‘Where’s your brother?’
‘With Jenny. As there’s no longer a police guard.’
DI Baker looks irritated. He knows the point you’re making. ‘Are they here?’
Sarah’s hostile silence annoys him.
‘If you are willing to cooperate in this you can stay with him, but if-’
She cuts off his threat. ‘He’s outside.’
Sarah goes into the corridor.
‘You need to come with us now, Ads,’ she says to him. ‘I want you to know that apart from my idiot boss, none of us think you did this. Not for one minute.’
The PC looks astonished by her. She turns to my mother, who is shaking.
‘Why don’t you go and see Grace for a little while? I’ll take care of him.’
Maybe she’s afraid of my mother not holding it together.
She gives Mum a quick unexpected hug, then accompanies Adam into the office.
‘Sit down, Adam,’ DI Baker said. ‘I need to ask you some questions, alright?’
Adam is silent.
‘I asked if that was alright, Adam. If you find it hard to speak, then you can nod.’
Adam is totally still.
‘I’d like to talk to you about the fire.’
The word ‘fire’ makes Addie crumple into himself.
I put my arms around him but he can’t feel my touch. And then Sarah pulls him onto her knee. Small for eight, he’s still able to sit on knees. She clasps her hands in front of her, encircling him.
‘Let’s start with yesterday morning,’ DI Baker says. ‘It was your birthday, wasn’t it?’
Maybe this is his attempt to put Adam at his ease.
‘Sorry, Ads,’ Sarah says. ‘Useless aunt. I always forget, don’t I?’
I used to think it was because she couldn’t be bothered with our children.
‘I always open my presents at breakfast,’ DI Baker says to Adam. ‘Did you do that?’
I’d piled up his presents in the middle of the kitchen table, trying to make them look as many as possible; ours done up with a blue satin bow, to make it look extra presentlike. Inside, a ‘play-space enclosure’ for his guinea pigs. ‘Looks like the bloody Hilton,’ you’d said on Tuesday evening as I’d wrapped it up. ‘Alton Towers for guinea pigs,’ I’d corrected.
I’d got him a card with an ‘I am 8!’ badge so he could wear it to school, because it’s important that everyone knows it’s your birthday. It was a rocket card, even though he’s not into space, but by the time you get to eight, the age cards have almost petered out and there’s virtually no choice.
The smell of coffee and toast and pain au chocolat in the oven because it’s a birthday.
Adam came down the stairs hurriedly, two at a time. He did almost a comic-book double-take when he saw the presents. ‘All for me? Really?’
Calling up to Jenny and you that the birthday boy was here and knowing he liked being called that and thinking that next year he probably wouldn’t.
Jenny came downstairs, far earlier than usual, and – amazingly – dressed already. She hugged Adam and gave him her present.
‘Aren’t teaching assistants meant to be smartly dressed?’ I said. ‘Professional looking?’
She was wearing her short, gauzy skirt and skimpy top.
‘It’ll be fine, Mum, really. Besides, my outfit goes with the shoes.’
She stuck out her suntanned bare legs and the jewels in her sandals glinted in the morning summer sunshine.
‘I just think you should be a little more…’
‘Yeah, I know,’ she said and teased me about bumsters.
Then you came into the kitchen, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ loudly and out of key. Really loudly. And Adam laughed. You said we’d do something special that evening.
His voice was quiet. ‘I hate going to school on my birthday.’
‘But your friends will be there,’ you said. ‘And it’s sports day, isn’t it? So not all work today.’
‘I’d rather have work.’
A flash of annoyance on your face – or was it sadness – covered because it was his birthday. You turned to Jenny.
‘Don’t kill anyone, Nurse Jen,’ you said.
‘Being school nurse is a serious thing, not something to joke about,’ I said, snappish.
‘It’s just for the afternoon, Mum.’
But what if there’s a head injury? I’d thought. And she doesn’t know to watch out for sleepiness and sickness when a child has an internal bleed in the brain. Aloud, I said, ‘Seventeen is just too young to have that much responsibility.’
‘It’s a primary school sports day, Mum, not a motorway crash.’
She was teasing me, but I didn’t catch the ball she threw me.
‘Children can be severely injured if they fall wrong. All sorts of unforeseen accidents can happen.’
‘Then I’ll dial 999 and call in the pros, OK?’
I didn’t argue with her any more. There was no point. Because I’d be there at sports day, with the watertight alibi of cheering Adam on, to keep an eye on things – any signs of sleepiness in injured children and I’d be on it.
She doled out the pain au chocolat hot from the oven, bought from Waitrose two weeks ago and waiting in the freezer for this morning.
‘I have done a St John Ambulance training, Mum,’ she said to me. ‘I’m not totally incompetent?’
A rise at the end of her sentence, like all teenage girls, as if life is one long question.
You took a hot pain au chocolat, juggling it from hand to hand to cool it, going to the door.
‘Run super-fast,’ you said to Adam. ‘And I’ll see you tonight.’ Turning to me: ‘Bye. Have fun.’
I don’t think we kissed goodbye. Not in a pointed way, but in a kiss-taken-as-read way. We thought we had a never-ending supply of kisses and had become careless with the ones we didn’t use.
‘And did your mum make you a cake?’ DI Baker asks Adam.
Silence.
‘Adam?’
But he doesn’t move or speak.
‘It was a brilliant cake,’ Jenny says to me. She puts her arm around me. ‘They’ll find out it’s a mistake.’
I remember Jenny and Adam searching the house for Adam’s tiny Lego skeleton man to put on the cake’s noman’s-land and me saying I thought this was going a little far, but secretly being glad that he was doing something boyish.
I remember counting out eight blue candles (three would go into the artillery guns) and thinking it hadn’t felt long since I’d had to take just two candles out of the full packet, and it had felt extravagant and touching. How could he need a whole fistful of them? The cake bristling like some pastel blue foreboding of stubble.
‘Right, let’s move on then,’ DI Baker says to Adam. ‘Did you take your cake to school?’
Adam doesn’t reply. Can’t reply.
‘I spoke to your form teacher, Miss Madden,’ DI Baker says, and it seems strange that he’s talked to the insipid and mean Miss Madden.
‘She told me that children are always allowed to bring a cake in on their birthdays?’
I remember putting the cake tin into the jute bag with the square base, which is perfect for cake tins as they don’t fall on their sides. And then-
‘Oh God.’
‘Mum?’ Jenny asks but DI Baker is talking again.
‘She told me that parents supply the candles and also the matches.’
A slight stress on ‘matches’ but Sarah reacts as if scalded.
‘Your headmistress has corroborated this,’ DI Baker continues.
I plead with Sarah to stop this Sherman tank of an interview before it reaches its destination. But she can’t hear me.
‘Miss Madden told us that she keeps the cake, with the candles and matches, in a cupboard next to her desk. Usually she would get it out at the end of the day, just before the children go home. But yesterday was sports day, wasn’t it?’
Adam is silent and still.
‘She said that if it’s sports day, the birthday child can take it out to the playing field to have at the end?’