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  “James.”

  “I’ll see Mr. James in my office. There’s no need to be concerned. But you might look after Penny here, see that she’s all right.”

  Gary was watching her, uncertain. This woman not much older than himself, if that, taking control, coping. She didn’t seem frightened at all. Tall, Gary thought, five eight or nine, likely had something to do with it. Not bad looking, either. Standing there in her smart bluejacket and the pleated skirt, waiting for him to make his next move.

  When he said nothing, Nancy turned to the couple she’d been interviewing, now agog outside her door, and explained to them this was something of an emergency and if they wouldn’t mind waiting a while, she would talk to them again and see if they couldn’t sort something out. From her purse she handed them some coins and suggested they try the drinks machine on the next floor.

  “Please,” she said to Gary, holding open her office door. “After you.”

  A shade hesitantly, Gary lowered the chair to the floor and walked in. For the briefest of moments, Nancy hesitated; up to now she’d been working on instinct, training, defusing the situation without any special regard to herself. Only now did it strike her, the degree to which she was placing herself in danger. She made a quick face down the corridor that said, do something, and then stepped smartly after him, closing the door behind her.

  Four

  “Lock the door,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Lock the door.”

  Nancy sweating a little now, wondering what she’d got herself into. “It’s against regulations …” she began, but she could see Gary, increasingly edgy, looking round the room for something to break. Something to break over her. Quietly, she slid open the small drawer to the right of her desk and took out the key.

  No sooner had the door been locked and Nancy sat back down than the phone rang, once, twice, three times; looking at Gary for a sign that she should pick it up.

  “Hello,” she said into the receiver. “Nancy Phelan here.”

  A pause, then: “No, I’m fine.” Glancing across the desk to where Gary was still standing. “We’re fine. Yes, I’m sure. No. Bye.”

  Deliberately, she set the receiver down and, as she did so, Gary bent towards the floor and pulled the wire from its socket above the skirting.

  “Well,” Nancy said, “why don’t you sit down?”

  But Gary was staring round her office, taking it all in. The postcards from foreign holidays she’d Blutacked to the filing cabinet, the ivy that needed repotting near the window, the overflowing in-tray, a color photograph of her cousin’s twins. In a clear plastic container with an air-tight lid, green leaves and pieces of thin twig. Gary picked it up and shook it.

  “Don’t!” Nancy cried, alarmed. Then, more quietly, “I’d rather you didn’t do that. There’s something … there are stick insects in there. Two of them. I think.”

  Gary held it up to his face and gave the container an experimental shake.

  “They were a present,” Nancy said, uncertain why she felt the need to explain. “A client.”

  “I think they’re dead,” Gary said.

  Nancy thought he might be right.

  The first response car had only arrived at the Housing Office moments before Resnick walked in, strudel, cheese, and sausage in a plastic bag in his left hand. In the lobby, a young PC was talking to the security guard, another, slightly older, having problems using his two-way radio to call in. Not recognizing either of them, Resnick produced his warrant card.

  “PC Bailey,” said the officer with the radio. “That there’s Hennessey.”

  Not, Resnick assumed, the one that used so effectively to police the Forest midfield. He listened to a quick run-down of the situation and moved towards the stairs.

  “D’you not think we should wait for some support, sir?” Bailey asked.

  “Let’s see what we can do ourselves,” Resnick said. “Whoever he’s got in there might not thank us for hanging about.”

  Most of those who had been queuing to be seen and a growing number from other floors had crowded into the corridor outside the locked door.

  “Keep everybody back,” Resnick told Hennessey. “In the waiting room with the door shut.”

  “I spoke to Nancy on the phone just after they went in,” the receptionist said. “She said she was all right.”

  Resnick nodded. “Can I talk to her?”

  Penny shook her head. “The line’s gone dead.”

  “The man,” Resnick asked, “do we know his name?”

  “James. Gary James.”

  “And did he seem to be armed? Was he carrying any kind of weapon?”

  “He tried to hit me with a chair.” At the thought of it, Penny’s shoulders gave an involuntary shake.

  “Gary James,” Resnick told Bailey, who was already entering the name in his notebook. “Get him checked out, see if he’s known.”

  “And the backup, sir?”

  Resnick half-smiled. “If there’s any to spare.” Turning back to the receptionist, he asked, “Has there been any shouting from inside? Signs of a disturbance?”

  “I went up to the door, close as I dared,” Penny’s voice, a little breathless, telling it. “On and on about the state of the place where he’s living, that’s all I could hear. How cold it was and damp and how it would be a miracle if his kids got through the winter without pneumonia. That was a while back, though. I haven’t heard a dickybird since.”

  “Someone must have another key to the room?”

  “Oh, yes. The caretaker. For the cleaning staff, you see.”

  “You’ve tried contacting him?”

  “Oh, no. I’m sorry. With all the fuss, I didn’t think. I can try for him now, though, to be honest, I’m not sure where he is this time of day. Somewhere with his boilers, I dare say.” She indicated the security guard, blinking behind his glasses. “Howard might know.”

  “All right, ask Howard for me if he can track him down.” Resnick held his carrier bag of provisions out towards her. “And do me a favor, will you? Look after this.”

  Taking the bag, Penny glanced inside. “Would you like me to pop and put them in the fridge? We’ve got a fridge.”

  Resnick shook his head. “Your colleague, Nancy, what’s her other name?”

  “Phelan. Nancy Phelan.”

  Resnick thanked her and walked towards the door.

  “You know something,” Gary said. It was the first time he had spoken-either of them had spoken-in several minutes.

  “What’s that?” Nancy said.

  “I know you.”

  “Yes, you said. When you and your wife …”

  “She’s not my wife.”

  “Well, whatever.”

  “Me and Michelle, we’re not married.”

  “When you and Michelle came in before, you said that was when you saw me.”

  “But that’s not what I mean. Nothing to do with being here. This place. I mean I know you, from before.”

  Nancy didn’t think so.

  “From school. We were at the same school. Don’t you remember?”

  “No.”

  “Top Valley. You were two years above me. Yeh. You went around with-what’s his name? — Brookie. Him and my brother, they was mates.”

  Malcolm Brooks. Brookie. Watching him play pool in the pub, evenings, sipping a rum and coke, and waiting for him to drive her home. He’d park his old man’s Escort round the back of Tesco’s till Nancy told him how she’d catch it if she was in late again. She hadn’t thought of Brookie in years.

  “Nancy,” said Resnick’s voice through the door. “Nancy, are you all right in there?”

  Gary reached across faster than she could judge and caught a hold of her hair. “Tell him,” he snarled. “Tell him it’s okay.”

  “Nancy, this is the police. Detective Inspector Resnick, CID.”

  “Tell him,” Gary said, twisting her hair in his hand. “Tell him he’d better sod off and leave us a
lone.”

  “Hello? Inspector?” Her voice muffled, difficult to judge the tone. “Listen, there’s nothing for you to be concerned about. Really.”

  Nancy angled her eyes towards Gary, wanting him to look at her. The way he had hold of her hair, tugging against the roots, it was all she could do not to cry.

  “Are you sure?” Resnick asked, face all but resting on the cream paint of the door. Nothing solid about it at all, a couple of good whacks and it would be down. “You sure everything’s okay?” Listening hard, Resnick could only hear his own breathing. “Nancy?”

  She was staring into Gary’s face, willing him to let her go.

  “Nancy?” Resnick knocked on the center of the door, not hard, even so it moved a little against the frame.

  With a look and a sigh, Gary leaned away, loosening his grip on her hair. She read the look and it was that of someone realizing they were deep into something from which there was no easy way out.

  “We’re talking,” Nancy said, raising her voice, never taking her eyes off Gary. “About a problem Gary has with his housing. There was just a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

  “And Gary,” Resnick said. “Let me hear your voice, will you? Just say something. Say hello. Anything.”

  Gary said nothing.

  Bailey beckoned Resnick back along the corridor. “James, sir. Quite a tasty little record. Petty stuff as a juvenile. Supervision orders. Right now he’s on probation. Aggravated assault. Actual bodily harm. Troops are on their way.”

  “What it seems to me, Gary,” Nancy was saying, “the sooner this is over, the less trouble for you.”

  “Oh, yeh,” Gary said, lip curling. “I can see you being worried about that-trouble for me.”

  “Gary,” she said, “I am. Really, I am.”

  “Nancy,” Resnick said from outside, “as long as everything’s all right in there, do you think you could unlock the door?”

  She was looking across at Gary, the sweat was beginning to stand out like pimples on his skin and his eyes refused to hold her gaze. Nancy had thought not to leave the key in the lock and now it lay at the end of the table between them, eighteen inches from her right hand. And his. She began to crab her fingers towards it and then stopped, reading his intention clearly.

  “No,” Nancy said, voice raised but even, “I don’t think I can. Not right now.”

  Bailey signaled that reinforcements had arrived outside the building; soon Resnick would hear their feet as they charged the stairs.

  “Gary,” he said, “this is your one and only chance. Come on out of your own free will before we have to come in and get you.”

  “You see,” Nancy said, leaning her face towards him, pleading.

  “I don’t know,” Gary said, licking sweat from the soft hairs sprouting round his top lip. “I don’t fucking know.”

  His voice was trembling and he reminded Nancy of the way her younger brother had looked caught stealing from their mother’s purse, all of nine years old. Slowly, very slowly, so that he could see what she was doing, Nancy took the key between forefinger and thumb, stood, and walked the four paces to the door.

  “Okay, Gary?” she asked, glancing round.

  When she turned the key and pushed the door wide, they were inside in a flash: Bailey and Hennessey and two others, grabbing Gary as he tried to move, hands, arms, swinging him hard about and forcing him up against the wall, feet kicked wide, legs spread, arms yanked back and round, the cuffs as they went on biting at his wrists.

  “Are you all right?” Resnick asked, touching Nancy lightly on the shoulder.

  “I kept telling you, didn’t I? I’m fine.” She stood aside, arms folded across her chest, her breathing going ragged now and seeking to control it, turning her head as Gary was hauled out into the corridor, no longer wanting to look into his face, see his expression as they bundled him away.

  Five

  “Things not so good at home,” was that what Resnick had said? Lynn smiled grimly, changed down, and indicated that she was taking the next left. Not so good could be measured by the way her mother had stood, tight-lipped and close to tears, still stirring the last of her Christmas puddings with only days to go. Other years, there would have been at least three of them, fat in their white basins, ready in the cupboard by the end of October.

  “It’s your dad, Lynnie,” all she had said.

  Lynn had found him mooching between the hen houses, an unlit cigarette loose between his lips, fear in his eyes.

  “Dad, whatever is it?”

  The electrical equipment used to stun the birds before slaughter had malfunctioned and, at the height of the busiest season, forty-eight hours and several thousand pounds had been lost before it was set to rights. Worse for her father, before the fault was discovered, some hundred force-fed capons had been doused alive in scalding water, their throats slit, feathers plucked-he would wake at four, against all logic, reliving their screams. “Come on, Dad,” Lynn had said, “there’s nothing you can do about it now.”

  She should have known there was something more. On the morning she left, she found him in the kitchen at first light, hand round a mug of well-brewed tea. “It’s the doctor, Lynnie. He says I’ve to go to the hospital, see this consultant. Something here, in my gut.” He had stared at her along the table and Lynn had hurried from the room before he could see her cry.

  It was a little after four in the afternoon and the dark was starting to close in. Still you could read, graffitied in two-foot-high letters on the Asian shopkeeper’s wall, Keep Christmas White-Fuck Off Home. Lynn glanced at the street atlas again and readied herself for another three-point turn.

  Michelle had not been home long. The buses had been overloaded with shoppers and those whose working day had finished in the lunchtime pub; sporadic bursts of carol singing, most often with the words changed to crude parody, drifted down from the upper deck. A ginger-haired man, still wearing his postman’s uniform, sat with his legs out into the aisle, performing conjuring tricks with a deck of cards. As they were veering across the roundabout at the end of Gregory Boulevard, a businessman, wearing a gray pin-stripe suit and a red and white Christmas hat, had leaned wide from the platform of the bus and lost his lunch beneath the wheels of the oncoming traffic.

  Natalie had fallen asleep, rocked by the vehicle’s motion, and Karl had sat close, clinging to the sleeve of Michelle’s coat, wrapped in the wonder of what was going on around him. When the postman leaned across and magicked a shiny ten-pence coin from behind Karl’s left ear, the small boy squealed with delight.

  “Whatever’s happened to him, poor lamb?” Michelle’s mother had asked, pointing to the swelling puffing out the side of Karl’s face.

  “He fell,” Michelle had said quickly. “Always rushing at everything. You know what he’s like.”

  “Aye,” her mum had said. “Bit of a madcap, like his dad.”

  There were Christmas lights in some of the windows as they walked back up the street towards home; tiny red and blue bulbs glinting from plastic trees. A neighbor called out a greeting and Michelle felt a sudden rush of warmth run through her. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad place after all. If they could just see off the winter, it really could be a new start.

  She had called out opening the front door, expecting Gary to be back; the queue at the Housing must have been even longer than he’d thought. Quickly, she’d got the children changed, shipped Karl off in front of the TV with some bread and jam while she spooned rice and apple in and around the baby’s mouth. Once fed, she’d put her down and tend to the fire, get it going before Gary returned, settle down to watch Neighbours with a fresh pot of tea.

  The knock on the door was clipped and strong and though her first thought was that Gary had mislaid his key, it didn’t sound like his knock at all.

  “Michelle Paley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Detective Constable Lynn Kellogg. I’d like to talk to you a minute, if I could.”

  Michelle took i
n the warrant card, the neat dark hair, the sureness of the stance, cheeks that showed red in the light spilling from the house.

  Lynn glanced past Michelle into the room and saw the beginnings of a fire, a cartoon Dracula on the television, volume turned low. On a carpet that had seen better days, a mousy little kid with both legs in the air behind him, squinted round.

  “You’ll be letting in the cold,” Lynn said. Michelle nodded and stood aside, closing the door behind Lynn as she walked in, pushing the folded square of rug back against it to keep out the draught.

  Lynn unbuttoned her coat but made no move to take it off.

  “What’s happened?” Michelle said, sick to her stomach, fearing the worst. “It’s Gary, isn’t it? Is it Gary? Is he all right? Tell me he’s all right.”

  “Why don’t we sit down?” Lynn said.

  Michelle swayed a little as she felt her legs starting to go.

  “Nothing’s happened to him,” Lynn said. “You don’t have to worry. Nothing like that.”

  Michelle did sit, uneasily on to the sofa, reaching for the arm to steady herself down. “He’s in trouble, then,” she said.

  “He’s at the station,” Lynn said. “Canning Circus. He was arrested earlier this afternoon.”

  “Oh, God, what for?”

  Lynn was conscious of the small boy, leaning back against the legs of the TV set, paying them all his attention. “There was a disturbance, at the Housing Office …”

  “A disturbance? What kind of …?”

  “It seems he threatened the staff, physically. At one point he locked himself in a room with one of them and refused to let her out.”

  Michelle’s face had drained of what little color it had.

  “I don’t know yet,” Lynn said, “if he’ll be held overnight. It’s possible. We thought you ought to know.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Later. I’ll give you a number you can ring.”

  Upstairs, the baby began crying and then, just as abruptly, stopped.

  “Did he hit anyone?” Michelle asked.

  “Apparently not. Not this time.”

  “What d’you mean?”