Afterwards

But now crime isn’t ‘out there’ but exploding into my family and the police are crucial to our lives.

We go inside the police station and down a corridor with paint-peeling walls and concrete floors, which smell strongly of cleaning fluid, the same one that is used in the hospital; an archetypal institutional smell; only this institution has crime not injury as its raison d’etre.

We pass offices with phones ringing for too long and loud male voices and pieces of paper pinned with seemingly no particular order onto old notice boards. Such a scruffy, chaotic place for Sarah; not the neat organised place I’d imagined.

A young woman police officer comes down the corridor. She hugs Sarah and asks her about Jenny and me. And then an older male officer takes her hand as he passes her and says how sorry he is and asks if there’s anything he can do. Anything.

We go into a main office area, which reeks of deodorant and sweat, fans overhead whirring noisily and ineffectually against the heat. And everyone in here comes up to ask after Jenny and me, to offer sympathy, to give her a hug or hold her hand for a moment. Everyone knows her. Everyone minds about her. I realise she is loved and valued here. I’d been right about this place being her element, but for the wrong reasons.

She goes into a side-office and an attractive man in his thirties, with caramel-coloured skin, virtually runs across the small space and put his arms around her and holds her tightly. He’s not wearing a uniform so must be CID. His cream cotton shirt has sweat patches under his arms. There isn’t even a fan in here.

‘Hi, Mohsin,’ she says, as he hugs her.

‘You ran the sympathy gauntlet, then?’ he asks.

‘Something like that.’

‘Poor baby.’

Baby? Sarah? Behind them, a woman in her twenties is pretending to look at a computer monitor. A sharply cut auburn bob frames her angular face. She’s the only person who hasn’t offered sympathy.

‘Penny?’ Sarah says, and the severe-featured young woman turns to her. ‘Where are we on the hate-mail investigation?’

‘I’m going over the original statements now. Tony and Pete are trying to locate footage from the CCTV camera, which records the postbox where the third letter was posted. The Nationwide Building Society had it installed last year, and the postbox is next to it.’

‘I think the hate mail could well be linked to the arson attack,’ Sarah says.

Penny and Mohsin say nothing.

‘Alright,’ Sarah says, tight-lipped. ‘Maybe it is just an extraordinary coincidence that Jenny was sent hate mail and then her place of work was set on fire and she was the only member of staff to be badly injured.’

‘But the campaign against her had stopped, right?’ Penny asks, and I hope to God that Ivo – if he actually bothers to come – will tell them about the red paint attack just a few weeks ago.

‘If it turns out there is a link to the fire,’ Penny continues, ‘then for now that will just have to be a fortunate byproduct. It can’t be a focus of the malicious mail investigation.’

‘We need a connection, honey,’ Mohsin says. ‘Something that links the hate-mail campaign with the arson attack.’

‘Her oxygen may have been tampered with,’ Sarah says.

Penny’s eyes flick to hers. ‘May?’

‘It’s being downplayed,’ Sarah continues. ‘By the hospital and by Baker. But I think someone tried to make sure they finished the job.’

‘Downplayed?’ Penny asks and I see the irritation on Sarah’s face.

‘Baker’s lazy, we all know that.’

‘But not that incompetent,’ Penny retorts. She turns back to her computer screen.

‘Who was this witness who supposedly saw my nephew?’ Sarah asks, going closer to her.

‘Detective Inspector Baker has made it absolutely clear that the witness’s anonymity must be respected.’

Her harshness reminds me of Tara. But at least she wears her toughness on the outside, so gives fair warning.

Sarah turns to Mohsin.

‘It’s not in the file?’

‘No,’ responds Penny. ‘DI Baker thought you might come asking for it. He’s pretty astute about you.’

‘Not about much else,’ Sarah snaps. ‘So he’s hidden it?’

‘He’s just respecting the witness’s right to privacy and anonymity.’

‘How handy for him that someone comes along and does his work for him.’

Mohsin tries to put his arm round her again, but she moves away from him.

‘And he’s cheap. How much overtime has he signed off recently? It would be a big-budget number to do a full- scale arson and attempted murder investigation. The witness gave him a gift-wrapped package. This way he doesn’t have to spend any time or money on it but gets a great clear-up rate. A model of twenty-first-century policing.’

Penny is going to the door.

‘I’ll tell you what Tony and Pete find out,’ she says.

‘Has anyone investigated Silas Hyman’s alibi?’ Sarah asks.

‘Take that compassionate leave,’ Penny says as she leaves, her personality as angular as her haircut, all sharp corners.

Sarah is alone with Mohsin.

‘Jesus,’ Sarah says. ‘Does she always have to speak like there’s a cork up her bum?’

He laughs and I’m frankly a little shocked. Sarah doesn’t talk that way. And I’ve never seen her be so physical with someone before, apart from you, her little brother. But I can’t believe she’s having an affair; not Sarah, of all people, surely? She’s just too law-abiding to break the first rule of marriage.

‘Do you know who the witness is?’ she asks him.

‘No, I don’t. You might not like Penny, but she is good.’

‘So it was Penny who took the statement? I thought it must have been. Sod’s bloody law, isn’t it? The one person guaranteed not to help me.’

‘True. But if the witness was dodgy in any way Penny would have been onto it. She’s a bloody sniffer-dog- Rottweiler-mix that woman.’

‘Can you get her to tell you who it was?’

‘I can’t believe you asked me that.’

‘Well, can you?’

‘You’ve never even broken a rule, let alone a law. Let alone asked someone to do that for you.’

‘Mohsin…’

‘You’ve never even filed something incorrectly before.’

She turns away from him.

‘You know how the files sit around on that stack of trays after they’ve been typed up,’ he continues. ‘And people seem to find better things to do than put them where they’re meant to be? It’s woefully insecure, that area. Probably completely contravenes the data protection act. I’m sure that the anonymous witness statement isn’t left so open to abuse like that. But other transcripts…’

‘Yeah, thanks.’ She lightly kisses his caramel-coloured cheek.

‘So how’s that husband of yours?’ he asks.

She pauses a moment.

‘You think that when it comes to it, when it really matters, that someone’ll be more than they are the rest of the time. Better, somehow. You hope that someone will be like that, for you, when it counts.’

‘So are you still going to wait till Mark’s eighteen?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It was a mad idea.’

‘Maybe. But neither of us wants the boys to go through a divorce. Not until they’re grown-up. I told you