Reconstruction (22 page)

‘You’re a waiter?’

‘Fast food. I work on counter.’

‘And when did you meet Miro?’

‘Was before Christmas. December. Maybe November.’

‘Do you still work at the same place?’

‘I do not know,’ said Jaime. ‘I am not there yesterday. Maybe they sack me.’

‘So you’ve been working all this time. While you and Miro were lovers.’

‘You think he keep me? You think I live in his flat, lie on his couch all day? Or maybe you think he give me flat of my own?’

Ben didn’t think that at all. If Miro had been keeping Jaime, the dogs would have sniffed him out day one.

‘He kept you very secret.’

‘I already tell you this. He not want you people to know about me.’

‘But he told you about me,’ said Ben.

‘Yes.’

‘Why did he do that?’

‘Because he is scared,’ said Jaime.

A bird’s-eye view of Grandpont, this time of a weekday, would reveal a largely deserted area, compared to the bustle half a mile north – there’d be life, but it would be moving slowly. A different clock would be calling the shots; a female clock, on the whole. The bird – most likely a pigeon, though gulls aren’t uncommon, and the odd swan bisects the suburb’s airspace, its heavy flapping loud as a heartbeat – would be looking down on mothers or nannies heading nurserywards, to put in an hour’s help before collecting their charges for lunch; on the mothers or carers of smaller tots, wheeling prams along pavements, except where maliciously parked cars forced them on to the road. One or two retirees heading home from the shops, though most would have finished their chores long since. And there’d be little urgency about any of this; no rush, either, around the benches at the junction near the nursery, where the local homeless sometimes sit in conference; cans of Special Brew oiling the wheels of their dis-course, more cans refitting those wheels each time they came off. Perhaps there’d be lorries making the rounds – supermarkets delivering wildly inaccurate stabs at the weekly shopping; friendly red vans leaving mail-ordered treats. Or removal trucks. Barely a week goes by without somebody moving out or in. This is the life that’s lived when you’re at work.

Today is different.

The mothers aren’t in evidence so much, though there are one or two down there, among the crowd clustered on the safe side of the cordon. Theirs are the paler faces; they don’t have the experience of such situations that some others in the crowd enjoy, but their understanding of its essential evil is probably greater. The combination of guns and children hurts them where they live. If everything turns out all right – if the children emerge unscathed – this will be due to the power of their prayers. It’s both good and necessary that they’re there. None of them feel either of those things, though. What they feel is dread, in its purest bitterest form. They feel as if something is crushing them from the inside out. It’s the squeeze-equivalent of microwave action. If it persists a moment too long, they will explode.

The rest are mostly journalists. There’s been no formal press conference, though that never stopped a story yet. Film crews have staked patches of kerbside, and there’s a lot of straight-to-camera going on, the absence of hard information lending itself to story making – there’s a class ful of children held by balaclavaed terrorists: there are fifteen children in there; there are nine; there are six. The phrase
Islamic extremist
is bandied around the way
IRA
once was, and means the same thing. With nobody know-ing anything, even the winos’ views are polled – and they are certainly available for comment. They have huge opinions. There was definitely a lorry rolled up earlier; a definite troop of authentic, camofatigued, unshaven suicide bombers disembarked. Where the lorry went isn’t clear. What happened to the bombers is a mystery too.

If the police officers maintaining the boundary were a bit more forthcoming, this whole business of news-gathering would be a lot simpler.

Meanwhile, truth emerges in fragments, initially indis-tinguishable from gossip. There was a woman here – she was inside with her child when the gunmen broke in. Except there was only one gunman, and he was already there. Nobody knows where this woman has gone; she’s returned to a place of safety, or else been spirited into that van inside the cordon: the Major Incident Vehicle – they don’t roll out the Major Incident equipment for petty events. It’s all in the name. So perhaps she’s in there, being debriefed, while inside the nursery, banged up with the gunman, with the gang, with the armed militia, is a teacher, though she was outside earlier – somebody spoke to someone who said she’d gone back inside of her own free will. Why would she do that? It’s not just suspicious, it’s downright sinister . . . Anybody who might know any-thing concrete is absent. But small tendrils of the truth snake out here and there, attempting to take root on the slippery ground of rumour.

Our bird, not hampered by cordons, moves in nearer.

The officers manning the boundary are in the familiar blue shirt/dayglo waistcoat combo, nothing about this suggesting that anything more than a traffic-related event is in progress. They’re not here to enlighten the crowd. But nor are they bulky enough to prevent the press seeing over their shoulders: there are armed officers present too, more sinisterly garbed – nothing light-reflecting about their get-up: they wear black, bulky outfits, like Batman stand-ins, and hold themselves with a degree of macho assurance that dayglo waistcoats prohibit. It’s possible that our bird – even without knowledge of weaponry, beyond the occasional loud bang and feathered explosion hardwired into its species memory – would recognize a difference between these two groups; the reinforced, heavy-vested contingent, and the public face of crowd control.

And then over the nursery itself the bird flies; and over the annexe, whose quiet roof gives no hint of the damage-waiting-to-happen within, and across the adventure play-ground, on whose apparatus, most of which resembles medieval siege devices, more black-clad officers perch. They don’t matter to our bird – pigeon, gull or swan, it keeps on beating; crosses the playground, crosses the rail-way tracks and then more fields, then roads, then more fields, until it finds a body of water or clump of trees or electricity pylon, on which it comes to rest, and doesn’t die.

* * *

There are other views too. You don’t have to be a bird to be looking down on all this.

A marksman’s rifle is trained on the doorway to the annexe. The rifle is DS Bain’s, and DS Bain is perched on the roof of the large detached house which is the nearest building to the nursery grounds. A length of crime-scene bunting attached to one of its gateposts has come loose, and flaps like a kite’s tail in a sudden breeze. The house has been evacuated, and its occupants are currently enjoy-ing that mixture of aggrievement at the inconvenience and possessive thrill of being involved in events, if at a remove. In time to come the extent of that removal will diminish, and their roles, as recounted at dinner parties, will bloom, as if their expert opinions had been sought by the police, rather than their well-positioned chimney block. For the moment, though, they’re out of the picture. For the moment, the picture, as seen from the chimney block, is this:

An unremarkable doorway into an unremarkable, prefabricated, one-storey building. The door opens inwards – that’s hard fact, though there’s no way of telling from this angle, at which the door’s hinged edge is hidden by the jamb. There’s no glass in the door; what there is is a rain-bow-crayoned cardboard sign reading
The Palace
. This has been tacked in place at its corners but is starting to curl, and there’s a rip in the upper left quadrant – a tear no more than half an inch long, but these things never heal themselves; torn cardboard only becomes more torn, the way a late train only gets later. DS Bain doesn’t know, but isn’t hard pushed to guess, that this sign needs remaking every term. The various designs employed – the rainbow motif, and also stars, rabbits, footballers, zoo animals and Harry Potter characters – are recycled on a regular basis, core elements of an unwritten curriculum. The hand-crayoned sign, in its recurring versions, is an affirmation that some stories keep happening. Though no one involved in any of its designs ever imagined it as DS Bain sees it now: through the crosshairs of a high-powered rifle.

And framing that cardboard sign is the door; framing the door is the building. The building is set in the nursery grounds, and the nursery grounds lie in this pleasant area . . . So the picture moves ever outwards, the way children pencil their addresses on their schoolbags: their name, number, street, neighbourhood, town; then England, Europe, the Northern Hemisphere, the World, the Galaxy, the Universe – an outward spiral gradually wrapping everything in its geography, with that child at the centre, held in place by gravity. Except that DS Bain is here to put all that in reverse. From where DS Bain crouches, harnessed to the chimney block of a large suburban house, the picture is always getting smaller; the area of focus always narrowing. The Universe, the Galaxy, the World, the Northern Hemisphere . . . all the way on down to this door, and whoever might come through it, and then even tighter: body, upper body, chest –
there
– a spot no more than an inch across which, pressed hard enough, can undo the work of gravity, and blow everything apart.

Target acquired.

Steady.

DS Bain waits.

The door refuses to open.

I’m not a spy, Jaime. I’m an accountant.

You are spy accountant.

I’m a civil servant. As Miro was.

You work for secret services. Miro tell me this.

‘This is spook business.’

The mobile telephone was doing its work – the phone Faulks gave Louise Kennedy before she went back into the annexe. On or off, it broadcast sound from the annexe into the Major Incident Vehicle, where Peter Faulks was listen-ing attentively, as was Malcolm Fredericks. Except Fredericks was thinking out loud at the same time, which wasn’t helping Faulks.

‘Who the hell is Miro Weiss?’

‘Sir, I need –’

Fredericks waved a hand and shut up. He knew what Faulks needed.

The van was smaller inside than it looked, because of all the equipment it contained: it was mobile crime lab as well as listening post. Faulks sat before a bank of monitors broadcasting four live feeds of the annexe exterior, with no action on any of them. Real Big Brother stuff. Next to Faulks was a uniformed tech in a headset, who every so often spoke in an undertone: confirming call-ins from officers on the perimeter. When guns were in play, you kept a check on who was still alive.

He could feel tension knotting in his stomach; actually feel it writhing around, as if he were about to spawn an alien bug. This was what The Job was about – being in charge of situations that resembled, Jesus, a simile failed him. That resembled the space shuttle: one of those enter-prises with a million ways of going wrong, and only one of going right. When that happened, everyone forgot about it. When things went wrong, the fallout lasted for-ever; a constant scar on the skies above, in the shape of a dying swan.

‘I’m going outside,’ he said. ‘Keep me informed.’

Outside was a movie set; somewhere where a particular reality was being created, but whose immediate effect was of artifice. A lot of urgency, with little to show for it. Fredericks walked round the van, off-camera, then lit a cigarette. All this activity: hurry-up-and-wait . . . He’d had two hostage situations in three years: in the first, what should have been a routine drugs raid ended with a dealer holed in a flat with two working girls, a Glock, and an industrial amount of crack cocaine. Which there’d been a lot less of when they’d carried three bodies out. The second had been a domestic: a father pushed to an edge that was waiting for everyone, though the lucky never get near it. A crumbling marriage; non-existent financial ground-ing; a tendency to keep drinking long after time should have been called. Once in a million goes, this happens with a grandfather’s wartime souvenir on the premises. The gun wasn’t even loaded. But you didn’t take chances with children in the picture. DS Bain’s shot from an attic room over the road had been Olympic standard.

The wife – the one they had on tape, screaming for her life – was currently chasing the Force through the courts. And what was the betting that would be rehashed over pages 2 to 7 tomorrow?

He crushed his cigarette underfoot; called to mind again the sketch of the annexe Claire Christopher, the nursery head, had drawn. One biggish room with a small office and a lavatory down the far side; windows facing into the complex, and metal shutters pulled over these. There was a skylight in the roof, and they could drop an officer through that, but placing somebody up there silently was another problem.
When it rains
, she’d told him,
it’s like
being inside a tin drum
. And all of these problems could be handled – they could take the annexe inside twenty seconds, Faulks assured him. But twenty seconds was a long time when the opposition was armed. In less than half of that, those two little boys could die: like the dealer and his unlucky prostitutes, or the melt-job with a WWII pistol.

Fredericks went back into the van, to find out what was being said.

Because he is scared . . .

‘Why was Miro scared?’ Ben asked.

Jaime took a while to answer.

The annexe’s dimensions seemed to have altered since Ben’s arrival: the walls had shifted inwards, as if outside forces were squeezing them into an ever-smaller container. He could feel his shirt dampening, his thighs growing clammy. The nearby bodies were also reacting in predict-ably unhygienic ways to stress, and the annexe, face it, was never going to be the most fragrant of rooms – any other weekday, it would be a laboratory of infant accidents. The children, fastened to their father, were pumping out heat like twin immersion heaters, and the squat woman, Judy, was a heap on the floor, the stink of fear coming off her in waves. Only Louise Kennedy, closest to him, seemed under control. All he could smell of her was soap; an expensive blend of fruit and herb.