Afterwards

him. But Natalia Hyman was clear it was Jenny. She saw them together.’

‘Saw her husband flirting with Jen, yes,’ Sarah says. ‘But he flirted with every female at the school. Elizabeth Fisher called him a cockerel in the hen-house. I think he flirted with Rowena White too. That it went further.’

They’ve reached Mohsin now, who’s listening intently.

‘What about the head teacher and the leash thing?’ Penny asks. ‘Sally Healey knew it was Jennifer.’

‘She just said it was a teaching assistant,’ Sarah replies. ‘It was Natalia who drew her own conclusions from that. And if you put the two girls side by side it’s easy to see why you’d pick Jenny.’

‘OK, I need to get brutal here,’ Penny says. ‘Jennifer – long legs, long blonde hair, beautiful face. Jenny, I buy.’

She sees Sarah react on ‘beautiful face’, and Mohsin glaring at her.

‘Sorry. But why ugly, dumpy Rowena White when he has Natalia at home?’

‘Because Natalia is the kind of woman who shoves shit through letterboxes?’ hazards Mohsin.

‘And Rowena’s extremely intelligent,’ Sarah says. ‘Reading Science at Oxford. Maybe he’s attracted to that. Or maybe he knew he could seduce her because she’s vulnerable. Or she’s seventeen and that’s beauty enough. I don’t know his reason.’

‘Because there isn’t one,’ Penny says.

‘There’s more,’ Sarah said, rummaging in her bag. ‘I’ve got my notes here from when I spoke to Maisie White.’

Penny watches her, alarmed.

‘Who the fuck didn’t you speak to? Does DI Baker know about this?’

You arrive, interrupting.

‘Is Jenny on her own?’ Sarah asks, her anxiety clear. Because if it’s Silas Hyman, as she thinks, he’s out there somewhere and a threat.

‘Ivo’s with her,’ you say. ‘And a whole load of doctors. About Rowena White. After we spoke I remembered something.’

Penny and Mohsin both look awkward with you here. Penny even blushes a little. It’s affecting to be physically close to someone who is emotionally stripped raw.

‘When I spoke to Silas Hyman’s wife,’ you say, ‘she accused me of getting her husband sacked. Of “wanting him out”.’

I remember Natalia following you to the car; her hostility like a strong cheap perfume around her.

‘I thought she meant me as a parent,’ you continue. ‘Just a generic parent at the school. But I think she meant me personally. She thought I’d got him fired – presumably because she thought he was having an affair with my daughter.’

Sarah nods and I see the allegiance between the two of you.

‘She got the wrong girl so she blamed the wrong father,’ you say.

Penny is silent. Presumably it’s not good police practice to argue with a father whose daughter is in ICU; nor cast aspersions about said daughter’s morals to her distraught dad. And now I realise why you’re here; why instead of waiting for Sarah to come to you, you’ve interrupted this meeting with her colleagues.

You’d said the idea of Jenny and Silas Hyman having a relationship was ‘bloody ridiculous’. You don’t want lies being told about Jenny, something you’d see as a slur on her – an affair with a married older man.

When you leave, there’s a pause before anyone speaks again.

‘I think Mike’s right about that interpretation,’ Sarah says. ‘And it makes sense if the red-paint attack was to punish Jenny for getting Silas the sack. It would explain the escalation of violence. She just got the wrong girl.’

‘You said you spoke to Maisie White…?’ Mohsin asks.

‘Yes.’

She opens her owl notebook. As she does so, I remember the shadowy empty cafeteria and Sarah writing up her notes, the moment that Maisie had left to join Rowena.

‘I spoke to Maisie White on Thursday July the twelfth, the day after the fire, at nine p.m.’

Sarah concentrates on her notebook, but must be aware of Penny’s disapproval.

‘She told me, “It’s wrong to make someone adore you, when they’re so much younger and can’t think for themselves.” I thought she was talking about Adam. But I think now that she was referring to her teenage daughter.

‘She said that Silas got people to love him because no one realised he was a sham. She said that he “exploited” people, and emphasised that word.’

Penny is silent now; like Mohsin, listening intently.

‘I asked her when she’d changed her mind about Silas Hyman. From my notes she didn’t answer immediately.’

I remember Maisie fussing with a little pink packet of fake sugar, not answering for a while.

‘She then said it was at the prize-giving,’ continues Sarah. ‘But I think it was before then – when she found out about Silas and her daughter.’

I remember Maisie’s pale face at the prize-giving. How unlike her it was to hate someone. I remember her saying, ‘That man should never have been allowed near our children.’

Silas Hyman wasn’t at the school when Rowena was a pupil there. But he was there last summer when Rowena was a sixteen-year-old teaching assistant. Why didn’t I realise she meant Rowena? And why hadn’t she told me – and later Sarah – the truth?

I think it’s probably because, like you, she thinks it’s a slur on her daughter. She thinks Silas has already exploited Rowena and she doesn’t want to damage her any further by making it public. Even to a friend.

And she’s used to keeping secrets.

‘When I spoke to Rowena the next day,’ Sarah says, ‘she told me that Silas was violent.’

‘You have your notes on that interview too?’ Mohsin asks.

Is he teasing her? No. It is standard procedure to write contemporaneous notes.

She nods and gives him the notebook.

I’ve never really understood the police’s obsession with procedure and note-taking and bureaucratic attention to detail; which Sarah has always excelled at. Now I do.

‘The good angel and the devil thing, that’s interesting,’ Mohsin says as he reads.

‘If she’d helped him with the arson attack,’ Penny says, ‘it would explain why she ran back in. Maybe she hadn’t realised that people would get hurt.’

‘Let’s talk to her,’ Mohsin says, getting up.

‘I’ll call the station,’ Penny says. ‘Get them to find Silas Hyman urgently.’

I follow Mohsin and Sarah, thinking about Ivo standing guard at Jenny’s bedside while you came to talk to Sarah and her colleagues. I’m glad you trust him enough to let him stand guard in your place; glad that you’re not as prejudiced against him as I was.

We arrive at the burns unit and I look through the glass wall into Rowena’s side-room. As I said before, she doesn’t look plain or ugly to me any more – how can anyone with an undamaged face ever look even plain to me now – but I do understand Penny’s harsh honesty about her.

But she was beautiful as a little girl. Like a fairy child, with her enormous eyes and elfin face and silky honey- blonde hair. Remember that bronze statue that Mrs Healey commissioned to mark the first year at Sidley House? We weren’t meant to know which child it had been modelled on, but we all guessed it was Rowena. But at six her tiny white perfect teeth had been replaced by uneven gappy ones that looked too big and discoloured next to the remaining pearly milk teeth. Her eyes seemed to shrink as her face grew and her shiny fair hair turned dull matt brown. You think it’s odd that I noticed these things? At school you watch children grow and change, and you can’t help but notice. I felt for her. It must have been so hard to have been so gloriously pretty and then to lose that. She’d cried at the dentist’s, Maisie told me, demanding her old teeth back, as if she knew, even while it was happening, that she was losing her little-girl beauty. I used to wonder if that was what made her so competitive; as if she was trying to prove herself in other ways.

Jenny did the opposite: our gawky duckling growing into a beautiful teenager, while Rowena suffered the adolescent blight of acne. Growing up must have been fraught for Rowena, even without her father’s physical