Neil fears that next time he won’t give up; that he’ll shoot the kids against the door, because they won’t move. They might be vomiting they’re so frightened, he knows that’s what’s happening in the library, but they’re still against the door.
How much time can Neil give to the children if he goes out and tackles the gunman? He will be shot, so how much time? And if it’s a minute or two, will they feel long minutes to the kids? Because if they did, then it would be worth it. Or would the horror at seeing their deputy head lying in the corridor, like a betrayal in its own way, Neil thinks, would that contract the time they had left to them?
His phone rings and he answers it.
‘Mr Forbright? It’s PC Beard. I’ve just heard from Tonya in Jacintha’s classroom. There was a tweet and it’s all over the internet. The gunman in your corridor is a psychopath.’
The word chills Neil because he knows what it means, wishes he didn’t, wishes his Kindle wasn’t full of books on psychopathy, but he’d become fascinated by people at the other end of the mental health spectrum from himself. Because while he’s felt fearful of life, as if missing a layer of skin, too empathetic, too sensitive, without enough confidence to steer a course through life, psychopaths have huge egos and are ruthless, many becoming captains of industry, valued for their lack of empathy and utter self-belief, and if they are murderous have no compassion.
‘The police officers in charge of all this have said they cannot comment,’ PC Beard says. ‘Which is protocol and there’s very good reasons for that protocol, but I’m afraid it means it’s true, otherwise they’d have denied it.’
‘Do the kids in the library know?’ he asks. ‘Has Tonya told them?’
‘No. She thought it best not to.’
‘Good.’
Frank is saving the data on his laptop for emails, he won’t be searching the internet.
‘You told me earlier that the corridor bends?’ PC Beard says.
‘Yes.’
‘Is it a sharp bend?’
‘Like an L-shape.’
‘So, if he went past the bend towards the front door, everyone along your bit of the corridor would be out of his sight?’ PC Beard asks.
‘Yes, but—’
‘And that means everyone in the library and in Jacintha’s classroom, Tonya and Donna and all the children in there, they’d be out of his sight too?’
‘Yes, but he just walks up and down our part of the corridor. He doesn’t go towards the front door, doesn’t go that far.’
‘All right, we need to come up with a plan,’ PC Beard says. ‘Do you have the phone number of a teacher in the theatre? I’ll need to let them know.’
‘I’ll text it to you.’
He’ll send PC Beard Sally-Anne’s number, humour him, but there is no way for any of them to escape.
He listens to the footsteps that have new menace now, and thinks of the experiment when people were given flashcards with the words Murder and Rape. Normal people were disturbed, their brain’s amygdala lighting up, but the psychopaths’ remained dark. Then they were shown graphic photos of murder victims. The psychopaths’ amygdalae were still dark but their language centre was activated as if they were analysing the emotions instead of experiencing them. The man in the corridor has no connecting humanity.
* * *
There are no windows in the theatre so no sign of the storm outside, but despite the central heating the temperature is dropping. On stage, the kids have put on cardigans and hoodies over their hessian tunics as they rehearse. They’ve been forgetting lines and missing cues, and then they go back to the start of the scene, determined to get it right, as if by getting it right they can achieve some kind of control.
Sally-Anne comes up to Daphne.
‘There’s a policeman in the gatehouse,’ she says. ‘PC Beard. He wants to get everyone in Old School to us in the theatre.’
‘Does he know how he’ll do that?’
Sally-Anne shakes her head, as Daphne knew she would, because those children and staff can’t get here without being shot by Victor Deakin.
‘He says Victor Deakin is a psychopath,’ Sally-Anne says. ‘The real thing.’
When Zac said Jamie thought Victor was ‘a psycho’, Daphne had thought he meant it in a slangy way, like on the telly when anyone who’s strange and unbalanced is a psycho.
‘I just googled it,’ Sally-Anne says. ‘Here.’
And it’s almost funny that you can google the mental state of a gunman in your school. Daphne skims the results:
… they hide among us … ruthless, callous and superficially charming … master manipulators …
Another article:
Psychopaths are able to display emotions they don’t feel … everyone around them is convinced that those emotions are real … they lack remorse … It’s difficult to spot a psychopath … they can look actually like they’re more genuine than other people … most people don’t have to fake emotions all the time, so they don’t have any practice at it. But someone who doesn’t feel these emotions will have practice at faking them.
Daphne remembers that she didn’t like Victor when he arrived in Year 11, he hadn’t charmed her then. When did he start to charm her? When did he know how to play her? Or rather, when did she teach him how to play her?
They hide among us. Fake emotions all the time. Practice at faking them.
Oh dear God, what has she done? All those notes she gave him that he was so brilliantly quick to pick up: she taught Victor to mimic emotion. She coached him on how to appear like a normal person, a regular teenager, to dissemble convincingly.
On stage, Miranda is playing Lady Macbeth as a sex kitten, pretty much how she’d play any part she was given, even in these circumstances.
‘Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe top full
Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse …’
She’d cast Victor, her star pupil, as Macbeth but if he is anyone he is Lady Macbeth, not like sweet, implausible Miranda, but right from the start ruthless, manipulative and wicked.
‘I’ll stand by the doors, wait for them,’ Sally-Anne says.
She leaves and Daphne feels suddenly very alone, maybe because she cannot share Sally-Anne’s hopefulness or because guilt cuts you off from other people.
On stage, Miranda as Lady Macbeth continues.
‘Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, “Hold, hold”.’
It’s like she’s trying to become a psychopath, pitiless and without remorse, as she pumps herself up to murder, but Victor doesn’t need to try.
And she realizes this play isn’t about getting titles and a crown and palaces, but about seizing raw power; something Victor has right now.
What will he do to everyone in Old School? What has he done to Jamie?
She wants to tell them all that she should have seen it, should have known or at least suspected; that it is her fault, because she helped him hide in plain sight.