Afterwards

and Adam, did it?’

She nods in agreement.

‘Anyway, us cabbages are pretty tough.’

‘Mum!’ she says, shocked but smiling at me.

We follow Sarah as she makes her way to ICU.

‘So are you going to tell me what happened, then?’ Jenny asks. ‘No, don’t tell me. You’ve discovered it was Mrs Healey having the affair with Silas?’ She sees my expression. ‘It was a joke.’

But is it so comically ridiculous? Mrs Healey is only in her late forties. There’s no difference in the age gap between her and Silas Hyman than between Sarah and her beautiful gazelle policeman. But Jen’s right. It’s an absurd idea. It was Mrs Healey who fired Silas; Mrs Healey who brought his career crashing to the ground. And even if that hadn’t been the case, Mrs Healey is far too professional to have an affair with a junior colleague.

Yes, I’d once have thought that of Sarah.

I outline our meeting with Mrs Healey to Jen. Listen to me – ‘our meeting’, as if I was an active participant rather than eavesdropper. But, weird as this must sound, I do feel a little like Sarah’s silent partner.

‘The thing I find strangest,’ I say, ‘is Donald phoning Mrs Healey the night of the prize-giving, and countermanding Maisie. Why would he protect Silas Hyman like that?’

‘Maybe because he was there, Mum, like you were, and didn’t find Silas threatening at all. Just like you didn’t. Not until this happened and blame started being thrown around the place.’

I find her innocent certainty about Silas Hyman, a man more than a decade older than her, another reason to still see her as not yet an adult.

‘Maybe Mrs Healey wasn’t worried there was going to be a fire,’ Jenny continues. ‘But planned to start it herself and wanted to make sure the fire precautions were in place so the insurance paid out. She banged on about her bloody precautions on TV, the night of the fire. Even then she wanted to make sure everyone knew.’

I remember Mrs Healey’s pink linen shirt and assembly voice.

‘I can reassure you that we had every fire precaution in place.’

‘She knew the fire precautions wouldn’t make any difference,’ Jenny continues, ‘because the building was old and the fire was so intense.’

She must have been thinking about this; working it all out.

‘But Mrs Healey was at sports day,’ I say. ‘People would have noticed if she’d left.’

‘She’s a mini-dictator. Nearly all the teachers are on short-term contracts, which she can choose not to renew. And if they’re chucked out by her they’re still dependent on a reference from her to get another job. She could have blackmailed someone into it.’

Jenny is so keen for this to be the scenario; for her terrible injuries to have been an accident, not deliberate. Right from the beginning she’d thought – hoped – that it was something to do with the school as a business; an insurance fraud.

‘She’d choose sports day,’ Jenny continues, ‘because there’d be virtually no staff to try and put it out. I mean, Annette would be next to useless and I wouldn’t be much better, and that only leaves Tilly, who’d have her hands too full of young children to try and do anything to stop it spreading.’

I agree with her about sports day being a deliberate choice of date. It also meant there was hardly anyone there beforehand to see the arsonist open the windows; pour out the white spirit.

‘But what good would it do her?’ I say, gently.

‘She’s a part-owner, right? So she’d get her share of the insurance money.’

‘But why would she want to burn down a successful business? She’s already trying to find premises to get the school going again. There won’t be any financial benefit. She’ll just use the insurance money to rebuild.’

I can’t yet see Jenny as an adult, but I am trying to be more straightforward with her.

We move onto Elizabeth Fisher, who Jenny has always liked. Like me, she knows Elizabeth would have had nothing to do with it.

We still haven’t spoken about the three weeks, less a day, left to her. My grip on your optimism isn’t strong enough to confront the ticking clock, the speeding car, with spoken words. And I think Jenny is deliberately turning her back on it too. It’s as if looking at it properly, even peeking, would turns us to stone, terrorised and mute. But the fact is there, huge and monstrous. And we are playing grandmother’s footsteps with a gorgon.

As we arrive on ICU, you see Sarah. And you run. Literally run. I see the urgency in your body with big news to tell her. A heart must have been found! The monstrous fact smashed to pieces.

Then I see your face.

25

‘Mike?’ Sarah asks.

‘He was here. Watching her through the glass. I saw him watching her through the glass.’

‘Who was it?’

‘I don’t know. He had a hood up, and there was a trolley in the way so I couldn’t see his face.’

‘How did you know he was dangerous?’

‘He was still.’

Sarah looks at you, waiting for more.

‘Totally still,’ you say. ‘No one is totally still. Everybody’s moving. No one just stands there, watching. He was waiting for her to be alone. For me to leave her.’

I think of that figure on the edge of the playing field; the figure I noticed because of his stillness.

‘He wants to kill her,’ you say.

‘Did you see anything else?’ Sarah asks.

‘He turned away, when he saw me looking, and I just saw the coat, that’s all. A blue coat with a hood.’

‘That’s it?’ Jen says. ‘Some guy in a coat was a bit still?’

But I see that she’s afraid.

‘I’ll be in the garden.’

‘OK.’

She leaves, turning her back on this.

‘It could have been Hyman,’ you’re saying to Sarah. ‘If Jen saw him at the school, or something which incriminated him.’

You’ve said this before, and it’s as if repetition gives increased validity to your suspicion.

‘Or the hate-mailer has become more dangerous than we realised,’ Sarah says, and again I wish to God I could tell her about the red-paint attack.

‘When they stop having to sedate Jenny so heavily, she’ll be able to tell us if she saw something,’ you say.

But neither Sarah nor I share your confidence. Sarah, because she’s not sure that Jenny will ever get well enough for the doctors to stop sedating her; and me, because I know that at the moment she can’t remember anything past texting Ivo at two thirty.

‘I’ll phone the station,’ Sarah says. She leaves ICU to make the call.

I hug you, resting my face against your shirt, feeling your heart beating.

I feel so close to you now, my darling.

We are the only people who know the man in the blue coat is real. Sarah takes it on trust from you, but you and I know. And we are totally united against the threat to our daughter. We are Earth battling the aliens; a testudo of a family.

And although you don’t make Jen finish her homework or revise, or tell her that she ought to do retakes, you guard her ferociously and devotedly when a hate-mailer sends her vicious letters; when a maniac is out to kill