10.
9.58 a.m.
A police surveillance drone, with a live feed to a screen in Rose Polstein’s command and control vehicle, keeps watch on the gunman outside the pottery room. Their teacher is still putting in her clay tiles. It’s been an hour and thirteen minutes since a gunman shot at the police car, forty-two minutes since the head teacher was shot, and no more shots have been fired. The gunman in Old School continues to walk up and down the corridor. There has been no more communication with the BBC or anyone else.
‘Why aren’t we just going in there and rescuing the kids?’ Thandie asks. ‘Why the hell aren’t we doing that?’ Energetic, athletic and impatient, Rose bets Thandie regularly goes to a gym and beats the hell out of a punchbag.
The answer: because the gunmen threatened to shoot the children if they see police and there are still drones above the school. They must wait until the gunmen cannot watch them from the sky and even then there are no guarantees.
Because looking at the plan of Old School, which they all have, the corridor has no windows or skylight to surprise him and take him out before he can open fire; because the windows in the library and English classroom are too small for the kids to escape through; because he almost certainly has a semi-automatic and if the police storm the building, how many will he kill?
And because the children in the pottery room have no means of escape, are corralled into a single place with large windows, and he most definitely has a semi-automatic pointed at them. The police marksmen will have to shoot a part of his brain, the medulla oblongata, so there’s no involuntary muscle movement and he can’t press the trigger; but the medulla oblongata is only 3 cm by 2 cm. The marksmen have to get closer, and they can’t, not yet, not until they know they’re not being watched.
And because the safest way for this to go would be a negotiation so that the captives are set free, unharmed.
‘We have our job and we leave the armed units and everyone else to do theirs,’ Rose says to her. ‘We have to trust in their skills and experience; trust they know what they’re doing; that’s how this has to work.’ Jesus, she’s turned into her former boss, who was a patronizing bastard, but it’s true. ‘We have our own job to do,’ she repeats.
In order to predict what the gunmen are going to do next, and whether they can negotiate, they need to know who the gunmen are. A list of suspects with a grudge is being winnowed down – anybody the police have been able to speak to, anyone who is definitely not at the school – and they are left with three names: Jed Soames, the disgraced former PE teacher, and the two expelled sixth-formers, Malin Cohen and Victor Deakin.
Detective Constable George Hail ends a phone call with other officers who are working off site. George is less nervous now, his round face almost pink again as he’s got stuck into the job.
‘Jed Soames has been found at his ex-wife’s. Malin Cohen’s mother said he was at work in the local café, but he’s not there and hasn’t shown up for the last two weeks. There’s a girlfriend they’re trying to track down and an incident in the States that’s being checked out.’
‘Thanks, George. And Victor Deakin?’ Rose asks.
‘He isn’t at college but his first class isn’t for another ten minutes. They can’t get hold of his parents. His mother has a Mini convertible. There’s a Mini convertible parked in Junior School car park.’
‘They’re making the Mini a priority?’ Rose asks.
‘Yes.’
But it could easily belong to a member of staff. Throw a stick at a car park and it probably hits a Mini or falls on to the convertible roof.
Police drones are photographing number plates in the school car parks and the surrounding area, but nearly all are partly or fully hidden by snow and slush; maybe they’ll get lucky and get a partial match.
But the attack might not be motivated by a personal grudge. The more Rose has found out about this school, with its strikingly liberal ethos, the more she’s feared it could be a target for terrorists.
‘Amaal, did you find anything significant in today’s date?’
‘Not yet. I’m checking lesser-known nut-job anniversaries.’
‘We’ve got through to Rafi Bukhari, the boy who saw the explosion,’ Thandie says to her. ‘He’s in the woods.’
‘Thanks.’ She takes the phone, puts it on loudspeaker.
The sound of the wind howling through trees; she thinks she can hear branches creaking and she feels the disconnect between herself with her screens and her computer, her bottle of mineral water, the safe interior of this purpose-built vehicle, and what is happening outside.
‘Rafi, my name is Rose Polstein. Are you okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘You saw the explosion in the woods earlier?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see anyone?’
‘No. But I didn’t look.’
A loud gust of wind and it’s hard to hear him.
‘Rafi?’
‘I just ran.’
‘Do you think someone could have been hiding?’
‘Maybe.’
The bomber could have been hiding close by and used a garage door opener or key-fob to detonate the bomb. Or he might have been nowhere near the woods, the bomb being detonated with a timer; an alarm clock or a kitchen timer would do it.
‘Do you know if Hannah Jacobs is safe?’ He sounds very young to Rose. ‘Are junior school on the boats? Please, I have to know.’
‘Junior school are getting on to the boats now and we’re flying a helicopter over the beach to keep them safe. I’ll let you know when they’re away. I don’t know about Hannah, I’m sorry.’ The identity of the captives is not her area of responsibility; her task is to help find the identity of the gunmen, help negotiate and predict what they are going to do.
‘Sorry. Gotta go,’ Rafi says to her.
She guesses it’s because she’s answered the only two questions that matter to him, and because he’s saving precious charge on his phone.
‘Be careful,’ she says, about to add more, but he’s hung up and in the sudden quiet she feels that she is skimming surfaces, gleaning information and imposing rational thought, but far from the heart of what is happening here.
* * *
Rafi is running and phoning Hannah again, each time the same vertiginous desperation that she’ll answer him, but again she doesn’t. She’s run out of charge, that’s all, or she saw it was him and doesn’t want to talk to him, because she hates him for abandoning her; hopefully that’s why. He rings her landline, because maybe she’s safely at home by now and the landline won’t show it’s him so she’ll pick up. The answerphone clicks on. Not at home.
As he runs on towards Old School, the gatehouse now in sight through the trees, the wind drops for a few moments and he hears the rustle of an anorak. His rational mind that’s paid attention in therapy says Fuck’s sake! It’s just your PTSD!, but the frightened part of him that hasn’t paid any attention tells him to run and he races to the gatehouse, a hundred feet away through the woods.
Spruce trees have grown right up against the back wall of the gatehouse and he squeezes between the wall and the trees; his heart’s pounding away like a punk band drummer and his chest’s going in and out like a demented pigeon’s and then he sees a fishbone pattern of bricks in the back wall and it calms him that over a hundred years ago a person built this detail. In Arabic, Daesh sounds like the word to crush and trample; builders and architects are the absolute opposite of Daesh.