Marina watched the school children run across the playground into the arms of more than fifty police officers. The negotiators had done their job. They’d convinced the gunman to release the children from the school.
All of the children, except for one.
Dmitry. Her son.
Marina was not about to sit around and listen to the police strategising while her only child was being held at gunpoint by none other than her ex-husband.
That was her son in there.
She was going to get him.
The first thing was to slip away from the police command that had been set up at the school gate. She had been there for the last two hours while they had thrown her question after question about the man she had once been married to, Sergei Klovoc. Was he sane? Was he normally violent? What did she think he wanted? Stupid questions.
Marina slipped away from the trucks and the flashing lights and ran through the parking lot, passed the caretaker’s shed, by the oval to the tennis courts where she knew a gate would be unlocked.
Dmitry was a beautiful boy – delicate and deeply introverted. He’d now been trapped in the classroom for close to three hours. What was Sergei doing to him? What was he telling him?
Marina ran across the tennis court to the back of the main school block. Bags and books were scattered everywhere, dropped by terrified children as they’d run out of the school. These students were being held by their parents right now, comforted by those who loved them.
Not her son. He was still inside.
As she moved into the locker room she reminded herself of the things she knew from her conversations with the police. She knew he was in Dmitry’s classroom, and still there because Sergei had stayed on the classroom telephone to them nearly the whole time. She knew he had an accomplice, the substitute teacher and Sergei’s new girlfriend. She knew they were armed, knew they had Dmitry in there alone, knew there was no one else in the school and she knew that now the police were aware she was inside. The back entrance may have been open, but police snipers were watching it in case Sergei decided to make a run for it.
It was dark inside the school corridors, the power having been shut off by the police. With her shoes off to avoid making a sound she ran down the corridors and up a set of stairs.
And now here she was, looking down the hallway at his classroom door. Her son was just inside.
The door opened.
Marina panicked and pulled herself back behind a set of lockers.
It was the woman. She was carrying a weapon – some type of handgun – and she was checking the corridor for signs of life.
Here we go.
Marina took a school bag that was discarded on the ground, pulled a pencil case from inside and retrieved two pens and a pair of scissors. In a second school bag she found a bag of marbles. Perfect.
The first marble rolled through the shadows, making a sharp chink against the tin of a locker door. Marina watched the woman’s head turn sharply. She waited a moment and then sent another marble rolling down the corridor. As long as they stayed in the shadows the teacher would hear them but not know where they were coming from.
