Part Two
* * *
To think of time – of all that retrospection,
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
8.
9.38 a.m.
Three miles from the school a helicopter lands on a snow-covered field. It is fifty-three minutes since a gunman fired at the local police officer as he drove towards the school; twenty-two minutes since the head teacher was shot.
Detective Inspector Rose Polstein gets out of the helicopter, running under the still-spinning blades, snow whirling around her, slapping her face, billowing her dress and hair, stinging her ears. Before she gets into the waiting Land Rover Discovery, she’s sick, attributing nausea to the bucking helicopter journey and morning sickness, not nerves. She puts a mint into her mouth and gets inside the vehicle. Simon Letwynd, working for Bronze Commander, drives her towards the command and control centre near to the school, set up a few minutes ago. She and Letwynd have never met each other. Snow scuds against the windscreen, tyres only just gripping.
In a major incident, command is structured into bronze, silver and gold tiers, with roles allocated by task not rank. Rose thinks the impersonal metallic system is not only practical but helps foster a sense of rational order being imposed over something chaotic; hard metals a bulwark against unknowable extremes.
‘How many children and staff are still in the school?’ she asks. Since getting into the chopper she’s had limited communication.
‘Our current information is seventy-one in three locations – Old School, the theatre and the pottery room,’ Letwynd says. ‘Plus one hundred and twenty junior school children, between four and ten years old, hiding under the cliffs on Fulmar beach with ten adults. The beach is accessible only by the school path and by sea. High winds and snow have delayed the rescue boats. We have a helicopter flying over the beach and there’s no sight of a gunman.’
Letwynd will have been briefed en route to the school as well as during the few minutes after arrival.
‘Any change to the situation in Old School?’ she asks.
‘The gunman is still in the corridor and hasn’t fired again. The head teacher is badly wounded in the library with thirteen sixth-form students. We’ve been unable to get medical attention to him; paramedics are standing by. There are a further twelve sixth-formers and three members of staff in a classroom further along the corridor and the deputy head, Neil Forbright, on his own in an office on the same corridor.’
‘Any kids still missing?’
‘Rafi Bukhari, sixteen, and Jamie Alton, seventeen.’
‘What about the children in the pottery room?’
‘In the middle of woodland. Pedestrian access only. Large glass windows. A class of sixteen seven-year-olds and their teacher. We have no communication with them. Armed teams are on their way to get them out.’
Rose feels sick again, winds down the window, the icy air blowing against her face although she’s already shivering hard. Take a breath, Rose, for fuck’s sake. Take a breath.
‘The rest of the hostages are in the theatre,’ Letwynd says. ‘Twenty-two kids and two teachers.’
Rose doesn’t correct him, doesn’t say that they are only hostages if the gunmen want to use them as bargaining tools, if the gunmen actually have an interest in keeping them alive.
She believes an understanding of psychology is crucial in effective police work and eight years ago took time out from the police service to do a degree in psychology, followed by an MSc in investigative forensic psychology at London South Bank University, before rejoining and rising rapidly to Detective Inspector. At thirty-one years old, she’s widely regarded as an exceptional police officer.
Her role in this attack is to predict what the gunmen are going to do next and help other officers find out who they are, using her expertise both as a detective and as an investigative forensic psychologist.
‘The theatre has security doors and no windows,’ Letwynd says. ‘Safest place in the school. The vast majority of students and staff were evacuated from the New School complex, situated near to the main road. There are other outlying small buildings, but they are simply storage sheds and so forth, not occupied apart from the gatehouse, where PC Beard has taken refuge.’
‘He’s unharmed?’
‘Yes. Just his radio damaged. He spoke to someone in Bronze Command on his mobile. He described the sound of a rifle and said it definitely came from the woods, but he didn’t see the shooter and can’t tell us anything more. The windows in the gatehouse are bricked up so he can’t see anything. He apologized for not being able to help and said not to waste any resources on him. We’ll get someone to his family when we can but we’re already stretched. We’ve told him to stay put in the gatehouse.’
‘Good.’
‘The CCTV camera on the gatehouse was painted over early this morning, so even if we can get hold of the footage it won’t give us anything on the shooter.’
‘Do we know what kind of weapon was used to shoot the head teacher in Old School?’
‘From Neil Forbright’s description of the sound in the corridor, it was also a rifle.’
‘We still only know of two shooters?’
‘Yes, the one who was hiding in Old School and another who fired from the woods at PC Beard’s car. Neil Forbright told us that the head was followed through the woods. The timings suggest this gunman shot at the police car and then followed the head. We’ve started searching for him using surveillance drones and helicopters but we’re being hampered by snow and by press and sightseers, who’ve got drones in our airspace.’
‘You’re telling them to get the hell out of the way?’
‘Less politely. I heard you trained in the States on school shootings?’
‘Six months. Always had an interest.’
A horror, more like, that the same thing could happen here; and with terrorist attacks on the increase in Europe, a fear that a school would be a target.
‘Anything on phones?’ she asks.
‘We’re working with mobile phone companies, but it’ll take time.’
‘And vehicles?’
‘We’re using drones to check the school car parks for a vehicle not belonging to staff or sixth-formers.’
‘Can we secure the perimeter?’
‘We’re attempting to, but it’s huge and open.’
Her phone rings; it’s Stuart Dingwall, a senior officer in the South West Counter Terrorism Intelligence Unit, a colleague who she knows well and likes.
‘We’ll be there in five, Stuart,’ she says. ‘Anything to suggest a terrorist attack?’
‘Nothing that’s been on our radar. My team’s been speaking to evacuated teachers and to governors and the school has a robust Prevent policy; they’re all certain that no students have been radicalized.’
‘An outside attack?’
‘I think it’s a stretch but I’m not discounting it.’
‘Anything more on the explosion in the woods?’
‘A student saw it and informed the head and deputy head. It sounds rudimentary; a small amount of low-grade explosives. Possibly a pressure-cooker bomb, made from that article, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom”.’