Three Hours : A Novel (2020)

by Lupton, Rosamund

  Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

  And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn

  As you have done to this.’

  Right, enough is enough; Daphne gets up on to the stage. ‘Okay, everyone. Let’s decide if we really want to carry on with this.’

  ‘She’s a psycho bitch,’ Tim says.

  ‘Why doesn’t he see that?’ Caitlin asks. ‘She’s said she’ll bash a little baby’s brains out. Her own baby. While it was breastfeeding. Jesus.’

  ‘How did he persuade Jamie? How the hell did he do that?’ Josh asks.

  Daphne also cannot understand how Victor could persuade gentle, shy Jamie to be part of something this wicked.

  ‘There’s the witches,’ Tracey says, in her witch costume, so clearly aware of the power of the witches. ‘They kind of started this too.’

  ‘But Jamie doesn’t have any witches,’ Tim says. ‘Does he, for fuck’s sake?’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ Tracey replies.

  ‘He had a crush on me and I knew about it,’ Antonella says. ‘I wasn’t kind to him, if I had been kinder maybe …’

  ‘Not your fault, Antonella, half the school’s got a crush on you,’ Tim says. ‘And nobody else teams up with a gunman.’

  Zac looks up and Daphne sees he’s crying. ‘If I’d stayed his friend …’

  ‘No, absolutely not,’ Daphne says. ‘This is nothing to do with you, Zac.’

  Although if warm-hearted Zac had still been his friend, then maybe everything would be different.

  ‘I think we should keep on rehearsing,’ Tim says, and people are agreeing with him.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Daphne asks.

  ‘I think it helps make sense of things,’ Caitlin says.

  Perhaps they also see this first act as being about how a murderer is made; the creation of a diabolical pair.

  ‘Right then, we’ll keep going, but we’ll stop whenever you like. Any of you. If it gets too much.’

  ‘We’ll have to stop before we get to the Macduff children scene, won’t we?’ Tracey says.

  Daphne nods.

  ‘You’re sure they’re okay, Anna and Young Fry?’ Josh asks.

  ‘They’re safe,’ Daphne says. ‘Evacuated with everyone else in New School.’

  As they get on stage, ready to resume the rehearsal, Daphne thinks again about Lady Macbeth’s psychopathic violent rant, and then in walks Macbeth, her poor sap of a husband. And what does he say to this woman, who’s asked for night to hide her crime from heaven? My dearest love.

  She thinks Jamie believes Victor cares about him.

  * * *

  Rose Polstein looks at the feed from the police surveillance UAV above the pottery room. Through the dense snow she can just make out the shape of Camille Giraud at the window. They now know that the gunman in the black balaclava, pointing his semi-automatic at the window, is Jamie Alton. Police imaging specialists, monitoring footage of Jamie Alton, say that for a few seconds he fiddled with something in his left cargo trouser pocket, while his other hand kept a finger on the trigger of the semi-automatic, braced against his shoulder. They now realize that he was powering up his mobile or putting in the battery. His two-way-radio antenna still protrudes from a right-hand pocket.

  Rose wishes their suspicions had been unfounded but from the beginning of this every missing student had to be seen as a potential perpetrator as well as a victim. It was why she asked for Beth Alton to be brought here, so she could speak to her face to face. Officers met the father’s train and are questioning him; at Warwick University police are talking to the older brother. They have also been talking to evacuated teachers and a team was ready and waiting to go into the Altons’ house. So far they’ve found a journal hidden under his mattress which they have scanned and sent across, but no weapons; a computer forensics expert Rose hasn’t worked with before is searching Jamie Alton’s computer.

  The FBI use the term dyad for killers who jointly carry out a crime. After the Columbine attack by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the phenomenon has been researched extensively. Those two teenagers were not the bullied outcasts or members of a gang as originally portrayed by a frenzied media but, Rose believes, a psychopath and a depressive with lethal toxicity as a pair. The chance of such a dyad coming together must be infinitesimally tiny, all those coincidences and fateful small decisions.

  She turns to her team. ‘Okay, we don’t know for definite Jamie’s movements this morning because his mobile battery was out, but we now have a plausible narrative. Victor Deakin knew he couldn’t come into the school unnoticed, he’d been expelled, but Jamie Alton could. He left the theatre this morning at 8.15, ostensibly to get props from the CDT room, but instead came into Old School. He was just another student at the school so didn’t attract any attention. He was probably carrying a sports bag or a rucksack, something big enough to hide the guns.’

  ‘The rifle’s long, would stick out,’ Thandie says. ‘So he camouflaged it; a cricket bat cover maybe or rolled-up sleeping bag. And no one would take any notice because kids at a school like this are always going on D of E expeditions and the like. Or they’d just think he was fetching props.’

  Rose nods. ‘He’s also got a balaclava and combat clothes in there,’ she says. ‘And a two-way digital radio to talk to Victor Deakin. He slips into an empty room in Old School. He puts on the clothes and balaclava, turns on the digital radio.

  ‘The school goes into lockdown and he waits for his head teacher. And up until this point he’s behaving very weirdly, extremely worryingly, but not yet violent; not yet abhorrent. He could simply be under Victor’s influence up until now, undertaking his orders. But then he came out of that room and he shot his head teacher. He crossed a line into attempted murder. And we need to understand why, because that’s the only way we’re going to be able to predict what he’ll do next, and if we can negotiate with him.’

  ‘He knew Victor Deakin was coming to check up on him?’ Dannisha suggests. ‘You said that earlier.’

  ‘Yes, and I think that’s a part of it – remote coercion by Victor – but not all of it.’

  ‘Do you think Victor deliberately chose him?’ George asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  Because this toxic, catastrophic friendship wasn’t random on Victor’s side. Fate might have served up Jamie Alton at the same school as him, but she thinks Victor befriended Jamie and then somehow persuaded him to be his partner in the attack.

  ‘I think Victor could well have tried to recruit other people first,’ she says. ‘A teacher saw him with Malin Cohen, maybe Malin refused.’

  At Columbine High School, Eric Harris was turned down by other students before he found lonely, depressed Dylan to be his sidekick, a boy named after the poet Dylan Thomas, from a family where even toy guns weren’t allowed; a gentle boy who made his mother origami birds.

  * * *

  There’s a young male police officer in the Portakabin with Beth. She’s on the phone to Mike, who is in a police car.

  ‘To start with, they thought he might have been hurt by Victor or was his prisoner,’ Mike says. ‘But even then they were asking me these odd questions, like if he had a grudge against anyone, if he’d ever been violent. Violent. Jamie, for God’s sake. And now they’re searching the house. They asked me if it was safe. If there were booby traps. Jesus Christ.’

  Beth thinks of her kitchen with the police in it; their breakfast things still piled up in the sink. Jamie hadn’t eaten breakfast, had left early, rushing out to a waiting car, a friend giving him a lift this morning he’d said, not saying which friend, and she’d just been pleased and didn’t pry. She called goodbye, but not I love you, because she’s become wary of doing that, worried about getting it wrong. But she’s done everything wrong. Because with a different mother, this wouldn’t be happening.

  She looks through the windows of the Portakabin, as if something will change, make all of this different, but there is just thick snow.

 
She has to face the truth, has to do that, because it’s all her fault. She didn’t know that Jamie had taken Victor’s calls again; that Victor had somehow clawed his way back into Jamie’s life. She didn’t see how lonely and unhappy Jamie must have been; didn’t prevent Victor from doing this to her son.

  ‘We just need to talk to him,’ Mike says. ‘He wants to talk to us. Doesn’t want to be doing this.’

  ‘I know.’

  It’s intensely comforting to have another person who knows Jamie like she does, who’s known him since he was a six-pound-two-ounce scrap of a baby, who knows that he is good.

  ‘I’ve told them he’d never hurt anyone,’ Mike says. ‘I told them it’s Victor behind this, not Jamie. Check again.’

  They both hang up as they did a minute ago to check that Jamie hasn’t phoned or texted while they’ve been talking, knowing that he hasn’t, knowing that their mobiles would beep and vibrate if a call or message was coming through, but not trusting the knowledge.

  Mike rings back.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I told them he never even had toy guns, just the Nerf ones with the foam bullets, and water pistols, Super Soakers, and that’s nothing like boys who want air rifles and BB guns or toys that look like the real thing. I told them it was Victor who’d have made him hold one. I told them he doesn’t even play violent Xbox games; he likes that building-cities one.’

  ‘And he likes drawing too,’ Beth says.

  Beautiful intricate pictures. But it feels indulgent to her, this conversation, as if they’ve been good parents.

  ‘The police asked me if he’s depressed,’ Beth says.

  ‘He wants an eighteenth-birthday party and he wants to do really well in his exams, that’s not being depressed.’

  ‘I think that might just be a brave front,’ Beth says. ‘Maybe for us. I don’t know if he is or not.’

  She thinks sadness and loneliness led him back to Victor, and then Victor did something terrible to him.

  ‘I think it must’ve been Victor who turned him against us, made him even more isolated,’ she says.

  ‘He didn’t turn against us.’

  ‘He doesn’t talk to us any more, Mike. He hasn’t spoken to me, not really, not properly for almost six months. Hasn’t taken my calls when I ring him at school. Most of the time, he doesn’t even come out of his room.’

  ‘He spoke to us after that thing in Exeter at Halloween; we were up half the night talking, just like we always used to.’

  ‘But it was us talking, he was just listening.’

  ‘He spoke to Zac.’

  ‘Not for long. A few minutes maybe.’

  And it sounded like he was laughing but his face wasn’t smiling, just pretending to. But she’d believed he was fine, that it would all be all right, because she’d wanted to believe that.

  ‘He’ll talk to us now. He’ll want to talk to us.’

  ‘But what if he—’

  ‘They’ll shoot him, Beth, if we can’t talk to him.’

  ‘No. They can’t. He’s not going to hurt anyone.’

  ‘I know that, darling. But the police don’t know him, don’t know us. Check again.’

  * * *

  Snow is blowing inside the command and control vehicle, George’s shoe wedging the door open, but only the cold air stops Rose’s nausea. Still wearing Thandie’s jacket, she is gradually appropriating her team’s clothing.

  Rose knows that for the kids and staff trapped inside the school, the confined space will be getting smaller; quiet sounds will have a new volume as the world constricts around them. But at the same time this event is expanding with increasing numbers of police and counterterrorism officers, journalists and cameramen not only in the UK but all over the world covering the story live on TV screens, radio and internet news where social media brings it to an ever-growing audience.

  Neil Forbright has told them that Victor Deakin tried to get into the library but gave up; Rose thinks he got bored, or was toying with them, and fears he’ll try again.

  They haven’t yet been able to talk to Victor Deakin’s parents; the police in Chile are trying to locate them but Rose thinks this may well be over before they are found. Matthew Marr told them about the rape fantasies and she thinks the violence and hubris probably fitted with personality traits they’ll have seen in him since childhood. But surely they wouldn’t have gone away on holiday if they had any inkling he could do something like this? No, he’s most probably been on model behaviour for months, convincing them that Matthew Marr exaggerated what he’d done, that the childhood behaviours that worried them were now a thing of the past, that he’s been keeping all his psychology appointments.

  ‘Still nothing on the Deakin parents?’ she asks Amaal.

  ‘No. And Jamie Alton still isn’t answering his mum or dad.’

  ‘You’d have thought the parents would have noticed, wouldn’t you?’ Thandie says. ‘I mean, what the hell are these parents doing?’ Another thump to the punchbag.

  But Rose feels compassion for Beth Alton: from what she’s seen, she’s a loving mother who doesn’t deserve what’s happening to her. And she feels sympathy for Victor Deakin’s parents too, until there’s evidence to the contrary, because Victor is adept at concealment and because a psychopath’s brain is made that way. Yes, an abusive childhood can exacerbate it but it doesn’t cause it. She remembers the case of a five-year-old girl calmly and repeatedly trying to flush a kitten down the loo, witnessed by her horrified mother. Later the little girl had just as calmly denied it. She doesn’t know what kind of parents the Altons or the Deakins are, all of that will be found out after this, the details analysed every which way, but she does know that whether deserved or not, for the rest of their lives they’ll be blamed for what’s happening now. We’re not a ‘sins of our fathers’ century, she thinks, but ‘sins of our children’. Sometimes she has a terror of motherhood. She thinks of her scan earlier this morning, watching the second heart beating inside her body; the realization that from now on she’ll always have two heartbeats.

  What the hell are these parents doing?

  Get a grip, Rose, it’s not normal to worry like this. Normal pregnant women worry about folic acid and pelvic floor exercises. Get a grip and just focus on your job.

  On screen, a briefing begins, led by Bronze Commander.

  ‘Visibility is atrocious and it’s impossible to monitor the sky,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘It’s too risky to assume that we’re not being watched. So our marksmen are still keeping their distance. As I said before, if they fire from that range they risk only wounding Alton, giving him time to shoot and inflict multiple civilian casualties before taking him out. Where are we on negotiation?’

  ‘Jamie Alton’s mother and father are attempting to phone him,’ Dannisha says. ‘But he hasn’t answered.’

  ‘UAV footage shows he hasn’t taken his phone out of his pocket,’ a UAV operator says.

  ‘So why’s he switched it on?’ Bronze Commander asks.

  ‘One of two reasons,’ Rose says. ‘He switched it on just after Victor told us that Jamie was his wingman. Victor knew we’d be able to trace the mobile number. He may have told Jamie to prove what he’d just told us.’

  ‘Via the two-way radio?’

  ‘Yes. Or, more optimistically, Jamie has turned on his phone because a part of him wants to talk to his parents, or to us, to be dissuaded from going any further.’

  ‘Do we know why he’s doing this? Does he have a grudge?’ Bronze Commander asks.

  ‘Not as far as we know,’ Rose says. ‘Nothing against Matthew Marr or the other teachers, nor with other students. There’s very little bullying and no jock culture at the school. It’s possible that he shot Mr Marr for expelling his best friend, pushed on by Victor, but it doesn’t explain pointing a gun at a room full of children. There’s nothing to suggest that he’s psychotic and he’s never been violent before.’

  Jamie’s be
en lonely, but no one has called him a loner. He might have felt left out, but he’s never done anything aggressive, never hurt anyone, never even said mean things that students or teachers have reported. The diary found in his room has nothing violent, but is filled with intricately coloured drawings and romantic poems.

  ‘I think that he was lonely and depressed, and that made him easy prey for Victor Deakin,’ she says.

  Teachers had noticed him becoming withdrawn and two had been concerned enough to talk to him about depression, but Jamie denied it. He was bullied at his previous school, according to his tutor, and that could have later caused teenage depression. His tutor had asked the school counsellor to see Jamie last term, but Jamie had failed to keep any of the appointments.

  ‘We need to find out why Jamie has become violent,’ she says. ‘I don’t think Victor Deakin’s influence alone can make a previously unaggressive boy into a killer. There’s something else in play.’

  She tends to agree with his mother that a single person, even psychopathic highly manipulative Victor Deakin, doesn’t have that kind of power.

  ‘Once we know why he’s become violent,’ Dannisha says, ‘then we will know if we can negotiate with him and how to do so.’

  ‘Has your opinion of Victor Deakin remained the same, Detective Inspector Polstein?’ Bronze Commander asks.

  ‘Yes, a brutal psychopath and the orchestrator of the attack, and also wanting to orchestrate how it’s covered by the media and how we investigate it.’

  Rose thinks everyone in the briefing probably imagines Victor-the-brutal-psychopath as darkly malevolent but Rose sees him as a surfing, base-jumping DJ, a party guy, a prankster with Rohypnol in his pocket and a brick in his messenger bag, and hey! a semi-automatic in the kit bag, and he’s having a blast, man, a fucking blast! And all the more terrifying because of it.

  ‘What about a third shooter on site?’ Bronze Commander asks.

  ‘Our surveillance teams haven’t found anybody else,’ an officer says. ‘But the school’s extensive grounds are mainly woodland, much of it very dense, and the weather is making our search almost impossible.’