Three Hours(62)
Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse …’
She’d cast Victor, her star pupil, as Macbeth but if he is anyone he is Lady Macbeth, not like sweet, implausible Miranda, but right from the start ruthless, manipulative and wicked.
‘I’ll stand by the doors, wait for them,’ Sally-Anne says.
She leaves and Daphne feels suddenly very alone, maybe because she cannot share Sally-Anne’s hopefulness or because guilt cuts you off from other people.
On stage, Miranda as Lady Macbeth continues.
‘Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, “Hold, hold”.’
It’s like she’s trying to become a psychopath, pitiless and without remorse, as she pumps herself up to murder, but Victor doesn’t need to try.
And she realizes this play isn’t about getting titles and a crown and palaces, but about seizing raw power; something Victor has right now.
What will he do to everyone in Old School? What has he done to Jamie?
She wants to tell them all that she should have seen it, should have known or at least suspected; that it is her fault, because she helped him hide in plain sight.
*
In the police Range Rover, Beth Alton sees press vehicles being turned back at a police cordon, but they are waved through and drive nearer to the school. There are dozens of parked emergency vehicles, police cars and vans and ambulances, fire engines too, why do they need fire engines? Overhead the sound of a helicopter, a blurry black shape in the sky. The police driver parks the Range Rover and tells her that Detective Inspector Polstein will be with her shortly. He escorts her towards a Portakabin.
The emergency vehicles have snow inches deep on their roofs and covering the windscreens; the sound of creaking as the wind pummels against them.
She sees a woman in her early thirties walking towards her, just wearing a dress, not a coat or jumper even, but strikingly upright despite the fierce wind and snow, almost marching.
‘Mrs Alton? Detective Inspector Polstein,’ the woman says, holding out her hand, having to raise her voice above the wind. ‘Rose. Let’s go inside.’
‘Have you found him?’ Beth asks, and despite no indications for this she hopes that Rose will say, Yes! And he’s fine! And you can take him home with you.
‘Not yet,’ Rose replies. ‘We’re doing everything we can.’
She opens the door of the Portakabin and ushers Beth in.
‘The police officers at the leisure centre said you haven’t managed to speak to Jamie?’
‘No.’
‘And he hasn’t texted?’
‘No.’
As Rose turns up a heater, Beth looks at the side view of her face, pale, almost ill, her slanting cheekbones, the corner of her mouth, no lipstick, and then she turns to Beth and her eyes look directly at her, and Beth wants to look away because she reads something there.
‘I heard he used to be friends with Victor Deakin?’
Here it comes; this is why they want to talk to her. She’d hoped she was being paranoid, hoped against all logic that it wasn’t because of this.
‘Yes, but then Jamie broke off their friendship.’
‘When was this?’
‘October the thirty-first.’
She thinks of devils and monsters at their door; Victor’s handsome human face.
‘After the vandalism incident in Exeter?’
‘Yes. He wouldn’t take Victor’s calls or Snapchats or anything. Mike and I told him to do that. To break from him completely. And I think Victor might want to punish him.’
The snake let out from its cage.
‘Up until the vandalism incident, was there anything that Victor did that—’
‘No. He had us completely fooled. But I should have seen what he was like, should have suspected – I was even grateful to him for being friends with Jamie.’
‘It’s not your fault nor Jamie’s that you thought Victor was genuinely who he appeared to be. Nobody saw what he was really like.’
She’s kind, Rose Polstein; but what kind of mother is grateful to someone for being friends with their child? And maybe that’s why she didn’t look harder at him, because Jamie was lonely and she was too busy being grateful to find out who this person really was. She imagines driving Victor Deakin to the top of a cliff, the car teetering over the edge, and threatening to go over unless he reveals himself.
Right, Mum, like that would’ve helped.
I know, but …
I told you before, he had me fooled too and he was my friend.
Rose Polstein’s pager vibrates and she looks at it.
‘I’m sorry, I have to go for a little while. It should warm up in here in a minute.’
When Rose has gone, Beth opens the door again and cold invades the Portakabin but she leaves it open as if she’ll hear Jamie or at least be closer to him. When he was at his last school, and so unhappy, she used to arrive early to pick him up, ridiculously early, like an hour or more, and stand by the gates to the school as if that made any difference to anyone, but she’d done it anyway.
Getting him drunk might have been easier, Mum, rather than the whole car-cliff-teeter thing.