Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  But now crime isn’t “out there” but exploding into my family and the police are crucial to our lives.

  We go inside the police station and down a corridor with paint-peeling walls and concrete floors, which smell strongly of cleaning fluid, the same one that is used in the hospital—an archetypal institutional smell, only this institution has crime, not injury, as its raison d’être.

  We pass offices with unanswered phones ringing and discordant male voices and pieces of paper pinned with seemingly no particular order onto old notice boards. Such a scruffy, chaotic place for Sarah, not the neat organized place I’d imagined.

  A young woman police officer comes down the corridor. She hugs Sarah and asks her about Jenny and me. And then an older male officer takes her hand as he passes her and says how sorry he is and asks if there’s anything he can do. Anything.

  We go into a main office area, which reeks of deodorant and sweat, fans overhead whirring noisily and ineffectually against the heat. And everyone in here comes up to ask after Jenny and me, to offer sympathy, to give her a hug or hold her hand for a moment. Everyone knows her. Everyone minds about her. I realize she is loved and valued here. I’d been right about this place being her element, but for the wrong reasons.

  She goes into a side office, and an attractive man in his thirties, with caramel-colored skin, virtually runs across the small space and puts his arms around her and holds her tightly. He’s not wearing a uniform so must be part of the Criminal Investigation Department. His cream cotton shirt has sweat patches under his arms. There isn’t even a fan in here.

  “Hi, Mohsin,” she says, as he hugs her.

  “You ran the sympathy gauntlet, then?” he asks.

  “Something like that.”

  “Poor baby.”

  Baby? Sarah? Behind them, a woman in her twenties is pretending to look at a computer monitor. A sharply cut auburn bob frames her angular face. She’s the only person who hasn’t offered sympathy.

  “Penny?” Sarah says, and the severe-featured young woman turns to her. “Where are we on the hate-mail investigation?”

  “I’m going over the original statements now. Tony and Pete are trying to locate footage from the CCTV camera, which records the postbox where the third letter was posted. The Nationwide Building Society had it installed last year, and the postbox is next to it.”

  “I think the hate mail could well be linked to the arson attack,” Sarah says.

  Penny and Mohsin say nothing.

  “All right,” Sarah says, tight-lipped. “Maybe it is just an extraordinary coincidence that Jenny was sent hate mail and then her place of work was set on fire and she was the only member of staff to be badly injured.”

  “But the campaign against her had stopped, right?” Penny asks, and I hope to God that Ivo—if he actually bothers to come—will tell them about the red paint attack just a few weeks ago.

  “If it turns out there is a link to the fire,” Penny continues, “then for now that will just have to be a fortunate by-product. It can’t be a focus of the malicious mail investigation.”

  “We need a connection, honey,” Mohsin says. “Something that links the hate-mail campaign with the arson attack.”

  “Her oxygen may have been tampered with,” Sarah says.

  Penny’s eyes flick to hers. “May?”

  “It’s being downplayed,” Sarah continues. “By the hospital and by Baker. But I think someone tried to make sure they finished the job.”

  “Downplayed?” Penny asks, and I see the irritation on Sarah’s face.

  “Baker’s lazy, we all know that.”

  “But not that incompetent,” Penny retorts. She turns back to her computer screen.

  “Who was this witness who supposedly saw my nephew?” Sarah asks, going closer to her.

  “Detective Inspector Baker has made it absolutely clear that the witness’s anonymity must be respected.”

  Her harshness reminds me of Tara. But at least she wears her toughness on the outside, so gives fair warning.

  Sarah turns to Mohsin.

  “It’s not in the file?”

  “No,” responds Penny. “DI Baker thought you might come asking for it. He’s pretty astute about you.”

  “Not about much else,” Sarah snaps. “So he’s hidden it?”

  “He’s just respecting the witness’s right to privacy and anonymity.”

  “How handy for him that someone comes along and does his work for him.”

  Mohsin tries to put his arm around her again, but she moves away from him.

  “And he’s cheap. How much overtime has he signed off recently? It would be a big-budget number to do a full-scale arson and attempted murder investigation. The witness gave him a gift-wrapped package. This way he doesn’t have to spend any time or money on it but gets a great clear-up rate. A model of twenty-first-century policing.”

  Penny is going to the door.

  “I’ll tell you what Tony and Pete find out,” she says.

  “Has anyone investigated Silas Hyman’s alibi?” Sarah asks.

  “Take that compassionate leave,” Penny says as she leaves, her personality as angular as her haircut, all sharp corners.

  Sarah is alone with Mohsin.

  “Jesus,” Sarah says. “Does she have to speak like there’s a cork up her bum?”

  He laughs, and I’m frankly a little shocked. Sarah doesn’t talk that way. And I’ve never seen her be so physical with someone before, apart from you, her little brother. But I can’t believe she’s having an affair; not Sarah, of all people, surely? She’s just too law-abiding to break the first rule of marriage.

  “Do you know who the witness is?” she asks him.

  “No, I don’t. You might not like Penny, but she is good.”

  “So it was Penny who took the statement? I thought it must have been. Murphy’s bloody law, isn’t it? The one person guaranteed not to help me.”

  “True. But if the witness is dodgy in any way, Penny would have been onto it. She’s a bloody sniffer-dog Rottweiler mix, that woman.”

  “Can you get her to tell you who it was?”

  “I can’t believe you asked me that.”

  “Well, can you?”

  “You’ve never even broken a rule, let alone a law. Let alone asked someone to do that for you.”

  “Mohsin …”

  “You’ve never even filed something incorrectly before.”

  She turns away from him.

  “You know how the files sit around on that stack of trays after they’ve been typed up,” he continues. “And people seem to find better things to do than put them where they’re meant to be? It’s woefully insecure, that area. Probably completely contravenes the Data Protection Act. I’m sure that the anonymous witness statement isn’t left so open to abuse like that. But other transcripts …”

  “Yeah, thanks.” She lightly kisses his caramel-colored cheek.

  “So how’s that husband of yours?” he asks.

  She pauses a moment.

  “You think that when it comes to it, when it really matters, that someone’ll be more than they are the rest of the time. Better, somehow. You hope that someone will be like that, for you, when it counts.”

  “So are you still going to wait till Mark’s eighteen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It was a mad idea.”

  “Maybe. But neither of us wants the boys to go through a divorce. Not until they’re grown up. I told you that.”

  “You breeders. So many complications.”

  “You pervs. So few commitments.”

  She goes to the door. “Can I ask you a favor?”

  He nods.

  “There’s a printer called Prescoes, which printed the school calendar for Sidley House some time before Christmas. They had their name printed on the back, but no contact number. Could you get hold of them and find out how many they printed?”

  “No problem. Be careful, won’t you?”

 
“Yup.”

  “Call me. If you need to. Anytime.”

  “Thanks.”

  So Sarah has a best mate I never knew about, who she can speak to in a language she never uses to anyone else—well, certainly not whenever I’d been with her. I’m glad for her.

  I’m not sure if you know that her marriage to Roger has an end date. But I don’t think you’ll be surprised that it’s been planned with such thought. It fits with the highly organized, practical woman I’ve known for so many years. And also with the kind, emotionally generous woman I’ve met in the last two days.

  I go with her to a room where there are boxes and files of paperwork. She takes a file and tucks it under her jacket, hiding it. Her hands are shaking.

  I know Sarah’s done lots of dangerous things—chased armed criminals and tackled violent thugs hugely bigger than her—but I thought it was attention-seeking bravado. “Look at me, everyone!” I didn’t know about this quiet courage.

  She goes into a photocopier room and starts to make copies. The door suddenly opens behind her. She starts. An older man comes in. From the pips on his shoulder he’s clearly senior to her.

  “Sarah? What on earth are you doing here?”

  I feel dread for her.

  “Haven’t we given you compassionate leave?” he continues.

  “Yes.”

  “So stop whatever work you’re doing and get off home. Or to the hospital. Work will be waiting for you when you return. You may think that it’s better to bury yourself in it, but frankly it’s probably not a wise thing to do.”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry. About your niece and sister-in-law.”

  “Yes.”

  “And your nephew. We all are.”

  He leaves. She hurriedly stuffs the photocopies into her handbag, not folding them first, scrunching them. I don’t know if she’s managed to photocopy all the documents she needs.

  She takes the file back to where she got it, holding it under the left-hand side of her jacket, pinned down with her arm. She’s sweating, her hair sticking to her forehead.

  With the file returned, she hurries back down the corridor.

  We are almost at the exit and I am also selfishly relieved because the pain is overwhelming me now, as if I am made of it.

  “Hey, you!”

  A young man is hurrying towards her. I notice his fine features and gray eyes and youth, no more than his midtwenties. He is astonishingly handsome. For some reason, he makes me think of that reading you wanted to have at our wedding—“My lover leaping like a gazelle” from the “Song of Songs”; lithe and beautiful. (At six months pregnant, I’d worried the congregation would burst out laughing.)

  “You forgot something,” he says to her.

  They are alone in the institutional corridor, which smells of the cleaning fluid.

  He kisses her, full on the mouth, a powerful sexual kiss that melts her bones and fills the moment because while they kiss she allows herself to be lost from the real world and enter this one. I turn away, remembering the first time I kissed you; your mouth closing onto mine and becoming an open doorway to a different, intensely physical place.

  I know that while he kisses her, for these long seconds, she forgets Jenny and me and Adam and your suffering. Forgets the illegal copies stuffed into her handbag and her promise to you. A gift of a kiss.

  Then she pulls away.

  “We can’t do this anymore,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  As she walks away I see she has kicked him harder than he’s ever been kicked before and how much it hurts him. I see that despite the age difference, and that he is beautiful while she is not, he is in love with her. I wonder if she knows.

  I’ve never really thought through what it must have been like for Sarah when your parents died and you were still a child. I’d assumed that teenage Sarah, like the adult, was naturally responsible. But was she forced to be that way? Because inside her rule-abiding, responsible, sensible persona there’s a risk-taking, life-grabbing person. Maybe it’s taken to her midforties to let out her teenage self.

  No wonder her marriage with Roger is over.

  We leave the police station together, and I wish I’d known her like this before. Wish we’d gone for a drink together, become friends. You wanted me to spend more time with her, on our own, but like a recalcitrant child I resented being made to play with someone I didn’t think I liked.

  The truth is, I was jealous of her. I know, I never said, and you don’t understand why not. Well, it’s partly because I didn’t dare acknowledge it, even to myself, especially to myself, only occasionally daring to sneak a look edgeways-on. But now I see it clearly. Don’t worry, it’s not about you. There’s no weird kind of Antigone-brother thing going on (and I know you know about Antigone because I made you go to a three-hour production at the Barbican—sorry).

  This jealousy thing is about Sarah’s career. Because what she does matters. I know that fully now.

  And I also know that jealousy is a shaky foundation on which to build an opinion of someone. No wonder it’s collapsing.

  Jenny is waiting in the goldfish-bowl vestibule.

  “Are you OK?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  As soon as I was back here again the pain stopped. But at the police station the floor had turned to spikes, and in the car the humid air scorched my no-skin self.

  I tell her about the illicit photocopies.

  “Did you meet him?” Jenny asks.

  “Who?” I say.

  She shrugs and looks uncomfortable and I realize she means Sarah’s gazelle lover.

  “You know about him?” I ask.

  She nods.

  The surprising thing is that I don’t feel jealous of Sarah being close to Jenny in that way—but of Jenny. Sarah would never confide in me about him.

  We follow Sarah as she takes the corridor towards the cafeteria.

  “Why isn’t she going to Dad?” Jen asks.

  “Probably wants to read it through for herself first.”

  The Palms Café is brightly lit, but I still sense the shadow of Maisie and Sarah’s conversation last night about Silas Hyman. “Violent … vicious … But he gets people to love him.”

  Sarah takes a piece of paper out of her bag and tries to smooth out the crumples. Across the top is a border in the black-and-white chessboard pattern of the police. Underneath in whiteout letters against a black strip is “RESTRICTED—FOR POLICE ONLY.”

  21

  Annette Jenks’s name and occupation—school secretary—is on the cover sheet, with her contact details. Annette was with Rowena when the alarm went off; she couldn’t have started it. But she was in charge of who came in.

  “This is illegal, right?” Jen asks.

  I nod.

  As Sarah turns the page to read the transcript, a woman in a cleaner’s uniform comes up. “You eating?”

  Sarah goes to buy a sandwich as rent for her table, taking the statement with her, and we wait. The cleaner sprays the table next door with some kind of pungent fluid, wiping the Formica clean.

  “Did you get to know Annette Jenks?” I ask Jenny.

  “My soul mate?”

  You’ve never met Annette, so you don’t have an image in your head of an overly made-up twenty-two-year-old with talon-nails who looks as if she’s about to go clubbing at eight twenty in the morning.

  “I try to avoid her,” Jen continues. “But she often collars me. There’s usually some big drama-queen number going on.”

  I look at her to go on.

  “Oh, you know, has a friend of a friend who’s been murdered or has married a Mormon with seven wives already or gotten the bridesmaid pregnant at his own wedding. I’m not sure if that was the Mormon. And there’s always some starring role for her.”

  Does she relish what’s happened to us, stirring it into her bland life like pepper sauce?

  “Remember that guy in the States who pretended his child was in the runaway ho
t-air balloon?” Jenny says. “If Annette had a child, she’d put him in it.”

  I smile but feel uneasy.

  “She used to try and grease up to me because of Dad,” Jenny continues. “She’s desperate to get on telly. She’d entered all these auditions for reality TV shows.”

  “Do you think she and Silas could be in a relationship?” I ask.

  She gives me one of her withering looks.

  “She’s very, well, alluring,” I say. Her on-display cleavage was something of a standing joke among us buttoned-up mothers. “And you said yourself that he was unhappy in his marriage.”

  “Even if he was having an affair, I expect he’d want at least a scattering of brain cells. Anyway, he’d left before she started working there.”

  “Yes, but—”

  I stop as Sarah returns with her sandwich. She turns over the cover page. At the top is a key: PP stands for Detective Sergeant Penny Pierson. I think of the sharp-featured young woman I’d just seen at the police station. AJ stands for Annette Jenks.

  The time of the statement is 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday. “They didn’t hang about before interviewing people,” Jenny says. “But why talk to Annette so quickly?”

  “Probably because she lets people into the school.” I also want to know who she let in on Wednesday afternoon. And whether she’s telling the truth about Jenny signing herself out. We read the document with Sarah.

  PP: Can you outline for me your duties at the school?

  AJ: Yes, I’m the secretary, so I sort out the mail, take phone calls, that kind of thing. Couriers leave things in my office, I sign for them; you know, the usual. I also get the registers and send out the letters for Mrs. Healey. And I buzz people in through the gate, though in the mornings a teacher sometimes stands by the gate, kind of a welcoming thing, and it means I don’t need to do it, which is lucky because it’s in the mornings that parents come in here asking for all sorts of things, like I don’t have enough to do.

  PP: Anything else? [AJ shakes head.]

  Elizabeth Fisher had been the school nurse as well as the secretary. Why didn’t Annette Jenks have that role too? If she had, Jenny wouldn’t have been up in that sickroom. She wouldn’t have been hurt.

  Yes, it would have been Annette. Yes, I would rather it had been her than Jenny. Anyone other than Jenny, apart from Adam. Motherhood isn’t soft and cozy and sweet; it’s selfish ferocity, red in tooth and claw.