Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton Read Free Book Online

and a large overdraft too late.’
    ‘Of course we will get better,’ I say to her.
    Further along the corridor, we spot Tara coming towards you. I remember seeing her earlier, in the melee of press. Now she’s tracked you here. Jenny has also noticed her.
    ‘Isn’t she the one who thinks the
Richmond Post
is the
Washington Post
?’ Jenny asks, remembering our joke.
    ‘That’s the one.’
    She reaches you, and you look at her, perplexed.
    ‘Michael… ?’ she says, using her purring voice.
    Men are usually hoodwinked by Tara’s girlish rosy face, slender body and pretty glossy hair, but not a man whose wife is unconscious and daughter critically ill. You shy away from her, trying to place her. Sarah joins you.
    ‘She was asking me about Silas Hyman earlier,’ you tell Sarah.
    ‘Do you know her?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘I’m a friend of Grace’s,’ Tara calmly butts in.
    ‘I doubt it,’ you snap.
    ‘Well, more a colleague. I work with Grace at the
Richmond Post
.’
    ‘So a journalist,’ Sarah says. ‘Time to go.’
    Tara’s not going to budge. Sarah flashes her warrant card.
    ‘
Detective Sergeant
McBride,’ Tara reads, looking smug. ‘So the police
are
involved. I presume that this teacher, Silas Hyman, is a line of enquiry you’ll be taking?’
    ‘Out. Now,’ Sarah says in her uniform-and-truncheon voice.
    Jenny and I watch as she virtually manhandles Tara towards the lifts.
    ‘She’s fantastic, isn’t she?’ Jenny says and I nod, not graciously.
    ‘She was wrong though earlier,’ Jenny says. ‘Or at least Mrs Healey was when she told her about the code on thegate. You know, that people don’t know it? Some of the parents do. I’ve seen them letting themselves in when Annette takes too long answering the buzzer. And a few of the children know it too, though they’re not meant to.’
    I don’t know the code, but then I’m not pally with the in-the-know kind of mothers.
    ‘So a parent could have come in,’ I say.
    ‘All the parents were at sports day.’
    ‘Perhaps someone left.’
    I try to think back to this afternoon. Did I see something and not realise?
    The first thing I remember is cheering on Adam in the opening sprint, his face anxious and intent, his spindly legs going as fast as he could make them, desperate not to let down the Green Team. I was worrying about him coming last and you not being there and Jen’s retakes; not seeing the huge truth that we were all alive and healthy and undamaged. Because if I had, I’d have been sprinting around that field, cheering till my voice was hoarse at how fantastic and
miraculous
our lives were. A blue-skies and green-grass and white-lines life; expansive and ordered and complete.
    But I must focus.
Focus
.
    I can remember a group of parents from Adam’s class asking me if I’d go in for the mothers’ race.
    ‘Oh go on, Grace! You’re always a sport!’
    ‘Yeah, a
slow
sport,’ I replied.
    I look again at their smiling faces. Did one of them, shortly afterwards, leave for the school? Perhaps he or she had left a container of white spirit in the boot of their car. A lighter slipped into a pocket. But surely their smiles were just too relaxed and genuine to be hiding some wicked intention?
    A little while later, and Adam hurried up to tell me hewas going to get his cake
right now!
Rowena had to collect the medals from school so she was going with him. And as he left with her, I thought how grown-up she looked now in her linen trousers and crisp white blouse; that it hardly seemed a minute since she was a little elfin girl with Jenny.
    I’m sorry, not relevant at all. I have to look harder.
    I turn away from Adam and Rowena, swinging my focus to the right then to the left, but memory can’t be replayed that way and nothing comes into focus.
    But at the time I did check round the playing field, a broad sweep from one end to the other, looking for Jenny. Maybe if I concentrate on that memory I will see something