Neil sent a message to say that Victor Deakin hasn’t returned – hasn’t returned! – so Neil and Matthew are safe too.
‘Hey, Hannah,’ Antonella says, calling to Hannah at the back of the auditorium. ‘Text for you from Rafi. He says that Basi must be in the boatshed by Junior School. He’s going to join him.’
‘He’ll be safe in there. Sheltered too,’ Benny says, loud with relief, and Daphne claps her hands; she’s not sure if it’s because she’s in a theatre that she’s clapping – would anyone clap in everyday life at good news? Hannah looks like she could float, as if she isn’t fully physically present.
‘More good news,’ Sally-Anne says. ‘PC Beard’s texted and he’s safe. He’s hiding in the woods.’
And now she wants to cheer; restrain yourself, Daphne.
Sally-Anne texts PC Beard and tells him where Rafi and Basi are. Maybe he can go and shelter with them until this awful thing finally ends. She doesn’t want them to be on their own.
‘Right then,’ Daphne says. ‘Shall we carry on?’
After they’d found out about 14 Words, fearing for Rafi and Basi, the rehearsal had become frenetic and disorganized, some scenes left out, others abandoned, and before the arrival of everyone from Old School they’d reached the end of Act Three. The kids from Old School just want this rehearsal to continue, so even though Daphne’s not sure how many of them will follow what’s going on, they’re going to start Act Four.
Benny again projects the huge photo of a bombed street in Aleppo on to the back wall of the stage: collapsed chalk-white buildings, black shadow spaces where rooms should be, whitened cables and wires trailing; no building left intact; nowhere left to run. Their desolate place.
Zac bangs a gong for thunder and Luisa strobes a bright light across the stage as lightning for the entrance of the three witches, the instruments of darkness.
Sophie, Tracey and Antonella stride out on to the stage. They are wearing the black balaclavas again and have put on the black sashes, but must have turned the sashes inside out, because now they have white supremacist symbols on them of a swastika and a raised white fist – most probably done with Tippex, Daphne thinks. The audience applaud; she hears Donna shout ‘Brava!’
‘People from New School are on TV,’ Frank says, looking at his laptop.
Everyone looks at their screens, the theatre people sharing theirs with the library kids and the ones in Jacintha’s class whose mobiles ran out of charge.
News sites and social media sites have footage of a coach and four minibuses, all with CLIFF HEIGHTS CO-ED SCHOOL 4–18 written on the side, and teachers’ cars arriving at The Pines Leisure Centre. Someone at the leisure centre must have filmed this, sold it perhaps.
Daphne sees colleagues getting out of their cars, which are crammed full of children, and although she already knew they were evacuated, seeing it now makes it newly uplifting, because that really is the word for it, like watching this momentarily lifts her out of this appalling thing that’s happening to their school. The kids too are buoyed up by this footage, their bodies less tense, voices lighter as they spot their friends.
‘There’s James and Maddy.’
‘Sarah Jennings. Lucy Carver.’
‘Look at the Year Eights, they’re strutting!’
‘Not all of them, some are in tears, look.’
‘Where’s Anna and Young Fry?’ Josh asks.
Daphne looks for the two young children. It was the sixth-formers who nicknamed Davy ‘Young Fry’ because Davy loves his murderer’s line, ‘What, you egg? Young fry of treachery!’ and they’d all got into the habit of asking where Young Fry had got to, which was often, as he has the knack of never being where he’s meant to be. Last week Daphne had found him with the sixth-formers on an illicit fag break, though not himself smoking, small mercies; she’s suspected his mother wanted him in a school play to wear him out.
‘I found Anna fast asleep on my fake-fur coat last week,’ Antonella says. ‘Curled up like a kitten.’
Unlike her stage brother, who will one day make a fantastically exuberant Puck, Anna is a dreamy little girl, easily tired.
‘I can’t see any junior school class,’ Josh says.
‘There’s no little kids there,’ Caitlin says. ‘They’re all too tall.’
‘They were doing art in New School this morning, right, Daphne?’ Tracey says.
‘Yes,’ Daphne says. And she’s certain of this because she had everyone’s timetables to schedule the dress rehearsal. ‘We’ll see them in a minute, I’m sure.’
Everyone looks for young children on their screens; phone screens are too small so they cluster round people with iPads and laptops.
‘Maybe they didn’t go to art, maybe they were in Junior School and got out with the other children on the boats,’ Antonella says.
‘But I was going to pick them up from the art room in New School,’ Tracey says. ‘In time for their cue. You emailed me, Daphne.’
They’re going to other news sites, searching the footage for young children.
Daphne sees Tonya, the headmaster’s secretary, and Donna, Old School’s receptionist, looking very anxious, almost in tears.
‘They’re in the pottery room,’ Tonya says. ‘Anna and Davy, with their class. Matthew went to warn Camille when this first started.’
‘They didn’t get out?’ Tracey says.
‘I don’t think so, no,’ Tonya says.
The theatre is quiet, appalled.
‘Surely Jamie, Victor even, won’t go after young children,’ Zac says.
‘They probably don’t even know they’re in the pottery room,’ Josh says.
Please God, let them be right.
* * *
The shape in the snow that was earlier spotted above the pottery room has been identified as a military-grade UAV. It seemed to have vanished but they reran their footage and tracked it dipping below the treeline and out of sight. They hope that the dense snow has got into its engine, that even though it’s military grade it’s crashed to the ground; but it could be waiting, hiding.
‘We don’t go in yet,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘We still have eighteen minutes till Alton opens fire. We need to make sure. Search again.’
Rose has often been under time pressure in her career, but time has always been digital before, not seconds as grains of sand running through an hour glass.
But the kids and staff from Old School are safe. Astonishingly, they are safe. And Victor Deakin hasn’t returned. They’re searching for him in the woods, but aren’t hopeful of finding him in these conditions. They’ve tried phoning PC Beard but he must have turned his phone off – sensible when he’s hiding in a woodland with a gunman on the loose.
Would they have stopped PC Beard’s plan if they’d known about it? (And they only found out about it from the teachers once they were safely in the theatre.) She doubts it, because of all potential options, and she cannot believe there were any good ones, it surely carried the least risk to the kids.
She goes to the open door, needing the icy air and physical separation to think. She’s still troubled by the language Victor used in the announcement about the bloodbath in Old School. Because why would Victor Deakin use words from a teenage attacker at Columbine, with no obvious motive beyond world fame, and a Kansas white supremacist terrorist with a hatred for Muslims? Maybe he couldn’t be bothered to come up with his own words; taking the piss out of the organization he’s supposedly killing for because he’s superior to them; superior even to a supremacist group – only a narcissistic psychopath could go that far.