Reconstruction (8 page)

‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘Do you know, that’s the answer I was expecting?’

Chapman shrugged.

‘The gun was lost,’ Fredericks said.

Chapman nodded.

‘And now could be anywhere.’

‘It’s pretty clear who has it.’

‘And is he dangerous?’

Well, he has a fucking gun, Chapman thought. Join the frigging dots. But what he said was what he’d practised saying, sitting in that plastic chair: ‘I suspect his intention will be to disappear. Head underground.’

Fredericks said, ‘Let’s cut to the chase. We’re talking about terrorism, is that right?’

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘Your fuck-up has put an armed terrorist on the streets of my city. No, let’s get this straight. Your fuck-up has armed a terrorist and put him on the streets of my city.’

‘I imagine he’ll leave your city as soon as possible.’

‘Well, what a relief. But forgive me if I don’t base the official response to this on what you might imagine.’ He did something with his hands: rearranged some biros, or perhaps shifted a small piece of desk furniture from one side of his blotter to the other. Physical punctuation; the prelude to a new mode of discourse. He was about to deliver instruction. ‘I’ll need a description. I expect it to be a good one.’

Chapman showed his palms, fingers wide. ‘I didn’t get much of a look, I’m afraid.’

Fredericks stared long enough that a lesser man would have confessed.

A police car left the station a couple of storeys below, siren wailing. Traffic stopped to let it out; it zipped round a corner; everything returned to normal.

Fredericks said, ‘I thought you people kept files on your targets.’

‘Witnesses.’

‘You’re coming very close to crossing a line you don’t want to cross.’

Chapman said, ‘It was Ashton’s call. I was along to observe.’

‘He was new to the job?’

‘I’m not sure he’s in the past tense yet. But either way, no, he’s not.’

‘So what are you, his line manager?’

Chapman said, ‘We’re all slaves to procedure, aren’t we?’

Fredericks picked up a pencil – he actually had a pencil on his desk. Chapman wondered what he used it for. He rolled it briefly between finger and thumb as if it were a cigar, then put it back. He might have liked to snap it, but had too much control. That was how you climbed the ladder in the Force these days. A big reason Sam Chapman was glad he’d never worn the uniform.

‘We’ve got a lorry driver,’ Fredericks said at last, ‘who saw the whole thing.’

Chapman didn’t answer. It wasn’t, after all, a question.

‘When we find this man of yours,’ Fredericks went on, ‘I’m going to have a long talk with him. Personally.’

Chapman said, ‘Now, there we have a line that
you
don’t want to cross.’

Fredericks looked at him, long and hard, and it seemed, for those moments, that this spook looked right back through him – that Fredericks was nothing more than an interruption of the view of an office wall. Chapman’s eyes had a vacancy Fredericks hadn’t often seen. The time that came to mind was a years-old event: an arrest he’d made, his first summer on the Job. The eyes belonged to a sanitation engineer; a binman as was. And the blood on his shirt had belonged to his family, whom he’d just murdered for, as he explained to PC Malcolm Fredericks, ‘a very good reason’.

When more than enough time had passed, Chapman said, ‘When he turns up, I’ll be informed immediately. Don’t question him. Don’t release him into anyone else’s custody.’

‘Who the hell do you think you are?’

Chapman nodded towards the window. ‘Remember those streets? Walking the beat?’ He stood. ‘I’m the man who’ll have you back doing that if you even think about interfering with my job.’ He produced a card and tossed it on to Fredericks’ desk. It showed a mobile number; nothing else. ‘Immediately. Got that?’ Then he left.

Out on those streets he’d mentioned, Sam Chapman took a deep breath: petrol fumes, mostly. They didn’t mention that in the tourist guides. Crossing at the lights, he headed up to the city centre. Cup of coffee: first place he came to. He hadn’t been offered any at the copshop; the whole encounter had not been wisely handled. But he’d never been good with uniforms. And besides, the thing about making enemies was, they worked harder to fuck you up. Jaime Segura wouldn’t be on the streets long. Fredericks would have him collared, just to show who ran this place.

And then Fredericks would hand him over, because one thing a ranking officer wouldn’t risk was his status.

The grey morning was breaking up; shafts of sunlight slicing through cloud mass to pick out local landmarks – a tower here, a spire there; a DIY superstore over to the west. Might turn out a good one, but you couldn’t base judgements on passing interludes. The day so far had been full of deceptive appearances. The op, for instance, had been a collect-and-comfort, or that’s how it would appear on the books.

But Jaime Segura had never been meant to survive it.

So far, she’d been operating on remote. That part of Louise Kennedy that had made her run towards the Gun instead of away wasn’t a part she was in daily contact with, though she could recognize it as a survival instinct, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding – if she’d reached that gate first, she wouldn’t be in this room now. The chances of leaving which didn’t look pretty. Guns and schools didn’t mix.

And there were other parts of her, too; parts which hadn’t done anything brave lately, not even to save herself – one was curled into a ball in the darkest room her consciousness could find, waiting until this was over. Another part was blaming her mother – there was a good solid reason for this; an unbreakable link in a chain of logic she couldn’t lay a hand on right now – and another still was blaming Eliot, whose undeniable guilt was scribbled all over the fact of his presence. She hadn’t blamed the boys, though their turn might yet come. And curiously, she was-n’t blaming the gunman, either – the gunman was a given right now; above criticism, because he was what every-thing else was about.

All of which might have her screaming any moment but she had to take a grip because nobody else was going to, that was clear –

Five of them, then. Thrust into this room built for twenty: one had a gun, another had two boys, and only she had a voice it seemed, because nobody else was say-ing anything, though the boys were whimpering in a peculiarly syncopated way. She had to speak because whatever made the silence collapse, she didn’t want it to be the Gun.

Emotion triggers emotion.
Keep calm.
There was a formula for this; you took control –

‘Who are you? What do you want?’

he had a gun he had a gun he had a gun

‘You’re the lady?’

he had a gun

‘I’m – who are you, what do you want, this is a
nursery
school
–’ And bit her tongue: don’t tell him
that
. As if, by not mentioning its purpose, she could disguise the school’s reality, and thereby neutralize his intent. You didn’t carry a gun into a nursery for fun. If they could all pretend it was a barracks, a Territorial Army hangout, somewhere this might pass for a practical joke . . .

He said, ‘The lady is the teacher, yes?’

Louise said, ‘I don’t know which lady you mean.’

Eliot caught her eye but said nothing.

The gunman looked around. He stood between them and the door, and seemed to become aware of this as he took in the surroundings: with his weapon, he waved them further inside, reducing – Louise supposed – the chances they might rush him . . . yeah, right. Maybe Eliot could pick up a twin and throw it. Draw his fire. Eliot, who was hobbled by his boys; they clung to his legs like a pair of clown’s trousers as he shuffled backwards past the hamster cage, whose occupant chose that moment to push her snout through the bars – please don’t shoot Trixie. The chances of a second successful substitution were not good. Perhaps Trixie caught Louise’s thought wave, or perhaps gun-recognition was filtering down the food-chain; either way, she retreated into her straw-castle without even a token spin on her wheel as they all edged past to the soft-play area, a more optimistic setting for an armed siege. If that’s what this was.

Against a rising red panic, Louise tried to mentally clamp down: she was on home territory; these were familiar surroundings. There must be a way of establishing control, because that’s what she did here every day – the Darlings weren’t armed, of course, or not so far, but a battle or two of nerves had occurred, and she hadn’t lost hers yet. There was an overlap between what was happening now and what ought to be, and she knew – because this was the golden rule: in teaching, in business, in sport, in love – that whoever took charge in the first few moments stood the best chance of coming first. Every other cell in her body was screaming at her to give up, lie down, take shelter, but the moment she did that it was over. She had to do what she could before events took control, and the natural momentum of catastrophe splashed the four of them across the furnishings.

She looked at him. He had the gun, but he wasn’t only a Gun; before he’d picked that weapon up he’d been a boy, and she doubted she’d have noticed him – there was beauty here, true, but it was the beauty of youth, and it had been a while since that was of anything but theoretical interest to Louise. He wasn’t looking back – was taking in the surroundings: the exits; the windows – but the intensity of her gaze must have registered, because his eyes were suddenly on her, and they weren’t just deep and brown, they were bottomless. It was like staring down a well. Her first reaction was to pull back in case she dropped, but that would be to let the situation slide . . . She spoke instead. ‘My name’s Louise.’

He didn’t reply.

‘Louise Kennedy. I’m the nursery assistant. Second in command.’
Second in command
? Words were like that – they escaped without warning; attached themselves vaguely to the meaning you’d intended, then burst into the open air. This could be a nightmare at dinner parties. Here and now, though, it wasn’t likely there’d be arguments about nomenclature. He still didn’t reply.

‘And this is Eliot Pedlar. He’s one of our parents. And these are his boys, Timothy and Gordon. Timmy and Gordy. They’re twins.’

Twins and terrified, but quiet now – one each side of Eliot; Timmy clutching his right knee, Gordy his left. Eliot had an arm round each; was trying to divide his attention three ways – two parts for his boys; the third for the gun.

‘They’re nearly four years old.’

Become a person. Wasn’t that the mantra? She’d read an article; an interview with a woman who’d disarmed a multiple-killer after he’d taken her hostage. She
became a
person
, a risk-control expert had concluded – odd phrase; as if the process involved effort. But the point was, she made it difficult for him to treat her as an object . . . She’d managed this with God on her side, Louise recalled – well, Louise was going to have to cope without God. Any God that fell for a conversion under these circumstances wasn’t as omniscient as She ought to be.

‘Maybe you should tell us what you want. Maybe if we talked about this, we’d find . . . ’ Find what? Find a useful noun: answers, resolution, peace. ‘Maybe we’d find a way out of this. Nobody has to get hurt.’ And again came that clunking feeling, as if she were putting put ideas in his head.

Absurd. He’d crashed into her nursery, gun in hand. The idea of causing harm was not new to him.

‘Are you going to tell us your name?’

That way you’ll be a person too.

‘Or tell us what you want?’

Or show us what’s under your jacket? A Semtex bandolier; a
jury-rigged belt of plastic explosives?

There was sudden clarity in the image that reached Louise then; of how this was going to look later, all over the world. Views of the school she’d elected as a refuge from personal strife would be beamed into homes in Paris, Sydney, San Jacinto; less a sanctuary than an object of pity and terror, with a scrolling newstext updating channel-hoppers as to what they’d missed so far. In Wimbledon Crispin would watch, and just for a moment his eyebrows would knit –
Oxford? Wasn’t that where that girl ended up –
what was her name again? ‘Oh, nothing, darling. Just wool-gathering.’
His eyebrows proved that.

‘Please . . . ?’

‘You’re the lady?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘I don’t know which lady you mean. Who are you looking for?’

He released a snort of air through his nostrils, making a bullish, frustrated noise that recalled one of her Darlings: a sweet troublemaker; happy as Christmas, right up to the moment things stopped going his way. Then there’d be tears, and broken bits to sweep up; cross words and necessary admonishments. If any of that happened now, the broken bits might be a bit more difficult to tidy away.

‘Please?’ she said.

In the back of her mind, the clock was ticking . . . Dave would arrive. The gate would be opened. Parents and children would flock in, some of them coming through the door behind the Gun: he would turn in alarm, his hand would clench, the trigger would squeeze . . .

And then came a sudden calm, as if the world wound down for a second – she’d heard of such moments; moments of crisis in which time slowed so you could appreciate its subtler workings. She was looking into his eyes, and there might have been understanding there; a nanosecond in which the bigger picture asserted itself, teaching him that whatever twisted motive had propelled him here was wrong; that he shouldn’t do what he planned on doing . . . Whatever that was. Anything might happen.

He opened his mouth to speak.

Please
, she thought, in a sudden access of desperate clarity –
please don’t ask if I’m the fucking lady again
. . .

Something collapsed.

He fired the gun.

The trouble with Louise Kennedy was –

(The trouble with Judy Ainsworth was, too many of her thoughts began
The trouble with somebody else
–)

The trouble with Louise Kennedy was, she was too big for her boots. Hardly been here a year, and acting like she was in charge the moment Claire wasn’t about.