by Mick Herron
And she gave him the name. Crispin.
He had led her up a cut into the estate opposite the rec ground. When they reached a row of garages he stopped, and held her while she sobbed out what was left of her heart, or that’s what it felt like. When she was dry at last, she was emptied of more than tears; had had every last drop of emotion wrung out of her. This state persisted for twenty seconds, and felt literally a blessed relief. And then reality booted up and left her standing by a row of garages, her boys still locked inside the annexe.
Dave Osborne said, ‘I’m so sorry, Chris.’
She released herself, shaking her head. She meant noth-ing by this, and might as easily have nodded.
‘How did you find out?’
This strange question forced her to rearrange her thoughts. Perhaps that was its purpose. ‘I – this morning, I was busy. Eliot brought the boys in.’
‘I know.’
‘I was visiting my old office on the Cornmarket. And I went into the shopping centre afterwards, and walked past that TV place –’
And had seen the event beamed out to shocked shoppers. Shocked, but not ungratified; there was a sense of importance attached to being a local when news was breaking. Chris Pedlar had been rooted to the spot: important was not how she felt. What she was feeling – what she was feeling was in her pocket for her mobile. And yes, it was on; and no: no txts, no voicemail, no missed calls were registered. And however flaky Eliot could be, how-ever detached from family life, no way he couldn’t know what was happening in Grandpont right now; no way he wouldn’t have called her the second he heard . . .
Unless he wasn’t able to.
Dave handed her a tissue, and she blew her nose loudly. ‘Things are going to be okay, Chris.’
‘My boys are in there, aren’t they?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Chris. I think so. Yes.’
‘Why? Why them and not –’
She couldn’t finish the thought. Whose children would she substitute for her own; whose place in mortal danger? Anyone’s – that was the raw truth. She’d have her children change place with anyone’s right now, but finding a name was thankfully beyond her. She realized Dave’s hand was still on her shoulder, and he must have registered that too, because he removed it.
‘Who else?’ she asked.
‘In there?’
‘Who’s with my babies?’
‘Your husband,’ he said. And then said, ‘I’m so sorry’ again.
‘At least they have him.’ God, that that could be a comfort.
‘And Louise, Louise Kennedy. She didn’t have to be, Chris. She went back inside. She could have escaped.’
She looked at him, not understanding.
‘There’d have been others in there, but she got them out. Then went back.’
‘But not my boys.’
‘They must have been first. The rest of them, the ones who arrived when I did, she chased them away.’
‘But why were they there first? Eliot was taking them to kick a football around.’
Dave shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘But that’s what he told me they were doing.’
This little snippet of memory was worth holding on to. It could form the basis for a whole new reality; one in which Eliot and the twins were kicking a ball on the rec ground, oblivious to the passage of time and the massed police forces nearby.
He said, ‘Maybe it got too cold for them.’
‘But it isn’t cold.’
‘But maybe it was then. Chris, I’m sorry. I wish this wasn’t happening, and I don’t know why it is. All I know is . . .’
He lifted a helpless hand, then let it drop. That it is was what he couldn’t say.
She blinked, then rubbed her eyes. It didn’t help. She was still here, the world was still wrong; Dave was still looking at her, fear and compassion mixed in his eyes. He was good-looking, Dave Osborne, all the mothers agreed, and he’d figured in the occasional reverie, though recall-ing that was like looking through a window into make-believe. Had she really enjoyed moments when her mind wasn’t screaming? The last time she’d kissed her boys – oh God don’t say the last time – she’d been waving them off to play football, not sending them into the arms of a gun-wielding maniac. So she’d thought. Could the point of slippage really be that they’d felt cold, so went into the nursery early? How could something so mundane be life-altering? And how come they’d got in anyway, if Dave hadn’t been there to open the gate?
Her black angel hovered overhead, masquerading as a helicopter.
Dave said, ‘You’d better talk to the police.’
‘Why? Will they do things differently if I do?’
‘I don’t know, Chris. It’s just what you have to do, I think.’
She thought so too. But it would be another line crossed, indicating her acquiescence in this nightmare. If she couldn’t turn the clock back she wanted it to stand still; wanted now to last forever, a now in which there was at least the possibility that things would turn out all right. Allowing things to continue was to open the door to all manner of grief. And again that image splashed across her mind: of her babies ruined on a nursery floor.
More tears fell. Nothing could dam them up.
‘Chris? Chris?’
Dave shimmered before her, for an instant becoming twins. And then was blurrily solo again, holding some-thing out.
‘Don’t tell anyone, okay? It’s more than my job’s worth.’
He smiled a conspirator’s smile.
After a moment she took the cigarette, and he lit it for her, then one for himself.
Time wouldn’t stand still, but at least she could lurk out-side it for a while. These things took minutes off your life – the next few wouldn’t be missed.
They stood close as lovers, by the garages, smoking.
A short distance away, her children shook.
Time was back to doing somersaults: every moment crawled; every minute jumped. Outside, the sun would be edging through the sky, or that’s what it would look like it was doing. Here in the annexe, electric light was all they had to go on.
Eliot thought: Any other day, any other lifetime, I’d be at my desk, thinking about lunch.
Lunch wouldn’t figure on today’s menu.
Judy was back on the floor, in a crouch. Head between her knees, arms around her legs. The only one among them to make a break for freedom. He ought to admire that, but instead felt disgust that she’d endangered their lives . . . Circumstances altered perspective. The one who’d put their lives in danger was the young man with the gun. But Eliot blamed Judy for attempting escape, and all the justification he needed for that was wrapped round his thighs.
Timmy and Gordon. Gordon and Timmy.
‘Talk about Miro,’ Ben Whistler had said.
Eliot didn’t give a fuck about Miro, whoever fucking Miro was. This had nothing to do with him or his boys.
At my desk, thinking about lunch . . . This should have read: At my desk, thinking about Louise. If not for Louise, he and his boys would have been elsewhere.
Jaime said, ‘You are one of them. You are on their side.’
‘I just closed the door, Jaime. I could have walked right through it. The next time they come in, you’re dead. So talk about Miro. Why was he so sure he was in danger?’
‘Because of things he knew.’
‘Not because of what he stole?’
‘He was not a thief.’
Question answer, question answer . . .
If Eliot shut his eyes, he could be back at the school quiz.
But he couldn’t remember the questions now; that was the funny thing. At the time, he’d never forgotten a detail in his life; no fact too trivial, no statistic too insignificant, to have escaped his attention – the Cato Street Conspirators’ ringleader; Hitchcock’s first American movie; the third man on the moon. He’d recalled the depth of the Marenas Trench. On a multiple choice, true, but a breathtakingly unlikely answer t
o the less well informed. And then, of course, there’d been the downhill stuff – contemporary lit, seventies TV, late eighties pop and pre-Blair politics.
‘You are the king of trivia,’ Louise had whispered.
‘Oh, I’m good at important stuff too,’ he’d whispered back.
They’d formed a faction: the two of them v. Lizzie. Safety in numbers; plus, Lizzie knew remarkably little about anything – refusing to believe, for example, that Cliff Richard wasn’t his real name. ‘It’s a trick question,’ she’d said.
Louise was hot on botany, geography, and – surprisingly, though Eliot pretended otherwise – sport.
‘You’re good at this too.’
‘Oh, it’s not the only thing I’m good at.’
The other tables: they blew them away. It was the scene in the movie – give him a moment, Eliot would tell you its director – when everything goes right, the background’s a soft buzz, and there’s no doubt who’s in focus.
It didn’t even feel like a mistake that it wasn’t Chris sharing it with him.
When Eliot tried, he could remember life as a sequence of tracts of time controlled by Christine; the early days, when her choices determined his mood. ‘That’s what we’ll do for Christmas,’ she’d say – or for her birthday, or his, or for the first Sunday after Whitsun: whatever – and something inside him would relax, and he’d think: Okay, she intends us still to be together then. And it had quietly become established that their future was a series of shared events. When had that stopped? The king of trivia couldn’t put his finger on it. Like everything else that had happened to him, the opening of that chasm had been a gradual process. You could pick the twins’ birthday, of course, but that had been a sharing day; he honestly couldn’t remember being happier. The slippage was buried somewhere since; the dim falling off from his centrality in all their lives to being the ghost who left for work every morning, and didn’t come home till the fun was over. For all the boys’ important steps – their first, for instance – he’d been elsewhere. Which he could have lived with if it weren’t for the guilt he was made to feel: it was as if Chris resented his having a career, when it had been her choice to stay at home. Neither liked the idea of full-time childcare; he earned more than she did; she was their mother – it was a nobrainer. So why had it become another of those unspoken-of areas; part of their relation-ship’s no-man’s land? And how did no-man’s land work, anyway, when one of them was a man? Well, it worked in the obvious way – he’d had more intimate moments with his dentist lately than he’d had with his wife. And he hadn’t seen his dentist in a year.
You could blame him for what had happened with Louise – of course you could – but you couldn’t blame him for it. This was a subtle shade of difference that he wouldn’t have liked to justify before an audience, but nevertheless it was deeply felt. You could blame him. But you couldn’t blame him.
. . . Even here, even now, he could look at Louise and know that in a single encounter, he’d established a greater connection with her than he’d known with Christine in years. And for all this turbulent danger that had jumped out of nowhere, there was a comfort in knowing that she’d found that too.
Even so, she was avoiding his gaze.
‘It began when he went to Iraq,’ Jaime said.
If he’d stop looking at her, this might be easier. It wasn’t first on her list – if the boy with the gun hadn’t turned up; if they weren’t arranged against a wall; if there hadn’t just been an armed incursion into the annexe – if none of that had happened either, this would definitely be easier; but still, right that moment, what Louise mostly wanted was for Eliot to stop looking at her.
Then again, if none of that had happened, she’d have to be talking to him.
Ben was saying, ‘Iraq. Right,’ as if a coin had dropped into his mental well.
Iraq had been one of the answers at that damn quiz.
None of it had been deliberate, not on her part. If she’d been given a map of the evening before starting out, she’d have vanished screaming. There was solid circumstantial back-up for this, and it was scribbled all over her recent history: Louise had already teetered on the edge of her life’s Big Mistake – her version of ‘teeter’, admittedly, being another woman’s ‘plummet’ – and no way was she was approaching that cliff again. It wasn’t as if the danger wasn’t posted. There had been a significant increase, Claire had mentioned, in fathers delivering their young ones since Louise had started work, and while Claire hadn’t necessarily meant it as such, Louise had taken it as a warn-ing. ‘Maintain distance’ had become her mantra. It had worked until that evening.
You could avoid wine and moonlight, steer clear of roses and poetry, and still come undone over something as simple as shared victory.
Iraq had been the final answer, and even as their sheets were collected in, Louise was saying, ‘I think we’ve won.’ ‘Put it this way,’ Eliot said. ‘We haven’t lost.’
‘Put it this way’ was already a familiar Eliotism; frequently attached to statements so straightforward, it was hard to know what more obvious formulation he’d rejected. But knowing they’d just managed something special together had a warming effect. So Louise simply smiled. ‘Yes. We haven’t lost.’
For the next ten minutes they listened to Lizzie explain-ing that it didn’t matter who won, that she’d read in a book that Cliff was his real name, and wasn’t this nice, and it was a pity Chrissie couldn’t be there, though obviously that wasn’t possible, what with the little ones. Then she broke off to accost some passing acquaintances, while Eliot explained that ‘Chrissie’ was Christine – Chris – and that nobody called her Chrissie except Lizzie, who’d never met her.
‘I like Chris,’ Louise had said. In fact, she wasn’t entirely sure she had the right woman. The twins were a clue, being the only pair in the nursery, but sometimes the mothers melded into an abstraction of exasperation and busyness.
Their prize was a bottle of champagne.
‘Well, isn’t that lovely,’ breathed Lizzie. Then: ‘I don’t drink, of course.’
That of course was an insight into a whole other mindset.
‘So I think it would be nice if Eliot took it home for Chrissie to share.’
Louise didn’t mind one way or the other, but cared a lot less about Lizzie making the offer for her.
‘That’s kind,’ Eliot said. ‘If Louise doesn’t mind.’
A ghost of a wink accompanied his words.
They left not long after. Lizzie was on her bike – another of course – and Eliot was heading for the bus stop. They were out of the building before Louise said, ‘I can drop you. I’m in the car.’
‘Well, I live over East Oxford. It’s out of your way.’
The bottle was in a bag he was holding carefully; not let-ting it swing.
‘That’s all right.’
They’d driven maybe two hundred yards when he said, ‘You should have this.’
‘Have what?’
‘The bottle. Lizzie doesn’t drink, did you notice that? So she doesn’t think it’s much of a sacrifice you shouldn’t either. But you won it really. Besides, I’d just glug it.’
‘We both won it. And I’m sure Chrissie would enjoy a treat.’
He smiled.
‘Or doesn’t she drink either?’
‘Well, with kids, you know how it is. She’s so exhausted by the time they’re packed off to bed.’
‘So glug it yourself. Once she’s gone to bed.’
‘Can’t drink champagne on your own.’
That hung between them for a while. They came to a halt at pedestrian lights, though no one was using the crossing.
‘Well, we could share it,’ she said.
And there it was – of course – unplanned, but definitely stated. The point at which the evening’s map sheered into uncharted places. Beyond here lie monsters, they used to say. The fact that the monsters were instantly recognizable didn’t make them any less scaly.
&nb
sp; ‘Um,’ said Eliot. ‘I think drinking in cars is a bit of a no-no. Put it this way. It’s definitely frowned on.’
The little green man gave way to the red, and she drove on, passing the junction which would have taken them east. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You can always say we went to the pub after.’
‘I’d probably better say we were part of a crowd.’
And then, a minute or so later, he added, ‘Actually, it’d probably be best if I didn’t mention you at all.’
The downstairs light was on when they got back, and Eliot had asked whether that was for burglars, and she’d told him, lightly, Oh, her mother was staying. Every sentence was conspiracy. This particular construction nearly unravelled everything, but mischief was rearing in her soul: ‘It’s okay. She’ll have gone to bed.’
Which she had.
So what happened next? The inevitable happened next. They whispered on the sofa and drank the bottle, and then stopped whispering and started kissing instead, and before either of them got much older her knickers were round one ankle, and maybe three minutes after that she was pulling them up again; the whispering a little more formal, the bottle definitely empty.
‘I’m not sure I should drive you home.’
‘It’s okay. I can walk.’
‘It’s just, I’m over the limit . . . ‘
‘Don’t worry.’ He insisted on kissing her again. ‘When can I see you?’
‘Eliot, you know what we just did was stupid, don’t you?’
But his face wore a moon-fogged expression, which he might have thought tender, but only spelled trouble. Already, he was cherishing a Memory. Already, she was regretting an Incident. One of those irresistible force/ immovable object scenarios, which could be postponed but never avoided.
Though dumping it in a hostage situation might throw it into perspective.
And now Louise thought: what had it all been about? Really? And understood that it was mostly payback for her mother shirking the evening quiz. You want me to have fun? Okay. This is how grown-up girls have fun. With half a bottle of bubbly inside her, she hadn’t even cared if her mother had heard them, though it was amazing how quickly that had turned into a damp sticky fear that her mother had heard them. Not the only thing that had been amazingly quick. At least there’d been no cries of passion to stifle.
