Three Hours(64)

‘No, there must be a mistake.’

‘I’m sorry, there isn’t a mistake.’

Rose Polstein is wearing a corduroy jacket that’s too tight, though it’s too wide at the shoulders; focusing on her clothes not what she’s saying because her words are appalling and absurd.

‘We think that Jamie shot Mr Marr,’ Rose Polstein says.

‘No. You’re wrong. Totally wrong.’

She’s pregnant, Beth realizes, maybe five months. That’s why the jacket’s too tight, why does she realize that now? Rose Polstein’s left hand has moved to her tummy, unconsciously protecting the baby. Against who?

‘You can’t have any proof,’ she tells Rose Polstein. ‘Because it’s not true. Jamie would never hurt someone.’

Rose Polstein’s pager bleeps and she turns from Beth to read it.

I’m phoning you again, Jamie, and my hands are shaking but I just need to press one button, because you’re top of my favourites.

She says your mobile phone has been traced to outside the pottery room.

She says you’re holding a gun.

She says there are children inside.

Pick up, pick up, pick up.

It goes through to message. ‘Hey, it’s Jamie, leave me a message.’

The same message he’s had for over a year.

‘It’s Mum. Please call me, sweetheart, please. Please.’

‘Do you think he can be negotiated with?’ Rose Polstein asks.

‘Yes. Of course! If it’s Jamie, which I can’t believe, but even if it is really him he won’t fire the gun. I don’t know how Victor got him back as a friend or persuaded him to frighten people but he won’t be able to make him actually hurt anyone. He’s not that powerful. No one could make Jamie change that much.’

From kind to violent; from a boy who’s lived inside her body and heart and head and home for over seventeen years, to someone she has never met. He’s been withdrawn for the last few months, unhappy, but not fundamentally changed. Not deep down. He’s a gentle person, always has been, never rough even as a little boy. She remembers seven-year-old Jamie with an injured bird, demanding she take it to the vet. He’d brought it to her from the lawn, pulling out the bottom of his jumper to make a fabric sling for it, in case touching it with his hands frightened it.

‘And he’s turned on his phone,’ she says to Rose Polstein. ‘So if it is him, it means he wants to talk, doesn’t it? If it’s him it means he wants this to stop.’

*

Daphne hadn’t wanted to tell the kids in the theatre about Jamie, but Detective Sergeant Amaal Ayari, the gentle bearer of terrible, terrible news once more, had said the police need any information the students might have. But no one has any information, none of them can really believe it. They’d chosen to carry on with the rehearsal, shock in their hesitant, quiet voices.

Daphne had been so worried about Jamie, feared he’d been harmed by Victor, and she thinks that he has been but not in the ways she’d imagined.

On stage, Miranda plays Lady Macbeth convincing Tim as Macbeth to commit murder; but even shaken teenage Miranda cannot take away the horror of these lines.

‘I have given suck and know

How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn

As you have done to this.’



Right, enough is enough; Daphne gets up on to the stage. ‘Okay, everyone. Let’s decide if we really want to carry on with this.’

‘She’s a psycho bitch,’ Tim says.

‘Why doesn’t he see that?’ Caitlin asks. ‘She’s said she’ll bash a little baby’s brains out. Her own baby. While it was breastfeeding. Jesus.’

‘How did he persuade Jamie? How the hell did he do that?’ Josh asks.

Daphne also cannot understand how Victor could persuade gentle, shy Jamie to be part of something this wicked.

‘There’s the witches,’ Tracey says, in her witch costume, so clearly aware of the power of the witches. ‘They kind of started this too.’

‘But Jamie doesn’t have any witches,’ Tim says. ‘Does he, for fuck’s sake?’

‘We don’t know that,’ Tracey replies.

‘He had a crush on me and I knew about it,’ Antonella says. ‘I wasn’t kind to him, if I had been kinder maybe …’

‘Not your fault, Antonella, half the school’s got a crush on you,’ Tim says. ‘And nobody else teams up with a gunman.’

Zac looks up and Daphne sees he’s crying. ‘If I’d stayed his friend …’

‘No, absolutely not,’ Daphne says. ‘This is nothing to do with you, Zac.’

Although if warm-hearted Zac had still been his friend, then maybe everything would be different.

‘I think we should keep on rehearsing,’ Tim says, and people are agreeing with him.

‘Are you sure?’ Daphne asks.

‘I think it helps make sense of things,’ Caitlin says.

Perhaps they also see this first act as being about how a murderer is made; the creation of a diabolical pair.