Afterwards

‘That’s fantastic!’ you say, refusing to be defeated too.

They go into the ward, to Jenny’s bed.

Jenny stays in the corridor with me.

‘Dead but not scarred,’ Jenny says. ‘Well, that’s comforting.’

‘Jen…’

‘Yeah, well, sometimes only gallows humour cuts it.’

‘You’re not going to-’

‘So you keep saying.’

‘Because it’s the truth. You’re going to live.’

‘So why didn’t Dr Sandhu or Miss Logan say so? I need a walk.’

‘Jenny-’

She starts walking away from me.

‘They’ve found you a heart.’

She doesn’t turn.

‘I’m too old for fairy stories, Mum.’

31

Sarah is waiting in the cafeteria, fingers tapping as yours do when you are impatient. She has her owl notebook out and has been reading through it. I sense increased energy in her exhausted face. She stops tapping as she sees Mohsin and Penny arrive.

‘Natalia Hyman’s been charged under the malicious communications act and for assault,’ Penny says. ‘She’s admitted to all the incidents of hate mail and to the paint attack.’

Her sharp features are softened with satisfaction at a job well done.

‘Silas Hyman had nothing to do with his wife’s malicious hate-mail campaign,’ she continues. ‘He didn’t even know it was happening.’

‘And the tampering with Jenny’s oxygen?’ Sarah asks.

‘Natalia swears blind it wasn’t her,’ Penny says. ‘And I believe her. She’s our hate-mailer, but I really don’t think she’s the saboteur.’

‘And Donald White?’ Sarah asks Mohsin.

‘His alibi checks out,’ Mohsin replies. ‘He was on a BMI flight at three on Wednesday, halfway between Gatwick and Aberdeen. But we still think you were right about the arson for fraud. He must have had an accomplice.’

‘His smart lawyer is trying to spring him,’ Penny says. ‘But Baker’s not having it, not yet anyway.’

‘Or the arsonist was Silas Hyman,’ Sarah says.

Mohsin and Penny are taken aback.

‘I think my brother might have been right from the beginning,’ Sarah continues.

I want her to stop, right now. I don’t have the emotional capacity or the mental energy for this. We have it sorted out. Done and dusted. Donald White burnt the school down to get the insurance money. Possibly Jenny saw something that incriminated him, which is why he may be the person who tried to kill her. Natalia Hyman was getting misplaced revenge on Jenny. Maybe, just a possibility, it was Natalia who attacked her in the hospital. That’s it. These two people make sense of it all. Not a nice neat parcel of facts, but an ugly, vile dossier of the foulness in people. But known. Done.

‘Don’t you want the truth?’ Nanny Voice snaps at me. ‘Don’t you want Adam unequivocally cleared and Jenny safe? Isn’t that what you want?’

Of course it is, I’m sorry.

‘But we’ve found out about the fraud,’ Mohsin says to Sarah. ‘Rather, you found out.’

Is he also frustrated and tired by this now?

‘I found a motive, yes,’ Sarah says. ‘But I now think the arsonist could equally well be Silas Hyman.’

‘Taking revenge on the school?’ Mohsin asks.

‘Yes.’

‘I never bought that Silas Hyman could be the arsonist,’ Penny says sharply. ‘Even first time around.’

‘I think we were too quick to dismiss him,’ Sarah says.

‘But what about his wife giving him an alibi?’ Mohsin asks. ‘She clearly loathes him, so she’d hardly lie for him, would she?’

‘If he gets sent down, she’ll be a single mother with three children and no income,’ Sarah says. ‘It’s in her own interests to lie for him. In any case, I think she still has feelings for him, in her own weird and perverted way.’

I agree, because sitting next to Natalia in the car, beneath her spat-out furious words, her passionate viciousness, I glimpsed something fragile and wounded. ‘He was fucking her, but he was making love to me.’

‘Give me ten minutes?’ Sarah asks and before they can reply she leaves, holding her owl notebook. Mohsin looks perplexed, Penny irritated.

‘I’ll call the station,’ Penny says, annoyed. She leaves. Mohsin goes to the counter to get another cup of tea.

Alone, I think about Jenny. ‘I’m too old for fairy stories, Mum.’

I remember you reading to her every night: your big hands, the knuckles with dark hair, rough and masculine, around a sparkly covered book. Her favourites were the old ones, the ones that begin ‘Once upon a time’ and so, as convention dictates, must end ‘happily ever after’.

But that happily ever after was hard won. Those beautiful princesses and girls with pure white skin and defenceless children were pitted against vicious cruelty. A witch keeps children caged, fattening them up to eat; a stepmother abandons children in a forest to die; another demands a woodcutter kills her beautiful stepdaughter and brings her the heart for supper.

Inside the sparkly covers was a world of good against evil; snow-white innocence against dark violence.

But despite the wickedness, the children and the wronged beautiful girls and the blameless princesses won through. They survived – always – into a happy-ever-after ending.

And I believe in fairy stories now, did I tell you that? Because I’ve gone through the looking glass; stepped through the back of the wardrobe. The young girl will get her prince, the children will be reunited with their loving father, and Jen will live.

She will live.

Mohsin finishes his cup of tea as Sarah comes back into the cafeteria, Penny just behind her. And I must think about dark wickedness again – the who and the why of our story. Unlike those fairy tales, the narrative isn’t neatly linear but looping back on itself to Silas Hyman.

‘OK, let’s run with your idea of Silas Hyman as arsonist then,’ Penny says to Sarah, with a note of derision in her voice. ‘Let’s say he did want to torch the place. Even if he knew the code on the gate – let’s actually get him inside – how would he have walked through the school up to the second floor, unnoticed?’

‘I’ve thought about that,’ Sarah responds calmly. ‘Although most of the staff were at sports day, there were still three members of staff in the building and it would have been risky.’

‘Exactly. So-’

‘So he had an accomplice. Someone who made sure the coast was clear for him.’

Penny looks even more annoyed and impatient. I hope her children are intelligent and fast or homework time will be a nightmare in her house.

‘What if it was Rowena White who was helping him?’ Sarah asks. ‘What if she kept lookout? Possibly made sure the secretary was distracted while he got in?’

‘And why on earth would she do that?’ Penny asks.

‘Because I think that Silas Hyman was having an affair with someone at the school. A teaching assistant. But it wasn’t Jenny. It was Rowena.’

I am startled. Rowena?

‘That’s absurd,’ Penny says. ‘I understand why you don’t want your niece to have been having an affair with