Sarah finds the nurse who was with Rowena earlier.
‘The injuries to Rowena White’s hands, do you think they were an accident?’ she asks. ‘I mean, the more recent damage?’
So she’s guessed.
‘You’re Jenny’s aunt, right?’
‘Yes. I’m also a police officer.’
‘Have you got ID?’
Sarah digs in her bag for her warrant card and shows it – Detective Sergeant McBride. ‘My married name,’ she says.
‘OK. I don’t think the injuries were accidental. At least, I can’t see how she could have got them if she tripped. The blisters on the tops of her hands have been damaged too.’
I remember Donald brutally gripping hold of her bandaged hands. Rowena’s quiet scream of pain.
‘Do you know when the injuries happened?’
‘No. But the blisters were undamaged at four thirty yesterday, because I changed her dressings myself. But then I went off shift at five.’
‘Do you know who was on after you?’
‘Belinda Edwards. I’ll find her for you.’
Ten minutes later, Sarah is with Belinda, the briskly competent nurse who showed Donald to Rowena’s room yesterday. She carefully checks Sarah’s warrant card.
‘It was after her father visited,’ she says.
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m not saying it was him. But I spoke to her when I arrived on my shift and she was fine, cheerful even. Her father came to see her shortly afterwards, about five fifteen. He wasn’t with her long. When he’d gone, I went in to give her her usual drugs. She and her mother were distressed. Rowena was trying not to show how much pain she was in, but it had clearly increased. I took the dressings off her hands and saw that the blisters had burst on both hands.’
‘She told you she tripped…?’ Sarah asks.
‘Yes, and that she put her hands out to save herself. But that wouldn’t explain the damage on the tops of her hands too. I asked a doctor to examine her and she gave him the same story.’
‘Do you have Rowena’s past medical record?’
‘We’re not computerised yet – well, not successfully, so I’ll have to chase up the hard copy from records.’
‘And can you get Maisie White’s, her mother’s?’
Belinda’s eyes meet Sarah’s and an unspoken accord passes between them.
‘I’ll chase that up for you in the same way,’ she says.
‘Thank you.’
‘We’re concerned about the infection risk,’ Belinda says. ‘So she’ll be remaining with us for a few days yet.’
Sarah is going to go to the police station. Jenny and I go with her towards the exit of the hospital. I don’t want Jen to go outside.
‘We need to know everything in case we’re the ones who have to put it all together,’ I say to her. ‘Can you stay here in case Donald comes back? We need to watch him too.’
Giving her a job to do, as I used to years ago – sifting the icing sugar so she wouldn’t mind that it was me taking the cake tins out of the too-hot-for-children oven.
‘You’re sure it doesn’t hurt you?’ she asks.
‘Hardly at all.’
She looks at me, unconvinced.
‘Apart from colds, I’m actually very resilient.’
‘I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry. God, you went into a burning building and-’
‘It’s fine, Jen, really.’
She looks at me, and there’s something else. I wait.
‘How long d’you think it takes, from Barbados?’
‘About nine hours,’ I say.
She smiles a shy, happy smile and I hate Ivo for making her smile like that and for what will happen when he gets here.
I leave the hospital with Sarah, shedding the protective skin of its walls, but for a little while, maybe a minute or more, I feel alright. Then the pain hits. The gravel path leading to the car park cuts into my unprotected feet. It’s still early but the bright sun reflects off the cars with dazzling, migrainous intensity.
In the car Sarah talks to Roger on her hands-free, finishing their earlier argument; words starched, voices stiff. He accuses her of forgetting it was ‘your son’s’ deadline for his course-work this week. She tells him that you need her more. He says she should start allocating her time ‘more carefully’. She tells him there’s a call waiting. She hangs up and blares her horn – too loud, too long – at a van hogging a box junction. She drives the rest of the way in silence.
For the first time I feel like an eavesdropper or spy.
She parks and we walk to Chiswick police station along a heat-baked concrete pavement, the road sweating tarmac. Next to the police station is the Eco shop, with its growing roof and plant-covered walls. I want to stop outside and breathe its newly made oxygen and window-shop, as I often have with Jenny, at the eclectic display.
I used to think that in the police station next door Sarah would be in her element. She was ideally suited, I thought, to a job that had uniforms and numbers and name badges and ranks clearly marked. Everyone and everything labelled; strict protocols to be followed; rules and laws to be adhered to and implemented. I’d think that if Sarah hadn’t been a police officer (she drummed that word into me after my first calamitous police-woman mistake) then she’d have been an officer in the army in some kind of organisational role.
Because I didn’t want to think her brave and driven and doing something worthwhile.
And it was easy to believe myself because up until now the police didn’t seem important or connected to us. Yes, they keep criminals off the streets, but Chiswick hardly has any litter, let alone muggers or murderers on the newly widened, Bugaboo-friendly pavements. The worst vandalism we get is fly-posting for music festivals and the occasional poster for a missing cat. From newspapers and TV I thought the police were, on the whole, bolters of doors when the murderers and bombers had already done their worst and left in their stolen cars.
But now crime isn’t ‘out there’ but exploding into my family and the police are crucial to our lives.
We go inside the police station and down a corridor with paint-peeling walls and concrete floors, which smell strongly of cleaning fluid, the same one that is used in the hospital; an archetypal institutional smell; only this institution has crime not injury as its raison d’être.
We pass offices with phones ringing for too long and loud male voices and pieces of paper pinned with seemingly no particular order onto old notice boards. Such a scruffy, chaotic place for Sarah; not the neat organised place I’d imagined.
A young woman police officer comes down the corridor. She hugs Sarah and asks her about Jenny and me. And then an older male officer takes her hand as he passes her and says how sorry he is and asks if there’s anything he can do. Anything.
We go into a main office area, which reeks of deodorant and sweat, fans overhead whirring noisily and ineffectually against the heat. And everyone in here comes up to ask after Jenny and me, to offer sympathy, to give her a hug or hold her hand for a moment. Everyone knows her. Everyone minds about her. I realise she is loved and valued here. I’d been right about this place being her element, but for the wrong reasons.
She goes into a side-office and an attractive man in his thirties, with caramel-coloured skin, virtually runs across the small space and put his arms around her and holds her tightly. He’s not wearing a uniform so must be CID. His cream cotton shirt has sweat patches under his arms. There isn’t even a fan in here.
‘Hi, Mohsin,’ she says, as he hugs her.
‘You ran the sympathy gauntlet, then?’ he asks.
‘Something like that.’
‘Poor baby.’
Baby? Sarah? Behind them, a woman in her twenties is pretending to look at a computer monitor. A sharply cut auburn bob frames her angular face. She’s the only person who hasn’t offered sympathy.
‘Penny?’ Sarah says, and the severe-featured young woman turns to her. ‘Where are we on the hate-mail investigation?’
‘I’m going over the original statements now. Tony and Pete are trying to locate footage from the CCTV camera, which records the postbox where the third letter was posted. The Nationwide Building Society had it installed last year, and the postbox is next to it.’
‘I think the hate mail could well be linked to the arson attack,’ Sarah says.
Penny and Mohsin say nothing.
‘Alright,’ Sarah says, tight-lipped. ‘Maybe it is just an extraordinary coincidence that Jenny was sent hate mail and then her place of work was set on fire and she was the only member of staff to be badly injured.’
‘But the campaign against her had stopped, right?’ Penny asks, and I hope to God that Ivo – if he actually bothers to come – will tell them about the red paint attack just a few weeks ago.
‘If it turns out there is a link to the fire,’ Penny continues, ‘then for now that will just have to be a fortunate byproduct. It can’t be a focus of the malicious mail investigation.’
‘We need a connection, honey,’ Mohsin says. ‘Something that links the hate-mail campaign with the arson attack.’
‘Her oxygen may have been tampered with,’ Sarah says.
Penny’s eyes flick to hers. ‘May?’
‘It’s being downplayed,’ Sarah continues. ‘By the hospital and by Baker. But I think someone tried to make sure they finished the job.’
‘Downplayed?’ Penny asks and I see the irritation on Sarah’s face.
‘Baker’s lazy, we all know that.’
‘But not that incompetent,’ Penny retorts. She turns back to her computer screen.
‘Who was this witness who supposedly saw my nephew?’ Sarah asks, going closer to her.
‘Detective Inspector Baker has made it absolutely clear that the witness’s anonymity must be respected.’
Her harshness reminds me of Tara. But at least she wears her toughness on the outside, so gives fair warning.
Sarah turns to Mohsin.
‘It’s not in the file?’
‘No,’ responds Penny. ‘DI Baker thought you might come asking for it. He’s pretty astute about you.’
‘Not about much else,’ Sarah snaps. ‘So he’s hidden it?’
‘He’s just respecting the witness’s right to privacy and anonymity.’
‘How handy for him that someone comes along and does his work for him.’
Mohsin tries to put his arm round her again, but she moves away from him.
‘And he’s cheap. How much overtime has he signed off recently? It would be a big-budget number to do a full-scale arson and attempted murder investigation. The witness gave him a gift-wrapped package. This way he doesn’t have to spend any time or money on it but gets a great clear-up rate. A model of twenty-first-century policing.’
Penny is going to the door.
‘I’ll tell you what Tony and Pete find out,’ she says.
‘Has anyone investigated Silas Hyman’s alibi?’ Sarah asks.
‘Take that compassionate leave,’ Penny says as she leaves, her personality as angular as her haircut, all sharp corners.
Sarah is alone with Mohsin.
‘Jesus,’ Sarah says. ‘Does she always have to speak like there’s a cork up her bum?’
He laughs and I’m frankly a little shocked. Sarah doesn’t talk that way. And I’ve never seen her be so physical with someone before, apart from you, her little brother. But I can’t believe she’s having an affair; not Sarah, of all people, surely? She’s just too law-abiding to break the first rule of marriage.
‘Do you know who the witness is?’ she asks him.
‘No, I don’t. You might not like Penny, but she is good.’
‘So it was Penny who took the statement? I thought it must have been. Sod’s bloody law, isn’t it? The one person guaranteed not to help me.’
‘True. But if the witness was dodgy in any way Penny would have been onto it. She’s a bloody sniffer-dog-Rottweiler-mix that woman.’
‘Can you get her to tell you who it was?’
‘I can’t believe you asked me that.’
‘Well, can you?’
‘You’ve never even broken a rule, let alone a law. Let alone asked someone to do that for you.’
‘Mohsin…’
‘You’ve never even filed something incorrectly before.’
She turns away from him.
‘You know how the files sit around on that stack of trays after they’ve been typed up,’ he continues. ‘And people seem to find better things to do than put them where they’re meant to be? It’s woefully insecure, that area. Probably completely contravenes the data protection act. I’m sure that the anonymous witness statement isn’t left so open to abuse like that. But other transcripts…’
‘Yeah, thanks.’ She lightly kisses his caramel-coloured cheek.
‘So how’s that husband of yours?’ he asks.
She pauses a moment.
‘You think that when it comes to it, when it really matters, that someone’ll be more than they are the rest of the time. Better, somehow. You hope that someone will be like that, for you, when it counts.’
‘So are you still going to wait till Mark’s eighteen?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It was a mad idea.’
‘Maybe. But neither of us wants the boys to go through a divorce. Not until they’re grown-up. I told you that.’
‘You breeders. So many complications.’
‘You pervs. So few commitments.’
She goes to the door. ‘Can I ask you a favour?’
He nods.
‘There’s a printer’s called Prescoes, which printed the school calendar for Sidley House some time before Christmas. They had their name printed on the back, but no contact number. Could you get hold of them and find out how many they printed?’
‘No problem. Be careful, won’t you?’
‘Yup.’
‘Call me. If you need to. Any time.’
‘Thanks.’
So Sarah has a best mate I never knew about, who she can speak to in a language she never uses to anyone else – well, certainly not whenever I’d been with her. I’m glad for her.
I’m not sure if you know that her marriage to Roger has an end date. But I don’t think you’ll be surprised that it’s been planned with such thought. It fits with the highly organised, practical woman I’ve known for so many years. And also with the kind, emotionally generous woman I’ve met in the last two days.
I go with her to a room where there are boxes and files of paperwork. She takes a file and tucks it under her jacket, hiding it. Her hands are shaking.
I know Sarah’s done lots of dangerous things – chased armed criminals and tackled violent strangers hugely bigger than her – but I thought it was attention-seeking bravado. ‘Look at me, everyone!’ I didn’t know about this quiet courage.
She goes into a photocopier room and starts to make copies. The door suddenly opens behind her. She starts. An older man comes in. From the pips on his shoulder he’s clearly senior to her.
‘Sarah? What on earth are you doing here?’
I feel dread for her.
‘Haven’t we given you compassionate leave?’ he continues.
‘Yes.’
‘So stop whatever work you’re doing and get off home. Or to the hospital. Work will be waiting for you when you return. You may think that it’s better to bury yourself in it, but frankly it’s probably not a wise thing to do.’
‘No. Thank you.’
‘I’m sorry. About your niece and sister-in-law.’
‘Yes.’
‘And your nephew. We all are.’
He leaves. She hurriedly stuffs the photocopies into her handbag, not folding them first, scrunching them. I don’t know if she’s managed to photocopy all the documents she needs.
She takes the file back to where she got it, holding it under the left-hand side of her jacket, pinned down with her arm. She’s sweating, her hair sticking to her forehead.
With the file returned, she hurries back down the corridor.
We are almost at the exit and I am also selfishly relieved because the pain is overwhelming me now, as if I am made of it.
‘Hey, you!’
A young man is hurrying towards her. I notice his fine features and grey eyes and youth, no more than his mid-twenties. He is astonishingly handsome. For some reason, he makes me think of that reading you wanted to have at our wedding – ‘My lover leaping like a gazelle’ from the ‘Song of Songs’; lithe and beautiful. (At six months pregnant, I’d worried the congregation would burst out laughing.)
‘You forgot something,’ he says to her.
They are alone in the institutional corridor, which smells of the cleaning fluid.
He kisses her, full on the mouth, a powerful sexual kiss that melts her bones and fills the moment because while they kiss she allows herself to be lost from the real world and enter this one. I turn away, remembering the first time I kissed you; your mouth closing onto mine and becoming an open doorway to a different, intensely physical place.
I know that while he kisses her, for these long seconds, she forgets Jenny and me and Adam and your suffering. Forgets the illegal copies stuffed into her handbag and her promise to you. A gift of a kiss.
Then she pulls away.
‘We can’t do this any more,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’
As she walks away I see she has kicked him harder than he’s ever been kicked before and how much it hurts him. I see that despite the age difference, and that he is beautiful while she is not, that he is in love with her. I wonder if she knows.
I’ve never really thought through what it must have been like for Sarah when your parents died and you were still a child. I’d assumed that teenage Sarah, like the adult, was naturally responsible. But was she forced to be that way? Because inside her rule-abiding, responsible, sensible persona there’s a risk-taking, life-grabbing person. Maybe it’s taken to her mid-forties to let out her teenage self.
No wonder her marriage with Roger is over.
We leave the police station together and I wish I’d known her like this before. Wish we’d gone for a drink together, become friends. You always wanted me to spend more time with her, on our own, but like a recalcitrant child I resented being made to play with someone I didn’t think I liked.
The truth is, I was jealous of her. I know, I never said, and you don’t understand why not. Well, it’s partly because I didn’t dare acknowledge it, even to myself, especially to myself, only occasionally daring to sneak a look edgeways-on. But now I see it clearly. Don’t worry, it’s not about you. There’s no weird kind of Antigone-brother thing going on (and I know you know about Antigone because I made you go to a three-hour production at the Barbican – sorry).
This jealousy thing is about Sarah’s career. Because what she does matters. I know that fully now.
And I also know that jealousy is a shaky foundation on which to build an opinion of someone. No wonder it’s collapsing.
Jenny is waiting in the goldfish-bowl vestibule.
‘Are you OK?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’
As soon as I was back here again the pain stopped. But at the police station the floor had turned to spikes and in the car the air scorched my no-skin self.
I tell her about the illicit photocopies.
‘Did you meet him?’ Jenny asks.
‘Who?’ I say.
She shrugs and looks uncomfortable and I realise she means Sarah’s gazelle lover.
‘You know about him?’ I ask.
She nods.
The surprising thing is that I don’t feel jealous of Sarah being close to Jenny in that way – but of Jenny. Sarah would never confide in me about him.
We follow Sarah as she takes the corridor towards the cafeteria.
‘Why isn’t she going to Dad?’ Jen asks.
‘Probably wants to read it through for herself first.’
The Palms Café is brightly lit, but I still sense the shadow of Maisie and Sarah’s conversation last night about Silas Hyman. ‘Violent…vicious… But he gets people to love him.’
Sarah takes a piece of paper out of her bag and tries to smooth out the crumples. Across the top is a border in the black-and-white chessboard pattern of the police. Underneath in whiteout letters against a black strip is ‘RESTRICTED – FOR POLICE ONLY’.