Yes, that’s it. I don’t expect we shall ever get there but there’s the other children to think about, isn’t there? The ones who saw it all happen. The ones who lost their friends.
You’ve been to the school, I assume?
You’ve seen the tributes then. The flowers, the notes. The ribbons too. It’s astonishing, isn’t it? How many people just one life can touch. That helps sometimes. I feel guilty that it does but it helps: knowing that others are grieving too. In different ways, for different reasons most of them, but they’re grieving nonetheless. You know what they say about misery. There’s truth in those old sayings, don’t you think? Except for that one about healing, the one about time. I can’t imagine that there’s any truth in that.
But yes, the headmaster. He’s always seemed a decent enough fellow. He seems to say the right thing, make the right noises, you know. I don’t envy him his job, I can tell you. It can’t be easy, even in normal circumstances. He must be doing something right though because they’re under such scrutiny these days, aren’t they? The school always does well in the tables. It always comes out near the top. That’s why we sent Sarah there. That’s why we moved here.
No, thank you. I still have this one. I’m okay.
You know, it’s interesting that you ask. About the school. Because do you know what a friend of mine said? He said to me – well, actually, it was both of them, him and his wife – they said to me – Susan wasn’t there and I’m glad now I think about it that she wasn’t – but they said to me: you should sue. The school. Can you believe that? They told me I should sue the school. For hiring him. For putting him in charge of our children, they said. For taking a man at face value, I say. For not knowing what no one could have known.
Because no one could have known, could they? No one could have predicted what would happen. What he would do. You know that better than me, I’d imagine. You have access to his records, don’t you, to these lists people have, to these registers. And he was clean, wasn’t he? He had no history. The headmaster, he told me all of this. He assured me that there was nothing they could have done. He said this man had a vendetta against one of the children and that Sarah just got in his way. He said it was unfortunate, it was tragic but what happened was a freak, an aberration. He said it was the inscrutable will of God.
I haven’t spoken to them since. The friends I mentioned. I’m putting what they said down to shock. I mean, it’s everyone’s first reaction, isn’t it? To look for someone to blame. People say it’s an English thing, this need to find fault, to look for scapegoats, but I don’t think it’s just us. It’s human nature. I mean, I can’t deny that I have my moments. I can’t deny that sometimes I succumb. Do you know what I wish? Obviously you know what I wish but apart from that do you know what I wish? I wish that he weren’t dead. So I could talk to him. That’s why. Sometimes, that’s why. I wish he were alive so I could ask him… I’m not sure what I’d ask him. I’d ask him why I suppose. Although I don’t know that he would be able to answer. It seems to me if he were rational enough to be able to answer he wouldn’t have done what he did in the first place.
Then other times, other times I wish he were alive so I could kill him.
I don’t mean that. I don’t mean that.
Sometimes I think I do but I don’t.
I think what I’m doing is what my friends were doing. It’s hard, isn’t it? When there’s no one to blame when something terrible happens. Or when there’s no one left to blame. Do you know what I mean? It’s always easier to deal with the pain if you can twist that pain into anger, if you can lash out, if you can blame someone, anyone, even if they don’t deserve to be blamed.
Do you know what I mean?
.
Lucia was right. Though the clouds became bloated, there was no breach. The effect, rather, was like shutting the windows in a room that was already stuffy and overheated. And the clouds lingered. The afternoon was dark long before evening arrived. The evening was sunless, then starless. The night was no cooler than the day.
She did not sleep. Usually, whenever she said she had not slept, she would know that actually she had, in starts, for an hour, perhaps two hours, at a time. But that night, the night following the memorial service, she did not sleep. She lay on sheets that scratched, uncovered but for a corner of a blanket she clutched only because she needed something to clutch, her head perspiring on pillows that felt recently vacated even on their underside. She tried to convince herself that no one in London was sleeping, that the country was awake and uncomfortable and as worn out as she was. She tried but she convinced herself only that she would never sleep again, whereas everyone else, the ones who in the morning would say, no, I didn’t sleep a wink, not a wink all night, were in fact sleeping in starts, for an hour, perhaps two hours, at a time.
At the station the next day no one looked as though they had not slept. Her colleagues appeared no more weary, no more dishevelled than usual. Lucia, on the other hand, saw the image reflected by her monitor, by the glass partition of Cole’s office, by the mirror in the ladies’ toilets as a forgery, painted with mascara and foundation on a canvas that was worn and cracked. She drank coffee though she knew she was drinking too much. She was hot and she was edgy and the coffee made her hotter, more on edge.
And the clouds lingered.
She tried to not think about Szajkowski. She tried to not think about the school, about Travis. She cleared her desk and filed her files. She emptied her inbox and deleted documents from her desktop. But she saw Walter, she heard his guffaw, she smelt his failing deodorant, and the sight, sound, smell of him was more than enough to remind her. She sent Cole an email. She wanted to make sure that the report – the bastardised report, Walter’s report – had not been filed in her name. From the moment it occurred to her that it might have been, she became determined to make sure that it was not. She knew it was unimportant but she became determined nonetheless. She blamed the coffee and took another sip.
Cole did not reply and Lucia grew tired of waiting. For the first time since she had joined the police force, she lamented the lack of paperwork awaiting her attention. She craved menial tasks but she had none. When he had first handed her the Szajkowski case, Cole had absolved her of responsibility for anything else. Now Cole had snatched the Szajkowski case back and for the moment Lucia had nothing.
She tried to look busy. It was hard to look busy and at the same time to watch Walter, to listen to his conversations, to angle herself in such a way that she might catch a glimpse of Cole in his office, to walk past the doorway and to linger without seeming to. What she most wanted to do was march in. What she most wanted was to ask and be told what was happening with her case, what the superintendent had said, the commissioner, the home secretary. What she most wanted, seeing as she was playing this game, was to rewind twenty-four hours, forty-eight, and write the report again, write it better, present it again, present it better. Present it later so Cole would not have time to do anything other than accept it.
She pulled out her files again and she read. She read the statements and the more she read the more she felt vindicated, righteous, wronged. She found a highlighter in her drawer, a yellow one, and stole a green one from Harry’s desk. As she read she annotated: yellow for the prosecution, green for the defence. She marked yellow, yellow, nothing for a while, then yellow again, more yellow. She drank coffee. Every so often she would pull the lid off the green pen with her teeth and highlight a sentence, a paragraph, not because she felt she really needed to, more to assure herself that she was being fair.
At lunch she bought a sandwich and ate one half of it. She drank water to flush out the coffee but filled her mug as soon as she returned to the office.
The yellow highlighter was running low. She felt like brandishing it at Cole, saying, here, look, do you see now? I was right and you were wrong. But it did not run out. She willed it to. She double underlined and scrawled extravagant asterisks in the margins but still it did not run dry. Whenever she was forced to pick up the green pen she left the cap off the yellow. She knew she was breaking the rules she had set but the contest had already become a rout.
Until she reached the end of one statement and realised she had marked it only in green. She read it again with her yellow highlighter poised but found only another section that should probably also have been green. The same thing happened with the next statement, then with a third. And though it was the yellow pen that lay bare on her desk, it was the green one that gave out first. Lucia cursed. She blamed Harry for buying cheap, decided the
