Chapter 66
LAUREN
Lauren steps on to the roof. Wind whips her hair into her mouth and stings her eyes, and her heart punches against her ribcage.
Below, tiny people and tiny cars pepper the streets.
On the far side of the flat grey roof, Fraser stands on the parapet, his back to an extractor vent.
His right arm is tight around a sobbing figure, her tearstained face framed by two plaits.
‘Hi, Fraser.’ Lauren takes a few steps towards him. Stops. She doesn’t know if he’s armed. Apart from her rapid heart rate she feels strangely calm, as though her whole life has been building up to this one moment.
Fraser doesn’t look round. ‘If they shoot me,’ he says, ‘she’ll fall.’ A terrified wail comes from the petite figure locked to his side.
‘It’s okay.’ Lauren takes another few steps forwards. ‘You’re going to be okay.’
‘Tell them I want fifteen minutes and a clean route out.’ He seems unmoved by the fact that it’s Lauren talking to him. The woman he said he loved. The woman he wanted to marry.
‘You know I can’t do that, Fraser.’ She uses his name again, hoping to break through this eerily calm veneer, but he still doesn’t look at her.
‘If they put down their weapons and give me a clean route out, I won’t touch her.
Otherwise . . .’ He loosens his arm and pushes the girl forward so she’s teetering on the edge, and she screams so loud Lauren cries out too, but then Fraser regrips.
Gives a short laugh. ‘It’ll make a hell of a mess,’ he says.
The scream becomes a wail. The girl twists her head to look at Lauren. ‘Please! Just do what he says!’
She’s in her early twenties. Denim dungarees and an Elmwood Primary School lanyard covered with brightly coloured pin badges.
‘Are you Miss Key?’ Lauren says.
‘Y-yes.’ She chokes back another sob.
‘I need you to just sit tight for a while longer, okay? Just while I talk to Fraser.’
‘I don’t want to die!’
‘You’re not going to die.’ Lauren walks towards the parapet until she’s level with Fraser and Miss Key.
The drop to the ground makes her dizzy, and she looks up at the other roofs instead.
She can’t see the snipers but she knows they’re there, their rifles trained on Fraser.
She shivers. No sudden movements. She can’t afford to make a mistake.
Fraser’s jaw is tense, a muscle jumping in his neck. Beside him, Miss Key moans softly, her eyes squeezed shut. The toes of her lime-green sneakers protrude from the parapet like miniature diving boards, twenty metres above the pavement.
‘Let her go,’ Lauren says softly.
‘I can’t.’
There’s something in his voice – desperation? Fear? Lauren seizes it.
‘It must feel like there’s no way out. Like you’re trapped.’ She waits, but he doesn’t respond. ‘But there’s always a way out. You don’t have to do this, Fraser. Let Miss Key go, and you and I can walk out together.’ She swallows. ‘We’ll sort it out together.’
Slowly, Fraser turns his head and looks at her, as if he’s seeing her for the first time. ‘Together,’ he says, so quietly it’s almost taken by the wind.
‘Together,’ Lauren repeats. And then she can’t say anything at all.
She touches the tip of her thumb to the inside of her ring finger, spinning the metal band until she feels the spike of the diamonds against her nail.
Grief surges inside her. She swallows hard.
Stratman was right – she shouldn’t be here.
‘We’re good together,’ Fraser says. ‘You and me.’
She nods. Takes another few steps. She’s only three or four metres away now. She can make out a badge on Miss Key’s dungarees. Librarians rock. ‘I don’t want them to shoot you,’ she says in a low voice. She thinks of the explosives taped to the chairs; of the booby-trapped stage.
‘If they don’t shoot me, they’ll lock me up.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. You’re having some kind of mental health crisis, Fraser. This New Dawn stuff . . . it’s not you.’
‘It is me. This country’s being destroyed; we need drastic action to—’
‘You’ve been sucked in. Radicalized.’ Lauren takes another step.
‘New Dawn is the future.’
‘We’ll tell the courts you had a breakdown. You never meant to hurt anyone.’
The whomp whomp whomp of the helicopter grows louder and Fraser looks up sharply, tightening his grip on Miss Key and making her cry out. Lauren silently curses.
‘Let her go,’ she says again. ‘Please, Fraser. I know you’re better than this.’
When he looks at her again, his eyes are shining, although whether it’s from tears or the wind, she can’t be sure. She steps forward again, and, as she does, Fraser’s grip loosens. Slowly, as though she’s befriending a wild horse, Lauren reaches towards Miss Key.
It happens in a heartbeat.
Miss Key, grappling for Lauren’s hand in desperation; Fraser panicking and snatching her tighter.
Lime-green sneakers scuffing at the concrete, and debris falling from the parapet and freewheeling into the sky.
Faint screams from the street below. They teeter there, in a moment that is at once slow-motion and terrifyingly brief, their weight shifting, the world tipping.
Then Lauren grabs them.
They fall in a clumsy, breathless heap away from the parapet. Lauren has a fistful of dungaree and a hand on Fraser’s belt, and a fat lip slammed on the asphalt roof. Stars flit across her vision.
But the hostage is safe. They are all safe.
Miss Key struggles to her feet and runs. Stratman will be there to catch her at the top of the stairs, Lauren knows, and she pays no more heed to her because now it’s just the two of them. Lauren and Fraser, the way it’s always been. The way she thought it always would be.
‘I never wanted to hurt you,’ he says. ‘I love you. I’ll always love you.’
There’s a beat as their eyes lock. Then, with a sharp click, Lauren snaps a handcuff over Fraser’s wrist. His eyes fly open in disbelief, and before he can gather his senses she uses the metal cuff as a lever, putting him in a wrist lock that has him gritting his teeth in pain.
The door to the roof crashes open, boots racing across the roof towards her.
‘Suicide by cop,’ Lauren says coldly. ‘That’s what they call it, isn’t it?
’ She twists the cuff and Fraser grimaces.
‘New Dawn would have loved that, wouldn’t they?
You’d have died a hero. A martyr for the cause.
’ She leans close enough to hiss in his ear.
‘I didn’t want them to shoot you, because the people you’ve hurt deserve their day in court.
And you deserve to go down for a very, very long time. ’
Lauren feels a hand on her shoulder. It’s Stratman, with what seems like an army of uniformed officers.
She gets to her feet and lets them take over, and he helps her up as though she’d been the one held hostage.
They walk to the fire escape together, Stratman just close enough to stop her legs from buckling under her.
Lauren doesn’t look back.