Afterwards

DI Baker turns to Sarah.

‘I gather we interviewed her friends, but didn’t do any forensic tests, except for the DNA test on the used condom? You presumably know the case well, having a personal interest.’

‘Yes. But we didn’t find a match.’

‘No samples were taken from a boyfriend or friends?’ DI Baker asks.

‘No, we didn’t have-’

‘We’ll do it now. What about the locations of the postmarks?’

‘Random,’ Sarah replies. ‘But all within London. One of the letterboxes has a CCTV camera in the street. There’s a slim chance the hate-mailer was filmed posting the letter, but at the time we didn’t have the resources to-’

‘I’ll put someone onto it.’

I find Jenny in the corridor, back from her wanderings.

‘I saw Tara,’ Jenny says, choosing, for the moment, a neutral kind of subject. ‘She was hanging around on the ground floor.’

‘The lazy journalist’s way to ambulance-chase,’ I say. ‘Wait for them to come to you.’

‘Does Aunt Sarah think it’s the hate-mailer?’ she asks, ending our decoy conversation.

‘I think she’ll be considering everything. About the hate-mailer, was there anything you-’

‘No, don’t start. Please. It was bad enough you and Dad doing it at the time.’

‘I just-’

‘No one I know would do this to me,’ she says, just as she did at the kitchen table during the hate-mailer days.

‘I’m not suggesting for one minute that it’s one of your friends. Really. I just want to know if there was anything you didn’t tell us.’

She looks away from me and I can’t read her expression.

‘You got pretty fed up with us always wanting to know your movements,’ I say.

‘You policed me,’ she corrects. ‘Dad tailed me, for heaven’s sake. I used to see him.’

‘He just wanted to make sure you were safe. That’s all. And when you refused his offer of driving you to-’

‘I’m seventeen.’

Yes, only seventeen. And so pretty. And so unaware.

‘Then Maria’s party, you wouldn’t let me go,’ she continues. ‘Because it didn’t start till nine. Nine. Everyone else went but you grounded me because of something I didn’t even do.’

Jenny made me a dictionary a couple of years ago, as a kind of joke, so I could understand her vocabulary. (I had to promise I wouldn’t actually use any of the words myself.) ‘Grounded’ was one word I already knew.

She’s right though. It wasn’t fair, was it? She hadn’t done anything to deserve what she saw as punishment and we saw as protection. And our increased need to keep her safe just fuelled her desire to pull away from us. Thinking about it now, ‘hate mail’ is the right term for it, not just because of what the messages said and the awful things that were posted – but because while it was happening it sapped so much happiness out of our family.

‘I went,’ Jenny confides, ‘to Maria’s party. It was the night I was staying over at Audrey’s house after the squash tournament. She’d been invited too.’

Why has she felt the need to come clean about this? Did something happen at that party? I wait, but she doesn’t say anything more.

‘Was there anything you didn’t tell us about the hate mail?’ I ask her again. ‘In case we “policed” you even more?’

She turns a little away from me.

‘Sometimes, I’m back there, inside the school,’ she says quietly. ‘I can’t escape. Can’t get out. I can’t see anything. I mean, it’s not like a memory. Not like that. Just pain. And fear.’

She’s shrinking into herself, making herself as small as she can.

I put my arms around her. ‘Hey, it’s over. All over.’

There must be something she didn’t tell us. Because asking her made her think deeply about the fire, made her feel it again, as if she connected the two. But she’s trembling and I can’t ask her again. I can’t. Not yet.

I think that she will tell me though, in time.

When I used to pick her up from school she’d tell me, as Adam does now, that school was ‘fine, Mum’. But an anxiety was often tucked into a uniform pocket, a problem slipped up a sleeve, fears hidden under a jumper. You had to wait patiently for the pocket to be emptied as you drove home; a rumpled problem pulled out during homework; the fear finally revealed from under the jumper on the sofa at TV time. You had to wait till bath-time to hear if there was anything really big; I suppose there was nowhere for it to hide any more.

She gestures towards the burns unit.

‘So how am I?’ she asks.

I’ve been preparing my answer.

‘I didn’t see you properly. But the nurse says you’re doing everything they’d expect. It’s still another few days until they’ll know about the scarring.’

That much is true at least.

‘Is Dad there?’ she asks.

‘No, he’s had to go to a doctors’ meeting,’ I say.

It’s the meeting with my doctors about me. They’ll have the results of my brain scans now. I decide to use the decoy conversation again.

‘Shall we go and see what Tara is doing?’ I suggest.

‘Shouldn’t we be with Dad?’

‘He’ll be alright on his own for a little while.’

I don’t want Jenny to hear what the doctors say to you.

I don’t want to hear.

Not yet.

Not yet.

‘D’you remember when I got the dog mess?’ she asks.

‘It was in a box, like the ones you get to post a book,’ I say, surprised that she wants to think about this.

‘Remember Addie?’

‘I think it’s a terrier’s poo,’ he said, peering into the box.

I was horrified he’d seen. ‘Adam, really, I don’t think you-’

‘I mean, if you look at its size it’s from a small dog’s bottom.’

Jenny started to smile.

‘Maybe a Yorkie?’ he hazarded.

‘Or a Scottie?’ suggested Jenny, smiling more.

‘No. I know!’ Adam shrieked. ‘It’s a poodle’s poo! ’

And for a few minutes their giggling filled the house.

10

Tara is by the hospital shop, multitasking flicking her hair with texting.

‘D’you think she’s waiting to collar Dad again?’ Jenny asks.

‘Probably.’

She’s like a glossy, pretty vulture waiting for more news carrion.

Through the glass wall of the shop, next to the old fruit and teddies, is a pile of Richmond