‘A little maudlin, isn’t it?’ the deputy head before Neil had said, missing the point that a great relaxation of spirit, liberalism and openness was something hard-won; something to be remembered; commemorated.
The man had been an imbecile. The kids got it, though. Running footsteps often abruptly halting.
He passed the doors to the empty drawing room, used for music recitals and parents’ evenings, and reached Donna at the reception desk. The Gothic-Victorian front door had been bolted top and bottom with the original iron bolts, more secure he thought than the more recently added Banham.
‘I know Tonya asked you this, but is there anyone you might have let in that you didn’t know? Or who seemed off in any way?’
Donna shook her head. ‘No one.’
‘You’re absolutely sure?’
‘Yes. I spoke to Serena in New School, and she’s the same. We’ve been racking our brains, just in case. But there’s nobody. This far into term no one is new any more, staff or kids, we know everyone.’
‘Thank you.’
He needed to be certain he’d made the right call to keep everyone, apart from the children and staff in Junior School, which had special circumstances, inside the school buildings.
‘Can you lock the door behind me?’ he asked Donna.
‘But it’s not safe to go out,’ she said, looking afraid.
‘I’ll be fine. This whole thing has most probably been a huge overreaction on my part. But I want to tell Camille in the pottery room what’s going on. Why don’t you go and wait in Jacintha’s classroom? Not be on your own. I’ll phone Neil to let me in again.’
He went outside and waited till he heard Donna bolting the door behind him, then walked quickly over the lawn. He hadn’t paused to get his coat and the air was startlingly cold. A low stone wall surrounded two sides of the lawn, edged with evergreen Christmas Box becoming whitened with snow.
No one was outside apart from him, children still in their first lesson, most of them not yet even aware there was an amber alert. He looked back at Old School with its mellow bricks and ornate chimneys and gargoyles, the lawn powdered white and the woods stretching off into the distance, with snow falling between the trees; like walking through a Christmas card. Inconceivable in this tranquil scene that there was a threat to the school. What was conceivable was that he would look – or actually was – paranoid and panicky; adjectives that hardly topped the list of desirable qualities in a head teacher.
He should have spoken to Rafi for longer, had a more detailed conversation with him. Rafi genuinely believed he’d seen and heard an explosion, but Matthew should have ascertained more facts. Lorrimer had said Rafi was ‘something of a son to you’; he hadn’t known it was so obvious, thought he’d hidden this paternal love for Rafi; but Lorrimer was right and perhaps it meant he’d believed Rafi too quickly.
It was Neil, as well as Rafi, who’d convinced him he needed to act urgently, because right from the start Neil had taken the threat seriously, believed that something terrible was happening to the school. Yes, because Neil suffered from depression, barely controlled by medication, and probably shouldn’t be back at work. Because in his depressed state the world was a hostile and frightening place, with dark catastrophe closing in. He was mentally primed and waiting for something bad to happen.
The terrible coincidence was that he also felt paternal towards Neil. Just these two people, he didn’t go around feeling paternal willy-nilly. Everyone else had the normal kind of headmasterly attention, shared equally among them, but Rafi and his young deputy head were different; perhaps it was because he didn’t have children and his paternal love needed an outlet. But whatever the reason, love makes you biased, makes you behave illogically.
He saw flashing blue lights in the distance, getting gradually bigger. A police car was coming up the tree-lined drive, still a long way from him as it approached the gatehouse. The police car didn’t have a siren on; maybe because the police driver knew that it was someone, him, overreacting, or just because they didn’t put a siren on in a school.
Rafi’s PTSD, Neil’s drumming fingertips, and here they were with the school under amber alert and a police car coming up the drive. Lorrimer would be vindicated. Bloody hell. Lorrimer. He would think the photos of those boy soldiers maudlin too.
A gunshot. The sound spliced through the iced air.
The police car had skewed off the side of the drive, stationary.
He had no recollection of dropping to his knees. He crawled towards the low wall on one side of the lawn, sheltering under it. He thought the shot had come from the woods, near to the gatehouse.
His instinct was to run crab-style back inside Old School, still close to him, to safety; quickly replaced by his need to reach the pottery room and make sure the children were safe and didn’t go outside where a madman was shooting. His third instinct, inculcated into him by seminars on safety and by insomniac run-throughs of worst-case scenarios, was to make sure essential information was relayed as quickly as possible. He dialled Neil on the emergency number.
‘Someone’s fired a gun. The police car was shot at. Near to the gatehouse. Put me on speaker. Tonya, put out a code red alert now. Neil, put on the siren.’
A second shot. On the phone he heard Tonya scream, she must have heard it too.
‘Evacuate New School immediately. Get them on to the coach and minibuses and teachers’ cars and get them away, sitting on each other’s laps, on the floor, just get them out. Everyone else follow the emergency protocol. If the room has curtains or blinds or shutters, get them down. Lock all doors that have a lock. Keep everyone down on the floor, below windows and away from the doors. Put desks up against doors and windows. Turn off lights and smartboards. All phones turn off ringers.’
The school lockdown siren wailed into the frozen air. Anybody outside would get into a building as quickly as possible. Anyone who couldn’t get to the shelter of a building would hide, and then phone to let them know where they were.
He stood, the length of him exposed, and ran from the lawn across the drive towards the woods and the pottery room. At any moment he expected to hear the shot. Expected to feel it. He was a coward, he realized, because he was terrified. He reached the edge of the woods and headed into the dense interior. It was snowing more heavily and he prayed the snow would obscure him as he ran. He was wearing a dark-blue jumper and brown chinos; he didn’t know how conspicuous that made him. He felt totally conspicuous.
He was away from the siren now, quietness around him. He used to think the ancient woods had a living pulse, beating back through time to charcoal workers cutting trees every fifteen years for iron smelting, so that sunlight could reach the woodland floor and continue the rhythm. And then the violent dissonance of those shots and the pulsing rhythm was stilled.
Footsteps cracked on frozen twigs. He listened again. Someone was near him. The gunman had come after him. He crouched between two hawthorn bushes. He’d already turned off the ringer on his phone, now he turned off vibration.
He ran from the hawthorns to a copse of rowan trees, pressing himself against their trunks, and then he was running again towards the pottery room. He’d thought he was pretty fit, but his muscles ached and his breath was laboured and it felt impossible that he could keep up this pace but he kept running to the next copse of trees; sprinting, hiding, getting his breath back.