Three Hours : A Novel (2020)

by Lupton, Rosamund

  Some of the Reception children and Year Ones were crying because Mr Lorrimer was cross and because some of the teachers looked really worried and they were missing circle time.

  Rafi called out, ‘Who likes playing hide-and-seek in the snow?’ and he held Basi’s hand tightly as he said that, because he knew Basi was frightened of snow; and the little children stopped crying because everyone liked playing hide-and-seek and everyone liked playing in snow, apart from Basi.

  ‘Who’s the seekers?’ Mani asked, and Rafi said, ‘The sixth-formers!’ Everyone thought it super-cool the sixth-formers were playing with them. And then Rafi said, ‘We’re going to win because we’re going to the beach where they won’t be able to find us and we’re going to go quickly so we get a good head start.’

  ‘Which beach?’ Mani asked.

  ‘Fulmar beach,’ Rafi said and people were excited because no one had been there before, because it was out-of-bounds.

  Basi and Rafi had played hide and seek lots of times on the Journey and they always hid together.

  Some people started putting on their welly boots, but Rafi said they didn’t have time if they wanted to get hidden, so they went outside in the snow just wearing their indoor shoes, even Samantha in her Lelli Kellys. Rafi asked teachers and the older, stronger children to carry the big black bin bags and they all said yes, but Rafi didn’t ask Mr Lorrimer.

  In the car park, there were just the teachers’ cars because all the parents had gone. On the other side of the car park was the gate at the top of the path that went down to the beach. They weren’t allowed through the gate. Mr Lorrimer had to unlock it. Some of the boys heard him swearing.

  When they got through the gate, Rafi knelt down so Basi could get on his shoulders for a piggyback ride, which they also played a lot on the Journey, because he got tired and because his shoes had holes in the bottom. Rafi’s did too, but he said his feet were toughened up. It was still snowing but Basi was okay because Rafi was with him, holding tightly on to his legs, and he could bend down and put his face against Rafi’s hair.

  ‘How long till the seekers come?’ Sofia asked.

  ‘Not long,’ Rafi said. ‘But if we hurry we can get hidden.’

  ‘But where can we hide on a beach?’ Mani asked and Basi had been wondering that too.

  ‘We could bury ourselves in sand,’ Sofia said but Basi thought that was a silly idea, nobody had brought a spade or anything.

  Rafi stopped walking and shouted out really loudly so everyone could hear, ‘The cliffs jut out so we’re going to hide in the overhang. It’s a great place because when the seekers come searching for us, they’ll look down at the beach from the top of the cliff and won’t be able to see any of us.’

  ‘What’s an overhang?’ Sofia asked and no one else knew either. The teachers probably did but they were all on their phones, trying to get a signal, but they couldn’t.

  Rafi opened his mouth and stuck his front teeth right out over his bottom lip and chin and made everyone laugh, and then he pointed to under his sticking-out teeth and said ‘overhang’, which sounded funny because his teeth weren’t in the right place to talk. ‘We are going to hide on the chin.’

  * * *

  In Matthew’s office, Neil put down the phone to the police, wired with anxiety, his fingers tapping one after another on the desk. ‘A police car’s close, he’ll be here soon; just one officer though, their cars aren’t double-crewed any more, because I asked. She said it’s an initial response and he’ll report back, and if necessary try and contain what’s happening as much as possible.’

  Tonya put down the phone to Gina Patterson, designated head of New School.

  ‘Camille Giraud isn’t in the art block. She told Gina she was taking the children to the pottery room, but we think she must have switched her phone off because she’s not picking up.’

  The pottery room, in the middle of woodland, was accessible only by foot.

  ‘We could put the siren on,’ Tonya suggested. They’d installed a lockdown siren two years ago, a different sound to the fire alarm.

  ‘Too far away, they won’t hear it. I’ll go and let Camille know,’ Matthew said. ‘In the meantime, keep trying to call her.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Neil said, fingers still drumming.

  ‘Your role is liaison with the emergency services,’ Matthew replied. ‘You need to stay here.’

  ‘Four children in that class are off sick,’ Tonya said, looking at the register. ‘So Camille has sixteen children with her.’

  Matthew left his office, walking along the corridor towards the front door. Behind him the corridor used to end in a blank wall but now there were doors to a glass corridor leading to the theatre. He’d thought about evacuating everyone in Old School to the theatre but the glass corridor was too exposed to the woods and any possible threat there.

  This had been the original school building, with just forty students when it was founded in the 1920s as part of the Progressive School Movement, but it had quickly expanded, so an existing building half a mile away had been converted into a junior school; and then New School had been built on the other side of the road to meet demand. In the last two decades a sports hall, music block and art block had been added on to New School. The doughty sisters who’d founded the school would be astonished.

  He walked past the library, where sixth-formers were making a racket. He’d instigated a ‘no mobiles or laptops’ rule in the hope some of them might read a book but it clearly wasn’t working, nor were they in the least worried by the amber alert, which could well be the right reaction; and then on past Jacintha Kale’s English classroom, the usual hum of a lively discussion inside.

  It was all so normal; even the feel of the floor under his shoes, the grooves in the wood worn smooth with running footsteps thumping down on to the floorboards. Don’t run! teachers would call and he’d wish it was a command that could apply to him. He felt the kids’ energy under his feet.

  The dark-green walls had every year’s framed photo of those responsible for the worn floor; the numbers increasing over the years, their clothes and hairstyles changing from the 1920s to the present day, but the children’s faces all had a similar expression, smiling and open, not imagining danger. At the end of the corridor, near the front door, there were black-and-white photos of young soldiers, boys barely out of the sixth form, who’d gone off to fight and die in the Second World War. As Matthew got older those boys’ faces seemed to get younger. Had war seemed unimaginable to them as they’d raced with thudding footsteps along this corridor a year or so before? Don’t run!

  He often thought about those boys as he walked along this corridor, thought they had fought and died for the next photo of school children, and the next and the next; that a school like this one, progressive, non-religious and open-minded, which had a bursary fund to take in refugees – Jewish children smuggled out of Poland, children from Sarajevo decades later, now Rafi and Basi – a school that was genuinely tolerant and liberal, was only possible because they had fought for it. That’s why their photos were the first you saw as you came into the school. Medals of three of them were displayed outside the library.

  ‘A little maudlin, isn’t it?’ the deputy head before Neil had said, missing the point that a great relaxation of spirit, liberalism and openness was something hard-won; something to be remembered; commemorated.

  The man had been an imbecile. The kids got it, though. Running footsteps often abruptly halting.

  He passed the doors to the empty drawing room, used for music recitals and parents’ evenings, and reached Donna at the reception desk. The Gothic-Victorian front door had been bolted top and bottom with the original iron bolts, more secure he thought than the more recently added Banham.

  ‘I know Tonya asked you this, but is there anyone you might have let in that you didn’t know? Or who seemed off in any way?’

  Donna shook her head. ‘No one.’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure?’

&n
bsp; ‘Yes. I spoke to Serena in New School, and she’s the same. We’ve been racking our brains, just in case. But there’s nobody. This far into term no one is new any more, staff or kids, we know everyone.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He needed to be certain he’d made the right call to keep everyone, apart from the children and staff in Junior School, which had special circumstances, inside the school buildings.

  ‘Can you lock the door behind me?’ he asked Donna.

  ‘But it’s not safe to go out,’ she said, looking afraid.

  ‘I’ll be fine. This whole thing has most probably been a huge overreaction on my part. But I want to tell Camille in the pottery room what’s going on. Why don’t you go and wait in Jacintha’s classroom? Not be on your own. I’ll phone Neil to let me in again.’

  He went outside and waited till he heard Donna bolting the door behind him, then walked quickly over the lawn. He hadn’t paused to get his coat and the air was startlingly cold. A low stone wall surrounded two sides of the lawn, edged with evergreen Christmas Box becoming whitened with snow.

  No one was outside apart from him, children still in their first lesson, most of them not yet even aware there was an amber alert. He looked back at Old School with its mellow bricks and ornate chimneys and gargoyles, the lawn powdered white and the woods stretching off into the distance, with snow falling between the trees; like walking through a Christmas card. Inconceivable in this tranquil scene that there was a threat to the school. What was conceivable was that he would look – or actually was – paranoid and panicky; adjectives that hardly topped the list of desirable qualities in a head teacher.

  He should have spoken to Rafi for longer, had a more detailed conversation with him. Rafi genuinely believed he’d seen and heard an explosion, but Matthew should have ascertained more facts. Lorrimer had said Rafi was ‘something of a son to you’; he hadn’t known it was so obvious, thought he’d hidden this paternal love for Rafi; but Lorrimer was right and perhaps it meant he’d believed Rafi too quickly.

  It was Neil, as well as Rafi, who’d convinced him he needed to act urgently, because right from the start Neil had taken the threat seriously, believed that something terrible was happening to the school. Yes, because Neil suffered from depression, barely controlled by medication, and probably shouldn’t be back at work. Because in his depressed state the world was a hostile and frightening place, with dark catastrophe closing in. He was mentally primed and waiting for something bad to happen.

  The terrible coincidence was that he also felt paternal towards Neil. Just these two people, he didn’t go around feeling paternal willy-nilly. Everyone else had the normal kind of headmasterly attention, shared equally among them, but Rafi and his young deputy head were different; perhaps it was because he didn’t have children and his paternal love needed an outlet. But whatever the reason, love makes you biased, makes you behave illogically.

  He saw flashing blue lights in the distance, getting gradually bigger. A police car was coming up the tree-lined drive, still a long way from him as it approached the gatehouse. The police car didn’t have a siren on; maybe because the police driver knew that it was someone, him, overreacting, or just because they didn’t put a siren on in a school.

  Rafi’s PTSD, Neil’s drumming fingertips, and here they were with the school under amber alert and a police car coming up the drive. Lorrimer would be vindicated. Bloody hell. Lorrimer. He would think the photos of those boy soldiers maudlin too.

  A gunshot. The sound spliced through the iced air.

  The police car had skewed off the side of the drive, stationary.

  He had no recollection of dropping to his knees. He crawled towards the low wall on one side of the lawn, sheltering under it. He thought the shot had come from the woods, near to the gatehouse.

  His instinct was to run crab-style back inside Old School, still close to him, to safety; quickly replaced by his need to reach the pottery room and make sure the children were safe and didn’t go outside where a madman was shooting. His third instinct, inculcated into him by seminars on safety and by insomniac run-throughs of worst-case scenarios, was to make sure essential information was relayed as quickly as possible. He dialled Neil on the emergency number.

  ‘Someone’s fired a gun. The police car was shot at. Near to the gatehouse. Put me on speaker. Tonya, put out a code red alert now. Neil, put on the siren.’

  A second shot. On the phone he heard Tonya scream, she must have heard it too.

  ‘Evacuate New School immediately. Get them on to the coach and minibuses and teachers’ cars and get them away, sitting on each other’s laps, on the floor, just get them out. Everyone else follow the emergency protocol. If the room has curtains or blinds or shutters, get them down. Lock all doors that have a lock. Keep everyone down on the floor, below windows and away from the doors. Put desks up against doors and windows. Turn off lights and smartboards. All phones turn off ringers.’

  The school lockdown siren wailed into the frozen air. Anybody outside would get into a building as quickly as possible. Anyone who couldn’t get to the shelter of a building would hide, and then phone to let them know where they were.

  He stood, the length of him exposed, and ran from the lawn across the drive towards the woods and the pottery room. At any moment he expected to hear the shot. Expected to feel it. He was a coward, he realized, because he was terrified. He reached the edge of the woods and headed into the dense interior. It was snowing more heavily and he prayed the snow would obscure him as he ran. He was wearing a dark-blue jumper and brown chinos; he didn’t know how conspicuous that made him. He felt totally conspicuous.

  He was away from the siren now, quietness around him. He used to think the ancient woods had a living pulse, beating back through time to charcoal workers cutting trees every fifteen years for iron smelting, so that sunlight could reach the woodland floor and continue the rhythm. And then the violent dissonance of those shots and the pulsing rhythm was stilled.

  Footsteps cracked on frozen twigs. He listened again. Someone was near him. The gunman had come after him. He crouched between two hawthorn bushes. He’d already turned off the ringer on his phone, now he turned off vibration.

  He ran from the hawthorns to a copse of rowan trees, pressing himself against their trunks, and then he was running again towards the pottery room. He’d thought he was pretty fit, but his muscles ached and his breath was laboured and it felt impossible that he could keep up this pace but he kept running to the next copse of trees; sprinting, hiding, getting his breath back.

  Lone wolf, the expression coming into his head because that’s how he imagined him as he ran, a human finger on a trigger with a wolf’s face. But maybe there was more than one; a pack of the bastards.

  He reached an oak, its bark covered in dense moss, surrounded by tall holly trees. He pressed himself between the oak and hollies. He couldn’t hear the footsteps, but maybe the snow was muffling his sounds.

  Why would anyone do this? Madman, he’d thought earlier, lone wolf, but was that true? What if this was a terrorist attack? But why would terrorists attack this small, non-religious school in Somerset, miles from anywhere?

  He saw the path that led to Junior School and ran along it, the snow heavier now. After a hundred yards it forked, the smaller fork leading to the pottery room.

  As he raced towards the pottery room, sweat running down his face, he saw children through the windows, their small hands working with clay; one child looked out of the window, up at the snow.

  Through the huge pottery-room windows Camille Giraud saw Matthew running – running – towards the pottery room and knew, a wire vibrating inside her, that something was terribly wrong. He came into the room, so much larger than everyone else, his hair and shoulders covered in snow, and he was out of breath.

  He turned off the light, making the room abruptly dark. He whispered to her, ‘Code red,’ and then turned smiling to the children.

  ‘What are you making?�
�� He was still out of breath, his words sounding strange to her, but not to the children.

  ‘Acorns! Acorns!’ they all chanted, thrilled by his unexpected arrival.

  ‘Wonderful! We’ll make a display of them in Old School. Camille, you said there was a problem with a tap?’

  They went into the tiny bathroom; her squashed up against the basin, him against the loo; children’s murmurs next door, a boy laughing; no one questioning their headmaster as impromptu plumber.

  ‘There’s a gunman in the woods,’ he said.

  ‘A gunman?’ She couldn’t take it in.

  ‘It’s too dangerous to evacuate them through the woods. Until the police arrive you need to keep them all here. Get them on the floor. Have you got a phone?’

  ‘Yes. What will you do?’

  ‘I think the gunman might have followed me. It might be me he’s after. I’m not sure. I think I make you a target.’

  ‘So, you need to leave.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  She went back to join the children, Matthew behind her. He waved goodbye to the children, hesitated by the door for a few moments, and then slipped out.

  Camille went to get her mobile out of her jacket pocket but there was only the keys to the minibus, a bag of Jelly Babies and a packet of Kleenex. The phone that she seldom used was in her handbag, which she’d left under the driver’s seat because she didn’t think she’d need it. Didn’t think about the phone. Should have thought. How could she have been so irresponsible? She hurried to the door to call to Matthew, but he was already out of sight.

  The children’s heads were bent as they went back to their clay, their hair shiny despite the absence of the overhead lights; all oblivious as they made their acorns.

  The dark trees outside the windows looked malevolent to Camille, hiding threat. The glass windows turned into weapons.