Three Hours(76)
She remembers those spread-out small incidents when Jamie appeared for a few moments; a smile, a cup of tea, Wolf Alice, Hey, Mum – those brief moments were the ghost of her son.
She looks at the full-length photo of the gunman in army combat clothes with ammunition slung round him, pointing a gun at the building in front of him; the pottery room.
Rose Polstein comes in.
‘You said there are children inside?’ Beth asks and her voice sounds like it belongs to a woman she’s never met.
‘Yes. A class of seven-year-olds.’
The Postman Pat van; the young father with the toddler in the corridor of the leisure centre, his white face. She can place his face now, one of the ‘elect’ parents as she’d thought of them, leaving the cafeteria while the other parents were waiting; but they are the parents of the children in the pottery room.
She remembers looking inside through the clear Plexiglas wall along the corridor then hurriedly looking away; because the fear and anguish was too nakedly shocking. A pregnant mother sitting on the floor rocking to and fro, and nobody going to her. Remembers how the terror in that room seemed to bulge out the walls.
‘I can’t talk to him,’ she says to Rose Polstein. Him, not Jamie, because it’s not Jamie standing there with a gun.
Rose Polstein takes her hand. Beth can’t look at her, just feels the other woman’s fingers pressing around hers.
‘Nobody can talk to him,’ Beth says. ‘Because no part of Jamie is left.’
The words taste metallic in her mouth, the same taste she had in the first three months of pregnancy.
‘I can’t stop him shooting the children.’
She says this not because she’s brave and selfless, not because she’s thinking about other people’s children and saving them, but because if those young children are killed, even the memory of Jamie, the seventeen years and two months when he was still her boy, before he was abducted and killed, will vanish; the beautiful soul of him will be lost. Dead, he can still be Jamie; can still be loved.
Rose Polstein has taken her hands into both of hers, as if Beth is slipping down a cliff face and she’s trying to hold on to her, but surely Rose Polstein wants to rest one hand on her bump, check that her baby is moving; this new innocent beginning, a tabula rasa, which once Beth had too. For a few moments, the time for the midwife to hand him to her, Jamie had been the newest person in the world.
‘I think Jamie was killed by Victor and these terrorists a long time ago,’ she says. ‘But nobody noticed. I didn’t notice.’
She remembers the dead bird in the makeshift stretcher of Jamie’s jumper. She remembers the feathers, smooth under her fingertips, and Jamie’s tears.
‘Take him to the vet, Mum, please, please, you have to make him better.’
‘He’s already dead, Jamie.’
‘No, he isn’t dead! Look at his feathers. His feathers are still alive!’
It hasn’t hit her yet, what’s happening, what she has made happen. But she knows what’s coming, she does; the hell that she’s sliding and falling towards.
*
Rose is giving an on-screen briefing to Bronze Command and other senior officers.
‘Jamie Alton’s mother says that she can’t reason with him, even if she can get through to him. She thinks he’s been entirely radicalized; that her son no longer exists. There is no chance of negotiation.’
As she speaks she looks at the live drone feed, watching the gunman in the balaclava and combat clothes, once Jamie Alton, facing the pottery room; his converted semi-automatic against his right shoulder, his finger on the trigger which will shoot fifty bullets in three seconds.
Camille Giraud is just visible at the window; maybe she’s trying to talk to Jamie Alton or is back at work putting in her clay tiles. Both are futile. Perhaps Camille already knows that, but cannot bear feeling as useless as Rose does right now.
Lysander comes on to the screen.
‘A heavily encrypted announcement on the dark net has been accessed. I’m sending it to your screens. Presumably it was meant to be about the children in Junior School but is now applicable to the children in the pottery room. It was scheduled to be released at 12.20 p.m. today on to Aryan Knight’s Twitter and Instagram accounts.’
He sends through the announcement.
I am Aryan Knight.
When you read this I’ll be firing until they take me out.
Cliff Heights School took in Muslim scum.
Doesn’t matter how young the cucks are, they’re traitors because their libtard parents are traitors.
This is a warning.
Collaborators in white genocide will be punished.
Put your own first.
When you read this, I’ll be firing. The announcement was programmed to be released at 12.20 p.m. It’s now 11.26 a.m. They have fifty-four minutes to rescue the pottery-room children and their indefatigable teacher. It’s a respite from the immediate pressing danger and gives them a chance. Around her, Rose sees her team’s and Dannisha’s relief and breathes out before she realizes she’d been holding her breath.
‘We have fifty-four minutes to kill Alton and rescue the children and their teacher,’ Bronze Commander says to all the unit commanders listening and watching this. ‘Unless we’re seen, in which case, he opens fire. So we make sure we’re not seen. We find any terrorist drone and take it down. Yes, visibility is atrocious, but we have a window of opportunity. So we hunt hard. We take their drone down and then we close in and shoot him dead.’