We arrive at the offices of the Richmond Post.
It’s been an age since I was here, preferring to send in my monthly page by email. As we go in, I’m embarrassed that Sarah will discover that I’m not loved here as she is at her police station. Frankly, I’m probably no more valued than the out-of-date yucca plant in the corner of what passes for reception.
Sarah must have phoned ahead because Tara arrives almost immediately, pink cheeks glowing. Sarah looks less than thrilled to see her.
‘I spoke to one of your colleagues,’ Sarah says curtly. ‘Geoff Bagshot.’
‘Yes, I recognised the name, Detective Sergeant McBride,’ she says. ‘You chucked me out of the hospital.’
I remember Sarah’s uniform-and-truncheon voice as she virtually pushed Tara away from you. But Tara only knows her as a police officer; not as a member of our family.
‘Geoff’s left it for me to handle.’
I see Sarah stiffen at Tara’s ‘handling’ of her.
‘There’s an office we can use this way,’ Tara says, her stride quick and determined; she’s always enjoyed a spat.
‘When I met you, you said you were friends with Grace?’ Sarah says.
‘I was trying to gain access to her ward, so I stretched the truth a little. It’s what you have to do sometimes in journalism. Clearly I don’t have much in common with a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two.’
‘Nor she with you. Clearly.’
Thank you, Sarah.
Tara escorts her into Geoff’s office; she must have turfed him out. It looks like the set for a film about journalists – old mugs with the dregs of cold coffee in them and illegal ashtrays brimming with butts. I’ve only been here once or twice a year, and it’s been mineral water, no smoking and a digestive biscuit if you’re lucky. Maybe Tara’s taken over décor.
‘What time did you arrive at Sidley House School on the day of the fire?’ Sarah asks, wasting no time on preliminaries.
‘Three fifteen p.m. I already told your buddy.’
‘That was extremely fast?’
‘What is this? Interviews in duplicate?’ She’s enjoying herself.
‘Who told you?’ Sarah asks.
Tara is silent.
‘You arrive barely fifteen minutes after a fire started which has left two people critically ill and I need to know who told you.’
‘I can’t reveal my source.’
‘Your tip-off was hardly from Deep Throat. And this,’ she says, gesturing around the crummy office, ‘isn’t exactly the Washington Post.’
She must have heard me joking to Jenny about Tara; remembered it. Unlike me, she’s said it to her face.
‘Can we do a deal?’ Tara asks.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I’ll tell you in return for information that you will only give to my paper.’
Sarah is silent.
‘You don’t think the kid did it any more?’ Tara says. ‘You can’t do or you wouldn’t still be investigating.’
Sarah says nothing, which Tara takes as an affirmative. She glows with satisfaction. The cat that got the cream with a side order of pilchards.
‘So are you going to investigate Silas Hyman properly this time?’ she says.
Again, Sarah says nothing.
‘I need something back if I’m going to play ball here,’ Tara continues.
‘Adam Covey isn’t responsible for the fire,’ Sarah says. ‘And in a few minutes we’ll discuss Silas Hyman.’
Tara almost purrs with self-satisfaction.
‘It was Annette Jenks,’ she says. ‘The secretary at the school, who phoned us. At a minute or so past three. She had to shout above the sound of the fire alarm.’
‘Why did she call your paper?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. We did a photo and article a few weeks back when the school raised money for a charity. You know the whole giant-cheque-and-smug-rich-kids-holding-it routine? Sidley House were keen to get publicity for it and we obliged. She’d have our number from that.’
‘Did she phone any other papers?’
‘I don’t know. But she did phone a TV station. Their reporters and cameramen arrived about half an hour after us.’
I remember again the TV news playing while you were hurrying through the hospital to find Jenny.
‘She wanted us to take her picture,’ Tara continues. ‘I think Dave, our photographer, took a few to keep her quiet. But once the TV mob arrived she was all over them.’
I remember Maisie talking to Sarah in the shadowy cafeteria. ‘… There was a lot of smoke by then but she was smiling, like she was enjoying it, or at least she was not at all upset and she had lipstick on.’
The idea of someone getting a kick out of this – an ego-driven high – is horrible. But is it anything more than that? Could her need to take centre stage be extreme enough to create the stage; making reality TV so that she could be in it? I remember Jenny talking about the hot-air balloon: ‘If Annette had a child she’d put him in it.’
‘Going back to Silas Hyman,’ Sarah says. ‘You published a story about him a few months ago. After the incident in the playground.’
‘Yes.’
‘How did you find out about that?’
‘An anonymous text message was sent to the landline here. It was read out by one of those weird electronic voices.’
‘Do you know who it was?’
‘Like I just said, anonymous.’
‘Yes. But do you know who it was?’
Irritation hardens Tara’s face.
‘No. Couldn’t trace it. It was from a payphone. But it wasn’t Annette Jenks, if that’s what you’re thinking, because she wasn’t working there then. It was still that old cow of a secretary. Took me ten minutes before she’d let me speak to the head to confirm the story.’
‘So you published your article. Front page.’
Tara tosses her silky hair as an answer.
‘You had quotes from outraged parents. Did you tell parents about the incident, or did they come to you?’
‘I really don’t remember.’
‘I am sure you do.’
‘Alright, I phoned around a few families; got a couple of quotes in response to what I told them. So what do the police have on him then?’
‘Nothing.’
Tara looks at Sarah, coldly furious. She turns off her iPhone, which has been covertly recording this; not wanting her humiliation on record.
‘You said you’d do a trade,’ she says, petulantly. Her parents really should have made her play Monopoly and lose once in a while.
‘No,’ Sarah says coolly. ‘That’s what you inferred.’
As we walk to the car, I glance back at the Richmond Post offices and, in a fit of self-indulgence, think of my dreams being filed away in an ugly grey filing cabinet.
Because following Sarah, seeing her talent and commitment, has made me see that any promise I once had hasn’t been kept. She’s made me remember what I so hoped for – longed for – once for myself. It wasn’t to review art and books, but to be the artist or the writer. It was absurd to think I could bash out Anna Karenina or a Hockney between school drop-off and pick-up while still fitting in a trip to Sainsbury’s. Although people do. And a mediocre book or painting would be fine. Just something; to try to create something.
I used to make excuses to myself: when I had more time; when Jenny was older; when Adam started school. But somehow, without realising it or even really noticing, I stopped making excuses because I’d given up.
In the car, Sarah phones Mohsin on hands-free. She turns off the air-conditioning so she can hear him.
‘Hi, Mohsin.’
‘Hey, baby, you hanging in there?’
‘Has Penny got anything on the hate-mailer?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Until she does, I’m going to work on the assumption that Jenny saw either the arsonist or someone connected to the arsonist, which is why he wants to kill her now.’
Mohsin is silent.
‘You did hear about the attacker?’
‘Yes.’
He doesn’t say anything more and the sound of his silence fills the hot car.
I see the effect on Sarah, a slight sagging of the shoulders, and I wish I could tell her I am with her, supporting her.
‘It was the secretary, Annette Jenks, who tipped off the Richmond Post about the fire,’ Sarah says. ‘But there was another tip-off, four months ago, about Silas Hyman not supervising the playground. Someone wanted him out of the school.’
Mohsin is quiet. I hear a noise, maybe a biro point being clicked in and out.
‘What if the witness is right, Sarah?’
‘You’re not an uncle, are you?’ she says.
‘Not yet, though my sister’s working on it.’
‘I know Adam. Who he really is, the bedrock of him, if you like, because he is a part of Michael. And therefore a part of me. And he didn’t do this.’
Silence seems to ratchet up the heat in the car.
‘Silas Hyman had birthday cake candles,’ Sarah says. ‘Eight blue ones, like the ones that must have been on Adam’s cake. And he has the school calendar with Adam’s birthday ringed. And his wife, I know she’s lying. Or hiding something at least. I’m sure she is.’
‘You went to his house?’ He sounds horrified.
‘No one else is doing anything, are they?’ she snaps. ‘Not now everyone’s decided that my gentle little nephew is an arsonist.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Sarah, you can’t just go to someone’s house.’
She says nothing. The sound of a pen tapping hard now in the background, or maybe a foot.
‘I’m worried about you, darling, what’ll happen if someone finds out and-’
Sarah interrupts, her tone weary now. ‘I know. Actually from a getting-into-hot-water angle, it’s a lot worse.’
‘How?’
‘His wife was bathing their kids and I just didn’t clock it. I’m a mother, an aunt; bathing children is just so normal and…’
She breaks off. So that’s what rattled her. She’d been pretending to be on police business when children were naked.
‘I left once I realised,’ Sarah continues. ‘But it made me so angry that I was in this position. And then I felt so angry about everything. And then this bloody woman was feeling sorry for herself, sorry for herself!’
‘Do you think she’ll report you?’
‘If she finds out I didn’t have any authorisation to go round there, then yes. Most probably.’
‘Well, I’m kind of impressed, actually,’ Mohsin says. ‘I always knew you had a subversive streak but never had you down as an out-and-out rebel.’
‘Thanks. So will you help?’
We both wait for the sound of Mohsin’s voice in the car. Nothing.
‘You told me the files wouldn’t be securely stored,’ Sarah ventures.
‘I know. Totally out of line. Baker will bust my guts for that if he finds out.’ The sound of the clicking biro again. ‘What do you need?’
Sarah’s relief is an exhaled breath, changing the atmosphere in her car.
‘The names of the investors in Sidley House.’
‘Penny told me that fraud was ruled out almost straight away,’ Mohsin says. ‘They’re comfortably in the black, according to the bank.’
‘Yes, and they’re starting the school up again in September. There’s no reason for fraud that I can see. But I need to check all of it. And when I spoke to the head teacher she didn’t like talking about the investors and I want to know why not.’
‘You spoke to her too?’
Sarah was silent.
‘Jesus, honey.’
‘I also need to know if we’ve got anything on a man called Donald White. I’m pretty sure he’s abusive to his daughter, possibly his wife.’
‘OK. I’ll do what I can,’ he says. ‘I’m doing an extra shift tonight. So I’ll meet you for breakfast tomorrow morning. Is that grim hospital café still going?’
We arrive back at the hospital car park and the residual heat in the early evening air scalds me. I hurry ahead of Sarah towards the building. This time I can’t see Jenny waiting for me.
Once inside the hospital’s protective skin the pain again vanishes, and for a moment the state of not-being-in-pain makes me feel euphoric.
I follow Sarah towards ICU. Jenny is leaning against a wall in the corridor.
‘I tried, you know, the scratch-and-sniff memory thing,’ she says. ‘But it’s no good. A school doesn’t smell like a hospital. At least Sidley House didn’t.’
It’s what I’d been banking on. Sidley House smelt of polish and hoovered carpets and cut flowers, not strong disinfectant and antiseptic and lino.
A little ahead of us, Sarah is scrolling through her texts and emails; the last point before ICU where mobiles are still allowed. We look over her shoulder. Nosiness and eavesdropping are becoming second nature.
Among her texts is one from Ivo. He’s got a standby flight from Barbados, an overnight, and will be here in the morning. I look at Jen, expecting to see her beamy-happy, but her face looks tight with anxiety; almost fear. Maybe she’s started to see their relationship for what it is. And perhaps that’s better now, than when he actually arrives.
‘Jen-’ I begin, but she cuts me off.
‘I was about to go in,’ she says, pointing at a door behind her.
It’s the entrance to the hospital chapel, which I’ve never noticed before. The chapel is the one place in the hospital that won’t smell of disinfectant and antiseptic.
We go in together. But I’m not worried, because surely it won’t smell anything like a fire in here. In any case, I’ll be with her.
Wooden pews and a carpet, threadbare but a carpet nonetheless. Even lilies, like the ones Mrs Healey always has in the small waiting area outside her office; their smell pungent in the room.
The combination of scents transports me momentarily into Sidley House; as if the gateway to a memory has a keypad and the right sensory code is punched in.
Looking at Jenny, I know that she feels it too.
‘I was near Mrs Healey’s office,’ she says. ‘And the lilies smelt really strong, you could smell the water a little too. I can remember that.’
She pauses a moment and I wait. She’s going further into the memory. Should I stop her?
‘I’m feeling happy. And I’m going down the stairs.’
Behind us, the door closes. An elderly woman has come in. It’s broken the sensory thread to the past.
‘You were going down the stairs?’ I ask. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah. I must have already got to the upper ground floor because that’s where Mrs Healey has those lilies.’
Maybe Annette Jenks was telling the truth after all about Jenny signing herself out.
Jenny closes her eyes again, and again I don’t know whether to let her continue with this. But how else are we going to help Addie?
Her face relaxes. It’s all OK. She’s back in a summer’s afternoon at school.
She screams.
‘Jenny-?’
She’s running out of the chapel.
At the back, the elderly woman has lit a candle, the smoke no more than a charcoal line in the air. But enough.
I catch up with her.
‘I’m sorry, I should never have-’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
I put my arm around her and she’s shaking.
‘I’m fine now, Mum. I wasn’t actually back in the fire, just close.’
We walk to the garden together.
I’d thought memories were kept behind a gateway, wrought-iron, I’d visualised, with spaces to glimpse through and sometimes opening for a short time to let you actually wander in again.
But I see a corridor, now, like a long hospital corridor, and behind each set of swing doors is another memory leading inexorably to the fire. I don’t think you can control how far you go along it, or know what lies behind the next set of doors. And I dread her reaching the end and the full horror of that afternoon.
Out here in the garden, the shadows are lengthening into soothing darkness.
‘It was a good idea,’ I say. ‘To think of the chapel.’
The one place in the hospital that smelt like the school; that even had candles and matches.
‘That wasn’t why I was there,’ she says.
She turns a little away from me, her face half hidden in darkness.
‘I was hoping to suck up to God. A last minute dot com search for a place in heaven.’
Anxieties hidden in sleeves and pockets and fears stuffed up jumpers, but my God, Mike, I didn’t expect this.
‘I’m not that scared actually,’ she says. ‘I mean, this whole thing, whatever we are now, does make it likely there’s a heaven, some kind of an afterlife, doesn’t it? It proves that the physical world and the physical body isn’t all there is.’
I’ve imagined talking to her about so many things: drugs, abortion, STDs, tattoos, piercings, internet safety. Some of these we have actually discussed and I had all my research to hand. But I’ve never researched this conversation. Never imagined it.
I thought we were so liberal, bringing up our children without God in the house – no church-going, no grace before food, no prayers at bedtime. I secretly thought we were more honest than our church-going friends, who I assumed used going to church as a means of getting their children into high-achieving free St Swithun’s. No, I’d let my children make up their own minds, when they were older. In the meantime, we’d sleep in on Sunday morning and go to a garden centre, not church.
But my lazy lack of faith, my in-vogue atheism, has taken away the safety net hanging beneath our children’s lives.
I just didn’t think it through; never thought what it would be like facing death with no knowledge of a heaven or a father-figure God to go to.
Maybe in the old days, when children died so frequently, people were more religious because they had to know where their dead children were. And if a child was dying they needed to tell her where she was going next. That it would all be alright. And to believe that. No wonder they all flocked to church. Did antibiotics kill off the devout in us? Penicillin replacing faith?
I’m talking too much, my thoughts jabbering away; like Maisie trying to hide the jagged truth with a swirl of words; trying to drown out the ticking clock, the speeding car, the sound death makes.
‘Do Christians believe that you go to purgatory if you’re not baptised?’ Jenny asks.
She’s facing this.
‘You won’t go to purgatory,’ I snap, furious. ‘There’s no such thing as purgatory.’
How dare any God send my daughter to purgatory? As if I could walk into the head teacher’s study and say that it’s absolutely unjust for her to have a detention and I am taking her home right now.
Still talking too much.
I have to join her. Face this too.
I turn to look at the gorgon.
And death isn’t a clock ticking or a car speeding towards her.
I see a girl falling overboard from life and no one is able to reach her.
Exposed and alone.
Three weeks less a day until she drowns.
Maybe it has been there all the time; this girl-alone-in-an-ocean silence; that ghastly vast expanse of it which I didn’t want to hear.
‘So that was what this drowning thing was really about,’ Nanny Voice says. ‘All along it was really this.’
Perhaps. Yes.
But she’s not going to drown. I won’t let her.
My certainty startles me. And there’s fear in it; the nervous, jittery-as-hell kind. But anything else is simply unthinkable.
Jenny dying before August the twentieth, an actual date on our calendar in the kitchen, and all those days afterwards that won’t contain her is ludicrous. Unbearable.
And I’m not clinging onto your hope now but believing it – knowing it – for myself.
Jenny living is my only truth.
Because your child staying alive trumps everything. ‘You’re going to live,’ I say to Jenny. ‘You don’t need to think about any of this. Because you’re going to live.’
I have my rope around her.