Christopher Brookmyre (16 page)

'The name?' she asked.

He looked past the receptionist for a moment and waved, though Jane didn't see at whom. The girl looked back inside also. As she did, the man glanced at the register-sheet lying atop the counter. He put his index finger down on the clipboard. 'Mackie,' he stated. He put a hand into his trouser pocket and proffered a fiver.

'Oh, no, we just charge for the children,' the girl explained, smiling.

'Okay,' he said.

She hit a button under the desk and buzzed him through. Jane, a seasoned visitor, had the exact change ready in her hand.

'Hello again,' the girl said. 'Fleming, isn't it?'

Jane nodded, managing a slightly bashful smile. Other people got recognised by the staff at their local, their favourite restaurant, maybe their golf club. Her face was her passport in supermarkets and soft-play centres. She kept hold of Rachel (with some difficulty, it had to be said) once they were beyond the gate as she wanted her to note where Granny was sitting before haring off into the multicoloured jungle. Jane was having trouble enough spotting Michelle in the throng. The accompanying adults were mainly accommodated around rectangular picnic-style tables with built-in seats, though there were also a few round tables with individual chairs, as well as benches hugging the walls. Every last one of them appeared to be taken, with the corner housing the snack bar particularly mobbed. The main attraction was an enormous, labyrinthine climbing structure combining ramps, ladders, chutes, tunnels, webbing, ropes and swings. Underneath it there was space for pits full of soft balls. There was also a bouncy castle and a cushioned, miniature adventure zone for the smallest visitors. Rachel's experiences of the place had begun down there, but she had soon graduated - an initially heart-stopping experience as adults were not permitted (and seldom physically able anyway) to accompany the kids beyond ground level. Once your little one took off up that first ramp or ladder, it was out of your hands, which you would thereafter be needing to cover your eyes as you watched through your fingers. It was scary enough when the place was quiet, but with kids swarming all over the structure like ants, you just had to take a seat, maybe grab a coffee, and simply hope your wee treasure reappeared at some point.

'Mummy!' Rachel called out, zeroing in instinctively as Jane continued to scan the tables.

Michelle was kneeling down on the foam flooring of the toddler zone, staying close to Thomas, who was scrambling the wrong way up a ramp that led into a pit full of soft balls. Rachel bounded over to her mum, slaloming tables and benches, then gave her a brief hug before tearing off up a cushioned staircase. A man stepped across Jane's path to lift a proffered baby from his breast-feeding partner, and when he stepped back out of the way, Rachel had disappeared from sight.

'Miraculous recovery?' Jane asked, indicating Thomas.

Michelle looked up.

'Hi, Mum. Yeah, bloody typical. He perked up about ten minutes after we left you. By the time we were in the doctor's waiting room, he was bouncing off the walls. Then I've to stand there going: "Well, he was looking a wee bit hangy earlier on, Doctor."'

'Och, the doctor will have seen that often enough,' Jane assured her. 'You and Ross were both masters of the two-hour fever.'

Jane looked at Thomas and waved. He smiled and waved back, causing him to lose his grip on the slope. He slid back down into the balls with a giggle, which confirmed a return to full fitness. Any hint of feeling sorry for himself would have turned that little setback into a major trauma. A table became free soon after as an elephantine pair of women vacated with an equally rotund brood.

'Must be genetic,' Michelle whispered. Jane knew Michelle was trying to get a rise out of her, provoke her disapproval, but she wasn't biting. She didn't like to dwell on whether Michelle's bitchy streak was a genuine reaction to her own chronic preaching of tolerance, respect and general politeness. The more benign explanation was that it proved Michelle had absorbed all of the above and that the joke was in knowing her comments were unacceptable, but as far as Jane was concerned, the jury was still out. The only thing it had ruled on was that you didn't stop worrying about your children's upbringing even when they were bringing up children of their own. She circled the supermarket car park once more, following the one-way system until she reached the furthest corner, which abutted the cul-de-sac. The rear of the blue Civic was visible through the slatted wooden fence, unlikely to be going anywhere for a while, even in the implausible event that the driver had gone into the little hair salon. Lex picked a space further up the slope, with a clearer view of the play-house's front doors, reversed into position and killed the engine.

She reached across to the passenger-side footwell and lifted a briefcase on to the seat. From it she removed the nine-millimetre and silencer attachment, screwing the two together in her lap. Both parts were for 'insurance'. She hated the idea of using the gun, but knew that if it came to it, she had no choice, and it would lead to fewer complications if there were no reports echoing around the area.

Discretion was an underlined mission parameter. She had to acquire the target without being conspicuous, without either of them drawing attention to themselves. Tough gig. Forcibly rip a human being from their everyday life and demonstrate to them how the world is a far more evil and dangerous place than they ever feared, but please do it quietly and without anyone noticing. She wouldn't be easily separated from the kid; Lex was under no illusions about that. It would therefore be all about choosing the moment. Unfortunately, she knew the number of moments from which she could choose was ever diminishing. Patience had to be allied to judgement, but patience against the clock meant judgement had to be allied to nerve.

Their seats were close to the action, a row of tables back from the toddler zone. Jane stayed with Thomas for a while to let Michelle rest her feet, then tempted him over to the table with the promise of some chocolate buttons. He sat on Jane's knee and smeared contentedly while she and Michelle had a coffee. Every so often, they'd make out a familiar voice calling 'Mummy!' or

'Gran!' amid the dozens of unfamiliar ones calling out the same thing, and look up to see Rachel wave at them from some vertiginously elevated part of the climbing structure.

'It's as well she does that now and again,' Michelle remarked, 'otherwise I'd lose track of her completely.'

'In my experience, she comes back approximately every ten minutes for a drink of juice. I'd only worry if she exceeded that.'

'This place is just mental. Too busy, too many weans. There's a wee girl in here with the same dress as Rachel. I waved to her soon as I saw her through the crowd, a few minutes before you got here. Felt like an eejit.'

'Glad it wasn't me that waved, then,' Jane said. 'You'd have said I was having a "senior moment".'

'I'm telling you, you're the one that must have your wits about you, taking Rachel to this place so often. I cannae handle it. She goes haring off and disappears, then my heart's in my mouth when I do see her, because she's hanging off something or diving head first down a slide.'

'You'd better just accept it, Michelle, because it never ends. One minute she's heading up that ladder, the next she's asking for driving lessons.'

'Please no motorbikes. Please no motorbikes. If I believed in God, that would be my prayer every night.'

'Just don't let them hear you saying it. Somehow they always find a way of doing the opposite of what you want for them.'

'Well, that depends on whether what you want for them is reasonable or consistent, doesn't it?' Michelle replied, a slight edge coming into her voice. Jane immediately regretted her last remark. It was the kind of thing you could comfortably say to any mother on the planet apart from one who also happened to be your daughter.

'I'm not having a go, Michelle. Just saying it'll come to you.'

'I'll be ready. Donald and I talk about this all the time. You can have your hopes, but don't have expectations. The fun's not in guiding them, but in what they do on their own.'

I'll quote you on that a few years hence, Jane kept to herself. 'Wise words,'

she said instead.

'And anyway, Mum, I don't think you can cry foul too loud. I must be about the only daughter whose mother complained about the fact that she quit playing in a rock band in order to study hard and get a good degree.'

'I never complained,' Jane protested. 'I was just surprised you didn't take it a bit further, see where it led.'

'Take it further?' Michelle asked, raising her voice, but laughing with it. She could have been screaming her lungs out and it would have attracted no more attention amid the din.

They'd been over this umpteen times, Jane perhaps subconsciously picking at the scab as she so often found herself bringing it up. Michelle got less aggressive in response these days, but there was a tone of tired exasperation to her voice, asking the same question as Jane was right then asking of herself: why couldn't she let this go?

'Mum, it was a student band. We were called The Giorgio Marauders, for God's sake. How far did you think we were going to take it?'

As far as a mother's daft dreams, was the answer; a mother who wanted her daughter to have the things she never had, whether her daughter wanted them or not. Sports cars and casinos, or maybe just the path less travelled by. It wasn't about the band, it was about the marrying and settling down when Michelle had other choices that Jane didn't.

'I know the band was just a bit of fun, Michelle. I never complained,' she reiterated. 'I was just a little surprised - not disappointed, surprised - your choices at that age were, I don't know, so conventional.'

'The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, Mum,' Michelle replied, shaking her head. Michelle reached, too late, to grab Thomas's hands before he could wipe them on Jane's jacket, leaving her with three chocolatey streaks around either breast. 'Sorry. Is it dry-clean only?' she asked, with a wince.

'No, no,' Jane assured, lying. 'But what do you mean, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree?'

Michelle laughed again, and Jane knew she was sugaring a pill.

'You're saying you're surprised I've been conventional? Well, wherever did I get it from?'

'You mean your father,' Jane stated, relieved to divert but feeling slightly disloyal.

'No, I mean you, Mum. You've never exactly been the essence of urban rebellion, have you? You keep a house so immaculate you could eat your dinner off the bathroom floor, you drive five miles below the speed limit at all times and when you're not bailing me out at zero notice, you spend your spare time doing work for charity. You're the soul of dutiful and responsible behaviour. What kind of an example is that to give your children?'

Jane laughed to convey that she was taking it in the lighter spirit Michelle intended. Inside, part of her wanted to weep.

'I'm not that responsible,' she insisted, a little bashfully.

'Oh come on, Mum. I don't think you've ever had a parking ticket. How many times did you give us that speech about how respect for other people and respect for the law are one and the same thing, and that's why you've never broken it?'

'There's nothing to be ashamed of about--'

'I'm not ashamed of it, Mum. But I'm not so sure about you. Just because you stuck by the rules doesn't necessarily mean you're happy about it.'

Out of the mouths of babes. It was hard to take when your kids thought they knew you better than you knew yourself; harder still when they were right. On this form, she should ask Rachel to attempt a Jungian analysis.

'And what I really don't get,' Michelle continued, the pill getting audibly more bitter, 'is why you act like I was a mug for settling down when I supposedly had the world at my feet, yet you're in the huff with Ross because he dumped his fiancee over that job in France. How does that work? He gets a hard time for breaking the rules and I get a hard time for sticking by them?

Make up your mind.'

'I'm not in the huff with Ross,' Jane insisted, turning suddenly defensive to protect a vulnerable spot. 'More like he's the one in the huff with me.'

'What's the difference? When did you last speak? Ages, I'll bet. You should call him.'

'I do call him. He's never in. I always get the answering machine.'

'Do you leave a message? You don't, do you?'

'I hate those things.'

'That's a no.'

'I have left messages,' she said, which was true but only just into the plural, and the last had been several weeks ago. 'He never calls me back.'

'No, and knowing Ross, he's not going to say he's sorry, either. But one way or another, you need to talk, and I mean properly. Not five minutes with Dad about Celtic and then you asking him how the job's going.'

Jane winced. More preter-generational wisdom, Michelle describing fairly accurately most of their telephone exchanges with Ross even before their falling out.

At that moment, Thomas climbed down from Jane's lap and began tugging on his mum's hand, indicating his desire to return to the toddler zone.

'Balls, Mummy,' he said, pretty much echoing Ross's sentiments the last time they'd had a discussion of any substance.

'Duty calls,' Michelle said, allowing herself to be dragged from the bench.

'But I'm serious, my last word - you need to talk to him.'

'I will,' Jane said, unsure whether this was a statement of intent or merely an optimistic prediction.

She watched Michelle walking away, bent over Thomas, and reached for the last of her coffee. It was still just about warm enough to drink. She knocked back a big gulp and looked around the climbing structure for Rachel. So many little bodies, clambering, sliding, pushing, so many tunnels and barriers. She remembered bringing a camera here once, and trying for a frustratingly long time to get a picture of Rachel in action. She ended up with a few blurry shots of her bolting away from the end of a chute, and several of completely different children. Eventually Jane spotted her. She was up on the highest tier, her back visible through a grid of safety webbing, waiting - but not queuing -