Read Online Reconstruction by Mick Herron - Free Book Online

then the weight on the gate was too much for her, and that happy ending slipped from her reach . . . The gun was at Eliot’s head, she distantly registered. That noise she’d been hearing was English, filtered through a mouth born to other languages. Push. Push or I shoot your boy. He would shoot the boy. The fact that he hadn’t specified which was a detail you could hardly blame Eliot for: besides, Louise was beyond blaming now – the gate, so immovable seconds ago, was swinging into her, and the latch she’d just triggered was slamming a bolt into thin air, an inch or so from its socket. She felt gravity taking over again. The ground reached out and took her.
    Push. Push or I shoot your boy . . .
    He hadn’t known how he might react to guns – forced to answer a questionnaire on the subject, his pen, like any man’s, would have hovered over the box marked Hero , but he had too much self-knowledge to tick it. Yet seconds ago, Eliot had angled an elbow into a gunman’s arm to throw him off his aim.
    Push or I shoot your boy.
    And then he’d pushed the gate, to open it, like he was told.
    All this time, his boys had been hugging his thighs, tugging him different ways: left right; up down – he wanted to hunker and shield them with his body; rise up and smite whoever’d do them harm. But when the threat had been made, it had been his head the gun was pointing at, so what did that say? Whatever it was, for the moment it went unspoken: the gate was opening; Louise was falling to the path. And Eliot was tumbling through the gate, Timmy and Gordon attached to him like small moons, dragged onwards by his movement, and all three of them still unshot – though that, too, remained in the balance, because the Gun was coming with them, one hand on Eliot’s collar, shoving him forwards so he tripped over Louise’s prone form, taking the boys down with him.
    Another nursery accident. How many little bodies had this path seen, sprawled and screaming? But don’t think about that; check, instead, that the boys are okay – that this is just the usual tumble, with no bones broken. And then look, for one brief moment, into Louise’s eyes, which are inches from yours, and share the horror. There are five of you here; six, if you count the weapon. But for an instant only two of you count. If you’re to come through this alive, you need each other.
    Eliot blinked. Louise’s gaze left him; turned, instead, to the Gun.
    The boys clutched him again, and he felt himself dragged down.
    She’d never been this close to a gun – stupid: nobody had ever been this close to a gun; nobody with a normal life, and ordinary aspirations. Eliot’s boys were crying, but that seemed a long way distant; much closer was the gun itself, which was this side of the railings now. While Louise gazed into its mouth, the boy holding it – the only one among them on his feet – closed the gate. That, at least, was normal; everything else had rattled free of its holdings, scattering reality around her like spring rain.
    He was brown-eyed, black-haired – this a curly mess; tucked behind his ears, and dropping below his jacket collar – and his toffee-coloured skin was smooth as milk. Under other circumstances, Louise would have wanted to touch his cheek. Even holding a gun, he looked nineteen; clean-shaven, he’d have got away with it. But his stubble was grown-up stubble; his eyes weren’t simply exhausted, they were adult-exhausted – he had seen stuff, been places. And all this, he was bringing with him into her nursery.
    ‘You’re the lady?’ he asked.
    ‘. . . What?’
    ‘We go inside now.’
    ‘Who are you?’
    ‘We go inside.’
    The gun twitched in his hand.
    Eliot was trying to lever himself up, keeping one arm folded round each of his boys. Not so long ago – less than twenty minutes – the biggest problem in Louise’s world was the Incident, and the undiscovered ways in which it might come back to haunt her. Now this: thanks,