Afterwards

‘No. He threw it from behind. I don’t remember anything useful at all. Nothing that will help Addie. I just remember this woman screaming and screaming. It was red gloss, the paint. She thought it was blood. It covered the back of my coat. And all down my hair.’

Was the paint meant to look like blood? A hideous warning of the violence to come?

‘It was on the tenth of May,’ she says.

That was just a few weeks ago. Just a few weeks. It hadn’t stopped at all. It had got worse. Not just posting her vicious letters, but following her and throwing paint at her. Is he still stalking her now? Attacking her for real?

‘If I’d told the police, they might have found him,’ she says. ‘Stopped him in time. And Addie…’

Guilt crumples her face; she looks more like ten right now than seventeen.

I put my hand on her, but she shakes me off as if sympathy just makes it all worse.

‘I tried to convince myself it wasn’t the hate-mailer who set fire to the school. But now with Adam being accused, I can’t…’

She’s admitting this awful possibility out of love for Adam.

‘Why didn’t you tell us, Jen?’

‘I thought it was the right thing to do,’ she says quietly.

Before the fire, I’d have told her that the right thing was to be responsible and tell us and the police. I’d have become my nanny voice and got up onto my washing-powder box and told her this wasn’t about her being ‘grounded’ or ‘policed’ but about keeping her safe, and unless she told us she was putting herself at risk.

‘Who else knows?’ I ask.

‘Just Ivo,’ she replies. ‘I made him promise me he wouldn’t tell anyone.’

You’ll think it’s unfair of me to hate Ivo now, but he should have told us.

‘When’s he coming home?’ I ask.

‘Ten days. But he’s bound to find out about this and come back sooner.’

I nod. But I doubt he’ll fly back to be at her side. And you think my doubt is unfair on him too.

As I stare out of the window, a man brushes past me.

Mr Hyman.

I feel jolted by shock. Shivery with it. What is he doing here?

He’s in shorts and T-shirt, looking so suntanned in this white place. At school he had to wear a formal jacket and trousers and I find his bare arms and legs too intimate.

He’s by some kind of vending machine now, taking a ticket.

He goes through a door I hadn’t noticed before.

I follow him.

‘Mum?’

‘I want to know what he’s up to.’

‘I’m sure he’s not up to anything.’

But she comes with me anyway.

The door leads onto steep concrete steps. It closes behind us.

We follow him down to a basement car park. After the bright sunshine of the atrium, the basement is oppressively dark. The heat smells of petrol fumes and exhausts. The concrete is stained, the roof too low. I automatically look for exits.

There’s only us down here and Mr Hyman.

‘I don’t like this,’ I say.

‘It’s just a car park. He was getting a ticket for it.’

‘You’re invisible,’ my nanny voice snaps, so much harsher than Jenny. ‘And probably half dead already. So what can possibly happen to you?’

Mr Hyman reaches an old yellow Fiat and sticks the ticket from the vending machine on the windscreen. There are three children’s seats crammed into the car.

‘What’s he doing here?’ I say.

‘He’s probably come to have it out with Tara,’ Jenny says. ‘She deserves it.’

‘But how would he know that she hangs around here?’

‘Maybe he’s a good guesser,’ Jenny says. ‘I don’t know. Or he’s just trying to get away from his wife. He used to pretend to run the after-school scrapbook-making club so he could get more time away from her.’

She smiles as if it’s funny but I don’t.

‘You can’t blame him, really. She’s horrible to him,’ Jenny continues. ‘Told him he was a loser, and that was when he still had a job. Said she was embarrassed by him. But she won’t get divorced. Says if he leaves her, he’ll never see the kids.’

I look at the three car seats in the car, a discarded teddy, a Postman Pat comic.

‘He told you that?’ I ask.

‘So?’

So, you were sixteen last summer and he’s thirty, I want to say, but don’t.

‘Perhaps he’s come to see one of us,’ Jenny continues. ‘Bring flowers or something. He’s really kind, remember, Mum? You do remember that, don’t you?’

A challenge to remember him, as I used to think him.

We follow him back up the basement steps, me staring at his back, as if I can X-ray through his body to see the inner man. He’s hot and sweating, his T-shirt sticking to him, and I see how muscular he is.

I am relieved to be back in the goldfish-bowl atrium of daylight and people and noise.

I spot Adam coming in with Mum and Sarah. As I look at him, I lose sight of Mr Hyman.

Mum has her arm around Adam.

‘Mummy will still be having a few bits and bobs sorted out,’ she says to him, reducing MRIs and CT scans and God knows what else to bits and bobs and I love her for it. ‘So let’s get a drink to settle your tummy and then we can see her later.’

When Dad died I’d found out that my parents were the roof which had been sheltering me. Icy winds of grief blew through what had once been warm and safe; terror clawing its way in. Now Mum is putting up a canopy for Adam and I so admire her strength as she tries to shelter him.

I go up to Sarah, desperate to talk to her. Because I have information that will surely exonerate Addie.

I now know that the hate-mailer attacked Jenny with red paint. It didn’t stop in February as everyone thinks, but in May, just a few weeks ago. And maybe he’s attacking her now, not symbolically with red paint, but trying to kill her.

Because I know that a man sabotaged Jenny’s ventilator – I saw him.

But I also think you’re right to be suspicious of Silas Hyman because what the hell was a thirty-year-old man doing bad-mouthing his wife to a sixteen-year-old? And what’s he doing here? Now?

And I’ve seen Donald being vicious to Rowena and I think he’s probably been violent to Rowena and Maisie for years. Both of them were in the school at the time of the fire. But they won’t tell anyone about him, not when they haven’t done so in the past.

I feel like I’ve become the keeper of the keys and one of them, surely, will unlock the truth.

It’s my job now to find out everything I can.

Then I will make sure that Adam is proved innocent.

I have to.

That is all there is to it.

14

You’re at Jenny’s bedside, staring at the monitors around her. You barely glance at Sarah as she arrives.

‘Baker’s going to get the bastard now?’ you say to her.

‘He still thinks it’s Adam.’