Reconstruction (31 page)

squeak squeak squeak squeak

He said, ‘All of you. He’ll let all of you go. He only needs me.’

Jaime said, ‘No.’

Judy said, very quickly, ‘If you don’t let me go I’ll tell them what you’ve been saying you want that? You want them to know what you’ve been saying with this fucking racket filling their ears up? I’ll tell this Chapman what you’ve been saying about him.’

Louise just shook her head.

Ben said, ‘Judy. Judy? You want to be very careful what you say to anyone. Especially him.’

‘Then let me
go
!’

In Ben’s dreams, Jaime raised the gun, put a bullet through the ceiling.

here comes the chopper

to chop off your head

He felt like he needed a bath, or a scouring with a wire brush, but neither would get him really clean; besides, neither was available, so he made do with a cigarette. He’d turned left on exiting Deirdre Walker’s, then left again at the river: he was following this back towards Grandpont now. A helicopter buzzed overhead, and a swarm of midges at face level. In the river, a lost swan drifted regally. After a while the path wound round to a bridge, at the far end of which lay the nature park. If he approached this way he’d end up on the recreation ground, surrounded by trigger-happy policemen.

Sam Chapman had no gun. Ashton had been armed – for obvious reasons – but Bad Sam didn’t routinely carry, so far without fatal consequences. Ashton had once referred to Sam’s habit as ‘going commando’, which was not without wit, but where had his gun got Ashton? Bad Sam, meanwhile, had grass underfoot and no artillery weighing him down. The Deirdre Walkers of this world didn’t warrant a bullet. He could still have done with a shower, though.

The woman had been Catty. That was the lost frigging dwarf, as far as Bad Sam Chapman was concerned. As for Happy, Sam would have drowned him in the sink.

His collar rasped against his neck. The dead weight of his switched-off mobile slapped against his thigh.

Up ahead, but out of sight, something new was happening.

‘Door’s opening.’

Faulks knew this. He’d seen doors open before.

‘Someone’s –’

‘Yes. Move back.’

The crowd behind the cordon caught the event a second later, and reacted as crowds do: as if the same strange idea had struck each particle of it at once. This manifested, briefly, as a hush. And then new noises intruded, mostly variations on the same digital buzz, as God alone knew how many recording devices thrummed into life.

Faulks’ hand clasped more tightly round his handset, and as soon as he realized this, a worry sparked into life: what other hands were tightening now? Some of them clutching weaponry? While the door opened, and some-one stepped out . . .

Specifically, he was thinking of DS Bain.

Who might also have tensed at that moment, but you wouldn’t have known it from watching. There was no tremor in the barrel of the rifle; no twitch in the muscles of the mouth. From a Bain’s-eye view, too, the world remained steady: the crosshairs fixed in place, though the target had not yet been acquired.

Whoever came through that door belonged to Bain.

Nobody else on ground level mattered.

Peter Craven was among them. He was crouched between stacks of outdoor play equipment on the terrace bordering the nursery; had retreated here after leaving the annexe with no prisoner in tow; no hostage rescued. His focus since had been the door. His outstretched arms rested on a plastic-wrapped bale of hay, part of a set used as outdoor building blocks which lent the air of a sanitized Western to proceedings; the more so since he held a gun. And what he was finding, despite this gun, was that it remained possible to wander, mentally; to let concentration slip, and, instead of living the moment, imagine its triumphant conclusion – recounting it later to Tasha or the Supe; supplying their responses: thoughtful approbation from the Supe; enthusiastic adulation from Tasha, involving certain other elements it was best not to be distracted by right now – that was what Peter Craven was discovering: how very very hard it was to remain fixed in the moment. He could have learned a lot from Bain. He blinked, and the door started opening, and yes: his fingers tensed on his itchy weapon.

No door had ever opened as slowly as this.

Christine Pedlar broke apart from Dave Osborne without realizing there was anything to break apart from: only gentle touching, arm against arm. They had been standing close was all. And Dave was forgotten, might have shattered into atoms the moment the door moved . . . Christine was behind the cordon, cattled with the rest of the onlookers, some of whom were professional; the rest simply duped by reality TV into thinking observation involvement.
You’d better talk to the police
, Dave had said. And she’d agreed, but her objection still ran –
Why? Will
they do things differently then? –
and after smoking the cigarette and making her way back to the street, had snaked her way to the front of the crowd, which was as close as she could come to her children. And now the door was opening, and Dave Osborne had ceased to exist . . .

Let it be my boys let it be my boys
. There was no end to this sentence. It looped eternally, because eternity could be neatly encompassed within a finite amount of time. Eternity was what it took a door to open, when your boys might be on the other side: safe and well and leaping for her arms; or bound and bloodied and dead, leaping nowhere. Or neither. Or both – there were two of them, and one could be dead and the other living, and if so which would she choose, which would she choose? That thought struck her like a madman with a cricket bat –
answer, quickly, now
– there was no way she would ever for-get that thought. No way she would forget answering it. And then the door was open

and blinking into the light, like a mole emerging from spring cleaning, came Judy Ainsworth: exactly the same Judy who’d turned up for work four hours previously, but piss-stained and dumpier and confirmed in her world-view: that things existed to make her life worse, that every-thing would always be this way. She hadn’t intentionally opened the door slowly; the handle had weaselled in her grasp. Behind her, the Gun was taking aim – she wouldn’t even hear the bang – and still the door wouldn’t open, still those children were watching, but the Gun wasn’t going to open fire on those children; it wasn’t like she was reaching safety at their expense – she was the victim here, just like always. The handle worked at last, and she stepped out into what should have been an ordinary day.

. . . Later, she would be asked what she felt on her ordeal ending, and so attuned was she to this from
Big Brother
evictions that part of her mind was recording her thoughts and feelings as they happened, but they arrived so swiftly, so wrapped around each other, that an honest articulation was a jumbly list:
the gun the man the noise the songs the shot
the screams who screamed?

None of it my fault he let me go he kept the children he had
the gun

And underneath, beating like an unacknowledged drum, an image that refused to go away: of a one-inch plastic bear in leather jacket and sunglasses; that a child had given her; that she kept on a shelf in her room.

Back in his office, the first thing he did was open a window, or pretend to open a window: an old-fashioned sash arrangement lifted if you tugged hard enough, but fitted into the external brickwork was a sheet of reinforced glass strong enough to stop a bullet, apparently. This didn’t open. But you could stand by it anyway, and gaze at the rooftops and their electronic furniture – aerial masts and miniature pylons – and what looked like privies or garden sheds, but were presumably access wells. The hooded carapaces of CCTV cameras hung at innumerable junctions; some static; others twisting on pivots to a preordained pattern, or at the whim of a distant watcher. Perhaps one was pointed his way now. But the glass was treated. No one could see in. That was the theory, and, like the glass’s protective qualities, Jonathan Nott presumed its effectiveness in this area was tested regularly.

Must make a note of that.

He turned to his desk, pressed Tina’s number on a key-pad: ‘Anything from Chapman?’

‘He’s not answering his mobile, sir.’

‘Do we have a fix?’

‘It was in Oxford an hour ago.’

Tina was Queen of the Database. She knew Bad Sam’s phone wasn’t Bad Sam.

‘What about Ashton?’

‘He’s off the table.’

For a moment, he wondered if this was euphemism, then it clicked: operating table. ‘Anyone with him?’

‘I sent a car for his wife. She’ll be by his bed.’

Not what Nott had meant.

‘Duffy’s there too.’

One of the Dogs.

‘But he’s not expected to gain consciousness any time soon.’

‘Right. What’s happening at the nursery?’

‘Live on News 24, sir.’

‘If I want to know what the media choose to reveal, I’ll pay my TV licence. Has Whistler checked in?’

‘He’s been asking for background.’

‘On?’

‘Hostage contacts. The teacher, Kennedy, used to be in banking. A City job with an international outfit. Whistler wanted to know more.’

‘When was this?’

‘Second.’ It wasn’t much more than. ‘11.15.’

‘While he was inside.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And he didn’t give a sit rep? What are we teaching these kids?’

‘He presumably had a gun on him.’

‘Which is why we have code words. You spoke to him?’

‘An e-mail. He has a Black—’

‘I don’t care what they’re called, we’re sure it was him asking?’

‘The locator’s not that accurate. It was his device, in or near the nursery.’

‘So for all we know it was the gunman.’

Her pause answered that.

‘What are the rest of Chapman’s team doing?’

Chapman headed a team of six.

‘Moody’s in the building, sir. The others are off-shift.’

‘Well get them on-shift and get them to Oxford. Tell them I want their boss back here, sooner than now. And if Barrowby calls from over the water, tell him Chapman’s on his way.’

He killed the call.

Mobiles, as long as they’re on, send out a regular pulse to the nearest transmitter: if you have one in your pocket, we can find out where you are. Chapman would have switched his off as soon as it started saying things he didn’t like, such as
Return to base
. If it ever switched on again, they’d have the double fun of trying to second-guess Bad Sam: was the phone still on him, or on a jolly of its own? Nott had a vision of Bad Sam on a railway bridge, dropping his mobile on to a north-bound container.

It’s been three weeks since Miro Weiss disappeared with
enough money to start his own country, and Bad Sam’s no
nearer finding him. How hard is he looking?

Maybe the Barrowboy was right, and Chapman was up to his neck in missing money.

Nott returned to the window to glare down at the pavement opposite: the ‘private bookshop’; the tourists idling past; the girls like a mobile stripshow. Two men stood smoking by a drainpipe, evidently sharing an hilarious conversation, not one speck of which reached Nott’s ears. It was important to remember that such people were the public – his sole professional purpose being to keep them intact and unslaughtered – but face it: they were small souls mired in banality, and would literally shit if they had his problems. Literally.

His department had a number of functions, one of which, until recently, had been the funnelling of various astronomical sums of money – astronomical being a precise term: the figures resembling lunar distances – through different channels, each of which put a baffle between the money’s origin and its current whereabouts. These sums spent so much time offshore, they probably developed fins. Which was fine: disguise was good. Though in retrospect, not all that good, given how impeccably invisible a recent sum of money had become; an amount so huge, there was no way of making it real. An amount that weighed more than the average house.

The first thing you did when you lost this much money was shut all the doors and hope no one had noticed. The second thing, you did a headcount, and found Miro Weiss missing too.

Once the doors were all shut, the headcount done, Sam Chapman was the obvious one to loose: former field agent and current Top Dog, with years of experience at keeping the kennels in order. Put his track record against that of Miro Weiss – seven years a desk man – and the story wrote itself: twenty-four hours tops, and Sam would have Weiss’s head on a stick. But it hadn’t worked out like that. Weiss had disappeared so comprehensively, he might not have known where he was himself, and Bad Sam’s investigation had generated more heat than light.

I don’t care if Weiss is the last of the fucking Mohicans, if
Chapman was trying, he’d have him by now.

But that was another desk man talking, wasn’t it?

Nott sat down.

Bad Sam wasn’t following orders: anyone else, you might take that as an admission of guilt. But guilt didn’t figure on Bad Sam’s list of attributes, and he’d never been a dog you called to heel. Loose ends were his specialty – he chased them down and annihilated them. Maybe the Barrowboy was right and Sam hadn’t found his man because he hadn’t been looking, but that meant one of two things: he and Weiss had been in it together, or he had some other associate, and Weiss had been his fall guy. Either way Miro Weiss wouldn’t be turning up any time soon, and Bad Sam would either never be seen again or appear with tracks swept so clean there’d be no chance of working out what he’d been up to.

A desk man himself, Jonathan Nott swept his hand across its clean surface almost fondly. The money had been first to go – the desk would be next, along with the visions Nott had nursed of graceful retirement: a K and the occasional discreet consultation. Best he’d get would be a warm glass of white and a few lacklustre speeches; con-sider himself lucky, too. Back when the Crane brothers were Service hellhounds, a particularly uncompromising attitude towards failure had been the norm. Retirement notices had been known to arrive marked
Send No Flowers
.