CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
1011 HRS
‘Jeee-zus,’ said Jason, and tried to fight back. This time his finger clinched the trigger. The gun bucked.
The bang scattered the group in the yard. The bullet whined off the cobble and into a tree.
Jason shoved his left forefinger into Indira’s mouth as though to pacify a baby, and squeezed off two more rounds.
Even the sharpest sharpshooter finds it hard to cope with an Indian hellcat scratching and biting at his groin.
Jones, Habib, Haroun and Dean had slipped into the Members’ Entrance of the House of Commons, like deer suddenly lost in the woods. Roger Barlow ran after them.
On the roof Jason and Indira disentangled themselves, and stared at each other in a miserable post-coital way. ‘Where are you going?’ said Indira, as Pickel slung his rifle over his shoulder. But the American was off singing his song of crucifixion. ‘When I survey the wondrous cross,’ he hummed as he ran down the roof beam, sure footed as a marmoset, ‘on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss,’ he puffed down the stairs and sprinted along the parapet in the direction of Westminster Hall, ‘and pour contempt on all my pride.’
Pickel’s gun was not especially loud, and the four seal-bark shots meant nothing to most people in the hall, least of all the President, who chuntered gently on. To Cameron, whose ears were pricked for the unusual, it sounded potentially bad. And for some of the audience at the far end there was certainly a distraction in the noise of Jones’s entreaties, and the coppers falling over, and Jason Pickel’s shouted orders. Some of them vaguely paid attention to the banging of the swing doors in the Members’ Entrance, and the sound of running feet dimly in the corridor to their left.
But in the Ops Room, there was a kind of frenzy, and they boiled and thrashed and snatched at scraps of information, like a tankful of fish at feeding time.
‘We’ve got shooting,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell. ‘We’ve got shooting in the yard. Four shots,’ he said, holding the receiver to his ear.
‘Four shots?’ said Bluett. ‘Didn’t the tow-truck guy say there were four of them?
‘What do you mean, pegged them?’
‘Shot their motherfucking asses.’
‘Let’s hope so, my old mate.’
Jones confidently led the way through the Members’ cloakroom, a route he had long ago identified as the least heavily secured. No eyes beheld him, even at this stage, as he pushed open the oak swing doors, save the sightless bronze orbs of one Randall Cremer, parliamentarian of the nineteenth century.
No alarms sounded, no sensors were triggered. For a moment he thought he would be able to complete the twenty yards of the cloakroom entirely unseen .
Whoosh, whoosh went the shoe brush, wielded with manic zeal by Woodrow Watson, Labour MP for Pontefract and Castleford. He was standing in the corner of that dim silent place to which no one is admitted who has not been elected by the sovereign people of Britain. It is like a scene from a l950s film about public school life. There is rank upon rank of coat hooks, with red tape nooses into which MPs are supposed to put their swords, and long-forgotten macs and duffle coats suspended as if in some spooky human abattoir.
At the far end is a mirror, a TV screen, a letter writing set, some scurvy hairbrushes and an ancient set of electric scales, which tired, fat, dejected MPs mount and remount, jettisoning still more from their pockets, in the hope of achieving a favourable reading. At the near end by the swing doors from New Palace Yard, are the shoeshine things.
Here, since the break-up of his marriage, Woodrow Watson was spending more and more time. He fully understood the psychological meaning of his actions. By shining his shoes he was doing what he could to bring back lustre and perfection to his life. His heart was a mess, scuffed, battered, shredded. But the shoes could be made whole and clean. The more he hurt the harder he polished. Around Westminster his colleagues bickered and plotted. Speeches were made. Reputations rose and fell. But Woodrow Watson stood in the twilight and buffed. He was a buffer, he told himself. At fifty-six he was on the threshold of bufferdom, and this was his buffer zone.
First he ground the polish in, smearing it over the welts and into the cavity in the instep. Then he left one shoe to dry while whoosh, whoosh, he began his obsessive frottage. His standards were by now very high. He no longer accepted the sheen of a polished apple. Even when his wrist ached and the lactic acid was building in his bicep, and he had produced the kind of vitreous surface that would get top marks at Sandhurst, Woodrow Watson was not satisfied. He liked it when all the crinkly surfaces of the leather sparkled with tinsel points of halogen brightness. That was the good bit; that made him feel calm. As he rotated the shoe like an Amsterdam jeweller, he felt momentarily proud of his work and with that brief surge of self-worth, he was able to obliterate his wife’s desertion.
The trouble was that he needed his fix ever more frequently. He was getting through tins of taxpayers’ polish. His nails looked as though he’d been mining coal, and though that was once a proper function of a Labour MP, his colleagues knew what he was up to, and he was starting to feel ashamed.
So when the funny Asian- or Arab-looking TV crew burst through the door, Woodrow Watson tensed. Hardly daring to breathe, one hand clenching the shoe, the other poised in mid-buff, his eyes locked involuntarily on Dean.
Oh God, thought Watson. It’s probably a documentary about the peculiar habits of MPs. Blasted media. Don’t they know they’re not allowed in here?
The three others walked on quickly to the far door, but the young half-caste was still staring at him.
‘Yer gotta stop it,’ said the kid.
Watson thought he must be hallucinating. Who was this epiphany sent to piss around with his brain?
‘It’s madness,’ said the hallucination, and Woodrow Watson could take it no more.
He knew it was eccentric to stand all day polishing his shoes, but he was damned if he was going to accept any kind of counsel from this intruder, who had in any event, no right to be here at all. He unstuck his terrified tongue from the roof of his mouth.
‘You…You…’
But then one of the two Arab cameramen stalked back down the cloakroom. To the horror of Woodrow Watson, the young man stuck his face unconscionably close.
‘Please, man,’ said Dean, ‘yow gotta get help.’ It was too much. The shoe dropped from one hand, the brush from the other.
He had to get help.
He knew he had to get help. But he didn’t need this squit to tell him.
Roger Barlow should easily have overhauled the four terrorists; and under any normal circumstances would have done so. But his legs were tired after so much running, and his feet were dragging.
The result was that he snared himself in one of the long black cables that coiled through the Members’ Entrance and fed the TV lights and the cameras. He tripped, and fell flat on his face.
As he put out his arms to break his fall, both hands somehow became caught up in other rubbery snakes of electric flex. He righted himself, and the writhing lianas wrapped themselves about his arms and shoulders.
Oh for the Lord’s sake, he said to himself.
Had Roger been in the mood for literary echoes, he might have caught his resemblance to the Vatican sculpture of Laocoon, who warned in vain of the Trojan horse, and who was devoured by sea-snakes.
Instead, he thought that even by his own energetic standards, he was making a bit of a berk of himself. He wondered what his wife and children would make of his performance, and remembered that it was the second time
