by Mick Herron
nodded understandingly.
‘Bitter isn’t the word.’
Which meant it was.
‘I think when her husband left her – well . . . You can see why he did, actually.’
‘She’s divorced?’
‘She’s a widow. Like me.’
He waited.
‘But would have been divorced.’
He waited some more.
She took a last drag on her cigarette, then crushed it in an ashtray embossed with Princess Diana’s portrait, though which event in that short, hysterical life it commemorated wasn’t clear. ‘He went off with another woman. Then they were killed in a car crash.’
‘I see.’
She looked at the TV screen, which had just flipped pictures and was now showing an airport scene: hostile crowds waiting while security measures eked themselves out. Chapman recognized stock footage when he saw it. Somebody was making connections: hostages equals terrorism. Terrorism causes death and panic and outrageous queues at airports.
‘It’s one of those Arabs, isn’t it? At the nursery school.’
‘Is that what they’ve said?’
‘More or less. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not prejudice.’ The d had dropped off the end: strange how often that happens with this particular assertion. ‘But I once had a tenant from that part of the world. Saudi or wherever.’ She waved an airy hand. Don’t bog her down with geographical precision. ‘She barely bathed, I can tell you. The atmosphere became quite oppressive.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Not as bad as darkies, though,’ she dared.
‘I know what you mean.’
‘Talk about filthy habits.’
‘My place is full of them,’ Bad Sam Chapman told her.
‘The government makes you, I suppose. I watched that spy thing on telly. There was a blackie in that.’ She exhaled smoke. ‘Course, they shot him in the head in the end.’
‘Does she talk much about him?’
‘Keeps herself to herself, mostly. Only told me that much when she’d . . . ’ Walker made a tippling motion. ‘Shame. But she’s not got much else in her life.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Would you like one, by the way? It’s after twelve.’
‘That would be kind.’
‘Well, maybe I’ll just have a small one.’ He was twist-ing her arm, judging by her tone. She moved into the kitchen where he heard her opening a cupboard, then a bottle, then two, then the fridge, with such unclumsy swiftness it was difficult to believe she didn’t do this regularly. When she returned she had a fizzing G&T in each hand. As soon as he’d relieved her of one, she reached for her cigarettes.
‘Here. Have one of mine.’
‘Don’t mind if I do.’
She steadied his rock-steady hand with her own as he offered his lighter.
Chapman said, ‘So where did it happen?’
‘This is like an interrogation, isn’t it?’
‘Except without the rubber truncheon.’
She wagged a finger. ‘Now now. I may be a single woman, but that doesn’t mean you can take advantage.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it, Mrs Walker.’
‘Deirdre.’
She looked at him over the top of her G&T and sniggered. ‘You ever do proper spying? Or just go round talking to people?’
‘You’d be surprised how much spying gets done, just talking to people.’
‘Have you ever killed anyone?’
‘I could answer that,’ he said. ‘But then I’d have to kill you.’
She sniggered more, then stopped.
Something in Chapman’s eyes made his joke a lot less funny.
Jaime put the mobile back into his pocket.
Ben wrote on the sheet of paper he’d collected.
‘I tell them everything is okay.’
‘I heard you.’
‘What you do now?’
Ben shook his head.
‘I am in charge here!’
Jaime’s voice rose at the end of that. Jaime’s voice nearly broke.
Ben held the paper up.
SAY NOTHING
‘What the hell’s going on in there?’
‘Sounds like our spook is taking control.’
‘Trying something on, you mean.’
Faulks said: ‘Whatever just happened, Jaime didn’t pull the trigger. And you heard him just now, he says every-thing’s all right.’
‘But it isn’t,’ Fredericks reminded him.
Because they were still out here, and the kid with the gun was still in there. Jaime. He didn’t like it that Faulks was calling him ‘Jaime’; he’d preferred it when they’d all agreed that the kid with the gun was the bastard.
‘What’s Whistler playing at?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He’s supposed to be calming things down. Finding out what the bastard wants.’
‘He’s the one with the gun pointed at him,’ Faulks said. ‘Meaning?’
‘I doubt he’s deliberately trying to wind Jaime up. Where would that leave him?’
It is not on.
‘What’s not on?’ Fredericks immediately asked.
Doesn’t matter.
‘Hush a mo,’ Faulks said quietly.
In the Major Incident Vehicle, time ticked on at the same speed as everywhere else. But as the voices coming through the speakers thinned, it seemed to Fredericks that it slowed to a crawl; that he’d be here forever, head tilted slightly upwards to catch whatever might come next: a random word, a shriek, a gunshot. Or a sudden unexpected splash, followed by nothing at all.
SAY NOTHING
Jaime looked at the paper.
THE PHONE IS BUGGED
His face creased.
Ben was starting to feel like Rolf Harris. Or someone, anyway. He wasn’t positive it was Rolf Harris.
THEY’RE LISTENING TO EVERY WORD WE SAY Jaime looked at the phone in his hand, then back at Ben. ‘It is not on.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Ben whispered.
Eliot said, ‘Look, exactly what the –’ ‘Shush.’
‘It’s not up to you to –’
Ben looked at him.
Eliot shut up.
Ben scribbled again, the black marker pen squeaking as he wrote: THE MAN WHO TRIED TO KILL YOU IS OUTSIDE
‘Are you crazy?’ Louise said, in a harsh whisper.
‘Make him angry, and he might kill all of us,’ Eliot said, same volume. ‘I have children here. Or had you forgotten?’
Ben looked at Judy. ‘Anything to add?’
‘Don’t fucking talk to me.’
‘Fair enough. Now shut up, all of you.’ He turned to Jaime, holding the paper at arms’ length: Here is the news. The word KILL arrested him, Ben could tell.
For a wonder, they’d all done what he’d said. The only noise leaked through from outside: no discernible voices, but an overlapping murmur, and the occasional electronic squawk. They might have been trapped in a zombie movie: just the odd shuffling sound breaking in, as if there were a braindead army hovering out there, waiting for a clue as to their presence.
At last Jaime said, ‘What we do, then?’
We.
He was holding the mobile phone in his gunfree hand, staring at it as if he’d wound up holding a live grenade, with no idea how.
Ben turned the sheet over and started scrawling again, then thought better of it. Dropping both pen and paper, he held a hand out to Jaime, who didn’t notice.
‘Jaime?’
The boy looked up.
He didn’t want to say it out loud. Just nodded his head in the direction of the phone, and wiggled his hand.
Even the little boys were quiet. Perhaps they’d stopped breathing.
Jaime put the phone on the floor, and took two steps back. The gun in his hand was still pointing at Ben.
It wasn’t far to where the phone lay. And it wasn’t as if having his back to the wall made Ben safer: he could be shot just as dead standing there as anywhere
else. He forced himself to keep his eyes on Jaime as he collected the phone and straightened up: this, his body language said, was the essence of honesty. We. You just said We. This is what We do next.
He put a finger to his lips.
The phone was just a phone: how many times had he held a mobile phone? There was a great long chunk of his life during which he never had, him or anyone else; then bang – it happened every day. How many things could you say that of? It probably wasn’t the moment to make a list. This one was no different to any of the others: what-ever the makers wanted you to think, every mobile was basically the same lump of plastic. This one, though . . . This one felt heavier than it should. And while Ben knew that was his mind playing tricks – taking the knowledge that this phone was bugged, and transmitting that knowledge to the palm of his hand – that feeling wouldn’t leave him as he carried the phone through the door to the toilets, and dumped it down the pan in the first cubicle.
‘What was that?’
Faulks ignored Fredericks for a moment. Lowered his face to his hands instead, and rubbed it, as if he were washing himself.
‘Did he just . . .’
‘He just dumped it down the toilet. Yes.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ.’
The van was growing smaller – all those banks of listening equipment seemed to swell in direct proportion to their new-found uselessness.
Fredericks said, ‘I should never have let him in there.’
‘I don’t remember you having much choice.’
‘He’s endangering every hostage. What are we sup-posed to do now?’
Faulks said, ‘He’s a spook, Malc. He’s got his own agenda. But I doubt that includes getting innocents killed. He’s in the firing line too, don’t forget.’
‘But whatever he’s up to, we’re not allowed to hear it.’
‘We’ve got directional mikes. They’ll pick up something.’
‘Everything?’
‘Depends how loud they are.’
Fredericks shook his head. ‘He’s cutting us out of the loop.’
‘Or somebody.’
‘What?’
‘Us or somebody.’ Faulks reached for a set of head-phones. ‘It might not be us he’s keeping secrets from.’
He was back from his mission. He’d drowned the phone. Everything was exactly as it had been, except that the dig-ital spy had been removed from the scenario.
There were other ways of eavesdropping, of course – directional microphones; possibly other bugs clamped to the outside walls during that aborted incursion. If Bad Sam Chapman was outside, he’d be glued to the speakers now; wondering why the hell the main attraction had just dissolved into watery silence. And possibly switching to one of those back-up devices: bug on the wall, directional mike.
On a table beneath one of the shuttered windows sat a tape recorder; a children’s model in big chunky plastic, with primary-coloured buttons. A slew of pre-recorded tapes surrounded it, and Ben chose one at random; slotted it in. It burst into life at a frightening volume:
EELS ON THE BUS GO ROUND AND ROU
He fumbled with the dial.
nd round and round round and round Better.
The others were staring as if he’d gone mad. Even the little boys – nursery music? They raised their heads from their father’s thighs, and gazed like woodland creatures who’ve just heard a piper in the trees.
He said, ‘Okay. Now we can talk.’
Words just loud enough to be heard above the music.
‘You’re at Marble Arch,’ he said. ‘Waiting for me. And two men arrive in a car looking for you.’
‘Yes.’
‘The same men who tried to pick you up this morning.’ ‘Yes. That is right.’
‘But you must have got away from them last night. What did you do?’
‘I run down into underground.’ Jaime’s whisper was hoarse: this wasn’t easy for him. Whispering in a foreign language – two things to concentrate on at once. ‘But I don’t get on train. I come up other side. Other side of road.’
‘Got you.’
Jaime looked puzzled.
‘I understand. Never mind. Carry on.’
‘They follow me, but I think I lose them. I am good at disappearing in crowd. They think they trap me, but I lose them.’
‘What time was this?’
Jaime said, ‘It is late. Many people, though. There are many people coming from pubs and shows. Enough to disappear in.’
‘And you’re sure they followed you down?’
‘Tall man did. I not see other one.’
From what Ben had heard, it was when you couldn’t see Bad Sam that you had to worry.
‘I hide behind ticket machine. The tall man –’
‘His name was Ashton.’
‘Ashton, he go through barrier, and stand at top of moving escalator. There are lot of people going down, young people, all with rucksacks and making noise. He think I am one of them.’
‘But you were hiding by the ticket machine.’
There was a rhythm to this. The occasional prod was all it took. Jaime’s story was up and running.
‘Yes. And while his back is to me, I go out other entrance. I come out other side of road.’
Ben flashed on Marble Arch. That side of the road was where the bus stops were – the intercity buses, on their way out of London from Victoria.
‘And you got on a bus.’
the wheels on the bus go –
‘I did not plan to. I plan to run, to keep running. I do not plan to leave London.’
‘So why did you?’
‘Because there is bus there, as I reach the bus stop. It say Oxford on the front. And I remember something Miro tell me.’
From below, DS Bain must have resembled a gargoyle on a college battlement, but nobody was looking up right now. After a while, you don’t see the gargoyles; they’re just another kind of brickwork.
Though the occasional crackle in an earpiece confirmed a connection to the earthly scene.
Target acquired.
Steady . . .
But no: that was last time.
This time, things were quiet below – quiet, anyway, inside the crucial circle. This was the area mapped out by the rifle’s crosshairs; a tiny, intimate region only Bain currently understood. To step inside that area was to surrender to the possibility of death.
The man in the dirty vest appears once more, and the thing in his hand acquires definition as he turns to the window, looks directly through it, and brings the object level with his chest, pointing it outwards, into the night . . .
Who could have known that his gun wasn’t loaded?
The wind gusted without warning, and made its usual rearrangements: rustled grass; plucked at sleeve and hair; attempted to dislodge a weapons specialist. But Bain wasn’t moving. Movement was the marksman’s enemy; every limb adjustment demanding a recalibration of the required shot . . . Bullets couldn’t be recalled once the trig-ger had been squeezed. Nobody needed to tell Bain that.
But the inquiry had determined that the shot had been justified – the man had been holding a gun, after all. An unloaded antique, but still a gun. A hurled bedside lamp – a bang and a flash – had completed the picture.
shots fired shots fired
‘And you’re comfortable with returning to duty?’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘In your firearms role, I mean.’
‘Of course, sir.’
That conversation also figured in dreams; an endless recurring dream, it felt like, and thus an accurate reflection of an endless recurring reality. Loaded conversations in airless offices. Conversations that always had the same subtext:
You killed a man.
I know. I was there.
Could you do it again?
The role was not about shooting people, so the wisdom went. The role was about Containment.
Containment, though, covered a broad spectrum, and occasionally involved shooting
people.
Below, the crowd milled about with the apparently pointless but somehow graceful motion of dust motes in sunlight. Everything moved. The wind tickled the trees and bushes lining the rec ground; a train within hailing distance buffeted its way along the tracks. A car Bain couldn’t see roared into life. The only motionless object was the door framed by the crosshairs of the rifle’s scope.
Target acquired. . .
Steady.
‘Anyone could turn up at the door, say they were with Special Branch, or whatever you said.’
‘You’d do well to bear that in mind. Tell me about Judy’s husband. Did she talk about his business interests at all?’
‘I’d like you to go now.’
‘And I’d like you to answer my questions. Did she talk about his business interests at all?’
‘She – he – she only talked about him once. Really talked. Other than that it was Derek used to this or used to that. Like he was still alive, except they were divorced.’ She was forgetting to smoke; forgetting to drink. Sam Chapman was no longer partner in scandal. He was more like the big bad wolf this foolish piggy had invited in.
On the TV screen, the nursery view had again given way to the larger picture: a pixellated version of join-the-dots – Dunblane/Hungerford/Columbine. A little lacking in narrative cohesion, but the names pushed buttons that would guarantee viewing figures. On another channel, they’d be flogging the numbers game: 9/11; 7/7. A sequence of diminishing returns – so far – whose consequences rattled round the world.
She was flapping, but he’d stick around a while longer. To find out how much she knew, in case this turned out to be another loose end in need of tying off.
‘Your glass is empty,’ he said.
‘I – I don’t want another.’
‘Of course you do. One last one. I’ll fetch it.’
Stepping into the kitchen, he looked back, but she hadn’t turned. In the mirror, he watched her fiddling with the top button of her blouse; twisting it nervously, as if it were constricting her breath. And then she shook another cigar-ette from her pack, and lit it with a trembling hand.
When she leaned forward to meet the flame, the back of her neck exposed itself whitely, as if it were laid on a block.
The wheels on the bus, having gone round and round, were fading into silence.
It was 12.22, and Eliot’s legs had turned to stone. His children’s grip had murdered his circulation, and if he ever walked out of this building again, he doubted he’d man-age it on his own two feet – which would be all he needed: footage of him being stretchered out of the annexe. Undying proof of his utter wimpishness.