Three Hours(59)
‘Is that likely to happen here?’
‘I think that’s one reason why Victor got himself a partner; someone to keep him hyped, giving him hits of adrenaline to keep going.’
‘Did none of the kids suspect he’d do something like this?’ an officer asks.
‘I very much doubt it.’
Psychopaths are not the sinister outsiders keeping to the shadows, but often charming, likeable and outgoing. And they enjoy, revel even, in their deceptions. A few are homicidal.
‘With a psychopath, it’s a totally different negotiation than with any other kind of person,’ Dannisha says. ‘We cannot establish a connection based on any kind of rapport. I cannot appeal to his conscience or to any sympathy for what he is putting the children through, even young children. Instead, we have to play to his belief in his own superiority, he needs to feel in a position of dominance. Detective Inspector Polstein has already helped with that, which is why he responded to our earlier texts.’
‘We’re still waiting for him to tell us about Jamie Alton?’ Bronze Commander asks.
‘Yes. He’ll be enjoying making us sweat, having that power,’ Rose says.
‘Do you think it was Deakin who shot the head teacher?’ Bronze Commander asks Rose.
‘No. If Neil Forbright is right, and I think he is,’ Rose says, ‘Victor Deakin wasn’t in Old School till just afterwards, when he swapped places with his accomplice. But I’m certain that it’s Victor Deakin who’s the orchestrator of the attack.’
‘Why swap places?’
‘I think Deakin came to check up on his accomplice, to make sure he went through with it, and that was part of the plan; possibly it was a form of remote coercion because his accomplice knew Victor would be coming to check up on him. Then once he was inside Old School, he chose to terrorize people in a centrally heated building where he could stride up and down, enjoying the power, not stand out in the cold.’
‘And he told his accomplice that there were children in the pottery room,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘Because he’d followed the head teacher there earlier.’
‘That’s the logical conclusion, yes.’
‘Any more leads on Deakin’s accomplice?’ Bronze Commander asks.
‘Malin Cohen was arrested nine months ago in the States for serious assault,’ an officer says. ‘His father got him a good lawyer and he was still under eighteen then so they just kicked him out of the country.’
‘Victor and Malin Cohen met each other,’ another officer says. ‘I’ve spoken to an evacuated teacher who saw them together in a pub five months ago.’
‘You said at the beginning of this, Inspector Polstein, that the dominant one, who we now know to be Victor Deakin, is trying to get as much attention as possible,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘And that he might just be playing for time to maximize his audience?’
‘Yes, and knowing what we do now about Victor Deakin, that is a highly likely scenario.’
‘And when he’s got his audience? Do you know what Deakin intends to do?’
‘There are two options. Both are as a result of him being a psychopath. The first is that Victor being a psychopath actually works in our favour because psychopaths rarely commit suicide. According to teachers he’s extraordinarily bright, so smart enough to know that if he opens fire police will kill him. It’s possible that he wants to have the power that he has now, and the spotlight of media attention focused on him, but doesn’t want to die so will eventually give us his demands for how to end this peacefully.’
‘And the second option?’
‘The worst case is that he wants to massacre as many people as he can in front of a vast audience and it’s worth dying to accomplish it. He will commit mass murder to get fame; he thinks a monstrous event will guarantee his name a place in posterity.’
At Columbine High School, Eric Harris wanted fame. That was it pretty much. To be a bigger badass than the worst murdering badasses to date, to kill more, to inflict more carnage, and he was hyped and ready to die to achieve it.
The briefing ends.
*
Snowflakes are almost blinding against the windscreen of the police Range Rover. The vehicle hits a patch of ice, Beth Alton’s mind and the car skidding together, and she hears Jamie aged five counting the seconds.
One banana, two bananas – how many bananas?
Ten, then you shout, ‘Ready or not!’
You can also count in giraffes, Mummy.
You can.
Victor hasn’t found him. He can’t have done. She keeps forgetting to breathe and feels it like a scream building inside her.
They’ve skidded into a snowy bank. The police driver gets out and Beth gets out too, to help him, to hurry him, but he tells her to get back into the car. She thinks this will make things quicker so she does as he says.
*
Neil Forbright stands at the locked door of Matthew’s cold, dark office, listening to the footsteps in the corridor, intimidating, unrelenting, and realizes that for months this was the sound of his depression, but now the threat and his isolation are real.
If the police attempt a rescue, which means shooting dead Victor Deakin, he’ll have time to open fire before they bring him down. The kids in the library don’t call him Victor Deakin, but ‘the gunman’, as if he has forfeited the right to a name. Neil thinks they are right and will follow their example.