Three Hours : A Novel (2020)

by Lupton, Rosamund

  ‘Good.’

  Frank is saving the data on his laptop for emails, he won’t be searching the internet.

  ‘You told me earlier that the corridor bends?’ PC Beard says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it a sharp bend?’

  ‘Like an L-shape.’

  ‘So, if he went past the bend towards the front door, everyone along your bit of the corridor would be out of his sight?’ PC Beard asks.

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘And that means everyone in the library and in Jacintha’s classroom, Tonya and Donna and all the children in there, they’d be out of his sight too?’

  ‘Yes, but he just walks up and down our part of the corridor. He doesn’t go towards the front door, doesn’t go that far.’

  ‘All right, we need to come up with a plan,’ PC Beard says. ‘Do you have the phone number of a teacher in the theatre? I’ll need to let them know.’

  ‘I’ll text it to you.’

  He’ll send PC Beard Sally-Anne’s number, humour him, but there is no way for any of them to escape.

  He listens to the footsteps that have new menace now, and thinks of the experiment when people were given flashcards with the words Murder and Rape. Normal people were disturbed, their brain’s amygdala lighting up, but the psychopaths’ remained dark. Then they were shown graphic photos of murder victims. The psychopaths’ amygdalae were still dark but their language centre was activated as if they were analysing the emotions instead of experiencing them. The man in the corridor has no connecting humanity.

  * * *

  There are no windows in the theatre so no sign of the storm outside, but despite the central heating the temperature is dropping. On stage, the kids have put on cardigans and hoodies over their hessian tunics as they rehearse. They’ve been forgetting lines and missing cues, and then they go back to the start of the scene, determined to get it right, as if by getting it right they can achieve some kind of control.

  Sally-Anne comes up to Daphne.

  ‘There’s a policeman in the gatehouse,’ she says. ‘PC Beard. He wants to get everyone in Old School to us in the theatre.’

  ‘Does he know how he’ll do that?’

  Sally-Anne shakes her head, as Daphne knew she would, because those children and staff can’t get here without being shot by Victor Deakin.

  ‘He says Victor Deakin is a psychopath,’ Sally-Anne says. ‘The real thing.’

  When Zac said Jamie thought Victor was ‘a psycho’, Daphne had thought he meant it in a slangy way, like on the telly when anyone who’s strange and unbalanced is a psycho.

  ‘I just googled it,’ Sally-Anne says. ‘Here.’

  And it’s almost funny that you can google the mental state of a gunman in your school. Daphne skims the results:

  … they hide among us … ruthless, callous and superficially charming … master manipulators …

  Another article:

  Psychopaths are able to display emotions they don’t feel … everyone around them is convinced that those emotions are real … they lack remorse … It’s difficult to spot a psychopath … they can look actually like they’re more genuine than other people … most people don’t have to fake emotions all the time, so they don’t have any practice at it. But someone who doesn’t feel these emotions will have practice at faking them.

  Daphne remembers that she didn’t like Victor when he arrived in Year 11, he hadn’t charmed her then. When did he start to charm her? When did he know how to play her? Or rather, when did she teach him how to play her?

  They hide among us. Fake emotions all the time. Practice at faking them.

  Oh dear God, what has she done? All those notes she gave him that he was so brilliantly quick to pick up: she taught Victor to mimic emotion. She coached him on how to appear like a normal person, a regular teenager, to dissemble convincingly.

  On stage, Miranda is playing Lady Macbeth as a sex kitten, pretty much how she’d play any part she was given, even in these circumstances.

  ‘Come, you spirits

  That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here

  And fill me from the crown to the toe top full

  Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,

  Stop up the access and passage to remorse …’

  She’d cast Victor, her star pupil, as Macbeth but if he is anyone he is Lady Macbeth, not like sweet, implausible Miranda, but right from the start ruthless, manipulative and wicked.

  ‘I’ll stand by the doors, wait for them,’ Sally-Anne says.

  She leaves and Daphne feels suddenly very alone, maybe because she cannot share Sally-Anne’s hopefulness or because guilt cuts you off from other people.

  On stage, Miranda as Lady Macbeth continues.

  ‘Come, thick night,

  And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

  That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

  Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

  To cry, “Hold, hold”.’

  It’s like she’s trying to become a psychopath, pitiless and without remorse, as she pumps herself up to murder, but Victor doesn’t need to try.

  And she realizes this play isn’t about getting titles and a crown and palaces, but about seizing raw power; something Victor has right now.

  What will he do to everyone in Old School? What has he done to Jamie?

  She wants to tell them all that she should have seen it, should have known or at least suspected; that it is her fault, because she helped him hide in plain sight.

  * * *

  In the police Range Rover, Beth Alton sees press vehicles being turned back at a police cordon, but they are waved through and drive nearer to the school. There are dozens of parked emergency vehicles, police cars and vans and ambulances, fire engines too, why do they need fire engines? Overhead the sound of a helicopter, a blurry black shape in the sky. The police driver parks the Range Rover and tells her that Detective Inspector Polstein will be with her shortly. He escorts her towards a Portakabin.

  The emergency vehicles have snow inches deep on their roofs and covering the windscreens; the sound of creaking as the wind pummels against them.

  She sees a woman in her early thirties walking towards her, just wearing a dress, not a coat or jumper even, but strikingly upright despite the fierce wind and snow, almost marching.

  ‘Mrs Alton? Detective Inspector Polstein,’ the woman says, holding out her hand, having to raise her voice above the wind. ‘Rose. Let’s go inside.’

  ‘Have you found him?’ Beth asks, and despite no indications for this she hopes that Rose will say, Yes! And he’s fine! And you can take him home with you.

  ‘Not yet,’ Rose replies. ‘We’re doing everything we can.’

  She opens the door of the Portakabin and ushers Beth in.

  ‘The police officers at the leisure centre said you haven’t managed to speak to Jamie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And he hasn’t texted?’

  ‘No.’

  As Rose turns up a heater, Beth looks at the side view of her face, pale, almost ill, her slanting cheekbones, the corner of her mouth, no lipstick, and then she turns to Beth and her eyes look directly at her, and Beth wants to look away because she reads something there.

  ‘I heard he used to be friends with Victor Deakin?’

  Here it comes; this is why they want to talk to her. She’d hoped she was being paranoid, hoped against all logic that it wasn’t because of this.

  ‘Yes, but then Jamie broke off their friendship.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘October the thirty-first.’

  She thinks of devils and monsters at their door; Victor’s handsome human face.

  ‘After the vandalism incident in Exeter?’

  ‘Yes. He wouldn’t take Victor’s calls or Snapchats or anything. Mike and I told him to do that. To break from him completely. And I think Victor might want to punish him.’

  The snake let out from its cage. />
  ‘Up until the vandalism incident, was there anything that Victor did that—’

  ‘No. He had us completely fooled. But I should have seen what he was like, should have suspected – I was even grateful to him for being friends with Jamie.’

  ‘It’s not your fault nor Jamie’s that you thought Victor was genuinely who he appeared to be. Nobody saw what he was really like.’

  She’s kind, Rose Polstein; but what kind of mother is grateful to someone for being friends with their child? And maybe that’s why she didn’t look harder at him, because Jamie was lonely and she was too busy being grateful to find out who this person really was. She imagines driving Victor Deakin to the top of a cliff, the car teetering over the edge, and threatening to go over unless he reveals himself.

  Right, Mum, like that would’ve helped.

  I know, but …

  I told you before, he had me fooled too and he was my friend.

  Rose Polstein’s pager vibrates and she looks at it.

  ‘I’m sorry, I have to go for a little while. It should warm up in here in a minute.’

  When Rose has gone, Beth opens the door again and cold invades the Portakabin but she leaves it open as if she’ll hear Jamie or at least be closer to him. When he was at his last school, and so unhappy, she used to arrive early to pick him up, ridiculously early, like an hour or more, and stand by the gates to the school as if that made any difference to anyone, but she’d done it anyway.

  Getting him drunk might have been easier, Mum, rather than the whole car-cliff-teeter thing.

  * * *

  Rose walks quickly back to the command and control vehicle, the wind slicing through her dress, the snow falling thickly on to her hair and shoulders. She’s numbed with cold by the time she gets inside. Thandie wraps her own jacket around her and she’s grateful.

  Before talking to Beth Alton, she’d suggested sending another text with a direct question:

  Do you have Jamie Alton with you?

  Dannisha had paged her to say Victor had responded.

  ‘What’s he said?’ Rose asks.

  Dannisha shows Rose Victor’s response.

  Dannisha types:

  How is Jamie?

  Is he ok?

  Having a fuckin blast man, a fuckin blast

  What do you mean?

  Need me to fuckin spell it out moron? He’s my pal my wingman

  14.

  11.00 a.m.

  Beth Alton goes outside the Portakabin, scanning for Rose Polstein, the wind blowing snow against her face and into her eyes. She sees a blur of movement, hopes it’s Rose, but it’s three police officers, wearing black and carrying guns, moving fast towards the school. Her mobile is in her pocket, so that it doesn’t freeze or get wet and stop working; her fingers are tightly around it. The helicopter overhead beams a searchlight down and for a moment she is blinded, has to blink to see again.

  She takes out her mobile and tries ringing Jamie, expecting it to go straight through to message again. But it doesn’t! It rings and rings, and she thinks he’s going to answer, that he’ll hear her special ringtone and answer! But after seven rings it goes to message.

  Rose Polstein is walking towards her through the snow, with that upright marching stance. Beth hurries to meet her.

  ‘Jamie’s phone’s on! It just rang. Didn’t go straight to his message.’

  ‘Did he answer?’

  ‘No. But it rang several times, seven or more.’

  Rose Polstein’s face is drawn like she’s suddenly very tired.

  ‘We think his phone was powered off or the battery was out until very recently,’ she says. ‘But now his phone’s on again and we’re tracing the location.’

  Rose goes into the Portakabin. Beth follows her quickly inside.

  ‘So you can find him; you can get him out!’

  Rose sits down on a plastic chair and gestures to Beth to sit next to her but she doesn’t want to sit down. She wants Rose to tell her how they’re going to rescue him.

  ‘Has Jamie been lonely?’ Rose asks.

  What does that matter? For God’s sake, why are they even in a Portakabin while Jamie is out there?

  ‘Has he ever been violent?’ Rose Polstein asks.

  ‘Of course not, why—?’

  ‘Has he said anything to you recently that’s been out of character or strange?’

  ‘Why are you asking me these things?’

  ‘Mrs Alton, I need to know.’

  A conversation with Jamie, a real one from just a fortnight ago, creeping then pushing its way in:

  ‘Jesus, just stop the questions.’

  ‘I just want to know if you’re okay at school, with friends and things, and—’

  ‘Get the fuck off my case.’

  ‘I’m worried about you, sweetheart, that you’re lonely and—’

  ‘Yeah, and what can you do about it? I’m not in fucking nursery school, Mum.’

  She’d held on to the ‘Mum’, like a tiny thing at the end of a cruel sentence that still meant they had a connection with each other. Because the truth is that the Jamie she’s been talking to in her head, well, she hasn’t heard from that boy for nearly six months; that long since she went out with him in the car on the farm track, teaching him to drive, longer since they went to visit St Andrews; all those words and phrases of his taken from six months ago and earlier.

  He doesn’t mean to hurt her though, she knows that; he still thinks mothers are unassailable. And her lovely boy is there, but hidden inside the bolshie teenager. And she has proof of that because at Halloween she and Mike had talked to him and he’d listened to them, had agreed not to see or talk to Victor again; he’d minded what they said and taken their advice.

  But then he’d retreated back into his surly shell, a camouflage to disguise unhappiness. And it’s just being a teenager, for heaven’s sake, unknotting the apron strings, and loads of mothers complain about it, their loving little boys, the girls too, becoming rude teenagers, and it’s worse when you’ve been particularly close, like her and Jamie. And yes it can feel like a stranger has arrived in your child’s body. But her beloved boy is still there. And later, after this terrible thing is over, they’ll be reunited, hugging, and she’ll be crying, heart soft as a baby bird, Mum, and they’ll be close again.

  ‘Victor and Jamie have been WhatsApping, Snapchatting and phoning each other; over the last few weeks, they’ve spoken more than a dozen times a day.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘We’ve gathered information on Victor’s phone and Jamie’s too. And we have phone calls logged between them, as well as messages, including earlier this morning.’

  Rose Polstein’s face is close to hers, looking at her with sympathy that is damning her son.

  ‘No, there must be a mistake.’

  ‘I’m sorry, there isn’t a mistake.’

  Rose Polstein is wearing a corduroy jacket that’s too tight, though it’s too wide at the shoulders; focusing on her clothes not what she’s saying because her words are appalling and absurd.

  ‘We think that Jamie shot Mr Marr,’ Rose Polstein says.

  ‘No. You’re wrong. Totally wrong.’

  She’s pregnant, Beth realizes, maybe five months. That’s why the jacket’s too tight, why does she realize that now? Rose Polstein’s left hand has moved to her tummy, unconsciously protecting the baby. Against who?

  ‘You can’t have any proof,’ she tells Rose Polstein. ‘Because it’s not true. Jamie would never hurt someone.’

  Rose Polstein’s pager bleeps and she turns from Beth to read it.

  I’m phoning you again, Jamie, and my hands are shaking but I just need to press one button, because you’re top of my favourites.

  She says your mobile phone has been traced to outside the pottery room.

  She says you’re holding a gun.

  She says there are children inside.

  Pick up, pick up, pick up.

  It goes through t
o message. ‘Hey, it’s Jamie, leave me a message.’

  The same message he’s had for over a year.

  ‘It’s Mum. Please call me, sweetheart, please. Please.’

  ‘Do you think he can be negotiated with?’ Rose Polstein asks.

  ‘Yes. Of course! If it’s Jamie, which I can’t believe, but even if it is really him he won’t fire the gun. I don’t know how Victor got him back as a friend or persuaded him to frighten people but he won’t be able to make him actually hurt anyone. He’s not that powerful. No one could make Jamie change that much.’

  From kind to violent; from a boy who’s lived inside her body and heart and head and home for over seventeen years, to someone she has never met. He’s been withdrawn for the last few months, unhappy, but not fundamentally changed. Not deep down. He’s a gentle person, always has been, never rough even as a little boy. She remembers seven-year-old Jamie with an injured bird, demanding she take it to the vet. He’d brought it to her from the lawn, pulling out the bottom of his jumper to make a fabric sling for it, in case touching it with his hands frightened it.

  ‘And he’s turned on his phone,’ she says to Rose Polstein. ‘So if it is him, it means he wants to talk, doesn’t it? If it’s him it means he wants this to stop.’

  * * *

  Daphne hadn’t wanted to tell the kids in the theatre about Jamie, but Detective Sergeant Amaal Ayari, the gentle bearer of terrible, terrible news once more, had said the police need any information the students might have. But no one has any information, none of them can really believe it. They’d chosen to carry on with the rehearsal, shock in their hesitant, quiet voices.

  Daphne had been so worried about Jamie, feared he’d been harmed by Victor, and she thinks that he has been but not in the ways she’d imagined.

  On stage, Miranda plays Lady Macbeth convincing Tim as Macbeth to commit murder; but even shaken teenage Miranda cannot take away the horror of these lines.

  ‘I have given suck and know

  How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:

  I would, while it was smiling in my face,