by Mick Herron
Eliot said, ‘Lou —’
‘Shut up.’
The boy barely glanced Eliot’s way. He was staring directly at Louise; the gun dangling in his hand like an empty milk bottle.
If you got that, I’d like you to call the number now.
‘I understand enough,’ he said.
‘Okay. If you – if we don’t start communicating, if we don’t start talking, bad things will happen.’ Men with guns will enter. Bigger guns than his. If he understood English, he’d understand what she wasn’t saying, too.
Did you hear that? If you don’t have a phone, we’ll supply one. But we need to know what you want. If we don’t know that, we can’t progress any further.
‘. . . So what you do?’
He was asking her? But yes, he was asking her.
‘I’ll go outside, I’ll fetch their phone. Then you can talk to them, tell them what you want.’
And what you’re prepared to do if you don’t get it.
He said, ‘You are my . . . hostages. Hostages, yes?’
Jesus Christ.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re your hostages.’
‘If you go out now, I have one less.’
She said, ‘I’ve already been outside. I came back. Remember?’
‘. . . Why you do that?’
Why had she done that? Because the boys were in her care. That was the answer she’d given Judy, but below it rippled things she couldn’t put a name to: expiation of guilt? A desire to be at the centre of things? What was happening would put her name in newspapers the world over, and going back into the annexe when she could have walked away ensured those reports would show her in the finest light. She’d be a heroine; she’d be brave; the opposite of an unsung hero . . . She’d be on first name terms with the tabloids. Was that why she’d come back? To be famous? To be sung?
‘Because this is my nursery. Because there are children here. In my care. Which means I have to protect them.’
‘You protect them from me.’
‘Yes.’
She was pleased they’d established that much.
‘I do not want to hurt anybody.’
That was good. That was very good. Though didn’t do much to quell unease: if he meant no harm, why was he here with a gun?
We have to know everyone’s all right in there. You do under-stand that, don’t you?
‘It is too much noise.’
In point of fact, she agreed – you’d have thought it com-forting, knowing there were policemen outside, but the Dalek-voice was disturbing; an intrusion on something that had started to feel private. Loud, unacknowledged instructions were not the way forward. That too was some-thing she’d learned as a teacher. If Peter Faulks had any-thing useful to contribute, they’d all be better off if he could deliver it mildly, over a phone.
‘I’ll go outside. They’ll give me a mobile. A mobile tele-phone. Then the noise will stop.’
It wasn’t so very different to negotiating with an infant. He said, ‘If you do not come back, if you let them come in – I will use the gun.’
She was looking directly into his eyes when he said this. Nothing she saw there suggested he didn’t mean what he said.
‘I’ll come back.’
‘Yes.’
Judy said, ‘I’ll go.’
‘No.’
‘I’ll come back I promise if you’ll let her why won’t you let me I’ll come back just as much as she will –’
Louise slapped her.
Judy screamed; a sudden high-pitched squawk that cut off mid-breath as she covered her mouth with her hand. But the echo of the slap bounced around the annexe a second or two, and if that wasn’t the first time a slap had been delivered here, Louise would have liked to know the details of the previous.
‘Judy. Listen to me. We can all get through this, but you have to stop – ‘ ‘Bitch!’
‘– behaving like –’ ‘Bitch!’
In the word was more venom than Louise would have believed possible. There was a man here pointing a gun who didn’t radiate such hatred.
Eliot said, ‘Judy, you’re endangering my children.’ The words would have sounded sensible and appropriate if not for the tremor that revealed his own boiling helplessness. ‘Shut up or I’ll . . .’
He’d, yes, he’d do something. Like what?
‘Stop it. Everyone.’
And the boy, too, said, ‘Be quiet, please. This is not good.’
I’m going to repeat that number now.
More than anything, at that moment, Louise did not want Peter Dalek-voice to repeat that number.
‘I’m going outside,’ she said. ‘I’m going to fetch a tele-phone. And then I’ll come back inside, and we can sort all this out.’
In the seconds that followed, the only sound was the low whimpering of one of the twins – Gordy, she’d bet. Was this also part of being a teacher? Not the immediate identification of the noisemaker, but the insistence on tak-ing charge, even in the face of ridiculous odds.
Then the boy said, ‘Okay. You go now.’
She would go now.
Before – when she’d jumped him, hoping to grab the gun; managing, at any rate, to carry little Amy out of the danger zone – movement had come fluidly. The only comparison she could find was playing squash: she hadn’t played squash in months, but that was the clearest sense-memory she retained of fast-flowing, thought-free motion; where the body takes over from the mind, as if the desired result is hard-wired into flesh. Now, she felt the way she imagined the morbidly obese must feel: her body pinning her to the wall, as if surrendering to a mightier gravity. Why morbid anyway – weren’t the fat supposed to be jolly? Pulling herself from the wall was like tearing Velcro from its mate.
One of the twins released a long wail.
‘Hush, darling’: Eliot.
The damned numbers were reciting themselves again: the threes, the fours, the nines; presumably in the same order as before, but weirdly unfamiliar all the same.
The boy said nothing. Judy was breathing harshly: a smoker’s ragged struggle.
The door handle met her hand: the tactile equivalent of one of those familiar objects from an unusual angle photograph.
Outside, the world was changed utterly.
Second e-mail.
The queens of the database had been busy, and though Ben knew they did what they did digitally, barely leaving their cocoons without serious enticement (tickets to Mama Mia; happy hour at Gordon’s), it was impossible not to picture them as custodians of a vast library, its shelves stacked cloud-high; its holdings classified according to a system only understood by the precious. Inside its walls, knowledge multiplied and was fruitful, and every time somebody in the outer world used a piece of plastic, or hit the speed-dial, or crossed a border, or had their loyalty card swiped, a new line was written on a page inside an expanding volume; and whenever an order was barked down the corridors where Ben worked, off went the queens of the database: scurrying up and down ladders; foraging through alphabets; scouring the fascinating collection for the titbits that meant the difference between understanding and bafflement.
All of which meant it was a bit of a letdown, this second e-mail, because it didn’t say much. Eliot Pedlar, thirty-six. Worked for a local publisher. Twin boys, Timothy and Gordon; both (obviously) three and a lot. Details to follow. But the very scantiness of the info told Ben this much: that Eliot Pedlar had no criminal record, had never served in the forces, never been a civil servant, never suspected of terrorist affiliation or sympathies . . . Ben wondered what a Venn diagram of those categories would look like. And at the same time felt a twinge of sympathy for Pedlar and Kennedy both; not just for the situation they’d found themselves in, but for the scrutiny they’d have to suffer as a result. Press, eventually, of course. But meanwhile Tina and the queens, because whoever had wandered into their lives with a gun had been on the run from Bad Sam Chapman, which made them Office business for the duration.
9.
45. What time did nurseries open? – 9.00, probably; he wasn’t an expert. Whatever, for matters to have come this far – for Ben’s name to have whipped through the channels; for Ben himself to have been loaded on to a helicopter and shipped halfway to Oxford already – this must have started before the nursery doors opened, which prompted two immediate questions, though more might follow. What was the hostage taker after? Occupying a nursery was headline news, but lost impact if no children were involved. And how come Eliot Pedlar, local resident, was there so early? There might be an innocent explanation, but innocence was something Tina & Co. got round to eventually; not what they expected from the outset.
Office business for the duration . . . That was the kind of thing Ben had meant.
The third e-mail, he now saw, was labelled delete immediately.
After reading it, Ben assumed. Not that it contained much of use: C&C target was level-3 confidential. Chapman will advise.
C&C: collect and comfort. Whoever Chapman had tried to pick up presumably hadn’t been aware of the essentially non-harmful definition.
But then, non-harmful wasn’t what Bad Sam Chapman radiated. Chapman had questioned him about Weiss, of course: he was Head Dog, and Weiss’s disappearance was Big Trouble. Though even when big trouble wasn’t involved, Chapman’s bad-tempered intensity managed to suggest it might happen anyway. You saw him in a bar, you’d sit on the other side of the room. He wasn’t necessarily about to start a fight, but if one happened to occur, you could bet he’d be involved.
So you were just colleagues?
Yes.
Nothing closer?
No.
You gay, Whistler?
Fuck off. But self-preservation had held Ben back: fuck off was exactly what Chapman wanted him to say. He’d peel an angry man like a banana.
Not as far as I know, he’d said. But maybe I’ve just never met the right man.
He didn’t really think that – who did? And there was little chance Miro Weiss could have engineered a lifestyle-altering epiphany. Miro Weiss: the Mirror Man to some, though Ben didn’t know how that started – Miro wasn’t vain; had nothing to be vain about. Prematurely balding, with washed-out watery eyes, and a hunched physique that never seemed to relax, as if he’d constantly been guarding secrets. Miro was the type who might sit facing you through nine halts on the underground, and the second he got off, you wouldn’t remember his gender. And just now, sitting in this helicopter, the reason for Mirror Man struck Ben – Miro; mirror. No more than that. One of those connections you’d never admit to missing, because that would be tantamount to explaining how dim you were.
Sometimes, the obvious took a little longer.
Glad you’re finding this funny, Whistler.
A missing quarter of a billion pounds had ruined a lot of senses of humour.
Neil Ashton had been there too, in lieu of a dictaphone, which Bad Sam would never have lowered himself to. Deniability was Bad Sam’s lodestone. He probably regarded a birthday card as a breach of security.
. . . C&C target was level-3 confidential. Chapman will advise.
Yeah, right. Ben had level-1 clearance, which meant he had his own shredder, but his phone calls were monitored. Whatever had happened this morning, Chapman wasn’t going to tell Ben about it, regardless.
There were a lot of things Chapman didn’t talk about. A lot of bodies whose locations only he knew.
The helicopter dipped, and Ben’s stomach with it. He turned to the pilot, who was pointing down. They’d reached Oxford. Those things below them – not far enough below for comfort, actually – would be the famous spires: from this perspective they looked less dreaming than sharp, carrying a not entirely academic promise of impalement. Ben’s future was in the hands of this stranger beside him, whose features were obscured by goggles and headset, and while it was true that every plane or train ride you took, you placed your life in another’s keeping, it wasn’t often that you sat right next to him, able to observe that he hadn’t shaved this morning, and that there was a smear of oil on his left wrist – man couldn’t wash his hands: what did that say about his ability to land a helicopter? Nothing, it turned out. They scooted over the last of the big buildings, crossed the river, then descended on to what looked like a recreation ground. The road alongside it was cordoned off, and lined with police cars stationed at haphazard angles. As he watched, a big white lorry lumbered to a halt by a junction, and was flagged through by an officer. It was like watching a circus being set up, he thought. Send in the clowns.
Ben deleted the e-mail, and turned his BlackBerry off.
Some days, it would be better if you’d stayed in bed.
No, there was a level deeper than that – some days it would be better if, the night before, you’d reached some previously unattainable plateau of drunkenness; a level at which you didn’t simply sleep through the following day, but it didn’t technically exist – it was a hole in your calendar, forever out of reach.
Superintendent Malcolm Fredericks, who’d been drunk on precisely three occasions in his life, and remembered each in embarrassing detail, was having one of those days now. He was well aware of the burgeoning gun culture – even Oxford had its violent underbelly. The handgun laws didn’t mean they were impossible to get hold of: it just made them more expensive. So last thing he needed was some cackhanded spook handing a lethal weapon to a ‘witness’ . . . And witness to what, anyway? Nothing pissed a policeman off more than being told there were things he didn’t need to know. A prick like Chapman would have ruined his day even without the gun. And the gun turning up in a nursery had a nightmare edge.
Especially today.
‘How many have you got?’
‘We have a full complement of AFOs.’
‘I’m not talking about who’s authorized to use firearms. I’m talking about marksmen. How many officers do you have who can take a target out from a distance? And who’ve been here before?’
Fredericks had suppressed a sigh. ‘One.’
‘Fucking hell.’
This had been four, no, five minutes ago: one of those phone conversations you didn’t want to have. Chief Constables swore like any other rank – better than most; they’d had more practice – and when this CC swore, the swearee tended to wind up on his grudge-list.
‘But we’ve got two more who’ve done most of the train-ing, and –’
‘Whose idea was it to send them on a course anyway?’
‘I assumed it was yours, sir.’
Had he really said that?
No: he’d said, ‘The instructions came from head-quarters, sir. All distance marksmen with two-years’-plus experience to attend the refresher in Yorkshire. I’ve sent an alert out, but –’ But as of this moment, he had only one Authorized Firearms Officer on-site who’d actually worked a hostage situation.
This was what was meant by economies of scale. Pack ninety per cent of the team off on one forty-eight-hour course: two days later, you had a team with all the boxes ticked on the latest Home Office questionnaire. Looked great on the paperwork.
What could happen in forty-eight hours?
‘You’ve passed word to the Met?’
‘I was about to, but –’ ‘And how would that make me look?
Like a Chief Constable who couldn’t control a firefight in his own back yard. Sir.
‘With all respect, sir, we need –’
‘Who’s your scratch man?’
‘DS Bain.’
‘Bain’s back on full duty, then.’
It wasn’t a question, but could hardly be left to dangle.
‘Yes.’
As of fifteen minutes ago.
‘So no major effects from the last outing.’
Again, not a question. And that outing sounded like a picnic, which it hadn’t been: DS Bain had shot a man, just as – the inquiry had determined – there was cause to believe he’d been about to turn a gun on his family. It had been an incredibly difficult kill: through a window. Then aga
in, that’s what Bain had been trained for.
‘It was deemed an appropriate response,’ he said.
‘Not really the issue. Training and reality, don’t you see?’ Which was a question, but didn’t require an answer. ‘Doesn’t matter how many bull’s-eyes you drill on the range, when the target’s flesh and blood, it has an effect on any normal person. Even an AFO.’
He said, ‘I’m sure you’re right. But there’s been a lot of evaluation, a lot of psychometric testing –’
‘A lot of trick cycling.’
‘– all of which indicated that Bain is fit for duty.’
‘Even if that duty might involve killing another man.’
‘All of which indicated that Bain is fit for duty,’ he repeated.
‘Well, I hope to God you’re right.’
That you’re didn’t escape him. A lot of evaluation, a lot of psychometric testing – but in the end, putting Bain in the shotgun seat was Fredericks’ decision.
Didn’t matter who’d signed the paper putting every other trained officer out of reach; didn’t matter who’d just told him not to seek help from outside forces –
‘Keep me informed. Minute by minute.’
‘Sir.’
Five of those minutes had passed. Now Fredericks was at the scene, which at least had the decency to be close by the station, and DS Peter Faulks, qualified negotiator, was reciting numbers through a megaphone, trying to establish contact with whoever was inside. But Fredericks didn’t believe in coincidence; there was statistical evidence some-where that they never really happened. He might not know precisely who was inside the nursery, but he knew where the gun came from – a cack-handed spook.
If you don’t have a phone, we’ll supply one.
The area was locked down. From where he stood, just outside the main nursery gate – there was nobody left on the nursery grounds, barring hostages and gunman – he could see the door to the annexe, and the metal shutters over its windows. There were no windows on the footpath side; nor facing the adventure playground. Another set of railings, six foot high, cut the nursery grounds in half, and their gate was locked. The woman had locked it, before going back inside. Unlocking it, or going over the top, wouldn’t take two seconds, but that was substantially longer than needed to squeeze a trigger. There was a sky-light, but the roof was metal, so a silent approach impossible. A flash-bomb through a window wouldn’t work, because of the shutters, and there was only one door, which was the same as the number of guns inside . . . The acceptable level of casualties here was zero. He hadn’t needed to hear the Chief Constable not say this for the message to come through loud and clear.
