Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  In all of this Sarah has found space and time to think about Adam. Has had the kindness to worry about him. I’ve never been grateful to her before.

  But you can’t take Adam on board, not with me and Jenny already weighing you down this heavily.

  “Have you spoken to the police?” you ask her.

  She nods, and you wait for her to tell you.

  “We’re taking statements. They’ll keep me fully informed. They know she’s my niece. The fire investigation team are working at the scene of the fire.”

  Her voice is police officer, but I see her reach out her hand and that you take it.

  “They’ve said that the fire started in the art room on the second floor. Because the building was old, it had ceiling, wall, and roof voids—basically spaces connecting different rooms and parts of the school—which means that smoke and fire could travel extremely fast. Fire doors and other precautions couldn’t stop its spread. Which is one reason it could overwhelm the whole building as quickly as it did.”

  “And the arson?” you ask, and I can hear the word cutting at your mouth.

  “It is likely, more than likely, that an accelerant was used, probably white spirit, which causes a distinctive smoke recognized by a firefighter at the scene. As it’s an art room, you’d expect to have some white spirit, but they think it was a large quantity. The art teacher says that she keeps the white spirit in a locked cupboard on the right-hand side of the art room. We think the fire was started in the left-hand corner. A hydrocarbon vapor detector should give us more information tomorrow.”

  “So there’s no doubt?” you ask.

  “I’m sorry, Mike.”

  “What else?” you ask. You need to know everything. A man who has to be in full possession of the facts.

  “The fire investigation team have established that the windows on the top floors were all wide open,” Sarah says. “Which is another signifier for arson because it creates a draft, drawing the fire more quickly up through the school, especially given the strong breeze today. The head teacher told us that the windows are never left wide open because of the danger of children falling out.”

  “What else?” you ask, and she understands you need to know.

  “We think that the art room was deliberately chosen,” she continues. “Not only because there was a chance that the arsonist could get away with it—the use of an accelerant being camouflaged as it were by art supplies—but because it’s the worst possible place for a fire. The art teacher has inventoried what materials were kept.

  “There were stacks of paper and craft materials, which meant the fire could take hold easily and spread. There were also different paints and glues, which were toxic and flammable. She’d brought in old wallpaper samples for a collage, which we think were coated in a highly toxic varnish.”

  As she describes an inferno of poisonous fumes and choking smoke I think of children making collages of hot-air balloons and papier-mâché dinosaurs.

  You nod at her to go on and she sturdily continues.

  “There were also cans of spray mount in the room. When they are exposed to heat, the pressure builds and they explode. Vapors from the spray mount can travel long distances along the ground to an ignition source and flash back. Next to the art room was a small room, little more than a cupboard, where the cleaning materials are kept. They too would have contained combustible and toxic substances.”

  She pauses, looking at you; sees how pale you are.

  “Have you eaten anything yet?”

  The question irritates you. “No, but—”

  “Let’s talk more in the canteen. It’s not far.”

  It’s not up for negotiation. When you were younger, did she bribe you to eat then too? A favorite TV program if you finished your shepherd’s pie?

  “I’ll tell them where you are, just in case,” she says, preempting any arguments.

  I’m glad she’s making you eat.

  She goes to tell the staff in my acute neurology ward where you will be; you go to tell the burns unit.

  Once you’ve gone, Jenny turns to me.

  “It’s true, what Mrs. Healey said about the windows not being left open. Ever since that fire-escape accident, they’re paranoid about children falling and hurting themselves. Mrs. Healey goes round herself, checking them all the time.”

  She pauses a moment, and I see that she is awkward. Embarrassed even.

  “You know when I went to your bed?” she says. “Before Dad got there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You looked so …” She falters. But I know what she wants to ask. How come I am so undamaged compared with her?

  “I wasn’t in the building as long as you,” I say. “And I wasn’t as close to the fire. And I had more protection.”

  I don’t say that I was in a cotton shirt with sleeves I could pull down and thick denim jeans and socks with trainers, not a short, gauzy skirt and skimpy top and strappy sandals, but she guesses anyway.

  “So I’m the ultimate fashion victim.”

  “I’m not sure I can do gallows humor, Jen.”

  “OK.”

  “Positive and even silly,” I say. “That’s fine. That’s great. And black humor, that’s all right too. But when it becomes gallows—well, that’s my line.”

  “Point taken, Mum.”

  We could almost be at our kitchen table.

  We follow you into the absurdly named Palms Café, the Formica-topped tables reflecting the overhead striplights.

  “Great atmosphere,” Jenny says, and for a moment I can’t work out if this statement is because of her relentlessly positive attitude, inherited from you, or her sense of humor, which she gets from me. Poor Jen, she can’t be positive or funny without one of us taking the credit for it.

  Sarah joins you with a plate of food, which you ignore.

  “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 percent 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 color 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 all right,” 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,” Sara
h replies. “Possibly behind a legitimate person who was buzzed in. Perhaps blended in somehow and not been noticed because parents thought the person was 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 memorized 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 percent 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 all right,” 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 realize 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 inquiry 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 elevators.

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

  “She was wrong though earlier,” Jenny continues. “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 realize?

  ——

  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 in 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.

  I can remember a group of parents from Adam’s class asking me if I’d go in for the mothers’ race.

  “Oh go on, Grace! You’re always a sport!”

  “Yeah, a slow sport,” I replied.

  I look again at their smiling faces. Did one of them, shortly afterwards, leave for the school? Perhaps he or she had left a container of white spirit in the trunk of their car. A lighter slipped into a pocket. But surely their smiles were just too relaxed and genuine to be hiding some wicked intention?

  A little while later, and Adam hurried up to tell me he was going to get his cake right now! Rowena had to collect the medals from school so she was going with him. And as he left with her, I thought how grown-up she looked now in her linen trousers and crisp white blouse; that it hardly seemed a minute since she was a little elfin girl with Jenny. But I mustn’t be distracted. I have to look harder.

  I turn away from Adam and Rowena, swinging my focus to the right then to the left, but memory can’t be replayed that way and nothing comes into focus.

  But at the time I did check around the playing field, a broad sweep from one end to the other, looking for Jenny. Maybe if I concentrate on that memory I will see something significant.

  She’ll be so bored, I was thinking as I scanned the playing field. Up in the medical room on her own. Surely she’ll leave her shift early.

  A figure at the edge of the playing field, half obscured by the border of chest-high azalea bushes.

  The figure is still, and its stillness has attracted my attention.

  But I only looked long enough to know it wasn’t Jenny. Now I try to go closer, but I can’t get any more detail. Just a shadowy figure on the edge of the field, the memory yielding nothing more.

  The figure haunts me. I imagine him going into classrooms at the top of the school and opening windows wide; I imagine the children’s drawings pegged onto strings across the classrooms flapping hard in the breeze.

  Back on the playing field, Maisie came to find Rowena, and I told her she was in the school. I remember watching Maisie as she left the playing field. And something snags at my memory. Something else I saw on the outskirts of the playing field that I noted at the time, that means something. But it is slipping from my grasp, and the harder I try and pull at it, the more it frays away.

  But there’s no point tugging at it. Because by this point the arsonist had already opened the windows and poured out the white spirit and positioned the cans of spray mount. And soon the strong god-sent breeze will be sucking the fire up to the third floor.

  The PE teacher blows his whistle and in a minute, not quite yet, but soon, I will see the smoke, thick black smoke like a bonfire.

  Soon I will start running.

  “Mum?”

  Jenny’s worried voice brings me back into the brightly lit hospital corridor.

  “I’ve been trying to remember,” she says. “You know, if I saw someone or something, but when I try and think about the fire I can’t …”

  She breaks off, shaking. I hold her.

  “It’s OK when I think about being in the medical room,” she continues. “Ivo and I were texting each other. I told you that, didn’t
I? The last one I sent was at two thirty. I know the time then, because it was nine thirty in the morning in Barbados and he said he was just getting up. But then … it’s like I can’t think anymore; I can only feel. Just feel.”

  A judder of fear or pain goes through her.

  “You don’t need to think back,” I say to her. “Aunty Sarah’s crew will find out what happened.”

  I don’t tell her about my shadowy figure half glimpsed on the edge of the playing field, because he really doesn’t amount to very much, does he?

  “I was worried you’d be bored up there,” I say to her lightly. “I should have known you and Ivo would be texting.”

  Put together, they must have texted the equivalent of War and Peace by now.

  When I was her age, boys didn’t say much to girls, let alone write, but mobiles have upped their game. Some must find it pressurizing, but I think it appeals to Ivo to send love sonnets and romantic haikus through the airwaves.

  But it’s only me who thinks Ivo’s texted poetry a little bit effeminate; while you are—surprisingly to me—firmly on his side.

  Jenny’s gone off to be with you, while I “pop to my ward to get an update on how I’m doing”—as if I’m nipping down to Budgens for an Evening Standard.

  Maisie is sitting by my bed, holding my hand, talking to me, and I’m moved that she thinks I can hear too.

  “And Jen-Jen’s going to be all right,” she says. “Of course she is.”

  Jen-Jen—that name we used for her when she was little, which sometimes slips out by accident even now.

  “She’s going to be just fine! You’ll see. And so are you. Look at you, Gracie. You don’t look too bad at all. You’re all going to be all right.”

  I feel her comforting warmth, and another vivid memory of sports day flashes into my mind. Not a detective one, but one that comforts me and I’ll allow myself to play it for a moment.

  Maisie was hurrying across the summer green grass, in her fun shirt, stepping over the painted white lines, delphinium blue sky above.

  “Gracie …,” she said, giving me a hug, a proper bear-hug kind, none of this air-kissing.