He walked back to his old Golf and got in. He tried Miranda's phone but he got no answer.
There was only way he was getting in the school and that was through the front door. He turned the key in the ignition and revved the engine.
He swung the car around away from the protestors and headed down the street away from the school. When he was fifty yards down the road he did a U-turn and pointed the car at the gate. He pressed hard on the accelerator. His old Golf jumped forward and began to pick up speed.
Erasmus pressed repeatedly on the horn. At the back of the demonstration the man with the corduroy jacket turned round and his eyes became saucers, a millisecond later he was screaming and running away. Panic transmitted through the crowd like an electric current, people turned, ran and the crowd parted for the battered VW. Erasmus swung off course for a moment to avoid a protestor who didn't move and then swung back towards the gate.
The security guards remained stock still, holding their position, they were well trained but Erasmus was close enough to see uncertainty in the commander's eyes. Ten feet away from the gate Erasmus saw the first guard break and dive to his side. By the time he hit the gate at 40 mph all the other guards were moving, all except for the commander who remained still.
So be it, thought Erasmus.
The car smashed through the gate sending it flying to the side. At the very last second Erasmus moved the wheel to the side and the car's front bumper clipped the commander's legs instead of ploughing straight into him. He checked his rear-view mirror, the commander was on his back and holding his leg.
He drove straight at the entrance and stopped the car outside. He risked a look behind: two of the security detail were running towards him, the injured commander was back on his feet and hobbling along at the rear.
Erasmus ran up the steps that led to the heavy school doors and, to his surprise, found them unlocked and unguarded.
In the lobby he had a choice. If he turned left it took him to the gym and the protestor threatening to burn the books. But he had seen children's scared faces at the first floor windows. A staircase ran off the lobby and Erasmus took it to the first floor.
Erasmus ran down the corridor checking each classroom, they were all empty until the last one at the end of corridor. Through the glass window on the door Erasmus could see a group of children and a few adults standing at the classroom windows looking out. Abby and Miranda were sat together on the teacher's desk.
Erasmus tried the door but it was locked. He banged on the glass.
Miranda saw him and jumped off the desk. Abby smiled at him and waved as though it was the most natural thing in the world that he should be standing outside her classroom. Erasmus waved back. Miranda came over to the door.
‘It's locked!’ she said.
Erasmus had assumed it was locked from her side.
‘Stand back!’
He kicked hard at the lock, the door buckled and there was a crack. He tried again and the door gave way. He ran in the classroom and hugged Abby and Miranda.
‘What's going on, Daddy?’ asked Abby.
He kissed her.
‘Nothing, honey, it's just a fire drill. How come the door was locked from the outside, Miranda?’
Miranda stayed calm but he could tell from the way she was chewing at her cheek that she was scared.
‘When the protestor stormed the school saying he was going to burn the books a man told us we would be safest in here. He locked us in.’
‘A man, the headmaster?’
‘No, he said he was with the Bovind Foundation, he had security guards with him. He was an American.’
Erasmus nodded. Something wasn't right.
‘OK, we are getting you out of here now. Everybody get your children and follow me.’
A man in an immaculately cut suit and a razor sharp tie approached Erasmus.
‘And who are you? The security forces told us to stay in here.’
‘See any of those security forces around lately? We are going. It's your choice.’
Then man's lip quivered as though he was about to put forward a case for staying but he was already facing Erasmus’ back.
Erasmus picked up Abby and took Miranda's hand. Together they walked out of the classroom followed by the other parents and their children, including the man in the suit and his son.
Erasmus led the children and their parents down the corridor. Something was very wrong. Why would anyone choose to put the kids in the classroom at the far end of the corridor? The classroom immediately next to the gym? If there was going to be a fire then this was putting them in harm's way.
Abby pulled his hand.
‘What is it, honey?’ he asked.
‘I like it that you and Mum are holding hands that's all.’
He and Miranda exchanged an embarrassed glance.
‘Come on.’
Slowly and quietly they made their way down the steps. At the bottom there were the two security guards who had followed him. They looked nervous and unsure. Erasmus took control.
‘You can arrest me in a minute. The first thing to do is to get these kids out of here. Miranda, will you go with them? Make sure everyone gets well back from the school.’
The children moved forward enveloping the security guards. One of the guards picked up a child.
‘Get going, I'll follow!’ commanded Erasmus. He directed this at the older guard. Erasmus pegged him as an ex-sergeant. The man regarded him for a moment, his eyes locked on Erasmus’ and then he nodded in agreement.
‘Everyone follow me!’ said the older guard.
The guards led the children and the parents out the doors. Erasmus hung back.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Miranda.
‘Something's not right and I intend to find out what it is. I need you to get outside and call the real police right away.’
Miranda shook her head. ‘Erasmus, this is not your battle.’
‘Someone put you and Abby in harm's way. That makes it my battle.’
She held his hand for a moment longer and then let it go. ‘Be careful.’
He smiled and then headed left towards the gymnasium.
Once he was out of the lobby the eerie quiet of the school returned. It was all wrong. If this was a genuine siege or hostage situation the police should be dealing with it, not Bovind's private security forces. He knew most services had been contracted out by the council but he was pretty sure the Mayor would have drawn the line at tactical response units. Yet here there was nothing.
The corridor was lined with art class pictures: red and green houses, yellow flowers and windmills. His footsteps echoed as they clacked on the tile floors.
The gym was at the end of the corridor, rising directly alongside the first floor classroom that the children had been locked into.
Someone was laughing.
The sound made Erasmus stop and listen. Yes, laughter, soft but vicious. And something else, the sweet sickly smell of petrol.
Erasmus moved forward and came to the gym entrance. The doors were closed but through the glass window a strange scene greeted him.
Against the far wall were books, textbooks, maybe five hundred stacked on pallets. At the bottom of the pile there was jerrycan lying on its side. The book pile was five feet high and sitting on top of it was a young man. By his beard and ill-fitting clothes Erasmus would have placed his mortgage on him being a student. His right hand handcuffed awkwardly to the wall bars. He was wet through, hair plastered to his face and he was shivering. He was looking, eyes wide with terror, at the man in the centre of the room.
The man was tall and even though he was slightly hunched over, Erasmus would have guessed he was pushing seven feet. He was wearing an old-fashioned single-breasted black suit and a felt hat. Erasmus recognised the Pastor immediately. He was holding a Zippo® lighter and clicking the top back and forth.
Erasmus paused and then entered the gym.
The young man, wild eyed and desperate, sa
w Erasmus and a desperate look of relief replaced the fear for a moment.
The Pastor turned slowly and faced Erasmus. His stare was like being fixed upon by a large bird of prey.
‘What's going on?’ said Erasmus.
The Pastor's eyes seemed to bore into Erasmus as though he were trying to find his very essence, his soul.
‘You,’ he paused as though he were recalling the depth of Erasmus’ sins. ‘This sinner, this malcontent, this atheist, broke into the school and wishes to immolate himself and the Foundation's books in the name of his sacrilegious cause.’
The young man moved forward, his chain pulling taut and stopping him.
‘That's a lie. I was going to burn the books but he caught me, handcuffed me here, covered me with petrol and is going to burn me!’
The Pastor flipped the Zippo®’s top open, shut, open shut. He said nothing.
‘What are you doing with the lighter?’ asked Erasmus.
‘Holding fast to that which is true.’
The Pastor clicked the lighter open. The young man whimpered.
‘Why did you put the children in the room above the gym?’ Erasmus began to move forward slowly, closing the distance between them.
The Pastor clicked the lighter shut. ‘To protect them until the police arrived. Unfortunately they are slow, over worked, so I have been forced to deal with this sinner myself.’ His thin lips came together in what may have been a smile. He clicked the lighter open.
‘He's going to burn me! He said he would!’
Erasmus noticed a trail of petrol on the gym floor leading to a foot in front of the Pastor.
Erasmus held out of his hand. ‘Give me the lighter.’
The lighter clicked shut.
‘He wanted to burn the books. Shall we not let him?’
The lighter clicked open and this time the Pastor struck the flint. A flickering, yellow flame appeared. All he would have to do is drop it and the books and the boy would explode into flames.
‘That would be murder.’
‘Please no!’ screamed the boy.
The Pastor tilted his head slightly. ‘Would it? Or would it be justice?’
There was a silence for a second. Erasmus was only a few feet away from the Pastor now. If he leapt forward he put his chances at no more than 50/50 of saving the boy from the flames.
‘Please help me,’ said the boy.
The Pastor held the lighter up to his eye line and looked into the flame.
‘And what is your name?’ the Pastor asked.
‘Erasmus Jones. I guess you can call me a concerned parent.’
The Pastor looked at the boy.
‘Sometimes a cause is greater than mere human life. The soul is eternal, the flesh is of this world only. Are you prepared to die for your cause? I would gladly die for my mine.’
The boy sobbed.
Erasmus shrugged. ‘I've seen plenty of dying. I think it's highly overrated. You seem the type who might enjoy it though.’
The Pastor clicked the lighter and the flame flickered.
‘You wanted the boy to burn and the children to die, didn't you?’
The Pastor's tongue flickered around his ruby red lips as though he were on the edge of saying something.
Erasmus took another step forward. His rubber soles slid on the petrol that lay slick on the gym floor. He had a cold, hard feeling that he had never been closer to death than at this precise moment.
‘Why would you want to do that?’
There was a loud crash and then the door to the gym was flung open. It was the commander of the security detail. He took in the scene before him.
‘Are you OK, sir?’ he asked the Pastor. ‘The police have arrived now.’
The Pastor clicked the lighter shut and threw it to the boy on top of the books who caught it with his free hand. He started crying.
‘Everything is just as it should be,’ the Pastor said calmly.
The Pastor moved close to Erasmus and stooped to place his face level with Erasmus’. His nostrils recoiled at the man's smell: it reminded him of dry old books and something else, something deep and bestial. His grey eyes fixed on Erasmus’.
‘I know you. I know your soul,’ said the Pastor. Erasmus felt a chill. It was like the Pastor was seeing inside him, searching something out. He dismissed the thought.
‘And I know your soul. You're an arsehole,’ declared Erasmus.
The Pastor ran his tongue over his top lip and then smiled a humourless smile, revealing a Californian set of top teeth and a trailer park bottom half.
‘Humour does not feed your soul and a starved soul will perish.’ He didn't wait for a response but turned to the commander. ‘Get this parent out of here.’
‘He hit me with his car, sir.’
‘A misunderstanding, I'm sure.’ The Pastor walked away.
‘This way,’ said the commander.
‘Your boss is a psychopath,’ said Erasmus.
The commander pushed him in the back, propelling him towards the gym doors. ‘Get out of here! You're lucky you are not going to jail.’
Erasmus didn't need asking twice and he headed outside to see Miranda and Abby. When she saw him waking across the school playground Abby shook out of Miranda's embrace and ran towards him. Erasmus scooped her up and she gleefully hugged him.
‘You saved us, Daddy, you saved us.’
Miranda was smiling. ‘She's right, you know,’ she said.
Erasmus wanted to say that he would always be there to save them but his heart wouldn't let him. He couldn't make promises that he knew where impossible to keep.
‘I'll always try,’ was the best he could manage.
Miranda smiled at him again and he felt something inside, emotions he had repressed, stir into life. He recognised it for what it was: hope. For the first time in a very long time he didn't immediately stifle those feelings.
He allowed himself to smile back.
CHAPTER 20
Mayor Lynch had never liked hospitals. The fact that he had now reached a certain social and monetary level where the hospitals he visited tended to be tucked away in leafy suburbs and were decorated akin to a fashionable hotel, didn't change the fact that he didn't like the places. Every time the Mayor entered a hospital he was filled with a dread that he would not be leaving and today was no exception.
He sat in the waiting room of the Murrayfield Hospital and tried unsuccessfully to find something to read in a glossy magazine but it was full of adverts for watches.
The one good thing about private hospitals, as far he was concerned, was that he was usually the only person in the plush waiting room. There was nothing worse than being confronted with real illness. Private hospitals were better at hiding it than the dirty NHS hospitals that he was forced to visit every now and again as part of his job. It was something that he had come to loathe: a meet and greet with society's real underclass, the unwell. The smells, sights and sounds of the sick made him feel generally unwell and you could just imagine the life threatening diseases and germs just idly waiting on some door handle or unclean surface for the moment when his hand landed on it.
The Mayor thought of this and shuddered. From somewhere unseen he heard a light whisper of compressed air as perfume was discharged into the waiting room.
He had always known it would come to this. The unexplained twinge that wouldn't go away, the visit to the GP, the referral to the consultant – not because the doctor thinks there is anything up but better to make sure – the X-rays, the scans, the nodding and shaking of heads of radiologists, and then the wait for results, the call to come in and, ‘No we can't discuss it with you,’ and then now, the last moments of life before everything changes.
The Mayor dropped the magazine back onto a pile of its equally glossy and aspirational cousins. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair as pain shot up through his buttocks to his back.
He thought about Bovind and the city. If he got the news he was expecting from his consulta
nt, the permatanned and increasingly tardy Mr Grey, then all bets were off. He had funding guaranteed for twelve months for the city. He would take a stand, graciously thank the Bovind Foundation for the monies received but, in the spirit of enlightened secularism, insist on educational freedom and on the council's right to approve any damn planning permissions for women's health clinics it bloody well wanted to. Yes, that was the way forward: make a stand and then step down on a purely temporary basis while his treatment took its grim toll. His mood sank as he pictured tubes and brownish fluids entering and exiting it his body. He ran a hand along his thinning hairline. It wasn't much, but he couldn't bear to lose it.
The door to the consultant's office opened and Mr Grey stepped out into the waiting room. He smiled at Mayor Lynch.
‘Mr Mayor, always a pleasure, please come through.’
The Mayor thought his legs might give way. Maybe it was another symptom.
The Mayor followed Mr Grey into his rooms. The rooms here were more like lawyers’ offices, all oak panelling and bookcases. There were even a couple of large palms by the window. Mr Grey sat behind a large mahogany desk and beckoned for the Mayor to sit down in the empty chair. The Mayor looked at the chair with trepidation. He was reluctant to sit in it. There was no escape from the bad news once he sat down.
Mr Grey nodded. ‘Time is money. Your money,’ he said, and then chuckled.
If it wasn't for the fact that his life was in his hands the Mayor would have punched Mr Grey right there and then. The Mayor sat in the chair. The death chair, he thought.
‘How are the kids?’ asked Mr Grey.
‘Mmm fine,’ said the Mayor. Inside he was screaming, ‘Get on with it!’
Mr Grey picked up a brown paper wallet and had removed some paper from within. He scanned quickly across the numbers that formed the contents of the report. Numbers that added up to bad news the Mayor was sure. He let out a little hysterical squeal.
‘You OK, old man?’ asked Mr Grey.
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