Afterwards

I leave the room.

Outside the office on the ground floor, everyone is gathering for another interview with Rowena. The social worker is already in there and now people start filing into the office. The corridor has got hotter, faces are sweating. DI Baker’s shirt is untucked and his hands leave clammy marks around the file he’s holding.

I’m thinking of you.

Of when you’ll realise I’m no longer there with you.

Only Penny and Sarah now remain out in the corridor.

‘There’s something you should know,’ Penny says, not meeting Sarah’s eye. ‘You probably should have been told before.’

‘Yes?’

‘Maisie White was the witness who said she saw Adam coming out of the Art room, holding matches.’

I have never known her.

34

‘I never thought Maisie White was involved in the fire directly,’ Penny tells Sarah. She’s keeping everyone waiting in the office, but she has to tell Sarah; owes her this.

‘She seemed genuinely distressed by what had happened to Jenny and Grace,’ Penny continues. ‘And was reluctant to tell me it was Adam. I thought I was having to force it out of her.’

‘If I’d known-’ Sarah begins.

‘Yes. I’m sorry. Since we found out about the fraud – you found out – we’ve been questioning the validity of her witness statement, but have been working under the assumption that she was protecting her husband. In retrospect she was playing us. I’m sorry.’

‘I told Maisie that a witness had seen Adam,’ Sarah says. ‘And she was surprised. I thought it meant she had no idea.’

‘A good actress?’ suggests Penny.

Sarah thinks a moment then shakes her head. ‘It’s because I’m a police officer. She thought I would already know it was her who was the witness. She’d have assumed I’d been told. It was my ignorance that surprised her.’

No wonder Maisie had initially seemed so nervous of Sarah that evening in the cafeteria.

Penny goes into the office.

There are so many people in here, making Rowena seem smaller. She is staring at the shiny carpet-tiles, not looking up.

‘You told one of my officers earlier that your mother knew you were going to go bankrupt?’ Baker says.

‘Yes.’

‘Why did your mother say she saw Adam coming out of the Art room?’ Penny asks, and DI Baker looks irritated.

‘She wanted a child to be blamed,’ Rowena says quietly. ‘So that no one would suspect fraud. It was just chance that it was Adam’s birthday that day.’

‘Sports day?’

‘Yes. She didn’t want anyone hurt.’

‘And there’d be no staff to put it out?’

Rowena is silent.

‘So who actually started the fire?’

Rowena is silent.

‘Was it you?’ Mohsin asks. ‘Did your mother ask you to do that?’

She doesn’t reply.

‘You said that you need to tell the truth?’ Mohsin reminds her.

‘I didn’t know what she was going to do. Not till too late. And it’s only been in here that she’s told me everything. She thought she could trust me. Oh God.’

‘So it was your mother?’ DI Baker asks.

She shakes her head.

‘She made Adam do it.’

But no one could make Adam do that. He’s too good, too thoughtful.

‘She told Adam that Mr Hyman had left him a birthday present in the Art room,’ Rowena continues. ‘She told him it was a volcano. They’d done that in year three – you know, with the vinegar and the baking soda, making an eruption?

‘She told Adam it was a different kind of volcano and he needed to light it. She said he could use the matches from his birthday cake, which she’d fetched for him.

‘She said the pathetic little wimp didn’t want anything to do with the matches.’

There’s a vocabulary that goes with this person I don’t know. Thinking about her words, not what she’s done. Because I can’t, yet, think about what she’s done.

‘She said she had to lay it on thick then,’ Rowena continues. ‘Told him Mr Hyman had brought the volcano present to the school himself, even though he’d get into terrible trouble if he was found there.’

It’s making a ghastly kind of sense now: a volcano, not a fire, for Mr Hyman, his beloved teacher.

‘She told Addie that Mr Hyman was waiting to say happy birthday to him. That he’d be back any minute. And that he’d be really disappointed if Addie wasn’t playing with the birthday surprise.’

So Silas Hyman is directly linked to the fire – but as a phantom presence; a motivating force, blameless of what was being done in his name.

‘And Adam lit the volcano,’ Rowena says, her voice quiet.

‘What was in this volcano?’ Penny asks.

‘She said it was white spirit and another accelerant. She’d also put cans of spray mount around it. She told me Adam must have been chicken and thrown the match from a distance away, otherwise it would have blown up in his face.’

‘Did she intend to kill him?’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘You just said it would have blown up in his face, if he’d got closer, as he was clearly meant to have done.’

‘She can’t have meant to kill him.’ But her voice shakes, no scaffolding of conviction to sustain it.

‘Is there anything else?’

Rowena nods, unable to look at another person’s face, her own cloaked in misery and shame. ‘She came up to Addie, when his mother had run in to find Jenny. She said, “You weren’t meant to actually do it, for goodness sake, Addie!”’

Rowena mimicked her mother’s voice with unnerving accuracy. I flinch from her and Rowena herself seems disturbed. She continues, quietly now. ‘She told him it was a knight’s test, and he’d failed it. That it was all his fault.’

And Adam believed her.

Because Adam believes in quests and tests of courage and honour.

Because in his eight-year-old imagination he was Sir Gawain.

Because at eight you really can think you’re a knight who’s been found wanting.

But instead of the giant nicking the side of your neck, your mother and sister are trapped in a burning building in front of you while you’re told that you are to blame.

I have to run to him now and tell him it isn’t his fault. It isn’t!

But my vocal cords no longer make sounds.

And Adam, too, is mute. The one thing that DI Baker got right is that Adam’s guilt silenced him.