Afterwards

‘Blimey, Mum, you socked it to her. In a good way, I mean.’

‘Shame she can’t hear me.’

‘I’m sure she will, one day. Everyone will. In stereo. I’ll tell them too.’

Sarah is looking through her notes. ‘If I could just go back to the secretary for a moment?’ she says. ‘Are you sure that she said everyone was out?’

‘Yes. Definitely. Later, I mean after Jenny had been brought out, she said that Jenny had signed herself out. Said she remembered her doing it.’

‘It would explain why your phone was outside,’ I say to Jen.

‘Maybe,’ she says, her voice unusually quiet. I see that she looks pale and tense, her fingers knotting together.

‘I can’t remember, Mum. I can’t fucking remember. Sorry. It just doesn’t make sense. Why would I sign myself out, then go in again? But why would Annette lie?’

20

Sarah finds the nurse who was with Rowena earlier.

‘The injuries to Rowena White’s hands, do you think they were an accident?’ she asks. ‘I mean, the more recent damage?’

So she’s guessed.

‘You’re Jenny’s aunt, right?’

‘Yes. I’m also a police officer.’

‘Have you got ID?’

Sarah digs in her bag for her warrant card and shows it – Detective Sergeant McBride. ‘My married name,’ she says.

‘OK. I don’t think the injuries were accidental. At least, I can’t see how she could have got them if she tripped. The blisters on the tops of her hands have been damaged too.’

I remember Donald brutally gripping hold of her bandaged hands. Rowena’s quiet scream of pain.

‘Do you know when the injuries happened?’

‘No. But the blisters were undamaged at four thirty yesterday, because I changed her dressings myself. But then I went off shift at five.’

‘Do you know who was on after you?’

‘Belinda Edwards. I’ll find her for you.’

Ten minutes later, Sarah is with Belinda, the briskly competent nurse who showed Donald to Rowena’s room yesterday. She carefully checks Sarah’s warrant card.

‘It was after her father visited,’ she says.

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m not saying it was him. But I spoke to her when I arrived on my shift and she was fine, cheerful even. Her father came to see her shortly afterwards, about five fifteen. He wasn’t with her long. When he’d gone, I went in to give her her usual drugs. She and her mother were distressed. Rowena was trying not to show how much pain she was in, but it had clearly increased. I took the dressings off her hands and saw that the blisters had burst on both hands.’

‘She told you she tripped…?’ Sarah asks.

‘Yes, and that she put her hands out to save herself. But that wouldn’t explain the damage on the tops of her hands too. I asked a doctor to examine her and she gave him the same story.’

‘Do you have Rowena’s past medical record?’

‘We’re not computerised yet – well, not successfully, so I’ll have to chase up the hard copy from records.’

‘And can you get Maisie White’s, her mother’s?’

Belinda’s eyes meet Sarah’s and an unspoken accord passes between them.

‘I’ll chase that up for you in the same way,’ she says.

‘Thank you.’

‘We’re concerned about the infection risk,’ Belinda says. ‘So she’ll be remaining with us for a few days yet.’

* * *

Sarah is going to go to the police station. Jenny and I go with her towards the exit of the hospital. I don’t want Jen to go outside.

‘We need to know everything in case we’re the ones who have to put it all together,’ I say to her. ‘Can you stay here in case Donald comes back? We need to watch him too.’

Giving her a job to do, as I used to years ago – sifting the icing sugar so she wouldn’t mind that it was me taking the cake tins out of the too-hot-for-children oven.

‘You’re sure it doesn’t hurt you?’ she asks.

‘Hardly at all.’

She looks at me, unconvinced.

‘Apart from colds, I’m actually very resilient.’

‘I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry. God, you went into a burning building and-’

‘It’s fine, Jen, really.’

She looks at me, and there’s something else. I wait.

‘How long d’you think it takes, from Barbados?’

‘About nine hours,’ I say.

She smiles a shy, happy smile and I hate Ivo for making her smile like that and for what will happen when he gets here.

I leave the hospital with Sarah, shedding the protective skin of its walls, but for a little while, maybe a minute or more, I feel alright. Then the pain hits. The gravel path leading to the car park cuts into my unprotected feet. It’s still early but the bright sun reflects off the cars with dazzling, migrainous intensity.

In the car Sarah talks to Roger on her hands-free, finishing their earlier argument; words starched, voices stiff. He accuses her of forgetting it was ‘your son’s’ deadline for his course-work this week. She tells him that you need her more. He says she should start allocating her time ‘more carefully’. She tells him there’s a call waiting. She hangs up and blares her horn – too loud, too long – at a van hogging a box junction. She drives the rest of the way in silence.

For the first time I feel like an eavesdropper or spy.

She parks and we walk to Chiswick police station along a heat-baked concrete pavement, the road sweating tarmac. Next to the police station is the Eco shop, with its growing roof and plant-covered walls. I want to stop outside and breathe its newly made oxygen and window-shop, as I often have with Jenny, at the eclectic display.

I used to think that in the police station next door Sarah would be in her element. She was ideally suited, I thought, to a job that had uniforms and numbers and name badges and ranks clearly marked. Everyone and everything labelled; strict protocols to be followed; rules and laws to be adhered to and implemented. I’d think that if Sarah hadn’t been a police officer (she drummed that word into me after my first calamitous police- woman mistake) then she’d have been an officer in the army in some kind of organisational role.

Because I didn’t want to think her brave and driven and doing something worthwhile.

And it was easy to believe myself because up until now the police didn’t seem important or connected to us. Yes, they keep criminals off the streets, but Chiswick hardly has any litter, let alone muggers or murderers on the newly widened, Bugaboo-friendly pavements. The worst vandalism we get is fly-posting for music festivals and the occasional poster for a missing cat. From newspapers and TV I thought the police were, on the whole, bolters of doors when the murderers and bombers had already done their worst and left in their stolen cars.