Reconstruction Read online

  No. That wasn’t fair.

  ‘Now. Please.’

  She stood, unsteady as a baby giraffe. Then reached down to help Timmy, unless it was Gordon. But whichever twin it was pulled away, and buried deeper into what it could find of its father.

  The gunman looked at the boys, at Eliot, at Louise.

  ‘Eliot,’ she said.

  His face was assuming that spaced-out, lost-in-Toyland expression the Darlings slipped into when they reached their limits.

  ‘Eliot!’

  He snapped out of it.

  ‘You’ve got to get the boys moving.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  He stood, scooped his boys up; set one of them – Timmy – upright, and grasped his hand. Gordon, he clutched under one arm, like an awkward parcel. Gordon’s legs stuck straight out behind Eliot, but only because his knee joints worked; his arms dangled down like broken branches. Eliot didn’t seem to notice. The parcel might have been one he was collecting for somebody else.

  Timmy said, ‘Timmy wants to go home.’

  ‘Hush now. Soon.’

  The gunman said, ‘We go inside.’ He wasn’t pointing the gun at anyone in particular, but the fact that he was hold-ing it spoke for itself.

  Behind him, the light on the gate had gone out. When it was locked, Louise knew, the red light shone unblinking; right now, anyone who knew the code could get through it . . . Dave would be here soon. It would be a really good idea if she could lock the gate.

  ‘Inside.’

  She began to move, leading the way. Her legs belonged to some other woman, who’d had something of a night; her limbs felt misappropriated. Where she was heading was where she’d come from: the gate in the second set of railings separating the annexe from the nursery proper.

  ‘Wait. Where you go?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Stop!’

  She stopped.

  Behind her Eliot was breathing heavily. Below that, the twins’ lungs were working overdrive, and Louise flashed on the memory of holding a frightened hamster; its heart-beat pounding in overdrive, too urgently for such a tiny beast. She remembered knowing that if she just stood holding it – presenting no threat other than her enormous size and power – the animal would have no alternative but to die of fear. So after a while, she’d put it down.

  ‘Where do you go?’

  She turned. ‘You wanted to go inside.’

  ‘There.’ He pointed at the main nursery building, but – and this might have been her imagination – a question mark quavered after the word. What she had to do was force it into the open.

  ‘It’s locked. I don’t have the key.’

  His eyebrows tightened.

  ‘Key.’ She mimed an action: finger and thumb, a twist-ing wrist.

  ‘I know key.’

  ‘Well, I don’t have it. Only the teacher has the key.’

  ‘You are not teacher?’

  ‘She’s not here yet.’

  ‘She is the lady?’

  Eliot said, ‘Are you looking for Claire? Claire Christopher?’

  Said it with a mixture of incredulity and something like relief: there was a reason this was happening, and it was nothing to do with him or his children.

  Louise spat fire at him, using only her eyes. ‘She’s not here yet,’ she repeated.

  ‘We need to go inside,’ the Gun said.

  Going inside meant putting walls round the situation. It was containment, but it meant containing herself, and the twins, and Eliot, with it.

  There was little choice involved. But what little there was, she’d grab while she could.

  ‘Then we have to go in there,’ she said, pointing to-wards the annexe. And started moving again, to show she meant it.

  She sensed rather than saw what happened behind her: the men and the boys frozen for a moment; the larger pair by uncertainty; the smaller by being locked in orbit round the uncertain. And there was an invisible thread connecting Louise to the four of them, and the further she got, the tauter it stretched . . . If it broke now, some-thing awful would happen; and with that thought she slowed, stopped, just a few feet short of the gate that hung open in front of her, just this side of the thread’s breaking point. Behind her the boy said something: words she didn’t catch. And then came footsteps, and they were following her – she reached the gate, went through it, and a moment later all five were the other side of those railings, and the boy was shutting the gate behind them. But it remained unlocked, the keys on the other side – somewhere in the grass, where Louise had flung them on her way through.

  ‘We go inside.’

  (That was how it was when you had a gun. Whatever happened was your idea. Though Louise was just as happy to let him take the credit.)

  Timmy said, ‘This’s the palace.’

  ‘Hush, Timmy.’

  ‘Wha’ did Timmy say?’

  ‘Gordon –’

  ‘Wha’ did Timmy say, daddy?’

  ‘Hush.’

  Louise pushed open the door of the annexe – the palace – and went in, followed by Eliot/Timmy/Gordon all in one mass; then the Gun, following so close he was part of the community.

  The room was long and narrow; lengthwise, it ran adjacent to the footpath heading to the railway line. The wall on that side had no windows, and so had become an art gallery by default – primary-coloured splodges and potato-shapes triumphantly labelled Mummy and Daddy; some Miss Kennedys too, as well as a Queen. The absence of windows was to prevent lookers-in. The days when watching infants’ innocent pursuits was an innocent pursuit were long gone.

  Against the narrow wall at the adventure park end of the annexe was a stainless steel sink and draining board, above which, out of reach of hurtable hands, hung a water boiler, from which a hot water tap descended on a swivel. There was a door either side of this fixture: one leading to a toilet; the other to an office which doubled as a sickroom, and was the space in which emergencies were dealt with. Windows punctuated the other long wall – to Louise’s left as she entered – and these served as natural dividers; the space between the second and third being the soft play area where mats were piled, and a circular plastic-mesh playpen sequestered a menagerie of squashy gonks and ungendered mannequins. At the far end, a waist-high arrangement of hooks was known as Cloakroom Corner. Between the first and second window, on a wobbly plastic table, sat a hamster cage. The floor below it was scattered now with its usual morning libations: lengths of straw and flakes of cereal; balls of hamstershit. This confection always struck Louise as a curiously tidy mess, being arranged as an outward-flowing spray with a razor-sharp edge, dictated by the tabletop two feet above. As for the hamster itself, by popular poll it was called Trixie, though had only been two votes short of being Wayne Rooney. Allotting a name by ballot was a useful way of introducing the concept of democracy to the under-fours, and the hamster was itself a means of broaching the possibility of death, in a gentle, not terribly important way. Though not so unimportant Louise had confessed it when, arriving on Trixie’s third day, she’d found the beast had turned its toes up: one frantic dash to the pet shop later, and a very similar hamster was in residence. (‘She’s grown a new spot!’ an observant child had exclaimed. ‘So she has!’ said Louise.)

  The metal shutters over the windows meant the day had made few inroads yet, though through the skylight, a grey imitation of April filtered down on everything. The smells were of children, hamster, paint, glue, the toilet, yesterday’s lunch, and hand cream.

  Into none of this was supposed to wander a man with a gun.

  The door that shut behind them sounded, to Louise’s ears, like a shot.

  The way Sam Chapman saw it, three things happened in life:

  1. You did your job faultlessly and didn’t get thanked, or

  2. you fucked up and were 3. dumped on from a great height.

  Chapman was hovering around the two-and-a-bit mark; waiting for the other shoe to drop. The thing was, not to switch his mobi
le on. There was always a chance he could clean up before the Office released the dogs. The fact that he was Head Dog was an irony not bringing him great pleasure.

  Meanwhile, he was being kept waiting. This was in the police station, foot of St Aldate’s, Oxford, within whose walls Bad Sam Chapman was halfway between nasty smell and suspect device, as if his appearance could only trigger catastrophe. Policemen don’t like spooks. That was okay. Chapman didn’t like policemen.

  Edgy, tense Chapman was a short, dark, sharp-featured man, so in an ideal world would have resembled Al Pacino. But where Pacino’s terrier-intensity and brooding surliness added up to sexual magnetism, in Sam Chapman the same combination produced a dangerous sulk. Besides, his features weren’t arranged like Pacino’s – instead, he resembled an ageing football hooligan in a suit. Late forties; a number two cut not quite eradicating the grey; brown eyes deep enough that getting to the bottom of them was no simple matter – an ex-wife could have glossed on this. Currently, he was sitting in a plastic bucket seat that doubtless figured on an Amnesty International to-do list, facing a noticeboard whose posters reminded onlookers that they’d recently been mugged, burgled, assaulted or had their bike nicked, though anyone close enough to read probably remembered that’s why they were here. And, every time he closed his eyes he was back in the lay-by, watching a big car making a mess of Neil Ashton. He’d been folded like a piece of damp laundry when Chapman reached him. The gun was nowhere – you had to assume Segura had taken it.

  It was likely Ashton had a girlfriend somewhere – possibly even a mother – and either or both would be receiving grim phone calls about now. Which was sad, but when you scraped away the sentiment Neil Ashton had displayed a gun on what he’d described as a collect-and-comfort, then compounded the error by losing it. He’d better hope he died on the operating table, because if he ever walked upright again, Sam Chapman would break him in two and kick the halves in different directions.

  Blessed are the unforgiving, for they shall come out even. That was the lost frigging beatitude as far as Bad Sam Chapman was concerned. As for the meek: we’ll make them give it back.

  A police officer, not a day over seventeen, appeared in the doorway and beckoned him to follow. Beckoned – not invited. But house rules were in play, so Chapman rose and went with her: down a corridor, through a safety door, up a stairwell, through another door – a labyrinth to dis-orient suspects. He wasn’t a suspect, of course; a fact it would be wise to keep in mind, given God only knew how today would pan out. In Bad Sam’s experience, what started badly fucked up worse.

  The last door boasted a plastic strip reading Superintendent Malcolm Fredericks. The officer knocked, an ‘Enter’ was barked, the door was opened, the officer retreated, and Chapman was inside, looking at Superintendent Malcolm Fredericks, who didn’t rise, offer his hand, or invite Chapman to sit. Instead he said, ‘I presume you have ID?’

  Wordlessly, Chapman showed him a card he could have run up in a stationer’s half an hour previously. But there were rings you had to jump through when you’d fucked up. Like tumbling down a snake in the game: once you’d thrown a bad number, you were at the mercy of the board. ‘It would have been courteous to let us know you were running an operation in the area.’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly an operation.’

  ‘Wasn’t it? And what was it, then? Exactly?’

  ‘We were picking up a witness.’

  ‘Well, what a splendid job you made of it. In my line of work, we’d call that an arrest. And when it’s planned in advance, we’d describe it as an operation.’

  ‘It wasn’t an arrest,’ Sam Chapman said.

  ‘But you were armed.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your companion was armed.’

  ‘I hadn’t been aware of that.’

  ‘You hadn’t been aware of that.’

  It was a technique Chapman used himself: repeat the last thing said in a tone somewhere between incredulity and sarcasm. Exactly how stupid would I have to be to believe that? And Malcolm Fredericks didn’t look stupid: he had one of those open, intelligent faces Chapman just naturally wanted to give bad news to.

  ‘What exactly was this witness a witness to?’

  ‘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 tow
ards 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.