A scheduled traffic report followed, but this too was dominated by the news from Bulverton. Drivers were warned to keep away from the A259 coast road between Hastings and Eastbourne, and generally to avoid the area until further notice. Bulverton was closed to traffic from all directions. More information, they said, would be made available soon.
All through this Nick continued to drive along in the slow-moving rush-hour traffic, his gaze fixed blankly on the back of the car in front of him. He was on a kind of emotional autopilot, suspending his feelings until he was convinced that what he was hearing was true. The programme switched to another topic, so he took the mobile phone from the glove compartment and punched in his parents’ number. After a brief delay for cellular connection, the number rang and rang without answer.
He switched the phone off and on, then tried again in case he had keyed in the wrong number. There was still no answer.
He knew it could mean anything, and that their absence from the hotel could have a mundane explanation: they sometimes drove into Bexhill or Eastbourne during the afternoon to do a little shopping, and such expeditions were so much a part of their lives that he rarely phoned them before he arrived home from work. However, he also knew that it was unusual for them to stay out this late. Another explanation could be that they were simply outside the building. Or that he had in his anxiety dialled the wrong number; he had to wait for the traffic to halt for a few seconds, but then immediately punched the keys again, being extra-careful to get them right. No answer.
His mind started racing, imagining the worst. He thought of them hearing gunfire in the street outside, going to a window to investigate, or, worse, stepping outside the door, to be caught instantly in a fusillade of bullets. His father was an instinctive intervener: he never ran away from trouble.
Nick’s dominant feeling continued to be disbelief. Terrible events reported in the news traditionally happen to other people, or are carried out in places you know of but are nowhere near, or they don’t directly concern you at all. When all these self-imagined rules are broken, you find yourself emotionally exposed.
It was hard for Nick to believe that it had happened in the dull little place he knew, where he had grown up and which was full of people he knew. He couldn’t take in the fact that it was happening now, that he was one of the people who were going to have to deal with it in some way, that he was already an indirect victim.
The radio programme was interrupted again, with another hastily arranged call from somewhere close to the incident. This was from a senior police officer, but again he was not on the spot, not there in Bulverton.
After this, it was clear that the shootings had become the main, the only, news story of that evening. Gradually, the BBC’s news organization responded to the sudden incident, and information began to come through more coherently, and therefore more immediately and terrifyingly.
Nick switched stations, though, irrationally trying to find more news, or better news, some message that would cushion the shock. He discovered, of course, that all the London and national stations were concentrating on Bulverton. They seemed to be reporting at different stages of the incident. He retuned to the BBC, and continued to drive in a state of numbness and inattention. He was aware that drivers of the other cars around him would be listening to the news on their own radios, but to almost all of them it must have been as if it was happening to someone else, in a place they had only heard of. The other drivers’ faces were neutral. Were they listening? Was he the only one? Unreality surged around him, coming and going.
At this time Nick was living alone in London, but he had a girlfriend called Jodie Quennell. He usually saw Jodie at weekends and on odd evenings in the week. That evening, that fateful day, he and Jodie had arranged as they often did to meet for a meal and a drink, but while he was in his car he had no way of contacting her. She too drove home from work at this time, but she had no mobile in her car. He would have to call her later. He distracted himself for a few seconds with an imagined conversation with her, but predominating were thoughts of the quiet and familiar streets of his home town and of people he probably knew being fired on in them.
At last he reached the Hangar Lane interchange, where the North Circular Road crossed the A40. He turned left, heading south, but was still heavily delayed by the slow-moving traffic. He was trying to think ahead, work out which would be the best route to the Bexhill region of the coast from this part of London, but all the time the radio was distracting him. He had driven this way dozens of times before, but usually timed his departure to miss the worst of the rush-hour traffic. He could easily imagine what the M25 would be like at this time of the early evening. He was in no mental condition to deal with that sort of stressful driving.
Nick had been born in Bulverton, the only child of James and Michaela Surtees. His parents lived and worked in the White Dragon for most of their adult lives, first as tenants of the large brewery chain that ran the place, then latterly, when the brewery started shedding its less prosperous sites, as the owners.
Bulverton had been in decline through all their years, but they had never given up trying to make the place profitable. What started out as a large white elephant of a pub on an unfashionable part of the coast had gradually been modernized and improved. When it was clear that Bulverton had no future as a holiday resort, his father took the difficult decision to move the White Dragon up-market and concentrate on the business and weekend markets. All the guest rooms were expensively refurbished, satellite and cable TV went into every room, the hotel installed fax, cellular phone and internet nodes, tele-conferencing facilities, a small but well-equipped business conference suite. The rooms were centrally heated and air-conditioned, they had mini-bar facilities, the bathrooms had needle showers as well as pressure-jet tubs, and so on. For a time, James Surtees employed a gourmet chef, and he built up what he claimed was the finest small wine cellar on the South Coast.
All to only temporary avail. The economy of the area was not dynamic enough to support a hotel of that kind, and although there were good years the decline was measurable. At the same time, the public bar continued to be popular with the locals, and it would have been foolish to take away this core business. The White Dragon for years had a split personality, in the kinds of custom it sought.
None of this had been of much concern to Nick, although he knew better than anyone the amount of work, and the huge investment, that his parents put into making the place what it had become. He grew up taking it all for granted, as any child would. When he was old enough his father made it clear to him that the business would be his one day, but Nick was going through his own adolescent insecurities. Although he learnt the basics of the hotel trade, and helped out around the hotel in the evenings and at weekends, his heart was never in it.
Habitually lazy at school, at the age of sixteen Nick at last started to take his schooling a little more seriously. It was computers and programming that did it for him. After years of messing around with the school computers he suddenly became interested, and soon transformed himself into a typically obsessive computer freak. Programming came as naturally to him as French or German came to some of his friends, and within a few weeks it was clear where his career would lie. The only problem was that jobs were almost impossible to find locally.
He found the tasks around the hotel increasingly irksome, and tensions grew between him and his parents. A solution presented itself when Nick saw some computing jobs in London being advertised in the Courier; he applied, and within a few days was offered a full-time job as a software engineer.
The break from Bulverton, sought by so many other young people of his generation, had come quickly and unexpectedly. Once he was established in London, Nick felt almost as if he had been reborn. His memories of his days in Sussex receded. At first he returned to Bulverton to see his parents on most weekends, but these visits gradually became less frequent, and shorter in duration. After three years he was promoted and became a departmen
t head. He later bought a small flat, then traded up to a small house, then a larger house. He married, and three years later he divorced. He changed jobs, started to make more money, and took on increasing responsibilities at work. He put on weight, lost some of his hair. He drank too much, spent too much money on food, wine, entertaining, went out too often, had too many women friends. He rarely thought of Bulverton.
But down in Bulverton his parents were getting older and less able to look after themselves. His mother’s health gave special concern. They were beginning to talk about retirement, something that seemed inevitable to them but which worried Nick a great deal. The reality of the future of the White Dragon was getting closer to him every week. He knew that they had few savings, that all their wealth was tied up in the business, that neither of them could afford to stop working.
Unspoken pressure began to mount on him. He knew they wanted him to say he would move back to Bulverton and take over the running of the hotel, but by this time he was settled in his life in London and nothing could have been further from his wishes. As with many big decisions in families, nothing concrete was agreed on and the months and years slipped slowly by.
Then everything changed, that hot afternoon in June.
The news from Bulverton grew steadily more horrifying. The gunman was thought to be cornered, but then he somehow escaped. Now he had taken a hostage, but a few minutes later he shot her in the head and left her for the police to find. Witness reports were coming in from people who had managed to get away from him, but few details were confirmed: he was a young man, he was middle-aged, he wore combat gear, he was dressed in jeans and T-shirt, he carried one gun, he carried two guns, he carried several. One witness claimed the gunman was actually a woman. Another denied this, said it was a man from a village outside the town, someone he thought he recognized. All this was described disjointedly in a series of phoned-in reports. There was another BBC reporter on the scene by this time, and his descriptions, though incomplete, were graphic in detail.
After a period in which nothing seemed to happen, at least as reported on the radio, hard news came in again. Now the police had surrounded the gunman, but he managed to get into a church and again there was at least one hostage with him.
Nick knew from the rough description which church he was probably in. It would be St Stephen’s, the parish church, a short way from the hotel along Eastbourne Road. It was not an especially ancient or beautiful church, but it was well-proportioned, solidly built and positioned attractively at the junction of the coast road and a residential street lined with good houses and many trees. It had been bombed during World War II, with some loss of life. Imagining the gunman there, brandishing his weapons, Nick started to drive faster. He was full of anxiety about his parents, but also for the town itself, for the people who lived there, for everyone. It was the worst thing that had ever happened in his life, and he hadn’t even been there to experience it.
He headed for Eastbourne. On the outskirts of the town he turned off into the first of several narrow country roads that would take him past Pevensey and across the Levels. As he had guessed there was hardly any other traffic heading this way. By now he had by force of will put himself into a controlled state of mind, driving with super care, making acute anticipation of hazards ahead.
The radio told him that the known death toll in Bulverton had reached seventeen, most of them people who had been walking in the town or passing through in cars. Three policemen had been shot, and two had died. Three of the civilian victims were children, whose school bus had happened to stop just as the gunman rounded the corner. Many other children had been injured by stray bullets or flying fragments of glass.
As Nick passed Normans Bay, with Bulverton only a couple of miles ahead, the BBC reporter in the town revealed that several shots had been heard from inside the church, and police believed that one of them had been the gunman turning his weapon on himself.
Then, suddenly, the news bulletins ended. The BBC continuity announcer said that they were returning to the scheduled programmes and would bring regular updates on the incident whenever possible.
Nick switched channels again, finding South-East Sound, the local talk-based commercial station. It was covering the incident live, but in a style remarkably different from the BBC’s. It had managed to get two of its reporters actually into the town, broadcasting their impressions live, and only interviewing people when they encountered them, in snatches of shouted questions. It was a crude, racy broadcasting technique that had become identified with the station, but until the massacre they had never really found a subject strong enough to do it justice. With the two young reporters alternating, both of them hoarse and sounding frightened, it was immediate, shocking and highly effective. Once you worked out what was going on it was impossible to tune away to another station. Nick was still listening to this channel when he reached the place where the narrow country road rejoined the A259, and he saw a police roadblock ahead. He drove slowly towards it.
He was immediately spotted by two armed policemen, who waved him to the side of the road. They were just outside the Old Town, a hundred yards from St Stephen’s Church, twice that distance from the White Hotel. There was a curve in the road beyond the church, so he could see no further. He was so nearly home. The sergeant in charge took his name and address, told him to wait by his car but not to get back inside. Meekly, Nick complied.
Later, they allowed him to continue on foot, with a policewoman assigned to conduct him. He had to wait until she returned from some other mission. When she arrived she was pale and flustered, and would not look directly at him.
‘Where did you say you lived?’ she said.
‘I told the sergeant. The White Dragon Hotel. It’s not far from here.’
‘I know where it is. Have they told you what’s been happening?’
‘Yes,’ said Nick, but in fact they hadn’t.
Until that moment, with the radio programme, the police roadblock, the quietly spoken sergeant, there had been a veneer of unreality. Now it all became real. It was this young policewoman’s expression, drained and too controlled, that finally convinced him. She muttered an informal warning that he would see distressing sights in the town, but her voice trailed off before she finished. She walked off down the streets he knew so well, keeping a couple of paces ahead of him.
The first sign was the broken glass. It was all over the place, scattered across both the road and the pavements. Much of it was the coarse granules of shattered car windows. They stepped over long smears of dark-brown stains on the pavements. Most of the windows they passed were broken. There were belongings scattered everywhere: shopping bags, children’s toys, packages of food, satchels of school books, a pair of shoes. He saw several vehicles that had been abandoned in the middle of the road, their windows shot away and the panels of their doors pock-marked with bullet holes. He was astounded by the number of bullets that appeared to have been fired. How much ammunition could one man carry? How many weapons had he used?
The policewoman strode ahead of him, glancing back from time to time to make sure he had not fallen behind. By the time the White Dragon was in sight, he was no longer looking around at what they passed. He stared only at the back of her legs, clad in dark stockings, trying not to see, trying not to think.
At last they arrived at the White Dragon. It was at the epicentre of the violence that had spilled across the streets. Here at last Nick was forced not only to witness the results of the rampage, but to begin, ineptly, unwillingly, uncomprehendingly, the long process of facing up to what had happened to his parents that afternoon, the day they apparently decided against driving into Eastbourne to do a little late shopping.
CHAPTER 5
Dave Hartland, flattened uncomfortably on the bare and dusty floorboards below the window frame, inched forward on his stomach until his head was by the sill. His view of the street below was restricted and his heart was beating so fiercely that he could barely hold still. He
glimpsed a number of policemen taking shelter behind a row of parked cars.
A bullet shattered the window pane and embedded itself in the ceiling. Glass and plaster showered down on the boards around him. In a reflex he rolled over, covering his head and neck as best he could.
Using his elbows for propulsion he wriggled backwards, scraping his limbs on the rough boards. Somewhere out there a helicopter was searching for him, and it was surely only a matter of time before it ventured within range. Once he had been picked up by the helicopter’s heat-imager he would be effectively done for. He could hear the pulsating of the motor as an insistent rhythm beneath every movement, almost sub-audible, a throbbing pressure.
In the corridor outside he was able to stand. He looked to right and left, then raised his boot and kicked down the door opposite. He burst into the room, covering every corner of it with a sweep of the rifle muzzle. When he was satisfied it was clear, he crouched and moved across to the window. He looked down into a wide, straight road. A row of tall terraced houses stood on the opposite side.
Until this moment he could have been anywhere; now he knew that he could be anywhere except Bulverton. He had lived in Bulverton all his life. Nowhere in the town looked like this. Cars were parked on both sides of the street, and behind these he could make out, as before, several armed policemen crouching for shelter. One was only barely concealed; Dave Hartland raised his rifle and shot him.