He hurried, still limping slightly, across the front lawn and pressed his finger hard against the bell, hammered with the stock of the shotgun against the door. Come on, come on, come fucking on! Then it was Derek, calling from inside, wanting to know what was wrong. The kitchen blinds moving, Lorraine’s face. Her voice raised in fear, anger. Both voices, arguing. Preston yelling, striking the door again. Harder. Back across the street, one bedroom light went on and then another. Someone, inside, unbolting the door, freeing the chain.
As soon as the door began to open, Preston pushed it wide.
Lorraine had pulled a cardigan over the shoulders of her nightdress; her face was ashen as she moved back against the wall. Farther along the hall, Derek, wearing pajamas, was standing by the telephone, receiver in his hand.
Preston slammed the front door shut behind him; three strides and he’d wrenched the phone from Derek’s fingers, smashed the set from the wall with the gun, torn the wires free with his hand.
The children, Sandra and Sean, were clinging to one another on the stairs.
“Lock it,” Preston said to Lorraine, pointing toward the front door. “And then get them back upstairs. And you …” He rounded on Derek, the end of the shotgun barrels hard against his neck, under his chin, forcing back his head. “Get in my way, anything, you’re dead. Understand?”
Eyes wide, Derek nodded.
“Don’t hurt him,” Lorraine said. “There’s no need to hurt him.”
“I thought,” Preston said, “I told you to get those kids out of the way.” Sean was crying, Sandra trying to comfort him. “While you’re there, get some clothes on, chuck a few things in a bag. Passport. We’re leaving.”
Lorraine’s eyes widened in understanding. “Oh, Michael. Michael, Michael.” She sighed and slowly shook her head, eyes closed.
“Do it,” he said. “There isn’t the time.”
She looked at him, looked at her children. “The gun,” she said. “You won’t need it.”
Preston nodded. “We’ll see.”
Sitting alongside Resnick in the back of the car, Helen Siddons was busily punching numbers into her mobile phone. “If you’re wrong about this,” she said.
Resnick shook his head. “I’m not wrong.” The pieces were in place now: he knew. “Maybe I wish I was.”
“What happened to your head,” Lorraine asked. They were in the middle room, the dining room, partition doors closed across. She had sent Derek upstairs to be with the children. “It’s swollen, there above the eyebrow. There’s blood. A cut.”
Preston touched it absentmindedly. “I don’t know.”
“What happened?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Lorraine had pulled on a T-shirt and cotton sweater, sneakers, jeans. There was a black travel bag near her feet. “Michael,” she said, “you know this is stupid. Crazy.”
“Get me an aspirin,” he said. “Something. Then we’re going.”
Hearing her in the hallway, Derek called down in a loud whisper, asking if she were all right. She didn’t answer. Back in the dining room she gave her brother two Neurofen and a glass of water.
“Michael, please …” She touched the back of his hand, sliding her fingers between his. “Listen to me.”
“Come on,” he said, pulling away. “We’re leaving.”
They were almost at the front door when an amplified voice broke through from outside: “This is the police. We have the house surrounded. I repeat, this is the police …”
There were four of them inside the command van: Siddons and Resnick, Bill Claydon, in charge of the Tactical Response Unit, and Myra James, a sergeant with special training in hostage negotiation. With the telephone in the house out of commission and Preston showing no disposition to engage in dialogue, negotiation was difficult.
Three monitors gave them grainy black and white pictures of the house; one camera by the fence at the far end of the garden, covering the rear; another, using a zoom lens, was focused on the front; the third was in the helicopter, turning noisily overhead.
Thirty officers from the Serious Crimes Squad and the Special Support Group were surrounding the house; of these, all were wearing body armor and half were armed. Six marksmen from the Tactical Response team were positioned at intervals around the building, each in continuous contact with Claydon through their headsets.
There were two ambulances waiting on standby, uniformed police holding back the television crews and cameramen. The houses close by had been evacuated.
It was now almost fully light.
Claydon pointed toward one of the screens. “We could be through those French windows in what? Five seconds, six. Set up a diversion at the front.”
“He’s got kids in there,” Resnick said. “Two of them.”
“We don’t know if they’re with him, if he could harm them. If he would.”
“We don’t know enough.”
“We don’t even know,” Siddons said, “what he wants.”
Claydon laughed. “What he wants, get out of there in one fucking piece, a plane to the other side of the earth, untold riches, happiness ever after, that’s what he wants, poor sod.”
They sat in virtual silence, save for the helicopter chattering overhead.
“Seven,” Claydon said, suddenly clapping his hands. “Seven on the dot. If he’s not given us something by then, I say we go in hard. What d’you say?”
“He’s already killed twice,” Resnick said.
“Three times,” Siddons corrected him.
“Three times,” Resnick said to Claydon. “Why are you in such a hurry to have him do it again?”
Inside the house, Preston had watched Derek and Lorraine, as under his instructions they moved furniture to barricade the front and rear doors. When the police made their move, and he was certain they would, he wanted what little time these precautions would earn him. One minute. Two. What he didn’t yet know was how he would use it.
“Talk to them,” Lorraine kept saying. “You have to talk to them.”
Myra James knew the bulletproof vest she was wearing under her blue sweatshirt would protect her from anything but the highest velocity bullet fired at close range. Maybe. But the helmet? Ruefully, she smiled. So much of her unprotected. Her Gap jeans already had a small tear below the knee.
Using the megaphone, she announced her intention: to walk toward the front door and place the mobile phone she was carrying down on the step. All someone had to do was open the door a few inches and take the phone inside. Then they could talk, find a way out of this situation before anyone was hurt.
After setting down the phone, Myra forced herself to stand there for several moments, staring at the door and waiting. But nothing happened, there was no immediate response. Slowly, she turned and walked away, willing herself not to lengthen her stride the closer she came to safety, not to run. The sweat was running freely down her back and legs and soon, she knew, unless she could change, it would be chafing her thighs.
Sandra came and stood just inside the dining-room door, working her lower lip between her teeth. She looked at the shotgun, which now lay diagonally across one end of the dining-room table. She felt Preston staring at her and, though she didn’t want to, made herself look back at him. He seemed old, older than her mum and dad. Tired. She wondered what it was he’d done. There was a lump, a bruise, right over his eye. She tried to remember him, there at their house, in that room after the funeral; the way he’d looked at her when she’d handed him something to eat, smiling, but still sort of funny, and his voice, nice and soft, not like now.
“What is it, sweetheart?” Lorraine asked.
“It’s Sean. He’s in the toilet. I think he’s being sick.”
Lorraine started to move toward the door and Derek stopped her, a hand on her arm, a shake of the head. “Run back up,” he said over his shoulder to Sandra. “Sit with him. Hold his hand. He’ll be okay.”
Sandra hesitated, looking past Derek at her mother, wanting to do the right thing.