What She Saw (36 page)

Rosen stepped out of his car and, picking up his phone from the dashboard, under the cast of a sodium streetlight, surveyed the darkened school, the windows obscured by drawn strip-blinds.

‘But you're not alone. Eye can see you but you can't see eye.'

The black van of CO19 pulled up, double parking alongside Rosen's car.

‘Let me put you completely in the picture, Mr Rosen. Are you listening?'

‘I'm listening.'

‘Mr Finn's on the roof, half-awake now, cold petrol in face and hair and clothes. Luke is conscious. He's tied to a chair. He's soaked in petrol. One must be sacrificed tonight, or both. If you want to save them, you must come in to the school alone and find me. No one else. Just you, Mr Rosen. The whole building is soaked in petrol, so when you come in don't move too quickly because you might slip and hurt yourself. It's a good game this. You've got ten minutes. Come and get me. Or else!'

The line went dead. Henshaw was at Rosen's side.

‘Did you catch that, James?'

Henshaw nodded.

Rosen turned to the growing band of officers.

He addressed Feldman. ‘Organize an evacuation of the street. Seal off the entrances and divert traffic at all junctions. Any house with no answer, ram the door and make sure there's no one in there.'

A white van negotiated its way past the CO19 vehicle. Engine running, Susan Clay, head of the Met's hostage and crisis negotiation team, stepped out. Two officers, armed with Heckler & Koch rifles, emerged from the back of the CO19 vehicle. Two extremes: persuasion and the bullet.

Two, then six guns from CO19 appeared with their leader, DCI Price; then Clay and three hostage negotiation officers; his own team: Bellwood, Feldman, Corrigan, Gold and Leung all waiting for him to speak.

Beside him, Henshaw spoke softly. ‘Tell them, David.'

Language deserted him. She was delivering on her death threat.

‘You can't go in there alone, David,' said Bellwood.

Clay cut in, ‘No way, David. Rule number one. Do not put yourself at risk of being taken hostage.'

‘We looked at a map of the area round the school on the way over.'
Price sailed across Clay. ‘Are these kids armed? Corrigan wasn't one hundred per cent. Do we know where they are in the building?'

‘Bellwood texted me,' said Gold. ‘I called Mrs Price, the head teacher. If they're in the hall, it's at the back of the building and it's the weakest spot in the school in terms of a point of entry.'

Rosen raised a hand for silence and forced himself to speak. ‘We'll assume she's got Trent's gun. She's given me ten minutes to go in there. She has hostages. . .'

‘Give me the number she called you from,' said Susan Clay.

Rosen pulled up Stevie's details and reeled off eleven digits to the operative in the telecommunications van. ‘Call her now!' she ordered.

‘. . . and in nine minutes we're going to find out if she means it.'

‘She means it,' said Henshaw.

‘She'll do it!'

‘Doug!' Rosen turned to Price. ‘Get your men into position. She can see out but we can't see in. My guess is all the windows have blinds closed.'

‘DCI Price,' Henshaw butted in. ‘As your officers move into position' – he addressed the six officers directly – ‘conceal your weapons as best you can. If she sees you approaching with guns, she could flip out and torch the hostages.'

Price deployed the men, two to the front, two to the side, and one on either side of the building.

Residents had begun pouring silently from open doors and were directed to either end of the road before being escorted away by uniformed officers.

‘Susan!' A hostage negotiator called from the back of the telecommunications van, a phone in his hand. ‘She told me she's taken five minutes off the ten because Rosen's not playing the game right. Then she hung up.'

Rosen walked away a small distance, turned his back to try and create a fragile privacy. Three silent fire engines turned the corner. He pressed SARAHMOBILE on speed dial. He looked at his watch as the phone
rang out and time poured away. Henshaw was at his shoulder.

‘This is a private call, James.'

‘I'm sorry. But she's got nothing to lose. Don't do it, David!' Henshaw backed off as Sarah picked up.

He heard Joe cooing, playing at speech.

‘He's awake, would you believe,' said Sarah. ‘Have you found them?'

‘Yes.' He looked at the front door of the school. It would take ten seconds to cross that distance.

‘David?'

‘Yes, love.'

‘What's wrong?'

‘I'll see you later, Sarah.'

‘Is it a siege?'

‘Yes.'

‘What are you going to do?'

‘Get them out alive.'

A thought cut him to pieces.
This could be the last time we speak
.

‘What's happening?' Her anxiety was sudden and complete. ‘What's wrong? Tell me.'

‘I've got to go.'

‘Wait.'

‘I love you.' In a moment, he felt his face turn crimson under the sheer weight of terror that mounted inside him.

‘And we love you,' she said. They were safe, away from the horror. Tenderness crept through the wall of fear.

Something flared on the flat roof of the school.

Fire.

Fire ran in a line from the back of the building to the front, chasing down a river of petrol, connecting with a target, a bundle of shadows, a form.

‘How much danger are you in?'

‘If it was Joe, I'd want someone, some stranger, to try and save him.'

A noise. Confusion. Terror. A human being waking into horror. The burning form on the roof moved. Fire engulfed Mr Finn.

‘David, I love you so much.' He heard tears in her voice. ‘We both do.'

The form was waking into agony, rolling and making an inarticulate sound.

‘I love you, Sarah. I love Joe.'
But I have no choice
.

Rosen closed the call down just before the screaming started.

On fire from head to foot, Alec Finn rose up to his knees, his arms outstretched, his screams intensifying.

He fell from the flat roof to the ground below.

She had drawn him to this place, just as she'd drawn him from the Portakabin onto Bannerman Square, and now that he had arrived, she'd used Finn to show him a vision of the children's future – their fate and his. He was no more than a fly that she would pluck the wings off and cast into the flames.

Finn rolled on the ground, sobbing.

He thought of Sarah and her voice sounded inside him: ‘
Walk away
.'

Rosen wanted to run.

He turned. A sea of faces watched him. Bellwood. Corrigan. Feldman. Gold. Leung. Henshaw. Numbness split the terror inside him and he felt as if he was drifting out of his own body.

‘Less than a minute,' said Susan Clay.

Rosen took out his phone, called Bellwood's mobile and added in Gold, Feldman, Corrigan, Price, Leung and Henshaw as a conference call.

Walking towards the front door, he called back, ‘You'll all have a soundtrack of what's going on in the building. You can hear me, but I can't hear you. Carol's in charge of operations from outside. I'm going in!'

The smell of burning flesh invaded Rosen's nose and the dying man's agony pounded in his ears. He kept his eyes off the twitching form of Alec Finn.

He glanced at the plaque commemorating the Rainer sisters.

His fear that one day he would come home and his son wouldn't recognize him altered, simplified itself. One day, he simply wouldn't come home, and Joe would have no memory of him at all.

He reached the school's front door and stopped.

‘I'm not going in,' he said to himself. Rosen thought of Joe, newborn, naked and helpless, needing everything he could give him.

He made to turn but then a light came on in the corridor. At the far end, he saw Luke Booth tied to a chair, crying, unable to move.

Macy appeared behind Luke and called, ‘Mr Rosen, you have seconds or else.'

She dragged Luke out of sight and the light went out.

He turned to the officers behind him and ordered, ‘Stay back!'

Rosen turned the handle and, opening the door, stepped into the darkness.

94

9.35 P.M.

T
he smell of petrol threatened to overwhelm him. Rosen walked towards the internal door connecting reception to the central corridor of the school, opened it and reached for the wall lights. Along the corridor a series of fluorescent strip lights blinked into life and, in the flashes of illumination, Rosen saw a pool of blood on the floor. He followed the trail leading from that pool down the corridor to a jagged rock on which a clump of human hair was glued by blood and tissue.

At the far end of the corridor, Macy reappeared, stepping sideways from a room Rosen guessed was the school hall. She stood perfectly still, the strobe effect of the flickering fluorescents giving her a ghostly aura.

‘Turn the light off, Mr Rosen.'

Rosen turned the light off. The corridor was plunged once more into darkness, moonlit through skylights in the ceiling.

In the blue darkness, she looked tiny, small enough to pick up and put in a pocket, a doll. She was perfectly still, and Rosen echoed her stillness.

He sensed a presence near him. A classroom door was open and, in the shadows, the burglar alarm sensor in the corner clicked and the red light winked.

He felt something creep round the edge of his shoe, a subtle but undeniable weight. The pool of blood had seeped towards him, touching his foot.

Macy stepped sideways towards the hall and Rosen took a step towards the classroom door. The windows of the classroom were covered with blinds; he knew he was inside a space invisible to the outside world.

‘What are you doing?' she asked.

‘I've come to see you. Where are you all, whereabouts in the school?' He hoped for an answer that would benefit Bellwood and the others outside.

‘The big hall. Have you got a gun?'

‘No. I wouldn't want to hurt you, Macy.'

‘Really? If you're lying to me, Mr Rosen. . .' She raised her arm and shook a fist. The rattle of a box of matches. She pointed at him. ‘Bad guy!' And then in the direction of the hall. ‘Dead baby!'

‘I understand. Trust me, Macy—'

‘Don't say that name!'

‘Trust me, I haven't got a gun. Have you got a gun?'

‘Maybe. I am sorry about Mr Finn.'

‘What happened to Mr Finn?'

‘Someone hit him on the head with a rock and someone asked someone else to drag him down the corridor and through the hall to the stairs behind the door. Then someone opened the skylight on the flat roof and someone and someone else dragged him to the front of the roof. Someone splashed petrol on Mr Finn's face and someone slapped him till his eyes opened. And then someone poured more petrol on him and made a trail of petrol from the skylight all along the roof and someone went back down and then came back and lifted the skylight a teeny-weeny bit and set the petrol on fire. And you know whose fault that was?'

‘Whose fault was it?'

‘It was your fault, Mr Rosen.'

‘How's that?'

‘Because we asked you in and you stayed outside. Someone had to show you that you have to do as you are TOLD!' With each word she had grown more irate, and by the end of her explanation, she was screaming.

‘I'm very sorry for keeping someone waiting.'

She breathed in and out deeply, sharply, several times. Rosen used the distraction to speak slowly and quietly to Bellwood. ‘Skylight on roof. Source of fire. Stairs down into hall.'

‘Will you do as you're told now?' Just as she had ascended into rage, so she quickly calmed down.

‘Yes, I will do my very best to do as I am told.'

She rattled the box of matches. ‘Come down here, Mr Rosen.' She walked into the hall and Rosen followed her down the corridor, each step made sticky with Alec Finn's blood. The smell of petrol intensified and there were splashes of it on the vinyl floor tiles.

He whispered into his phone, ‘Carol, I'm walking down to the hall. The place is soaked in petrol. She has a box of matches. I can't hear any voices from the hall but I had the strangest sense there was someone else here. There isn't. There isn't. There can't be.'

From the wall outside a classroom, three doors from the hall, Rosen lifted a mounted fire extinguisher with his right hand. He looked to the left: an open cloakroom. He snatched the nearest of three forgotten coats – anything with which to fight fire.

At the open door of the hall, he dropped the coat and left the fire extinguisher on top of it, careful not to make a sound, to antagonize her in any way.

In the hall, the smell of petrol hit the back of his throat and he had to stifle a cough.

‘Stop!' she commanded.

Rosen halted in the doorway. He could see a third of the hall, the
central section, but there was no sign of the children. Frosted glass on either side of the door blocked his view. ‘Where are you, Mr Rosen?'

‘I'm standing in the doorway to the hall.'

‘What are you seeing, Mr Rosen?'

‘I can see the wall bars for gym on the wall opposite me.'

‘What are you seeing near your foot?'

‘I can see a green first aid box and an unwrapped length of gauze. . . Oh, Jesus,' he whispered, anticipating what was to come.

‘You said you'd do as you're told. Didn't you?'

‘I did say I'd do my best to do as I was told.'

‘Then pick up the gauze and tie it around your eyes. Your eyes will not deceive. Do it. On Beltaine Night, even the moon is blind.'

He picked up the length of gauze and dug his nails into the fabric, ripping the threads. His heart pounded and his head span. Sweat rolled down his face and spine.