Rosamund Lupton - Afterwards

‘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.

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 got 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 any more 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 think I did.

So I skate around the circumference of a denial of a relationship between Jen 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 got 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 unauthorised 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 got 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 pretence 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 authorised.’

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 looked 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 further.

‘I’m arresting you under the malicious communications act. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence 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 got into a locked ward? And did her hatred really extend to murder?

Natalia is in the back of Penny’s car. Sarah 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.