Afterwards

  Is that him, turning a corner towards the ICU? God, I wish you were here.

  I race to catch up.

  A group of doctors are going into the ICU and I can’t see anyone in a dark coat.

  Maybe that’s him, hurrying away, half obscured by a porter wheeling a patient.

  But there’s no way they would have let Donald go already. Surely?

  Nothing now. The corridors empty, just two nurses in the lift.

  I can’t be sure I saw him. I’m probably just jumping at shadows.

  In the car park Mohsin is waiting for Sarah.

  “It’s really not good form to be late for your own disciplinary meeting,” he says, teasing her. But she doesn’t smile.

  “Addie still isn’t talking,” she says.

  But surely now everyone knows he’s innocent, he’ll be feeling a little better? Surely he can now at least turn away from the burning building?

  “I just spoke to Georgina,” Sarah says. “I thought that when he knew he was cleared, it would change things for him, but …”

  She usually speaks so neatly, correctly finishing her sentences, but nothing is neat about this.

  “Give him a little more time,” Mohsin says. “Maybe it hasn’t really sunk in yet.” Both Sarah and I hold on to his words.

  He drives her to the police station. The car is fogged with heat, the air-con uselessly blowing hot air back in. The heat haze on the tarmac gives a mirage. For a while Sarah is silent.

  “They say that Grace has no brain function,” she says abruptly.

  “But you said—”

  “I was a coward.”

  I want to shout out that I’m here, as if they’ll suddenly discover me and be embarrassed.

  “I’ve argued with them. Said they were talking bollocks. Because I can’t bear Mike to lose her. Can’t bear for him to go through that.”

  Mohsin puts his hand on hers as he drives, reminding me of you.

  “When Mum and Dad died, I promised him that nothing awful would happen again.”

  “And you were what?” Mohsin asks. “Eighteen?”

  “Yeah. But I still kept thinking that. Until Wednesday, I thought that because he’d already been through something terrible, nothing else bad would happen to him. As if terrible things, losing people you love, are doled out equally. God, as a police officer I should have known better. And now, it’s too much for him. And I can’t make it better. I can’t make it better for him.”

  I realize, fully, that she loves you as a mother, as I love Jenny and Adam.

  ——

  In the police station, jackets are discarded, belts loosened against the heat. Sarah goes into DI Baker’s office, closing the door behind her. There’s no need for me to shadow her anymore, not now that we know the arsonist, and Adam is no longer blamed, but I want to be with her when she’s hauled over the coals.

  I just want to be with her.

  DI Baker’s face is shiny with sweat, his too-tight clothes clinging to his paunchy body. The stagnant air is sticky with body odor.

  He glances up as she comes in; his voice is curt.

  “Take a seat.”

  He gestures to a plastic chair, but Sarah remains standing. She goes closer to him.

  “Is it clear to you now that it isn’t a case of a little boy playing with matches?” Her anger startles me and DI Baker.

  “Detective Sergeant McBride, you are here to—”

  “You owe Adam a formal and public apology.”

  Her pent-up, furious energy reminds me of you.

  “This meeting is about your conduct. It is about—”

  “Are you going to prosecute your supposed ‘witness’ for what he or she has done to Adam?”

  Has Sarah already written off her career? Is that why she’s come into this room all guns blazing, because she has nothing to lose?

  “This is not a meeting to discuss the case, or what you have found out through your illegal methods. Ends do not justify means, Detective Sergeant. Even before PACE, what you did would have been seen as beyond the pale. I understand the emotional strain you must be under, but there are no excuses. All the reforms of the last twenty-five years have made the police investigate cases by the book. And rightly.”

  “But you just flipped to the end of the book—decided on an ending, to use your analogy—not bothering to do any work at all to get there. Not bothering to investigate at all. Because of your laziness and crass stupidity, a child could have been blamed for this for the rest of his life and the real culprit not be punished.”

  “Are you asking for a mutual pact of silence—in effect, trying to blackmail me, Detective Sergeant?”

  What I see as nothing to lose he sees as blackmail.

  “Fortunately,” he continues, his voice frigid in the too-warm room, “the person who made the complaint against you withdrew it just over an hour ago.”

  Perhaps Mrs. Healey felt compassion for Sarah once she knew she was Jenny’s aunt and my sister-in-law. Or maybe she thought the police would go easier on her if she’d been kind to a fellow police officer.

  “But that doesn’t detract from the seriousness of your misconduct—” Baker continues, but a knock on the door interrupts him. The sharp-featured Penny Pierson comes into the room.

  “What is it?” Baker snaps.

  “Silas Hyman gave a sample of DNA on Wednesday night when we questioned him about the fire. His DNA didn’t match anything at the site of the fire, but it went into our database.”

  “So?” asks Baker, impatient.

  Penny turns to face Sarah. I think I see a flicker of an apology on her face.

  “Silas Hyman’s DNA matches the semen in the condom sent to Jennifer.”

  30

  We are now certain that Silas Hyman is Jennifer Covey’s hate-mailer,” Penny continues. “The condom was a part of his malicious-mail campaign. We think it must be Silas Hyman who also attacked Jennifer Covey with red paint. We therefore need to seriously consider whether he also tampered with her oxygen. It could have been an escalation of his previous assault with paint.”

  I was totally wrong when I thought Silas Hyman too intelligent, too subtle a personality, to cut out letters and stick them onto A4, let alone to post a used condom and dog mess through the letter box.

  And I remember him flirting with the pretty nurse. A smile and flowers—that was all it took to get through the door of a supposedly secure ward.

  “You need to send someone to guard Jenny straightaway,” Sarah says.

  Maybe I wasn’t jumping at shadows.

  Baker shifts in his sweaty seat. “There is no evidence that she needs guarding. It was a faulty connection. It happens.”

  “Because otherwise your incompetence left her exposed?” Sarah says to him. “Because if you hadn’t been duped into thinking it was an eight-year-old—”

  “That’s enough!”

  He’s shouted at her, and I think Sarah is glad of it. I think she wants shouting in here.

  He turns to Penny. “You will arrest Silas Hyman in relation to the malicious mail and question him about the assault against Jennifer Covey with paint.” He looks at Sarah. “I will decide in due course what steps should be taken against you.”

  “And the guard?” Penny asks, winning my respect, but Baker is clearly infuriated by two women confronting him.

  “I have already told you my decision. There is no evidence of any tampering. If you choose to persist in your paranoia, I can remind you that the intensive care unit has a very high ratio of medical staff to patients; Donald White is in custody for the arson attack. And Silas Hyman will shortly be arrested and put in custody for the malicious mail and possibly the paint attack.”

  “If we can find him,” Penny says.

  After Sarah and Penny leave the office, with me following, Sarah phones to check that Jenny is OK and to tell you about Silas Hyman. I don’t hear your response.

  She joins Penny in the police station car park.

  “
I checked with Sally Healey,” Penny says. “Jennifer was a teaching assistant with Silas Hyman last summer. That’s when they must have gotten to know each other.”

  I don’t want to hear this, but know it will continue. Because Jenny is now connected, forensically connected, to Silas Hyman.

  I remember he confided in Jenny about his failing marriage last summer—or a marriage he’d made out to be failing. Confiding in a sixteen-year-old when he was thirty. I’d thought it was shabby of him but nothing more, because surely she was far too young to think it anything more.

  I remember Jenny standing up for “Silas,” even when I’d joined you in my suspicion of him. But she’s naturally fair-minded and open to people, one of her charms and strengths.

  Each time I edge near a sight of a relationship between them, I pull myself away.

  But I don’t know her well enough anymore to say for definite no, not possible.

  I thought she loved Ivo. I thought she was desperate to see him. And I was wrong.

  I don’t know her as I thought I did.

  So I skate around the circumference of a denial of a relationship between Jenny and Silas Hyman, unable to state it for definite—however much I want to.

  Sarah gets in the car next to Penny—an unspoken agreement that Sarah should be there when Silas Hyman is arrested.

  “You still think that Donald White is the arsonist?” Sarah asks Penny as they drive.

  “Yes. After your one-woman investigation,” Penny says with a faint smile. “We are working on the assumption that it was fraud.”

  “So we’re still working on two separate cases.”

  I’m glad she uses “we” for police; maybe Baker won’t force her out.

  “Yeah. Jenny’s hate-mailer, now identified as Silas Hyman, who must also have thrown the red paint. And Donald White as the arsonist to get the insurance money.”

  “Let’s see how Mohsin is doing with that,” Sarah says. She phones him.

  “Hi, baby. I heard what happened with Baker,” he says. “We all did. Like the All Blacks rugby scrum outside his door while you were in there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The consensus is that he’ll drop it.”

  “Maybe. Have you gotten anything from Donald White?”

  “Nothing. He’s keeping quiet, waiting for his expensive lawyer. But his wife is kicking up a fuss. Very gently and politely kicking up a fuss. She says that he was in Scotland the afternoon of the fire.”

  “She’d say anything he wanted her to,” Sarah says.

  “Yeah. The technical guys have been looking at Jenny’s mobile. They think that two messages were wiped. They’re trying to retrieve them but aren’t sure it’s going to be possible.”

  “Right.”

  “We’ll all pop by the hospital and see her,” Mohsin says. “Make social calls. With a rota.”

  He’s offering Jenny police protection on the sly.

  “They don’t allow unauthorized visitors,” Sarah says. “Infection risk. It would have to be official. But Mike’s with her.”

  She thanks him and hangs up.

  “Why did Silas Hyman volunteer his DNA, do you think?” Sarah asks Penny. “He must have known we’d trace it.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know that we cross-reference cases, that it’s just one database. Or he just assumed that the hate-mail investigation was over or that we wouldn’t pull out all the stops. But without the DNA we wouldn’t have gotten him. The CCTV footage didn’t have anything. Baker’ll probably roast my hide for wasting police resources on that.”

  “Probably. How many hours, exactly, did you spend on the CCTV?” Sarah asks, teasing.

  “Too many,” Penny responds, smiling. But it’s a strained kind of banter between them, a pretense at camaraderie that they can’t quite pull off.

  We drive in silence, the police radio and the air-con hissing at different pitches. I see tension on Sarah’s face.

  “Can you tell me who the witness is who saw Adam?” she asks.

  “Not yet. I’m sorry. Baker would—”

  “Yeah.”

  “I will once it’s authorized.”

  I wonder if anyone will ever inspire enough love in Penny for her to break the rules, let alone risk her career—jettison it—as Sarah has for Adam. I can’t imagine it. But then once I couldn’t have imagined it of Sarah.

  At Silas Hyman’s house, another police car draws up behind us. A young uniformed officer, the archetype of a fresh-faced bobby, gets out and enthusiastically half jogs up to Silas Hyman’s door and rings the bell. Penny follows more slowly.

  Natalia is opening the door, and I feel the claustrophobia of the stifling flat oozing into the street. She looks furious and tired.

  “Where’s your husband?” the young bobby asks.

  “A building site. Why?”

  “Which one?”

  She’s looking at the two police cars outside her house.

  “What is this?”

  Penny is walking slowly towards them, staring at Natalia.

  Natalia holds Penny’s eye as she gets close to her.

  “It was you,” Penny says to Natalia. “Not your husband. You.”

  Natalia steps away from her. “What you going on about?”

  “I’ve got you on CCTV,” Penny said. “Posting one of your nasty little letters.”

  “Posting a letter is a crime, is it?”

  But she’s backing into the house.

  Penny puts a hand on her shoulder, preventing her from retreating any farther.

  “I’m arresting you under the Malicious Communications Act. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not say something now which you later rely on in court.”

  I remember the Postman Pat comic in Silas’s car that day in the hospital underground car park. Were some of the words red and cheerful before she dismembered them into letters and rearranged them into hatred?

  And the dog mess, did she go out with a shovel and a parcel box? Their house is only three streets from us. Easy to hand-deliver and get home again.

  Other times she’d posted her disgust from places all over London—was it to make her seem omnipresent? Or to muddy the geography of where she really lived?

  I don’t think about the condom. Not yet. Not yet.

  But I think about the red paint down Jenny’s long fair hair. A woman’s touch.

  And who’d notice a harassed mother with children in a shopping arcade? She’d have blended in and disappeared.

  Gradually I edge towards the figure in the blue coat, bending over Jenny, tampering with her oxygen supply, trying to kill her. The figure could have been a woman. I only saw the back view and from a distance. But how could Natalia have gotten into a locked ward? And did her hatred really extend to murder?

  Natalia is in the back of Penny’s car. Sarah sits next to her.

  For a little while no one speaks, Natalia picking at a thread in her seat belt. Then Penny turns off the air conditioner, and, without the drone, the car is suddenly hushed.

  “So why did you do it?” Penny asks.

  Natalia is silent, still picking at the thread, and I think she’s itching to talk.

  The car starts to heat up, as if silence has its own temperature.

  I remember Sarah telling a rapt dinner table that the best time “to get info out of a suspect” is when you first arrest them, before they’ve reached the police station, before they’ve had time to think or take stock.

  “You love him, do you?” Sarah asks, a note of sarcasm cutting through her words.

  “He’s a little shit. Weak. Useless. Fucked up my life.”

  Her words seem to mix with the heat in the car, fugging it up with loathing.

  “So why bother with the hate mail then?” asks Penny. “If you don’t even like him?”

  “Because the little shit belongs to me, right?” Natalia snaps.

  I remember her stressing my in “my husband.” Not loyalty but possessiveness.


  I remember Jenny saying, “She told him he was a loser. That she was embarrassed by him … But she won’t get divorced.”

  Silas Hyman was telling her the truth.

  “The head teacher, Sally Healey, told me I should keep my husband on a tighter leash,” Natalia continues.

  “Mrs. Hyman—”

  “Tighter leash. Like he was a dog. A fucking cocker spaniel. She’d got his measure. I asked what she meant, pretended I didn’t know. I have some pride, right? She said flirting with teaching assistants wasn’t acceptable. Flirting, not fucking. She’s very refined, Mrs. Healey. But clever. She delegated him to me to deal with. I admire her for that. Shows some spunk.”

  “But you punished Jennifer Covey, not your husband?” Penny says.

  “The stupid bitch made me a fool.”

  I lift my hands to cover my face as if her words are spit, but they get through.

  “I saw them, her all long legs and short skirt and long blond hair, a tart; fuck knows why they let her dress like that. He was flirting his pants off at her. Mrs. Healey didn’t need to tell me to get a leash.”

  “And the red paint?” Penny asks.

  “The tart had to get her hair cut.”

  “Why send the condom? When you knew it would be traceable?”

  “I never thought …,” Natalia begins, and I hear her picking at the thread again. “I wanted her to know that we were still having sex. He was fucking her, but he was making love to me.”

  We reach the police station. Penny takes Natalia to be questioned. Sarah is going straight back to the hospital. As she gets out to swap into the driver’s seat, Mohsin comes up.

  Sarah meets his quizzical gaze. The question he didn’t ask earlier—that Penny didn’t ask—is now too large and loud to be ignored.

  “Jenny wasn’t having an affair with Silas Hyman,” Sarah says. “She’d have told me.”

  I am envious she has such faith in how well she knows Jenny, which I lost only a little while ago and now feel its absence terribly. Is there a moment for every parent when you realize that your child has outgrown your knowledge of them? A moment when you can’t keep up?

  For some reason I think of her shoes.

  Knitted booties becoming tiny soft shoes, then small sandals with width fittings for summer and black school shoes for winter, all the time incrementally getting a little bigger until she was into small adult sizes and the decision in the shoe shop took longer—until one day she went on her own and came back with boots; but I didn’t see that she was starting to stride away from me with boots that didn’t come in width fittings on her long adult legs.