Three Hours : A Novel (2020)

by Lupton, Rosamund

  ‘And he expelled him?’

  ‘Yes. I’d deleted the rape fantasies so we didn’t have any evidence to take to the police. We also knew how credible and persuasive Victor could be. We were worried that Victor’s parents would go to the governors, who we knew would support Matthew’s decision, but even so it would draw things out. But the parents didn’t appeal, just accepted it straight away. Matthew met them and they promised they’d take him to a psychologist, keep a close eye on him. Matthew told me he’d make sure wherever Victor went next knew about him, off the record if it breached privacy rules. But a local sixth-form college took him anyway. He must have been very persuasive when they interviewed him. I’m not sure that he even went to a psychologist. I’ve thought about this, and I can’t imagine him agreeing to see one.’

  He’s right. There were four letters found in Victor’s bedroom, all of them asking why Victor hadn’t shown up to his appointments; written to Victor not his parents because he was over sixteen.

  ‘How hard was it to get into his journal on the laptop?’

  ‘Extremely. He had a highly sophisticated firewall and complex encryption. He probably okayed the search to Matthew because he didn’t think an IT teacher would get through it, but I worked in IT for a defence contractor before becoming a teacher.’

  So why no firewalls or encryption on his home computer? It adds weight to her belief that Victor wants certain things found by the police; that he’s trying to orchestrate this police investigation as much as he is the attack itself.

  ‘He’s exceptionally bright,’ Olav Christoffersen says. ‘I’m not sure if you’ve been told that already. Not only in IT and his other A-level subjects, but across the board. He taught himself ancient Greek and Latin for fun.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Christoffersen. You’ve been very helpful. Let me know if you think of anything else.’

  ‘Yes.’ He starts weeping. ‘I’m so sorry. We knew he was wicked, but we never suspected, Matthew and me, that he’d get a gun, attack the school, never even imagined it.’

  He hangs up.

  Intellectually her focus now has to be on Victor Deakin, her mental energy directed at him but – and this is important to Rose, crucially important to her – only so she can help the children and staff held captive in the school. Deakin doesn’t matter, they matter. It is for them and for their families that she is doing this job, why they are all doing their jobs, and she finds herself wanting to tell Victor Deakin this: it is not you who counts, it is the people you’re terrorizing who count, everybody else around you, everyone apart from you, you little shit.

  Rose runs through the PCL-R checklist to diagnose Victor. In an ideal world she would have a structured interview in scientifically controlled standardized conditions, but with his journal, the rape fantasies and with what the kids and teachers have told them about Victor Deakin she has enough and needs must when the devil drives; and this is surely when the devil drives. There is a score from 0, 1 or 2 for each category on the checklist. For the planned rape with Rohypnol and for the rape fantasies he scores 2 in the categories ‘callousness and lack of empathy’, ‘shallow affect’ (superficial emotional responsiveness) and ‘sexual promiscuity’, as defined by attempts to sexually coerce others into sexual activity. From his laptop journal, maximum marks for the categories ‘grandiose estimation of self’, ‘lack of remorse or guilt’ and ‘failure to accept responsibility for own actions’; while the letters to Sarah and her parents and lying to the teachers gain him top marks for ‘pathological lying’, ‘glib and superficial charm’ and ‘cunning and manipulativeness’; for vandalizing the shop in Exeter full marks for the categories ‘poor behavioural controls’, ‘high levels of irresponsibility’ and ‘juvenile delinquency’. His extreme sports show a ‘need for stimulation/proneness to boredom’ and ‘being overly impulsive’, while at this moment he is flaunting his ‘criminal versatility’ and she could carry on but he has reached 30, the number that makes the diagnosis.

  ‘What do you think?’ Dannisha asks, but Rose is sure that Dannisha, who heard the conversation with Olav Christoffersen, has reached the same conclusion.

  ‘Victor Deakin is a psychopath,’ she says.

  As Thandie sets up an on-screen briefing, Rose remembers the response of a scientific journal to Dr Hare, an expert in criminal psychology, when he sent them brainwave patterns of psychopaths. The journal returned them to Dr Hare saying they couldn’t possibly belong to real people.

  The children and teachers in Old School are up against someone who challenges our notion of what it is to be human.

  13.

  10.45 a.m.

  The door of the command and control vehicle swings wide open, banging against the wall. Snow and icy wind blow through the vehicle, scattering notes on Rose’s desk, chilling her legs and cheeks as she begins the on-screen briefing to Bronze Command and team leaders.

  ‘Victor Deakin is a narcissistic psychopath,’ she says. ‘He is ruthless, has no empathy or conscience. Psychopaths can kill for perceived slights and for kicks. Victor isn’t attacking the school in retaliation for being expelled and being upset about that, at least not in the sense that his life suffered as a consequence, but because someone had the temerity to do that to him. Matthew Marr had the audacity to get rid of him. He is also adept at manipulation.’

  The journal demonstrated that he was enraged at being crossed, a young man whose ego made him infinitely superior to the ‘fucking worms’; the letters showed he could play the penitent convincingly enough for teachers to believe him, including very experienced teachers.

  ‘Kids and teachers have also told us that he’s into extreme sports,’ Rose continues. ‘So thrill-seeking is a part of what drives him. But psychopaths get bored quickly, which is why he is pacing up and down the corridor, keeping himself going, as well as enjoying having power over the people he’s terrifying.’

  ‘Bored?’ Bronze Commander asks, sounding astonished.

  ‘Psychopaths have been known to stop halfway through a killing spree out of sheer boredom.’

  ‘Is that likely to happen here?’

  ‘I think that’s one reason why Victor got himself a partner; someone to keep him hyped, giving him hits of adrenaline to keep going.’

  ‘Did none of the kids suspect he’d do something like this?’ an officer asks.

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  Psychopaths are not the sinister outsiders keeping to the shadows, but often charming, likeable and outgoing. And they enjoy, revel even, in their deceptions. A few are homicidal.

  ‘With a psychopath, it’s a totally different negotiation than with any other kind of person,’ Dannisha says. ‘We cannot establish a connection based on any kind of rapport. I cannot appeal to his conscience or to any sympathy for what he is putting the children through, even young children. Instead, we have to play to his belief in his own superiority, he needs to feel in a position of dominance. Detective Inspector Polstein has already helped with that, which is why he responded to our earlier texts.’

  ‘We’re still waiting for him to tell us about Jamie Alton?’ Bronze Commander asks.

  ‘Yes. He’ll be enjoying making us sweat, having that power,’ Rose says.

  ‘Do you think it was Deakin who shot the head teacher?’ Bronze Commander asks Rose.

  ‘No. If Neil Forbright is right, and I think he is,’ Rose says, ‘Victor Deakin wasn’t in Old School till just afterwards, when he swapped places with his accomplice. But I’m certain that it’s Victor Deakin who’s the orchestrator of the attack.’

  ‘Why swap places?’

  ‘I think Deakin came to check up on his accomplice, to make sure he went through with it, and that was part of the plan; possibly it was a form of remote coercion because his accomplice knew Victor would be coming to check up on him. Then once he was inside Old School, he chose to terrorize people in a centrally heated building where he could stride up and down, enjoying the power, not stand out in the cold.’
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  ‘And he told his accomplice that there were children in the pottery room,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘Because he’d followed the head teacher there earlier.’

  ‘That’s the logical conclusion, yes.’

  ‘Any more leads on Deakin’s accomplice?’ Bronze Commander asks.

  ‘Malin Cohen was arrested nine months ago in the States for serious assault,’ an officer says. ‘His father got him a good lawyer and he was still under eighteen then so they just kicked him out of the country.’

  ‘Victor and Malin Cohen met each other,’ another officer says. ‘I’ve spoken to an evacuated teacher who saw them together in a pub five months ago.’

  ‘You said at the beginning of this, Inspector Polstein, that the dominant one, who we now know to be Victor Deakin, is trying to get as much attention as possible,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘And that he might just be playing for time to maximize his audience?’

  ‘Yes, and knowing what we do now about Victor Deakin, that is a highly likely scenario.’

  ‘And when he’s got his audience? Do you know what Deakin intends to do?’

  ‘There are two options. Both are as a result of him being a psychopath. The first is that Victor being a psychopath actually works in our favour because psychopaths rarely commit suicide. According to teachers he’s extraordinarily bright, so smart enough to know that if he opens fire police will kill him. It’s possible that he wants to have the power that he has now, and the spotlight of media attention focused on him, but doesn’t want to die so will eventually give us his demands for how to end this peacefully.’

  ‘And the second option?’

  ‘The worst case is that he wants to massacre as many people as he can in front of a vast audience and it’s worth dying to accomplish it. He will commit mass murder to get fame; he thinks a monstrous event will guarantee his name a place in posterity.’

  At Columbine High School, Eric Harris wanted fame. That was it pretty much. To be a bigger badass than the worst murdering badasses to date, to kill more, to inflict more carnage, and he was hyped and ready to die to achieve it.

  The briefing ends.

  * * *

  Snowflakes are almost blinding against the windscreen of the police Range Rover. The vehicle hits a patch of ice, Beth Alton’s mind and the car skidding together, and she hears Jamie aged five counting the seconds.

  One banana, two bananas – how many bananas?

  Ten, then you shout, ‘Ready or not!’

  You can also count in giraffes, Mummy.

  You can.

  Victor hasn’t found him. He can’t have done. She keeps forgetting to breathe and feels it like a scream building inside her.

  They’ve skidded into a snowy bank. The police driver gets out and Beth gets out too, to help him, to hurry him, but he tells her to get back into the car. She thinks this will make things quicker so she does as he says.

  * * *

  Neil Forbright stands at the locked door of Matthew’s cold, dark office, listening to the footsteps in the corridor, intimidating, unrelenting, and realizes that for months this was the sound of his depression, but now the threat and his isolation are real.

  If the police attempt a rescue, which means shooting dead Victor Deakin, he’ll have time to open fire before they bring him down. The kids in the library don’t call him Victor Deakin, but ‘the gunman’, as if he has forfeited the right to a name. Neil thinks they are right and will follow their example.

  Which room will he choose? Neil prays to God it’ll be this one, but fears it will be the English classroom, their barricade of desks giving way and Jacintha’s poems turned bloody with bullets; he cannot think of dead children and staff, he simply cannot, so he thinks instead in cowardly metaphors. Or he’ll choose the library first because Matthew is in there, and he’ll want to finish the job of murdering him and because the library has the greatest number of children.

  But Matthew may already be dying, and he can’t be with him.

  He unlocks the door, because if the motherfucker with the clicking heels starts firing, he’s going to ignore the police’s instruction to ‘stay put’, and go out and tackle him. Motherfucker, when was the last time he’d used that word, any aggressive pejorative adjective, against anyone but himself? Anger is a new emotion and he welcomes it; like a freak gust of wind, abrading his fear so that he feels clean of it.

  He is deputy head, responsible for the children in this school, and must step up to the mark.

  But how can he overpower a man with a gun? He’s not armed, nor is he strong and athletic. How can he help them?

  * * *

  In the library, the shutter is banging and banging as the wind outside builds. Mr Marr has lost consciousness again. Hannah is checking his pulse, which is getting harder to feel.

  Everyone is quiet, listening to the shutter and the footsteps which are coming back towards them. Click-click click-click; does he know that his footsteps are like time beating? The footsteps stop outside their door.

  If this is how she’s going to die – ‘if’, still a great big ‘if’ – then it’s nothing like she’d imagined. Not that she’d imagined it often, she’s not maudlin that way, but when she did she’d imagined long dusty roads or an ice age come early, civilization gone, her and a band of fellow survivors toughing it out as long as they can with a few books and a flute; not the school library on a normal day.

  The footsteps haven’t moved away. He’s still outside. Keep thinking about dystopian novels; frankly it’s a bit embarrassing that the only way you could imagine your own death was to have the entire planet dying as well.

  The door creaks. He’s pushing it.

  She wants to speak to Rafi; tries to believe it’s really good that she can’t because his last impression of her would be that she’s not at all brave. And that might be stupid, but it’s all he’ll have to go on about her, and she wants him to remember them running through the woods this morning, even though she was wheezing like an old geezer in a tartan dressing gown, because they were happy and she was unafraid.

  A book falls from the pile as he pushes against the door. The pile is budging. He must be putting his whole weight against the door.

  Good that she can’t speak to Dad too, because she’d break down and that would be awful for him, awful for her. She was quite calm on TV with lip-glossy Melanie, speaking normally, smiling even. He’ll think that’s how she feels, hopefully he’ll think that.

  There’s a gap now, he’s opened the door a tiny way.

  Ed goes to the door and sits down with his back pressed to the books, using his body to shore up the barricade. Frank joins him, pushing back, and the door doesn’t open any further.

  A minute later, the footsteps walk away.

  * * *

  A young officer comes on to Rose’s screen, one of Lysander’s computer forensics team.

  ‘A tweet’s trending,’ the officer says. ‘It says the gunman inside the school is a psychopath. The news channels are picking it up.’

  ‘Who tweeted it?’ Bronze Commander asks.

  ‘We’re trying to trace the source.’

  And the question they’re asking, but not out loud, is if there is a leak inside the investigation? Is someone feeding information to the media? Rose hasn’t met the majority of officers involved, but she trusts her colleagues; when kids’ lives are at stake, she totally trusts them.

  ‘Beth Alton has been held up because of snow,’ Thandie says. ‘There’s a Portakabin ready for her when she arrives.’

  ‘Tonya, the secretary inside Old School, is on the phone,’ George says. ‘A kid in her class has seen the tweet.’

  * * *

  Matthew’s office is getting colder, the wind blowing in even through the shuttered windows. Neil has received another email from Frank in the library; the gunman tried to push his way in, but after one minute gave up.

  One minute never used to seem long to Neil, the difference in the softness of a boiled egg, but now he know
s how long each of the sixty seconds lasts when there’s a gunman the other side of the door, as if he’s taken control of time and stretched it.

  Neil fears that next time he won’t give up; that he’ll shoot the kids against the door, because they won’t move. They might be vomiting they’re so frightened, he knows that’s what’s happening in the library, but they’re still against the door.

  How much time can Neil give to the children if he goes out and tackles the gunman? He will be shot, so how much time? And if it’s a minute or two, will they feel long minutes to the kids? Because if they did, then it would be worth it. Or would the horror at seeing their deputy head lying in the corridor, like a betrayal in its own way, Neil thinks, would that contract the time they had left to them?

  His phone rings and he answers it.

  ‘Mr Forbright? It’s PC Beard. I’ve just heard from Tonya in Jacintha’s classroom. There was a tweet and it’s all over the internet. The gunman in your corridor is a psychopath.’

  The word chills Neil because he knows what it means, wishes he didn’t, wishes his Kindle wasn’t full of books on psychopathy, but he’d become fascinated by people at the other end of the mental health spectrum from himself. Because while he’s felt fearful of life, as if missing a layer of skin, too empathetic, too sensitive, without enough confidence to steer a course through life, psychopaths have huge egos and are ruthless, many becoming captains of industry, valued for their lack of empathy and utter self-belief, and if they are murderous have no compassion.

  ‘The police officers in charge of all this have said they cannot comment,’ PC Beard says. ‘Which is protocol and there’s very good reasons for that protocol, but I’m afraid it means it’s true, otherwise they’d have denied it.’

  ‘Do the kids in the library know?’ he asks. ‘Has Tonya told them?’

  ‘No. She thought it best not to.’