Reconstruction

by Mick Herron

  My grandfather’s clock

  was too tall for its shelf

  ‘Then he’d wrap their file in a ribbon and deliver it to Operations, who’d confront the target with it. We called it a looter’s tax. Miro worked out how much they’d skimmed, and the Service took it all. If the targets didn’t like the offer, they could take their chances.’

  ‘You’re not talking about prison, are you?’

  ti – ick tock

  ti – ick tock

  Ben shook his head. ‘No need. These people ripped off the companies they worked for, and we’re talking about the construction industry. The best the targets could expect was broken bones, maybe a lot worse. It’s a rough business.’

  ‘So the Service took the money.’

  ‘Eliot wasn’t wrong. The war on terror’s expensive. It helps to have a treasure chest.’

  ‘And that’s the money that went missing.’

  ‘The principle was there from the start. Stolen money’s the easiest kind to steal. Who do you tell?’

  ‘But a quarter of a billion pounds?’

  ‘There’s been a lot of looting.’

  ‘And there’s been no sign of Miro since it went missing,’ Louise said.

  ‘So maybe he’s holed up in the Swiss Alps, recovering from plastic surgery,’ said Ben.

  ‘Or in a different kind of hole altogether.’

  ‘Which brings us back to Chapman. Even if he is behind all this, he didn’t know about Jaime until yesterday. He’s got to be tearing his hair out, wondering how much Jaime knows and how much he’s told. That’s why I’ve got to get Jaime away from here.’

  but it stopped

  short

  never to go again

  Ben said, ‘We’ll go to London, find a safe house, until all this gets sorted. You won’t need to worry about Chapman any more.’

  ‘I don’t know about this money.’

  ‘I believe you, Jaime. It’s all going to be okay.’ He turned to Louise. ‘You can do this? You ask them for a car, for a mobile.’

  She said, ‘I can do that. But Ben – if Chapman did have someone helping him, someone who knew how to shift money around – I think I know who it was.’

  ‘Because you’re the lady in the nursery.’

  ‘He was my boss. Back when I worked in banking.’

  ‘So how would he know Chapman?’

  ‘It might have been the other way around. Chapman might have gone looking for someone exactly like him.’

  Ben said, ‘Either way, Miro was still involved. Otherwise how would he have known about you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ There was too much she didn’t know.

  He said, ‘Chances are, Chapman knows about you too. And may think you know more than you do.’

  ‘Does that make me a loose end?’

  ‘I hope not. Once I get Jaime out of here, he’ll have too much else to worry about anyway.’

  ti – ick tock

  ti – ick tock ‘You’d better go,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Jaime said, ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Well, this isn’t the day I was expecting when I got up this morning.’ Jaime bowed his head at this, and she almost laughed. Some of the kids were the same way: express your disappointment, and they wanted to go and hide. Of course, some others were proto-thugs. ‘It’s okay, Jaime. I hope this works out.’

  ‘Get us the car,’ Ben said. ‘And it will.’

  So this was what it was like in an Incident Van. So this was what it was like in an Incident Van. So this was what it was like in an Incident Van. Eliot’s responses had become trapped in a loop, as if a safety valve had triggered to prevent his heart bursting – it was working all too well. He should have been overjoyed; emotion should have been leaking through his pores. ‘Oh my sweet girl,’ he murmured. He hadn’t called her his sweet anything in years. And Chris wasn’t listening anyway; was wrapped up in her children; literally wrapped up in them; they were clamped to her like parasites: Jesus, don’t call them parasites. But he could have said it out loud and not been heard; could have nipped off for a pint without anyone noticing. A synaesthetic would go blind, witnessing this reunion. And how many people, normal people, would have reached for a word like ‘synaesthetic’ right now? He was an actor delivering an unconvincing performance: all he could really feel was that he was somewhere new. And that this was what it was like in an Incident Van.

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Mummy mummy.’

  ‘We were scared but we hardly cried at all.’

  ‘We hardly cried ever.’

  He was waiting to be asked for confirmation of their bravery, but they were caught in their own loops, each one’s words circling the other’s.

  ‘Mummy.’

  ‘Mummy mummy?’

  And Chris was talking and crying at once, issuing frag-ments of their names between sobs and hiccups – tih – megor – dytim – egord – ‘They were very brave,’ he said.

  ‘Mummy.’

  ‘Mummy mummy.’

  ‘They hardly cried at all.’

  He should be crying now, though – there was something wrong with a husband, a father, who did not cry at such a moment. It wouldn’t be difficult. Here was the trick; you summoned up a scene of enormous sorrow, or long-spent happiness, and embraced it; wrapped yourself round it the way the boys were wrapped round their mother, then let it pour out. Simple. But Eliot couldn’t latch on to the right scene.

  They were bundled in front of him: Chris on her knees; the children all over her; his hands on Chris’s shoulders, and all this was happening in the Incident Van. Which was large, but smaller inside than out because of all the equip-ment it held, and the number of people crammed into it suddenly struck him as oppressive: two officers were close by and there were two others up the far end; a woman perched on a stool, with another officer, also female, hovering awkwardly by – the seated woman was Judy Ainsworth.

  Who would have sacrificed his children to save her own skin.

  And this too looped. Sacrificed his children to save her own skin. Sacrificed his children to save her own skin. She looked like a frog, squatting on that stool – she’d have sacrificed his children? What made her skin valuable? It was lousy skin, sagged and wattled, and that was just those parts he could see. And she thought herself worth more than his smooth unsullied children, whose lives lay all ahead of them? His hands tensed involuntarily, and Chris jerked free from his sudden grasp.

  ‘God sorry –’

  But she was away again. The children were her world.

  Eliot felt himself being judged, though he wasn’t sure who by. None of the cops were looking his way. His own eyes remained on Judy. A sudden flashback bit him: that inhuman noise she’d issued just before propelling herself for the door – Jaime had jumped on her, and men with guns had burst in. He could still feel the grip the boys had taken on his thighs. Before his own hands could tighten again, he jammed them into his pockets, and moved along to where she sat.

  She didn’t look up.

  ‘Judy?’

  ‘Sir, I think she’s still a little upset –’

  ‘We’re all a little upset.’

  ‘Perhaps you should be with your family, sir.’ The officer read him, his stance, his expression, and softly said, ‘It’s been a dreadful morning. You can’t blame her if she feels threatened by –’

  ‘I’m not threatening her. Judy?’

  Sacrificed his children to save her own skin. This time she did look up, and in the time it took her to do so, every-thing changed. There were tears in her eyes. Same Judy, but it was like looking at her through a different doorway; a doorway he’d walked through himself.

  Whatever he’d been going to say came out as, ‘You’re okay?’

  She nodded.

  ‘That’s – good . . .’

  ‘Your boys,’ she said.

  ‘They’re fine. They’re with their mother.’

  ‘He didn’t kill any of us,’ she
said.

  ‘No. No, he didn’t.’

  ‘Is she –?’

  ‘She’s still in there. But he’s not going to hurt her.’ He hunkered down to her level. Her face was the same, and there was a very specific unloveliness to it, as if her body had played a practical joke on her. But he’d never looked her in the eyes before. What reason would he have had to do so? Here in the Incident Van, where artificial light imposed a forensic bleakness on everything, Judy’s eyes were vague and colourless. Out of danger, she remained frightened. He wondered if that were always the case.

  He said, ‘It’s over.’

  She nodded.

  ‘What happened in there – it doesn’t matter, you know.’ He meant her snarling outbursts; her attempt to run; the way she’d have sacrificed his children to save her own skin. ‘People react in different ways.’

  She looked at him blankly.

  ‘I mean . . .’

  And he realized he couldn’t say what he meant, because he meant too many things at once: that everyone was weak, everyone was guilty; that only having his boys there had kept him from melting down too . . . And that he might have done or said things this morning that would keep him awake in nights to come, but nobody else would remember them, not with Judy’s outbursts to recall instead. But Judy wouldn’t have wanted to hear this; and besides, the words would have choked off as Judy’s face dissolved into tears, along with everything else – just washed away in front of him as if a plug had been pulled; simply swirled round going nowhere, until it struck him that Judy wasn’t crying, he was – Eliot Pedlar. Just when he’d been about to offer comfort, a terrifying reversal took place, because she was reaching her arms out for him instead, and if anything should have stopped his sobbing it was the prospect of this squat witch comforting him, with his wife and kids not feet away. So why was he leaning into her embrace? He didn’t know, but he did it anyway.

  It’s okay.

  Don’t worry.

  You just cry.

  So Eliot Pedlar, who’d just found out what it was like in an Incident Van, closed his eyes and sobbed his heart out. And before it was halfway gone, his family had come across and joined him.

  Down by the river, smoking wasn’t enough: the pinprick afterslap told Bad Sam Chapman those bastard midges had bitten him. It was otherwise lifeless; the locals having more to occupy them today than early afternoon strolls through an urban approximation of nature. And even if he hadn’t known anything was happening, he’d have known something was happening. The day was pent like a tightly laced boxing glove. Where Bad Sam lived, alarms erupted with monstrous regularity, but most were triggered by nothing substantial – some areas had a hair-trigger atmosphere, that was all. Grandpont wasn’t like that, he guessed, but today wasn’t normal, and out of sight, though not far away, whatever freakish charge had gripped the neighbourhood was fizzing and sparking, desperate to ground itself.

  He slipped Ben Whistler’s BlackBerry back into his pocket. He was thinking, as he walked, of Louise Kennedy.

  Kennedy had gone back into the nursery, and Sam Chapman didn’t know why. Maybe it didn’t matter: the same circumstances produced different reactions in different people. Most of us are average – it’s what the word means – but there’s always variation. We all hit the ground at the same painful speed, but some of us get up and walk away. Louise Kennedy was one of the lucky ones, and either brave or arrogant enough to think she could survive the same fall twice. That had been his first impression, but then he’d learned about her connection to Crispin Tate. With that in mind, you had to throw the same circum-stances back in the cup, give it another shake: maybe Ms Kennedy was not what she seemed. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it probably wants you to think it’s a duck. A thought which brought him to Whistler . . . What was Whistler’s game, anyway? And how much did he know?

  Thinking all this, Bad Sam had taken the wrong track on the far side of the bridge, and had wound up next to the railway line. So that’s where he was when the birds took off; a sudden spume of them lifting out of the trees lining the tracks, their wings thrashing and clattering as they mowed the air. It was a less than a second before the significance of their flight struck him.

  He started to run.

  ‘What did he say about me, Jaime?’

  ‘He call you his friend.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘That if something happen to him, I should call you.’

  ‘So – what made you wait so long?’

  Jaime tried looking puzzled.

  Just the two of them now. Louise was back in the world, either arranging a car or not – Ben thought she would. When she’d left, it was with the look of a woman who’d registered that what had happened this morning was just a small part of something that had happened elsewhere; that Jaime had no more wanted any of this than she had. Which didn’t mean Jaime had been entirely open with them.

  ‘It’s been three weeks. He gave you instructions what to do if anything happened to him. Did you not think vanishing counted?’

  ‘. . . I think he might come back.’

  ‘How long did you keep thinking that?’

  ‘I not understand you.’

  ‘For the first couple of days, I’d have thought the same thing. That he’d come back. That he’d gone on a bender or whatever. A drinking spree,’ he added. ‘But after a week, I’d be worried. I’d assume something had happened. Just like he said it might.’

  ‘I ring you,’ Jaime said defensively.

  ‘After another fortnight.’

  ‘He is very private man. You know that.’

  ‘And that might have kept me quiet another couple of days. But not for three weeks, Jaime. Three weeks is well past worried.’

  Jaime said nothing.

  ‘You weren’t there, were you, Jaime? You didn’t know he’d gone.’

  Jaime looked at the gun in his hand. After all these hours, it was starting to look normal: the way an umbrella or a clipboard might. ‘I – he – No. We were not speaking.’ ‘You’d had an argument.’

  ‘He is nice man. I like him. But I also like . . . ’ He fell quiet; a parade of other things he liked marching through his mind.

  Ben said, gently, ‘You like clubs and dancing. Parties and young people.’

  Jaime said, ‘It does not mean I do not like Miro.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But he never want to go out. He says there is no need. He says we can have a nice life together, without noisy clubs and . . .’

  ‘And parties.’

  ‘Now he has met me, he does not need to go to clubs any more. That is what he tell me.’

  ‘But you did. Didn’t you?’

  Jaime said nothing.

  ‘Jaime. I’m not blaming you. I’m just trying to work out where you were for three weeks. Why you didn’t know Miro was missing.’

  And why the dogs didn’t know Jaime existed.

  Jaime said, ‘Miro is a good man. He is kind. But . . . ’

  ‘But not terribly exciting.’

  ‘So I go to club without him, yes. And I meet a man.’

  ‘These things happen.’

  ‘This man like the same things I like. And he tell me has money, and that we can do nice things, go on holiday, and . . .’

  And eat in nice restaurants and drink nice wine and take nice drugs and fuck each other stupid, thought Ben.

  ‘But it didn’t work out.’

  ‘He is a bastard.’

  ‘Men mostly are,’ Ben admitted. ‘So you went home to Miro.’

  ‘I ring him up,’ Jaime said. ‘On the telephone,’ he explained.

  ‘But you didn’t get an answer.’

  ‘This is not like Miro. Not many people call him. And he always answer telephone.’

  That figured, thought Ben. On any list of assumptions he’d make about Miro, the ability to ignore a ringing phone wouldn’t appear.

  ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘You thought
what?’

  Jaime looked at the gun again and then at Ben. ‘I thought maybe he hurt himself.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The nursery rhyme tape was faltering. The batteries, thought Ben – its batteries were dying. Jack and Jill were struggling up that hill. The summit receded the further they got, and perhaps they were having doubts as to the wisdom of heading uphill to fetch water.

  He said, ‘He was a lonely man.’

  ‘So I worry. Yes.’

  Ben suffered a sudden flash of empathy with Miro Weiss, but this wasn’t the time or the place. ‘I’m sure he was sorry to lose you, Jaime. But that wasn’t the reason for anything that happened to him.’

  Jaime’s eyes were wet. ‘He was nice man. I’m sorry I treat him like that.’

  ‘So what did you do? When he didn’t answer the phone?’

  ‘I go to see him.’

  ‘But he wasn’t there.’

  ‘I still have keys.’ He looked away from Ben, then back. ‘I have copy made. Just in case.’

  ‘We call that a contingency plan. What was his place like?’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Was it the same as when you left?’

  ‘No. Messy. Very messy. Not like Miro would leave it.’

  And that would be the dogs. Protocol demanded they left a place the way they found it, but frustration had a way of nudging protocol aside. The more time passed – the more Miro stayed disappeared – the less they’d have cared about keeping things neat.

  ‘You were lucky,’ he said. ‘If you’d gone back sooner, they’d have picked you up. After the first couple of weeks, they didn’t have his flat under surveillance. They’d have known he wasn’t coming back, because they knew he was too careful for that.’

  ‘Or because he is dead,’ Jaime said flatly.

  ‘If they’d thought he was dead, they’d have thought he was innocent,’ Ben said.

  Jaime furrowed again, as he worked his way through that one.

  ‘So maybe they wanted everyone else to think he was still alive,’ Ben said. ‘Because they already knew he wasn’t.’

  Whistler.

  ‘I think that’s our ride.’

  We’ve got your car. Just like you wanted.

  Jaime said, ‘It might be trap.