Reconstruction (12 page)

‘His offi—’

‘This flap. Where is it?’

‘Oxford.’

Oxford. Ben had never been to Oxford. He was a Loughborough man.

What the hell did Nott want?

So Ben Whistler, anyway: Ben Whistler looked like what you got when you thought about a rugby player, then fixed his teeth. Six-two and broad in the shoulders with pale grey eyes and straw-coloured hair; a slightly crooked nose, which he’d never had the decency to break. ‘That’s just its normal shape’ was a phrase he was called on to use more than most men. And he carried everywhere this air of untidiness, despite the suit, despite the tie; always looked – as one of the distinctly unroselike queens of the database once put it – like he’d just been dragged through a blonde backwards. A comment which had caused a momentary lull in conversation, as her fellow worker-queens filed the image for private perusal later.

He was thirty-four, and if not quite an underachiever, hadn’t set the world alight. The targets he’d had ten years ago remained just that: undiminished concentric circles that might as well have been nailed to a distant tree. It was handy he’d set different targets since.

As for Jonathan Nott, he wasn’t head of department; he was head of the whole damn building. Which wasn’t Vauxhall Cross, but still . . . Ben was fourth floor. Operations Director didn’t visit the fourth floor much – the basic idea behind departments like Ben’s being, they should run in such a way that Operations Director forgot they existed. The lift should skip the fourth floor alto-gether. Ben had rarely met Jonathan Nott, still less been wanted by him.

The fourth floor. He was here now, so went to his cubicle – exactly the way he’d left it; a benign mess, delivering the impression that work was happening, but wasn’t getting on top of him. He took his mobile from his pocket, and dared to turn it on at last, already inwardly flinching from the anticipated fall-out from last night’s misbehaviour – he’d got talking to a girl in a bar; talked to her so long, he’d stood his date up . . . And yep, here came the voice-mail alerts. At the same moment, Ben saw the new post-it attached to his monitor:
JN wants you – now (or sooner).
He was a bit late for now. ‘Sooner’ would have demanded prior notice. Switching his mobile off, putting it down, he headed back to the stairwell; his heart pumping so much, he didn’t really need more exercise.

Last time he’d had this summons – two weeks previously – he’d been more or less expecting it, and Nott’s first words were, ‘Any idea where Weiss is?’

Three seconds into the room, this was. No
Whistler, sit
down, cup of coffee?
Then Nott had glanced at his watch. He was mostly bald, and what hair still fringed his ears and the back of his head was shaved to stubble. Broad shoulders and eyes like pebbles, though not so friendly. Probably sixty, but Ben guessed he’d been that for a while, and would remain so for ditto. Some people had an ideal age and stuck to it. Ben was hoping his own was thirty-four . . . Miro Weiss. Ben had known this would be about Weiss – there was no other reason for Nott wanting to see him.

‘None at all, sir.’

Firmly voiced; unfaltering gaze.

‘The dogs have already asked, right?’

(The dogs were precisely that: the Service hounds. Their bark, rumour had it, was softer than their bite – and Ben, along with everybody else on the fourth floor, had endured the bark lately, which was harsh enough. Bad Sam Chapman had been prowling incessantly; now there was a bite you didn’t want to know more about.)

‘That’s right, sir.’

‘And nothing’s occurred to you since.’

‘If it had,’ Ben said, ‘I’d have –’

‘Right, right, right. You’d have taken it to the dogs.’ Then Nott said: ‘Sex, money, boredom.’

And leaned back in his chair.

Jonathan Nott: probably a Jonty. In some ideal future, in which all possible promotions had come to pass, Ben could see himself partnering Jonty on a croquet lawn – partner-ing him being the only way to win. Competing would involve fluffing shots and bollocking strategy, then being enthusiastic about being whupped: ‘Well played, sir.’ No need to stand on ceremony, Benjamin. Call me Jonty. Probably Jonty had a daughter or two: damn fine fillies, they’d be. Already he could see the old man wiping away a tear of undiluted joy when Ben asked permission to –

‘The three great motivators.’

Sex, money and boredom, he meant.

‘But I’m not sure boredom comes into play. You account-ant types have a pretty high threshold of that, don’t you?’

‘So we’re told, sir.’

‘Wouldn’t be accountants otherwise, hmm? Did you

know him well?’

‘Not too well, sir.’

‘Gay, wasn’t he?’

Past tense.

‘I always assumed so,’ Ben said carefully.

‘Ever make a play for you?’

‘Not overtly, sir.’

‘Care to elaborate?’

Well of course he fucking wouldn’t.

‘If he ever made a pass, it was too subtle for me, sir. When a man asks if I’d like a drink after work, I generally assume he wants a drink after work.’

‘And did you?’

‘Occasionally. Never just the two of us.’

There was a pub on the corner – name a junction in Soho there wasn’t – and Ben and Miro Weiss had indeed passed an evening or two there, with other colleagues; even Reggie once. There’d been a World Cup game on, and half the department was clustered round the big screen.

‘I’ll take your word for it. I’m sure the dogs didn’t.’

They hadn’t. Dates, places; what was said, what was drunk. Every detail they could unearth, recorded.

‘Well, he lived alone. I’m sure he got his end away now and then, but he was damn bloody careful about it. Rumours about some boy he might or might not have had, but even the dogs haven’t sniffed that one out. So for the moment, we’ve narrowed it down to the money.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Though mind you,’ said Nott, ‘the missing quarter of a billion pounds was a clue there.’

And that had more or less been that. Everyone on the fourth floor had been through something similar, and more than one had been granted the same payoff line – hard not to imagine Jonty honing it between interviews; playing around with the stress until he had it just the way he liked it. Which was arguably abuse of power, but the Service had no strong tradition of employees’ rights.

Meanwhile,
Oxford
was still floating through Ben’s mind. Nothing he could remember linked him to Oxford.

Twenty past nine. He knocked, and went in. Jonathan Nott was leaning back in his chair, apparently chewing the inside of his mouth. Ben collected the tics and posturings of those above him.

As before, Nott jumped right in. ‘Sam Chapman was in Oxford this morning.’

Ben said, ‘I heard there’s a flap, sir.’

‘Sam Chapman was doing a C&C. How many of those do you suppose he’s handled?’

Numbers being treacherous, slippery objects – Ben, an accountant, was wary of the little devils – he didn’t hazard a guess. ‘A lot, I should imagine. Sir.’

‘Too many, it seems. He got careless.’

Ben had a sudden image of what carelessness might mean: blood on the pavement; hair coating the walls.
Collect-and-comfort
wasn’t quite a euphemism; it meant bringing someone in gently. But when the someone didn’t want to come, comfort could turn unkind.

And what did this have to do with him?

‘What happened, sir?’

‘It’s not yet clear. Chapman’s got a containment issue on his hands. We’ll run the postmortem later.’

‘Figure of speech?’

‘For the time being. Neil Ashton was hit by a car. A big car, apparently. Four wheel drive.’ Nott glazed slightly. Maybe car-porn was his thing. ‘He might live. Stupid prick needn’t think he’s coming back to a job, though.’

Ben kept an unshocked face. In this line stuff happened, everyone knew that, but Ben’s was a desk job; the worst it involved being a paper-cut, or a bawling out for jamming the shredder. Neil belonged to the dogs, who were nearer the sharp end, but didn’t usually get hit by cars . . . Ben had the sense of being underneath a wall, a major brick of which had just slipped loose. Any moment now, debris would rain.

Because Nott wasn’t saying anything, and someone ought to, he said, ‘What about the target?’

‘Oh, the target. Yes. That’s interesting.’

Seconds ticked past, while Ben was allowed to absorb the adjective.

‘The
target
snaffled Ashton’s gun and vamoosed. Now he’s turned up in a nursery school in a suburb. He’s got hostages, children among them, and he says he’s going to start shooting soon. Unless you, Ben Whistler, go talk to him. Couldn’t pop up there, could you?’

In the nursery, backs to the wall, they sat: Judy, Louise, Eliot, Timmy and Gordon. The man with the gun stood a few yards in front of them. The metal shutters were over the windows, and with just one overhead light on, it felt like mid-evening instead of 9.45 in the morning –
quarter
to ten
! Louise couldn’t believe so much had been crammed into such a short time; couldn’t credit, either, that so little had happened since she’d walked back into the annexe, having cleared the immediate area of potential victims. She could have been on the other side of the gate by now. Instead she’d become part of this stasis; this short queue against the wall, waiting for God knew what.

Neither Eliot nor Judy had believed it when she’d walked back in.

That had been almost an hour ago. The intruder was off the ground by then; had recovered his gun, though not his composure. Sweat shone on his forehead, and something wild had broken his eyes, two parts fear and one part something Louise didn’t recognize, though she felt its force when he spun towards her and pointed the gun. He spat something – Spanish. He was spitting Spanish. The gun looked ready to spit too; its barrel round as a cannon’s, dark as a well.

Eliot shouted: ‘No!’

‘You –’

‘Don’t,’ said Louise.

For a moment everything froze, while different realities struggled to be born. In most of them the trigger was pulled, the world grew dark, and Louise ceased to be. In this one the boy released his breath, and lowered the gun. Louise’s heart began again, though she hadn’t noticed it stopping. Timmy raised his head from his father’s leg, his face a blank mask awaiting its next expression. What that would be depended on the next outrage life delivered.

‘You go against the wall,’ the boy said at last. Then he backed away from them, and kicked the door shut. He looked at the lock.

‘The keys aren’t here,’ Louise told him.

‘You shut up now.’

Judy said, under her breath, ‘You came back.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re a bigger fucking idiot than I thought.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Be quiet.’

What next? Outside, the morning’s noises followed their usual routine – cars heading up to the council car park, or down towards the main road – but that couldn’t last, and without consciously knowing what she’d been waiting for,

Louise felt something relax inside when she heard the first siren. The police station was less than five minutes away. That time had been crammed with activity elsewhere – with phone calls from Dave and others; with a rehearsed police reaction to news of firearms on school property; with a mad scramble for equipment and instructions, along with things she couldn’t know about, such as the rude awakening of DS Bain – but for her, it had been filled with the slow realization that this was where life had led her: that all her career decisions and emotional mistakes were nothing more than an elaborate joke, leading to this punchline: Louise Kennedy, trapped in the nursery she’d chosen to teach in, alongside a man she’d had an overwhelmingly stupid one-night stand with, his two terrified children, and a woman she couldn’t stand and who, she was increasingly certain, had wet herself in the recent past. Oh yes, and a man with a gun.

It must have been nine o’clock when the Dalek spoke.

He’d read somewhere, a couple of years ago, that the mystery of how birds navigated had been solved. It seemed they used the road network: like an AA map, only actual size. How they’d managed before roads was presumably awaiting resolution; meanwhile, Ben could see their point. From the helicopter, the landscape was a thing of rolling wonder: interfolding shades of green across which cloud shadows tumbled; tripping over trees; skiing over reservoirs – beautiful, but useless if you needed to know where you were heading. But the roads that ribboned through it knew the way, and the helicopter’s own shadow skated alongside the largest of them, zipping past cars as if it weren’t simply moving faster, but on a different scale altogether. Oxford drew closer with every beat of the blades, and Ben didn’t have to be a swallow to know that much.

The pilot said something: too used to being in one of these things to realize he was inaudible. Ben just nodded.

So how fast had this happened? Half an hour ago, it had been an ordinary morning: he’d turned up at work with the usual expectation of boredom, adulterated by that intestinal queasiness which had been present since Miro Weiss’s last day. And now he was in a helicopter, which was a first, and ideally a last, as it wasn’t helping the queasiness any. The chopper had collected him from the roof not five minutes after Nott dismissed him: those images of working among soundproofed glass walls and handgun galleries no longer seemed farfetched. It was tempting to wonder who’d noticed, though not much impressed the local girls. But why him? Ben was a desk man; he shuffled numbers – big numbers, but still a far cry from being whisked away in an airborne blender. Sure, when he’d joined the Service, he’d had those Leicester-Square pictures of foreign assignments and shiny gadgetry, but he’d been recruited for his accountancy degree. Five years later, his BlackBerry was state of the art as he got, and that was ex-display from Dixons.

And he couldn’t help wishing this had happened next week, when he wouldn’t be here. Ben had holiday booked. He was taking the road to Rio: margaritas, se?oritas,
hasta
la vista
s. All of which could still happen – bottom line was, he was Civil Service; they could take his life, but they’d never take his annual leave – but he recognized that this morning could throw his future out of whack. The helicopter wasn’t just taking him from his desk. It was flying him into the world of the dogs.