Three Hours(67)

‘Still nothing on the Deakin parents?’ she asks Amaal.

‘No. And Jamie Alton still isn’t answering his mum or dad.’

‘You’d have thought the parents would have noticed, wouldn’t you?’ Thandie says. ‘I mean, what the hell are these parents doing?’ Another thump to the punchbag.

But Rose feels compassion for Beth Alton: from what she’s seen, she’s a loving mother who doesn’t deserve what’s happening to her. And she feels sympathy for Victor Deakin’s parents too, until there’s evidence to the contrary, because Victor is adept at concealment and because a psychopath’s brain is made that way. Yes, an abusive childhood can exacerbate it but it doesn’t cause it. She remembers the case of a five-year-old girl calmly and repeatedly trying to flush a kitten down the loo, witnessed by her horrified mother. Later the little girl had just as calmly denied it. She doesn’t know what kind of parents the Altons or the Deakins are, all of that will be found out after this, the details analysed every which way, but she does know that whether deserved or not, for the rest of their lives they’ll be blamed for what’s happening now. We’re not a ‘sins of our fathers’ century, she thinks, but ‘sins of our children’. Sometimes she has a terror of motherhood. She thinks of her scan earlier this morning, watching the second heart beating inside her body; the realization that from now on she’ll always have two heartbeats.

What the hell are these parents doing?

Get a grip, Rose, it’s not normal to worry like this. Normal pregnant women worry about folic acid and pelvic floor exercises. Get a grip and just focus on your job.

On screen, a briefing begins, led by Bronze Commander.

‘Visibility is atrocious and it’s impossible to monitor the sky,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘It’s too risky to assume that we’re not being watched. So our marksmen are still keeping their distance. As I said before, if they fire from that range they risk only wounding Alton, giving him time to shoot and inflict multiple civilian casualties before taking him out. Where are we on negotiation?’

‘Jamie Alton’s mother and father are attempting to phone him,’ Dannisha says. ‘But he hasn’t answered.’

‘UAV footage shows he hasn’t taken his phone out of his pocket,’ a UAV operator says.

‘So why’s he switched it on?’ Bronze Commander asks.

‘One of two reasons,’ Rose says. ‘He switched it on just after Victor told us that Jamie was his wingman. Victor knew we’d be able to trace the mobile number. He may have told Jamie to prove what he’d just told us.’

‘Via the two-way radio?’

‘Yes. Or, more optimistically, Jamie has turned on his phone because a part of him wants to talk to his parents, or to us, to be dissuaded from going any further.’

‘Do we know why he’s doing this? Does he have a grudge?’ Bronze Commander asks.

‘Not as far as we know,’ Rose says. ‘Nothing against Matthew Marr or the other teachers, nor with other students. There’s very little bullying and no jock culture at the school. It’s possible that he shot Mr Marr for expelling his best friend, pushed on by Victor, but it doesn’t explain pointing a gun at a room full of children. There’s nothing to suggest that he’s psychotic and he’s never been violent before.’

Jamie’s been lonely, but no one has called him a loner. He might have felt left out, but he’s never done anything aggressive, never hurt anyone, never even said mean things that students or teachers have reported. The diary found in his room has nothing violent, but is filled with intricately coloured drawings and romantic poems.

‘I think that he was lonely and depressed, and that made him easy prey for Victor Deakin,’ she says.

Teachers had noticed him becoming withdrawn and two had been concerned enough to talk to him about depression, but Jamie denied it. He was bullied at his previous school, according to his tutor, and that could have later caused teenage depression. His tutor had asked the school counsellor to see Jamie last term, but Jamie had failed to keep any of the appointments.

‘We need to find out why Jamie has become violent,’ she says. ‘I don’t think Victor Deakin’s influence alone can make a previously unaggressive boy into a killer. There’s something else in play.’

She tends to agree with his mother that a single person, even psychopathic highly manipulative Victor Deakin, doesn’t have that kind of power.

‘Once we know why he’s become violent,’ Dannisha says, ‘then we will know if we can negotiate with him and how to do so.’

‘Has your opinion of Victor Deakin remained the same, Detective Inspector Polstein?’ Bronze Commander asks.

‘Yes, a brutal psychopath and the orchestrator of the attack, and also wanting to orchestrate how it’s covered by the media and how we investigate it.’

Rose thinks everyone in the briefing probably imagines Victor-the-brutal-psychopath as darkly malevolent but Rose sees him as a surfing, base-jumping DJ, a party guy, a prankster with Rohypnol in his pocket and a brick in his messenger bag, and hey! a semi-automatic in the kit bag, and he’s having a blast, man, a fucking blast! And all the more terrifying because of it.

‘What about a third shooter on site?’ Bronze Commander asks.

‘Our surveillance teams haven’t found anybody else,’ an officer says. ‘But the school’s extensive grounds are mainly woodland, much of it very dense, and the weather is making our search almost impossible.’