Afterwards

DI Baker ignores your newspaper.

‘Were there any other forms of hate mail that you didn’t tell us about?’ he continues. ‘Texts on her mobile, for example, or emails, or postings on a social networking site?’

You glare at him.

‘I asked Jenny and there was nothing like that,’ Sarah says.

You’re pacing the office now; five paces from one wall to the other, as if you can outpace whatever is hunting you down.

‘Would she have told you?’ asks DI Baker.

‘She would have told me, or her parents, yes,’ Sarah replies.

But we hadn’t just taken her word for it. We searched; you breaking every rule in the bringing-up-teenagers book, me being a normal mother.

‘MySpace? Facebook?’ DI Baker asks as if we don’t know what ‘social networking site’ means, but you interrupt.

‘The hate-mailer had nothing to do with it. Christ, how many more times?’ You jab at the newspaper. ‘It’s this teacher, Silas Hyman, you should be investigating.’

‘We haven’t read the paper, Mike,’ Sarah says. ‘We’ll read it if you’ll give us a minute.’

She must be humouring you, I think. After all, what on earth could Tara know about the fire that she – a policewoman and your sister – doesn’t?

The picture of the burnt-out school dominates the front page, the oddly undamaged bronze statue of a child in the foreground. Under it is a picture of Jenny.

‘It’s from my Facebook page,’ Jenny says, looking at her photo. ‘The one Ivo took at Easter, when we did that canoeing course. I can’t believe she’s done that. She must have gone onto my site and then just printed it off, or scanned it. Isn’t that theft?’

I love her outrage. Out of all of this, to mind about her photo being used.

But the contrast between our daughter in the burns unit and that outdoorsy, healthy, beautiful girl in the photo is cuttingly painful.

Maybe Jenny feels it too. She goes to the door.

‘The hate-mailer didn’t do it and Dad’s idea that Silas Hyman did it is completely ridiculous and I’m going for a walk.’

‘OK.’

‘I wasn’t asking permission!’ she snaps. And then she leaves. Just the word ‘hate-mailer’ pushing those old buttons again.

Just after she’s gone, Sarah opens the paper out to show a double-page spread, with a banner headline across both pages.

‘Jinxed School.’

On the left-hand page is the sub-headline, ‘Fire Started Deliberately’, and another photograph of this ‘popular and beautiful’ girl.

Tara has turned Jenny’s torment into private entertainment. ‘Beautiful seventeen-year-old… fighting for her life… horribly burnt… severely mutilated.’ Not news, but prurient news-as-porn; titillating garbage.

Tara makes me out as a kind of superhero-mum racing into the flames. But a rather tardy superhero, arriving too late in the day to save the beautiful heroine.

Tara finishes with a flourish.

‘The police are continuing their urgent hunt for the person responsible for arson, and possibly a double murder.’

Jenny and my deaths would add more cachet to her story.

Directly opposite, on page 2, Tara’s just rehashed an article she’d written in March, adding a new intro.

Only four months ago, the Richmond Post reported on Silas Hyman, 30, a teacher at Sidley House Preparatory School who was fired after a child was seriously injured. The seven-year-old boy broke both his legs after plunging from an outside metal fire escape onto the playground below in an alleged ‘accident’.

Just as she had the first time, she doesn’t say that Mr Hyman was nowhere near the playground at the time. And those quotation marks around the word ‘accident’ – saying that it wasn’t. But who’s going to sue her over quotation marks? Slippery as her patent leather Miu Miu bag.

And still her bid for journalistic glory, measured in column inches, continues.

Situated in a leafy London suburb, the exclusive ?12,500-a-year school, founded thirteen years ago, is marketed as a nurturing environment where ‘every child is celebrated and valued’. But even four months ago questions were being asked about its safety.

I interviewed parents at the time.

A mother of an eight-year-old girl told me, ‘This is supposed to be a caring school, but this man clearly didn’t look after the children. We are thinking about taking our daughter away.’

Another parent told me, ‘I am very angry. An accident like this just shouldn’t be allowed to happen. It’s totally unacceptable.’

In March Tara had titled her article ‘Playground Plunge!’ but now she’s changed it to ‘Teacher Fired!’

So on the right-hand side of the newspaper is ‘Teacher Fired’ and on the left-hand side is ‘Fire Started Deliberately’. And the connection crackles between them, an invisible circuit of blame – the fired teacher exacting his fiery revenge.

DI Baker’s mobile goes and he answers it.

The Richmond Post lies on the table, like a challenge thrown into the ring – your Silas Hyman contender for arsonist versus DI Baker’s hate-mailer.

I know that you’ve never liked Mr Hyman. Before he was fired we’d had weeks of sniping over him. You thought I totally over-exaggerated Mr Hyman’s effect on Addie.

‘“Exaggerated” doesn’t need “totally” and “over” added to it,’ I said frostily.

‘Not all of us did an English degree,’ you replied, stung.

‘Only half of one, remember?’

Mr Hyman made us fight. And we don’t normally fight.

‘Before Mr Hyman, Addie was miserable,’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

He was picked on, couldn’t do the work, had virtually no self-esteem.

‘So he’s come through that,’ you said.

‘Yes, because of Mr Hyman. He’s sorted out who he sits next to, worked out the boys who are likely to become his friends, and they are now. They’re asking him on playdates. He’s got a sleepover this weekend. When’s he ever had one of those? And he organises who the children sit next to on the coach when they go on trips. Addie used to dread no one sitting next to him. And he’s got him confident in Maths and English.’

‘He’s just doing his job.’

‘He calls Addie “Sir Covey”. That’s lovely, isn’t it? A knight’s name?’

‘It’ll probably make the other kids tease him.’

‘No, he’s got pet names for all of them.’

Why didn’t you appreciate him more?

An attractive young teacher with a sparkle in his eyes, I’d wondered if your antagonism towards him was because he’d kissed me on the cheek when we went to parents’ evening in the first term. ‘Totally inappropriate!’ you’d said, not realising that Mr Hyman is just very physical – tousling the children’s hair as he passes them at their desks, a quick warm hug at going-home time. And yes, us mothers did smile a little about him, but not in a serious way.

Then when Mr Hyman was fired and I came home that day and was outraged on his behalf, you just seemed irritated. You said you paid the school fees, worked bloody hard to do that, and before you set off for a gruelling trip the next day you didn’t want to hear about some inadequate teacher who’d got himself the sack.

Until yesterday afternoon I’d have argued with you for suspecting him. Like Jenny, I’d have said it was completely ridiculous! But all my old certainties are burnt to the ground. Nothing is like yesterday any more. So I don’t trust anyone. Not even Mr Hyman. No one at all.