Reconstruction (24 page)

Christine Pedlar pushed through the crowd like a blind woman crashing through a wood.

There were journalists, and locals, and way up above a helicopter buzzed like a demented mosquito. This would be filming the event – which is what this was: an
event
. And from that high perspective, its rotorblades trimming the undersides of clouds, an event no different from any other mass gathering; animal rights or football mob. One in which there was no telling anyone from anyone else, though really she should show up as the single splash of colour – a bright red anguished figure clawing through a black and white uncaring mass.

Her boys were in there. Her beautiful twin sons. In that building, around which armed policemen waited.

This information was too big for her head. Any moment now her skull would crack, and the horrible fact it held come screaming out, to shatter the daylight.

How did it happen? What caused this slippage in normality? Today should have been ordinary – different, but
normal
; she was visiting her old office, to discuss a return to work. Did she want to return to work? Not especially, but it had to be discussed, if only to keep Eliot quiet. But shortly after her arrival, something unexpected had tugged inside Chris, and she realized that she had missed this: the business of being at work, performing tasks that did not revolve around the needs of children. Christine had been a legal secretary; a good one. The solicitors she worked for could do with her return. And somewhere between being offered coffee and receiving it, this notion had come to seem not altogether far-fetched: perhaps, after all, it was what she needed. And it came with options attached – flexible working plans were mentioned. By the time the coffee was drunk, her former boss was acting like her future boss. She’d have to discuss it with Eliot, she reminded him. But something in his friendly goodbye hinted that he thought she’d made her mind up.

Perhaps she had. And now was being punished for it.

So was that the way the world worked? Four years’ full-time devotion, and the first time you thought of blinking –
bang!

She was pushing to the front now; was pushed back by those who thought she was just another rubbernecker at someone else’s car crash.

You don’t understand – my children are in there.

Words rocketing round her brain without finding an opening they could use.

This is not an
event
. This is my life exploding.

Hers was the kind of nature, if someone honked their horn at her, it wrecked her for half an hour. This: this could kill her.

But don’t use that word. Don’t use that word. It might give the world ideas.

Something flashed in her mind like a bulb in a cellar, and her darling babies splashed around the nursery floor. And with the image something else broke, because her vision swam apart, and all the black and white figures around her fissured into blurry messes, their edges foamy and transparent.

Someone touched her elbow.

‘Chris?’

She turned and tried to speak, but all she could do was burst into tears.

That was probably the most fucked-up hostage-rescue attempt since Tehran. Even allowing for scaled-down con-sequences – there was small chance Ronald Reagan would be re-elected – Fredericks could feel the backlash already:
you don’t send a team in if they’re not up to the job
.

‘It’s nobody’s fault,’ Faulks told him.

‘Guess who just got to be nobody?’

‘There’s only one point of entry. What were the chances he’d be underneath a hostage? I mean,
underneath
. . .’

‘You think the
Mail
will be that understanding? We put the team in, we pulled it back out. And nothing’s changed.’

‘Everyone’s still alive,’ Faulks said.

‘Only because I haven’t debriefed them yet,’ said Fredericks, and then both men fell silent, because there was talk in the annexe again.

‘Get up.’

She didn’t move.

‘Get
up
!’

Jaime shoved, and Judy rolled off him. And then he saw Ben by the door, fresh from closing it, and screamed: ‘
You.
Against the wall!
’ and aimed the gun, his hand shaking so much, Ben would have had to be fibrillating hard to be in its way. ‘
Now!
’

Ben stepped carefully, hands in the air. ‘I was closing the door,’ he said.

Jaime was breathing hard.

‘They’ve gone, Jaime. But you saw how fast they moved.’ ‘I am still here.’

‘Because you got lucky.’

Ben, back at the wall, was the only upright body in the room. But Louise was pushing herself up, and Eliot Pedlar coming out of the crash position. The two small boys were still dead lions: not a happy association. Beside Jaime, Judy – the cause of the recent eruptions – was a badly filled bin-liner.

‘It’s just a matter of time, Jaime.’

‘Shut up.’

‘No. Keep talking. It’s the only way.’

‘They want to kill me.’

‘They don’t want to kill you. But that’s what they’ll do. Because you’ve got a gun, Jaime, and six hostages. Killing you is what happens next. Unless you keep talking.’

Jaime stepped away from Judy, and looked down on her. For a moment, Ben thought he was going to spit.

Instead he said, ‘You. Go back over there.’

After a moment, she stirred into life. She crawled, didn’t walk, back to the wall.

The squeaking from the hamster cage began again, slowed, then stopped.

Jaime looked behind him, at the door that could no longer be trusted. Then back at Ben.

Ben said, ‘Talk about Miro.’

‘Louise used to work for a City bank,’ Bad Sam Chapman said.

‘It was a good job. It paid well.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘But she worked long hours, weekends, everything. I never saw her.’

‘What made her give it up?’

‘Well, she trained as a teacher, you know.’

‘So I gathered. But it doesn’t pay as well, does it?’

‘Money isn’t everything,’ Mrs Kennedy said.

‘But it’s unusual to give up such a well-paid career so young.’

‘Louise has always done precisely what she wants to do.’ This with a tightening of the mouth, as if in memory of certain occasions when Louise would have done better to heed others’ advice.

‘So it was her own idea to quit?’

‘Which part of the security services did you say you worked for?’

‘I didn’t. Was it her own idea to quit?’

‘There was . . . trouble.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘She wouldn’t say. But I could tell. Amother always can.’ ‘Did they catch her with her hand in the till?’

Further mouth-tightening, and enough frost in the eyes to blind a windscreen. ‘Louise would no more steal than she would . . .’ A comparison failed her. ‘There was a man involved.’

‘And
he
was caught with his –’ ‘She had an affair. With a senior partner. And it’s always the woman who pays for that sort of indiscretion, isn’t it?’ Bad Sam had operated enough honeytraps to know otherwise, but had conducted enough interviews not to contradict. He said, ‘She told you about this?’

‘Not in so many words.’

He waited.

‘But my daughter is an ambitious woman. She crossed teaching off her career list once she found she could earn ten times as much doing something she was better at.’

‘And she wouldn’t have walked away if it hadn’t become necessary.’

‘Quite.’

‘There are other banks.’

‘Yes. But whatever happened hurt her. She wanted out of that world. That’s how I know a man was involved.’

And she gave him the name.
Crispin
.

He had led her up a cut into the estate opposite the rec ground. When they reached a row of garages he stopped, and held her while she sobbed out what was left of her heart, or that’s what it felt like. When she was dry at last, she was emptied of more than tears; had had every last drop of emotion wrung out of her. This state persisted for twenty seconds, and felt literally a blessed relief. And then reality booted up and left her standing by a row of garages, her boys still locked inside the annexe.

Dave Osborne said, ‘I’m so sorry, Chris.’

She released herself, shaking her head. She meant noth-ing by this, and might as easily have nodded.

‘How did you find out?’

This strange question forced her to rearrange her thoughts. Perhaps that was its purpose. ‘I – this morning, I was busy. Eliot brought the boys in.’

‘I know.’

‘I was visiting my old office on the Cornmarket. And I went into the shopping centre afterwards, and walked past that TV place –’

And had seen the
event
beamed out to shocked shoppers. Shocked, but not ungratified; there was a sense of importance attached to being a local when news was breaking. Chris Pedlar had been rooted to the spot: important was not how she felt. What she was feeling – what she was feeling was in her pocket for her mobile. And yes, it was on; and no: no txts, no voicemail, no missed calls were registered. And however flaky Eliot could be, how-ever detached from family life, no way he couldn’t know what was happening in Grandpont right now; no way he wouldn’t have called her the second he heard . . .

Unless he wasn’t able to.

Dave handed her a tissue, and she blew her nose loudly. ‘Things are going to be okay, Chris.’

‘My boys are in there, aren’t they?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Chris. I think so. Yes.’

‘Why? Why them and not –’

She couldn’t finish the thought. Whose children would she substitute for her own; whose place in mortal danger? Anyone’s – that was the raw truth. She’d have her children change place with anyone’s right now, but finding a name was thankfully beyond her. She realized Dave’s hand was still on her shoulder, and he must have registered that too, because he removed it.

‘Who else?’ she asked.

‘In there?’

‘Who’s with my babies?’

‘Your husband,’ he said. And then said, ‘I’m so sorry’ again.

‘At least they have him.’ God, that that could be a comfort.

‘And Louise, Louise Kennedy. She didn’t have to be, Chris. She went back inside. She could have escaped.’

She looked at him, not understanding.

‘There’d have been others in there, but she got them out. Then went back.’

‘But not my boys.’

‘They must have been first. The rest of them, the ones who arrived when I did, she chased them away.’

‘But why were they there first? Eliot was taking them to kick a football around.’

Dave shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘But that’s what he told me they were doing.’

This little snippet of memory was worth holding on to. It could form the basis for a whole new reality; one in which Eliot and the twins were kicking a ball on the rec ground, oblivious to the passage of time and the massed police forces nearby.

He said, ‘Maybe it got too cold for them.’

‘But it isn’t cold.’

‘But maybe it was then. Chris, I’m sorry. I wish this wasn’t happening, and I don’t know why it is. All I know is . . .’

He lifted a helpless hand, then let it drop.
That it is
was what he couldn’t say.

She blinked, then rubbed her eyes. It didn’t help. She was still here, the world was still wrong; Dave was still looking at her, fear and compassion mixed in his eyes. He was good-looking, Dave Osborne, all the mothers agreed, and he’d figured in the occasional reverie, though recall-ing that was like looking through a window into make-believe. Had she really enjoyed moments when her mind wasn’t screaming? The last time she’d kissed her boys – oh God don’t say
the last time
– she’d been waving them off to play football, not sending them into the arms of a gun-wielding maniac. So she’d thought. Could the point of slippage really be that they’d felt cold, so went into the nursery early? How could something so mundane be life-altering? And how come they’d got in anyway, if Dave hadn’t been there to open the gate?

Her black angel hovered overhead, masquerading as a helicopter.

Dave said, ‘You’d better talk to the police.’

‘Why? Will they do things differently if I do?’

‘I don’t know, Chris. It’s just what you have to do, I think.’

She thought so too. But it would be another line crossed, indicating her acquiescence in this nightmare. If she couldn’t turn the clock back she wanted it to stand still; wanted now to last forever, a now in which there was at least the possibility that things would turn out all right. Allowing things to continue was to open the door to all manner of grief. And again that image splashed across her mind: of her babies ruined on a nursery floor.

More tears fell. Nothing could dam them up.

‘Chris? Chris?’

Dave shimmered before her, for an instant becoming twins. And then was blurrily solo again, holding some-thing out.

‘Don’t tell anyone, okay? It’s more than my job’s worth.’

He smiled a conspirator’s smile.

After a moment she took the cigarette, and he lit it for her, then one for himself.

Time wouldn’t stand still, but at least she could lurk out-side it for a while. These things took minutes off your life – the next few wouldn’t be missed.

They stood close as lovers, by the garages, smoking.

A short distance away, her children shook.

Time was back to doing somersaults: every moment crawled; every minute jumped. Outside, the sun would be edging through the sky, or that’s what it would look like it was doing. Here in the annexe, electric light was all they had to go on.

Eliot thought:
Any other day, any other lifetime, I’d be at my
desk, thinking about lunch.

Lunch wouldn’t figure on today’s menu.

Judy was back on the floor, in a crouch. Head between her knees, arms around her legs. The only one among them to make a break for freedom. He ought to admire that, but instead felt disgust that she’d endangered their lives . . . Circumstances altered perspective. The one who’d put their lives in danger was the young man with the gun. But Eliot blamed Judy for attempting escape, and all the justification he needed for that was wrapped round his thighs.