Three Hours : A Novel (2020)

by Lupton, Rosamund

  Rose thinks that the original rifle shots were a deliberate misdirection, so that they wouldn’t see this was a more sophisticated and brutal attack.

  ‘Two messages have just been received by the BBC,’ an officer says. ‘First message, if they see police they will shoot the children. Second message, if anybody tries to escape they will be shot.’

  Rose hears orders being given to armed officers on the ground to pull back; to wait.

  ‘How will they see us? Surveillance drone?’ Letwynd asks.

  ‘Probably,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘There are still numerous drones above the school, which could belong to the press or sightseers, but the attackers may also have one up there. We need to clear them. At present, our snipers are too far away from the pottery room and visibility is too poor to take him out cleanly. We risk wounding him before killing him and if he puts any pressure on the trigger he can inflict multiple civilian casualties. It would also tip off his pal in Old School, who’d open fire too. Until the drones are down we cannot risk going any closer; not unless we have no other option. Detective Inspector Polstein, what’s your opinion?’

  Jesus, is that all the time she has? Fuck.

  ‘This is on the fly, with little to go on,’ Rose says.

  ‘Your best guess?’ Bronze Commander says.

  Get it together, Rose. Focus.

  She separates herself mentally from the noise and activity, her brain finding its space for concentration, emotions pushed aside. In the US, she’d spoken to people who’d been involved in school attacks, including local law enforcement officers, FBI officers, students, teachers and psychologists. But none of those attacks, on the face of it, were anything like this one.

  ‘This is not a typical school shooting, when shooters go on the rampage from the off, killing as many as possible,’ she says. ‘They have only shot at two people, both of whom are adults, and significantly haven’t fired again after shooting the head teacher. There are two interpretations of this. The first is that they want to enter into negotiation, which means they are prepared to release the children. If this is the case, they may have demands that they want to make, probably using the BBC, as they have phoned a warning message to them. The second interpretation is that they want us to think exactly what I just outlined, and are playing for maximum airtime.’

  ‘Publicity?’ Bronze Commander asks.

  ‘Yes. They want this story playing out live, everyone glued to their TVs and tablets and phones, with the shooters as the stars of the event. They want to be trending on Twitter and TV programmes interrupted with updates. The longer this goes on, the bigger the audience. Any attack that is unfolding live attracts very large numbers.’

  ‘And when their audience is big enough?’ an officer says.

  ‘We hope they make demands and don’t start a televised tweeted killing spree?’ Bronze Commander says and Rose nods.

  ‘The two adults they’ve shot at are both figures of authority,’ she says. ‘A police officer and a head teacher. I know that we’re already investigating anyone who has a personal grudge against the school, but it’s also possible that these authority figures may represent something – a political system, a religion, a country even.’

  ‘So, a terrorist attack?’ Bronze Commander asks.

  ‘It’s a possibility, yes.’

  There really should be a different noun to terrorist, she thinks, especially when they attack children; inadequate cowards springs to mind. Evil bastards too, of course, but also cowards. At moments like this she realizes that she really went for her job out of rage.

  ‘I think that one of the gunmen is highly manipulative and if we do negotiate he will attempt to play us,’ she says. ‘We’ve seen that with the misdirect of using rifles when they have semi-automatics.’

  ‘One of the gunmen?’ Bronze Commander asks.

  ‘It’s unlikely there would be two manipulative people working together – one would be dominant, the other subordinate. Even if it’s a terrorist attack with a defined goal, we cannot treat the gunmen as a single unit.’

  Dannisha Taylor, lead hostage and crisis negotiator, joins the discussion. ‘I agree with Detective Inspector Polstein. Their personalities and individual motivations will be different, and they’ll need different negotiating tactics. But it will be difficult to establish a communication channel.’

  A priority for the tech teams, working with mobile companies, is to get the gunmen’s mobile phone numbers and any other comms data.

  Rose studies the gunman outside the pottery room. His build is obscured by the webbing and weapon, he could be scrawny or muscular, slim or heavy, impossible to tell; his face is obscured by the black balaclava, just his eyes showing through the slits in the fabric. She remembers a description from Macbeth which she did at school many moons ago, ‘false face’.

  ‘If they have a surveillance drone watching us, who’s flying it?’ an officer asks.

  ‘The gunman in Old School?’ Letwynd suggests. ‘No one knows what he’s doing in the corridor.’

  ‘And the gunman outside the pottery room could have an earpiece under his balaclava,’ another officer says. ‘For a mobile or walkie-talkie.’

  ‘I’d guess at a two-way digital radio, harder for us to monitor,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘There may be more gunmen, but these two bastards haven’t been shy about being seen so I’m hopeful that there aren’t. The weather’s set to get worse, a storm’s moving our way and visibility may well become atrocious, so we hunt as hard as we can now.’

  Alongside the physical search of the school by police surveillance drones and helicopters, counterterrorism units are monitoring internet chatter and they are getting info on all mobiles operating within the school campus.

  ‘Will they react to seeing a helicopter?’ an officer asks.

  ‘They know they can’t be taken out by a helicopter,’ Bronze Commander says, ‘nor can children be rescued, unless it lands. So they won’t be bothered by a helicopter.’

  ‘What about PC Beard? Does this change anything for him?’ another officer asks.

  ‘No. As far as we know there’s no gunman anywhere near him,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘And the gatehouse is secure. He should stay put.’

  Rose turns to the three police officers who have been assigned to her from different divisions in Avon and Somerset Constabulary, an area covering almost five thousand square kilometres, including Bristol where Rose is based. None of them have met before nor worked in the school’s area. She managed to speak to them briefly en route.

  ‘Are we getting anything on number plates?’

  ‘Trying to with UAVs,’ DS Thandie Simmonds says. ‘But most of the plates are obscured by snow.’

  ‘Tell them to try and get partials. And we need to look at cars parked within a mile; but no one goes close. Columbine shooters booby-trapped their cars. And I want to know everything we get on that message to the BBC.’

  ‘If either gunman starts shooting, we go in,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘Until then we try every option to avoid civilian casualties.’

  * * *

  In the pottery room, the children are underneath the eight tables that sixty-year-old Camille Giraud pushed together. She’s given them each a fat chunk of clay and they’re making cups and bowls for their house while Camille makes clay tiles to stop flying glass. The children in their house haven’t seen the gunman.

  The first row of clay tiles are stuck to the wooden window frame and if she moulds the next row just right they should stick to the first row. She’s been crouching down but now she needs to stand because otherwise she can’t reach to do the tiles. She unbends, her knees clicking. As she stands she sees the man in the balaclava through the window, pointing his gun at her. She pushes the clay tiles against the window, not looking at the man’s eyes in the slits in the balaclava, but instead remembering Jemima; how beautiful she’d been. Her smile. It was her smile that was beautiful, so completely artless, so unaware of its power; dazzlingly lovely.
And meant for her. That was the miracle of loving Jemima. That this woman had loved her back. And not because Jemima had a husband, although she had, but because anybody loving Camille was surprising to Camille and that Jemima did was something she daily didn’t believe. The man in the balaclava shifts his gun, as if feeling the heft of it; it’s pointing pretty much at her mouth.

  Up until now, she didn’t mind the idea of dying at all. If there was a heaven, an afterlife, which Jemima believed in, then they’d be reunited. She’d imagined Elysian fields. Or their first kiss, played over and over, the joy of it repeating. But it would be too much. She’d need to take a quiet calm walk in those Elysian fields, which hopefully would be English like Jemima, with bluebells and cabbage whites, and then return to Jemima’s kiss. And then she’d imagined just reliving the bits she loved and misses the most now, tea in bed together, the feel of her softly warm against her back when she woke up, the smell of Jemima’s perfume as she came in through the front door; the sound of her voice saying Camille’s name with more love and affection than either of her parents had ever used. And if there weren’t any Elysian fields, a heaven, an afterlife, then that would be okay too because she wouldn’t have to buckle under the weight of grief any more; the loss would stop eating at her. She wouldn’t have to hold it together all day until she could get into the house and crumple next to the front door, arms round her knees.

  But the children.

  Clearly, obviously, they have to live and that means she must too, because it’s up to her to keep them safe.

  She bends down under the tables. ‘Do you think your house should have pets?’ she asks, giving them each more clay.

  The children will not die. That simply cannot happen. And she will make sure they’re not afraid.

  9.

  9.49 a.m.

  Neil Forbright, the deputy head, stands at the locked door of the headmaster’s office. The fire has gone out in the grate and the large Victorian room is cold as well as dark. An email comes in on his phone from Frank in the library, sent to him and Jacintha: Matthew is still conscious. He’s only realized today that Matthew is like a father to him, that he relies on his kindness and belief in him. His actual father would say Neil looks for a top dog, because he is not. His father believes that humans are pack animals. For a moment, he thinks absurdly about Elsie, his elderly Labrador rescued from the pound, and wonders who’ll feed her and let her out this evening.

  His phone rings. ‘Mr Forbright? It’s PC Beard.’

  ‘Do you know if the children in the pottery room are safe? If—’

  ‘Sorry, I’m still stuck here in your gatehouse and don’t know anything, but the high-powered lot running this will be doing everything they can to help them. Your school secretary, Tonya, told me your head teacher was shot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the gunman, he’s still in the corridor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve been to your school before with my wife, watched your plays when you open them up to the public. Les Mis, last year. Point is, I’ve been in your theatre and it’s very secure. So we need to get you all to the theatre.’

  ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘Can you describe how you’d normally get to the theatre?’

  ‘It’s really not possible.’

  ‘Please, can you just tell me?’

  He’s clearly not going to give up.

  ‘To the left of Matthew’s office, the end of our corridor has doors, and they open on to a glass corridor which goes to the theatre.’

  ‘Matthew’s office is where you are?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what about Tonya? She said she’s in Old School.’

  ‘Yes, in Jacintha’s classroom. It’s to the right of Matthew’s office.’

  ‘How many other people are in Jackie’s classroom?’

  ‘Jacintha.’

  It’s important Jacintha’s name is said properly because if she dies, then the last few times people speak her name they have to use the right one, the one that she is loved by. At the moment, her A-level English class are reading poems, the beautiful ones, she says, that are soothing in cadence and imagery; and for a short while she’d put her phone on speaker and he’d listened to her reading aloud:

  ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

  Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

  Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine …’

  He can see how poetry might help. His thoughts are daisy-chaining, one to the next, to get away from the gunman in the corridor; mindfulness, which he’s been told to practise, is the opposite of daisy-chaining and is about physically inhabiting the present moment, actually remarkably easy to do with a gunman outside your door; every hair on your arm, every breath, every sound and smell is magnified and it’s appalling, hateful, shocking, and he’d rather daisy-chain to Jacintha’s bank of wild thyme for a little while, for a reprieve. Be a man, his father says to him.

  And all this takes place inside his head in a second, his thoughts absurdly fast, not daisy chains but fibre optics, because that’s the other thing that happens when you’re in a building with a gunman, time changes, so that your inner self moves too quickly, an insect trapped in a jar, frantically battering wings against the glass.

  ‘There’s twelve sixth-form students and three members of staff,’ he says. ‘Tonya, Jacintha and Donna, the school receptionist.’

  ‘And the head teacher is in the library?’

  ‘Yes. With thirteen teenagers.’

  ‘And the library is where exactly?’

  ‘The other side of the corridor, opposite Matthew’s office, Tonya’s office and Jacintha’s classroom, running almost the whole length of our part of the corridor.’

  ‘That’s everyone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Righty-ho, I’ll let you know when I’ve got a plan to get you all out.’

  He hangs up. Righty-ho, he actually said that, and for a moment Neil thinks of the photos of the boy soldiers and imagines PC Beard rowing a little boat to the beaches of Dunkirk; a leaky bathtub, because there’s not a snowball in hell’s chance of getting to the safety of the theatre.

  He listens to the footsteps again; they are outside the library and coming back towards him. When his phone rings, he thinks it’s PC Beard again, back with more nonsensical optimism, but it’s a woman’s voice, young and serious, part of the ‘high-powered lot’, he guesses.

  ‘Mr Forbright? My name’s Detective Inspector Rose Polstein.’

  ‘Are the children in the pottery room safe?’

  He thinks there’s a pause before she speaks, a fumbling.

  ‘We are doing everything we can,’ she says.

  ‘And junior school?’

  ‘Boats are on their way, we’ll evacuate them as quickly as we can.’

  ‘What about Rafi Bukhari and Jamie Alton?’

  Lorrimer had phoned Tonya from Fulmar beach, his voice chastened, to pass on the information that Rafi had left. It was just before Matthew was shot and he’s glad that Matthew doesn’t know.

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t yet know the whereabouts of either boy,’ Rose says. ‘Has the school received any threats?’

  PC Beard hadn’t asked about who might be doing this, just focused on his nonsensical plan to rescue them; he likes PC Beard for that.

  ‘No, at least none that I’ve been told about,’ he says. ‘But I’ve been away, off sick. I’m sorry.’

  His catch-up meeting with Matthew had barely begun when Rafi phoned from Junior School.

  ‘Do you think it’s possible the school, or a person in the school, could be a target for terrorists?’

  He wants to think the question ludicrous – but what would Daesh make of him? They’d stoned gay men to death in Raqqa and thrown them off buildings; beheaded women for not covering themselves top to toe. He has gay and lesbian colleagues who are married, a transgender student, and no one bats an eye, that’s the thing, nobody bats an eye
and girls can wear miniskirts and boys a tutu if that’s what they want, because what you wear doesn’t matter, it is you who matters.

  And they’re in the middle of woodland without even a proper fence; so an easy target.

  ‘You told a police officer earlier that you don’t believe any of your students have been radicalized?’ Rose Polstein says.

  ‘No. We have safe spaces for debate, democracy in action through the school council, everything that’s required; but tolerance is an integral part of the school. It’s why we don’t have a uniform here and the students are free to practise whatever religion they choose, or none. We have no head boy or girl and no prefects; every member of the school is equally valued and the children are respected by the staff as well as the other way round. We foster tolerance and mutual respect from Reception through to our sixth form.’

  He looks at Frank’s email on his phone.

  Mr Marr is still conscious. We are all ok. We have barricaded the door with books.

  He thinks of the kids in the theatre rehearsing Macbeth; Jacintha and her class reading poetry. They have clearly also fostered courage. He wants to say that he is extraordinarily proud of them, but how will that be helpful?

  ‘Do you check what students are doing on the net?’ Rose Polstein asks.

  ‘We get alerts if anyone visits an inappropriate site but most of them have 4G and when they get home we can’t keep an eye on them. But we have equipped them to resist extremism.’

  ‘One of the students, Rafi Bukhari, is a refugee?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long has he been at the school?’

  ‘Just over two and a half years.’

  ‘How did he come to be here?’

  ‘Matthew, the head, met him and his brother at the Dunkirk migrant camp, they were unaccompanied vulnerable children. There was a huge amount of red tape, lots of barriers, but Matthew managed to bring them here.’