We reach the office they’ve allocated for this meeting at the same time as you and Sarah.
Why on earth are you holding a newspaper? I know that I have a go at you at the weekends for reading the papers rather than engaging with the family, and we’ve done the whole “It’s the caveman looking into the fire to have time to let the week settle” thing. But now? Here?
We follow you and Sarah in. The ceiling is too low, trapping the heat. There’s no window. Not even a fan to shift the stale heavy air around.
Detective Inspector Baker introduces himself to you without getting up from the chair. His sweaty, doughy face is unreadable.
“I want to fill you in on a little of the background to our investigation,” DI Baker says, his voice as stodgy as his physique. “Arson in schools is extremely common. Sixteen cases a week in the UK. But people getting hurt in arson attacks on schools is not common. Nor is it common for fires to be started during the daytime.”
You’re getting irritated—get to the point, man.
“The arsonist may have thought that the school would be empty because it was sports day,” DI Baker continues. “Or it may have been a deliberate attempt to hurt one of the occupants.”
He leans forward, his sweaty polyester shirt sticking slightly to the back of his plastic chair.
“Do you know of anyone who may have wished to harm Jennifer?”
“Of course not,” you snap.
“That’s ridiculous,” Jenny says to me, a shake in her voice. “It was just a fluke I was in there, Mum. Pure chance, that’s all.”
I think of that figure last night, going into her room, leaning over her.
“She’s a seventeen-year-old girl, for fuck’s sake,” you say.
Your sister tightens her hand on yours.
“For fuck’s sake!” you repeat. You never use that word in your sister’s hearing, or your children’s.
“She was the victim of a hate-mail campaign, wasn’t she?” DI Baker asks you, an edge now to his bland voice.
“But that stopped,” you said. “Months ago. It’s not connected. It has nothing to do with the fire.”
Beside me, Jenny has become rigid.
She never told us how she felt when she was called slut, tart, jail-bait, and worse. Or when dog mess and used condoms were posted through our letter box addressed to her. Instead she turned to Ivo and her friends, excluding us.
“She’s seventeen now, darling, of course she turns to them.”
You were so infuriatingly understanding, so “I’ve-read-the-manuals-on-teenagers” rational.
“But we’re her parents,” I had said. Because parents outrank everyone else.
“There’s been nothing for almost five months,” you tell DI Baker. “It’s all over.”
DI Baker flicks through some notes in front of him as if finding evidence to disagree with you.
I remember how desperate we were for it to be over. Those terrible things that were said to her. It was shocking. Grotesque. The ugly, vicious world had come crashing through our letter box and into our daughter’s life. And, this I think is key, you hadn’t kept it at bay. You thought you hadn’t done your job as her father and protected her.
Those hours you spent looking at the pieces of A4 lined paper, trying to trace the origin of the cutout letters—which newspaper? Which magazine? Studying postmarks on the ones that had been posted, agonizing over the meaning of the ones that had been hand delivered—he’d been here, right outside our door, for God’s sake, and you hadn’t caught him.
I’d understood after a little while that you wanted to be the person who caught him and made him stop. To make amends to Jenny or to prove something to yourself? I thought it was both tangled together.
Then two weeks after—two weeks, Mike—the day the hand-delivered envelope with the used condom arrived, you told Sarah. As you’d predicted, she told us we must go to the police—and why the hell hadn’t we done that to start with? We duly did as she said but, as you’d also predicted, the police—apart from Sarah—didn’t consider it important. Well, not as important as it was to you and me. Not life-stoppingly important. And they didn’t find out anything. It wasn’t as if we could help them; we had no idea who might target Jenny like that or why.
Poor Jen. So furious and mortified when the police interviewed her friends and boyfriend. The teenage paranoia that adults disapprove of their choices taken to an extreme.
But you’d already interrogated most of them, grabbing them as Jenny tried to hurry them past us and up to her room. Those long-limbed, long-haired, silly girls seemed unlikely hate-mailers. But what about one of the boys who were friends with her? Did one harbor hatred? Unreturned love turning acrid and spreading across venomous letters?
And Ivo. I’ve always been suspicious of him—not as a hate-mailer but as a man. Boy. Maybe because he’s so different from you, with his slight frame and fine features and his preference at seventeen for Auden over car engine manuals. I think he lacks substance. But you disagree. You think he’s a fine fella, a great lad. Possibly because you don’t want to be a clichéd possessive father? Because you don’t want to alienate Jenny? But whatever our reasons, you support Jenny over Ivo, while I gibe.
Though even with my prejudices against him, I don’t think he’d send her hate mail. Besides, he’s her boyfriend, and she adores him, so why would he?
“When, exactly, was the last incident?” DI Baker asks you.
“February the fourteenth,” you reply. “Months ago.”
Valentine’s Day. A Wednesday. Adam worried about his times-tables challenge, Jenny late down to breakfast as usual. But we’d been up for an hour already, waiting for the sound of the letter box. Just the click of metal shutting made me feel physically sick.
It was the letter with the C word across it. I can’t say that word in connection with her. I just can’t.
But the day after that letter there was nothing. Then a whole week went by with no hate mail. Then a fortnight. Until over four months had passed, so that yesterday I picked up the post hardly bothering to check.
“You’re sure there’s been nothing since the fourteenth of February?” DI Baker asks.
“Yes. I told you—”
He interrupts you. “Could she have hidden something from you?”
“No, of course not,” you say, frustrated. “The fire is nothing to do with the hate-mailer. Presumably you haven’t seen this yet?”
You slap the newspaper you’re holding in front of DI Baker. The Richmond Post. The headline shouts out: “Arsonist Sets Fire to Local Primary School!”
The byline is Tara’s.
DI Baker ignores your newspaper.
“Were there any other forms of hate mail that you didn’t tell us about?” he continues. “Texts on her mobile, for example, or e-mails, or postings on a social networking site?”
You glare at him.
“I asked Jenny and there was nothing like that,” Sarah says.
You’re pacing the office now, five paces from one wall to the other, as if you can outpace whatever is hunting you down.
“Would she have told you?” asks DI Baker.
“She would have told me, or her parents, yes,” Sarah replies.
But we hadn’t just taken her word for it. We searched, you breaking every rule in the bringing-up-teenagers book, me being a normal mother.
“MySpace? Facebook?” DI Baker asks as if we don’t know what “social networking site” means, but you interrupt.
“The hate-mailer had nothing to do with it. Christ, how many more times?” You jab at the newspaper. “It’s this teacher, Silas Hyman, you should be investigating.”
“We haven’t read the paper, Mike,” Sarah says. “We’ll read it if you’ll give us a minute.”
She must be humoring you, I think. After all, what on earth could Tara know about the fire that she—a policewoman and your sister—doesn’t?
The picture of the burnt-out school dominates the front page, t
he oddly undamaged bronze statue of a child in the foreground. Under it is a picture of Jenny.
“It’s from my Facebook page,” Jenny says, looking at her photo. “The one Ivo took at Easter, when we did that canoeing course. I can’t believe she’s done that. She must have gone onto my site and then just printed it off, or scanned it. Isn’t that theft?”
I love her outrage. Out of all this, to mind about her photo being used.
But the contrast between our daughter in the burns unit and that outdoorsy, healthy, beautiful girl in the photo is cuttingly painful.
Maybe Jenny feels it too. She goes to the door.
“The hate-mailer didn’t do it and Dad’s idea that Silas Hyman did it is completely ridiculous and I’m going for a walk.”
“OK.”
“I wasn’t asking permission!” she snaps. And then she leaves. Just the word hate-mailer pushing those old buttons again.
Just after she’s gone, Sarah opens the paper out to show a double-page spread, with a banner headline across both pages. “Jinxed School.” On the left-hand page is the subheadline, “Fire Started Deliberately,” and another photograph of this “popular and beautiful” girl.
Tara has turned Jenny’s torment into private entertainment. “Beautiful seventeen-year-old … fighting for her life … horribly burnt … severely mutilated.” Not news, but prurient news-as-porn, titillating garbage.
Tara makes me out as a kind of superhero-mum racing into the flames. But a rather tardy superhero, arriving too late in the day to save the beautiful heroine.
Tara finishes with a flourish.
“The police are continuing their urgent hunt for the person responsible for arson, and possibly a double murder.”
Jenny and my deaths would add more cachet to her story.
Directly opposite, on page 2, Tara’s just rehashed an article she’d written in March, adding a new intro.
Only four months ago, the “Richmond Post” reported on Silas Hyman, 30, a teacher at Sidley House Preparatory School who was fired after a child was seriously injured. The seven-year-old boy broke both his legs after plunging from an outside metal fire escape onto the playground below in an alleged “accident.”
Just as she had the first time, she doesn’t say that Mr. Hyman was nowhere near the playground at the time. And those quotation marks around the word “accident” say that it wasn’t. But who’s going to sue her over quotation marks? Slippery as her patent leather Miu Miu bag.
And still her bid for journalistic glory, measured in column inches, continues.
Situated in a leafy London suburb, the exclusive £12,500-a-year school, founded thirteen years ago, is marketed as a nurturing environment where “every child is celebrated and valued.” But even four months ago questions were being asked about its safety.
I interviewed parents at the time.
A mother of an eight-year-old girl told me, “This is supposed to be a caring school, but this man clearly didn’t look after the children. We are thinking about taking our daughter away.”
Another parent told me, “I am very angry. An accident like this just shouldn’t be allowed to happen. It’s totally unacceptable.”
In March Tara had titled her article “Playground Plunge!” but now she’s changed it to “Teacher Fired!”
So on the right-hand side of the newspaper is “Teacher Fired” and on the left-hand side is “Fire Started Deliberately.” And the connection crackles between them, an invisible circuit of blame—the fired teacher exacting his fiery revenge.
DI Baker’s mobile goes and he answers it. The Richmond Post lies on the table, like a challenge thrown into the ring—your Silas Hyman contender for arsonist versus DI Baker’s hate-mailer.
I know that you’ve never liked Mr. Hyman. Before he was fired we’d had weeks of sniping over him. You thought I totally overexaggerated Mr. Hyman’s effect on Addie.
“ ‘Exaggerated’ doesn’t need ‘totally’ and ‘over’ added to it,” I said frostily.
“Not all of us did an English degree,” you replied, stung.
“Only half of one, remember?”
Mr. Hyman made us fight. And we don’t normally fight.
“Before Mr. Hyman, Addie was miserable,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”
He was picked on, couldn’t do the work, had virtually no self-esteem.
“So he’s come through that,” you said.
“Yes, because of Mr. Hyman. He’s sorted out who he sits next to, worked out the boys who are likely to become his friends, and they are now. They’re asking him on playdates. He’s got a sleepover this weekend. When’s he ever had one of those? And he organizes who the children sit next to on the bus when they go on trips. Addie used to dread no one sitting next to him. And he’s got him confident in math and English.”
“He’s just doing his job.”
“He calls Addie ‘Sir Covey.’ That’s lovely, isn’t it? A knight’s name?”
“It’ll probably make the other kids tease him.”
“No, he’s got pet names for all of them.”
Why didn’t you appreciate him more?
An attractive young teacher with a sparkle in his eyes, I’d wondered if your antagonism towards him was because he’d kissed me on the cheek when we went to parents’ evening in the first term. “Totally inappropriate!” you’d said, not realizing that Mr. Hyman is just very physical—tousling the children’s hair as he passes them at their desks, a quick warm hug at going-home time. And yes, we mothers did smile a little about him, but not in a serious way.
Then when Mr. Hyman was fired and I came home that day and was outraged on his behalf, you just seemed irritated. You said you paid the school fees, worked bloody hard to do that, and before you set off for a grueling trip the next day you didn’t want to hear about some inadequate teacher who’d gotten himself the sack.
Until yesterday afternoon I’d have argued with you for suspecting him. Like Jenny, I’d have said it was completely ridiculous! But all my old certainties are burnt to the ground. Nothing is like yesterday anymore. So I don’t trust anyone. Not even Mr. Hyman. No one at all.
DI Baker stops his phone call and glances at the Richmond Post.
“One peculiar thing,” he says to Sarah, “is how quickly the press were on the scene of the fire. Before the fire engines even. We’ll need to know who told them, or how they found out. In case that’s relevant.”
You are infuriated by his anodyne off-the-point remark.
“It’s not only the article,” you say, but DI Baker’s radio interrupts. He answers it but you continue.
“I saw him acting violently a few weeks after he was fired. It was at the school prize-giving. He gate-crashed it and made threats. Violent threats.”
8
Do you think I’ll win a prize, Mum?” Adam said. “For anything?”
It was the morning of the prize-giving. Adam, still seven then, was eating Coco Pops and watching Tom and Jerry.
Mr. Hyman had been fired three and a half weeks before, and already Adam hated going to school, so I was trying to compensate. You were away filming and I’d allowed myself to spoil him a little. Your man-to-man talk could come later. My excitement about your homecoming was cloaked by anxiety for him.
“You should win a prize,” I said to him, fairly certain that he wouldn’t. “But if you don’t, you mustn’t be disappointed. Remember what Mrs. Healey said at assembly? Everyone will get a prize in the end, even if it’s not your turn this year.”
“That’s such bollocks,” Jenny said, still in her pajamas, although we were meant to leave in ten minutes. “I mean, think about the math,” she continued. “Number of children, number of prizes, number of prize-givings. It doesn’t compute, does it?”
“And the same people always win them,” Adam said.
“I’m sure that’s not—”
Adam interrupted me, hotly frustrated. “It is true.”
“He’s right,” Jenny said. “I know they
say every child is equally valued, blah blah blah, but it’s rubbish.”
“Jen, you’re not helping.”
“She is, actually,” Adam said.
“The school has to get a few of its pupils into a top secondary school like Westminster for boys or St. Paul’s Girls,” Jenny continued, pouring out cereal. “Otherwise new parents aren’t going to truck up with their four-year-olds next year. So it’s the cleverest kids that get the prizes, so it’ll help them get into the top secondary schools.”
“Antony’s already won it for best in the class,” Adam said, miserably. “And for math and for leadership.”
“He’s eight. Who’s he meant to be leading, exactly?” Jenny asked with derision, making Adam smile. Thank you, Jen.
“It was Rowena White when I was at school,” Jenny continued. “She cleaned up.” She stood up, her movements languid. “Is it still at St. Swithun’s Church?” she asked.
“Yup.”
“Nightmare. I always got stuck behind a pillar. Why can’t they use that perfectly good modern church right next to the school?”
Adam saw the clock and jumped. “We’re going to be late!” He raced to get his bookbag, his fear of being late temporarily outweighing his fear of school.
“I’ll be superquick,” Jenny said. “I’ll eat my Shreddies in the car, if Mum can drive a little more smoothly than last time.” She paused as she left the room. “Oh, and you know all those silver cups and shields? They make the school seem older and more established than it really is. So the current parents are kept happy too.”
“I think you’re being a little cynical,” I said.
“I’ve worked there, remember,” Jenny said. “So I know to be cynical. It’s a business. And prize-giving is a part of that.”
“You were only there for three weeks. And there’s a prize for improvement,” I said a little lamely.
Adam glanced up from fastening his bookbag. His look was identical to Jenny’s. “That doesn’t mean anything, Mum. Everyone knows that.”