Reconstruction (7 page)

Another nursery accident. How many little bodies had this path seen, sprawled and screaming? But don’t think about that; check, instead, that the boys are okay – that this is just the usual tumble, with no bones broken. And then look, for one brief moment, into Louise’s eyes, which are inches from yours, and share the horror. There are five of you here; six, if you count the weapon. But for an instant only two of you count. If you’re to come through this alive, you need each other.

Eliot blinked. Louise’s gaze left him; turned, instead, to the Gun.

The boys clutched him again, and he felt himself dragged down.

She’d never been this close to a gun – stupid:
nobody
had ever been this close to a gun; nobody with a normal life, and ordinary aspirations. Eliot’s boys were crying, but that seemed a long way distant; much closer was the gun itself, which was this side of the railings now. While Louise gazed into its mouth, the boy holding it – the only one among them on his feet – closed the gate. That, at least, was normal; everything else had rattled free of its holdings, scattering reality around her like spring rain.

He was brown-eyed, black-haired – this a curly mess; tucked behind his ears, and dropping below his jacket collar – and his toffee-coloured skin was smooth as milk. Under other circumstances, Louise would have wanted to touch his cheek. Even holding a gun, he looked nineteen; clean-shaven, he’d have got away with it. But his stubble was grown-up stubble; his eyes weren’t simply exhausted, they were adult-exhausted – he had seen stuff, been places. And all this, he was bringing with him into her nursery.

‘You’re the lady?’ he asked.

‘. . . What?’

‘We go inside now.’

‘Who are you?’

‘We go inside.’

The gun twitched in his hand.

Eliot was trying to lever himself up, keeping one arm folded round each of his boys. Not so long ago – less than twenty minutes – the biggest problem in Louise’s world was the Incident, and the undiscovered ways in which it might come back to haunt her. Now this: thanks, Eliot.

No. That wasn’t fair.

‘Now. Please.’

She stood, unsteady as a baby giraffe. Then reached down to help Timmy, unless it was Gordon. But whichever twin it was pulled away, and buried deeper into what it could find of its father.

The gunman looked at the boys, at Eliot, at Louise.

‘Eliot,’ she said.

His face was assuming that spaced-out, lost-in-Toyland expression the Darlings slipped into when they reached their limits.

‘
El
iot!’

He snapped out of it.

‘You’ve got to get the boys moving.’

‘Yes . . .’

He stood, scooped his boys up; set one of them – Timmy – upright, and grasped his hand. Gordon, he clutched under one arm, like an awkward parcel. Gordon’s legs stuck straight out behind Eliot, but only because his knee joints worked; his arms dangled down like broken branches. Eliot didn’t seem to notice. The parcel might have been one he was collecting for somebody else.

Timmy said, ‘Timmy wants to go home.’

‘Hush now. Soon.’

The gunman said, ‘We go inside.’ He wasn’t pointing the gun at anyone in particular, but the fact that he was hold-ing it spoke for itself.

Behind him, the light on the gate had gone out. When it was locked, Louise knew, the red light shone unblinking; right now, anyone who knew the code could get through it . . . Dave would be here soon. It would be a really good idea if she could lock the gate.

‘Inside.’

She began to move, leading the way. Her legs belonged to some other woman, who’d had something of a night; her limbs felt misappropriated. Where she was heading was where she’d come from: the gate in the second set of railings separating the annexe from the nursery proper.

‘Wait. Where you go?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Stop!’

She stopped.

Behind her Eliot was breathing heavily. Below that, the twins’ lungs were working overdrive, and Louise flashed on the memory of holding a frightened hamster; its heart-beat pounding in overdrive, too urgently for such a tiny beast. She remembered knowing that if she just stood holding it – presenting no threat other than her enormous size and power – the animal would have no alternative but to die of fear. So after a while, she’d put it down.

‘Where do you go?’

She turned. ‘You wanted to go inside.’

‘There.’ He pointed at the main nursery building, but – and this might have been her imagination – a question mark quavered after the word. What she had to do was force it into the open.

‘It’s locked. I don’t have the key.’

His eyebrows tightened.

‘Key.’ She mimed an action: finger and thumb, a twist-ing wrist.

‘I know key.’

‘Well, I don’t have it. Only the teacher has the key.’

‘You are not teacher?’

‘She’s not here yet.’

‘She is the lady?’

Eliot said, ‘Are you looking for Claire? Claire Christopher?’

Said it with a mixture of incredulity and something like relief: there was a reason this was happening, and it was nothing to do with him or his children.

Louise spat fire at him, using only her eyes. ‘She’s not here yet,’ she repeated.

‘We need to go inside,’ the Gun said.

Going inside meant putting walls round the situation. It was containment, but it meant containing herself, and the twins, and Eliot, with it.

There was little choice involved. But what little there was, she’d grab while she could.

‘Then we have to go in there,’ she said, pointing to-wards the annexe. And started moving again, to show she meant it.

She sensed rather than saw what happened behind her: the men and the boys frozen for a moment; the larger pair by uncertainty; the smaller by being locked in orbit round the uncertain. And there was an invisible thread connecting Louise to the four of them, and the further she got, the tauter it stretched . . . If it broke now, some-thing awful would happen; and with that thought she slowed, stopped, just a few feet short of the gate that hung open in front of her, just this side of the thread’s breaking point. Behind her the boy said something: words she didn’t catch. And then came footsteps, and they were following her – she reached the gate, went through it, and a moment later all five were the other side of those railings, and the boy was shutting the gate behind them. But it remained unlocked, the keys on the other side – somewhere in the grass, where Louise had flung them on her way through.

‘We go inside.’

(That was how it was when you had a gun. Whatever happened was your idea. Though Louise was just as happy to let him take the credit.)

Timmy said, ‘This’s the palace.’

‘Hush, Timmy.’

‘Wha’ did Timmy say?’

‘Gordon –’

‘Wha’ did Timmy say, daddy?’

‘Hush.’

Louise pushed open the door of the annexe – the palace – and went in, followed by Eliot/Timmy/Gordon all in one mass; then the Gun, following so close he was part of the community.

The room was long and narrow; lengthwise, it ran adjacent to the footpath heading to the railway line. The wall on that side had no windows, and so had become an art gallery by default – primary-coloured splodges and potato-shapes triumphantly labelled Mummy and Daddy; some Miss Kennedys too, as well as a Queen. The absence of windows was to prevent lookers-in. The days when watching infants’ innocent pursuits was an innocent pursuit were long gone.

Against the narrow wall at the adventure park end of the annexe was a stainless steel sink and draining board, above which, out of reach of hurtable hands, hung a water boiler, from which a hot water tap descended on a swivel. There was a door either side of this fixture: one leading to a toilet; the other to an office which doubled as a sickroom, and was the space in which emergencies were dealt with. Windows punctuated the other long wall – to Louise’s left as she entered – and these served as natural dividers; the space between the second and third being the soft play area where mats were piled, and a circular plastic-mesh playpen sequestered a menagerie of squashy gonks and ungendered mannequins. At the far end, a waist-high arrangement of hooks was known as Cloakroom Corner. Between the first and second window, on a wobbly plastic table, sat a hamster cage. The floor below it was scattered now with its usual morning libations: lengths of straw and flakes of cereal; balls of hamstershit. This confection always struck Louise as a curiously tidy mess, being arranged as an outward-flowing spray with a razor-sharp edge, dictated by the tabletop two feet above. As for the hamster itself, by popular poll it was called Trixie, though had only been two votes short of being Wayne Rooney. Allotting a name by ballot was a useful way of introducing the concept of democracy to the under-fours, and the hamster was itself a means of broaching the possibility of death, in a gentle, not terribly important way. Though not so unimportant Louise had confessed it when, arriving on Trixie’s third day, she’d found the beast had turned its toes up: one frantic dash to the pet shop later, and a very similar hamster was in residence. (‘She’s grown a new spot!’ an observant child had exclaimed. ‘So she has!’ said Louise.)

The metal shutters over the windows meant the day had made few inroads yet, though through the skylight, a grey imitation of April filtered down on everything. The smells were of children, hamster, paint, glue, the toilet, yesterday’s lunch, and hand cream.

Into none of this was supposed to wander a man with a gun.

The door that shut behind them sounded, to Louise’s ears, like a shot.

The way Sam Chapman saw it, three things happened in life:

1. You did your job faultlessly and didn’t get thanked, or

2. you fucked up and were 3. dumped on from a great height.

Chapman was hovering around the two-and-a-bit mark; waiting for the other shoe to drop. The thing was, not to switch his mobile on. There was always a chance he could clean up before the Office released the dogs. The fact that he was Head Dog was an irony not bringing him great pleasure.

Meanwhile, he was being kept waiting. This was in the police station, foot of St Aldate’s, Oxford, within whose walls Bad Sam Chapman was halfway between nasty smell and suspect device, as if his appearance could only trigger catastrophe. Policemen don’t like spooks. That was okay. Chapman didn’t like policemen.

Edgy, tense Chapman was a short, dark, sharp-featured man, so in an ideal world would have resembled Al Pacino. But where Pacino’s terrier-intensity and brooding surliness added up to sexual magnetism, in Sam Chapman the same combination produced a dangerous sulk. Besides, his features weren’t arranged like Pacino’s – instead, he resembled an ageing football hooligan in a suit. Late forties; a number two cut not quite eradicating the grey; brown eyes deep enough that getting to the bottom of them was no simple matter – an ex-wife could have glossed on this. Currently, he was sitting in a plastic bucket seat that doubtless figured on an Amnesty International to-do list, facing a noticeboard whose posters reminded onlookers that they’d recently been mugged, burgled, assaulted or had their bike nicked, though anyone close enough to read probably remembered that’s why they were here. And, every time he closed his eyes he was back in the lay-by, watching a big car making a mess of Neil Ashton. He’d been folded like a piece of damp laundry when Chapman reached him. The gun was nowhere – you had to assume Segura had taken it.

It was likely Ashton had a girlfriend somewhere – possibly even a mother – and either or both would be receiving grim phone calls about now. Which was sad, but when you scraped away the sentiment Neil Ashton had displayed a gun on what he’d described as a collect-and-comfort, then compounded the error by losing it. He’d better hope he died on the operating table, because if he ever walked upright again, Sam Chapman would break him in two and kick the halves in different directions.

Blessed are the unforgiving, for they shall come out even. That was the lost frigging beatitude as far as Bad Sam Chapman was concerned. As for the meek: we’ll make them give it back.

A police officer, not a day over seventeen, appeared in the doorway and beckoned him to follow. Beckoned – not invited. But house rules were in play, so Chapman rose and went with her: down a corridor, through a safety door, up a stairwell, through another door – a labyrinth to dis-orient suspects. He wasn’t a suspect, of course; a fact it would be wise to keep in mind, given God only knew how today would pan out. In Bad Sam’s experience, what started badly fucked up worse.

The last door boasted a plastic strip reading
Superintendent
Malcolm Fredericks
. The officer knocked, an ‘Enter’ was barked, the door was opened, the officer retreated, and Chapman was inside, looking at Superintendent Malcolm Fredericks, who didn’t rise, offer his hand, or invite Chapman to sit. Instead he said, ‘I presume you have ID?’

Wordlessly, Chapman showed him a card he could have run up in a stationer’s half an hour previously. But there were rings you had to jump through when you’d fucked up. Like tumbling down a snake in the game: once you’d thrown a bad number, you were at the mercy of the board. ‘It would have been courteous to let us know you were running an operation in the area.’

‘It wasn’t exactly an operation.’

‘Wasn’t it? And what was it, then? Exactly?’

‘We were picking up a witness.’

‘Well, what a splendid job you made of it. In my line of work, we’d call that an arrest. And when it’s planned in advance, we’d describe it as an operation.’

‘It wasn’t an arrest,’ Sam Chapman said.

‘But you were armed.’

‘No.’

‘Your companion was armed.’

‘I hadn’t been aware of that.’

‘You hadn’t been aware of that.’

It was a technique Chapman used himself: repeat the last thing said in a tone somewhere between incredulity and sarcasm.
Exactly how stupid would I have to be to believe
that?
And Malcolm Fredericks didn’t look stupid: he had one of those open, intelligent faces Chapman just naturally wanted to give bad news to.

‘What exactly was this witness a witness to?’