The words ‘or both’ must have hung in the air but weren’t recorded.
AB: Are Silas Hyman’s contact details also in your palmtop?
SH: Yes. I haven’t updated it.
AB: Can you write them down for me.
SH: Now?
AB: Yes.
[SH writes down Silas Hyman’s details.]
AB: If you could please excuse me one moment.
[AB leaves the room and returns six minutes later.]
Baker must have gone to tell Penny about Silas Hyman. Presumably he also sent someone to find him – he’d told you the police had spoken to Silas Hyman that evening.
AB: We were talking about school security. Can you tell me about the fire regulations at the school?
SH: We have appropriate fire-fighting equipment – extinguishers both foam and water, as well as fire blankets and sand buckets on every floor and in vulnerable areas such as the kitchen. The walking distance to the nearest extinguisher does not exceed thirty metres. Staff are trained in the use of appropriate equipment. We have signed exits, both pictorially and in writing, in every classroom and in rooms such as the Art room, dining room and kitchen. We also routinely practise evacuating the building. We have certified smoke detectors and heat detectors, which are linked directly through to the fire station. We have quarterly, yearly and three-yearly maintenance and testing by a qualified engineer as required by BS 5839.
‘It sounds like she’s memorised it all,’ Jen says, and I agree with her, but why?
AB: You have all those facts to hand?
So AB noticed this too.
SH: I am the head teacher of a primary school. As I just told you, safety is my number-one concern. I delegated myself as the fire safety manager. So yes, I have the facts to hand.
AB: Firefighters reported that windows at the top of the school were wide open. Can you comment on that?
SH: No. That’s not possible. We have window locks to prevent them being opened more than ten centimetres.
AB: Where are the keys to the window locks kept?
SH: In the teacher’s desk. But surely…
She must have trailed off at this point. I imagine again that figure going to the top of the school, but now more was required before he could fling open the windows and let the breeze suck the fire upwards.
AB: You said your staff were trained to put out fires?
SH Yes. Clearly containment, alongside evacuation, is the best method of minimising the impact of a fire.
AB: But the staff were all out at sports day? Apart from the three you told me about?
[SH nods.]
AB: Why was Jennifer Covey inside the school and not at sports day too?
SH: She was in charge of the medical room. For minor injuries.
AB: Where is the medical room?
SH: On the third floor.
AB: At the top of the building?
SH: Yes. We used to use the secretary’s office. Elizabeth was a qualified nurse. There was a sofa in there and we had a blanket. Just to hold the fort until a parent arrived to take the child home. But the new secretary isn’t medically trained in any way so there was no point keeping it there. Mr Davidson, our head of upper school, has it on his floor. He’s our trained first-aider but he was needed at sports day.
AB: How long had you known that Jennifer Covey would be the nurse this afternoon?
SH: Nurse is a little grand for the title. Clearly I didn’t expect a girl that age to deal with anything remotely serious.
‘I did a St John Ambulance training, you witch,’ Jenny says as she reads it and I’m glad she’s focused on Sally Healey’s answer and not Baker’s question. Because right at the beginning he’d suspected the fire was aimed at her. I suppose he’d have put her name in the computer and the hate-mail case would have come up instantly.
AB: If you could answer my question. How long had you known that Jennifer Covey would be the nurse this afternoon?
SH: I announced it at the Thursday staff meeting last week. It wasn’t my original plan but I decided that in view of Jennifer’s consistently inappropriate clothes during the hot weather it would be better if she wasn’t in view of the parents.
‘She is a witch, Mum,’ Jenny says.
AB: Original plan?
SH: Initially I’d allocated the job to Rowena White. Rowena has done a St John Ambulance course. She was upset about the change but I felt it was appropriate.
Jenny turns to me. ‘Do you think Rowena could have told her father she was going to be nurse, to make him proud, same old, but then didn’t tell him when I replaced her?’
‘Maybe,’ I say.
Was the wrong girl hurt?
AB: Who was at the Thursday staff meeting when you announced the change?
SH: The senior management team. Then they disseminate the information to all the other members of staff.
[SH is silent.]
AB: Mrs Healey?
SH: Jenny, is she going to die?
[SH cries.]
It didn’t say for how long.
Sarah takes the final photocopy out of her bag. I’d hoped it would be a transcript of Silas Hyman’s interview but it’s Tilly Rogers’s, that archetype of a reception teacher – pink cheeks and long fair hair and smiling face with white, pearly teeth. A healthy, clean-living, nice girl who’ll do this job for a few years before marrying and having a family of her own. Children in her class love her, fathers feel wistful, mothers maternal.
I can’t imagine she has anything to do with the fire.
Tilly’s interview started at 6.30, so after Mrs Healey’s. It was AB, Inspector Baker, who interviewed her.
I skim-read it, just getting the basics. She was with her class doing circle time when the alarm went off. Maisie White helped evacuate the children, who all knew her already as a volunteer reader. She didn’t mention a delay before Annette brought her the register, maybe because she didn’t notice or because she didn’t think it was important. Nobody had noticed and asked her. It’s two pages before I see a question that seems relevant.
AB: Do you know Silas Hyman?
TR: Yes. He was a year-three teacher at Sidley House. Up until April that is. But I didn’t exactly know him. We taught on different floors. I’m right at the bottom – well, you know that already. And the reception classes don’t integrate with the rest of the school, not until they reach year one.
Is she telling the truth about not really knowing Silas Hyman? Is it possible that she’s his accomplice? Did the fresh-faced, floral-frocked Tilly Rogers leave her class with their storybooks and Listening-Teddy to go upstairs and find the keys to the windows and open them for him? Pour out white spirit and find a match?
Once I’d have said that it was impossible to imagine. But nothing is impossible to imagine any more.
But I can’t see how she could have got back to her classroom in time. Because if she’d started the fire, surely Maisie would have arrived to help with the evacuation and found her missing.
AB: Is there anything else you think may be relevant?
TR: Rowena White. I don’t know if it’s relevant but it was extraordinary.
AB: Go on.
TR: I was outside the school with the children but most of their mothers had got there by then, so I was able to look around. I saw Rowena running into the PE shed and coming out with a towel. A big, blue swimming one. The children leave them in there some times. There were two bottles of water on the gravel at the side of the school, by the kitchen entrance. You know, the really large four-litre ones? And she poured water on the towel. Then I saw her going into the school. As she got to the door, I saw her putting the towel over her face. It was just so brave.
Sarah leaves to find you. Jenny and I wait a moment, both quiet with disappointment. No magic sentence to free Adam from guilt.
‘Maybe Aunt Sarah will see something we haven’t,’ I say. ‘Or it will at least give her a lead.’
‘Yes.’
A little while later, we join you and Sarah in the corridor of ICU. You’re looking through the glass at Jenny, holding a transcript.