Rosamund Lupton - Afterwards

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 harbour 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 to 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 jibe.

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 letterbox. 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 by-line 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 emails, 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 humouring 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, the 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 of 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 sub-headline, ‘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’ – saying 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 over-exaggerated 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.