Three Hours(75)

It’s what she’s been telling herself over and over since she heard.

‘What if Rafi can’t find Basi?’ Miranda asks. ‘Or they find him first?’

No one replies.

‘So, they’re the witches,’ Antonella says. ‘These 14 Words fuckers.’

And they are getting back on to the stage, Tim picking up two bloody daggers, to resume Act Two, Scene Two, and Daphne understands that this is their way of standing up to terror.

*

In the Portakabin, Beth feels faint and wants to black out and then she’ll come to in her old life where she’s in Waitrose and Jamie is at his school’s dress rehearsal.

Again and again he doesn’t answer his phone.

Another police officer has come into the Portakabin, and she can tell that this young athletic woman blames her and she’s right to blame her because with a different mother this wouldn’t be happening to him; and she’d give him up – give up his babyhood and childhood, every day of him – give him to another mother if it stopped this.

She asks the athletic police officer if she can have a photo of Jamie today. She pretends, to herself as well as the police officer, it’s so she can look at the photo and see that there’s something of her boy in it and she’ll know for sure that they can talk to him. But truthfully she has this hope, a lifeboat as her family drowns, that she’ll look at the photo and it will all be a mistake, the wrong person, it won’t be Jamie at all.

*

Thandie comes into the command and control centre, her hair and her jumper covered in snow, and Rose realizes that she’s still wearing Thandie’s corduroy jacket. She takes off the jacket and puts it across Thandie’s shoulders.

‘Beth Alton wants a photo of him,’ Thandie says. ‘Bit late to take a good look at him now, isn’t it?’

Another hefty thump to that punchbag; Rose catches Dannisha’s eye, both older women thinking Thandie harsh, because what could Beth Alton have seen? Jamie didn’t shave his head, lace up his DMs and go on a white pride march; he’s a floppy-haired, Converse-wearing kid who’s doing props for his school play. There should be sacraments of evil, Rose thinks, showing outward visible signs of an inward invisible wickedness, so that parents would see the signs and stop their kids being groomed by white supremacists or ISIS or any other terrorist group.

But Beth Alton suspected nothing because everything is hidden. The searches on the Deakins’ and Altons’ houses haven’t found bookshelves in the gunmen’s bedrooms full of neo-Nazi literature and CDs of white supremacist music. Because Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, Building a Whiter Brighter World, Angry Young Aryans, Blue Eyed Devils and their ilk are invisible on Kindles, iPods and smart phones. And the time has long since passed when there was a household phone in a hall or sitting room, where eavesdropping happened as a matter of course, and parents had an inkling of what their children were up to, what they were thinking.

Thandie prints out two stills from UAV footage and leaves.

*

The young athletic woman police officer opens the door wearing the corduroy jacket that Rose Polstein was wearing earlier, because they are still in a life where you lend a friend a jacket.

She hands Beth a large envelope and Beth asks if she can be alone.

When the Portakabin is empty, she takes two photographs out of the envelope. They’re large, like those professional family ones with the white background, everyone smiling and dressed in brightly coloured clothes, draped around each other; they have one in the hall – her and Mike and Theo and Jamie.

The first photo is of a man in army combat clothes with ammunition slung round him, holding a big gun; there’s a building in front of him. The second photo is a close-up of the man’s face hidden by a black balaclava.

She tries to imagine Jamie’s voice, what he’d say to her. She didn’t have to try before, it was remembering and daydreaming, a kind of empathetic talking.

All she can see are his eyes in the cut-out holes in the balaclava, the same hazel as Jamie’s eyes, with thick lashes, the same eyelashes.

This isn’t you, Jamie. It can’t be.

What do you know, bitch?

You wouldn’t do this. You’re kind and gentle and—

What the fuck do you know?

The same eyes but Jamie has never looked at her like this, never looked at anybody like this.

I want to talk to my boy …

Still think I’m drowning, bitch? With a fucking gun in my hand?

Where’s Jamie?

Fuck you, cunt.

Who are you?





17.


11.23 a.m.


The photos are on Beth’s lap; they’re slippery and she has to hold on to them to stop them skidding off. She wants to let them go, let them slide to the floor.

She makes her fingers hold the photos and her eyes look at them.

This gunman can’t be Jamie.

He isn’t Jamie.

They’ve told her that he is.

No.

She faces the gunman who isn’t Jamie, she’s right about that, appallingly right; because her son was being killed in front of her as she took him tea in the morning, drove him to school listening to Radio 1, kissed him goodbye. She imagines him abducted and murdered; a stranger substituted.

His loving voice she’s heard in her head all through this is the voice she’s been longing to hear for months, but it had fallen silent.