‘Do you think she’ll report you?’
‘If she finds out I didn’t have any authorisation to go round there, then yes. Most probably.’
‘Well, I’m kind of impressed, actually,’ Mohsin says. ‘I always knew you had a subversive streak but never had you down as an out-and-out rebel.’
‘Thanks. So will you help?’
We both wait for the sound of Mohsin’s voice in the car. Nothing.
‘You told me the files wouldn’t be securely stored,’ Sarah ventures.
‘I know. Totally out of line. Baker will bust my guts for that if he finds out.’ The sound of the clicking biro again. ‘What do you need?’
Sarah’s relief is an exhaled breath, changing the atmosphere in her car.
‘The names of the investors in Sidley House.’
‘Penny told me that fraud was ruled out almost straight away,’ Mohsin says. ‘They’re comfortably in the black, according to the bank.’
‘Yes, and they’re starting the school up again in September. There’s no reason for fraud that I can see. But I need to check all of it. And when I spoke to the head teacher she didn’t like talking about the investors and I want to know why not.’
‘You spoke to her too?’
Sarah was silent.
‘Jesus, honey.’
‘I also need to know if we’ve got anything on a man called Donald White. I’m pretty sure he’s abusive to his daughter, possibly his wife.’
‘OK. I’ll do what I can,’ he says. ‘I’m doing an extra shift tonight. So I’ll meet you for breakfast tomorrow morning. Is that grim hospital café still going?’
We arrive back at the hospital car park and the residual heat in the early evening air scalds me. I hurry ahead of Sarah towards the building. This time I can’t see Jenny waiting for me.
Once inside the hospital’s protective skin the pain again vanishes, and for a moment the state of not-being-in-pain makes me feel euphoric.
I follow Sarah towards ICU. Jenny is leaning against a wall in the corridor.
‘I tried, you know, the scratch-and-sniff memory thing,’ she says. ‘But it’s no good. A school doesn’t smell like a hospital. At least Sidley House didn’t.’
It’s what I’d been banking on. Sidley House smelt of polish and hoovered carpets and cut flowers, not strong disinfectant and antiseptic and lino.
A little ahead of us, Sarah is scrolling through her texts and emails; the last point before ICU where mobiles are still allowed. We look over her shoulder. Nosiness and eavesdropping are becoming second nature.
Among her texts is one from Ivo. He’s got a standby flight from Barbados, an overnight, and will be here in the morning. I look at Jen, expecting to see her beamy-happy, but her face looks tight with anxiety; almost fear. Maybe she’s started to see their relationship for what it is. And perhaps that’s better now, than when he actually arrives.
‘Jen-’ I begin, but she cuts me off.
‘I was about to go in,’ she says, pointing at a door behind her.
It’s the entrance to the hospital chapel, which I’ve never noticed before. The chapel is the one place in the hospital that won’t smell of disinfectant and antiseptic.
We go in together. But I’m not worried, because surely it won’t smell anything like a fire in here. In any case, I’ll be with her.
Wooden pews and a carpet, threadbare but a carpet nonetheless. Even lilies, like the ones Mrs Healey always has in the small waiting area outside her office; their smell pungent in the room.
The combination of scents transports me momentarily into Sidley House; as if the gateway to a memory has a keypad and the right sensory code is punched in.
Looking at Jenny, I know that she feels it too.
‘I was near Mrs Healey’s office,’ she says. ‘And the lilies smelt really strong, you could smell the water a little too. I can remember that.’
She pauses a moment and I wait. She’s going further into the memory. Should I stop her?
‘I’m feeling happy. And I’m going down the stairs.’
Behind us, the door closes. An elderly woman has come in. It’s broken the sensory thread to the past.
‘You were going down the stairs?’ I ask. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah. I must have already got to the upper ground floor because that’s where Mrs Healey has those lilies.’
Maybe Annette Jenks was telling the truth after all about Jenny signing herself out.
Jenny closes her eyes again, and again I don’t know whether to let her continue with this. But how else are we going to help Addie?
Her face relaxes. It’s all OK. She’s back in a summer’s afternoon at school.
She screams.
‘Jenny-?’
She’s running out of the chapel.
At the back, the elderly woman has lit a candle, the smoke no more than a charcoal line in the air. But enough.
I catch up with her.
‘I’m sorry, I should never have-’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
I put my arm around her and she’s shaking.
‘I’m fine now, Mum. I wasn’t actually back in the fire, just close.’
We walk to the garden together.
I’d thought memories were kept behind a gateway, wrought-iron, I’d visualised, with spaces to glimpse through and sometimes opening for a short time to let you actually wander in again.
But I see a corridor, now, like a long hospital corridor, and behind each set of swing doors is another memory leading inexorably to the fire. I don’t think you can control how far you go along it, or know what lies behind the next set of doors. And I dread her reaching the end and the full horror of that afternoon.
Out here in the garden, the shadows are lengthening into soothing darkness.
‘It was a good idea,’ I say. ‘To think of the chapel.’
The one place in the hospital that smelt like the school; that even had candles and matches.
‘That wasn’t why I was there,’ she says.
She turns a little away from me, her face half hidden in darkness.
‘I was hoping to suck up to God. A last minute dot com search for a place in heaven.’
Anxieties hidden in sleeves and pockets and fears stuffed up jumpers, but my God, Mike, I didn’t expect this.
‘I’m not that scared actually,’ she says. ‘I mean, this whole thing, whatever we are now, does make it likely there’s a heaven, some kind of an afterlife, doesn’t it? It proves that the physical world and the physical body isn’t all there is.’
I’ve imagined talking to her about so many things: drugs, abortion, STDs, tattoos, piercings, internet safety. Some of these we have actually discussed and I had all my research to hand. But I’ve never researched this conversation. Never imagined it.
I thought we were so liberal, bringing up our children without God in the house – no church-going, no grace before food, no prayers at bedtime. I secretly thought we were more honest than our church-going friends, who I assumed used going to church as a means of getting their children into high-achieving free St Swithun’s. No, I’d let my children make up their own minds, when they were older. In the meantime, we’d sleep in on Sunday morning and go to a garden centre, not church.
But my lazy lack of faith, my in-vogue atheism, has taken away the safety net hanging beneath our children’s lives.
I just didn’t think it through; never thought what it would be like facing death with no knowledge of a heaven or a father-figure God to go to.
Maybe in the old days, when children died so frequently, people were more religious because they had to know where their dead children were. And if a child was dying they needed to tell her where she was going next. That it would all be alright. And to believe that. No wonder they all flocked to church. Did antibiotics kill off the devout in us? Penicillin replacing faith?
I’m talking too much, my thoughts jabbering away; like Maisie trying to hide the jagged truth with a swirl of words; trying to drown out the ticking clock, the speeding car, the sound death makes.