Falling, she clutched the canvas to herself, defending the tender swell at her stomach as she tumbled toward the hard London stone.
Two strong arms were attempting to knock her down to the ground. She broke the fall with one knee and felt his chin jab hard against her skull as the jolt took him by surprise. Her stockinged skin grazed against the paving. She felt a familiar, stabbing pain from childhood, loose flesh damaged by grit. Tears pricked at her eyes. She was in someone’s arms and she knew, immediately, whose.
She couldn’t see him, but he was still on her, tight arm around her throat.
When she looked up three men in black uniforms circled them, weapons to their shoulders, eyes fixed on a target that was, she understood, as much her as it was him.
Half-crouched and gasping for breath, she could see the iron security gates were just a few short steps away: security, a safe, private world, guarded so carefully against violent young men carrying mysterious rucksacks. Someone came into view, face in darkness initially since she was now in the shadow cast by the gigantic clock tower and the day seemed suddenly almost as dark as the mouth of the Tube from which she had so recently emerged.
“Don’t shoot me,” she said quietly, and realized there were tears in her eyes. “Don’t…”
Her hands stayed where they were, on her stomach. Somehow she couldn’t say the words she wanted them to hear. Don’t shoot us…
The grip on her neck relaxed, just a little. She caught the eyes of the man in front of her. Sergeant Kelly-she had never known his second name, and feared now she never would-had his hands out in front, showing they were empty. His face was calm and kind, unflustered, that of a gentle man, she thought, one for whom violence was distasteful.
“It doesn’t need to end this way…” he pleaded quietly.
“What way?” the voice behind her demanded.
“Badly,” the policeman said, and moved forward so that they could see his eyes. “Let the young lady get to her feet. Can’t you see she’s hurt?”
Laughter from an unseen mouth, his breath hot against her scalp. She found the courage to look. The old red rucksack was high in the air. From its dirt-stained base ran a slender black cord, dangling down toward the arm that gripped her. Tight in his fingers lay some small object, like a television remote control.
She couldn’t count the black shapes gathering behind Sergeant Kelly. They wore heavy bulletproof vests and soft caps. Black, ugly weapons stood in their arms tight to the shoulder, the barrels nodding up and down, like the snouts of beasts sniffing for prey.
“She’s pregnant,” the sergeant went on. “You see that? Can’t you?”
The unseen man sighed softly, a note, perhaps, of hesitation. She felt there was some flicker of hope reflected in Sergeant Kelly’s eyes.
“Get up…” the foreign voice ordered.
She stumbled to her feet. Her knee hurt. Her entire body seemed racked by some strange, unfamiliar, yet not unwanted pain.
Her captor’s young face was now just visible. He was looking toward the tower of Big Ben.
“We’re going in there,” he insisted, nodding toward the black iron security gates. “If you try to stop me…she’s dead.” He nodded at the armed officers circling them. “Them or me. What’s the difference?”
She wondered how long the men with guns would wait, whether they were already gauging how wide to make the arc of their circle so that they might shoot safely in order to guarantee a kill, yet not be subject to their own deadly fire when the moment came.
It will be soon…she thought, and found her hands returning to her belly, as if her fingers might protect what was there against the hot rain of gunfire.
Someone thrust aside the barrel of the closest weapon. It was the sergeant again, swearing furiously, not at her assailant, but at the officers with guns. Harsh words. Harsher than she’d ever heard him speak before.
“There are choices,” Sergeant Kelly insisted as he pushed them back.
Hands high, empty, face still calm, determined, he wheeled around to confront the man who held her.
“Choices…” the policeman repeated quietly. “She’s pregnant. Isn’t there-” he shook his head, struggling to locate the right words “-some rule that says it’s wrong to kill an unborn child?” Sergeant Kelly shrugged. “For me there is, and I don’t believe in anything much, except what I can see and touch. If you believe-” his right hand swept briefly toward the sky “-something, isn’t it the same?”
“You are not my preacher, policeman,” the voice behind her spat at him.
“No.” Sergeant Kelly was so close that she could feel the warmth of his breath on her face and it smelled of peppermints and stale tobacco. “I’m no one’s priest. But tell me this. What will your god say of a man who knowingly takes the life of an unborn child?” He leaned forward, bending his head to one said, as if listening, curiously. “Will he be pleased? Or…”
A stream of angry, foreign words filled the air. The London policeman stood there, his hand out, beckoning.
“She doesn’t belong here,” he said. “Let her go with me. After that…”
He shrugged.
“You…and they…” The way he nodded at the others, the men with the guns, shocked her. It was as if there was no difference between them and the one who had snatched her, out in the bright, stifling day in Parliament Square. “You can do what the hell you like.”
Silence, followed by the distant caterwauling of sirens. This was, she knew, the moment.
“I beg you…” Melanie Darma murmured, not knowing to whom she spoke.
The grip on her neck relaxed. A choking sob rose in her throat. She stumbled forward, out of the young man’s grip, still clutching the bag with the portcullis logo close to her stomach.
“Quickly…” the policeman ordered, beckoning.
She lurched forward, slipped. Her knee went to the ground once more. The pain made her shriek, made her eyes turn blurry with tears.
One set of arms released her. Another took their place. She was in the grip of Sergeant Kelly, and the smells of peppermint and tobacco were now secondary to the stink of nervous sweat, hers or his, she didn’t know and didn’t care.
She fell against him. His arms slipped beneath hers, pulling, dragging, demanding.
They were close to the gate. She found herself falling again, turning her head around. She had to. It was impossible to stop.
The young man from the Tube had his hands in the air. He was shouting, words she couldn’t understand, foreign, incomprehensible words, a lilting chant that seemed to veer between anger and fear, imprecation and beseechment.
“Melanie…” the police sergeant muttered, as he pulled her away. “Don’t look…Don’t…”
It was futile. No one could not watch a scene like this. It was a kind of theater, a staging, a play in real life, performed on a dirty stone stage in the heart of London, for all to see.
Not far away there were men with cameras, people holding cell phones, recording everything. Not running they way they should have been.
That puzzled her.
She fell to one knee again, and felt glad the pain made her wake, made her pay more attention.
The darks shapes with the rifles were around him again, more close this time, screaming obscenities and orders in equal measures. Yet his eyes were on the sky, on something unseen and unseeable.
The rucksack flew from his hand. The ugly black metal creatures burst into life in the arms of their owners and began to leap and squeal. She watched the young man she had spoken to on the Tube twitch and shriek at the impact, dancing to their rhythm as if performing some deadly tarantella.