Afterwards

‘Who did this?’ you ask her.

‘We don’t know yet, but we will find out. I promise.’

‘But someone must have seen who it was, surely?’ you say. ‘Someone must have seen.’

She puts her hand on your arm.

‘You must know something,’ you say.

‘Not much.’

‘Do you know what they were doing to Jenny, when I left her just now?’ you ask.

‘Jen, leave, please,’ I say to her, but she doesn’t budge.

‘They were giving her an eye toilet, an eye toilet, for Christ’s sake.’

I feel Jenny stiffen next to me. Sarah’s eyes fill with tears. I’ve never seen her cry.

She hasn’t yet asked how Jenny is. I see her brace herself. I will her not to do it.

‘Have they told you the chances of…?’ she asks, her voice trailing off, unable to continue. Her life is spent questioning people, but she can’t finish this one.

‘She has a less than fifty per cent chance of surviving,’ you say, repeating Dr Sandhu’s words exactly; maybe it’s easier than translating them into your own voice.

I see Sarah pale, literally turn white, and in the colour of her face I see how much she loves Jenny.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Sarah asks you, and her words could be Jenny’s to me.

‘Because she will be alright,’ you say to Sarah, almost angrily. ‘She will get better.’

‘There were only two members of staff, apart from Jenny, who weren’t at sports day,’ she tells you. ‘We think it highly unlikely it was one of them.

‘The school has a gate, which is permanently locked with a code. The secretary buzzes people in via entry phone from her office. No parents or children are told the code; they all have to be buzzed in. Members of staff know it, but they were all out on the playing field at sports day. So we’re probably looking at an outsider.’

‘But how could they get in?’ you ask. You’d wanted a culprit but now you don’t want that person to have access; as if you can change what’s happened if you prove it was impossible.

‘He or she could have slipped in earlier in the day,’ Sarah replies. ‘Possibly behind a legitimate person who was buzzed in. Perhaps blended in somehow and not been noticed if parents thought they were a member of staff and vice versa. Schools are busy places, lots of people coming and going. Or the arsonist may have watched a member of staff key in the code and memorised it and come back while everyone was out at sports day.’

‘Surely you can’t just walk in, though? Surely…’

‘Once someone is through the main gate there’s no more security, the front door isn’t locked and there’s no CCTV or other security device.

‘That’s really all we’ve got so far, Mike. We haven’t yet made it public that it’s arson. But the investigation is urgent; they’re allocating as many people as they can to it. Detective Inspector Baker is running the case. I’ll see if he’ll have a meeting with you but he’s not the most sympathetic of people.’

‘I just want the police to find the person who did this. And then I will hurt him. Hurt him like he’s hurt my family.’

6

‘Your definition of “fine” is a more than fifty per cent chance of dying?’ Jenny asks, and I hear a tone in her voice that sounds like teasing, but surely she can’t be?

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t want to look at myself but I do want to know what’s happening. I need the truth, OK? If I ask for it, it means I can take it.’

I nod and pause a moment, chastened.

‘The scarring,’ I say. ‘What I told you about that, it was the truth.’

I see her relief.

‘I will be alright,’ she says. ‘Like Dad said, I know I will. And so will you. We will get better.’

I used to worry about her optimism, thinking she hid behind it instead of facing things.

‘In a way it’s a good thing, Mum,’ she’d said about flunking her A levels. ‘Better to realise I’m not cut out for university now, than three years and a large overdraft too late.’

‘Of course we will get better,’ I say to her.

Further along the corridor, we spot Tara coming towards you. I remember seeing her earlier, in the melee of press. Now she’s tracked you here. Jenny has also noticed her.

‘Isn’t she the one who thinks the Richmond Post is the Washington Post?’ Jenny asks, remembering our joke.

‘That’s the one.’

She reaches you, and you look at her, perplexed.

‘Michael…?’ she says, using her purring voice.

Men are usually hoodwinked by Tara’s girlish rosy face, slender body and pretty glossy hair, but not a man whose wife is unconscious and daughter critically ill. You shy away from her, trying to place her. Sarah joins you.

‘She was asking me about Silas Hyman earlier,’ you tell Sarah.

‘Do you know her?’

‘No.’

‘I’m a friend of Grace’s,’ Tara calmly butts in.

‘I doubt it,’ you snap.

‘Well, more a colleague. I work with Grace at the Richmond Post.’

‘So a journalist,’ Sarah says. ‘Time to go.’

Tara’s not going to budge. Sarah flashes her warrant card.

‘Detective Sergeant McBride,’ Tara reads, looking smug. ‘So the police are involved. I presume that this teacher, Silas Hyman, is a line of enquiry you’ll be taking?’

‘Out. Now,’ Sarah says in her uniform-and-truncheon voice.

Jenny and I watch as she virtually manhandles Tara towards the lifts.

‘She’s fantastic, isn’t she?’ Jenny says and I nod, not graciously.

‘She was wrong though earlier,’ Jenny says. ‘Or at least Mrs Healey was when she told her about the code on the gate. You know, that people don’t know it? Some of the parents do. I’ve seen them letting themselves in when Annette takes too long answering the buzzer. And a few of the children know it too, though they’re not meant to.’

I don’t know the code, but then I’m not pally with the in-the-know kind of mothers.

‘So a parent could have come in,’ I say.

‘All the parents were at sports day.’

‘Perhaps someone left.’

I try to think back to this afternoon. Did I see something and not realise?

The first thing I remember is cheering on Adam in the opening sprint, his face anxious and intent, his spindly legs going as fast as he could make them, desperate not to let down the Green Team. I was worrying about him coming last and you not being there and Jen’s retakes; not seeing the huge truth that we were all alive and healthy and undamaged. Because if I had, I’d have been sprinting around that field, cheering till my voice was hoarse at how fantastic and miraculous our lives were. A blue-skies and green-grass and white- lines life; expansive and ordered and complete.

But I must focus. Focus.