Three Hours(18)
‘What’s an overhang?’ Sofia asked and no one else knew either. The teachers probably did but they were all on their phones, trying to get a signal, but they couldn’t.
Rafi opened his mouth and stuck his front teeth right out over his bottom lip and chin and made everyone laugh, and then he pointed to under his sticking-out teeth and said ‘overhang’, which sounded funny because his teeth weren’t in the right place to talk. ‘We are going to hide on the chin.’
*
In Matthew’s office, Neil put down the phone to the police, wired with anxiety, his fingers tapping one after another on the desk. ‘A police car’s close, he’ll be here soon; just one officer though, their cars aren’t double-crewed any more, because I asked. She said it’s an initial response and he’ll report back, and if necessary try and contain what’s happening as much as possible.’
Tonya put down the phone to Gina Patterson, designated head of New School.
‘Camille Giraud isn’t in the art block. She told Gina she was taking the children to the pottery room, but we think she must have switched her phone off because she’s not picking up.’
The pottery room, in the middle of woodland, was accessible only by foot.
‘We could put the siren on,’ Tonya suggested. They’d installed a lockdown siren two years ago, a different sound to the fire alarm.
‘Too far away, they won’t hear it. I’ll go and let Camille know,’ Matthew said. ‘In the meantime, keep trying to call her.’
‘I’ll go,’ Neil said, fingers still drumming.
‘Your role is liaison with the emergency services,’ Matthew replied. ‘You need to stay here.’
‘Four children in that class are off sick,’ Tonya said, looking at the register. ‘So Camille has sixteen children with her.’
Matthew left his office, walking along the corridor towards the front door. Behind him the corridor used to end in a blank wall but now there were doors to a glass corridor leading to the theatre. He’d thought about evacuating everyone in Old School to the theatre but the glass corridor was too exposed to the woods and any possible threat there.
This had been the original school building, with just forty students when it was founded in the 1920s as part of the Progressive School Movement, but it had quickly expanded, so an existing building half a mile away had been converted into a junior school; and then New School had been built on the other side of the road to meet demand. In the last two decades a sports hall, music block and art block had been added on to New School. The doughty sisters who’d founded the school would be astonished.
He walked past the library, where sixth-formers were making a racket. He’d instigated a ‘no mobiles or laptops’ rule in the hope some of them might read a book but it clearly wasn’t working, nor were they in the least worried by the amber alert, which could well be the right reaction; and then on past Jacintha Kale’s English classroom, the usual hum of a lively discussion inside.
It was all so normal; even the feel of the floor under his shoes, the grooves in the wood worn smooth with running footsteps thumping down on to the floorboards. Don’t run! teachers would call and he’d wish it was a command that could apply to him. He felt the kids’ energy under his feet.
The dark-green walls had every year’s framed photo of those responsible for the worn floor; the numbers increasing over the years, their clothes and hairstyles changing from the 1920s to the present day, but the children’s faces all had a similar expression, smiling and open, not imagining danger. At the end of the corridor, near the front door, there were black-and-white photos of young soldiers, boys barely out of the sixth form, who’d gone off to fight and die in the Second World War. As Matthew got older those boys’ faces seemed to get younger. Had war seemed unimaginable to them as they’d raced with thudding footsteps along this corridor a year or so before? Don’t run!
He often thought about those boys as he walked along this corridor, thought they had fought and died for the next photo of school children, and the next and the next; that a school like this one, progressive, non-religious and open-minded, which had a bursary fund to take in refugees – Jewish children smuggled out of Poland, children from Sarajevo decades later, now Rafi and Basi – a school that was genuinely tolerant and liberal, was only possible because they had fought for it. That’s why their photos were the first you saw as you came into the school. Medals of three of them were displayed outside the library.
‘A little maudlin, isn’t it?’ the deputy head before Neil had said, missing the point that a great relaxation of spirit, liberalism and openness was something hard-won; something to be remembered; commemorated.
The man had been an imbecile. The kids got it, though. Running footsteps often abruptly halting.
He passed the doors to the empty drawing room, used for music recitals and parents’ evenings, and reached Donna at the reception desk. The Gothic-Victorian front door had been bolted top and bottom with the original iron bolts, more secure he thought than the more recently added Banham.
‘I know Tonya asked you this, but is there anyone you might have let in that you didn’t know? Or who seemed off in any way?’
Donna shook her head. ‘No one.’
‘You’re absolutely sure?’
‘Yes. I spoke to Serena in New School, and she’s the same. We’ve been racking our brains, just in case. But there’s nobody. This far into term no one is new any more, staff or kids, we know everyone.’