Three Hours(40)

‘Not yet. I’m checking lesser-known nut-job anniversaries.’

‘We’ve got through to Rafi Bukhari, the boy who saw the explosion,’ Thandie says to her. ‘He’s in the woods.’

‘Thanks.’ She takes the phone, puts it on loudspeaker.

The sound of the wind howling through trees; she thinks she can hear branches creaking and she feels the disconnect between herself with her screens and her computer, her bottle of mineral water, the safe interior of this purpose-built vehicle, and what is happening outside.

‘Rafi, my name is Rose Polstein. Are you okay?’

‘Fine.’

‘You saw the explosion in the woods earlier?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you see anyone?’

‘No. But I didn’t look.’

A loud gust of wind and it’s hard to hear him.

‘Rafi?’

‘I just ran.’

‘Do you think someone could have been hiding?’

‘Maybe.’

The bomber could have been hiding close by and used a garage door opener or key-fob to detonate the bomb. Or he might have been nowhere near the woods, the bomb being detonated with a timer; an alarm clock or a kitchen timer would do it.

‘Do you know if Hannah Jacobs is safe?’ He sounds very young to Rose. ‘Are junior school on the boats? Please, I have to know.’

‘Junior school are getting on to the boats now and we’re flying a helicopter over the beach to keep them safe. I’ll let you know when they’re away. I don’t know about Hannah, I’m sorry.’ The identity of the captives is not her area of responsibility; her task is to help find the identity of the gunmen, help negotiate and predict what they are going to do.

‘Sorry. Gotta go,’ Rafi says to her.

She guesses it’s because she’s answered the only two questions that matter to him, and because he’s saving precious charge on his phone.

‘Be careful,’ she says, about to add more, but he’s hung up and in the sudden quiet she feels that she is skimming surfaces, gleaning information and imposing rational thought, but far from the heart of what is happening here.

*

Rafi is running and phoning Hannah again, each time the same vertiginous desperation that she’ll answer him, but again she doesn’t. She’s run out of charge, that’s all, or she saw it was him and doesn’t want to talk to him, because she hates him for abandoning her; hopefully that’s why. He rings her landline, because maybe she’s safely at home by now and the landline won’t show it’s him so she’ll pick up. The answerphone clicks on. Not at home.

As he runs on towards Old School, the gatehouse now in sight through the trees, the wind drops for a few moments and he hears the rustle of an anorak. His rational mind that’s paid attention in therapy says Fuck’s sake! It’s just your PTSD!, but the frightened part of him that hasn’t paid any attention tells him to run and he races to the gatehouse, a hundred feet away through the woods.

Spruce trees have grown right up against the back wall of the gatehouse and he squeezes between the wall and the trees; his heart’s pounding away like a punk band drummer and his chest’s going in and out like a demented pigeon’s and then he sees a fishbone pattern of bricks in the back wall and it calms him that over a hundred years ago a person built this detail. In Arabic, Daesh sounds like the word to crush and trample; builders and architects are the absolute opposite of Daesh.

He’s listening, but the wind’s picked up again and around him everything’s creaking and rustling, too noisy to hear an anorak. There’s a CCTV camera on the gatehouse wall; he can just see yellow paint under the covering of snow.

He edges round the gatehouse and sees a police car skewed at an angle to the side of the drive. The windscreen has a bullet hole and around it are thousands of cracks, like dense spiders’ webs, clouding the glass, but he can just make out that the car is empty. The police officer is probably inside the gatehouse. It’s safe in the gatehouse, thick walls and no glass windows. Like the theatre. That would be the safest place to go to. Hannah would think to go there. She’s sensible, she’d think to do that. Benny was doing the dress rehearsal this morning.

He phones Benny. After two rings Benny answers.

‘Rafi? You okay, bro’?’ He hears the warmth in his best friend’s voice and then other people in the background and Benny saying, ‘It’s Rafi!’, and people are calling out to him, saying, ‘You on a boat, Rafi?’, ‘You’ll miss your cue, bro’!’, ‘Hey, Rafi, you’re missing the fucking dress rehearsal.’ But they all sound frightened.

‘While you’re on your boat trip, we’re rehearsing Macbeth,’ Benny says.

‘Is Hannah there?’ he asks, no time to explain about not getting on a boat.

But Benny can’t hear him over the wind and he has to shout, ‘Is Hannah there?’ and he’s afraid that the man after him, who isn’t even real, will hear him shout.

‘No, she’s not. Sorry.’

‘D’you know where she is?’

‘No. You okay?’

‘Yeah. Gotta go.’

She could still be on her way home. Who’d know? Her first lesson was English and Charlotte does English too and he has her number in his contacts so he texts Charlotte.