Jim Crace - All That Follows

It is almost two hours since Leonard left her sleeping. The approach streets to Alderbeech are calm and unpopulated. A typical predawn Sunday. The waste ground has already almost cleared. There are a few detachments of uniformed men there, clearing up, and the mobile lavatories and canteen are still in place, though locked and shuttered. Francine goes directly to the Buzz. There is no sign of Leonard, but that is no surprise. She cuts across the waste ground, past two marquees not noticed on her first visit, and enters the hostage street under the bluish flooding of police lights. She sees at once there is no barrier for Leonard to be spectating behind. It has been dismantled and its parts are piled up on the pavement awaiting collection. For the first time in more than four days the street is open to traffic and pedestrians, but there are none yet. If she were Leonard she would want to see inside the hostage house and investigate the full length of the street. That is where she expects to meet her husband now, on the pavement. She thinks she sees him standing a hundred meters farther down, beyond the lights. She waves and starts in his direction, walking along the far-side path, not even pausing to stare into the house, past the single policeman who is at the gate, keeping guard and getting very wet. He watches her, glad to inspect this attractive older woman, walking with a swing, and relieve the monotony of guard duty by wondering what has made her seem so spirited so early in the day. Apart from this one officer, there’s no activity at the hostage scene. No doubt the policeman’s many colleagues are tired and catching up on sleep. Forensic teams will come in when it’s light, she thinks. Film crews will return to finalize reports. She hurries on, but the figure she has taken for Leonard turns out to be a dog walker, a dog that barks and warns her off. She’ll wait for Leonard in the car. She’s sure she has a spare key in her bag.

On her return — on the nearer pavement — she does stop to stare into the house. It seems untouched, determinedly undramatic, dull. Most of the curtains have been drawn. The only light is in the porch. The only movement is a cloud of moths. It’s hard to even dream up a figure standing in the shadows, holding a gun at shoulder height and pointing it at Leonard in the street, as he’s imagined it: Kapow. You’re scathed. Kapow. You’re dead!

“All over?” she asks the policeman.

“Done and dusted,” he replies.

“Anybody hurt?”

“One of our guys took a tumble. Family wasn’t touched. Three individuals in custody, and hardly a scratch on them. All foreigners. That’s about the size of it. Nice work all round. Top job.”

Francine offers him her widest smile and keeps on smiling as she crosses the street, heading for the entrance to the waste ground by the two marquees. It is there that she spots, with immediate alarm, what looks like Leonard’s yellow beach cap swept up among the litter, the recent pile of paper coffee cups, pop cans, and takeaway wrappers. She doesn’t pick it up at once but turns it with her foot, expecting to discover some other logo on its peak — but no, its slogan is QUEUE HERE, just like Leonard’s. Now she bends for it. The cap is damp and heavy in her hands, caked with mud. She shakes and stretches it, then turns it inside out, hoping not to find her husband’s stage name, Lennie Less, inked along the rim.

THE WONKY, UNEDITED VIDEO of Leonard’s detention in Alderbeech during the early hours of the morning is greeted by clapping and whoops when it is first aired on the wall screens of NSF’s debooting and debriefing rooms. There’s little else of dramatic interest for the news networks to broadcast and nothing else for the armed incident squads, now going off-duty, to applaud; the hostage rescue itself was disappointingly routine, with at best a bit of shouting but not a shot fired or a punch thrown. So Leonard’s late, unheralded appearance on the street was a godsend in a way. The weirdo in the yellow cap provided their only opportunity, after more than four days of dreary vigilance, to let off a bit of steam. “That’s copybook, that is,” one of the officers calls out, as the intruder is brought to the ground in three easy movements. “Step up, those men. Rosettes all round.”

Elsewhere in the building, in the rooms above the custody suite where the four detainees are being held in separate cells, the responses among members of the NSF command team are not so celebratory. It’s not only that the first broadcasters of the video, already syndicated round the world, have failed to pixilate the faces of the arresting officers. That is an easy fix. A phone call, or a text reminder of the National Security Standards in Broadcasting, and it’s dealt with. There are greater problems, less easy to massage or to solve. What is now clear is that what they flagged up as “a delicate and risky” security operation has proved to be an embarrassing anticlimax. According to the brisk report just delivered to them by the duty CO, the siege could have been ended much earlier “by a couple of coppers on a tandem.” When the armed squads stormed in, according to the first reports, everyone inside the hostage house — the family, the gang — was asleep. It was Operation Wakey-Wakey, not so much Shock and Awe as Rouse and Arrest. All but one of the hostage-takers’ guns were soon discovered to be replicas, and the single working revolver was unloaded, with no trace so far of any spare ammunition. There were no barricades, no booby traps, no ropes, just evidence of takeaway food, the stink of cigarettes, and unusual tidiness. A jigsaw puzzle of London’s Tower Bridge lay almost completed on the living room table. Add to that yesterday’s tip-off from NADA that the Emmerson kidnapping and SOFA’s grim threats of “an eye for an eye” were nothing but a stunt, and the whole standoff begins to look absurd. “No need to make any of that public. Yet,” one of the team says. “Embargo it.” Unfavorable details such as these can be buried in the minutiae of the official incident report, he suggests. And the report itself can be delayed for a week or so, at least until the public and the press have lost interest, as they will.

It is less easy, though, to know how to handle the embarrassment of the wonky video, especially with the summit leaders scheduled to discuss freedom and security in two days’ time and all the world’s press already in town and hungry for a British story to tide them over. What is needed, just to offer balance, is a strip of film showing a heroic and risky intervention by the NSF. A few injured officers paraded for the cameras would help. But there is nothing. They can’t even hope anymore for some drama associated with a rescue or release of Lucy Emmerson. Some shots of a pretty teenager, hurt possibly but certainly tearful, would have played well on the newscasts. Instead, the nation is getting up to watch three of the security force’s celebrated “burly bastards” knocking to the ground, with what commentators are already describing as excessive force, a shabby, middle-aged member of the British public who is guilty of little more than straying.

The command team plays and replays the video footage, looking for a PR spin but finding none. The liberty lobbies are going to have a field day. No question about it, the first kick is rule-breaking; this civilian is clearly offering no threat. He’s walking off, in fact. The man’s back is turned. His arms are down. He is not attempting to run. That kick cannot be justified. Nor can any of the subsequent blows: a knee in the back and a fist to the chin are not appropriate, especially given that the target is offering no resistance and is, to use the parlance of the force, already tarmacadamized. The video’s sound track — enhanced by NSF techs — is little help. It worsens matters, actually. It can’t be long before the news networks enhance the audio for themselves and hear exactly what was whispered full to camera into the arrested and incapacitated man’s ear as he lay stunned on the ground: “You so much as twitch and you are getting tasered. That’s fifty thousand volts, understand, you fuck?”