Reconstruction Read online

  As Judy herself might have put it: Some drive. Others walk.

  To wind the clock back a little: at 7.30 in the morning, this time of year, there’s often mist hanging over the river as it cuts through Grandpont, South Oxford, though it’s already in tatters by now; pulled to whispery ribbons by the encroaching day. I’ve lived here, time of writing, for fourteen years, but it’s only the past four that I’ve been crossing the river at Friars Wharf at 7.30, heading for the London train; way long enough for routines to become established – routines do that without invitation, often only noticed when you break them. For eighteen months, I passed the same man every morning; after the first thirteen, we were nodding at each other. But the train timetable changed, and the four minutes’ adjustment meant I never saw him again.

  Other routines are the opposite of what the word usu-ally means; they’re once-in-a-while happenings, the equivalent of the comets that underline the universe’s otherwise ordered existence. There’s a woman I see occasionally – there’s no rhyme or reason to her appearances, or none I’m privy to – and sometimes she’ll cycle past me, and some-times our paths cross because she’s heading the other way, and whichever direction she’s taking our eyes never meet, we never exchange smiles, we are strangers. But we share the same community, so if too much time passes without my seeing her, I wonder about her, and hope she’s okay. Because that’s how it works, even on the uptight suburban fringes – a neighbourhood is a web, with any thread plucked here reverberating there. So an actual local drama, with police aplenty, and junctions cordoned off with emergency bunting; with helicopters thrashing overhead, and armed-response officers yomping across the adventure playground, actual guns in states of readiness; with news crews baying behind hastily erected barriers – all of this, it had an effect on everyone in those streets. The effect varied depending on the character at issue – from stunned horror to secret glee – but no one was immune. Acts of violence, like acts of love, damage not only the participants but those around them.

  This opening is a bit busy: bound to be, really – a number of characters to be introduced; a lot of events happening simultaneously. Arguably, not simultaneously enough – DS Bain won’t be disturbed by a phone for another ninety minutes – but waking is the starting point of everyone’s day; we’re on different timelines, but we all experience the same grey nowhere in that space between sleep and consciousness. So, allowing for the odd bit of slippage, all of the following is happening at roughly the same moment: Louise approaches the nursery gates – still thinking about the significance of today’s date – as Eliot drives his boys past the squat unhappy figure of Judith Ainsworth, and George Trebor – who, like me, won’t be appearing in this story again – watches Bad Sam Chapman, whom he only knows as Man Two, search one hundred yards of roadside verge for the Heckler & Koch that went flying after the car hit Neil Ashton. He’s assisted in this by police officers, but it’s clearly a waste of time. They’re not going to find it. And the time they’re wasting is being swallowed up elsewhere, because it’s at least an hour since the accident, and Jaime Segura could be any-where, and the odds are good the missing gun is with him . . . Sam Chapman has long since admitted this to himself, but is uncharacteristically reluctant to act on it, as if a response would somehow confirm the event. He’s currently thinking a lot of things, but the most accurate summation would be fuck fuck fuck fucking fuck.

  And as for Segura himself . . . Later they’ll go over the map with pairs of compasses; there’ll be fakes in jeans and brown faux-leather jackets, whose rucksacks’ contents match exactly what was found in Jaime Segura’s, making their way from lay-by to nursery by whatever route seems fastest. Some will take the backstreets; others will plug on down the main road for far longer than consistent with nobody having seen Segura doing that; some’ll even hop on buses, though no bus driver will lay claim to picking him up – the fact is, nobody knows how Jaime Segura did what he did, which was disappear on one side of the city and reappear on the other an hour later. Not in itself an especially mystifying achievement, granted, but few who’ve managed it have had ‘them’ on their case. Because ‘they’ are the shadowy experts with access to hi-tech gimcrackery; able to blow up grainy stills from CCTVs and produce positive ID from pixellated fuzz, or watch screens aglow with thermal imagery, and trace a target as it edges past a blast furnace. Reconstruction is their business, but Jaime Segura slipped their digital leash.

  Eliot’s further down the road now; Judy, wrapped in her daily mist of complaint, is closer to work too. DS Bain twitches a little in sleep – ‘Target acquired.’ Steady – and freezes in readiness, while miles away Ben Whistler is hurtling down the Central Line, trying not to study too obviously the legs of the woman opposite, but allowing the richness of the image they suggest to colour the mental picture he’s forming of his possible future.

  Bad Sam Chapman gives up all hope of finding the missing gun, and says something to the seven-years’ cop-per next to him of such mordant foulness that the copper blanches.

  And Louise reaches the nursery gates at about the same moment I board a train – only six minutes late that morning – and leave these events behind; to be uncovered, embroidered, and faithlessly reconstructed over the year that follows.

  The gates were five foot high or so; good chunky black iron things with sensible weight to them, though they opened smoothly enough once the lock was dealt with – this being a keypad arrangement, because the days when you could clap a padlock to something and assume people understood it was meant to keep them out were long gone. Louise had been taught the keycode by Claire: Claire treat-ing the ritual as on a par with handing over St Peter’s keys. Crispin had been barely less uptight about the net-work passwords in Louise’s previous job, which was so patently Louise’s previous life that that was how she generally termed it. Crispin had been her lover. Vice-Control, European Investments, De John Franklin Moers. V-C/ Eur Invs, DFM. Much about her previous life had been abbreviated, including, in the long run, that life itself.

  7.52. Louise wasn’t always first to arrive – Claire, who was the nursery head (abbreviated to Miss), was often there before her – but procedure demanded the gate remained secured until 8.45, when the children were allowed in. The preceding time was for clean-up and organization, the former technically being Judith Ainsworth’s remit, though Louise’s take on Judy’s clean-ing abilities was that if she got much worse, she could be classified disabled. She’d said as much to Claire, but Claire had shaken her head disapprovingly. Louise knew Judy’s husband had walked out a year or so ago, and okay, that was sad, but hardly unprecedented and not remotely surprising. And Louise didn’t see why it meant she had to put up with substandard cleaning.

  This morning, as it happened, Claire would be late, because she had a dental appointment. Louise, once she’d let herself into the nursery grounds, would be their only occupant.

  The building facing her sat low on the ground. Essentially diamond-shaped, it had wings jutting out on two sides – on paper, it looked like a first draft of a cartoon character – and was built of light-coloured brick, with red roof and window frames, and a plaque over the door spelling out South Oxford Nursery School, though you’d have had to be pretty wayward not to have picked up on the clues already. The surfacing around the main building was of the soft, spongy variety used in playgrounds, and arranged in swirly red-green patterns which from over-head might have looked like a miscoloured sunflower device. Round the rear a wide porch arrangement sheltered a wooden picnic table and some haphazardly stacked chairs, and along the northside wall was a row of plastic storage bins, holding the overflow from nursery cupboards: outdoor toys, mostly – bats and balls; buckets and spades; skittles and skipping ropes. Where the spongy surfacing ended, a sloped and hillocky grassed area took over, punctuated by a number of small flowerbeds holding the sturdier type of bush – the kind intended to with-stand bats and balls and skittles, and games of hide and seek, and other less organized activities.
Bisecting this was another set of railings, the gate in which was secured with a Yale, and behind this was a second building; more of a hut, really, and this was Louise’s domain. The annexe, it was usually called; translated by the Darlings’ infant tongues into The Palace, which suited Louise fine.

  A hand dropped on her shoulder, and she yelped in fright.

  Turning, she saw the last person she wanted to see.

  Dreams come in different sizes, most of them smaller than others. This one is very small indeed. It is of a man framed in a window; he’s walking up and down, angry about something – he appears to be shouting – and though no others are visible, it’s apparent he’s not alone in the room. He’s carrying something in one hand, but whatever it is can’t be seen from this angle, at least two storeys higher, and the width of a street distant. The man’s face is red, his eyes bulge; he wears a sleeveless T-shirt which could do with a rinse, and the veins in his arms pulse crossly. But he keeps slipping out of frame, into that part of the room where anything could be happening. The rest of the house is in darkness; only this one window lit . . . So this is the size of the dream: it’s one small piece of activity beamed on to a flat expanse of plain brick, as if the whole house is simply a wall with a single window, through which, half the time, the angry man isn’t even visible. Half the time, the window’s merely a hole from which light pours.

  A trickle of sweat drops from an eyebrow, and for a moment the window puddles into blurry nothingness. And then the eye blinks, and focus returns, and the win-dow is there again, and the man appears behind it for the sixteenth time since counting began, pausing dead centre of the crosshairs.

  Somebody’s voice – impossible to say whose – says for the sixteenth time, ‘Target acquired.’

  Steady, a voice in the ear repeats.

  (Sometimes, it seems as if the dream will repeat this loop forever – ‘Target acquired.’ Steady.)

  The man dips out of shot again, but the crosshairs remain; a circular adornment to the shape of the window frame, as if a passing architect had sketched out an embellishment.

  And at last things interrupt.

  The room, already lit, is lit further; something flashes, and there’s an almost simultaneous noise – a crack; some-thing breaking, something broken. And the voice in the ear crackles into furious life: shots fired shots fired, and as well as being an announcement that something has happened, it’s a signal that other things should occur too now; that the waiting part of the dream is over, and the doing part must begin.

  The man in the dirty vest appears once more, and the thing in his hand acquires definition as he turns to the window, looks directly through it – enraged – and brings the object level with his chest, pointing it outwards, out of the dream, into the night.

  ‘Target acquired.’

  . . . Take him? Break him? Wake him? The reply isn’t entirely clear.

  But the finger squeezes anyway, in accordance with years of training: this finger has been taught in gyms and galleries and out in the open air, where targets have swung in complicated, restless patterns, which have never been enough to save them in the end.

  The window shatters. And the man’s head . . . What happens to the man’s head remains obscure, because at that precise moment something shrill and insistent rips the picture apart as if it were an unsatisfactory sketch, leaving only tatters and fragments. The wall, the shattered window: everything disappears, to be replaced by a view of duvet, through which 9 a.m.-type light is soaking.

  As with almost every other occasion on which this has happened, it is a dream; one from which Detective Sergeant B. J. Bain emerges as if from a dripping, smoking, shit-bespattered, bat-infested tunnel.

  But the phone is still ringing.

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Sorry –’

  ‘You scared me!’

  ‘I’m sorry –’

  She’d turned and stepped back, when he’d touched her shoulder, the image flashing through her mind one of violence; not violence directed specifically against herself, but against who and where she was. No one who worked in a nursery could fail to have these moments: unguarded slices of nightmare, in which playgrounds were targets for lone men with grudges and indecipherable pathology. But it was a different nightmare taking shape here; one best called consequences. Where Memory and Incident collided, scattering shards that needed collecting before anyone turned up to gawp.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

  And he was: you could say that for Eliot. When he was sorry, it was spelt out in capitals, all over his face.

  ‘. . . It’s not eight yet,’ she said.

  (This was something she’d noticed of herself and others: a tendency to remark on the time when trying to grasp a situation.)

  ‘I wanted to see you.’

  ‘But here?’

  ‘I’ve got the boys. They’re in the car.’

  Oh, fucking great, she thought.

  ‘Louise –’

  ‘It’s the middle of the street,’ she said. ‘Broad daylight.’

  ‘There’s no one around.’

  ‘It’s my place of work. I work here, Eliot. You can’t just turn up like this. We don’t open for another hour –’ ‘That’s why I thought we could talk –’ ‘What about the boys?’

  ‘They’re in the car. They can’t hear –’ ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

  Her back to the gate, she surveyed the scene behind him; the junction where the riverbound road bisected the street the nursery was on. A car rolled in then out of view, and any moment now one of a hundred pedestrians – dog-walkers, newspaper boys, joggers, winos – would spring out of nowhere and recognize the nursery lady having a tête-à-tête with a dad. Information that could circuit a neighbourhood twice in less time than it took to jump to a conclusion. ‘You can’t leave them in the car, Eliot. They’re boys, not dogs.’

  ‘I thought it would be more private –’ ‘Eliot. Eliot? This is not private. This is where I work. Now take the boys somewhere else. We open at quarter to nine, you should know that.’

  ‘We have to talk about this, Louise,’ he said.

  Why? Because you just said so? But she couldn’t deliver that reply; it was neither fair nor honest. Because they did have to talk about it; otherwise it would hover over both of them, with the deadly potential of the not-yet-mentioned. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Yes. But not here. And not now.’

  ‘So –’

  ‘Call me,’ she said. Then remembered that that was off-limits; that her home phone was potentially in enemy hands. ‘Not at home – look, come back when we’re open. I’ll give you my mobile number.’

  Fifty yards behind Eliot’s back, a dumpy anoraked figure turned the corner and headed towards them. Louise’s heart sank.

  ‘Now go,’ she hissed, or tried to. It came out a hoarse whisper; one she had to retract immediately: ‘No, wait. Ask me something.’

  ‘. . . Ask you what?’

  ‘Anything. How the twins are doing, or when half-term is, or –’

  ‘Oh. There’s someone coming. How are the boys doing?’ ‘Just fine,’ she said, her voice hitting a slightly higher pitch. ‘They mix well with the other children, which isn’t always the way with twins – there can be a tendency to become a republic of two, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, sometimes it’s like they speak their own language.’

  ‘Well, so long as they’re socializing, you don’t have to worry about that – oh, good morning, Judy.’

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘Anyway, as I was saying, we don’t actually open doors until 8.45, so –’ ‘Not to worry. I’ll take them on to the recreation ground for a spin.’

  Spin – he wondered why he’d said that as soon as it left his mouth.

  8.45 or not, Judy was opening doors now, four swift jabs on the keypad – a diagonal downward slash, left to right, then another figure, obscured by her hand.

  Louise saw Eliot notice, deliberately or not, and frowned.

/>   Judy pushed the gate open, and marched in, towards the main building.

  Eliot said, voice low: ‘Does she clean up after the kids, or cook them and eat them?’

  ‘Keep a close eye on the boys, if you’re going on the rec ground. It’s early, yet.’ She followed Judy through the gate, making sure the lock had secured behind her, but didn’t look back until she’d reached the nursery door, and Eliot had left by then.

  Some mistakes you keep on making. A year ago, she thought, I’d have been at my desk half an hour by now: telephone soldered to my head; mind locked into the inter-national money market (except that part wondering when Crispin would stick his head round the door: Ms Kennedy? Do you have a minute?). On my third America no. The aromas of spoilt milk and plasticine definitely absent; the artwork tending towards Rothko and Kandinsky rather than the homage to Brit Art four-year-olds produce. But pulsing underneath these new surroundings was the same old heartbeat; the one that reminded her – lub-dub – that she’d done it again: slept with someone she shouldn’t have. But let’s not deal with that right now. Let’s postpone introspection until there’s a glass of wine in hand, and some work behind us.

  ‘Judy?’

  They were in the nursery vestibule. Judy had her back to Louise, and was hanging her anorak in the store cup-board where the props of her trade were quartered: squeezy bottles and pump-action canisters; mops and dusters; dustpans and brushes; bleach and disinfectants. If she got half an hour’s use out of this lot in the average week, thought Louise, she was keeping things clean Louise hadn’t encountered yet. And she wasn’t listening, either. Or deliberately ignoring her. ‘Judy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you’re opening the gate, try not to let anybody see the number, please. It’s not good security.’

  ‘Don’t you trust him?’

  ‘That’s not the point. The system’s meant to preserve security. Nobody’s supposed to know the number.’