Rowena and Maisie are waiting in an office, with a young police officer I don’t recognise.
Sarah is with Mohsin and Penny just outside.
‘Baker’s on a call. He won’t be long,’ Mohsin says. ‘I’m still not sure about allowing Maisie White to be present at this.’
‘We’ll be able to watch her reaction too,’ Penny replies. ‘And questioning Rowena might tip Mum finally into telling us the truth. If it doesn’t work, Jacobs is finding a social worker to act as a competent adult.’
Baker arrives. I see him meet Penny’s eye and something is communicated between them, but I can’t interpret it. Perhaps it’s the closest Baker gets to shame.
‘Has Maisie White told us yet where her husband is?’ Sarah asks.
‘Claims she has no idea,’ Penny says. ‘The stupid bitch is lying again for him.’
I am shocked by the ugliness of her epithet for Maisie. Odd that language can still have the power to shock me.
They go in, while Sarah waits outside.
The air is thick with heat, the plastic stacking chairs sticking together. The nylon fibres in the carpet-tiles glint in the harsh light.
Rowena looks frail in her nightdress and dressing gown, her damaged hands still bandaged. Maisie fusses around her, sorting out her drip stand.
Mohsin formally introduces everyone in the room while the young police officer records it.
‘Are you sure you’re comfortable?’ Mohsin asks Rowena.
‘I’m fine. Yes. Thank you.’
Maisie rests her hand on Rowena’s arm, unable to hold her hand. She’s again wearing a long-sleeved shirt, no sign of the bruises underneath.
‘Your father has an alibi for the time of the fire,’ Mohsin says, his voice matter-of-fact; but I see him studying Rowena’s face intently. Penny is watching Maisie.
‘Yes,’ Rowena says, barely reacting. ‘Daddy was in Scotland on Wednesday.’
‘Did your father ask you to light the fire, Rowena?’ Mohsin asks, still matter-of-fact.
‘Of course he didn’t,’ Maisie says, her voice too high. A vein is flickering in her temple.
‘What about Silas Hyman?’ Mohsin says to Rowena, his voice sterner. ‘I asked you before-’
‘No, I told you,’ Rowena says, distressed. ‘He didn’t ask me to do anything.’
‘An hour ago someone tried to kill Jennifer Covey,’ Baker says. ‘We don’t have the time or patience for you to protect the man who did it.’
I hear a sharp intake of breath. Maisie has gone white. She looks clammy as if she might vomit.
Rowena is silent, struggling. She turns to her mother.
‘I think it’s best if you left.’
‘But I have to be with you.’
‘We can find another competent adult to be with Rowena,’ Baker says.
‘Is that what you’d like?’ Mohsin asks Rowena.
She nods.
Maisie leaves the room. I don’t see her face. But I see her stumble as she’s rejected.
The door closes behind her.
‘If you just give me a little while,’ Penny says to Rowena.
‘We need to find someone-’
‘I have to tell you the truth now. Because of Jenny. I have to. It wasn’t Dad. It wasn’t anything to do with him.’
I think of Silas Hyman flirting with Jenny then moving onto Rowena. I think of him swearing and raging at the prize-giving. I think of the flowers he gave to the nurse and the door to ICU opening.
‘It was Mummy,’ Rowena says.
Maisie?
I see her loving face and feel her encompassing hugs.
I think of her that day at the sports field, handing me a little something for Adam, beautifully wrapped, a spot-on present inside.
She’d known it was his birthday.
Of course she had! She’d known him since he was born. And three hundred other people knew it was his birthday.
She went to the school just before the fire.
To find Rowena. To give her a lift. Because the tubes were up the spout. ‘Chauffeur-Mum to the fore!’
The spool of our friendship stretches back through the years we’ve known one another and won’t unravel.
‘Mummy’s afraid of being poor,’ Rowena quietly continues. ‘She’s always had lots of money. My grandparents were rich and she’s never had to work.’
But Maisie said it wouldn’t matter to her being poor and she didn’t mind working. ‘I’ve always rather wanted a job, actually.’
‘She went into Sidley House to read,’ Rowena continues, ‘so that she could keep a check on what was happening after I’d left. Sally Healey didn’t tell anyone that there were no new admissions. Even Dad. Well, not for ages. But Mum found out from Elizabeth Fisher that no one was phoning any more.’
But she didn’t go in to spy! She went in to read because she loves being around young children.
I feel our friendship. So heavily substantial and Aga-warm; so many years invested in it, each one adding to its weight.
‘Did she ever leave your room?’ Mohsin asks.
‘Well, yes, she goes and gets things to eat. She went home to get me a clean nightie and my washbag. She goes out to use the phone, too. You’re not allowed a mobile in here.’
‘An hour or so ago, when we left you with your mother,’ Mohsin says, ‘did she leave your room again then?’
Rowena’s voice is so quiet that I have to strain to hear it.
‘Yes. Almost right away.’
There is no way, no way, that Maisie tried to kill Jenny. Everyone’s got this wrong.
‘Thank you, Rowena. We need to interview you again, formally, with what’s known as a competent adult present with you.’
Outside the office, Baker turns to the young policeman. ‘Chase up that social worker. I’m not going to give a defence lawyer any rope on this one.’
‘Maisie White must have seen Jenny being taken out of ICU and followed her,’ Mohsin says. ‘Got lucky with the MRI suite. Security’s not as tight.’
Sarah nods. ‘When Jenny’s ventilator was tampered with the first time, it was in the burns unit. Maisie was staying in Rowena’s room just down the corridor. No one would have questioned her being there.’
‘So you think it was Maisie, not Natalia Hyman?’ Mohsin asks.
‘Yes.’
I’d only seen a back view and hadn’t got close – but it couldn’t have been Maisie. It couldn’t have been.
‘Jenny must have seen her at the school,’ Sarah says.
‘And she had Jenny’s mobile,’ Mohsin says. ‘If there was anything incriminating on it, she’d have had plenty of time to delete it.’
As they speak it’s as if a painting-by-numbers portrait is being filled in, one colour at a time.
But I won’t look at their vicious portrait of my friend.
Because Maisie’s known Jenny since she was a little girl of four. She’s heard me talk about her and Adam, all the time. All the time. She knows how much I love them.
She’s my friend and I trust her.
I can’t add this to what has happened.
I can’t.
So I turn away from their picture of Maisie.
‘What about the domestic abuse?’ Mohsin asks.
‘God knows what’s been going on in that family,’ Sarah says.
‘Find Maisie White,’ DI Baker says to Penny. ‘And arrest her for the arson attack and attempted murder of Jennifer Covey.’
‘She’s in Rowena’s room,’ Sarah says. ‘I saw her there a few minutes ago.’
Sarah’s been keeping tabs on her, I realise.
Penny goes to arrest Maisie. I don’t go to watch, but instead follow Sarah back into the stifling office.
‘OK, Rowena, we’re waiting for a social worker. In the meantime-’
‘Will Mummy be taken away?’ Rowena asks.
‘I’m sorry, yes.’
Rowena says nothing, staring at the floor. Sarah waits.
‘She didn’t think I’d tell anyone,’ Rowena says, and she looks ashamed.
‘But she told you?’ Sarah says.
Rowena is silent.
‘You don’t have to say anything. This isn’t an interview. Just a chat. If you’d like it.’
I don’t think Sarah is seizing an opportunity. I think she’s just being kind to Rowena. Or perhaps she just needs to know right now, unable to wait.
‘Mummy feels terrible. Really guilty. It’s been awful for her,’ Rowena says. ‘She needed to tell someone. And maybe because I got hurt… maybe she felt she owed me something.’ She starts to weep. ‘She’ll hate me now.’
Sarah sits down next to her.
‘This is awful, but I was glad that she told me,’ Rowena continues. ‘I mean, that she confided in me. She doesn’t do that. Never has. Everyone thinks we’re close, but we’re not. I’m her “little disappointment”.’
But Maisie adores her.
‘When I was little I was pretty, you see,’ Rowena continues. ‘She was proud of me then. But as I got older, well, I stopped being pretty. And she stopped loving me.’
Argue with her, I urge Sarah. Tell her that mothers don’t do that. They don’t stop loving their children.
‘I know this sounds silly, but it was my teeth to begin with,’ Rowena says. ‘She made me go to an orthodontist because they were so crooked, but they were yellow too. Something to do with an antibiotic I’d had as a baby. Mummy tried everything, had me bleaching them at home every night, even though the dentist said it wouldn’t work with that kind of staining. And then it was the usual, you know, blonde hair goes mousey brown and my eyebrows got all big and my face got larger but my eyes didn’t. So I turned ugly. Cinderella in reverse, I suppose. I wasn’t the kind of daughter she wanted any more.’
And still Sarah says nothing. But surely to God, if there is one thing about Maisie that I am absolutely convinced of, it’s that she loves Rowena.
‘It’s hard, you know,’ Rowena says. ‘Not being pretty. I mean, at school the popular girls are the ones with the pretty faces and long hair who are good at music and English and Art. Not the clever girls with bad skin. Not me. A cliché really, isn’t it, for a clever girl to be ugly? And then you go home and it’s the same.’
‘You’re going to Oxford, aren’t you?’ Sarah asks.
‘To read Natural Sciences. She doesn’t tell people that bit. Pretends I’m off to May balls and parties and handsome undergraduates, not a Science lab and an all-girls’ college.
‘You know that Shakespeare sonnet, about love not being love which alters not when it alteration finds? I think it’s about a mother with her child growing up. But not mine.’
But all I can think is how proud Maisie is of Rowena’s reading: ‘Even Shakespeare, when she’s doing Science A levels. My little bookworm!’
Her pride in Rowena. Her love for her. How can these not be real? Her true colours. Because they are what make Maisie who she is.
‘I thought she’d be pleased about Silas,’ Rowena says, and I hear grief in her voice. ‘I mean, he’s handsome, isn’t he? I thought it was like proving to her that I could be like a pretty girl too.’
‘But he’s married for crying out loud,’ I say to her. ‘And he’s thirty. Of course your mother didn’t want him to be your boyfriend; of course she wanted something better for you.’
‘She went to see him,’ Rowena continues, her voice halting. ‘It was Valentine’s Day and he’d sent me a card. She went to his house. Told him he had to stop our relationship.’
The hate mail from Natalia stopped the day after Valentine’s Day. Maisie’s talk with Silas worked.
And I’d do the same for Jenny. If she was sixteen and was with Silas Hyman, I’d do the same. Because this is nothing like Jenny’s relationship with Ivo, nothing like it at all.
‘I loved him,’ Rowena says quietly. ‘I still do. I thought he’d fight for me. But he didn’t.
‘And then Mum got him fired. She phoned the newspaper, not thinking what would happen to the school, just wanting to get him out; punish him too. And she told me she sent him candles, eight blue ones, like the ones on Addie’s cake. She said she wanted him to know that if he ever started anything again with me, she’d make his life hell. That she has that power.’
The Maisie I’ve known for thirteen years is warm and vibrant and ran in the mums’ race every year and always came last by a mile and didn’t give a hoot! I’ve also learnt that she is fragile and vulnerable and bruised. Both these Maisies have been assimilated into my picture of her.
But not this.
A nurse knocks and comes in. It’s Belinda, the nice smiley nurse.
‘There’s a ward round and the doctors need to take a look at her. It’ll take about twenty minutes.’
Sarah stands up. ‘Of course.’
It’s cooler up here in my ward, the open windows and white linoleum at least visually lowering the temperature. A porter is wheeling a trolley, with my comatose body on it, back towards the bed. My scan must be finished.
You are waiting.
Dr Bailstrom’s shoes click across the linoleum towards you, black today but Louboutins, the red flashing on the underside like a warning.
She tells you that their scan shows I have no cognitive function. No brain activity beyond the basics of swallowing, gagging and breathing.
I wasn’t out on a grassy tennis court, warm under my toes, running for a ball, racket outstretched, and thwacking it over the net. I was with Sarah as she spoke to Rowena.
I have never been near my body when they’ve done their scans.
No wonder they think I’m not there.
You ask to be alone with me.
You take my hand in yours.
You say you understand.
And I am amazed by you.
You pull the curtain around my bed.
You lay your head down next to me, so that our faces are close, my hair falling across your cheek. United by almost twenty years of loving each other and seventeen years of loving our child.
The essence of our marriage is distilled in this moment.
Jenny is standing in the doorway.
‘Jen, come in.’
But she shakes her head. ‘I didn’t know,’ she says and leaves.
And I didn’t know either; that our tough-as-old-boots-strong married love contains this delicate intensity at its heart.
I think about speaking to each other every day for nineteen years. Nineteen years times three hundred and sixty five days times however many conversations per day – how many words does that make between us?
An uncountable number.
My hair is still falling across your cheek but I move away from you.
It will help you, my darling, if you think I’m not here. It will make this easier. And I want to make this easier for you.
I leave the room.
Outside the office on the ground floor, everyone is gathering for another interview with Rowena. The social worker is already in there and now people start filing into the office. The corridor has got hotter, faces are sweating. DI Baker’s shirt is untucked and his hands leave clammy marks around the file he’s holding.
I’m thinking of you.
Of when you’ll realise I’m no longer there with you.
Only Penny and Sarah now remain out in the corridor.
‘There’s something you should know,’ Penny says, not meeting Sarah’s eye. ‘You probably should have been told before.’
‘Yes?’
‘Maisie White was the witness who said she saw Adam coming out of the Art room, holding matches.’
I have never known her.