Perhaps they also see this first act as being about how a murderer is made; the creation of a diabolical pair.
‘Right then, we’ll keep going, but we’ll stop whenever you like. Any of you. If it gets too much.’
‘We’ll have to stop before we get to the Macduff children scene, won’t we?’ Tracey says.
Daphne nods.
‘You’re sure they’re okay, Anna and Young Fry?’ Josh asks.
‘They’re safe,’ Daphne says. ‘Evacuated with everyone else in New School.’
As they get on stage, ready to resume the rehearsal, Daphne thinks again about Lady Macbeth’s psychopathic violent rant, and then in walks Macbeth, her poor sap of a husband. And what does he say to this woman, who’s asked for night to hide her crime from heaven? My dearest love.
She thinks Jamie believes Victor cares about him.
* * *
Rose Polstein looks at the feed from the police surveillance UAV above the pottery room. Through the dense snow she can just make out the shape of Camille Giraud at the window. They now know that the gunman in the black balaclava, pointing his semi-automatic at the window, is Jamie Alton. Police imaging specialists, monitoring footage of Jamie Alton, say that for a few seconds he fiddled with something in his left cargo trouser pocket, while his other hand kept a finger on the trigger of the semi-automatic, braced against his shoulder. They now realize that he was powering up his mobile or putting in the battery. His two-way-radio antenna still protrudes from a right-hand pocket.
Rose wishes their suspicions had been unfounded but from the beginning of this every missing student had to be seen as a potential perpetrator as well as a victim. It was why she asked for Beth Alton to be brought here, so she could speak to her face to face. Officers met the father’s train and are questioning him; at Warwick University police are talking to the older brother. They have also been talking to evacuated teachers and a team was ready and waiting to go into the Altons’ house. So far they’ve found a journal hidden under his mattress which they have scanned and sent across, but no weapons; a computer forensics expert Rose hasn’t worked with before is searching Jamie Alton’s computer.
The FBI use the term dyad for killers who jointly carry out a crime. After the Columbine attack by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the phenomenon has been researched extensively. Those two teenagers were not the bullied outcasts or members of a gang as originally portrayed by a frenzied media but, Rose believes, a psychopath and a depressive with lethal toxicity as a pair. The chance of such a dyad coming together must be infinitesimally tiny, all those coincidences and fateful small decisions.
She turns to her team. ‘Okay, we don’t know for definite Jamie’s movements this morning because his mobile battery was out, but we now have a plausible narrative. Victor Deakin knew he couldn’t come into the school unnoticed, he’d been expelled, but Jamie Alton could. He left the theatre this morning at 8.15, ostensibly to get props from the CDT room, but instead came into Old School. He was just another student at the school so didn’t attract any attention. He was probably carrying a sports bag or a rucksack, something big enough to hide the guns.’
‘The rifle’s long, would stick out,’ Thandie says. ‘So he camouflaged it; a cricket bat cover maybe or rolled-up sleeping bag. And no one would take any notice because kids at a school like this are always going on D of E expeditions and the like. Or they’d just think he was fetching props.’
Rose nods. ‘He’s also got a balaclava and combat clothes in there,’ she says. ‘And a two-way digital radio to talk to Victor Deakin. He slips into an empty room in Old School. He puts on the clothes and balaclava, turns on the digital radio.
‘The school goes into lockdown and he waits for his head teacher. And up until this point he’s behaving very weirdly, extremely worryingly, but not yet violent; not yet abhorrent. He could simply be under Victor’s influence up until now, undertaking his orders. But then he came out of that room and he shot his head teacher. He crossed a line into attempted murder. And we need to understand why, because that’s the only way we’re going to be able to predict what he’ll do next, and if we can negotiate with him.’
‘He knew Victor Deakin was coming to check up on him?’ Dannisha suggests. ‘You said that earlier.’
‘Yes, and I think that’s a part of it – remote coercion by Victor – but not all of it.’
‘Do you think Victor deliberately chose him?’ George asks.
‘Yes.’
Because this toxic, catastrophic friendship wasn’t random on Victor’s side. Fate might have served up Jamie Alton at the same school as him, but she thinks Victor befriended Jamie and then somehow persuaded him to be his partner in the attack.
‘I think Victor could well have tried to recruit other people first,’ she says. ‘A teacher saw him with Malin Cohen, maybe Malin refused.’
At Columbine High School, Eric Harris was turned down by other students before he found lonely, depressed Dylan to be his sidekick, a boy named after the poet Dylan Thomas, from a family where even toy guns weren’t allowed; a gentle boy who made his mother origami birds.
* * *
There’s a young male police officer in the Portakabin with Beth. She’s on the phone to Mike, who is in a police car.
‘To start with, they thought he might have been hurt by Victor or was his prisoner,’ Mike says. ‘But even then they were asking me these odd questions, like if he had a grudge against anyone, if he’d ever been violent. Violent. Jamie, for God’s sake. And now they’re searching the house. They asked me if it was safe. If there were booby traps. Jesus Christ.’
Beth thinks of her kitchen with the police in it; their breakfast things still piled up in the sink. Jamie hadn’t eaten breakfast, had left early, rushing out to a waiting car, a friend giving him a lift this morning he’d said, not saying which friend, and she’d just been pleased and didn’t pry. She called goodbye, but not I love you, because she’s become wary of doing that, worried about getting it wrong. But she’s done everything wrong. Because with a different mother, this wouldn’t be happening.
She looks through the windows of the Portakabin, as if something will change, make all of this different, but there is just thick snow.
She has to face the truth, has to do that, because it’s all her fault. She didn’t know that Jamie had taken Victor’s calls again; that Victor had somehow clawed his way back into Jamie’s life. She didn’t see how lonely and unhappy Jamie must have been; didn’t prevent Victor from doing this to her son.
‘We just need to talk to him,’ Mike says. ‘He wants to talk to us. Doesn’t want to be doing this.’
‘I know.’
It’s intensely comforting to have another person who knows Jamie like she does, who’s known him since he was a six-pound-two-ounce scrap of a baby, who knows that he is good.
‘I’ve told them he’d never hurt anyone,’ Mike says. ‘I told them it’s Victor behind this, not Jamie. Check again.’
They both hang up as they did a minute ago to check that Jamie hasn’t phoned or texted while they’ve been talking, knowing that he hasn’t, knowing that their mobiles would beep and vibrate if a call or message was coming through, but not trusting the knowledge.