A motorbike is easier to hide than a car. Perhaps you could get a motorbike to go off-road on trails through the woods.
‘They’re retrieving Victor’s mobile phone data,’ Amaal says. ‘Not the content but the numbers. We should know who he’s been contacting.’
* * *
It’s as if the cafeteria has been holding its breath and with the news that it’s Victor Deakin, not terrorists, attacking the school, the room has exhaled. Hannah’s father’s face is no longer pinched tight, his fingers uncurled a little.
And Beth cannot endure their relief, the sharp contrast to her own feelings.
Hannah’s father must realize because he looks at her with kindness. ‘It’s not good news for you?’ he asks; an unselfish, thoughtful man to even notice. She shakes her head.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
Has Victor hurt you, Jamie?
She cannot bear to think of him hurt. She wills her phone to ring. The windowless cafeteria is closing in on her. Ten minutes till Mike’s train gets in. When she told him about Victor, he made a sound like a cushion being plumped up, a sigh of feathers against air, as if someone had held him up and punched him in all directions, but he didn’t want her to know.
Mike’s mother’s small car can’t get through the snow, so he’s asking a neighbour they barely know to break in through their kitchen window. Jamie could still have left a message on their home landline; hope a soap bubble, untouchably fragile.
‘Victor Deakin’s just getting revenge,’ the father in the Mumford & Sons sweatshirt is saying. ‘He shot the headmaster for not letting him stay at the school. But he’s got no reason to hurt the children.’
This has already been said but it’s as if repeating it will give it more solidity, make it more valid.
‘The police will make him see that, won’t they?’ Antonella’s mother asks, colour back in her face. ‘They’ll reason with him that it’s nothing to do with the children.’
Other voices join in, ‘Of course they will.’
‘He’ll let them go.’
‘He’s got no reason to punish the children.’
‘They’re not a target.’
But Jamie is a target. He’s got a reason to hurt and punish Jamie.
It was the 31st of October, early evening, when she got a call from the police in Exeter saying Jamie had been arrested. Jamie, who’d never even had a detention at his previous, strict school, who’s never even given in his homework late.
When she and Mike arrived at the police station, Victor and his father had already left.
They talked it all through that evening, Mike and Jamie and her, glad that Theo was at university, so their attention could be entirely on Jamie; all of them were shocked because she and Mike had liked Victor too – liked him! They said Jamie had to stop all contact with Victor; and Jamie, feeling utterly betrayed by his friend, agreed. Victor had left the school months earlier, so no reason that Jamie needed to ever see him again.
I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I never thought he was violent, never imagined he could be dangerous.
Me neither, Mum, and I was his friend.
I should have told you to ease away from him; should have warned you to be careful.
She sees Victor as a caged snake, and the cage door opening.
Around her a conversation has started about why Victor had to leave. A father is saying it’s because his parents couldn’t pay the fees and the school wouldn’t give him a bursary, which Beth already knows.
‘No, that’s not true. He was expelled,’ a mother says, a parent-governor and chair of the charity committee, who up until a few minutes ago had been mute with fear. ‘It was nothing to do with the fees. That was the story he put about and people believed it but it wasn’t what really happened.’
But that’s what Jamie thought and other people Beth knew at the school too, not that she knows many people, but they all said the same: the house and cars were being defaulted on and repossessed; it was the fees.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ a father says. ‘Whatever the reason he had to leave, he’s got nothing against our children, that’s the important thing.’
‘He was expelled for writing rape fantasies,’ the parent-governor says. She pauses a moment, not meeting anybody’s eye. ‘We were told during a governors’ meeting. But not in any detail. He’d gone by then, wasn’t allowed back on to school property, so we thought it was over. We never thought, any of us, that he’d attack anyone. Hurt anyone.’
Beth should have made friends with this woman, not been intimidated but made herself into a confidante, because then she’d have been suspicious of Victor and would have protected Jamie; would have known she had to do that.
‘Do you think he’s a danger to the girls?’ Hannah’s father asks. ‘Do you think he’s going to harm one of them?’
The room has constricted with tension, this new information pulling them taut, tendons in hands and shoulders and necks tightening.
The young female police officer comes towards her. ‘Mrs Alton?’
‘Yes.’
‘Detective Inspector Polstein would like to speak to you. There’s a car for you downstairs.’
‘Has something happened to Jamie?’
‘I don’t have any information, I’m sorry.’
She goes with the police officer; the air too heavy to breathe.
As they walk down the stairs, Beth feels the chill and sees through the windows that it’s snowing heavily. It’s been snowing all this time. She should have known it was snowing and this cold before, should have realized that Jamie might be outside and frozen. She tells him to wear a coat, but he hasn’t, not for years, just a hoody.
On the way to the exit, they walk past a room with a clear Plexiglas wall alongside the corridor. Inside a pregnant mother sits on the floor, rocking to and fro; nobody going to her. Just outside, a young father is playing with a toddler, winding up a clockwork Postman Pat van. He sets the Postman Pat van going along the corridor and the toddler chases it. The toddler is laughing; the father’s face is so white that she thinks he’ll pass out. She recognizes him, but cannot place him.
Press are gathered outside the leisure centre glass doors, a crush of them with cameras and sound booms, a police officer standing guard. She’s ushered away from them, to a goods entrance at the back.
* * *
In the library, Matthew Marr is losing his vision and each breath is harder than the last. He wants to do something, anything, to help the kids but he cannot move or speak. He forces himself to stay conscious, to stay with them. His hearing isn’t damaged; he can hear the footsteps walking up and down, up and down, and someone is talking about Victor Deakin.
Fragmented images wash ashore on to the part of him that is still able to remember: a vicious rape fantasy; a diary on a computer.
He feels anxiety for Jamie Alton but doesn’t know why.
He sees again that day with the china-blue sky, Old School bright with flowers, a bird calling. Darkness clouds around it, hiding something. He tries to go nearer – Come out! Come out! Show yourself! – but whatever it is retreats further into the darkness and he knows only that it evokes terror and guilt in him.
* * *