling out you got for being too stupid to know the difference between
yes
and
no
.

That’s your plan, is it?
the instructor had said.
Cross your
fingers and hope for the best? If you can’t manage the shot, you
can’t manage the shot. Life or death means precisely that. Life.
Or. Death.

‘They can’t shoot without hitting the woman,’ the hostage said clearly.

Who’s speaking?

‘Be quiet!’

And Peter meant both of them, the headset and the hostage . . . Peter Craven, first through the door, was the only one with a prayer of a shot at the gunman, and he knew the difference between
yes
and
no
.

Do you have a clear shot?

It was a matter of life or death.

All AFOs with two-years’ plus experience to attend the refresher
in Yorkshire . . .
As of this moment, Fredericks had only one Authorized Firearms Officer on-site who’d actually worked a hostage situation.

This was what was meant by economies of scale.

‘Pull them out,’ he said.

Faulks relayed the order to the officers in the field.

Like one of those moments when the brain plays catch-up, Louise thought afterwards. When it files a recent event in the wrong folder; classes it as memory instead of ongoing event. Now, everything was happening backwards, as if her brain was re-spooling, undoing the noise and confusion of barely a minute:

everybody down!

ungh

mummy

boys

don’t

stop shut up I shoot you now I shoot you

you fuck, you bastard

And then they were gone, and it was just the seven of them again, with the door still open, and Trixie’s wheel silent in the background . . . Gordon whimpered. Timmy belched. Eliot looked at her, but with nothing in his eyes; he might have been trying to remember what everything looked like before she was there.

The outside world leaked in, carrying strange hints of upsets continuing elsewhere.

Ben Whistler rose, walked to the door, and closed it.

When Sam Chapman knocked on Louise Kennedy’s door, it was opened by a cop, but that was okay. The woolly-suits at the nursery had more to worry about than letting the strength know he was ignorable. He flashed his card, and the cop said ‘MI6?’

‘Don’t tell everyone.’

‘This is terrorism? I thought that was Five’s –’

‘It’s a foreign national with a gun, son,’ he said quietly. ‘Is her mother in?’

Louise Ann Kennedy: b.1975 in Chester. Educated there and
Sheffield University (PPE), then a PGCE (Oxford Brookes)
before a stint in banking: DeJohn Franklin Moers.
He’d collected this from Whistler’s BlackBerry; had read, too, the follow-up, which had come after Whistler had surrendered the gadget to Faulks.
Current circumstances: single; mother
on premises
. They delivered the goods, the queens of the database, though their manner of expression tended towards the robotic.

The front door opened on to the living room. And there she was, the mother on the premises, in a straight-backed chair with her back to him; another cop opposite her, face carefully composed into an attitude of sympathetic concern. Unless that came naturally. You couldn’t always tell. The officer got to her feet, and the mother turned to see what was happening. The cop behind Sam mouthed
spook
, and the officer sat back down.

‘Is my daughter all right?’

‘As far as I know, Mrs Kennedy.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I work for the government,’ he said. ‘Security services. I wonder if I could have a word.’

He looked at the female cop. Who looked at the cop behind him.

‘We’re supposed to stay here.’

‘You can stay in the kitchen.’

‘Our orders –’ ‘Just changed.’

It wasn’t the card he carried – a lot of the time, it was anything but. It was the way he said it: years of experience plus attitude. It was okay if people ended up nursing a grudge; that was the basis of most of Bad Sam’s relationships.

When they were alone, he sat.

‘Your daughter’s alive. The more we know, the more likely she is to stay that way.’

People made the mistake of thinking older people weak. But you only got old by surviving. Things wore out, but the core got harder. And Sam was in a hurry; he had no time to pussy around.

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

‘Exactly what I say.’

‘This man broke in, he just chose a school. My daughter’s unlucky, that’s all.’

‘More than likely. But we have to explore the possibility that this isn’t random, Mrs Kennedy. We have to look at the background.’

She glanced toward the television, which was off. ‘They’re showing pictures. But nothing’s happening.’

‘Lots is happening. We can’t see it, that’s all. Time is of the essence – tell me about your daughter.’

All these people – how come there were all these people, when the only one involved was her?