‘Sure. There’s paramedics. A whole convoy of us.’
She smiles and hangs up.
Three police officers were wounded by the blast as they ran towards the theatre, trying to get the kids to evacuate, but she’s been told that their injuries are minor.
As she gets closer to Old School she sees groups of children and teachers with emergency personnel being loaded on to coaches. Some seem dazed, as if in a trance, early symptoms of PTSD starting – but alive.
She feels suddenly dehydrated and exhausted. And something else, that’s subtler, and she knows that she is fundamentally changed from who she was before this.
She thinks about Rafi looking after his brother on a journey from Syria to England and then again today; the fierce responsibility of his love. She’s never had to look after anyone, not outside of her job where her role is defined and limited. It’s funny, since becoming pregnant she’s looked at kids, wondering if her son will turn out like this one or dear God please not like that one, but when she thinks about Rafi Bukhari she wonders what kind of parent she’ll be.
She sees a girl sitting on the doorstep of Old School, her long red hair bright in the snow, as if waiting for someone. A paramedic’s blanket is wrapped around her. Snowflakes and tiny burnt fragments from the theatre fall around her. She must have charmed a police officer because she should be getting on to a coach, but Rose will let her be. Stuart said they’d secured the immediate perimeter around the school, so she’s safe enough.
Rose walks past Old School and sees four fire engines; firefighters are hosing water on to the burning theatre; debris scattered through the trees. But culture isn’t contained within a building, it is alive with beating hearts walking into the woods, holding their trees, doing a promenade performance of Macbeth. Bloody hell, these kids. Unbelievable. Fucking amazing.
The glass corridor lies on the snow in shards, reflecting the flames, and something bothers her.
* * *
They won’t let Hannah go to the boatshed and find Rafi herself but the drive from Junior School and the boatshed goes past where she is sitting, so she’ll see him soon. A young policeman checked her for weapons but she convinced him that she wasn’t a terrorist, though he didn’t need much convincing, he was smiling the whole time. Rules, he’d said. Right, she’d said.
She’ll see Dad soon. He’s waiting for her with her aunt and cousins and second cousins; all rabbit’s friends and relations, a joke between them since she was about three. She’s told him she can’t leave till she’s seen Rafi, and he understands. She didn’t tell him that she also just needs to be alone for a little while, nobody talking or even breathing close to her, just her in the cold air with no walls, no footsteps; to feel her own space and inhabit the world again. She needs a bit of time to put the pieces of herself back together that the footsteps broke apart; all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. She will be put back together again, just not quite the same.
Dark snowflakes drift through the sky, falling mainly over the woods but some of them over Old School and her too; they must be pieces of the theatre – walls and roof and seats and stage and props burnt to almost nothing. She’d have minded much more if it was the library that was blown up. She feels a debt to books for being a barricade against the gunman and would have been upset if they’d been blown to smithereens and were drifting down over the woods; but then books are made from trees, so maybe it would have been a returning home, their heroines and heroes unfettered from the covers – a new unbound narrative. Weird, but Rafi will understand. How much longer till he gets here?
* * *
Rose hurries towards the Victorian gatehouse. She’s radioed for assistance because she doesn’t think it was luck for the terrorists that the kids and staff in Old School were all evacuated to the theatre, all of them meant to be blown up. She fears they were corralled in there. 14 Words is tech-savvy; sophisticated. What if the police were meant to decrypt the bloodbath threat? And just in case they didn’t, 14 Words leaked that threat, and that Victor was a psychopath, in order to heighten the jeopardy, to create panic, so they all went along with the plan to run to the theatre?
She goes into the gatehouse. Other officers are with her. Shining a torch, they see drag-marks of blood and a police constable in uniform lying dead on the brick floor, shot in the chest, his police radio in fragments. Their torch shows his badge, ‘PC Beard’.
Rose puts out an emergency alert. Officers are opening the door to PC Beard’s car. A blanket is draped over the driver’s seat covering the blood, but it has seeped through. They take the blanket away. From the amount of blood, it’s clear PC Beard was shot inside the car. He was killed as he drove up towards the school at the very beginning of this.
She will mourn for a murdered colleague when her job is done. Think. What does this mean? She sweeps the beam of her torch around the gatehouse and sees a mobile phone in the corner, switched on and connected to an external battery pack; contributing to the lie that PC Beard was alive and in the gatehouse using his own phone. Was the third terrorist ever in here? People he spoke to thought he was and if he’d been outside they’d have heard the wind in the background. He was probably in the gatehouse for a short period of time, Victor and him hiding the body, covering over the evidence, and then he phoned from the maintenance shed and maybe the empty Junior School, just putting the battery into his burner phone for the duration of each call so the police didn’t pick it up. And now?
Surely he has escaped. He has consistently wanted to avoid being seen and captured; using a silencer, keeping hidden. He probably never even rang the doorbell, Victor just played a recording on his phone. But she imagines his rage as he spent two hours searching for Rafi, thinking Basi had been evacuated; his hate for the boys becoming stronger than his fear of being caught or killed.
Officers are using their hands to dig through the top layers of snow. They find tracks of blood, from the car to the gatehouse; and the CCTV camera covered in paint was blind.
Stuart Dingwall phones her.
‘I just got an alert that you—’
‘Are you with Rafi and Basi?’ she asks.
‘A school minibus has overturned across the drive. A branch was used as a lever. We’re moving it now.’
* * *
Rafi and Basi are in the boat. In the dark Rafi can feel Basi’s body gibbering with cold and he’s worried that hugging Basi close to him is just making him colder.
A knock on the door of the shed. Rafi feels Basi’s body stiffen with fear and tightens his arms around him.
Another knock-knock and the man knocking at the door is one of Assad’s men battering at their door to arrest their father and brother or he is part of Daesh or a paedophile at the camp banging on the door of their shed; he is First Murderer or Second Murderer or Third Murderer in Macbeth, a man of violence without a name who lives in the dark, who will hurt a person you love, bringing the darkness with him, falling across something bright and good so that love has a shadow.
A friendly English voice calls to them.
‘Rafi? Basi? I’m a police officer. My name’s PC Beard, can you let me in?’
English police officers are good. Nothing bad will happen. He should trust him.
‘You’re okay now, sons. Let me in. You’re safe.’