Three Hours : A Novel (2020)

by Lupton, Rosamund

  Rafi rubs his legs and then his arms, but he still can’t get very warm, and Rafi can’t give him a hot potato through his anorak so he gives his hands a hot potato.

  Basi’s hands feel like little ice blocks against Rafi’s mouth as he tries to use his own breath to warm him.

  ‘There was a bomb,’ Basi says, his words hopping up and down with his shivering. ‘I heard it.’

  ‘Nobody was hurt. They were all outside pretending to be trees.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s funny we’re inside a boat inside a shed, isn’t it?’ Basi says, his words still hopping up and down with his shivering, and Rafi knows he’s been waiting to say this, hoping that Rafi wouldn’t notice so that Basi can point it out.

  ‘It’s hilarious!’ Rafi says.

  Basi is shaking with cold and his laugh sounds different.

  ‘Remember when I went blue?’ Basi asks.

  ‘Course I do.’

  The third night on the boat from Egypt to Italy, no shelter on the deck. Basi turning blue with cold, all the children turning blue, as the rain hammered down over them. Everyone crammed up against the stern, pushing the boat too low in the water, nobody at the bow because of the huge waves. Rafi was terrified they were going to capsize and go into the violent sea so he got out his laser pointer, to shine if they capsized so a nearby ship would see them and rescue them, but there weren’t any ships, the sea vast and empty and dark, and all he had was a laser pointer. Then he saw Basi watching him.

  ‘Look, Basi!’ and he shone the light up at the sky.

  ‘You shone a laser pointer,’ Basi says. ‘You made the dark rain into a light tunnel!’

  ‘I did.’

  And then dawn had come finally, lightening the dark ocean, bringing some warmth; people sharing sea-sickness pills and lemons. A child pointed, and in the murderous sea dolphins were playing in the waves.

  * * *

  Beth Alton is being driven away in a police Range Rover to a police station, where Mike has also been taken. Press vehicles are parked half on the snowy verge, journalists with TV cameras line the road for what seems like miles. Cameramen run after the Range Rover but the police vehicle is too fast for them and they pass in a blur through the snow. Theo is being questioned by the police at Warwick University. He phoned her a few minutes ago, no longer a fledging adult but a distraught boy, and she must take care of him, make sure he survives this somehow, help him as she didn’t help Jamie; and for a few seconds she resents Theo, that loving him means enduring what she feels now because she cannot kill herself; love for her older son must come before guilt and grief for her beloved younger child.

  But the three of them, Mike and Theo and her, must keep intact who Jamie was, not what he was turned into; because they alone know that he was dead even if he seemed alive.

  Like I was a kind of zombie, Mum?

  Jamie …

  That whole zombie thing was weird, loving someone one moment, then they die and become terrifying.

  You still liked the zombie films though.

  Only the funny ones with a cushion for jumpy-out moments.

  They’ll remember little details about him like him enjoying funny zombie movies, Shaun of the Dead, but not horror, he hated horror, and they watched them together because he was a boy who liked watching films with his mother, a cushion for jumpy-out moments. No one else will know that about him or want to know that about him.

  The police Range Rover has to stop behind a car moving slowly in front of them, perhaps deliberately because there are lenses being pushed up against the car window, camera flashes going off, dazzling, so that she can’t see properly, lights shimmering in rings. She closes her eyes and for a few moments there is a slippage in time; she has picked Jamie up from school as usual and she’s driving him home.

  * * *

  Rose Polstein is walking towards Old School along the drive. Thandie has given her her jacket on permanent loan. This evening and into the night she and her team will be debriefing and doing the paperwork and although exhausted she thinks this will probably be a good thing for all of them; she’ll be able to tell them she’s proud of each of them and why. Emergency vehicles stream past, throwing up slush over her, but she wants to be physically present when she’s had to be at a remove for so long, watching it all on a screen. Above her helicopters buzz through the snow.

  By the old Victorian gatehouse, she sees a police patrol car, skewed at an angle off the drive, the windscreen shot. There’s a splatter of yellow paint on the CCTV camera, just visible under the snow.

  She’s on her phone to Stuart Dingwall, who’s in his Land Rover on his way to the boatshed. There’s fifty armed police officers also on their way.

  ‘How long till you’re there?’ she asks.

  ‘Not long. The drive’s just about passable with a four-wheel drive. That first copper on the scene, PC Beard, is probably with them already; a teacher with a tree told him where they were.’

  ‘He won’t be armed.’

  ‘I think they’re safe, Rose.’

  ‘You’re counterterrorism. You think the third terrorist is still after them. That’s why you’re going.’

  ‘To be honest, it’s a long shot. I don’t think the third terrorist hung around after the bomb. I think he scarpered pronto. We’ve secured the perimeter immediately around the school but not the woods; too big, too porous. Relatively easy for him to escape. We’ll get him though. These terror organizations aren’t closed off from each other and they like to boast. So we’ll find him.’

  She remembers Stuart saying that 14 Words were paranoid about being infiltrated but thinks counterterrorism has managed that with another group. She thinks that’s how he’ll be found and his identity discovered. But she already knows his essential self – a cowardly inadequate bastard, the same as every other cowardly inadequate bastard terrorist. Counterterrorism don’t want the media to give undue coverage to terrorism and she hopes the media won’t puff him up with a name and a story, that they save the names and stories for the kids and teachers at the school, the police and counterterrorism officers and the helicopter pilot flying in the teeth of a blizzard, and their remarkable and different stories.

  ‘Let me know how Rafi is?’ she asks Stuart.

  ‘Sure. There’s paramedics. A whole convoy of us.’

  She smiles and hangs up.

  Three police officers were wounded by the blast as they ran towards the theatre, trying to get the kids to evacuate, but she’s been told that their injuries are minor.

  As she gets closer to Old School she sees groups of children and teachers with emergency personnel being loaded on to coaches. Some seem dazed, as if in a trance, early symptoms of PTSD starting – but alive.

  She feels suddenly dehydrated and exhausted. And something else, that’s subtler, and she knows that she is fundamentally changed from who she was before this.

  She thinks about Rafi looking after his brother on a journey from Syria to England and then again today; the fierce responsibility of his love. She’s never had to look after anyone, not outside of her job where her role is defined and limited. It’s funny, since becoming pregnant she’s looked at kids, wondering if her son will turn out like this one or dear God please not like that one, but when she thinks about Rafi Bukhari she wonders what kind of parent she’ll be.

  She sees a girl sitting on the doorstep of Old School, her long red hair bright in the snow, as if waiting for someone. A paramedic’s blanket is wrapped around her. Snowflakes and tiny burnt fragments from the theatre fall around her. She must have charmed a police officer because she should be getting on to a coach, but Rose will let her be. Stuart said they’d secured the immediate perimeter around the school, so she’s safe enough.

  Rose walks past Old School and sees four fire engines; firefighters are hosing water on to the burning theatre; debris scattered through the trees. But culture isn’t contained within a building, it is alive with beating h
earts walking into the woods, holding their trees, doing a promenade performance of Macbeth. Bloody hell, these kids. Unbelievable. Fucking amazing.

  The glass corridor lies on the snow in shards, reflecting the flames, and something bothers her.

  * * *

  They won’t let Hannah go to the boatshed and find Rafi herself but the drive from Junior School and the boatshed goes past where she is sitting, so she’ll see him soon. A young policeman checked her for weapons but she convinced him that she wasn’t a terrorist, though he didn’t need much convincing, he was smiling the whole time. Rules, he’d said. Right, she’d said.

  She’ll see Dad soon. He’s waiting for her with her aunt and cousins and second cousins; all rabbit’s friends and relations, a joke between them since she was about three. She’s told him she can’t leave till she’s seen Rafi, and he understands. She didn’t tell him that she also just needs to be alone for a little while, nobody talking or even breathing close to her, just her in the cold air with no walls, no footsteps; to feel her own space and inhabit the world again. She needs a bit of time to put the pieces of herself back together that the footsteps broke apart; all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. She will be put back together again, just not quite the same.

  Dark snowflakes drift through the sky, falling mainly over the woods but some of them over Old School and her too; they must be pieces of the theatre – walls and roof and seats and stage and props burnt to almost nothing. She’d have minded much more if it was the library that was blown up. She feels a debt to books for being a barricade against the gunman and would have been upset if they’d been blown to smithereens and were drifting down over the woods; but then books are made from trees, so maybe it would have been a returning home, their heroines and heroes unfettered from the covers – a new unbound narrative. Weird, but Rafi will understand. How much longer till he gets here?

  * * *

  Rose hurries towards the Victorian gatehouse. She’s radioed for assistance because she doesn’t think it was luck for the terrorists that the kids and staff in Old School were all evacuated to the theatre, all of them meant to be blown up. She fears they were corralled in there. 14 Words is tech-savvy; sophisticated. What if the police were meant to decrypt the bloodbath threat? And just in case they didn’t, 14 Words leaked that threat, and that Victor was a psychopath, in order to heighten the jeopardy, to create panic, so they all went along with the plan to run to the theatre?

  She goes into the gatehouse. Other officers are with her. Shining a torch, they see drag-marks of blood and a police constable in uniform lying dead on the brick floor, shot in the chest, his police radio in fragments. Their torch shows his badge, ‘PC Beard’.

  Rose puts out an emergency alert. Officers are opening the door to PC Beard’s car. A blanket is draped over the driver’s seat covering the blood, but it has seeped through. They take the blanket away. From the amount of blood, it’s clear PC Beard was shot inside the car. He was killed as he drove up towards the school at the very beginning of this.

  She will mourn for a murdered colleague when her job is done. Think. What does this mean? She sweeps the beam of her torch around the gatehouse and sees a mobile phone in the corner, switched on and connected to an external battery pack; contributing to the lie that PC Beard was alive and in the gatehouse using his own phone. Was the third terrorist ever in here? People he spoke to thought he was and if he’d been outside they’d have heard the wind in the background. He was probably in the gatehouse for a short period of time, Victor and him hiding the body, covering over the evidence, and then he phoned from the maintenance shed and maybe the empty Junior School, just putting the battery into his burner phone for the duration of each call so the police didn’t pick it up. And now?

  Surely he has escaped. He has consistently wanted to avoid being seen and captured; using a silencer, keeping hidden. He probably never even rang the doorbell, Victor just played a recording on his phone. But she imagines his rage as he spent two hours searching for Rafi, thinking Basi had been evacuated; his hate for the boys becoming stronger than his fear of being caught or killed.

  Officers are using their hands to dig through the top layers of snow. They find tracks of blood, from the car to the gatehouse; and the CCTV camera covered in paint was blind.

  Stuart Dingwall phones her.

  ‘I just got an alert that you—’

  ‘Are you with Rafi and Basi?’ she asks.

  ‘A school minibus has overturned across the drive. A branch was used as a lever. We’re moving it now.’

  * * *

  Rafi and Basi are in the boat. In the dark Rafi can feel Basi’s body gibbering with cold and he’s worried that hugging Basi close to him is just making him colder.

  A knock on the door of the shed. Rafi feels Basi’s body stiffen with fear and tightens his arms around him.

  Another knock-knock and the man knocking at the door is one of Assad’s men battering at their door to arrest their father and brother or he is part of Daesh or a paedophile at the camp banging on the door of their shed; he is First Murderer or Second Murderer or Third Murderer in Macbeth, a man of violence without a name who lives in the dark, who will hurt a person you love, bringing the darkness with him, falling across something bright and good so that love has a shadow.

  A friendly English voice calls to them.

  ‘Rafi? Basi? I’m a police officer. My name’s PC Beard, can you let me in?’

  English police officers are good. Nothing bad will happen. He should trust him.

  ‘You’re okay now, sons. Let me in. You’re safe.’

  But something stops Rafi from getting out of the boat and opening the door; maybe because he’ll have to take his arms away from his little brother who’s so cold or because of his injured leg which means he doesn’t want to move and a bodily knowledge of how much they are hated, and he remembers some people here see them as less than human; as cockroaches.

  The sound of a twig snapping and another.

  Dots of light appear in the door as the man outside fires. Basi doesn’t know to be afraid, but Rafi uses his body to shield Basi, lying over him in the boat, because the man will get into the shed any moment. Terror is a black thing: the dead of night, the pitch of darkness; Baba and Karam’s bodies in the snow.

  The sound of gunfire, rapid and loud. Basi whimpers in terror. And there are men pushing at the door, opening it, and they’re coming in and telling him and Basi to get out of the boat and that they’re safe. But they’re not. Nowhere is safe. He has his arms around Basi, just looking at Basi, protecting him, not looking at the people in the shed, not wanting to look at them.

  And then he hears a woman’s voice he recognizes. ‘Rafi, it’s Rose Polstein …’

  He tries to get out of the boat but his hands are numb. ‘It’s okay,’ he tells Basi. ‘We can get out of the boat now.’ He can’t feel the sides of the boat and the pain in his right leg makes him dizzy.

  People in police uniforms and grey uniforms are helping him and Basi out of the boat; and someone is putting blankets around him and around Basi, soft blankets, like picnic blankets, perhaps they’ve got them from their cars, and he sees a woman who must be Rose Polstein smiling at him, not wearing a police uniform but a dress and jacket, covered in snow.

  Angels are bright still.

  Benny would say, Wow, man, you’re so fucking deep, and he’d say back, Hey, bro’, you’re so fucking shallow.

  They’re helping him into an ambulance, Basi coming in the same one, because they won’t be separated.

  He’s right though, even if Benny would tease him, because against the men who live in darkness, there’s Rose Polstein, who’s shivering, and all these other people out in the snow, and Hannah and Mr Marr and Benny and his foster parents and his other friends and teachers and the people with welcome banners.

  He holds on to love, will not fear its shadow.

  * * *

  They’ve promised her that the ambulance with Ra
fi and Basi will stop and let her in, ‘like a bloody party bus’, the police officer said, but he was smiling. The coach with the little kids from the pottery room is leaving and Hannah waves at them as they go. Her other hand holds her mobile. Daphne gave her Mr Forbright’s number and she rings him. It rings and rings and she’s afraid he won’t answer, afraid of what that means for Mr Marr, and then he picks up.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mr Forbright? It’s Hannah.’

  In the silence, she daren’t ask about Mr Marr.

  ‘We’re on the way to hospital, Hannah.’

  She thinks of her Gap T-shirt pressed into his foot and her hoody round his head, the best she could do, and wishes she’d had real bandages, wishes she’d known what to do to save him. Because even though he’s in an ambulance with proper help now, she knows that he will die. ‘Do you want to talk to him?’ Mr Forbright asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll hold my phone next to him,’ Mr Forbright says.

  ‘Hey, Mr Marr, it’s Hannah.’

  She remembers holding his hand in the library, how even when he could no longer open his eyes she’d see them moving under his eyelids, letting her know that he was still with them.

  ‘It was really brave what you did, getting Tobias and me into the library, not saving yourself. I didn’t tell you that. I’m sorry. We’re all safe now, Rafi and Basi too. Do you know about everyone leaving the theatre? There were loads of trees backstage, little saplings that you can carry, and we all took one. Daphne said, “Method act trees!” You can imagine how much she liked saying that, but she looked sick with worry too. And then we left the theatre by the fire-exit door straight into the woods.’

  Dad says Lead on, Macduff as a joke, like when she needs to show him the right aisle in Sainsbury’s to get Shreddies. But it wasn’t Lead on, Macduff because no one was leading; they were all leading.

  ‘Did you know that there’s an oak tree in the real Birnam Wood which was alive when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth? Its trunk is rotten, but it’s still alive and has branches growing.’