Reconstruction (32 page)

Hard to tell how long he sat there, making no visible progress in his life or career. When the phone rang, the noise scraped against his consciousness like fingers on a blackboard.

‘Sir?’

‘What is it?’

‘Maybe you should turn the TV on after all.’

‘You should have let my boys go,’ Eliot said.

‘I do not like her. She is gone now.’

This with blank finality, as if to leave the annexe was to step out of any known realm.

Truth to tell, Eliot was starting to feel the same way. They’d been here so long, it was hard to believe the world outside remained familiar. And the Grand Old Duke of York, he remembered, had ten thousand men. He was so adrift, it was a moment before he understood that the thought was triggered by another damn nursery rhyme.

and when they were up they were up

and when they were down they were down

Though they were moving slowly, sluggishly; as if the hill was too steep for their battle-weary limbs; or the batteries powering their pointless manoeuvres dwindling out of life.

Louise said, ‘Tell us about the money.’

‘It wasn’t exactly real money.’

You can make money
, Crispin had said
. Out of nothing. All
you’d need is the right circumstances.

‘I’m familiar with the notion. I told you, I’ve worked in banking. And you work in accounting for the secret services, and so did this Miro guy. What got stolen, some kind of slush fund?’

Eliot said, ‘It was a war dividend, wasn’t it?’

He had a twin wrapped round each leg, and both looked up; Gordy murmuring along to the tortured nursery rhyme. He said, ‘We heard a lot about the peace dividend back when the Cold War ended, but cutbacks in military spending didn’t make the taxpayer better off, and if it did the NHS or schools any good, it was well hidden. It was ploughed back into government, wasn’t it? It’s what they’ve been fighting the war on terror with.’

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d strung so many words together. It felt like a speech.

Louise said, ‘He’s right, isn’t he?’

‘The money came from untraceable sources,’ Ben said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘He means it was stolen in the first place,’ Eliot said. ‘That’s the easiest kind to steal. The kind you can’t report missing.’

The children gripped him tighter. Though terrified, they’d grown used to what was happening; had accustomed themselves to a reality in which each clutched a leg and muttered rhymes while their father held them tight. And now he was talking to the other grown-ups as if this had become normal to him, too. And both had the same thought at the same moment: both wished their mother were here instead of their father. Their mother would never break her focus on their well-being.

Eliot went on: ‘You said this Miro was out in Iraq look-ing at all the ways money was going missing. But that wasn’t so you could stop it happening, was it? It was so you could join in the looting.’

Louise looked at him. For a moment, something passed between them, or Eliot thought it did. He hugged his boys tighter, having registered a shift in their postures, then looked to Ben Whistler for an answer.

Who was shaking his head. ‘This isn’t wise. You’re going to be asked what we talked about in here. Chapman – this guy, Bad Sam, he’s going to want to know what was said.’

‘It’s not like he can interrogate us.’

‘Don’t be too sure about that.’

‘You didn’t put that tape on to protect us,’ Louise said. ‘You didn’t ditch the phone for us. You did it so he wouldn’t hear what you say to Jaime and what Jaime says to you.’

Jaime said, ‘I ask for you because Miro trust you. This Bad Sam try to kill me.’

Jaime?

They all paused.

Thank you, Jaime. That was the right thing to do.

For a moment, it was as if the annexe had reverted to its stated purpose, and Jaime was an infant, praised for a sensible act.

Are you going to send the others out now, Jaime? How about
the children?

Ben said, ‘Exactly what I was about to say.’

‘And I do this, I release them, what happens then? What happens to me?’

‘I can get you out of here. But not while you’re keeping hostages. Those guys out there –’

Jaime? Can you hear me? Maybe you should think about
turning the music down.

‘– they’re not about to let you go anywhere.’

Jaime stared at them, one by one. The gun hung by his side as if its weight had grown too much: he looked tireder by the minute, Eliot thought. It was wearying being a hostage – despite the noise and constant fear, the worry of the children, the never knowing what would happen next, more than once Eliot had caught himself wandering on to the edge of sleep; that barely rational state where the real takes a sharp left turn. If he hadn’t been holding the children, he might have followed its lead. But it hadn’t occurred to him how exhausting it must be, holding the gun instead – no spare moment to close an eye. No lapse in concentration allowed. Being the focal point of so much hatred, it could probably power a car. And all this without a grip on the language, after a night on the run. It made Eliot want to say something, but Ben Whistler spoke first.

‘Besides, you only need me, Jaime. Because I came in of my own accord.’

Are you sending the children out now?

The cop had found extra volume on his gizmo, so he could be heard over the nursery rhyme racket.

Jaime?

‘Let’s let them go, Jaime.’

Putting himself on Jaime’s side, as if they were in this together. Probably something he’d been taught at spy school, though Whistler still didn’t look like Eliot’s idea of a spy: resembled, rather, the boys who’d been the bane of his life at school – the ones who were good at sports, and wore their ties and blazers as if uniform were their own idea.

‘Let’s let them go,’ Ben repeated.

For hours, this was what Eliot had been focused on; the only outcome he’d allowed himself to visualize. So why did he feel a sense of exclusion, as if he were being denied the chance to know how things turned out?

‘Wait,’ he said.

Ben said, ‘Excuse me?’

‘There’s something I need to hear.’

‘Are you –’

‘Shut up.’ Eliot felt good saying that; felt he had a grip on the situation, instead of the other way around. ‘What happened this morning, Jaime?’ he asked. ‘Tell me that. What happened this morning? They caught you, yes? But how did you get the gun?’

Jaime looked at Ben.

‘Jesus, don’t ask his permission, you’re the one with –’

‘Eliot.’ Louise spoke as softly as she could, and still be heard above the tape recorder. ‘Don’t lose it. Not now.’

He said. ‘I just want to know, that’s all.’

Ben Whistler was shaking his head, but said, ‘Why don’t you tell us, Jaime?’

‘Tell you what happen this morning?’

‘Yes. After you walked away from the road.’

Eliot said, ‘You found somewhere to lie down, but you didn’t sleep.’

‘You were cold,’ Louise said.

Jaime looked from one to the other, baffled by their recitation. ‘It gets light,’ he said after a while. ‘Perhaps I do sleep. Because it gets light very quickly.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Not far from road. There are cars, many cars, but all heading the other way. Away from Oxford.’

The early draft of rush hour, with traffic anxious to reach the outskirts of London before the system’s arteries hardened.

‘I see a building not far away, behind trees. By side of road.’

‘In a lay-by?’ Ben asked.

‘Lay-by?’

‘A place to stop your car.’

‘By the side of the road, yes. A brick building, I think it is a toilet. I need to go to toilet,’ Jaime said.

‘Okay.’

‘I not want to go in bushes. I have no paper.’

They all knew they’d never forget that detail.

‘So I go towards it. There are lorries parked in this lay-by, and maybe people, but nobody is watching. Perhaps they are sleeping.’

There was an electric squawk from outside; the mega-phone calling Jaime’s name again. But no one was listening.

‘I stay in toilet a long time. I feel safer there. I do not have money to buy bus ticket back to London. All I know in Oxford is what Miro say about the lady in the nursery. But I have nowhere else to go. I think perhaps I come here, borrow money for ticket. So that is what I decide to do. But when I leave the toilet, they are waiting for me. They are waiting in a car.’

He shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe this had happened.

Ben said, ‘They must have overtaken you at some point, without realizing it. If there was more than one Oxford bus on the road, it might have confused them. Anyway, I guess they ended up here in the city.’

‘Gloucester Green,’ Eliot said. ‘The bus station.’

‘They’d have questioned the drivers, found out who picked you up at Marble Arch, and asked them where you got off.’

‘They were probably driving up and down that stretch of road looking for you,’ Louise said.

‘If you’d hitched a lift back to London, you’d have been home free by now,’ said Eliot.

All of them filling in gaps for Jaime; pointing out where he’d gone wrong.

He said, ‘To hitch lift, you stand by road in plain sight.’

‘Good point,’ Ben said. ‘For all Jaime knew, they were right behind him. He’d have been making it easy.’

‘So they kept looking all night?’ Eliot asked. ‘For four, five hours, whatever it was?’

‘They’re professionals,’ said Ben. ‘Miro’s been missing for weeks, and they’ve found no trace of him. Suddenly a young man calls, saying he’s Miro’s . . . friend. They’re not about to lose him twice in one night.’

‘They got lucky.’

‘After a while, you just play the odds,’ Ben said. ‘If he was on the road back to London, they’d not find him. So they weren’t looking there. They were looking in places he might conceivably be.’

‘So what happened?’ Eliot asked.

They turned back to Jaime, who blinked.

‘I come out of toilet,’ he said. ‘And there they are.’

‘In the car,’ Ben said.

‘I am frightened,’ Jaime said. ‘I do not expect to see them. I do not know how they catch me.’

‘. . . Plain dumb luck,’ Eliot muttered.

‘Say?’

‘Say, daddy?’

‘Hush,’ he told them. ‘Not now. We’re going soon.’

‘The tall man, he gets out,’ Jaime said. ‘He come towards me.’

‘Did you speak?’

‘I ask him, Are you Ben Whistler? And he say, Ben can-not make it.’

‘I didn’t know about any of this,’ Ben said.

‘You say.’ Jaime glanced at the gun in his hand. ‘As he come towards me, his coat . . . flaps open. Flaps open?’

‘Yes,’ Louise said.

‘And I see his gun. This gun.’

He showed it to them, as if they’d not seen enough of it yet.

‘And I think, so . . . They have come to kill me.’

‘Why did you think that?’ Louise asked.

He looked at her.

‘If you’d done nothing wrong, why did you think they meant you harm?’

‘Because he has gun,’ Jaime said slowly.

‘But . . . ’

‘Because my friend is spy, and he has gone missing. Because someone search his house. Because these men fol-low me from London. And because he has gun.’

‘Okay.’

Jaime turned to Ben, as if he’d best understand what came next. ‘He say something else, but I do not remember what. I know he want to catch me, to pull me into car, and I do not want to get into car. I think . . . ’

‘You thought what?’

‘If I get in car, I will not get out again. That is what I am afraid of. That they drive me somewhere, and nobody see me again.’

‘Like Miro,’ Louise said.

‘I have rucksack on my shoulder, and I . . . ’ The word failed him. He mimed it instead; a shrug that allowed an imaginary bag to drop down his arm, into a waiting hand. He gripped its strap. ‘I swing it into his face.’

(Neil Ashton had stumbled but not quite fallen; he’d recovered before he hit the ground, propelling himself onward with one hand on the tarmac. Behind him the car door opened, and the second man emerged.)

‘And then I run, out on to road. The same way the traf-fic is moving. A car goes past me very fast.’

(Belted past, in fact, hitting its horn as it did so, and Jaime hurled himself on to the verge, as if the shock had stolen his grasp on gravity.)

‘When I look back, he is running after me. He is holding the gun, and I think he is about to shoot me. and then –’

(And then more cars were on them; the first a great grey swoosh that buffeted Neil Ashton off his feet – Jaime was watching: he saw this happen. Instead of falling inwards, Ashton fell into the road where the next car hit sucked him under its front wheel . . . There followed a squeal, a slam, and a point at which organic noise stopped, and mechanical screeching took over. The gun went flying high and wide into the air. It fell to earth at Jaime’s feet. He took it, and ran.)

‘I think the other man will chase me still. But I do not see him again.’

If they’d been asked what their day felt like, anyone there might have likened it to a car smash. But this glimpse of splintered bone and punctured organs somehow robbed them of a justified sense of drama.

‘Daddy?’

‘Daddy, what did he say?’

‘What happened, daddy?’

‘. . . Nothing, boys. Don’t worry. Nothing happened.’

Ben said, ‘Where did you run?’

‘Away from road. I crossed another field, wasted land. Then I find myself on streets again. I find a map for tourists pinned on a wall. It has Grandpont on it. That is when I remember Miro saying this.’

Big bridge.

It was the slickest kind of vanishing act; the kind where you don’t even know you’re disappearing. Nobody ever traced his route. Jaime couldn’t have traced it himself.

Ben looked at Eliot. ‘There. That what you wanted to hear?’

A flash of anger lit Eliot. ‘I don’t know what makes you so –’

‘Eliot.’

Which was Louise’s way of saying
hush
.

Ben said, ‘Time to let them go, Jaime.’

The way he said it, you’d have thought he was the one holding the gun.