Afterwards

to read the witness statements and interviews taken straight after the fire. We need to be armed with as much information as possible before going after any suspects.’

I’m stunned by how many rules Sarah will be breaking.

‘Silas Hyman was Addie’s form teacher, wasn’t he?’ Sarah asks. ‘Aren’t they very close?’

‘Adam wouldn’t set fire to anything, however much he loves someone,’ you say.

I hear the word ‘loves’ crying out.

I remember the terrible hurt on your face as he pushed you away from Silas Hyman and only now see that you’re jealous.

That’s why you thought he had an unnatural hold over Addie; why you loathed him, even before the fire. No wonder you resented working bloody hard to pay the fees so that another man could be with your son all day. No wonder you weren’t upset when he was fired.

But I didn’t see it.

I’m so sorry.

‘Did you come into contact with Silas Hyman before the prize-giving?’ Sarah asks. ‘Is there anything else that makes you so hostile towards him?’

‘Isn’t what I told you enough?’

She doesn’t reply.

And I’d do anything to be able to tell Sarah that the man Silas Hyman pretends to be is a fraud. That the man Adam loves, if he does love him, doesn’t exist.

I again think of him as a Janus – not only two-faced like that god but also, like him, the beginning and the ending. Because if Silas Hyman started this horror then he’ll also be there at its conclusion.

The clicking of high heels, an incongruous sound in ICU. I turn to see Dr Bailstrom in her red shoes – maybe she wears them as a warning device for patients and their relatives.

A meeting with my doctors has been arranged in an hour’s time.

16

Your familiar long stride has become short steps, as if you’re in unknown, hostile territory.

But when you near my bed you hurry towards me.

You reach my bed and sit down next to me, but you don’t speak.

You don’t speak.

I hurry towards you – talk to me!

‘Grace, my darling,’ you say as I reach you; as if you know when I am really there. Or is it just a coincidence?

You could run a florist’s shop from my bedside table. Only one vaseful is ugly – odourless, thornless, last- minute-shop-bought roses. ‘To Mrs Covey, with all best wishes, from Mr Hyman.’

But you don’t see the flowers, looking only at me.

‘There’s still no news on Jenny’s heart,’ you say. I think I’m the only person you’ve confided in about her lifespan of three weeks. ‘But they’ll find one for her. I know they will.’

‘Lifespan.’ Jesus. How could I use that word? It makes her sound like a tadpole or a mayfly. A punnet of ripen- at-home peaches. Children don’t have a bloody lifespan.

Thinking panicky loud thoughts, loud as I can, to try and drown out the ticking that has started again – faint but audible; a ghastly unstoppable rhythm.

‘Sarah said she’d told you about Addie,’ you say.

I remember Sarah at my bedside.

‘You have the right to know, Grace. You must hate the police for this. I understand that. But I promise you we’ll get it put right.’

She was so awkward with me, not realising how much I like her now.

You were worried that telling me this, on top of Jenny, would sap the remaining life force I have. But Sarah understands that for a mother, when your children are threatened, your life force isn’t sapped but galvanised.

You stand up. Don’t go! But you’re just pulling the flimsy ugly curtains around us, blocking out the bustle of the ward, and somehow, although it contradicts even key-stage-two Science, the noise of the ward seems blocked out too.

You hold my hand.

‘Ads doesn’t want me near him,’ you say.

‘That’s not true. And you need to go to him right now and tell him you know he didn’t do this and be with him. Sarah can stay with Jen for a bit. The detective stuff can wait for a little while, surely.’

You are silent.

‘You’re his father and no one else can be that to him.’

But you can’t hear me, nor can you guess now at what I am saying to you.

You stare at my face, as if staring at it will make my eyes open.

‘We always do this, don’t we, Gracie?’ you say. ‘Talk about Addie or Jen. But I’d like to talk about you and me, just for a few minutes, alright? I’d really like to do that.’

I’m touched. And yes, I’d really like to do that too – change the subject onto us – just for a few minutes.

‘Remember our first date?’ you ask.

Not so much a change of subject as a rewind of twenty years to a safe past. Leaving this white-walled London hospital far behind for a tea shop in Cambridge.

For a little while I’ll let myself join you there.

Pouring with rain outside; inside, fuggy with talk and damp anoraks.

You told me later you thought it would be romantic but some milk must have been spilt and not cleaned up and the rancid smell permeated the fug. The chintzy curtains were designed for tourists. Your hands looked absurdly big around a silly little china cup.

It was your first ‘first date’.

‘The only girl I’d ever asked on a date,’ you say.

You came clean about this amongst the chintz and the china.

Later I found out that usually you just went home with a girl after a party and sometimes would find her still there the next morning under your hideous duvet – I think Sarah chose the cover in the hope of it acting as a contraceptive device. If you liked the girl it stayed that way for a while. Nice things just happened to you – pretty girls ending up under your ugly duvet.

‘I courted you,’ you say.

We talked about attraction.

You, a scientist (what was I doing with a Nat Sci?), were all pheromones and biological imperatives while I was all coy mistresses and eyebeams threading on a double string. ‘You thought Marvell was a comic.’

‘You quoted something about a man spending a century admiring each bosom and I got the hint.’

In that prim little tea shop you told me that you were desperate to be away from the confines of university and ‘out there doing stuff ’.

I didn’t know anyone who used the word ‘stuff’. I’d done a year of Art History and then a term of an English degree and had never once used the word. My friends were all black-clothed, earnest arts students with a thesaurus for a vocabulary.

I liked the word ‘stuff’. And I liked it that you weren’t pale with cheekbones studying Kant but were muscular and robust and wanted to be mountaineering and canoeing and white-water rafting and abseiling and bivouacking the world rather than reading and philosophising about it.

‘I liked the climbing-a-volcano thing,’ I say. ‘Mad, but kind of mad in an attractive way.’

‘I wanted to impress you. You were so fucking beautiful.’