Authors: Mick Herron
These weren’t her thoughts, precisely, but she would have recognized and agreed with them if they’d been presented to her. But for the moment, having crossed the pedestrian bridge at Friars Wharf, she was walking down the street towards her place of work; chin tilted upright; bad thoughts painted on her face; cigarette jammed into a mouth that was a straight line, except for the downturn at the corners.
7.41.
Eliot glanced into the rear view mirror for what he could see of his boys – heads together like a pair of squirrels – and caught sight of part of the upper left quadrant of his own face as he did so: one blue/grey eye sheltering under a dark eyebrow he should trim really, except only old people did that, didn’t they? Or needed to, anyway; their eyebrows like GM hedges. His weren’t that bad yet, but the operative word was
yet
. . . Face facts, the prevailing condition was ‘yet’. Because Eliot was looking at forty; or rather, forty was looking at Eliot: suppressing a snigger, wiping a grin off its face. Forty wasn’t in itself anything to worry about, but everything that followed it exercised his imagination. Forty sounded the starting pistol on hair-loss and paunch extension; it was the point at which – time would tell – you discovered whether your penis was going to drop off, or develop its own mindset and acquire start-ling new inclinations. Schoolgirls, if you were unlucky; or, if you were
really
unlucky, schoolboys. All of which sup-posed, of course, that you weren’t securely bedded down in a warm and loving relationship with wife or long-term sex-partner. Eliot, for his part, had Christine, who was beautiful and warm and loving, it was true, but for whom sex had slipped off the agenda the same time everything else had, with the exception of her children.
As this familiar complaint reared up, it was banished almost immediately by the Memory.
And then somebody – definitely one of his boys – said, ‘Daddy, when we’ve builded our castle, you can visit it.’
‘Thank you.’
(He was touched, actually.)
‘Will you bring cake?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll definitely bring cake. Can mummy come too?’
‘Mummy’ll live there.’
‘Oh.’
‘With us.’
‘Yes. With just us.’
‘. . . Okay.’
A whole different memory threatened his composure now – a vague daydream he and Christine had concocted back in their summer of love; something about a chateau in the woods where they’d live alone forever – but swam out of reach before he’d taken a grip on it.
. . . So what else? Eliot was dark, lean, reasonably tall; had somewhat gaunt features which, when he was pursuing an idea with particular intensity – something he was prone to when alone – tended to cast themselves into shapes usually associated with melancholy; expressions which could earn him a ‘Cheer up, mate, it might never happen’ on the street. Which was fair comment, unless what you worried about was having fatuous platitudes flung at you by strangers, in which case it just had. Truth was, though, he was inclined to introspection, which usu-ally took the form of self-grilling; a minute examination of where he was, and where he’d expected to be by now. The destination had grown hazy, but a hollowness he’d grown used to – it lived in the pit of his stomach – reminded him he’d had ambitions once, though it was no longer clear how he’d expected to achieve them. Or even what they’d been, beyond the unspecific
I-expect-I’ll-be-successful
variety that went with having been top of the class at school, and never having had to struggle to get there. The gap between never having had to struggle and never making an effort, though, made itself felt around the forty mark. As for the others who’d been in the same class, he Googled them occasionally, to confirm their continued obscurity, but worried that it was the names he’d completely forgotten that were lighting up the search engines. That was the nightmare. That it was the unconsidered, the unremembered, who were carving their initials on the world’s windows, while he’d achieved nothing.
The twins shifted behind him, as if sensing this deep injustice.
Nearly there. Making a right after Folly Bridge – leaving the main road just before it descended into its constant chaos of roadworks – Eliot navigated a channel between two rows of tightly parked cars, thankfully reaching the end without anything coming the other way. As he turned left, Gordon, unless it was Timmy, gave a high-pitched squeal, and Timmy, unless it was Gordon, dissolved into giggles in reply.
‘Boys, please. I’m driving,’ he said.
This was funny enough that both laughed harder.
The Memory wrapped him again, the way bandages wrap a mummy . . .
He didn’t notice, and wouldn’t have given it a moment’s thought if he had, the squat, anorak-clad figure he drove past now, making its way down the road on his right; chin tilted upright; bad thoughts painted on its face; cigarette jammed into a mouth that was a straight line – Judy Ainsworth, who’d not long crossed the river herself, though she’d used the pedestrian bridge at Friars Wharf.
As Judy herself might have put it: Some drive. Others walk.
To wind the clock back a little: at 7.30 in the morning, this time of year, there’s often mist hanging over the river as it cuts through Grandpont, South Oxford, though it’s already in tatters by now; pulled to whispery ribbons by the encroaching day. I’ve lived here, time of writing, for fourteen years, but it’s only the past four that I’ve been crossing the river at Friars Wharf at 7.30, heading for the London train; way long enough for routines to become established – routines do that without invitation, often only noticed when you break them. For eighteen months, I passed the same man every morning; after the first thirteen, we were nodding at each other. But the train timetable changed, and the four minutes’ adjustment meant I never saw him again.
Other routines are the opposite of what the word usu-ally means; they’re once-in-a-while happenings, the equivalent of the comets that underline the universe’s otherwise ordered existence. There’s a woman I see occasionally – there’s no rhyme or reason to her appearances, or none I’m privy to – and sometimes she’ll cycle past me, and some-times our paths cross because she’s heading the other way, and whichever direction she’s taking our eyes never meet, we never exchange smiles, we are strangers. But we share the same community, so if too much time passes without my seeing her, I wonder about her, and hope she’s okay. Because that’s how it works, even on the uptight suburban fringes – a neighbourhood is a web, with any thread plucked
here
reverberating
there
. So an actual local drama, with police aplenty, and junctions cordoned off with emergency bunting; with helicopters thrashing overhead, and armed-response officers yomping across the adventure playground, actual guns in states of readiness; with news crews baying behind hastily erected barriers – all of this, it had an effect on everyone in those streets. The effect varied depending on the character at issue – from stunned horror to secret glee – but no one was immune. Acts of violence, like acts of love, damage not only the participants but those around them.
This opening is a bit busy: bound to be, really – a number of characters to be introduced; a lot of events happening simultaneously. Arguably, not simultaneously enough – DS Bain won’t be disturbed by a phone for another ninety minutes – but waking is the starting point of everyone’s day; we’re on different timelines, but we all experience the same grey nowhere in that space between sleep and consciousness. So, allowing for the odd bit of slippage, all of the following is happening at roughly the same moment: Louise approaches the nursery gates – still thinking about the significance of today’s date – as Eliot drives his boys past the squat unhappy figure of Judith Ainsworth, and George Trebor – who, like me, won’t be appearing in this story again – watches Bad Sam Chapman, whom he only knows as Man Two, search one hundred yards of roadside verge for the Heckler & Koch that went flying after the car hit Neil Ashton. He’s assisted in this by police officers, but it’s clearly a waste of time. They’re not going to find it. And the time they’re wasting is being swallowed up elsewhere, because it’s at least an hour since the accident, and Jaime Segura could be any-where, and the odds are good the missing gun is with him . . . Sam Chapman has long since admitted this to himself, but is uncharacteristically reluctant to act on it, as if a response would somehow confirm the event. He’s currently thinking a lot of things, but the most accurate summation would be
fuck fuck fuck fucking fuck
.
And as for Segura himself . . . Later they’ll go over the map with pairs of compasses; there’ll be fakes in jeans and brown faux-leather jackets, whose rucksacks’ contents match exactly what was found in Jaime Segura’s, making their way from lay-by to nursery by whatever route seems fastest. Some will take the backstreets; others will plug on down the main road for far longer than consistent with nobody having seen Segura doing that; some’ll even hop on buses, though no bus driver will lay claim to picking him up – the fact is, nobody knows how Jaime Segura did what he did, which was disappear on one side of the city and reappear on the other an hour later. Not in itself an especially mystifying achievement, granted, but few who’ve managed it have had ‘them’ on their case. Because ‘they’ are the shadowy experts with access to hi-tech gimcrackery; able to blow up grainy stills from CCTVs and produce positive ID from pixellated fuzz, or watch screens aglow with thermal imagery, and trace a target as it edges past a blast furnace. Reconstruction is their business, but Jaime Segura slipped their digital leash.
Eliot’s further down the road now; Judy, wrapped in her daily mist of complaint, is closer to work too. DS Bain twitches a little in sleep – ‘Target acquired.’
Steady
– and freezes in readiness, while miles away Ben Whistler is hurtling down the Central Line, trying not to study too obviously the legs of the woman opposite, but allowing the richness of the image they suggest to colour the mental picture he’s forming of his possible future.
Bad Sam Chapman gives up all hope of finding the missing gun, and says something to the seven-years’ cop-per next to him of such mordant foulness that the copper blanches.
And Louise reaches the nursery gates at about the same moment I board a train – only six minutes late that morning – and leave these events behind; to be uncovered, embroidered, and faithlessly reconstructed over the year that follows.
The gates were five foot high or so; good chunky black iron things with sensible weight to them, though they opened smoothly enough once the lock was dealt with – this being a keypad arrangement, because the days when you could clap a padlock to something and assume people understood it was meant to keep them out were long gone. Louise had been taught the keycode by Claire: Claire treat-ing the ritual as on a par with handing over St Peter’s keys. Crispin had been barely less uptight about the net-work passwords in Louise’s previous job, which was so patently Louise’s previous life that that was how she generally termed it. Crispin had been her lover. Vice-Control, European Investments, De John Franklin Moers. V-C/ Eur Invs, DFM. Much about her previous life had been abbreviated, including, in the long run, that life itself.
7.52. Louise wasn’t always first to arrive – Claire, who was the nursery head (abbreviated to
Miss
), was often there before her – but procedure demanded the gate remained secured until 8.45, when the children were allowed in. The preceding time was for clean-up and organization, the former technically being Judith Ainsworth’s remit, though Louise’s take on Judy’s clean-ing abilities was that if she got much worse, she could be classified disabled. She’d said as much to Claire, but Claire had shaken her head disapprovingly. Louise knew Judy’s husband had walked out a year or so ago, and okay, that was sad, but hardly unprecedented and not remotely surprising. And Louise didn’t see why it meant she had to put up with substandard cleaning.
This morning, as it happened, Claire would be late, because she had a dental appointment. Louise, once she’d let herself into the nursery grounds, would be their only occupant.
The building facing her sat low on the ground. Essentially diamond-shaped, it had wings jutting out on two sides – on paper, it looked like a first draft of a cartoon character – and was built of light-coloured brick, with red roof and window frames, and a plaque over the door spelling out
South Oxford Nursery School
, though you’d have had to be pretty wayward not to have picked up on the clues already. The surfacing around the main building was of the soft, spongy variety used in playgrounds, and arranged in swirly red-green patterns which from over-head might have looked like a miscoloured sunflower device. Round the rear a wide porch arrangement sheltered a wooden picnic table and some haphazardly stacked chairs, and along the northside wall was a row of plastic storage bins, holding the overflow from nursery cupboards: outdoor toys, mostly – bats and balls; buckets and spades; skittles and skipping ropes. Where the spongy surfacing ended, a sloped and hillocky grassed area took over, punctuated by a number of small flowerbeds holding the sturdier type of bush – the kind intended to with-stand bats and balls and skittles, and games of hide and seek, and other less organized activities. Bisecting this was another set of railings, the gate in which was secured with a Yale, and behind this was a second building; more of a hut, really, and this was Louise’s domain. The annexe, it was usually called; translated by the Darlings’ infant tongues into The Palace, which suited Louise fine.
A hand dropped on her shoulder, and she yelped in fright.
Turning, she saw the last person she wanted to see.
Dreams come in different sizes, most of them smaller than others. This one is very small indeed. It is of a man framed in a window; he’s walking up and down, angry about something – he appears to be shouting – and though no others are visible, it’s apparent he’s not alone in the room. He’s carrying something in one hand, but whatever it is can’t be seen from this angle, at least two storeys higher, and the width of a street distant. The man’s face is red, his eyes bulge; he wears a sleeveless T-shirt which could do with a rinse, and the veins in his arms pulse crossly. But he keeps slipping out of frame, into that part of the room where anything could be happening. The rest of the house is in darkness; only this one window lit . . . So this is the size of the dream: it’s one small piece of activity beamed on to a flat expanse of plain brick, as if the whole house is simply a wall with a single window, through which, half the time, the angry man isn’t even visible. Half the time, the window’s merely a hole from which light pours.