Matthew had gone as a volunteer teacher to the Dunkirk camp for the Christmas holidays and then spent months waging a one-man campaign against bureaucracy to get Rafi and Basi to England; sponsoring them himself, finding foster parents, getting them a bursary to come to this school; feeling guilt for the unaccompanied children he’d had to leave behind. Neil has sometimes suspected Matthew just hid the boys in his boot and drove them here himself.
‘The Bukhari brothers are from Syria?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re Muslims?’
Neil thinks these questions are suggesting something ugly.
‘It was Rafi who knew what the bomb was and warned us, nobody else had a clue. He made sure the juniors were evacuated. He and his brother came to England because their father and older brother were murdered; they wanted to be safe.’
Outside his door, the footsteps are coming closer, as if they have followed Rafi and Basi here, the terror they fled.
‘Poor boys,’ Rose Polstein says and her tone is softer; she must’ve had to check.
‘Do you know why Rafi left the beach?’
‘Probably to make sure his girlfriend was okay.’
* * *
Rose thinks for a moment about Rafi Bukhari, evacuating Junior School then coming back to make sure his girlfriend was all right. Stupid bloody boy; stupid bloody brave boy.
She is now in her own command and control vehicle with her team of three: Detective Sergeant Thandie Simmonds, a black woman who’s young to be a DS; quietly spoken Detective Sergeant Amaal Ayari; and Detective Constable George Hail, the most junior member of the team. She would have liked time for proper introductions, a bonding cup of coffee, but they are getting to know each other on the hoof. Young DC George Hail looks nauseous, his freckles vivid against pallid skin, and she hopes he isn’t horribly out of his depth. Their job is to liaise with other officers and feed back to Rose, as well as endeavouring to collect any information she asks for.
Her conversation with Neil Forbright is on speakerphone so that they can quickly share and follow up any new leads.
‘I need to ask you about people who may have a personal grudge against the school,’ Rose says. She has a list of names that Neil has already given the police, and they are being investigated by other officers, but she wants to check for herself.
‘What can you tell me about Mark Henley?’
She expects Neil to tell her he’s said all this before, but to his credit he doesn’t.
‘Mark was a maths teacher here; he shouted at the kids, belittled them by reading out test results, that kind of thing. Didn’t fit the ethos of the school. He was sent on a retraining course but his behaviour deteriorated.’
‘And after that he was fired?’
‘Yes.’
‘A year ago?’
‘Yes. He stopped teaching after that, went into business, I think.’
‘What about Jed Soames?’
‘A PE teacher. He flirted with a girl in Year Thirteen and secretly asked her out. One of her friends came to me. He resigned before he was fired but we wouldn’t supply a reference. She was eighteen, so a grey area legally but not morally. That was nearly two years ago now.’
‘What was his reaction to not getting a reference?’
‘He tried to sue, sent Matthew and some of the governors abusive emails, but then he stopped the legal proceedings. I don’t know why.’
‘There’ve been three students expelled in the last five years?’ she asks.
‘Yes. Simon Shawcross, Victor Deakin and Malin Cohen. Simon was found dealing Spice eighteen months ago. We give second chances to users of drugs, but not dealing. We reported him to the police.’
‘And Malin Cohen?’ Other teachers have told the police about Malin’s aggression; Malin Cohen is the one name that’s been put forward, reluctantly, but put forward all the same.
‘He was expelled a year ago for attempting to punch a pregnant teacher. A student grabbed him in time. It was an immediate expulsion. Malin has always had behavioural issues but Matthew tries to see the best in a young person, give them a chance to redeem themselves.’
‘How did Malin react to being expelled?’
‘He became uncontrollable. We had to have three male members of staff escort him off the premises, threaten him with the police. Hold on a minute.’
‘Are you okay? Mr Forbright …?’
‘He’s outside again, right outside the door.’
Rose presses the receiver to her ear to block out the other sounds around her. Neil Forbright must be holding the phone away from him, because she can hear a clicking sound. Footsteps, she thinks. She has a sudden glimpse into what it is like to be on your own, a gunman’s footsteps just the other side of a door. She admires Neil’s calm, his quiet courage.
‘Those are the gunman’s footsteps?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me about them?’
‘He just walks up and down this length of corridor, apart from when he has a cigarette break and then he sits right up against the library door; the kids in the library could smell the smoke. Does that tell you anything?’
‘Possibly, yes.’
She can’t share most of the information she has, but she will talk to him about the footsteps, because she thinks he’s owed that at least and because he might help build a profile.
‘I think that he’s either deliberately trying to intimidate you—’ she says.
‘Because we are less likely to fight back?’
Oh Jesus, please don’t let them fight back. There might have been a chance for some of them against a rifle but not against a semi-automatic.
‘You really mustn’t attempt anything yourselves, do you understand, Mr Forbright? We don’t know what weapons he has.’
‘Right … And the other reason?’ Neil asks.
‘It could be that he gets bored easily, he’s walking up and down to keep moving, to keep himself psyched.’
‘That helps actually. Makes him seem less in control.’
‘What can you tell me about Victor Deakin?’ she asks; the last in the list of expelled students.
‘Victor joined the school in Year Eleven and was expelled just over seven months ago.’
‘Why was he expelled?’
‘I don’t know, I was off sick again at the time; depression. I’m sorry.’
‘Did Mr Marr say anything to you about it?’
‘Just that he’d left. If it wasn’t an ongoing issue, then he wouldn’t have bothered me with it. Matthew tries to take as much off my plate as he can. But Victor wouldn’t have minded being expelled. It was his parents who made him stay here after GCSEs, Victor wanted to go to college. He felt he was being infantilized, his words. He didn’t want to be here. Hold on …’
Neil Forbright must be holding the receiver a little way from his ear again, because she can just make out the footsteps.
‘Mr Forbright …?’
‘I’d forgotten. Earlier, I heard footsteps going down the corridor, not just our stretch, but further, all the way to the front door. The only time they’ve gone that far. But I don’t think they were the same as these, I think they were lighter. I heard the front door. It’s heavy, makes a clang. Then footsteps came back and I think they were heavier.’
‘They swapped over?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘When was this?’
‘Just after Matthew was shot.’
‘Thank you, Mr Forbright, you’ve been very helpful. Let me know if there’s anything else you think of.’
She ends the call.
‘The BBC warning was from a burner phone,’ DS Thandie Simmonds says. ‘Not traceable. The tech guys say he must have removed the battery. They’re trying to find the last position it was used.’
‘Anything on the voice?’ Rose asks.
‘He used a voice-changer app. They’ve got some background sounds that they’re working on.’
‘Thanks, Thandie.’ She tu
rns to DS Ayari. ‘Amaal, can you look into the significance of today’s date?’
She’s using their first names to create intimacy because in this high-pressure situation they need to feel a personal relationship with one another to function best as a team.
‘Look out for anything a terrorist would ring in his diary,’ she continues to Amaal. ‘Anniversaries, religious holidays, birth dates of martyrs and leaders, and the number – day, month and year, both ways, American and English.’
The cowardly inadequate bastards do so love their special dates.
* * *
The wind makes the bolt on the shed door do shivery rattling and the dark creak. The eight-year-old boy is shuddering with cold, his knees knocking into his chin as he huddles; his fingers are numb. There’s a keyhole in the shed door with no key and a little bit of light like a magic wand comes through it.
The smell of the shed presses against his face, the rotting smell, but he can smell poo too, so an animal’s in here. He loves all animals, even the ones most people don’t, like rats. Maybe there’s a rat in the shed and they will become friends and he’ll take him with him in his pocket, like in the Indian in the Cupboard book, and no one will even know he’s there and he’ll feed him bits of cheese at lunchtime.
He thinks he hears a scrabble in the darkness. ‘Ratty?’ he says quietly, in case the man is listening outside. ‘The man can’t hurt us. I’ve bolted the door.’
He turns on his phone and shines his screen around the shed but he can’t see a rat; he’s probably shy and hiding. He has 7% charge. His phone animals haven’t been fed for ages and they’ll be really hungry so he’ll just quickly feed them, it’ll only take a tiny bit of charge. And then he must turn off his phone and be brave as a Barbary lion, as a Bengal tiger, as Sir Lancelot and the little mouse in The Gruffalo.
* * *
In the leisure centre cafeteria, Beth Alton has texted Zac five times but he hasn’t heard from Jamie. Her phone keeps ringing and each time she jolts with hope but it’s Mike or Theo or her parents, and she quickly answers because leaving it ringing means it’s engaged for Jamie; she speaks for just a few seconds then hangs up. She holds her phone tightly, as if it is Jamie’s hand.
The smell of old coffee and burgers is getting stronger as the room heats up. She wishes there was a window. She doesn’t even know if it’s still snowing; totally separated from Jamie.
More parents of the trapped children have joined them, but the noise level remains almost mute. Two journalists tried to blend in with arriving parents but were spotted immediately by the police officers; although the right age, the journalists’ bodies were too relaxed, their walk too easy, their faces too healthy. They were hustled out and since then a police officer has stood guard by the doors.
At the tables, the parents are isolated units; a brief exchange of information or sympathy, that’s all; even couples, pressed against one another, seem locked into this separateness.
The stillness in the large room, the terrible inertia, is broken by the young man – Steve, Beth has discovered, the fiancé of a junior school teacher, Chloe Price – who’s pacing fast up and down between the tables. She thinks of Jamie hiding on his own, and wishes there was someone who loved him and he could think of her and feel less alone, less afraid. And it can’t be her; she’s not enough, just his mum. He needs magical teenage romantic love and he had that once, but lost it, and that will make this even harder for him. And she shouldn’t even know about it; she has no right to know about it.
There’s something I have to tell you, Jamie.
Sounds ominous …
I found your diary.
You must have looked pretty hard.
I was changing your bedclothes.
Under the mattress?
I lift the mattress up so that the bottom sheet is good and tight, more comfy.
For God’s sake, Mum. I told you to leave my room alone, that I can change my own bedding. Did you read it?
I’m sorry.
You had no right.
I know.
Fucking hell, Mum.
I know, there’s no excuse, I know that, but I could tell you were unhappy. And I kept asking you but you kept just saying you were okay.
She’d thought if she just knew what was making Jamie unhappy she could lead the conversation into the right area and he’d confide in her.
In his diary, she’d read about his romance with Antonella, pages covered in beautiful drawings of a girl’s face, often just her blue eyes with long black lashes, and poems written alongside the drawings. He’s always loved to draw, not cars and dinosaurs like other little boys, but multicoloured intricate flowers and randomly coloured rainbows and then a girl’s beautiful blue eyes. And then, after three months of drawings, ‘It’s over’ in biro, his anguish clear in the jerky writing.
Theo hadn’t talked to her about girlfriends but he wasn’t vulnerable like Jamie, probably treating the girls badly rather than the other way round. And a little part of her was glad that she could help Jamie.
But whenever she attempted to talk about relationships his head had just bent lower, shoulders hunching towards her, and he’d found an excuse to leave the room.
Once she’d been able to make it better for him – giving a hug, reading a story and witch-hazel on bruises. But the terrible thing about your teenager being unhappy was that he doesn’t want your help and however much you love him, show him you love him, it just doesn’t make that much difference.
Can you say something? Jamie?
You’ve already read all about it so what’s there to say?
I really am sorry.
All those hinty conversations about girls.
Yes.
She hears him give a quiet laugh, resigned, and she’s forgiven.
He’d use the word hinty, would laugh like that, would forgive her. She’s known him since he was a few moments old, the time it took the midwife to hand him to her, and she knows what he would say to her.
Around her, parents are starting to talk to one another; tendrils of conversation branch outwards, so that groups at a table are talking and now a subject is seized upon – Who’s doing this?
Beth can’t think who would do this, but people are pitching in, some searching on their phones and iPads and laptops.
‘News sites are saying it might be a terrorist attack.’
Maybe they think if they understand what’s happening they are somehow less powerless to help their children.
‘Islamic State.’
‘That’s what they’re saying on Twitter too; that it’s an Islamist terror attack. Thousands of people are tweeting that.’
Their skin prickles with the words, sweat between shoulder blades, a terror under the conversation.
‘But why would ISIS come here?’ a mother asks, because they are just becoming more frightened, seeing their children in greater, unimaginable danger.
‘On the news, they’re asking about the school’s Prevent policy,’ a father says. ‘Look …’
He turns his laptop to the room. On Sky News, the anchor is talking to a counterterrorism expert: ‘Cliff Heights School, like every school, has to have a Prevent policy by law …’
‘He’s saying it’s kids at the school doing this,’ the father says.
And this is less frightening than ISIS terrorists with machetes and guns, posting beheadings on the internet, who speak a different language, who cannot understand English and their English children.
‘The terrorists are kids at our school?’
‘That’s what he’s implying. Yes.’
‘What difference does it make?’ a mother says. ‘Matthew Marr’s been shot and the gunman might shoot children in Old School and there are junior school children hiding for their lives.’
And she’s right, they all know she’s right, and can no longer believe radicalized students are any less frightening.
‘They mean those Muslim brothers, don’t they?’ another mother asks.
‘The refugees?’
‘We don’t know anything, we don’t know—’
‘Who made sure they were refugees?’
‘Was any kind of check done on them? To prove who they say they are?’
Beth thinks that the cafeteria is becoming ugly, fear peeling away their clothes and skin, exposing something that should be hidden. Most of the parents had welcomed the refugee brothers, cleared out cupboards for clothes for them, donated books and toys for the younger one, held raffles to raise money. She’s shy in a crowd, not as confident as the other mothers, but she has to say something now because this isn’t right.
‘Those boys wouldn’t hurt anyone,’ she says, but her voice isn’t strong enough to be heard, as if every part of her is diminished, but she carries on, ‘We shouldn’t blame two children who—’
‘What about the Parsons Green tube attack?’ a father says, interrupting. ‘The attacker was in foster care, just like the Bukhari brothers.’
‘Are the foster parents here?’ a mother says. ‘Anyone? Is anyone here foster parents to the Bukharis?’
A moment of silence in the cafeteria.
‘I think they were planning on seeing their daughter in Cardiff,’ a woman says. ‘The mother said something about it last week at a coffee morning.’
They might not even know yet, Beth thinks, but once they do they’ll hurry back, terrified as all the parents here are terrified. Mike is still on the train, slow because of the snow.
A woman in sportswear holds her iPad up to Beth.
‘Islamic State train teenagers then send them over here, pretending to be refugees; a Trojan Horse, that’s what they’re called. I’m sorry if you find that hard to believe.’ So she did hear Beth earlier in her quiet attempt to stand up for the boys.
‘You’re researching this nonsense?’ Hannah’s father says, appalled. ‘As if those poor boys haven’t been through enough.’ Beth likes him for it.
‘The older one is sixteen. More than old enough to be a terrorist,’ the mother in sportswear says. ‘And the other one isn’t too young,’ she continues, her finger on her iPad. ‘They have taught five-year-olds to be terrorists.’
‘Oh, balderdash,’ Hannah’s father says. ‘Rafi and Basi ran away from terror. Most of their family was murdered. They just want to be safe.’
Three Hours : A Novel (2020) Page 11