Three Hours(54)

Rafi must be okay, must be, because he’s out in the woods, not here in the library with the diabolical man, and yes, there were shots heard in the woods earlier, but they were near the gatehouse, and the woods are huge, and Rafi can hide and be safe.

*

It’s snowing harder; the wind’s making the trees bend like air has muscle. Snow has covered the path and Rafi cannot find his way back. There’s nothing familiar, everything blanketed white.

He turns and runs in the opposite direction. Surely he’ll find a landmark he recognizes and then the path. The wind blows snow at his face, making his eyes smart, and he feels tears and he thinks of Mama, as if the tears came first, before he thought of her, but that’s not true because she’s always there, and he thinks love lives inside his face, behind his eyes.

Not enough money for her, just him and Basi; ten thousand euros each to go via Italy, the safest route, the people smugglers said. And oh for fuck’s sake, people are bored of this story, all that tugging misery, and you get fed up with desperate people and he gets that, he really gets that, because he’d rather binge-watch a series on Netflix or listen to Spotify or play Xbox or hang out with his friends too, who wouldn’t?

But sometimes he tells parts of his story, and Hannah and Mr Marr and Benny and some of his other friends have listened. He hasn’t told them all the details, because some things Assad and Daesh did no one should have in their heads. They know he had to leave his mother behind but he hasn’t told anyone that on the Journey he’d sometimes thought she was with him; that he’d felt her hand in his as they ran from gangs or police with dogs and rubber bullets; heard the sound of her voice, gentle and quiet, encasing the shouts of men, softening them with her love for him. A woman’s shape near, but not too close, and she was there; and then the woman would turn or they’d get closer and she was too old or had short hair or was too tall and how could he ever have thought she was his mother? It was just him and Basi and he had to keep his six-year-old brother safe, that was all that mattered.

For six months looking after his brother was this huge responsibility, yes, but it was also protection against his own grief and loss. Getting to safety in the UK was not an unshouldering of a burden, it was sudden exposure to his own childishness and wanting Mama.

Right from the start Mr Marr had understood. In the Dunkirk classroom, he’d checked with Rafi about Basi: ‘Do you think he’s up to learning some maths today, Rafi, or maybe a story?’ Small things. Important things. And in England he must have spoken to his foster parents, or perhaps they understood too, not to strip the responsibility of Basi away from him, because it is also the skin that protects him.

He left Mama, but he loves her. He left Hannah, but he loves her too. He is someone who leaves the people that he loves.

But he will get to Basi. He just has to find his way through the woods.

*

Basi is getting colder. If he leans against the side of the boat his shivering makes the boat shiver too, and the oars make a rattling sound, like the wind against the door. He hopes Ratty isn’t as cold as him; fur is probably warmer than an anorak.

We’ve done much worse, Little Monkey, Rafi will say when he gets here, and they have done worse but Rafi was with him.

He wishes he could light a fire to keep warm. Mama and Rafi burnt rubbish when they slept outside, broken chairs and tables and things that had once not been rubbish at all. They were waiting for buses to take them out of east Aleppo. The day before, the buses along the road had been like his plastic snake with different joints that wiggle and each joint was a bus, but he’d been too ill to go, so they waited one day, and then there weren’t any more buses. Lots of people wanted to get warm by their fire so they all budged up but there wasn’t enough room for everyone. He was still ill so he got a good place.

Rafi will be here soon and then he’ll rub his arms and his legs and do hot potatoes and they’ll do some star jumps and get warm together.

*

The wind is strengthening and the snow getting heavier. Coastguard and police rescue boats with the junior school children and staff have arrived safely further down the coast and Rose feels a moment of relief from nausea. She thinks of Basi, and Rafi, who is responsible for their safety, somewhere out there in the snow, and the nausea returns. The worsening weather is hampering their efforts to search for a third gunman and to spot any hostile surveillance drone.

She looks at the feed from the police surveillance UAV above the pottery room; she can’t see the teacher at the window – perhaps she’s looking after the children inside.

A police imaging specialist took a still from earlier footage of the gunman, blew it up large, and saw the antenna of a two-way radio protruding from the top right-hand pocket of his army cargo trousers, the earpiece most probably hidden under his balaclava, confirming how the gunmen are communicating.

Victor Deakin hasn’t taken Dannisha’s calls or answered her texts. A police SUV is looking for Olav Christoffersen.

Lysander, lead computer forensics officer, phones from Victor Deakin’s house. His call is going to all senior officers.

‘Victor Deakin ordered The Anarchist’s Cookbook from Amazon and downloaded a PDF of “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” from Inspire, the online magazine for Al Qaeda.’

‘Anything on guns?’ an officer asks.

‘I’m sending everyone the emails now. Victor arranged to meet a man four weeks ago in London. His email address is an alias – we’re trying to unpick it and it looks like it’s most probably Ukrainian. The week before this meeting Victor made three withdrawals of ￡2,000.’