Three Hours(27)

A man in his mid-twenties, too young to be a father, too old to be a brother, barges through the swing doors of the cafeteria on the phone. He looks at the room full of parents. ‘They’re still on Fulmar beach,’ he says. ‘My fiancée just told me. She said boats are on their way but the weather’s really bad and held them up.’

At the far end of the cafeteria, junior school parents’ voices cluster and grow frantic.

‘What if he goes down to the beach? There’s no other way out.’

‘But he’s in Old School, in the corridor, he’s nowhere near the beach.’

‘There might be more of them.’

‘What does your fiancée say?’

‘I only spoke to her for a few seconds, there’s a helicopter flying over the beach, you can’t hear to talk.’

‘That’s good though, isn’t it? The helicopter. They’re making sure they’re all right.’

The young man looks too energetic to be in here, toe tapping on the floor, thumbs tapping at his phone, like he could spring away at any moment. The folding-in-half parents have had all their energy leached away by terror, can barely sit upright.

Something presses into Beth’s side; the edge of a laptop. Sitting next to her is a man in pyjamas, who has his laptop open flat on his lap. For a moment, she’s embarrassed to be so close to a man’s pyjama crotch; tiny taboos continuing. On his screen is a news channel, a girl is talking to a presenter, blurred out below her face. She’s asking how long the ambulance will be. The girl’s called Hannah. She gives an uncertain smile directly at the camera and the man in pyjamas puts his fingertip on to the screen, touching her face.

‘They keep showing it,’ he says. ‘She’s in the library.’

‘She’s with friends,’ Beth says. ‘Your daughter, Hannah, she’s not on her own.’

‘No. Your child …?’ Hannah’s father asks.

‘Jamie. No one knows where he is.’

How can that be? How can nobody know?

‘I think he must be hiding.’ And as she says this, the image crystallizes. Jamie is hiding and he can’t phone her because he can’t risk making any noise in case he gives his hiding place away.

*

In the theatre, the start of the dress rehearsal has been postponed. Someone, Daphne doesn’t know who, doesn’t matter, switched on their mobile and got a message from a friend in Jacintha’s classroom and now they all know. Their headmaster has been shot and is lying wounded in the library. Matthew, that kind, charismatic, extraordinary man; she still can’t fully take it in.

Jacintha must have shared Neil’s WhatsApp message with her kids; Daphne and Sally-Anne hadn’t shared it with theirs, had wanted to protect them, but perhaps that was wrong of them. Daphne hasn’t told them she already knew, because she doesn’t want them to stop trusting her.

Neil’s message said that Mathew is still conscious, that he’s been wounded in the head and foot, but the bullet can’t have hit his head, must have hit something else first, which is lucky, Neil said.

Still conscious. She’s been holding on to it tightly. Lucky.

She claps her hands. ‘Luisa and Zac, thunder and lightning, please.’ But Luisa doesn’t move, her camouflaged face pinched into green and brown streaks of anxiety. Her twin, Frank, is in the library and she’s staring at her phone, waiting for him to ring her or reply to her texts.

Tobias is in Old School too, Neil told Daphne that, and although terrified for him, she’s glad he’s not on his own. Tobias was meant to be playing his flute in tonight’s performance; a soundtrack for the good and noble characters. She and the kids had debated whether Macbeth was allowed a few of Tobias’s flute notes at the beginning of the play, before he’s turned wicked. Later, Tobias’s flute was to have been the soundtrack to the little Macduff boy being murdered.

Sally-Anne has remained in her position at the locked doors to the glass corridor, phone and nail gun to the ready, determined in spite of everything that the people in Old School will still escape to the theatre; there’s a kind of courage in her hopefulness that Daphne admires but cannot share, because it’s impossible with a gunman in the corridor – a gunman who’s prepared to shoot, who has shot Matthew – for any of them to reach the safety of the theatre.

‘We carry on, everybody,’ she says, her voice loud with far more confidence than she feels. ‘We rehearse this play and we do not let the bastards stop us. Okay, everyone? We carry on!’

A few nods, everyone apart from Luisa looking at her now.

Still conscious.

‘Zac, thunder and lightning, please.’

Lucky.

Zac claps his hands, a quietly human noise, not the ear-splitting, heavens-in-outrage thunder, but they could hardly have a loud bang at the moment.

‘Witches, please …!’ Daphne calls, because they haven’t heard Zac clapping and have missed their cue or because they’re too shocked to carry on.

Zac strobes a bright light across the stage for lightning, the same light that Sally-Anne plans on shining into the bastards’ faces if they attempt to storm the theatre.

Sophie and Tracey walk on to the stage, hunched with upset and fear, poor loves, but the third witch, Antonella, strides out with attitude. All three have goosebumps despite the central heating.