Christopher Brookmyre (19 page)

'Doing it in a public place was always risky,' he said, heavily accented. German, maybe Dutch. 'Too many variables. We should reacquire the child at the house, after dark, where we can control the environment.'

'I don't know,' the younger man argued. 'They're going to be extremely vigilant now. What about the cops?'

'The parents will be shaken up,' grey-hair agreed, 'but they won't think the girl was specifically targeted. The police will assume it was a random attempt, and that's what they'll tell the family to put their minds at ease. The cops won't be watching the house, and the parents won't think that lightning is about to strike twice.'

'They won't be letting the kids out of their sight, though.'

'That's not going to matter. We're not talking about a snatch job any more. We'll do it like we should have in the first place: hit the house at night, take what we need and silence what we don't. Kill everyone but the older kid. She'll be worth more to Fleming that way - she'll be all he has left.'

Lex listened to this matter-of-fact discussion and remembered that there were degrees of monstrosity.

'It's a bit of a leap from child abduction to what you're talking about,' she observed, with a fragile facade of calm.

'So, do you have a problem with that?'

the younger man asked, still

wrestling with those hierarchy issues. 'Are you going to tell us it's not "authorised"?' he added nippily.

'Oh, I'd authorise it in a New York minute. I just wanted to check you guys aren't squeamish about this kind of thing. But you're okay with the idea of killing people, just like that, if it cuts down on risks?'

'Anything that makes it easier to get the job done,' grey-hair told her.

'Cool,' Lex said, reaching behind her back.

Unsafe building

The sting of antiseptic on Jane's palms was the first sensation her nerves had managed to get through to her brain since the moment she realised it wasn't Rachel coming out of that yellow chute. She was beginning to notice a duller, deeper ache around the right side of her pelvis, the site denoted by a threaddangling rip across the material of her trousers. She couldn't quite remember where or when it had happened - whether it had been as she bounced on the roof, or perhaps when she hit the ground just after.

She was sitting upstairs in the Kaos Kottage's private party room, where groups of kids were taken to get filled up with Coke, chips and E numbers (just in case they weren't high enough) in a brief respite from their physical activities. Jane had to make do with a cup of tea, but she imagined, even without a slice of birthday cake, that her experience must be much the same as the weans': a moment to sit down and refuel, her legs starting to tingle in testimony to their efforts, her mind trying to replay and digest what had passed in a blur of excitement. One of the staff was in attendance with a first-aid kit, and was dabbing at her grazes with cotton wool and Dettol. A policewoman was downstairs waiting to talk to her, but was busying herself with other witness statements in the meantime.

Michelle had already gone, taking both the kids home on Jane's insistence. She'd offered to hang around, but Jane knew it was just a gesture of gratitude. They all needed to be back where they felt secure, and as soon as possible. Michelle's husband Donald had been called and was on his way back early from the hospital. Jane, for her part, needed to know they were home and safe more than she needed any solidarity. She felt strangely apart from everybody in the aftermath anyway; everybody except Rachel.

Mercifully, Michelle had missed all the fun. With the place being so mobbed, the noise inside had meant the crashes were only audible nearest the entrance, which was why merely a trickle of observers had come to investigate, many of them from the salon. With her attention taken by minding Thomas as he clambered clumsily around the toddler area, Michelle hadn't noticed Jane make her hurried exit, nor even heard her calls above the din of excited young voices. She was understandably shaken up when she learned exactly what she 103

had missed, but Jane was greatly relieved her daughter had been spared the most of it, and by far the worst of it.

There was a sensation that seized you suddenly like a cold steel fist in the pit of your stomach when you realised you didn't know where your child was. It happened all the time - wandering mere feet away out of sight in a shopping centre; slipping unnoticed to the toilet, leaving you staring in horror at an empty back garden - and usually resolved itself in moments, but frequency never diminished the impact. The worst of it, the thing Michelle had been spared, was what followed when the next few moments didn't bring resolution. The worst of it was the helplessness. The worst of it was the paralysing realisation that your child's welfare was out of your hands - the hands your child looked to for all ministrations, the hands that would in that moment give anything to touch your child's living flesh again. Michelle had been spared, and, in this case, Jane had been spared too. There had been no helplessness, no paralysis, and matters had been in her hands like they'd never been before. Nothing had ever felt so compellingly instinctive. There had been no fear, not for herself. There had been no choices, no decisions: only actions, only necessary deeds. It had seemed as though she was a passenger inside her own body, and someone else, someone tens of thousands of years more experienced, was doing the driving. She sipped her tea and obliged her first-aider with the politest minimum of conversational responses necessary to convey that she didn't much feel like talking. The police might get more, but they'd need to wait; she wasn't ready, and nor did she feel like she would be for a while yet. At this stage she was still struggling to assemble her memories coherently. They were like jumbled snippets of film and audio footage that still had to be correctly juxtaposed in order to create a linear narrative. Some of them told of events, some of them only of thoughts and feelings, and while she could dwell on them individually, she couldn't yet work out how they all fitted together. One element in particular jarred discordantly with the rest; or perhaps it was fairer to say that the rest was consistently discordant and thus rendered this one, oddly harmonious element out of place.

Moments played in loop-back, over and over, out of sequence. Sounds echoed, words repeated. She knew the story and knew that it had worked out in the end, but knew also that it was not a happy tale. Rachel's terrified screams cut shrilly through her and would do so forever in her memory (though Rachel herself would be over it by bedtime thanks to that kiddy resilience that helped ensure the very survival of the species). Jane had felt a horror, a wrenching fear of loss like nothing she'd experienced in her life, and in each of those looping moments there was danger, violence, destruction and pain. All of which, she could, given time and enough tea, just about fit together.

The jarring element was the hardest to isolate, the most difficult to expose and consider, never mind find a place for, because it wasn't supposed to be there. It had taken her a reluctant while to acknowledge its presence, but there it undeniably was, hidden deep and secret as any other uncomfortable truth about herself. It didn't fit, it didn't belong, and people would say it wasn't right, but she couldn't pretend it didn't exist either. She looked at her hands, the grazes minimal now that the blood and dirt had been washed away.

The backs of her fingers stroked the rip in her

trousers, felt the tender skin and pulsing ache below. Her heart still thumped like after her first ever workout, and her limbs sang in the afterglow of their exertion.

'You poor thing,' the first-aider said yet again, repeating the sentiment she'd heard from just about everyone except Michelle, who'd stuck to thank-yous.

'How awful for you.'

But she didn't feel like a poor thing.

Jane took a mouthful of tea and nodded, but her wordless assent was to herself, not the woman with the cotton wool.

It hadn't been awful for her.

She'd enjoyed it.

That didn't alter the many, many ways in which it had been one of the most horrible experiences of her life, and her fear for Rachel was something she never wanted to feel the like of again. There was anger, also hatred, still simmering from the act itself, and a fierce burning outrage that he had got away, which she knew she would draw upon when it came time to talk to the police. But despite it all, there was a part of her that had never been so alive as in those blurred, extreme, insane moments: so in control, so defined, so consumed, so full of purpose, so unstoppable, so bloody, utterly magnificent. And that part of herself wanted to feel that way again. Instead, she was facing a slow come-down towards mundane reality: this cup of tea, questions from the polis, then home for a change of these torn trousers, and time to make the dinner. What night was it? Tuesday. Mince and taffies followed by live Champions League football. Haud me back. It struck her that this was the first she'd even thought of Tom since the incident, and now that she had, it depressed her. Unlike Michelle, it hadn't even occurred to her to call her husband. She didn't want his comfort, nor did she even much want to tell him about it. He would only patronise her and belittle what she'd been through. He'd inevitably make her feel like a victim, almost wilfully misinterpreting what she told him in order to edit out the parts that didn't fit in with his image and expectations of her. But perhaps more icily than that, she didn't want to tell him because she felt that this was hers and she didn't want to share it. Not with him. Not with anyone yet, but definitely not with him. This was hers and he would only ruin it.

'I've a needle and thread downstairs if you want me to fix that tear,' the first-aid woman offered.

Jane looked again at her trousers, pulled automatically from the wardrobe that morning because she knew no single pair in there had any more style than the rest. She was a whole mountainside beneath the height of fashion, but even she drew the line at breeks with a stitched-up rip down the side.

'It's all right,' she said. 'I'll just change when I get home.'

'Can I get you another cuppa or anything?'

Jane was about to answer in the negative, when the woman's mobile began ringing. Or rather, Jane assumed it was the firstaider's until the woman said:

'I'll let you get your phone.'

'I don't have a phone,' Jane replied.

'Well, it's not mine. Mine's downstairs in my jacket.'

The ringing continued: a standard, electronic double chime as opposed to a melody, accompanied by a faint pulsing buzz. Jane looked down next to the table and realised that the sound was coming from her bag. She bent over and reached into it, feeling vibrations against the leather as she moved aside her purse, a short umbrella, a packet of baby wipes and a copy of the
Big Issue
. Her fingers found it before she saw it, feeling it pulse through a towelling bib right at the bottom of the bag. She lifted it out. It was silver, sleek and compact. Jane held it in her palm as it continued to chime, regarding it with the same puzzlement as though it was an alien artefact dropped from the skies. Then she remembered: at the supermarket, the girl with the American accent, Rachel pointing to her bag where it lay in the trolley seat.
Lady dropped her phone. It's in your bag, Gran.

But the American girl had denied it and held up her phone to demonstrate. Held up
a
phone to demonstrate. What the hell?

She dropped her phone. Ring, ring. Ring, ring.

Ring, ring, it chimed on.

'Are you going to answer it?'

'I'm not sure how.'

'I'll show you.'

The first-aider took it between her forefinger and thumb and unfolded the device with a snap. She held it out to Jane, saying: 'Press the green button to answer.'

Jane took it from her tentatively, pushed the button and held the phone reluctantly to her ear.

'Hello?' she ventured delicately.

'Good afternoon,' said a male voice, relaxed and confident.

'Ehm, before you say anything, I have to let you know, this . . . '

'Isn't your phone, I know. It's mine.'

'Oh, right. I see. It's not stolen, just so you know. Well, maybe it was, but not by me.'

'I know that too, Mrs Fleming.'

'If you're wanting to come and get it, I'll tell you where I am, but it's not exactly the best time. Mind you, there's police here. I could give it to them and . . . '

Jane stopped talking. Her cognitive abilities were understandably a little out of synch, given everything they'd been processing over the past hour or so, so it took an extra couple of seconds for her to deduce what was wrong with his last remark. By that point, however, he had trumped it.

'Not the best time, I appreciate that. And quite an understatement given that you're talking about the attempted abduction of your granddaughter. Are you alone, Mrs Fleming?'

Jane now had the phone clamped to her ear, staring blankly at the open door to the stairs. She blinked and glanced at the first-aider, who was looking expectantly towards her for news.

'No,' she stated.

'Then please ensure that you are before we continue this conversation.'

Jane instinctively placed a hand over the mouthpiece, though it wasn't the man at the other end she wished to prevent from eavesdropping.

'I'm sorry, would you mind leaving me a minute, please?' she said. The woman gave her a look of puzzlement which Jane met with a stern nod. The first-aider then withdrew with a shrug and closed the door.

'Who are you?' Jane asked immediately. 'And how do you know about--'

'About Rachel? Believe me, this is
not
about Rachel.'

Jane felt a surge of anger.

'Was it you?' she demanded, though the very idea posed a cascade of questions, none of which she could concentrate to focus on.

'No. I have no interest in your granddaughter. But neither did the man who tried to take her.'

'So what is this about?'

'Have a look at the screen.'

'What screen?' she asked, looking around the room, her paranoria reasonably extending to assume he could somehow see where she was sitting. He seemed to know everything else.