Afterwards

You’re having a meeting with Sarah’s boss in an office downstairs. We go to join you.

‘Aunt Sarah’s normal boss is on maternity leave,’ Jenny says. ‘Rosemary, remember, the really quirky one?’

I don’t remember Rosemary-the-really-quirky-one. I’ve never heard of a Rosemary.

‘Aunt Sarah loathes this guy, Baker. Thinks he’s an idiot,’ Jenny continues. She’s been fascinated by the flashing-lights-and-sirens side of Sarah’s police life since she was six years old. And I get that. How can my part- time job writing an arts review page in the Richmond Post compete with being a detective sergeant in the Met? What film, book or exhibition is going to out-cool directing a helicopter during a drugs bust? Bust. You may as well throw in the towel at the start on that one. But joking about fellow workers, that’s what Jenny and I do. OK, so Sarah didn’t joke to Jenny about quirky-Rosemary and Baker, whoever he is, but she clearly tells her the gossip.

We reach the office they’ve allocated for this meeting at the same time as you and Sarah.

Why on earth are you holding a newspaper? I know that I have a go at you at the weekends for reading the papers rather than engaging with the family, and we’ve done the whole ‘It’s the caveman looking into the fire to have time to let the week settle’ thing. But now? Here?

We follow you and Sarah in. The ceiling is too low, trapping the heat. There’s no window. Not even a fan to shift the stale heavy air around.

* * *

Detective Inspector Baker introduces himself to you without getting up from the chair. His sweaty, doughy face is unreadable.

‘I want to fill you in on a little of the background to our investigation,’ DI Baker says, his voice as stodgy as his physique. ‘Arson in schools is extremely common. Sixteen cases a week in the UK. But people getting hurt in arson attacks on schools is not common. Nor is it common for fires to be started during the daytime.’

You’re getting irritated – get to the point, man.

‘The arsonist may have thought that the school would be empty because it was sports day,’ DI Baker continues. ‘Or it may have been a deliberate attempt to hurt one of the occupants.’

He leans forward, his sweaty polyester shirt sticking slightly to the back of his plastic chair.

‘Do you know of anyone who may have wished to harm Jennifer?’

‘Of course not,’ you snap.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Jenny says to me, a shake in her voice. ‘It was just a fluke I was in there, Mum. Pure chance, that’s all.’

I think of that figure last night, going into her room, leaning over her.

‘She’s a seventeen-year-old girl, for fuck’s sake,’ you say.

Your sister tightens her hand on yours.

‘For fuck’s sake!’ you repeat. You never use that word in your sister’s hearing, or your children’s.

‘She was the victim of a hate-mail campaign, wasn’t she?’ DI Baker asks you, an edge now to his bland voice.

‘But that stopped,’ you said. ‘Months ago. It’s not connected. It has nothing to do with the fire.’

Beside me, Jenny has become rigid.

She never told us how she felt when she was called slut, tart, jailbait and worse. Or when dog mess and used condoms were posted through our letterbox addressed to her. Instead she turned to Ivo and her friends, excluding us.

‘She’s seventeen now, darling, of course she turns to them.’

You were so infuriatingly understanding, so ‘I’ve-read-the-manuals-on-teenagers’ rational.

‘But we’re her parents,’ I said. Because parents out-rank everyone else.

‘There’s been nothing for almost five months,’ you tell DI Baker. ‘It’s all over.’

DI Baker flicks through some notes in front of him as if finding evidence to disagree with you.

I remember how desperate we were for it to be over. Those awful things that were said to her. It was shocking. Grotesque. The ugly, vicious world had come crashing through our letterbox and into our daughter’s life. And, this I think is key, you hadn’t kept it at bay. You thought you hadn’t done your job as her father and protected her.

Those hours you spent looking at the pieces of A4 lined paper, trying to trace the origin of the cut-out letters – which newspaper? Which magazine? Studying postmarks on the ones that had been posted, agonising over the meaning of the ones that had been hand-delivered – he’d been here, right outside our door, for God’s sake, and you hadn’t got him.

I’d understood after a little while that you wanted to be the person who caught him and made him stop. To make amends to Jenny or to prove something to yourself? I thought it was both enmeshed together.

Then two weeks after – two weeks Mike – the day the hand-delivered envelope with the used condom arrived, you told Sarah. As you’d predicted, she told us we must go to the police – and why the hell hadn’t we done that to start with? We duly did as she said but, as you’d also predicted, the police – apart from Sarah – didn’t consider it important. Well, not as important as it was to you and me. Not life- stoppingly important. And they didn’t find out anything. It wasn’t as if we could help them; we had no idea who might target Jenny like that or why.

Poor Jen. So furious and mortified when the police interviewed her friends and boyfriend. The teenage paranoia that adults disapprove of their choices taken to an extreme.

But you’d already interrogated most of them, grabbing them as Jenny tried to hurry them past us and up to her room. Those long-limbed, long-haired, silly girls seemed unlikely hate-mailers. But what about one of the boys who were friends with her? Did one harbour hatred? Unreturned love turning acrid and spreading across venomous letters?

And Ivo. I’ve always been suspicious of him – not as a hate-mailer but as a man. Boy. Maybe because he’s so different to you, with his slight frame and fine features and his preference at seventeen for Auden over car engine manuals. I think he lacks substance. But you disagree. You think he’s a fine fella; a great lad. Possibly because you don’t want to be a cliched possessive father? Because you don’t want to alienate Jenny? But whatever our reasons, you support Jenny over Ivo, while I jibe.

Though even with my prejudices against him, I don’t think he’d send her hate mail. Besides, he’s her boyfriend, and she adores him, so why would he?

‘When, exactly, was the last incident?’ DI Baker asks you.

‘February the fourteenth,’ you reply. ‘Months ago.’

Valentine’s day. A Wednesday. Adam worried about his times-tables challenge; Jenny late down to breakfast as usual. But we’d been up for an hour already, waiting for the sound of the letterbox. Just the click of metal shutting made me feel physically sick.

It was the letter with the C word across it. I can’t say that word in connection with her. I just can’t.

But the day after that letter there was nothing. Then a whole week went by with no hate mail. Then a fortnight. Until over four months had passed, so that yesterday I picked up the post hardly bothering to check.

‘You’re sure there’s been nothing since the fourteenth of February?’ DI Baker asks.

‘Yes. I told you-’

He interrupts you. ‘Could she have hidden something from you?’

‘No, of course not,’ you say, frustrated. ‘The fire is nothing to do with the hate-mailer. Presumably you haven’t seen this yet?’

You slap the newspaper you’re holding in front of DI Baker. The Richmond Post. The headline shouts out: ‘Arsonist Sets Fire to Local Primary School!’

The by-line is Tara’s.