by Mick Herron
Judy flashed her a look, face predictably set to offended spite. ‘I’m not used to being spoken to like this by junior staff.’ Her voice rose in volume and pitch: that too was predictable. ‘Mrs Christopher wouldn’t –’
‘Claire will be late this morning. But when she gets here, I’m sure she’ll be only too happy to listen to your latest grievance.’
She left Judy standing, closing her mind for the moment to the obvious: that there were any number of tactical errors there, from latest grievance to the interruption. But it was impossible to occupy space near Judy Ainsworth without causing offence; Judy always gave the impression that, last time you’d met, you’d attacked her with a broom-handle, and while you might have forgotten this, she wasn’t about to. Besides, there came a point in any woman’s morning when she’d spent too long biting her tongue. ‘Junior staff’, anyway, was a joke: Judy’d not worked here herself much more than a year. And the fraction of that spent doing actual work was significantly shorter.
The office was just off the vestibule. Louise shut the door behind her, removed her jacket, and tried to summon up what the day held – there was a chart on the desk, with activities marked in half-hour blocks, but until she could hold a day in her head without paperwork, she’d still feel a beginner. Claire seemed to carry the whole week with no mental effort, including any variations the three of them agreed on a Monday morning, always supposing bright ideas had sparked over the weekend: the three being her-self, Claire and Dave, the other nursery assistant. Dave was younger than Louise, but had been doing this longer; he was a nice guy, quiet, helpful, and had a great way with the Darlings, who worshipped him. One or two of the yummy-mummies found his presence reassuring too, though that wasn’t an area Louise was in any hurry to dis-cuss with him.
Speaking of which, while she remembered, she wrote her mobile number on a post-it for Eliot. More shades of the same old mistake, but this hand was already dealt. She just hoped Eliot had the sense to work out that this was Part 1 of how to say goodbye, and not an invite to continue the conversation.
Eliot, meanwhile, had unloaded the kids and taken them on to the recreation ground. This had the advantage of retroactively validating the reason he’d given Chris for coming out so early in the first place, but felt like defeat anyway – in his mental rehearsal, the encounter with Louise had resembled one of the sparkier scenes from The Philadelphia Story, with her matching his every quip. In real life, he’d had the knowledge of impending grief. He hadn’t had much practice, but even he knew when the Conversation was coming. It’s one of those moments that’s familiar the first time.
Eliot –
Sorry. I’m sorry. It was stupid to come, I shouldn’t have –
(Unequivocal surrender. The first line of defence.)
No, you shouldn’t. Look, I’ve been thinking –
And that, right there, was the Conversation; it made little difference now whether they had it or not. She’d been thinking, and that was the kiss of death. What he had to do now was head her off before the words were spoken; before they could weevil into his head and and haunt him for weeks, or possibly years.
It’s not eight yet, she’d said. She wouldn’t have cared what time it was if she’d been planning to match his quips.
Actually, what little they’d said to each other hadn’t stuck. He might be misremembering. But it had ended with Call me, he was certain of that. Which simply meant the Conversation had been postponed, didn’t it, unless it meant something else.
Jesus, Eliot. Face facts.
There followed one of those sudden brain-drenching moments when he became aware that he had charge of his children, and they weren’t actually in his field of vision – Fucking hell was how this expressed itself, quickly followed by She’ll kill me – and then there they were again, chasing each other round the nearby basketball hoop. Over the far side of the field a man was walking a dog, but neither were anything to worry about: the dog was on its last legs, and the man – whom Eliot had seen up close a time or two – had cheeks the colour of broken roses; the ever-after legacy of too many nights on the beer.
Keep a close eye on the boys on the rec ground. It’s early, yet.
Some of the night folk might still be hanging around, she’d meant.
The recreation ground was bordered on all sides by ditch, tree or hedgerow, broken by a barrier – a padlocked pole on a hinge, blocking cars and quad bikes, with a bin for dog-waste next to it – in its south-east corner, opposite the nursery gates. A sturdy, six foot fence marked off the nursery perimeter; between that and the rec ground was a footpath that ran to the railway line. As for the rec ground itself, it boasted an open-air basketball court and a couple of five-a-side football pitches, but not many years back had been a dusty grey nowhere; a former gasworks’ site, whose soil, if not terminally ill, wasn’t terribly well. Environmental redemption wasn’t impossible, then, provided the target area was reasonably small. Kids from the local primary school, a short way up the road, played here in the summer months, and Eliot had rarely passed in the evening without the sounds of one ball game or another floating into the open sky. Even without a ball, there was space and grass enough to run around.
‘You okay there, boys?’
‘We’re not boys, daddy.’
‘Daddy, we’re lions.’
‘Of course you are.’
He should be joining in, he knew that, but pretending to be a lion this early in the morning was beyond him.
‘Rrarrrr?’ said Gordon.
‘Rrarrrr!’ said Timmy.
‘Rar,’ Eliot replied.
They rushed him, and he put both arms out to scoop them up, and when they hit, it was with a force beyond their combined weights; was one of those heartslapping moments like when you stand on a low bridge while an express train thunders underneath, or turn a corner into heavy wind. There never seemed much time for this kind of malarkey lately, or if there was it was always Christine at its centre, so Eliot’s heartslap went well beyond the physical thump . . . With one arm wrapped round each, he commenced tickling, and the twins dropped to the ground, this form of assault always having immediate effect – basically, you could put them on their knees at a distance if you threatened to tickle them loudly enough. Pretty soon he had a son clutching each thigh; their small but very very physical bodies shaking with fun and laughter while he growled nonsensical noises over their heads, rubbing his nose into each of their scalps in turn, while biting large but make-believe chunks out of them. For as long as it lasted the Memory was banished and he was simply Eliot Pedlar: not a great father, but he answered to Daddy. Then, in between biting one boy and starting on the other, he looked up and saw the figure with the gun slipping through the hedge. He blinked and it was gone, but it had been there, maybe fifty yards away. The gun had been real.
Eliot stopped, the tickling game turned to one of statues.
‘– Boys . . .’
‘Dah – dah – dah –’
‘– daddy! You’re ticklin us.’
‘Boys, stop a moment.’
‘No! Don’t stop!’
‘Don’t stop, daddy –’
But he pulled his arms away, letting Gordon slip to the ground with a bump while Timmy, who had a knack for maintaining balance, hit his feet and stayed upright.
‘What did you see?’
‘Hush a moment.’
‘What did you see, daddy?’
Eliot reached into his inside pocket at the exact same moment he received a mental picture of his mobile, nest-ling in the plastic well beneath the dash of his car.
‘Daddy, tell us what you seed!’
He wasn’t sure any more what he’d seed. Certainty was fading with every passing moment. A gun? There was no shortage of local horror stories, but guns were pushing it. Guns were more an East Oxford thing.
‘Was it a man?’
‘Did you see him?’ Eliot asked, before he could stop himself.
Gordon’s face curled into a
frightened guilty mask. ‘Who?’
‘Who did Gordy see, daddy?’
‘I didn’t!’
‘Daddy, who did Gordy see?’
‘Hush, now.’ Eliot hoisted Gordon into his arms, while Timmy clutched his leg, and began snuffling too. ‘There wasn’t anyone. Nobody saw anyone.’
Except he had . . . He’d seen somebody holding a gun, and even if it turned out it was just a mobile phone, it had looked damn like a gun a minute ago.
Small fingers nipped his leg. ‘Timmy’s scared.’ It was Timmy telling him this; the third person being a temporary refuge from Timmyhood. Both boys practised the technique.
‘Let’s go back to the car,’ Eliot suggested.
He’d parked on the curve of the road just yards from the nursery gates, and the three of them had walked up the same road and over the drainage ditch to the rec ground, crossing by the troll bridge. No troll had waylaid them; trolls, Eliot had promised, didn’t wake early, and always hid from daddies; trolls were even scareder of daddies than they were of billy goats. But when he turned that way now Timmy gripped tighter, while Gordy – already wrapped round him like a bandage – began vibrating in his arms, and Eliot knew that one false moment in the morning had woken the troll, and there was no way they were using that bridge again.
Keep a close eye on the boys on the rec ground. It’s early, yet. . .
There was space here to kick a ball, and grass enough to run around on, but it wasn’t any kind of idyll. It was true that to the south of the nursery lay another meadow, the Ham – a flood plain – and that between nursery and rail-way line was an adventure playground, containing a vaguely military array of wooden constructs for climbing over or tumbling out of; true, too, that the curved suburban road the nursery looked on to didn’t see much traffic outside of the school run, and that every so often, from a cool blue summer sky, hot-air balloons would drift down to land in the long grass on the meadow, like a Cadbury’s advert come to life. But it was equally true that the nature park to the rec ground’s north – a rarely mown strip of land hugging the river – was a haven not only for rabbits and foxes, but for outdoor sex addicts and drug abusers; the former huddling in the bushy clumps and among the strangled copses, scrawling semi-literate invitations on the stanchions of the bridge across the Isis, while the latter congregated round the wooden sculpture – four fingers and a thumb pushing out of the earth – to scatter hypodermics and scorched roaches, and trample scrunched-up balls of silver foil and glassine envelopes into the mud. It was true, too, that when mist clung low to the ground in the early hours, the occasional junkie would miss his footing stumbling for a piss, and fetch up in the river. And then a small battalion of emergency officers would congregate in dayglo coveralls, and pull bicycles and fridges from the water, until they got lucky, and gathered him in.
Put another way, Eliot thought, not all trolls lived under bridges. And not all of them were frightened of daddies.
And maybe some of them carried guns.
Louise, emerging from the office into the entrance hall, couldn’t see Judy anywhere, but right that moment some-one passed along the lane outside, or didn’t pass so much as sneak – that was her impression. A man, half crouching. He’d disappeared before she’d registered more, like what colour he was, or how he was dressed – sports gear would have been a clue. She crossed to the window, but saw nobody on the lane. Vague figures huddling on the rec ground, figures she could just make out through the trees, would be Eliot and his boys. Nobody lurking, though. Probably a jogger.
Which was why sports gear would have been a clue. The lane was a favoured route for joggers; it hopped over the railway track via an iron bridge, then dropped into one of the college sports grounds. But it was also much used by the local winos, who’d gather on the nearby junction on their way from nowhere in particular to anywhere else, and while Louise neither felt threatened by them nor sub-scribed to the belief that they lowered property prices, she was aware that they worried the kids, and wasn’t happy about them hanging round in the lane. Nobody could wander into the grounds – the keypad on the gate saw to that – and the fences might as well have been mountain ranges to your average chubby wino. Still. She’d better check one of the skinny ones wasn’t trying to squeeze through the mesh: she was, after all, in charge.
She did a quick tour of the main nursery, though they always left things battle-ready the day before. Nothing looked out of place except Judy, who should have been mopping the kitchen area but wasn’t. Louise gritted teeth. Judy was a trial, Claire occasionally admitted. Louise was starting to feel she was a sentence. If it was just the lack of work, she’d see the funny side; even DFM had had passengers, though they’d generally had the decency to be promoted to board level before really kicking back. But Judy radiated hostility, and it was hard not to respond in kind; hard not to feel there was little about her worth knowing better, starting with her appearance. Because it was as if, Louise sometimes thought – and felt guilty about thinking, but when did that stop anyone? – it was as if there was a list somewhere of colours Judy really shouldn’t wear, attached to clothes Judy shouldn’t go within a mile of, all topped off with a haircut Judy should desperately avoid, and out of what was possibly lack of self-awareness, but might just have been anger, Judy had decided to go for all these things at once, every day. Who was anybody else to tell her what to wear, what to look like? An attitude there was a lot to be said for when it went hand in hand with joie de vivre, but the rest of the time it made you cross the road in fear.
But fuck. The woman had a problem, but being the woman was no doubt a bigger one, and Louise had more to worry about. She checked the window locks were secure – something the insurance policy demanded – then went to open the annexe, which was where the first-term children spent their days: Louise’s Darlings. This was behind another set of railings, a safeguard against the kids wandering into the car park during outdoor play, but the gate in this one had a straightforward lock. Which had already been opened, and left unsecured, and while this wasn’t a major offence, it irritated Louise: Judy hadn’t finished in the nursery, or even started there. There was an order to the morning, for God’s sake . . . She locked it behind her.
And then, while she remembered, she walked down to the fence adjoining the lane, and peered along it, without seeing anyone. A while back, in the wash of some horror that had happened elsewhere, Claire had floated the idea of an Incident Book, a journal for jotting down stuff that might need remembering later, once it became important – after it had passed, in other words, from peculiar irrelevance to corroborating evidence. But the days were busy, and the idea hadn’t taken shape; besides, what would Louise have written? That somebody had walked past, looking like they didn’t want to be seen? She shook her head; one of those silly but not ineffectual gestures for banishing unwanted thoughts. Twenty minutes from now, she’d be passing Eliot her phone number on a post-it, hoping no one would notice. Shadowy figures would be less a worry than a welcome distraction. She turned back to the annexe. Time to get the day in gear. And an important point to bear in mind would be to stop using expressions like but fuck, or even for God’s sake: even mentally. The first time one of the Darlings head butted a nipple, then repeated whatever Louise said in response, was likely to be the last. Claire was a sweet woman, but pure iron where the children were concerned. You couldn’t run a nursery any other way.
She headed for the annexe, and had almost reached it when a noise behind her made her turn.
He’d got the boys as far as the corner, Gordon still wrapped round him and gaining pounds every moment; Timmy trotting by his side, but with one fist wrapped round Eliot’s trouser leg, which didn’t help either. At the barrier, he stopped –
‘What’s the matter, daddy?’ Timmy immediately asked.
– but the only figure in sight was the dogwalking alcoholic on the far side of the field.
‘Nothing, Timmy.’
‘But what were you lookin at?’
‘Looking. Nothing. I wasn’t looking at anything.’
‘But you were star in over there –’
‘Staring. And no I wasn’t, I was glancing. Gordy, are you sure you can’t walk?’
‘. . . Yes.’
‘But daddy’s getting tired, and it’s not far –’ ‘Was it that man you were lookin for?’
‘. . . Which man, Timmy?’
‘The man who was there before.’
‘Before when?’
‘What man?’
‘Nobody, Gordy . . . Which man, Timmy?’
‘Why are we goin to the car, daddy?’
‘Daddy has to make a phone call. Which man, Timmy? Did you see a man?’
‘. . . I thoughted I did.’
‘Not thoughted, Timmy. Thought. Gordon, you’re going to have to walk. You’re hurting daddy’s back.’
‘No!’
‘You can hold my hand. It’s only a little way. It’s all right, Gordy. There’s nothing wrong, daddy’s here.’
‘He was over there.’
Eliot lowered Gordon to the ground, and looked the way Timmy was pointing: towards the railway line. There was no one to be seen. But the lane twisted before meet-ing the tracks, and whoever it was could have turned a corner, or dropped into the ditch either side, though why would he want to do that? Unless he’d been carrying a gun, of course; carrying a gun might be reason to hide . . . Though not from a man with two little boys. Both of whom were frightened now, and gun or not – it had prob-ably been a mobile phone – Eliot had reason enough to call the police: you couldn’t be too careful. He glanced at his watch. It was ten past eight.
‘Is nursy open yet?’ Timmy asked.
‘Nursery. Not yet. Soon. We just have to go back to the car for a moment – ‘
A boy’s hand in each of his own, he steered them round the barrier, making sure Timmy didn’t get anywhere near the dogshit bin – Eliot had a terrible memory associated with that dogshit bin: you couldn’t take your eyes off a child for a moment – and on to the lane by the nursery gates, where he’d spoken to Louise twenty minutes ago. Twenty minutes seemed a lifetime. Down the lane’s far end a train rattled past; a reminder that things happened elsewhere. What happened here was a man stepped into their path and said, ‘The gates?’ He was dark-skinned, dark-haired; young and chocolate-eyed, with stubble that looked glued on, the way eighties pop stars’ did. He wore a brown leather jacket. He had a gun in his hand. He said, ‘The gates?’ again.
