‘Can you write down your address?’
As Elizabeth writes down her details, I want to tell Sarah about the lie Mrs Healey told the parents. Why did she do that?
‘Do you know Silas Hyman?’ Sarah asks her – a logical question but not the one I hoped for.
‘Yes. He was a teacher at Sidley House. He was fired for something he didn’t do. A month before me. We’ve spoken on the phone once or twice since then. Kindred spirits and all that.’
‘Why he was fired?’
‘In a nutshell? An eight-year-old boy called Robert Fleming wanted him out.’
‘And the longer version?’
‘Robert Fleming loathed Silas because he was the first teacher to stand up to him. Silas called Fleming’s parents in, during the first week he had him in his class, and used the word “wicked” about their son; not suffering from some attention deficit disorder or a problem with socialisation. Wicked. But unfortunately that’s not the form with fee-paying parents.
‘In March, when Silas was on playground duty, Fleming told him that an eleven-year-old boy had locked himself in the toilets with a five-year-old little girl, and she was screaming. Fleming said he couldn’t find any other teacher. So Silas went to the little girl’s aid. For all his faults, he’s very kind like that. And Robert Fleming knew that.
‘When he’d got Silas out of the playground, Fleming forced a boy called Daniel up the fire escape and then managed to get him over the edge. God knows what he must have said to the little chap to have got him to climb over. Then Fleming pushed him. He was badly injured. Broke both his legs. It was lucky it wasn’t his neck.
‘Part of my job was school nurse. I looked after him until the ambulance arrived. Poor little mite was in such terrible pain.’
I’d had only Adam’s version of events, and adult rumours, distorted as time went by. It became a terrible accident, not deliberate, and the blame was targeted on Mr Hyman for not supervising the playground rather than Robert Fleming. Because who wants to believe an eight-year-old child can be that disturbingly manipulative, that vicious, that malevolent?
But we already knew that he was from Adam, who lived in physical fear of him. We knew this wasn’t like regular teasing and bullying. I think it was when he pulled Adam’s tie around his neck, leaving a red welt for a week afterwards, saying he’d kill him if he didn’t ‘kiss his butt’. Or the skipping rope that he wound around Adam, tying him up, while he drew swastikas on his body.
Jenny called him psycho-child and you agreed.
‘Those aren’t things that a boy should be doing,’ you said. ‘If it was an adult, we’d say he was sociopathic. Psychopathic, even.’
It was after the swastika incident, just before this last half-term, that you demanded a meeting and got a guarantee from Mrs Healey that Robert Fleming wouldn’t be coming back to Sidley House in September.
‘Mrs Healey knew that a playground accident like that should never have happened in a primary school,’ Mrs Fisher continues. ‘She needed someone to blame, so she blamed Silas Hyman. I don’t think she wanted to fire him for it. She’s not stupid. She could recognise a gifted teacher, as a business asset if nothing else. But then there was that scurrilous article in the Richmond Post and the phone didn’t stop ringing with parents wanting action. So she had no choice as she saw it. Parents have a great deal of power in a private school, especially a new one.
‘The really appalling thing is if that wicked boy had been blamed and hauled over the coals, there might have been a fighting chance of stopping him before it was too late.’
He wasn’t hauled over the coals, was he? Mrs Healey gave him a quiet exit.
‘You think he’ll do something again?’ Sarah asks.
‘Of course he will. If he can plan and execute at eight breaking a boy’s legs, what will he do at eighteen?’
Did Robert Fleming leave the playing field during sports day? No. I can’t believe that. I know we were told that almost all school-time fires are started by children, but not fires which injure people so badly. Not fires like this one. I refuse to be like DI Baker and think a child capable of that.
‘You said that after the Richmond Post article the phone didn’t stop ringing?’ Sarah asks.
‘That’s right. And Sally Healey was forced to fire Silas.’
‘Do you know who told the press?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Does Silas Hyman have any enemies?’
‘None that I know of.’
‘You said earlier, “for all his faults”. What do you mean by that?’
‘I shouldn’t have said it.’
‘But there is a reason?’
‘I just mean that he was arrogant. Male teachers in a primary school are a rare species. He was a cockerel in the hen-house.’
She pauses a moment and I can see she’s fighting off tears.
‘How are they,’ she asks. ‘Jenny and Mrs Covey?’
‘Both of them are critically injured.’
Elizabeth Fisher’s ramrod-straight posture bends a little and she turns her face from Sarah, as if embarrassed by her emotion.
‘I was there at the start, and so was Jenny. Reception children would come to my office to show me the work they’d done. Jenny Covey would come in and give me a hug and then walk out again. That was what she’d come to show me. In year one she got into Hama-beads. Other children would do meticulous geometric patterns and she’d do something completely random, no design or maths to it – and it was wonderful. All those coloured beads just put together any old how. Just so… energetic and unworried.’
Sarah smiles. Does she remember Jenny’s Hama-bead phase? She probably got an anarchic mat for a Christmas present.
‘And Adam’s a lovely little boy,’ she continues. ‘A credit to Mrs Covey. I wish I’d told her that, but I didn’t. Not that it would have made any difference, what I thought, but I wish I’d said it anyway.’
Sarah looks moved by her, and Elizabeth Fisher has the encouragement she needs to continue.
‘Some of them, they hardly bother to say hello to their mothers at the end of the day, and the mothers are too busy gossiping to each other to really focus on their child. But Adam runs out there like a plane coming in to land, with his arms out to Mrs Covey, and she looks like there’s no one else in the entire place but him. I used to watch them out of my office window.’
She hasn’t got anyone to talk to about us, I realise, not with her husband gone. And she can hardly contact anyone at school after the excruciatingly embarrassing flowers-for-a-dying-husband.
‘Do you have any idea who might have set fire to the school?’ Sarah asks.
‘No. But if I were you, I’d look for someone like Robert Fleming as an adult – because no one intervened early enough.’
As Jenny and I return to my ward, I remember that meeting you had with Mrs Healey about Robert Fleming. I’d been annoyed she’d listened to you when she hadn’t listened to me all those times I’d gone into school and complained. I’d thought it was because you’re a man and I was just another mum with Kit Kat crumbs in my pocket and spare PE socks in my handbag. You said it was because of your celebrity status: ‘I can kick up a smellier stink.’
Maisie is arriving next to my bed. She pulls the ugly flimsy curtains around it.
‘Another visitor,’ I say to Jen. ‘It’s like a seventeenth-century salon in here this evening, isn’t it?’
‘A salon was in France, Mum.’ She gestures to the brown geometric curtains around my bed. ‘And it had walls. With oil paintings and ornate mirrors.’
We’d spoken about salons a few months ago. I’m touched she listened.
‘Nit-picky. It had a bed, didn’t it? And there was a woman at the centre of the attention. N’est-ce pas?’ Alright, so she was meant to be a glittering witty intellectual…