Annette Jenks’s name and occupation – school secretary – is on the cover sheet, with her contact details. Annette was with Rowena when the alarm went off; she couldn’t have started it. But she was in charge of who came in.
‘This is illegal, right?’ Jen asks.
I nod.
As Sarah turns the page to read the transcript, a woman in a cleaner’s uniform comes up. ‘You eating?’
Sarah goes to buy a sandwich as rent for her table, taking the statement with her, and we wait. The cleaner sprays the table next door with some kind of pungent fluid, wiping the Formica clean.
‘Did you get to know Annette Jenks?’ I ask Jenny.
‘My soulmate?’
You’ve never met Annette so you don’t have an image in your head of an overly made-up twenty-two-year-old with talon-nails who looks as if she’s about to go clubbing at eight twenty in the morning.
‘I try to avoid her,’ Jen continues. ‘But she often collars me. Always has some big drama-queen number going on.’
I look at her to go on.
‘Oh, you know, has a friend of a friend who’s been murdered or has married a Mormon with seven wives already or got the bridesmaid pregnant at his own wedding. I’m not sure if that was the Mormon. And there’s always some starring role for her.’
Does she relish what’s happened to us, stirring it into her bland life like pepper sauce?
‘Remember that guy in the States who pretended his child was in the runaway hot-air balloon?’ Jenny says. ‘If Annette had a child she’d put him in it.’
I smile but feel uneasy.
‘She used to try and grease up to me because of Dad,’ Jenny continues. ‘She’s desperate to get on telly. She’d entered all these auditions for reality TV shows.’
‘Do you think she and Silas could be in a relationship?’ I ask.
She gives me one of her withering looks.
‘She’s very, well, alluring,’ I say. Her on-display cleavage was something of a standing joke amongst us buttoned-up mothers. ‘And you said yourself that he was unhappy in his marriage.’
‘Even if he was having an affair, I expect he’d want at least a scattering of brain cells. Anyway he’d left before she started working there.’
‘Yes, but-’
I stop as Sarah returns with her sandwich. She turns over the cover page. At the top is a key: PP stands for Detective Sergeant Penny Pierson. I think of the sharp-featured young woman I’d just seen at the police station. AJ stands for Annette Jenks.
The time of the statement is 6.00 p.m. on Wednesday.
‘They didn’t hang about before interviewing people,’ Jenny says. ‘But why talk to Annette so quickly?’
‘Probably because she lets people into the school.’
I also want to know who she let in on Wednesday afternoon.
And whether she’s telling the truth about Jenny signing herself out.
We read the document with Sarah.
PP: Can you outline for me your duties at the school?
AJ: Yes, I’m the secretary, so I sort out the mail, take phone calls, that kind of thing. Couriers leave things in my office, I sign for them, you know, the usual. I also get the registers and send out the letters for Mrs Healey. And I buzz people in through the gate, though in the mornings a teacher sometimes stands by the gate, kind of a welcoming thing, and it means I don’t need to do it, which is lucky because it’s in the mornings that parents come in here asking for all sorts of things, like I don’t have enough to do.
PP: Anything else?
[AJ shakes head.]
Elizabeth Fisher had been the school nurse as well as the secretary. Why didn’t Annette Jenks have that role too? If she had, Jenny wouldn’t have been up in that sick-room. She wouldn’t have been hurt.
Yes, it would have been Annette. Yes, I would rather it had been her than Jenny. Anyone other than Jenny, apart from Adam. Motherhood isn’t soft and cosy and sweet, it’s selfish ferocity; red in tooth and claw.
PP: I’d like to ask you about who you let in earlier today.
AJ: You think it was deliberate? I mean, like arson? It’s a bit weird, isn’t it? To suddenly get a fire, like, out of nowhere? I mean, yeah, it’s hot. But it’s not hot like Australia, is it? I mean, we don’t get bush fires, stuff like that. Not in a building.
‘I told you,’ Jenny says, seeing my expression. ‘I bet she loved this, being interviewed by the police.’ The drama queen finally gets her stage.
PP: If we could return to who you let in?
AJ: Just the usual. I mean, no one I didn’t know.
PP: I’ll ask you for a list a little later. This afternoon, during sports day, who did you let in?
AJ: There were a couple of children who needed to use the toilets and Mrs Banks, the year-two teacher, was with them. We have to call people Mr and Mrs at school. It’s very stuck up. But they weren’t here long. There were a couple more teachers who’d forgotten something or other. Not for long either. Then there was Adam Covey and Rowena White, and then her mum. She’s always very polite, Mrs White, waves a thank-you at the camera so I see it on the screen. Hardly anyone does that.
PP: Anybody else?
AJ: No.
PP: You’re sure?
AJ: Yeah.
PP: You said you have a screen.
AJ: Yeah, it’s linked up to a camera on the gate so I can see who it is before pressing the buzzer.
PP: Do you always look at it before pushing the buzzer?
AJ: Yeah, not much point having it if I don’t, is there?
PP: But it must be tempting when you’re busy just to push the button and let them in.
AJ: Course I look at the bloody screen. Sorry. It’s stress. I mean it’s just so tragic, isn’t it? What’s happened. Tragic.
‘That’s bollocks,’ Jen says. ‘I’ve seen her press the buzzer and not look at the screen. She’s done it while she’s talked to me, for Christ’s sakes. Doesn’t she get how important this is?’
It’s what Rowena had said too, in a milder way.
I look again at the word ‘tragic’. It’s as if Annette had thought about it for a while and found the appropriately dramatic label.
PP: What about earlier in the day?
AJ: You mean like somebody came and hid?
PP: Could you please answer the question?
AJ: No, just the usual. People who are a part of the school. One or two suppliers, bringing things in.
PP: Do you know these suppliers?
AJ: Yeah, a caterer and a cleaning guy. They go round to the side entrance into the school, the building, I mean. Everyone has to come in through the main gate.
PP: Do you think it’s possible that someone could have got in?
AJ: Dunno. But if they did, it wasn’t me who let them in.
PP: I’d now like to talk about the immediate events around the time of the fire. Where were you when the fire alarm sounded?
AJ: In the office. As per usual.
PP: On your own?
AJ: No. Rowena White was with me. She’d come into the office to get the medals for sports day.
PP: You’re sure Rowena White was with you?
AJ: Yeah. I was telling her about a friend of mine’s problems when the alarm went off. Christ, it made a din.
Like Sarah earlier, Penny was presumably crossing suspects off a list.
PP: You said that as part of your job, you keep the registers. Can you explain how that works?
AJ: Well, yeah, at eight forty and again after lunch the teachers tick off all the kids in their class against the class register. Any kid who isn’t there is marked as absent. The register is brought to me in the office – a kid usually does it, like a treat. Anyways, if a kid arrives after the register’s taken they have to sign in a different register that I keep on a shelf in my office. Anyone leaving before the end of the school day has to sign themselves out in that too.
PP: Anyone being who?
AJ: Kids, mainly, leaving early because they’ve got to get to the dentist’s or whatever. But adults too, sometimes, like parent readers.
PP: And teachers?
AJ: Yeah, but hardly ever. I mean, they get in before me and leave later. Mrs Healey makes them work like dogs. But teaching assistants, well, they’re different. I mean, it’s like me. An eight-thirty-to-five deal and any excuse to leave early. So they sign themselves out.
PP: What did you do after the fire alarm went off?
AJ: I went outside.
She hasn’t told Penny that she waited for five minutes before going outside. Nor what she was doing in that time. Presumably Penny didn’t know to ask her.
AJ: I gave Tilly Rogers, that’s the reception teacher, the register for her class, but there wasn’t any need. I mean, she knew all the kids were there. Then I saw a boy getting hysterical. By that statue. Rowena was trying to calm him down, but he was just getting more wound up.
PP: Do you know the child’s name?
AJ: Now I know, I mean, I realise now why he was like that. Anyways, Rowena asked me if I’d seen Jenny. I said not to worry, that I knew she wasn’t inside. I knew, OK. Everyone gives me that look, but I knew.
PP: How did you know?
AJ: Because she’d signed herself out. In the register I was telling you about. The one in my office. Look at it yourself if you don’t believe me.
PP: You think a paper register survived the fire?
It doesn’t give a tone of voice but I imagine Penny’s was contemptuous. Wooden window frames and plaster and carpets didn’t survive the fire, so how the hell would paper?
AJ: She signed herself out, right? In the register. I remember her doing it.
PP: What time was that?
AJ: Around three, I suppose. I didn’t check the time.
PP: Didn’t she write the time in the register?
AJ: I watched her sign out but I didn’t go and check what she’d written. Why should I?
PP: Why didn’t you bring the register out?
AJ: I didn’t think it mattered. I just thought the reception-class one mattered.
PP: Surely the whole point of that register is to know who’s in the building in case of fire?
AJ: Look, I’m new, OK? Only been here a term. They had a fire practice a few weeks back but I was off sick. Even if I had brought the register out it wouldn’t have made no difference, right? It would have said Jenny was out of the building. Shown her bloody signature. Proved what I am telling you now. That she signed herself out.
I glance at Jen, enough to know that she still can’t remember and that it’s tearing her up.
‘Perhaps she just doesn’t want everyone to think it was her fault,’ I say.
Because why on earth would Jenny go in again?
PP: When did you realise that Jennifer Covey was still in the building?
AJ: I saw her mother running in, yelling for her. And then that daft cow went in too.
PP: Do you mean Rowena White?
AJ: Yeah. There were fire engines coming up the road by then. She should have left it up to them, not made their job even harder for them. They ended up having to rescue her too. Not sure what she was trying to prove. She must have wanted the attention.
I hear Annette Jenks’s jealousy without needing to listen to her voice. Because when it came down to it, the drama queen failed to do anything remotely deserving of attention. I can almost taste the bitterness of her words. She’ll be seething now about Rowena’s small mention in the Richmond Post.
[Detective Sergeant Baker asks PP out of the room. After three minutes PP returns.]
PP: Do you know Silas Hyman?
I remember Sarah telling you that the head teacher or a governor would have given the police information on anyone who could have a grudge against the school, ‘straight off the bat’. So someone, presumably Sally Healey, had told the police about Silas Hyman.
Perfect recall and logic and they think I’m a cabbage.
AJ: I’ve no idea who Silas Hyman is. What kind of a name is Silas anyways?
PP: He was a teacher at the school, who left in April.
AJ: I wouldn’t know him then, would I? Only started working there in May.
PP: You’ve never heard of him?
AJ: As I said, only started at the place in May.
PP: Nobody gossiped about him?
AJ: No.
PP: A teacher who’d been fired only a few weeks before and there was no gossip?
[AJ shakes head.]
PP: I must say that I find it hard to believe.
My respect for the harsh-faced PP goes up a notch.
‘You see,’ Jenny says. ‘Silas and Annette didn’t even know each other. Let alone have an affair.’
Sarah gets another crumpled statement out of her bag.
Her mobile rings and she starts, as if someone has seen her. I go closer and hear Mohsin’s voice at the other end.
‘Prescoes, that printing company, they printed three hundred copies of the Sidley House calendar. Does that help at all?’
‘Three hundred people knew that it was Adam’s birthday on Wednesday. And also that it was sports day so the school would be virtually empty. What about the witness?’
‘Sorry, honey, Penny won’t budge on that, and no one else is talking to me either. They probably don’t trust me. Fuck knows why.’
She thanks him and hangs up. Then she smooths out the next crumpled statement.
The key this time is SH for Sally Healey. The interviewer is AB – Detective Inspector Baker. The time it started was 5.55 p.m. The interviews were almost concurrent.