Three Hours(95)
‘Look, Basi!’ and he shone the light up at the sky.
‘You shone a laser pointer,’ Basi says. ‘You made the dark rain into a light tunnel!’
‘I did.’
And then dawn had come finally, lightening the dark ocean, bringing some warmth; people sharing sea-sickness pills and lemons. A child pointed, and in the murderous sea dolphins were playing in the waves.
*
Beth Alton is being driven away in a police Range Rover to a police station, where Mike has also been taken. Press vehicles are parked half on the snowy verge, journalists with TV cameras line the road for what seems like miles. Cameramen run after the Range Rover but the police vehicle is too fast for them and they pass in a blur through the snow. Theo is being questioned by the police at Warwick University. He phoned her a few minutes ago, no longer a fledging adult but a distraught boy, and she must take care of him, make sure he survives this somehow, help him as she didn’t help Jamie; and for a few seconds she resents Theo, that loving him means enduring what she feels now because she cannot kill herself; love for her older son must come before guilt and grief for her beloved younger child.
But the three of them, Mike and Theo and her, must keep intact who Jamie was, not what he was turned into; because they alone know that he was dead even if he seemed alive.
Like I was a kind of zombie, Mum?
Jamie …
That whole zombie thing was weird, loving someone one moment, then they die and become terrifying.
You still liked the zombie films though.
Only the funny ones with a cushion for jumpy-out moments.
They’ll remember little details about him like him enjoying funny zombie movies, Shaun of the Dead, but not horror, he hated horror, and they watched them together because he was a boy who liked watching films with his mother, a cushion for jumpy-out moments. No one else will know that about him or want to know that about him.
The police Range Rover has to stop behind a car moving slowly in front of them, perhaps deliberately because there are lenses being pushed up against the car window, camera flashes going off, dazzling, so that she can’t see properly, lights shimmering in rings. She closes her eyes and for a few moments there is a slippage in time; she has picked Jamie up from school as usual and she’s driving him home.
*
Rose Polstein is walking towards Old School along the drive. Thandie has given her her jacket on permanent loan. This evening and into the night she and her team will be debriefing and doing the paperwork and although exhausted she thinks this will probably be a good thing for all of them; she’ll be able to tell them she’s proud of each of them and why. Emergency vehicles stream past, throwing up slush over her, but she wants to be physically present when she’s had to be at a remove for so long, watching it all on a screen. Above her helicopters buzz through the snow.
By the old Victorian gatehouse, she sees a police patrol car, skewed at an angle off the drive, the windscreen shot. There’s a splatter of yellow paint on the CCTV camera, just visible under the snow.
She’s on her phone to Stuart Dingwall, who’s in his Land Rover on his way to the boatshed. There’s fifty armed police officers also on their way.
‘How long till you’re there?’ she asks.
‘Not long. The drive’s just about passable with a four-wheel drive. That first copper on the scene, PC Beard, is probably with them already; a teacher with a tree told him where they were.’
‘He won’t be armed.’
‘I think they’re safe, Rose.’
‘You’re counterterrorism. You think the third terrorist is still after them. That’s why you’re going.’
‘To be honest, it’s a long shot. I don’t think the third terrorist hung around after the bomb. I think he scarpered pronto. We’ve secured the perimeter immediately around the school but not the woods; too big, too porous. Relatively easy for him to escape. We’ll get him though. These terror organizations aren’t closed off from each other and they like to boast. So we’ll find him.’
She remembers Stuart saying that 14 Words were paranoid about being infiltrated but thinks counterterrorism has managed that with another group. She thinks that’s how he’ll be found and his identity discovered. But she already knows his essential self – a cowardly inadequate bastard, the same as every other cowardly inadequate bastard terrorist. Counterterrorism don’t want the media to give undue coverage to terrorism and she hopes the media won’t puff him up with a name and a story, that they save the names and stories for the kids and teachers at the school, the police and counterterrorism officers and the helicopter pilot flying in the teeth of a blizzard, and their remarkable and different stories.
‘Let me know how Rafi is?’ she asks Stuart.
‘Sure. There’s paramedics. A whole convoy of us.’
She smiles and hangs up.
Three police officers were wounded by the blast as they ran towards the theatre, trying to get the kids to evacuate, but she’s been told that their injuries are minor.
As she gets closer to Old School she sees groups of children and teachers with emergency personnel being loaded on to coaches. Some seem dazed, as if in a trance, early symptoms of PTSD starting – but alive.
She feels suddenly dehydrated and exhausted. And something else, that’s subtler, and she knows that she is fundamentally changed from who she was before this.