Three Hours
‘Three Hours is both a gripping thriller and a beautiful meditation on the nature of family, friendship, courage and unintended – lethal – consequences. Superb’ Kate Mosse
‘Three Hours is one of the most exhilarating reading experiences I’ve ever had. Rosamund Lupton takes a dark, painful subject and turns it into a novel full of hope and compassion. An amazing achievement’ Emma Healey
‘This is a stunner of a book. Staggeringly good’ Jane Fallon
‘ASTONISHING. Powerful, terrifying, heartbreaking’ Emma Flint
‘Propulsively plotted and full of vivid characters who earn our concern, Three Hours held me in its eloquent grip’ Emma Donoghue
‘So gripping, intelligent, timely, affecting and moving’ Marian Keyes
‘Utterly breathtaking and dazzling’ Jenny Colgan
‘Will chill your blood and break your heart by turns – a masterclass in suspense’ Cara Hunter
‘Rosamund Lupton’s best book yet, and that is high praise. A monster story for our fractious historical moment. Chilling, suspenseful, humane and brave’ William Landay
‘An incredible, unbelievably powerful book. It’s taut, it’s appalling, it’s uplifting, it’s extraordinary. Simply stunning’ Dinah Jefferies
‘This is an incredible novel: a heady combination of elegant writing, nuanced characterization, deep emotion and heart-stopping tension’ Elizabeth Brooks
‘Three Hours is exceptional – at turns hearbreaking, warm, terrifying, perceptive and grippingly page-turning’ Kate Hamer
‘I read Three Hours in two days, in awe. It’s breathtaking. A modern rumination on the issues that divide 21st-century life, a celebration of refugees, of mental health, of love and hope and bravery. I loved it more than I can say’ Gillian McAllister
‘Beautifully written, emotionally note-perfect and nail-bitingly tense. It’s brilliant’ Tammy Cohen
‘Three Hours is about hate crime, but what rings out from its pages – what is likely to stay with you long after you’ve read that magnificent last line – is love. I wanted to read Three Hours slowly to savour every beautiful word, yet it is so compelling that I couldn’t put it down. This one is destined for the bestsellers list, I reckon, and rightly so. It is phenomenal’ Fiona Mitchell
‘It’s mind blowing. It’s a horrifying story but told with such compassion and humanity. A large cast of characters and yet you feel genuinely emotionally engaged with each one … Amazing’ Francesca Jakobi
‘Three Hours is a brilliant novel – moving, relevant and honest. Rosamund Lupton takes us through the story of a siege in an English school, building on the tension and our emotions as the story speeds to its conclusion … An exceptional and heartbreaking read’ Jenny Quintana
‘Lupton tells her story with searing beauty and unbearable tension. Exquisite. Compassionate. Painful. Fantastic. A work of powerful imagination that wears its intelligence lightly. Don’t read this if you want to be able to put it down’ Kate London
‘Three Hours has a voice all of its own. Character and plot leap out at you from the first line. Rosamund Lupton makes you race through the pages with her irresistible storytelling. Impossible to stop until you reach the poignant end’ Jane Corry
‘Three Hours is phenomenal. Absolutely glorious, heart-rending and gripping!’ Gytha Lodge
‘Exceptional. I’m in awe of Rosamund Lupton’ Sarah Edghill
‘Three Hours is incredible. Haunting. Heartbreaking, relentless, beautiful’ Abi Daré
For Felicity Blunt
an inspiration and an exceptional person, thank you
Part One
* * *
And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?
Rumi (1207–1273)
1.
9.16 a.m.
A moment of stillness; as if time itself is waiting, can no longer be measured. Then the subtle press of a fingertip, whorled skin against cool metal, starts it beating again and the bullet moves faster than sound.
It smashes the glass case on the wall by the headmaster’s head, which displays medals for gallantry awarded in the last World War to boys barely out of the sixth form. Their medals turn into shrapnel; hitting the headmaster’s soft brown hair, breaking the arm of his glasses, piercing through the bone that protects the part of him that thinks, loves, dreams and fears; as if pieces of metal are travelling through the who of him and the why of him. But he is still able to think because it’s he who has thought of those boys, shrapnel made of gallantry, tearing apart any sense he’d once had of a benevolent order of things.
He’s falling backwards. Another shot; the corridor a reverberating sound tunnel. Hands are grabbing him and dragging him into the library.
Hannah and David are moving him away from the closed library door and putting him into the recovery position. His sixth-formers have all learnt first aid, compulsory in Year 12, but how did they learn to be courageous? Perhaps it was there all this time and he didn’t notice it; medals again, walked past a hundred times, a thousand.
He tries to reassure them that even if it looks bad – he is pretty sure it must look very bad indeed – inside he’s okay, the who of him is still intact but he can’t speak. Instead sounds are coming out of his mouth that are gasps and grunts and will make them more afraid so he stops trying to speak.
His pupils’ faces look ghostly in the dim light, eyes gleaming, dark clothes invisible. They turned off all the electric lights when the code red was called. The Victorian wooden shutters have been pulled shut over the windows; traces of weak winter daylight seep inside through the cracks.
He, Matthew Marr, headmaster and only adult here, must protect them; must rescue his pupils in Junior School, the pottery room, the theatre and the English classroom along the corridor; must tell the teachers not to take any risks and keep the children safe. But his mind is slipping backwards into memory. Perhaps this is what the shrapnel has done, broken pieces of bone upwards so they form a jagged wall and he is stuck on the side of the past. But words in his own thoughts grab at him – risks, safe, rescue.
What in God’s name is happening?
As he struggles to understand, his thoughts careen backwards, too fast, perilously close to tipping over the edge of his mind and the blackness there; stopping with the memory of a china-blue sky, the front of Old School bright with flowering clematis, the call of a pied flycatcher. His damaged brain tells him the answer lies here, in this day, but the thoughts that have brought him to this point have dissolved.
Hannah covers Mr Marr’s top half with her puffa jacket and David covers his legs with his coat, then Hannah takes off her hoody. She will not scream. She will not cry. She will wrap her hoody around Mr Marr’s head, tying the arms tightly together, and then she must try to staunch the bleeding from the wound in his foot, and when she has done these things she will check his airway again.
No more shots. Not yet. Fear thinning her skin, exposing her smallness. As she takes off her T-shirt to make a bandage she glances at the wall of the library that faces the garden, the shuttered windows too small and too high up for escape. The other wall, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, runs alongside the corridor. The gunman’s footsteps sound along the bookcases as he walks along the corridor. For a little while they thought he’d gone, that he’d walked all the way to the end of the corridor and the front door and left. But he hadn’t. He came back again towards them.