Afterwards

He wasn’t hauled over the coals, was he? Mrs Healey gave him a quiet exit.

‘You think he’ll do something again?’ Sarah asks.

‘Of course he will. If he can plan and execute at eight breaking a boy’s legs, what will he do at eighteen?’

Did Robert Fleming leave the playing field during sports day? No. I can’t believe that. I know we were told that almost all school-time fires are started by children, but not fires which injure people so badly. Not fires like this one. I refuse to be like DI Baker and think a child capable of that.

‘You said that after the Richmond Post article the phone didn’t stop ringing?’ Sarah asks.

‘That’s right. And Sally Healey was forced to fire Silas.’

‘Do you know who told the press?’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘Does Silas Hyman have any enemies?’

‘None that I know of.’

‘You said earlier, “for all his faults”. What do you mean by that?’

‘I shouldn’t have said it.’

‘But there is a reason?’

‘I just mean that he was arrogant. Male teachers in a primary school are a rare species. He was a cockerel in the hen-house.’

She pauses a moment and I can see she’s fighting off tears.

‘How are they,’ she asks. ‘Jenny and Mrs Covey?’

‘Both of them are critically injured.’

Elizabeth Fisher’s ramrod-straight posture bends a little and she turns her face from Sarah, as if embarrassed by her emotion.

‘I was there at the start, and so was Jenny. Reception children would come to my office to show me the work they’d done. Jenny Covey would come in and give me a hug and then walk out again. That was what she’d come to show me. In year one she got into Hama-beads. Other children would do meticulous geometric patterns and she’d do something completely random, no design or maths to it – and it was wonderful. All those coloured beads just put together any old how. Just so… energetic and unworried.’

Sarah smiles. Does she remember Jenny’s Hama-bead phase? She probably got an anarchic mat for a Christmas present.

‘And Adam’s a lovely little boy,’ she continues. ‘A credit to Mrs Covey. I wish I’d told her that, but I didn’t. Not that it would have made any difference, what I thought, but I wish I’d said it anyway.’

Sarah looks moved by her, and Elizabeth Fisher has the encouragement she needs to continue.

‘Some of them, they hardly bother to say hello to their mothers at the end of the day, and the mothers are too busy gossiping to each other to really focus on their child. But Adam runs out there like a plane coming in to land, with his arms out to Mrs Covey, and she looks like there’s no one else in the entire place but him. I used to watch them out of my office window.’

She hasn’t got anyone to talk to about us, I realise, not with her husband gone. And she can hardly contact anyone at school after the excruciatingly embarrassing flowers-for-a-dying-husband.

‘Do you have any idea who might have set fire to the school?’ Sarah asks.

‘No. But if I were you, I’d look for someone like Robert Fleming as an adult – because no one intervened early enough.’

As Jenny and I return to my ward, I remember that meeting you had with Mrs Healey about Robert Fleming. I’d been annoyed she’d listened to you when she hadn’t listened to me all those times I’d gone into school and complained. I’d thought it was because you’re a man and I was just another mum with Kit Kat crumbs in my pocket and spare PE socks in my handbag. You said it was because of your celebrity status: ‘I can kick up a smellier stink.’

Maisie is arriving next to my bed. She pulls the ugly flimsy curtains around it.

‘Another visitor,’ I say to Jen. ‘It’s like a seventeenth-century salon in here this evening, isn’t it?’

‘A salon was in France, Mum.’ She gestures to the brown geometric curtains around my bed. ‘And it had walls. With oil paintings and ornate mirrors.’

We’d spoken about salons a few months ago. I’m touched she listened.

‘Nit-picky. It had a bed, didn’t it? And there was a woman at the centre of the attention. N’est-ce pas?’ Alright, so she was meant to be a glittering witty intellectual…

Jen smiles.

Maisie sits down on the side of my bed, rather than the visitor’s chair, and takes my hand. I now know that the confidant, exuberant, not-giving-a-hoot! Maisie doesn’t exist. But she did once. I’m sure of that. I don’t know when Maisie started imitating herself as she used to be; the person she still should be.

But her kindness and warmth are genuine.

‘You’re looking lots better,’ she says to me, smiling at me as if I can see her as well as hear her. ‘Roses in your cheeks! And you don’t even use blusher, do you? Not like me. I have to slap on the stuff, but you look that way naturally.’

Instead of a French salon, I imagine myself now in her Aga-warm kitchen.

When she came to see me last time, I was sure she was going to tell me something but was interrupted. Maybe she’ll confide in me now about Donald. I hope so. One of the things about all this I find so hard is that she didn’t, or couldn’t, turn to me.

She’s fumbling in the pocket of her cardigan. She takes out Jenny’s mobile, with the little charm on it that Adam gave her for Christmas.

‘Tilly, the reception teacher, gave it to me,’ Maisie says.

Jen is staring at her phone in silence. Inside are texts of parties and travel plans and everyday chat with her friends; a teenage life in eight centimetres of plastic. It is shiny and undamaged.

‘Tilly found it on the gravel outside the school,’ Maisie continues. ‘Gave it to me as I got in the ambulance with Rowena. Wanted to make sure I gave it to Jenny. Like it was important. I suppose she just wanted to be doing something to help. Well, we all did. Then I just forgot about it. I’m sorry.’

‘How could she just forget?’ Jenny asks.

‘There was a lot going on,’ I say, marvelling at my understatement.

‘Should have returned it before, sorry,’ Maisie says, as if she’s heard Jenny. ‘Complete scatterbrain.’

Maisie finds a space between the vases of flowers for the phone.

‘They’ve gone overboard with the air-conditioning in Ro’s room,’ she says. ‘So I put on my cardi. Found it in the pocket and wanted her to have it back. You know girls and their mobiles.’

‘But how could I have dropped it?’ Jenny asks. ‘Ivo and I were texting each other while I was up in the medical room. And then it was the fire and I was still inside. So how come she found this outside?’

‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’

‘Maybe the arsonist stole it from me and then dropped it by mistake?’

‘But why would he steal it?’

‘If it was the hate-mailer,’ Jenny says slowly, ‘perhaps he wanted some kind of trophy?’

The idea sickens me.

‘Or maybe you went outside for some reason,’ I say. ‘And then returned.’

‘But why would I do that?’

I have no idea. We’re both silent.

Maisie sits down on my bed again, chattering on in her sweet voice, trying to make this as normal as she can, as if she wants to pretend we’re in her kitchen together – and that it’s as cosy as it seems. A deception within a deception.

Until today I’d thought Maisie’s babbling way of speaking was from a surfeit of things to say, a friendly warm outpouring, but maybe it’s more of a nervous habit, a flow of chat to swirl over underlying jagged unhappiness.

Like the baggy, soft cardigan now covering her bruises.