Afterwards

‘I’ve got you on CCTV,’ Penny said. ‘Posting one of your nasty little letters.’

‘Posting a letter is a crime, is it?’

But she’s backing into the house.

Penny puts a hand on her shoulder, preventing her from retreating any further.

‘I’m arresting you under the malicious communications act. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not say something now which you later rely on in court.’

I remember the Postman Pat comic in Silas’s car that day in the hospital underground car park. Were some of the words red and cheerful before she dismembered them into letters and rearranged them into hatred?

And the dog mess, did she go out with a shovel and a parcel-box? Their house is only three streets from us. Easy to hand-deliver and get home again.

Other times she’d posted her disgust from places all over London – was it to make her seem omnipresent? Or to muddy the geography of where she really lived?

I don’t think about the condom. Not yet. Not yet.

But I think about the red paint down Jenny’s long fair hair. A woman’s touch.

And who’d notice a harassed mother with children in a shopping arcade? She’d have blended in and disappeared.

Gradually I edge towards the figure in the blue coat, bending over Jenny, tampering with her oxygen supply; trying to kill her. The figure could have been a woman. I only saw the back view and from a distance. But how could Natalia have got into a locked ward? And did her hatred really extend to murder?

* * *

Natalia is in the back of Penny’s car. Sarah next to her.

For a little while no one speaks, Natalia picking at a thread in her seat-belt. Then Penny turns off the air- conditioner and, without the drone, the car is suddenly hushed.

‘So why did you do it?’ Penny asks.

Natalia is silent, still picking at the thread, and I think she’s itching to talk.

The car starts to heat up, as if silence has its own temperature.

I remember Sarah telling a rapt dinner table that the best time ‘to get info out of a suspect’ is when you first arrest them, before they’ve reached the police station; before they’ve had time to think or take stock.

‘You love him, do you?’ Sarah asks, a note of sarcasm cutting through her words.

‘He’s a little shit. Weak. Useless. Fucked up my life.’

Her words seem to mix with the heat in the car, fugging it up with loathing.

‘So why bother with the hate mail then?’ asks Penny. ‘If you don’t even like him?’

‘Because the little shit belongs to me, right?’ Natalia snaps.

I remember her stressing my in ‘my husband’. Not loyalty but possessiveness.

I remember Jenny saying, ‘She told him he was a loser. That she was embarrassed by him… But she won’t get divorced.’

Silas Hyman was telling her the truth.

‘The head teacher, Sally Healey, told me I should keep my husband on a tighter leash,’ Natalia continues.

‘Mrs Hyman-’

‘Tighter leash. Like he was a dog. A fucking cocker spaniel. She’d got his measure. I asked what she meant, pretended I didn’t know. I have some pride, right? She said flirting with teaching assistants wasn’t acceptable. Flirting, not fucking. She’s very refined, Mrs Healey. But clever. She delegated him to me to deal with. I admire her for that. Shows some spunk.’

‘But you punished Jennifer Covey, not your husband?’ Penny says.

‘The stupid bitch made me a fool.’

I lift my hands to cover my face as if her words are spit, but they get through.

‘I saw them, her all long legs and short skirt and long blonde hair, a tart; fuck knows why they let her dress like that. He was flirting his pants off at her. Mrs Healey didn’t need to tell me to get a leash.’

‘And the red paint?’ Penny asks.

‘The tart had to get her hair cut.’

‘Why send the condom? When you knew it would be traceable?’

‘I never thought…’ Natalia begins, and I hear her picking at the thread again. ‘I wanted her to know that we were still having sex. He was fucking her, but he was making love to me.’

We reach the police station. Penny takes Natalia to be questioned. Sarah is going straight back to the hospital. As she gets out to swap into the driver’s seat, Mohsin comes up.

Sarah meets his quizzical gaze. The question he didn’t ask earlier – that Penny didn’t ask – is now too large and loud to be ignored.

‘Jenny wasn’t having an affair with Silas Hyman,’ Sarah says. ‘She’d have told me.’

I am envious she has such faith in how well she knows Jenny, which I lost only a little while ago and now feel its absence terribly. Is there a moment for every parent when you realise that your child has outgrown your knowledge of them? A moment when you can’t keep up?

For some reason I think of her shoes.

Knitted bootees becoming tiny soft shoes, then small sandals with width fittings for summer and black school shoes for winter, all the time incrementally getting a little bigger until she was into small adult sizes and the decision in the shoe shop took longer – until one day she went on her own and came back with boots; but I didn’t see that she was starting to stride away from me with boots that didn’t come in width fittings on her long adult legs.

It’s not the fledgling birds that are thrown out of the nest by their parents and made to fly; it’s the parents who are made to get the hell out of the cosy family nest by their teenage offspring. It’s we who are made to be independent of them, crash-landing if we don’t manage it.

You and Sarah are in the corridor of ICU, Jenny listening.

I can’t hear what you’re saying, but can tell from your posture that you’re furious. I go closer.

‘For Christ’s sake, his wife made a mistake.’

‘I know that, Mike,’ Sarah says patiently. ‘I just wanted to tell you.’

‘It’s bloody ridiculous. The man’s thirty years old and married, for God’s sake!’

Jenny turns to me, bemused.

‘His wife thought I was having an affair with him?’

I nod. Then summon up my courage. ‘Were you?’

‘No. He flirted with me, he flirts with everyone, but nothing more.’

And I believe her; of course I do.

She smiles at me. ‘But thank you for asking.’

She means it.

I don’t ask her about Ivo, who I saw sitting in the corridor by the garden, a shoal of people separating briefly to pass him.

Guessing – hoping – that she wouldn’t have had an affair with Silas Hyman, and trusting her to tell the truth, doesn’t mean that I have full knowledge of our daughter again.

‘Dr Sandhu’s here,’ Jenny says.

I turn to see him, with Jenny’s cardiologist, the young Miss Logan.

‘We’ll be taking Jennifer for an MRI and CAT scan later today,’ Miss Logan says. ‘To check that she’s still a candidate for transplant.’

‘You think it’s likely then,’ you say, grabbing at her words.

‘The time frame is extremely narrow. We are simply following protocol.’

‘Remember we talked about the two kinds of burns?’ Dr Sandhu says. ‘We now know that Jenny’s burns are superficial second-degree partial thickness burns. Which means that the blood supply is intact and her skin will heal. There will be no scarring.’

But he sounds defeated rather than pleased.