I look at the three car seats in the car, a discarded teddy, a Postman Pat comic.
“He told you that?” I ask.
“So?”
So, you were sixteen last summer and he’s thirty, I want to say, but don’t.
“Perhaps he’s come to see one of us,” Jenny continues. “Bring flowers or something. He’s really kind, remember, Mum? You do remember that, don’t you?”
A challenge to remember him as I used to think of him.
We follow him back up the basement steps, me staring at his back, as if I can x-ray through his body to see the inner man. He’s sweating, his T-shirt sticking to him, and I see how muscular he is.
I am relieved to be back in the goldfish-bowl atrium of daylight and people and noise.
I spot Adam coming in with Mum and Sarah. As I look at him, I lose sight of Mr. Hyman.
Mum has her arm around Adam.
“Mummy will still be having a few bits and bobs sorted out,” she says to him, reducing MRIs and CT scans and God knows what else to bits and bobs, and I love her for it. “So let’s get a drink to settle your tummy, and then we can see her later.”
When Dad died, I’d found out that my parents were the roof that had been sheltering me. Icy winds of grief blew through what had once been warm and safe, terror clawing its way in. Now Mum is putting up a canopy for Adam, and I so admire her strength as she tries to shelter him.
I go up to Sarah, desperate to talk to her. Because I have information that will surely exonerate Addie.
I now know that the hate-mailer attacked Jenny with red paint. It didn’t stop in February as everyone thinks, but in May, just a few weeks ago. And maybe he’s attacking her now, not symbolically with red paint, but trying to kill her.
Because I know that a man sabotaged Jenny’s ventilator—I saw him.
But I also think you’re right to be suspicious of Silas Hyman because what the hell was a thirty-year-old man doing bad-mouthing his wife to a sixteen-year-old? And what’s he doing here? Now?
And I’ve seen Donald being vicious to Rowena, and I think he’s probably been violent to Rowena and Maisie for years. Both of them were in the school at the time of the fire. But they won’t tell anyone about him, not when they haven’t done so in the past.
I feel like I’ve become the keeper of the keys, and one of them, surely, will unlock the truth. It’s my job now to find out everything I can. Then I will make sure that Adam is proved innocent. I have to. That is all there is to it.
14
You’re at Jenny’s bedside, staring at the monitors around her. You barely glance at Sarah as she arrives. “Baker’s going to get the bastard now?” you say to her.
“He still thinks it’s Adam.”
It’s as if she’s slapped you. “I don’t understand.”
“He didn’t speak, Mike. He can’t speak.”
“But surely he shook his head or …”
“No. Nothing. There was nothing I could do. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh Christ. Poor Ads.” You stand up. “How the hell can Baker believe Hyman’s lies?”
“It can’t have been Silas Hyman who said he saw Adam,” Sarah says. “He’d have had no business being in the school in the first place.”
“You said already. So he got someone to lie for him.”
“Mike …”
“And who the fuck gave him an alibi?” Sarah doesn’t answer. “You know, don’t you?”
You look at her and she finally meets your eye.
“It was his wife.”
“I’m going to see them.”
“I really don’t think—”
“I don’t give a monkey’s arse what anyone thinks.”
I’ve never heard you snap at her before. She’s upset by it but you don’t notice.
“Will you stay here? Look after her?”
“I don’t think you’ll achieve much, Mike.”
You are silent.
“A friend brought your car from the BBC to the hospital car park,” she says. “The one outside. They’ve paid for an extended stay. Here.”
She hands you a parking chit. As I look at it, I glimpse people standing on the shore of our old life, waving at us with new toothbrushes and parking chits and nightdresses for me and meals left on the doorstep for Mum and Adam.
She takes your seat next to Jenny.
“There’s been no change since this morning,” you say. “Stable, they said, for the time being.”
When Jenny told me it had hurt her to go outside, I’d worried it had affected her body in some way, but thank God it clearly didn’t.
“Let me know if there’s anything, right away, anything,” you say.
“Of course.”
You leave the ICU and I want to tell you that Silas Hyman is right here in the hospital. But maybe seeing his wife without him will be an advantage. Maybe you’ll find out more that way.
And Sarah is with Jenny. Mum is with Adam. Both our children are safe.
Jenny is outside the ICU.
“Where’s Dad going?”
“Silas Hyman’s house.”
She turns away from me, so that I can’t see her face.
“Jen?”
“If I could remember more about that afternoon, then maybe the police wouldn’t blame Addie; you and Dad wouldn’t blame Silas. But I can’t. I can’t remember!”
“It’s not your fault, sweetheart.”
I touch her on the shoulder, but she shakes me off, as if angry with herself for needing comfort.
“It could be the drugs they’ve given you,” I say. “DI Baker told Aunt Sarah that drugs can affect memory.”
What he’d actually said was, “The only time I’ve seen genuine amnesia is when someone is drugged up to the eyeballs …”
“But the drugs aren’t affecting anything else,” Jenny says. “I can think clearly now, can’t I? I can talk to you.”
“Who knows what effect they have? And if it’s not the drugs, then there might be another reason. There’s something called retrograde amnesia. At least I think it’s called that.”
I want her not to blame herself, to have a reason she can understand. So I continue, “It’s when your brain blocks off access to a traumatic memory so you can’t get it. It can affect the time before and afterwards too.”
Although I’m pretty sure this doesn’t apply to Adam, it might be true of Jen.
“So it’s like a protective thing?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“But the memory is still there?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Then I’ll just have to be braver.”
I remember the judder of fear going through her when she tried to think back to yesterday afternoon.
“Not yet, sweetheart, all right? Maybe Aunt Sarah and Dad will find out what happened, without you needing to remember.”
She looks relieved.
“Is it OK if I go with Dad?” I ask her.
“ ’Course. But won’t it hurt you to go outside?”
“Oh, I’m a tough old bird,” I say to her, one of Mum’s expressions.
“Yeah, right. From the person who goes to bed with a cold.”
I leave the hospital with you. My skin is scalded by the warm air, and the gravel is shards of glass under my feet, as if the hospital building with its white walls and cool slippery linoleum has been giving me protection and now it’s ripped away.
I grip hold of your hand and although you don’t feel me, you give me comfort.
We reach our car and I see Adam’s books stuffed into the pouch behind the driver’s seat, a lipstick of Jenny’s in the bit meant for a mug, a pair of my boots that need reheeling on the backseat, like archaeological finds of a long-ago life, shockingly evocative.
We drive away from the hospital.
The pain hits me like blows, so I must focus on something else. But what?
It’s silent in the car. It’s never silent in the car. Either we are chatting, or there’s
music playing (blaring if it’s Jenny in charge). Radio 4 if it’s me on my own and I’ve spent too long with eight-year-old boys or teenage girls.
I look at you as you drive. Everyone warms to you. I wonder about this sometimes. Not that tall, not that handsome, not handsome at all really—what is it that causes this warming thing? When I’ve asked you, you say they’ve just seen you on the telly; they think they know you already.
But I think it’s a charismatic, self-assured thing. After all, I didn’t see you on TV before I fell for you.
You involuntarily reach your left hand across towards the passenger seat to hold mine, as you always do when you drive. “One of the advantages of an automatic.” And for a moment we are driving to see friends for dinner, with you praising sat-navs because we can talk instead of map-read, our bottle of wine rolling around in the trunk. Then you move your hand away.
In our silent car, I remember your old familiar voice, warm and deep and confident. The voice you had until yesterday morning.
Until now you’ve always been so happy, in that easygoing, masculine way; sometimes infuriatingly so. It’ll be fine, relax! will be written on your headstone, I’ve sniped. But it’s attractive, that happiness with yourself and the world, looking confidently outwards not anxiously inwards.
“Always been happy?” nanny voice chides, reminding me that your parents’ car crash was when you were only a little older than Adam is now.
“Little orphan Annie,” you said, when you first told me about it. “Only I don’t have the ringlets.”
You’ve suffered terrible terrible things before, even if you don’t bear the scars now. “I had Sarah, so I survived it,” you told me when we knew each other better. “A person version of a Swiss Army knife.”
You take our turning off the main road.
Pain makes a noise, like a loud, high-pitched vibration, breaking down barriers around thoughts I’ve been trying to keep at bay.
I think back to Jenny being attacked with red paint. I imagine a man going into a DIY superstore a few days before, a huge place where no one will remember him. I think of him walking along an aisle lined with paint tins, passing the gentler water-based paints until he finds the oil-based polyurethane glosses. In my head he walks quickly past the plentifully stocked whites and creams until he reaches the colors; not many of those because who wants to gloss their window frames and skirting boards in a color? He chooses crimson.
I imagine a girl on the checkout not finding it strange that he’s bought red paint and white spirit. Because the only way of getting out gloss paint is with white spirit and, yes, there is a large quantity, but there’s a queue building behind him now and her break’s in a minute.
Did Jen go to a friend’s house to wash her hair? Not knowing that gloss can be impossible to wash out. Did she then go to a hairdresser or did a friend or Ivo snip snip snip the evidence?
Did she scrub at her coat before taking it to a dry cleaner’s? They would have tutted and shaken their head and told her they couldn’t promise it would come out.
Why didn’t she come to me?
You’re turning into a street, three away from ours. Mr. Hyman’s road.
I didn’t know you’d listened to me when I said we often passed Mr. Hyman on the way to school.
You’re pulling over, not bothering to park. You slam the driver’s door so hard the car rocks.
I think that to survive loving Jenny, this terrible compassion, you need to feel counterbalancing rage.
From the car, I watch you as you ring doorbell after doorbell asking which number Silas Hyman lives at. The pain is getting worse the longer we are away from the hospital. I try to visualize it, as I did during childbirth, turning it into crashing waves and dancing lights. I’d thought it was bodies that feel pain, but maybe skin and flesh and bones are protecting something exquisitely tender inside.
I join you as you press Mr. Hyman’s doorbell, keeping your thumb hard down on it.
His wife answers the door. I recognize her and remember she’s called Natalia. I met her at the school “soirée” two years ago (you refused to go to anything called a “soirée for God’s sake”). She’d looked like something out of a Tolstoy novel then, and I’d wondered if she’d changed her name from Natalie to something more appropriately exotic. But Natalia’s striking beauty has become subtly coarsened since then; something—anxiety? tiredness?—slackening the skin on her face, causing her green cat-eyes to lose their perfectly outlined shape, foreshadowing her aging, when her feline beauty will be covered over without trace.
Looking at her face, imagining it in the future, because I don’t want to look at yours. You’re no longer a man people would warm to.
“Where’s your husband?” you ask.
Natalia looks at you; feline features stiffening, sensing threat.
“You are …?”
“Michael Covey. Jenny Covey’s father.”
Adam whips off a plastic helmet with a flourish as he pretends to be a Roman gladiator as played by Russell Crowe.
“My name is Maximus Decimus …”
“Meridius,” prompts Jenny.
“Maximus Decimus Meridius. Commander of the armies of the north. General of the—”
“Blah, blah.”
“Armies aren’t blah blah.”
“It’s the next bit that’s good.”
“OK, OK. I am Maximus Decimus Meridius. Skip armies bit. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.”
“It gives me shivers,” Jenny says. “Every time.”
Adam, holding his helmet, nods solemnly in agreement. You are trying desperately not to laugh and I daren’t catch your eye.
We haven’t let him watch the film yet. Much too violent. But Jen’s taught him all the punch lines.
Yes, I know, your situation is nothing like Maximus Decimus Meridius’s, because your child and wife are still alive.
“My husband isn’t here,” Natalia says with a slight emphasis on the word my, a stressing of loyalty.
“Where is he?” you ask.
“A building site.”
He’s lied to her. I feel a flash of anxiety for Jenny and Adam. But Sarah is with Jenny, Mum is with Adam. Neither of them would desert their posts.
“Where is the building site?” you ask.
“I don’t know. It’s different every day. Unskilled laborers don’t have the luxury of regular work.” She sounds upset for him.
“I read about your wife and daughter,” she continues. I wait for her to offer sympathy but she doesn’t. Instead she turns her back on you, leaving the door open behind her, and walks away. I follow her into the house. There are three small children, looking grubby and out of control; two of them are fighting.
Their house is almost identical to ours, just a few streets away, but a door blocks off the entrance to the first floor. It’s a flat, not a house. I’ve never really thought of the financial discrepancy between the teachers and parents at Sidley House before.
She goes into the small, airless kitchen. The school calendar is hanging on the wall, with three children’s photos for July. On July 11 is “Sports Day” in large type, “Adam Covey is 8” in small type.
The date is ringed in red.
Adam had been so pleased that Mr. Hyman had sent him a birthday card.
I remember Sarah talking to DI Baker.
“Anyone with a calendar would know it was Adam’s birthday on sports day. Including the arsonist. He planned for the blame to fall on him.”
Natalia picks up a copy of the Richmond Post. She comes back to you, holding the paper. Her fingers are over the picture of Jenny.
“Is this why you’re here?” she asks. “Because of this fucking load of crap?”
I’m shocked that she uses language like this in front of her children. I know, absurd. If a paper had said that about you, I’d be swearing too.
“It’s lies,” she says. “All of it.”
“The alibi you gave him,” you say to her. “What was it?”
“How about I tell you what I know,” she says. “Then I will answer your questions.”
You are wrong-footed, I can see that. You are Maximus Decimus Meridius looking for vengeance with Mr. Hyman. You’re not sure what to do with a BBC-style debate presented to you, with the option of having your say in a minute.
“Silas is the most gentle man you could meet,” she says, taking advantage of your hesitation. “To be honest, it annoys me sometimes that he’s so gentle. Our boys could do with a little discipline. But he won’t. Doesn’t even raise his voice to them. So the idea that he could set light to a school, well, it’s just ridiculous.”
“At prize-giving?” you say. “He was hardly ‘gentle’ then. I saw him myself.”
“He wanted to tell everyone it wasn’t his fault,” Natalia replies. “Can you blame him for that? For wanting his chance to tell the truth? You didn’t give him one before firing him, did you?”
I feel her hostility now, crouching behind her words.
“He dressed up for it,” she continues. “Put on a tie and a jacket, so he’d look smart, so that people might listen. But it’s not surprising he went to the pub first, is it? Had a few drinks to find the courage. He’s passionate. And he even gets a little drunk sometimes, but he’d never destroy something, set fire to something, let alone risk hurting anyone.”
Her northern accent at the school soirée had been barely noticeable, but now it’s pronounced. Did she disguise it before, or is she deliberately accentuating it now, to show how different she is from you—a Sidley House parent?
“It doesn’t tell you in here that he only went into teaching to give himself time to write a book. All those holidays and half-terms teachers get—and in private schools they’re longer—that’s why he went into teaching, so he’d have time to write.”
You try to interrupt, but she continues. “Doesn’t say he didn’t actually write his book, the whole point of it all, but spent his free time doing teaching plans and researching new ways of inspiring his class in history, English, even bloody geography, and finding field trips and teaching resources, even what kind of music helped kids concentrate best. He still talks about them all. He still calls them ‘his’ class.”