‘Your tip-off was hardly from Deep Throat. And this,’ she says, gesturing around the crummy office, ‘isn’t exactly the Washington Post.’
She must have heard me joking to Jenny about Tara; remembered it. Unlike me, she’s said it to her face.
‘Can we do a deal?’ Tara asks.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I’ll tell you in return for information that you will only give to my paper.’
Sarah is silent.
‘You don’t think the kid did it any more?’ Tara says. ‘You can’t do or you wouldn’t still be investigating.’
Sarah says nothing, which Tara takes as an affirmative. She glows with satisfaction. The cat that got the cream with a side order of pilchards.
‘So are you going to investigate Silas Hyman properly this time?’ she says.
Again, Sarah says nothing.
‘I need something back if I’m going to play ball here,’ Tara continues.
‘Adam Covey isn’t responsible for the fire,’ Sarah says. ‘And in a few minutes we’ll discuss Silas Hyman.’
Tara almost purrs with self-satisfaction.
‘It was Annette Jenks,’ she says. ‘The secretary at the school, who phoned us. At a minute or so past three. She had to shout above the sound of the fire alarm.’
‘Why did she call your paper?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. We did a photo and article a few weeks back when the school raised money for a charity. You know the whole giant-cheque-and-smug-rich-kids-holding-it routine? Sidley House were keen to get publicity for it and we obliged. She’d have our number from that.’
‘Did she phone any other papers?’
‘I don’t know. But she did phone a TV station. Their reporters and cameramen arrived about half an hour after us.’
I remember again the TV news playing while you were hurrying through the hospital to find Jenny.
‘She wanted us to take her picture,’ Tara continues. ‘I think Dave, our photographer, took a few to keep her quiet. But once the TV mob arrived she was all over them.’
I remember Maisie talking to Sarah in the shadowy cafeteria. ‘… There was a lot of smoke by then but she was smiling, like she was enjoying it, or at least she was not at all upset and she had lipstick on.’
The idea of someone getting a kick out of this – an ego-driven high – is horrible. But is it anything more than that? Could her need to take centre stage be extreme enough to create the stage; making reality TV so that she could be in it? I remember Jenny talking about the hot-air balloon: ‘If Annette had a child she’d put him in it.’
‘Going back to Silas Hyman,’ Sarah says. ‘You published a story about him a few months ago. After the incident in the playground.’
‘Yes.’
‘How did you find out about that?’
‘An anonymous text message was sent to the landline here. It was read out by one of those weird electronic voices.’
‘Do you know who it was?’
‘Like I just said, anonymous.’
‘Yes. But do you know who it was?’
Irritation hardens Tara’s face.
‘No. Couldn’t trace it. It was from a payphone. But it wasn’t Annette Jenks, if that’s what you’re thinking, because she wasn’t working there then. It was still that old cow of a secretary. Took me ten minutes before she’d let me speak to the head to confirm the story.’
‘So you published your article. Front page.’
Tara tosses her silky hair as an answer.
‘You had quotes from outraged parents. Did you tell parents about the incident, or did they come to you?’
‘I really don’t remember.’
‘I am sure you do.’
‘Alright, I phoned around a few families; got a couple of quotes in response to what I told them. So what do the police have on him then?’
‘Nothing.’
Tara looks at Sarah, coldly furious. She turns off her iPhone, which has been covertly recording this; not wanting her humiliation on record.
‘You said you’d do a trade,’ she says, petulantly. Her parents really should have made her play Monopoly and lose once in a while.
‘No,’ Sarah says coolly. ‘That’s what you inferred.’
As we walk to the car, I glance back at the Richmond Post offices and, in a fit of self-indulgence, think of my dreams being filed away in an ugly grey filing cabinet.
Because following Sarah, seeing her talent and commitment, has made me see that any promise I once had hasn’t been kept. She’s made me remember what I so hoped for – longed for – once for myself. It wasn’t to review art and books, but to be the artist or the writer. It was absurd to think I could bash out Anna Karenina or a Hockney between school drop-off and pick-up while still fitting in a trip to Sainsbury’s. Although people do. And a mediocre book or painting would be fine. Just something; to try to create something.
I used to make excuses to myself: when I had more time; when Jenny was older; when Adam started school. But somehow, without realising it or even really noticing, I stopped making excuses because I’d given up.
In the car, Sarah phones Mohsin on hands-free. She turns off the air-conditioning so she can hear him.
‘Hi, Mohsin.’
‘Hey, baby, you hanging in there?’
‘Has Penny got anything on the hate-mailer?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Until she does, I’m going to work on the assumption that Jenny saw either the arsonist or someone connected to the arsonist, which is why he wants to kill her now.’
Mohsin is silent.
‘You did hear about the attacker?’
‘Yes.’
He doesn’t say anything more and the sound of his silence fills the hot car.
I see the effect on Sarah, a slight sagging of the shoulders, and I wish I could tell her I am with her, supporting her.
‘It was the secretary, Annette Jenks, who tipped off the Richmond Post about the fire,’ Sarah says. ‘But there was another tip-off, four months ago, about Silas Hyman not supervising the playground. Someone wanted him out of the school.’
Mohsin is quiet. I hear a noise, maybe a biro point being clicked in and out.
‘What if the witness is right, Sarah?’
‘You’re not an uncle, are you?’ she says.
‘Not yet, though my sister’s working on it.’
‘I know Adam. Who he really is, the bedrock of him, if you like, because he is a part of Michael. And therefore a part of me. And he didn’t do this.’
Silence seems to ratchet up the heat in the car.
‘Silas Hyman had birthday cake candles,’ Sarah says. ‘Eight blue ones, like the ones that must have been on Adam’s cake. And he has the school calendar with Adam’s birthday ringed. And his wife, I know she’s lying. Or hiding something at least. I’m sure she is.’
‘You went to his house?’ He sounds horrified.
‘No one else is doing anything, are they?’ she snaps. ‘Not now everyone’s decided that my gentle little nephew is an arsonist.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Sarah, you can’t just go to someone’s house.’
She says nothing. The sound of a pen tapping hard now in the background, or maybe a foot.
‘I’m worried about you, darling, what’ll happen if someone finds out and-’
Sarah interrupts, her tone weary now. ‘I know. Actually from a getting-into-hot-water angle, it’s a lot worse.’
‘How?’
‘His wife was bathing their kids and I just didn’t clock it. I’m a mother, an aunt; bathing children is just so normal and…’
She breaks off. So that’s what rattled her. She’d been pretending to be on police business when children were naked.
‘I left once I realised,’ Sarah continues. ‘But it made me so angry that I was in this position. And then I felt so angry about everything. And then this bloody woman was feeling sorry for herself, sorry for herself!’