Afterwards

instinctively risk her life to rescue her child. And to start with I ran without thinking too. I just saw the school on fire and knew Jenny was inside and ran. But once I was inside.

Inside.

Every moment in that heat and choking smoke, my love for Jenny had to fight against my overwhelming urge to run away. A riptide of selfishness, which was trying to pull me out of the building. I was ashamed to tell you before.

‘You said you could get back into your body?’ she asks.

‘Yes. That’s right.’

‘I think that if you can get back into your body,’ she continues, ‘it means you’re not going to die. When my heart stopped, and I was technically dead, I suppose, it was warmth and light leaving my body and coming into me, not the other way around. I think it’s living that’s the other way around.’

‘Absolutely.’

Because surely she is right.

We are interrupted by Sarah arriving, with a ramrod-straight woman with steel-grey hair in her late sixties, who I know but can’t quite place.

‘Mrs Fisher,’ Jenny says, surprised.

The old secretary at Sidley House.

She’s brought me a fat bunch of sweet-peas wrapped in newspaper and the scent is glorious, temporarily overpowering the sanitised smell of the ward.

Sarah looks along my vases of flowers, then deftly bins Silas Hyman’s ugly yellow roses. She smiles at Mrs Fisher.

‘I think in the race for space here, yours win,’ she says lightly, but I see her notice Mr Hyman’s card and pocket it.

‘I didn’t think I’d actually see her,’ Mrs Fisher says to Sarah. ‘I just wanted to bring her flowers. We used to talk about gardening sometimes. But I hardly know her.’

I remember now that Mrs Fisher is the only person on her stretch of allotments to grow sweet-peas rather than their edible cousins. She told me about it on Jenny’s first day at school, distracting me with flowers, and by the end of our horticultural conversation Jenny had stopped crying and was on the reading rug.

‘Would you mind having a chat with me?’ Sarah asks. ‘I’m a police officer and Grace’s sister-in-law.’

Sisters-in-law. I’ve never before properly considered that we have our own separate and connecting thread in the matrix of the family.

‘Of course,’ Mrs Fisher replies. ‘But I really don’t think I’ll be of any help.’

Sarah escorts her into the relatives’ room.

‘Before you ask me anything,’ Mrs Fisher says, ‘I have a police record.’

Jenny and I are both startled. Mrs Fisher?

‘I was an activist for CND and Greenpeace. I still am, but I don’t tend to get arrested nowadays.’

Sarah looks a little judgmental, but I know not to misinterpret that now.

‘You said you were the secretary at Sidley House?’

‘For almost thirteen years. I had to leave in April.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Apparently I was too old to do the job. The head teacher told me that if I looked at my contract I’d see that there was “a policy of non-voluntary retirement for all support staff at sixty”. I’m sixty-seven. She’d waited seven years before enforcing the clause.’

‘And were you too old for the job?’

‘No. I was still bloody good at it. Everyone knew it, including Sally Healey.’

‘So do you know why she got rid of you?’

‘You don’t mince your words. No. I’ve no idea.’

Sarah took out a notebook, an incongruous Paperchase one with little owls on it, and wrote something down.

‘Can I have your details?’ Sarah asks. ‘Your full name is Mrs…?’

‘Elizabeth Fisher. And it’s Ms, however you pronounce it. My husband left me six months ago and I think it’s customary to drop the “Mrs” at that point. The ring won’t come off. I have to get it cut, apparently. The symbolism is a little brutal for me at the moment.’

Sarah looks sympathetic but I feel cold. Mrs Healey sent all the parents a letter saying Mrs Fisher’s husband was terminally ill and that was the reason she’d had to leave the school. I’d organised a card and Maisie had traipsed off to some super-snazzy flower place in Richmond for a bouquet for her and, at my suggestion, bulbs.

‘Can you write down your address?’

As Elizabeth writes down her details, I want to tell Sarah about the lie Mrs Healey told the parents. Why did she do that?

‘Do you know Silas Hyman?’ Sarah asks her – a logical question but not the one I hoped for.

‘Yes. He was a teacher at Sidley House. He was fired for something he didn’t do. A month before me. We’ve spoken on the phone once or twice since then. Kindred spirits and all that.’

‘Why he was fired?’

‘In a nutshell? An eight-year-old boy called Robert Fleming wanted him out.’

‘And the longer version?’

‘Robert Fleming loathed Silas because he was the first teacher to stand up to him. Silas called Fleming’s parents in, during the first week he had him in his class, and used the word “wicked” about their son; not suffering from some attention deficit disorder or a problem with socialisation. Wicked. But unfortunately that’s not the form with fee-paying parents.

‘In March, when Silas was on playground duty, Fleming told him that an eleven-year-old boy had locked himself in the toilets with a five-year-old little girl, and she was screaming. Fleming said he couldn’t find any other teacher. So Silas went to the little girl’s aid. For all his faults, he’s very kind like that. And Robert Fleming knew that.

‘When he’d got Silas out of the playground, Fleming forced a boy called Daniel up the fire escape and then managed to get him over the edge. God knows what he must have said to the little chap to have got him to climb over. Then Fleming pushed him. He was badly injured. Broke both his legs. It was lucky it wasn’t his neck.

‘Part of my job was school nurse. I looked after him until the ambulance arrived. Poor little mite was in such terrible pain.’

I’d had only Adam’s version of events, and adult rumours, distorted as time went by. It became a terrible accident, not deliberate, and the blame was targeted on Mr Hyman for not supervising the playground rather than Robert Fleming. Because who wants to believe an eight-year-old child can be that disturbingly manipulative, that vicious, that malevolent?

But we already knew that he was from Adam, who lived in physical fear of him. We knew this wasn’t like regular teasing and bullying. I think it was when he pulled Adam’s tie around his neck, leaving a red welt for a week afterwards, saying he’d kill him if he didn’t ‘kiss his butt’. Or the skipping rope that he wound around Adam, tying him up, while he drew swastikas on his body.

Jenny called him psycho-child and you agreed.

‘Those aren’t things that a boy should be doing,’ you said. ‘If it was an adult, we’d say he was sociopathic. Psychopathic, even.’

It was after the swastika incident, just before this last half-term, that you demanded a meeting and got a guarantee from Mrs Healey that Robert Fleming wouldn’t be coming back to Sidley House in September.

‘Mrs Healey knew that a playground accident like that should never have happened in a primary school,’ Mrs Fisher continues. ‘She needed someone to blame, so she blamed Silas Hyman. I don’t think she wanted to fire him for it. She’s not stupid. She could recognise a gifted teacher, as a business asset if nothing else. But then there was that scurrilous article in the Richmond Post and the phone didn’t stop ringing with parents wanting action. So she had no choice as she saw it. Parents have a great deal of power in a private school, especially a new one.

‘The really appalling thing is if that wicked boy had been blamed and hauled over the coals, there might have been a fighting chance of stopping him before it was too late.’