‘I think that he was lonely and depressed, and that made him easy prey for Victor Deakin,’ she says.
Teachers had noticed him becoming withdrawn and two had been concerned enough to talk to him about depression, but Jamie denied it. He was bullied at his previous school, according to his tutor, and that could have later caused teenage depression. His tutor had asked the school counsellor to see Jamie last term, but Jamie had failed to keep any of the appointments.
‘We need to find out why Jamie has become violent,’ she says. ‘I don’t think Victor Deakin’s influence alone can make a previously unaggressive boy into a killer. There’s something else in play.’
She tends to agree with his mother that a single person, even psychopathic highly manipulative Victor Deakin, doesn’t have that kind of power.
‘Once we know why he’s become violent,’ Dannisha says, ‘then we will know if we can negotiate with him and how to do so.’
‘Has your opinion of Victor Deakin remained the same, Detective Inspector Polstein?’ Bronze Commander asks.
‘Yes, a brutal psychopath and the orchestrator of the attack, and also wanting to orchestrate how it’s covered by the media and how we investigate it.’
Rose thinks everyone in the briefing probably imagines Victor-the-brutal-psychopath as darkly malevolent but Rose sees him as a surfing, base-jumping DJ, a party guy, a prankster with Rohypnol in his pocket and a brick in his messenger bag, and hey! a semi-automatic in the kit bag, and he’s having a blast, man, a fucking blast! And all the more terrifying because of it.
‘What about a third shooter on site?’ Bronze Commander asks.
‘Our surveillance teams haven’t found anybody else,’ an officer says. ‘But the school’s extensive grounds are mainly woodland, much of it very dense, and the weather is making our search almost impossible.’
‘There was a student on TV earlier,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘She saw a glint coming from the high ropes course in the woods just before 8.20 which might have been binoculars.’
‘If so, it doesn’t mean it was a third man,’ an officer says. ‘Most probably Deakin keeping watch.’
‘A scramble though,’ Rose says. ‘For Deakin to see PC Beard’s car and then get in position to take the shot.’
‘But doable,’ the officer says.
Rose nods, yes, doable.
‘Let’s run the rest of that scenario,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘Victor Deakin shoots at PC Beard from the woods and then follows the head teacher. He sees there are children in the pottery room. When Jamie Alton has shot the head teacher in Old School they swap places. It’s Jamie Alton who goes to the Junior School building where Basi Bukhari sees him. Junior School has been evacuated but Alton knows about the young children in the pottery room from Deakin. He goes to the pottery room, where our drone picks him up.’
Rose has been considering this scenario and she thinks it potentially has flaws.
‘It’s tight,’ she says. ‘For Alton to swap places with Deakin and then get from Old School to Junior School in the time. The head teacher was shot at 9.16, Rafi thinks Basi saw a gunman at 9.30.’
‘But again it’s doable,’ an officer says. ‘Even if Alton spent five minutes swapping over, he’d still have had nine minutes to cover a mile, which is fine for someone reasonably fit even in snow.’
‘Yes, but I think the shooter Basi saw must have searched Junior School first and found nobody before he started randomly shooting at a window in a rage.’
‘Then maybe the swap-over was quicker and he ran faster, or he simply fired for the hell of it without searching first,’ another officer says.
Rose hopes they’re right and there’s no third gunman.
Lysander comes on to the screen; he doesn’t bother with preliminaries.
‘Deakin’s been on the dark net, using Tor,’ he says.
The so-called ‘onion’ router, because of its layer-within-layer of complex encryption.
‘He visited a site which has Russian PKM machine guns for sale but didn’t buy from there,’ Lysander continues. ‘He also spent time on a site called “How to Make Your Gun Shoot Like It’s Fully Automatic – in One Easy Step” and “Fire-Power Enhancement”, which sells the necessary equipment. Using bitcoin he made a payment to “Fire-Power Enhancement” for an amount that would equal two sets of the equipment.’
‘Send out an alert to all units that we think both gunmen have converted their guns into fully automatics,’ Bronze Commander says.
In the Las Vegas massacre, Paddock’s converted semi-automatics fired 800 rounds a minute.
In effect, they have machine guns.
15.
11.10 a.m.
In the library, Frank is next to Ed, their backs against the books and the door. He hasn’t tried pushing it again, perhaps he won’t try again. Please let him not try again.
It’s funny, up until today Frank and Luisa have never been close, not in the way that twins are meant to be, no secret language, nothing like that, but earlier she emailed him that she loves him, which she’s never said before, or anything like it. He’s always thought Luisa was embarrassed of him; perhaps she still is but it doesn’t matter.
He thinks the footsteps are outside Mrs Kale’s classroom and feels guilty for his relief that they’re not outside the library door, tries to justify his relief as knowing that the English classroom has desks as a barricade, so more protection than they do, but knows that isn’t the truth.
Hannah is with Mr Marr, stroking his face lightly, and Frank can tell she feels useless, that she thinks stroking his face isn’t helping, but if it was him he’d like it, and not only because it would be Hannah doing it, but because another person’s touch is comforting, and he thinks Mr Marr can feel the kindness in it.
When Luisa and people in the theatre emailed them questions about Mr Marr, they said that he’s injured but will be okay, because they need to believe that.
A new email on his laptop from Benny in the theatre.
‘Benny’s spoken to Rafi,’ he says and his voice is startling to himself and to everyone else in the library because no one has been talking and if they do so it’s in whispers.
‘He wanted Rafi to come to the theatre, but Rafi said he couldn’t. Said his little brother’s missing.’
‘Basi wasn’t evacuated?’ Hannah asks him and he wants to lie to her but can’t.
‘No, he wanted to be with Rafi, so Rafi’s in the woods on the way to find him, but he’s lost.’
In his semi-consciousness, Matthew Marr hears Frank talking about Rafi and Basi and fear jolts him, adrenaline coursing through him.
His mind flicks through images: Scylla and Charybdis, the Cyclops, the drowned men and their wooden Ithacan ship; he remembers talking to Rafi about Odysseus’s voyage, comparing it to Rafi and Basi’s journey, their Circe the broker in Syria who said the route was safe.
But those dangers are past. New dangers now.
He’d thought they’d been evacuated but they’re in danger and it’s linked to Victor and the diary and to a word spoken in the corridor.
Rafi told him about a devil in the Quran called Iblis, with immense hubris, but whose only power is to cast evil suggestion into men’s hearts. Why is he thinking of Iblis?