Afterwards

AB: How long had you known that Jennifer Covey would be the nurse this afternoon?

SH: Nurse is a little grand for the title. Clearly I didn’t expect a girl that age to deal with anything remotely serious.

‘I did a St John Ambulance training, you witch,’ Jenny says as she reads it and I’m glad she’s focused on Sally Healey’s answer and not Baker’s question. Because right at the beginning he’d suspected the fire was aimed at her. I suppose he’d have put her name in the computer and the hate-mail case would have come up instantly.

AB: If you could answer my question. How long had you known that Jennifer Covey would be the nurse this afternoon?

SH: I announced it at the Thursday staff meeting last week. It wasn’t my original plan but I decided that in view of Jennifer’s consistently inappropriate clothes during the hot weather it would be better if she wasn’t in view of the parents.

‘She is a witch, Mum,’ Jenny says.

AB: Original plan?

SH: Initially I’d allocated the job to Rowena White. Rowena has done a St John Ambulance course. She was upset about the change but I felt it was appropriate.

Jenny turns to me. ‘Do you think Rowena could have told her father she was going to be nurse, to make him proud, same old, but then didn’t tell him when I replaced her?’

‘Maybe,’ I say.

Was the wrong girl hurt?

AB: Who was at the Thursday staff meeting when you announced the change?

SH: The senior management team. Then they disseminate the information to all the other members of staff.

[SH is silent.]

AB: Mrs Healey?

SH: Jenny, is she going to die?

[SH cries.]

It didn’t say for how long.

Sarah takes the final photocopy out of her bag. I’d hoped it would be a transcript of Silas Hyman’s interview but it’s Tilly Rogers’s, that archetype of a reception teacher – pink cheeks and long fair hair and smiling face with white, pearly teeth. A healthy, clean-living, nice girl who’ll do this job for a few years before marrying and having a family of her own. Children in her class love her, fathers feel wistful, mothers maternal.

I can’t imagine she has anything to do with the fire.

Tilly’s interview started at 6.30, so after Mrs Healey’s. It was AB, Inspector Baker, who interviewed her.

I skim-read it, just getting the basics. She was with her class doing circle time when the alarm went off. Maisie White helped evacuate the children, who all knew her already as a volunteer reader. She didn’t mention a delay before Annette brought her the register, maybe because she didn’t notice or because she didn’t think it was important. Nobody had noticed and asked her. It’s two pages before I see a question that seems relevant.

AB: Do you know Silas Hyman?

TR: Yes. He was a year-three teacher at Sidley House. Up until April that is. But I didn’t exactly know him. We taught on different floors. I’m right at the bottom – well, you know that already. And the reception classes don’t integrate with the rest of the school, not until they reach year one.

Is she telling the truth about not really knowing Silas Hyman? Is it possible that she’s his accomplice? Did the fresh-faced, floral-frocked Tilly Rogers leave her class with their storybooks and Listening-Teddy to go upstairs and find the keys to the windows and open them for him? Pour out white spirit and find a match?

Once I’d have said that it was impossible to imagine. But nothing is impossible to imagine any more.

But I can’t see how she could have got back to her classroom in time. Because if she’d started the fire, surely Maisie would have arrived to help with the evacuation and found her missing.

AB: Is there anything else you think may be relevant?

TR: Rowena White. I don’t know if it’s relevant but it was extraordinary.

AB: Go on.

TR: I was outside the school with the children but most of their mothers had got there by then, so I was able to look around. I saw Rowena running into the PE shed and coming out with a towel. A big, blue swimming one. The children leave them in there some times. There were two bottles of water on the gravel at the side of the school, by the kitchen entrance. You know, the really large four-litre ones? And she poured water on the towel. Then I saw her going into the school. As she got to the door, I saw her putting the towel over her face. It was just so brave.

Sarah leaves to find you. Jenny and I wait a moment, both quiet with disappointment. No magic sentence to free Adam from guilt.

‘Maybe Aunt Sarah will see something we haven’t,’ I say. ‘Or it will at least give her a lead.’

‘Yes.’

A little while later, we join you and Sarah in the corridor of ICU. You’re looking through the glass at Jenny, holding a transcript.

Jenny is standing a little distance away, so that she can’t see herself through the glass.

‘Do you think it’s like my mobile?’ she asks. ‘An infection risk?’

‘Must be.’

But I wonder if the photocopied transcripts really are an infection risk or if Sarah is trying to be as discreet as possible, avoiding Jenny’s highly staffed bedside.

You’re holding Annette Jenks’s transcript. I hope I’ll now hear Sarah’s take on it, which I could only guess at before.

‘But how the hell can Jen have signed herself out?’ you say as you read it. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’m not convinced yet that she did,’ Sarah says. ‘It could be that Annette Jenks just wanted to stop people from blaming her. A hit-and-run mentality.’

‘So there’s nothing useful from it.’

‘I wouldn’t say that. It’s clear from her statement that she didn’t actually light the fire. She says she was with Rowena White in the office when the alarm went off and Rowena told me the same thing earlier. The office is on the upper-ground level; the Art room on the second floor. So neither of them could have started the fire.’

‘Could she have let Hyman in?’

‘She claims not to know him, or even have heard of him, but I find it strange that she didn’t hear any gossip about him at all. She strikes me as a gossipy kind of girl. So, for some reason, I think she’s probably lying. And we know from both Maisie and Rowena White that she waited a few minutes before coming outside. In here she makes no mention of that. We have to find out what she was doing.’

As I expected, Sarah is bang on the button.

You read through Sally Healey’s transcript, pausing when you get to the fire regulations she had in place.

‘It’s like she’s memorised the manual,’ you say to Sarah.

‘I agree. And Baker picked up on it too. I think Sally Healey was worried about the real possibility of a fire. Almost as if she knew it was going to happen and was trying to minimise the consequences.’ She catches your expression. ‘No fire regulations would have stood a chance against an accelerant and open windows and an old building.’

‘Maybe she knew that?’

‘I can’t see why she’d burn down her own school. But something’s not right. As well as having all this down pat, she said there were no hard feelings when Elizabeth Fisher, the old secretary, left. But on Elizabeth’s side, there clearly are.’

‘Is that relevant?’ you ask, sounding a little impatient.

‘I don’t know yet.’

I feel sick as I reread the head teacher’s statement. Because this time her telling Baker that the medical room is on the third floor, right at the top of the building, leaps out at me. So too does her announcement that Jenny would be nurse, and that the information would be disseminated to all the other members of staff.

Everyone at the school knew Jenny would be up on the top floor, on her own, in a virtually deserted