Three Hours(33)

‘It’s not possible.’

‘Can you describe how you’d normally get to the theatre?’

‘It’s really not possible.’

‘Please, can you just tell me?’

He’s clearly not going to give up.

‘To the left of Matthew’s office, the end of our corridor has doors, and they open on to a glass corridor which goes to the theatre.’

‘Matthew’s office is where you are?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what about Tonya? She said she’s in Old School.’

‘Yes, in Jacintha’s classroom. It’s to the right of Matthew’s office.’

‘How many other people are in Jackie’s classroom?’

‘Jacintha.’

It’s important Jacintha’s name is said properly because if she dies, then the last few times people speak her name they have to use the right one, the one that she is loved by. At the moment, her A-level English class are reading poems, the beautiful ones, she says, that are soothing in cadence and imagery; and for a short while she’d put her phone on speaker and he’d listened to her reading aloud:

‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine …’

He can see how poetry might help. His thoughts are daisy-chaining, one to the next, to get away from the gunman in the corridor; mindfulness, which he’s been told to practise, is the opposite of daisy-chaining and is about physically inhabiting the present moment, actually remarkably easy to do with a gunman outside your door; every hair on your arm, every breath, every sound and smell is magnified and it’s appalling, hateful, shocking, and he’d rather daisy-chain to Jacintha’s bank of wild thyme for a little while, for a reprieve. Be a man, his father says to him.

And all this takes place inside his head in a second, his thoughts absurdly fast, not daisy chains but fibre optics, because that’s the other thing that happens when you’re in a building with a gunman, time changes, so that your inner self moves too quickly, an insect trapped in a jar, frantically battering wings against the glass.

‘There’s twelve sixth-form students and three members of staff,’ he says. ‘Tonya, Jacintha and Donna, the school receptionist.’

‘And the head teacher is in the library?’

‘Yes. With thirteen teenagers.’

‘And the library is where exactly?’

‘The other side of the corridor, opposite Matthew’s office, Tonya’s office and Jacintha’s classroom, running almost the whole length of our part of the corridor.’

‘That’s everyone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Righty-ho, I’ll let you know when I’ve got a plan to get you all out.’

He hangs up. Righty-ho, he actually said that, and for a moment Neil thinks of the photos of the boy soldiers and imagines PC Beard rowing a little boat to the beaches of Dunkirk; a leaky bathtub, because there’s not a snowball in hell’s chance of getting to the safety of the theatre.

He listens to the footsteps again; they are outside the library and coming back towards him. When his phone rings, he thinks it’s PC Beard again, back with more nonsensical optimism, but it’s a woman’s voice, young and serious, part of the ‘high-powered lot’, he guesses.

‘Mr Forbright? My name’s Detective Inspector Rose Polstein.’

‘Are the children in the pottery room safe?’

He thinks there’s a pause before she speaks, a fumbling.

‘We are doing everything we can,’ she says.

‘And junior school?’

‘Boats are on their way, we’ll evacuate them as quickly as we can.’

‘What about Rafi Bukhari and Jamie Alton?’

Lorrimer had phoned Tonya from Fulmar beach, his voice chastened, to pass on the information that Rafi had left. It was just before Matthew was shot and he’s glad that Matthew doesn’t know.

‘I’m afraid we don’t yet know the whereabouts of either boy,’ Rose says. ‘Has the school received any threats?’

PC Beard hadn’t asked about who might be doing this, just focused on his nonsensical plan to rescue them; he likes PC Beard for that.

‘No, at least none that I’ve been told about,’ he says. ‘But I’ve been away, off sick. I’m sorry.’

His catch-up meeting with Matthew had barely begun when Rafi phoned from Junior School.

‘Do you think it’s possible the school, or a person in the school, could be a target for terrorists?’

He wants to think the question ludicrous – but what would Daesh make of him? They’d stoned gay men to death in Raqqa and thrown them off buildings; beheaded women for not covering themselves top to toe. He has gay and lesbian colleagues who are married, a transgender student, and no one bats an eye, that’s the thing, nobody bats an eye and girls can wear miniskirts and boys a tutu if that’s what they want, because what you wear doesn’t matter, it is you who matters.

And they’re in the middle of woodland without even a proper fence; so an easy target.

‘You told a police officer earlier that you don’t believe any of your students have been radicalized?’ Rose Polstein says.