by Mick Herron
He wondered why the woman had gone back inside, when she’d had the chance to escape. Hero or idiot? Was there a difference?
Or did she know the man involved?
Someone said, ‘Sir?’
‘What is it?’
‘There’s someone coming out.’
Every day she stepped through this door: how many times? A dozen, twenty. In the time she’d been here, she’d seen the view it presented in every season, and once – late afternoon, long after the kids had gone – had surprised a fox examining a stray scent. It had looked at her with obvious disdain, then taken one last breath of whatever intrigued it, and trotted off towards the railway line. There’d barely been an occasion since that she’d come through that door without a memory of the fox nudging her. Certainly, she’d never expected to see anything wilder.
But the world that met Louise this morning was one she’d never stepped into before.
It was the lack of children, for one thing – sure, this time of the morning, the children were all inside, but you were never in doubt of their presence. Children en masse exerted gravity, and their absence here tainted the air. To anyone but an expert, it would have registered simply as an unpindownable oddity: the colour blue, missing from a landscape oil. And there was more . . .
Beyond the nursery grounds were police cars: eleven, her mind suggested, though she didn’t count them. And there’d be more she couldn’t see. Several were blocking the road at the junction, and the various figures stationed around them were all looking her way. From being her place of work, the nursery had turned into a focal point: a crime scene in progress. Louise had never seen one from this perspective before. She’d always been on the safe side of a TV screen, or staring up from a cinema seat. Now police officers were clustered by the nursery gate, and might be elsewhere too: hiding round corners, or on the roof of the nursery – and what did they know, other than that a man with a gun was in the building behind her? They might suspect her of complicity. She’d suspect her-self, in their shoes. She’d walked back in, when she could have walked away.
The Dalek spoke.
Miss Kennedy?
For some reason, she’d put a hand up to shield her eyes, though it wasn’t so bright they needed protection.
Miss Kennedy? You are Miss Kennedy, aren’t you?
So why had she walked back in – what answer would they accept?
She said, ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’
Miss Kennedy, would you come out now, please?
She said, ‘We need a phone. You promised us a phone.’
Would you come a little closer, please?
She wished she could – last thing she wanted was to go back into the annexe. But events had come too far for her to walk away. If you do not come back, if you let them come in – I will use the gun. She’d seen no reason to disbelieve his words. There’d been truth in his eyes. The dizzying image struck her of that perfect circle, the hole in the plaster where his bullet had struck. Dust had issued from the wound. What shape would his bullets make in flesh? Whatever: dust wouldn’t be the issue.
‘You promised us a phone,’ she repeated. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded disconnected.
Miss Kennedy, would you raise your arms to shoulder level, please?
They thought she had a gun.
But they couldn’t be that stupid. What would she be doing with a gun? She said, ‘A phone. We need a phone inside. So you can talk to him.’ She stayed exactly where she was, two yards outside the door. ‘If I don’t go back, he’ll use the gun.’
One of the men at the gate raised a hand; the man with the megaphone – she assumed that’s what it was; it looked no bigger than a mobile – lowered it and listened to what he had to say. Peter Faulks, that’s what the Dalek was called. And he knew her name; all of these gathered men did. A kind of fame, she supposed.
Her legs felt wobbly, like a newborn giraffe’s. All of this – the accumulated cars; the anxious policemen; the doubt-less imminent cameras – were part of her story now, because that’s what this was, her story, and to have side-lined herself at the earliest opportunity would have been accepting mediocrity . . . Was that why she’d gone back inside? Partly, she admitted now. Some of her wobbliness was stage fright. And besides, she had – who didn’t? – the indestructible sense that things would work out; that her story wasn’t going to be cut short. Hand in hand with the consciousness of mortality went the sense of invulnerability – sure, death would happen, but not today, not to her. How could it? She was only thirty-two . . . Did she really think all that? She thought she did. That was enough for now.
If people didn’t feel invulnerable, bungee jumping would be science fiction. But then again, sometimes the rope snapped.
Miss Kennedy? Would you come to the fence? We have a phone for you.
She looked at her feet. Do your stuff? It was like wearing diver’s boots, making that ten-yard trek to the locked gate – and like remembering pre-history, looking back to when she’d chucked the keys over the fence, having herded the last stragglers through it. There’d been civilians here then, scattering for the safety of their cars and their ordinary mornings. Being here now elevated Louise Kennedy above the ordinary. She wondered if her mother knew yet; if her former colleagues at DFM were picking this up on their constant newsfeeds. If Crispin knew, and what he was thinking.
Meanwhile, her feet were doing their stuff. Here was the fence that separated the annexe from the outer nursery grounds; and here, coming to meet her, was Peter Faulks, who turned out to have an unexceptional voice when it wasn’t processed through hardware. His face, too, was unexceptional; round and ruddy-coloured and forgettable. When the movie was made he’d be a character part; ideal for somebody seen in The Bill once, but whose name was never going to wedge itself ahead of the title.
It was one of those cold-war moments; two people meet-ing with a fence between them. A little stretch of no-man’s land on either side.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m as well as can be expected, thanks.’
Amazingly, he laughed at that: a short quick bark reminding her, again, of the fox.
‘How many of you are in there?’
She had to think for a moment. ‘Five. No, six. You mean, including him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Six.’
‘Names?’
‘Pedlar. Eliot Pedlar and his boys, Timmy and . . .’ Her mind went blank. ‘The other twin. Gordon.’
‘. . . That’s three.’
‘Me and Judy. Judy Ainsworth, she’s the cleaner.’ It wasn’t just the men on the road watching; there’d be others, unseen, and she’d be in their sights. That’s what happened in siege situations – marksmen collected unfold-ing events in the prism of their crosshairs. She’d be their target now – just in case.
‘And?’
‘Him,’ Louise said. ‘The gunman.’
‘Of course. Just wanted to be sure.’
‘He’s waiting.’
‘Where are you?’
Where was she? She was at the focal point of the universe; where the crosshairs met.
‘Inside. How are you grouped?’
‘He’s watching. I have to go back. He says he’ll use the gun.’
He was handing her something through the railings: a very normal-looking Nokia. ‘My number’s the only one on this. How are you grouped?’
‘Against the wall. He’s in the middle of the room. Or was. The children –’
‘The twins, right?’
‘Twins,’ she said stupidly. Then: ‘I have to go back.’
‘You’re a brave woman. We’ll get you out of there. All of you.’
Yes. Will we be walking or carried?
Because suddenly, thirty-two or not, she noticed that she was human – a collection of soft parts wrapped around bone, which could warp and damage if struck bluntly enough. A piano, dropped from a height; an unremarked streetlight, walked into. A bullet from a gun not far from here.
‘I hope so.’
‘Be brave, Louise. Take that to him.’
She wrapped her hand round the mobile phone, as if it were a crucifix or a magic wand, and headed back into the annexe.
Eliot Pedlar had his sons wrapped round him close as moss, and when Louise Kennedy returned, he felt like light had just re-entered the room. It wasn’t that he’d doubted she’d come back. She’d proved herself capable of that. But despite the nearness of his children, he’d felt alone until she walked through the door, holding the mobile phone out for the Gun as if this offering might defuse him – he carried a gun, but he amounted to a bomb. One that could go off any moment.
Louise. She was the reason he was here – he ought to hate her for that; and part of him was working on it.
She said, ‘Here.’ She was talking to the Gun. ‘His number’s pre-programmed. Call him and talk.’
But he admired, too, the steadiness of her voice, as if the gunman were no more than another recalcitrant child, who only needed to be shown where the boundaries lay.
Gordy shifted, trying to usurp part of Eliot that Timmy had already laid claim to. This was both familiar and unfamiliar; like those times he returned home after they were in their pyjamas. For a couple of minutes he’d be the centre of the universe, and they’d fight for his attention and his cuddles, and then remember they still had a mother on the property, and devolve to her orbit instead. But here there was only Eliot. While the Gun took the phone – his back to Eliot, so there was no telling his expression – Timmy growled. In ordinary life, this would be the start of something big; the boys were close as terraced houses, but there were no fights quite like those enjoyed by neighbours.
‘Hush, boys . . . ’
That was his role here. Hush, boys. Everything is going to be all right. If Eliot had a slot, you could put your penny in and that was the noise he’d make. But he wasn’t fooling the boys, and he wasn’t kidding himself. The whimpering Judy made every so often probably indicated she wasn’t taken in either. But fuck her: his soothing sounds weren’t for her benefit; truth to tell, they were mostly for his own.
Louise took her place against the wall. She didn’t look his way or Judy’s. She glanced at the boys, though, and he knew that if either had caught her eye, she’d have made a welcoming gesture, would have shared his burden by tak-ing one or other into her arms, but both had their eyes locked shut, and remained clinging to Eliot as if he were all that kept them rooted to the surface of the planet.
The Gun faced them; weapon in one hand, mobile in the other. Put it to your ear, Eliot prayed . . . He meant the gun. Put it to your ear and pull the trigger. Didn’t that happen? – this whole situation, all it meant was some confused kid was trying to make a splash, without ever having considered the stains that splash would make. He’d thought about his name in the papers; about hearing it spoken before Big Ben bonged. But this was the here and now, and there were policemen outside with bigger guns than his, and better versed in how to use them – shouldn’t he have noticed by now there was no way out? He could use the phone, and say he was giving up. Or put the gun to his ear and blow his brains out. Either way, Eliot would be taking his boys outside in a minute or two. There were different levels of trauma involved, and he did not want his boys to see a man shoot himself – but they had their eyes shut. They had their eyes shut, and at least it would be over.
And at the back of his mind he was picturing Chris, who’d have arrived at her office by now, expecting no greater shocks than those of seeing her old colleagues and being reminded of the world of work, only to find greater disturbances elsewhere . . . There’d be a radio playing. No, there’d be an online newscast, filtering on to her col-leagues’ monitors, and the catch-up chatter would falter as one of them would pick up on an Oxford nursery getting airplay . . . and that it was Chris’s kids’ nursery . . . Eliot could see, exactly as if he were there, the way the knowledge would settle on her; the same awful knowledge any mother would suffer at news affecting her children. If her boys weren’t involved, Eliot would have called to say they were safe.
She would blame him. That went without question. The one time he took the boys to nursery (that would be how she’d phrase it: the one time, though that wasn’t true; there’d been dozens of occasions, with no weaponry involved), the one time, and he’d led them into a battle-ground. If he couldn’t do anything else, at least he could avoid actively putting her boys in mortal danger . . .
‘Daddy?’
‘Hush now.‘
Because he didn’t want to hear what Timmy had to say – whatever it was, he had no answers. Hush now.
The Gun said, ‘He said call him, yes?’
‘He said to call him,’ Louise said. ‘Yes.’
‘And he give me whatever I want.’
‘I don’t know what he’ll give you,’ she said. ‘But you have to call. It’s our only chance of getting through this.’ Between the spoken words, odd snatches of outside noise broke through – discordant but purposive, as if a circus were striking ground nearby.
Judy said, ‘I feel sick.’
Oh, fucking great, Eliot thought, in a sudden access of anger – my boys are coping better than you, you stupid fucking bitch –
Louise said, ‘Judy. You’ve got to keep a grip. For all our sakes.’
She spoke more calmly than Eliot would have managed, but there was an undercurrent all the same.
The Gun said, ‘I call him. Do not be sick yet.’
He put the phone to his ear, and kept the gun pointed in their direction.
And what would a hero do, Eliot wondered bitterly. A hero would have made his move by now – there’d been moments, like when Louise had pushed the man to the ground, when it could all have been laid to rest: Eliot could have stepped forward, stamped on the man’s head, picked up the gun, and kept him for the cops. He’d have been reassuring Chris before she’d known anything was going on – Nothing that happened was my fault, except the good bits. And his excuse for not doing so was what? That he had his boys in his arms – that they were holding him back. It would have been dangerous and they might have been hurt, so instead here they were: in a dangerous situation, in which they might be hurt. Or worse. He’d known the alternatives even as he’d watched Louise sprinting for the door, and it was something worse than cowardice that had held him back – it was the simple inability to rise to the occasion. Every man’s worst nightmare, whatever the context. That events will simply leave him at a loss: legs jellified; brain frozen. His boys were an excuse, not a reason. The reason was simply that he, Eliot Pedlar, wasn’t up to it.
‘Who am I speak to?’
Like sitting on a bus, listening to one half of a stranger’s conversation. Except that such moments never carried any sense of consequence for the listener, beyond the occasional frustration of not knowing a story’s outcome.
‘No, I tell you this. I have a gun, you know? And there are people here. Children also.’
As if that were a cue, Timmy and Gordy fastened their grips, and Eliot held both as tightly as he could. Whatever was happening, and however inadequate his responses to it, he would hold his children while he could, and put him-self in the way of whatever came towards them. That much, he was capable of. It was hardwired, wasn’t it? – it was what men did. He was sure it was what men did.
‘Now I tell you this. I do not want to speak to you. There is a man, he works for your secret services, yes? His name is Whistler. He work in Soho.’
They were listening, but all they knew was that this had nothing to do with them.
‘You fetch him here, I talk to him. Yes?’
This had happened almost an hour ago now.
‘I am not listening any more. I have a gun, yes? You know this. I will shoot some people if you try to come in. Goodbye.’
The way he had looked at them after saying that – after telling the policeman that he
’d shoot them – was like nothing Eliot could put a word to.
And then they had waited, and the policemen did not try to enter.
Eventually, they heard the helicopter.
What did it feel like, stepping out of the helicopter? It should have felt like being a star – one rather obviously fallen to earth – but it hadn’t been a great landing, to be honest. An uncomfortable bump that had Ben Whistler reaching for his religion, only to find he hadn’t packed it. The field they’d touched down on was next to a suburban road littered with police cars, with blue-and-white emergency bunting strung at the nearby crossroads. Behind this tape a crowd was gathering, prominent among which would be press, Ben guessed. He hoped none of the cameras picked up his face. It was impossible, he discovered, to walk away from the chopper without crouching, though its blades were too high to touch a hair on his head. One of those precautions common sense demanded, even while logic chuckled.
The man approaching – tall, middle-aged, his uniform singing of authority – was extending a hand towards Ben; a courtesy that didn’t reach as far as his unsmiling face. It turned out he was proffering a mobile phone.
‘It seems we’re running a secretarial service.’ His voice wasn’t smiling either.
‘My phone,’ Ben realized. ‘I left it on my desk.’
‘So it would seem.’
Ben took the device with an apologetic shrug, just as the chopper lifted off, its racket making communication impossible – he sketched a wave at the departing pilot while the grass all around bowed down. The helicopter buzzed improbably away; its noise enormous, then medium-sized, then smaller. The phone in Ben’s hand coughed, or perhaps had been coughing all this time, unheard. Already Ben knew who this would be. Bad Sam, everybody called him.