They came from nowhere, their cameras clicking and flashing, their shouted questions like white noise. It was so stupid, so naive of me, not to have prepared myself for this. I tried not to shrink, tried to keep a steady path, my eyes fixed on the two policemen who were stationed at the school gates. Then I swept my way across the bare playground, not wanting to give myself the chance to think about the last time I’d trodden this tarmac. The tight knot of mums, Saffron’s small hand in mine, Peter’s gentle presence. Now he was gone, and the world of the school had stopped turning, at least for now.
Patrick had somehow managed to send me a suitcase of clothes – there was no way I could exude professional authority in my two pairs of grubby jeans – and my wedges click-clacked against the floor as I passed through the echoey corridors towards the headmaster’s office. I looked into the classrooms en route, splodgy artwork decorating the walls, tiny chairs empty of tiny bottoms, and wondered which one was Saffron’s. His name was stencilled on the wall in the last one: MR GRIEVE. I stood there, rooted to the spot by the sight of those black letters, then jumped in fright as I saw movement in my peripheral vision. She stood slowly, uncoiling herself from the carpeted corner of the room – it was Kimberley. Of course it was Kimberley. She smiled widely, carefully made her way towards the door.
‘You survived the mayhem at the gates?’ she asked.
‘It’s unbelievable.’ The story was igniting, a slow-news summer suddenly transformed. A blonde, photogenic wife of a cabinet minister sweeping through the school gates on Day Two could have only thrown petrol on a blazing fire. ‘They must’ve been all over you.’
She gave a self-deprecating shrug. ‘I’ve got used to navigating it. Ian’s going to be so pleased you’re here.’ She touched my shoulders, lightly grazing each of my cheeks with her lips. She was wearing a pair of leg-lengthening skinny jeans topped off by a V-necked grey marl T-shirt, her skin as fresh and luminous as it always was. Now I felt overdressed, like I’d come for a job interview in a provincial bank. ‘Shall I show you where his office is?’
‘Don’t worry. He said it was down there and to the left in his text.’
She paused, cocked her head, brooking no argument.
‘No, let me. I’m just sorting through the books. I organise an auction every summer term, and the book fund’s a big part of where the money goes.’ She exhaled. ‘I need to feel like I’m doing something useful here. Does that make sense?’
‘Of course it does.’
‘This was his classroom.’
She moved backwards as she said it, and I stepped in, without really wanting to. How did she do it, take total command of any space she occupied?
‘Was he a good teacher?’ I regretted the question as soon as I’d asked it. It felt callous, bald. Why did I feel the need to fill the space?
‘He definitely made the children feel special. He always went the extra mile.’ She gave a smile which didn’t reach her eyes. ‘Which should be a good thing, shouldn’t it?’
What did that even mean? I couldn’t waste energy decoding it: instead I took in the room, the project they’d obviously been doing on the environment, the clumsy crayon drawings of birds and animals, a big orange sun, a recycling bin with an ostentatious tick. Emotion surged up in me, and I looked downwards, not wanting her to see my face. She hadn’t exactly ambushed me, but she’d caught me off guard. It all felt so close suddenly, Saffron’s chaotic paint splatters lost somewhere in that jumble.
‘Let’s go and find Ian,’ I said.
‘Sure thing. I’ve got my police interview this afternoon. I need some time to psych myself up. Deep breathing, is that what you’d recommend?’
It always felt like she was mocking me, her pinches so light they left no bruises. God, I missed Lysette in that moment – she’d normally know if I was being oversensitive, and not make me feel like an idiot if I was. It’s humans’ fatal design flaw, the way we only appreciate the ordinary once it’s no longer ordinary at all.
‘I tend to find breathing helpful in most situations,’ I said.
She smiled, didn’t say anything for a beat longer than was comfortable.
‘I really must come and see you, mustn’t I?’
*
I looked at my watch as I followed Kimberley down the corridor, conscious that Lysette would be in her police interview at this very moment. By the time I got back from my meeting with Krall, the news about the cameras had leaked out, which was kind of a relief. I’d hoped it might bridge the gap I’d felt opening between us in the preceding days, the confirmation that her hunch was right, but if anything she felt more distant. Her way of psyching herself up for her interview was to get progressively angrier, convinced they’d be out to malign Sarah.
‘They weren’t having an affair,’ she’d said, yanking the cork out of a bottle of wine like a cowboy drawing his gun. I saw a look cross Ged’s face as she did it, but he didn’t say anything. ‘I know that’s what everyone’s going to say, but it’s bullshit.’
‘But for him to do that to himself – he must’ve been obsessed with her?’
She flung up a dismissive hand.
‘Everyone was obsessed with Sarah, Mia. She was that kind of person.’
I tried not to feel the sting, the sense of competing with someone impossibly perfect. An anarchic saint. Maybe dying young was the only way to square some of those impossible contradictions of being a woman.
‘But it sounds like he did have problems,’ I added. I was desperate to ask her about the complaint that Krall had alluded to, but I didn’t want her to think I was poking around for gossip.
There was an edge to her. ‘Look at you, with the inside track.’
‘Lys, if you don’t want me to do this . . .’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not that. I’m really glad you’re here.’
It doesn’t always feel that way, I thought, but then I looked down at the chaos around us, her living-room floor a sea of garish plastic toys. Saffron had made me some plastic fried eggs earlier: I should’ve cleared them away, rather than behaving like room service would come and do it for me.
‘I’m not part of the investigation. I’m just here to offer people a bit of support. Be someone to talk to.’
‘I want you to be someone for me to talk to.’
‘I’ll always be that,’ I promised.
Promises can be foxing – how often do we make them in a lifetime and really know they’ll hold fast?
*
Ian’s door was firmly shut when we got there, and Kimberley made sure that she was the one to knock. She opened it before there was a response, pushing her blonde head through the gap.
‘Ian, Mia Cosgrove’s here.’ It felt odd to hear my whole name come out of her mouth. How had she learnt it?
‘Come on in,’ said a stressed-sounding voice. ‘We’re wrapping up.’
The office was small and poky, with a view of the round-about in the playground and the fields that ringed the school. Ian Gardener was wedged behind his desk like it was a barricade; a man and a woman sat on the other side on boxy armchairs that looked too brown and synthetic to be comfortable – I guessed immediately that they were plain-clothes detectives. Ian probably wasn’t much older than me, but he was pasty and well padded, his hair thinning at the crown, plastic glasses perched high on his sweaty nose.
Once the detectives had made their exit, Ian turned his focus onto me.
‘So you managed to cross enemy lines?’ he said, attempting a weak smile.
‘The photographers? God, they’re like swarming rats, aren’t they?’
‘I feel like that’s unfair to rats,’ he said. His voice sounded nasal to my ears, each word delivered at a similar flat pitch. ‘We’ve got a couple of white ones in Owl class, they actually make very good pets.’
We sat there for a few seconds in silence. I like to let a first session unfold without me forcing it. Where the client instinctively wants to lead us tells me far more than I’ll glean from their answer to some question I’ve cleverly constructed.
‘Thanks for coming,’ he said eventually.
‘I’m glad you asked,’ I said. ‘I’m not arrogant enough to think I can do a great deal in three weeks, but if I can be any support to you, I’d like to try.’
He grabbed a ballpoint pen from the pen pot on his desk, started clicking the mechanism in and out. He was wearing a wedding ring that gripped the skin of his fleshy finger like it was too small for it.
‘That’s all we can really do, isn’t it?’ he said, looking up, his gaze intense. His eyes were almond-shaped, brown, too small for his wide face. ‘Try?’
‘In this instance?’
‘More life in general,’ he said, voice leaden. The next silence that came felt more loaded. I waited it out. ‘These sessions are confidential, aren’t they?’
‘Unless you tell me something that’s critical to the police investigation.’ I looked at the way his shoulders hunched inwards under his bog-standard black crew neck, his fingers still fiddling obsessively with the chewed plastic pen. All I wanted – all I ever want with clients, apart from the odd one I want to drown – was to make him feel that he wasn’t completely alone. ‘And I know so little about it that unless you tell me you . . .’ I stopped myself, then finished the sentence. ‘Were directly involved, then it seems unlikely.’
‘What, you mean if I’d pushed her?’ he said, words laced with grim humour. ‘I assume you know about the bruising on her body?’
‘I do, yes.’
He shook his head. ‘It still feels completely unbelievable. It’s like it’s a horrible practical joke, and someone’s going to jump out with a camera and it’ll all be over.’
‘Of course it does,’ I said gently. ‘It’s only just happened. You’re in shock.’
‘Shock’s one word for it.’
It seemed like a strange response. Was he shooting for a fake kind of nonchalance? I see it sometimes, particularly in men – an attempt to distance themselves from their feelings to self-protect.
‘If shock’s one word, what would be another?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said that was one word for it, as if you were thinking about a word which might better describe your feelings.’
‘Feelings.’ He almost spat the word out.
‘Well – how did it feel when you found out? Did the police tell you face to face?’
‘Dunno,’ he said, jaw rigid under the doughy flesh that covered it. ‘I felt – angry, if anything.’
‘Angry with who?’
‘Angry about all of it,’ he said, an answer to a different question. His voice dropped at the end of the sentence, like the ‘all’ was infinite, a stone thrown down a well, a distant splash. Was he skirting around the incident at the school that Krall had made mention of? ‘I mean obviously I felt terrible for the family. For Max.’
His postscript had none of the emotion of the first half of his reply.
‘Ian, can I ask what you mean by “all of it”?’
‘The whole thing is obviously a huge mess. Lives have been devastated.’ He was depersonalising my questions, keeping me at arm’s length, but all the time he was laying down breadcrumbs, encouraging me to venture closer. ‘A child’s life has been destroyed,’ he added for good measure.
‘Of course. I appreciate all of that. I just wondered about how it felt for you, specifically. In your role.’
‘What? Potentially having recruited a murderer? Fabulous, Mia, as I’m sure you can imagine.’
I laughed. I needed to take him at face value, break the tension.
‘I’m sorry if that sounded trite.’ He gave a smile that felt real, present in a way that he hadn’t been up until now. ‘You want the truth? I’m not sure I’ll ever be the person I was a month ago. He seems like a fool.’
Again, it wasn’t so much the words as the delivery.
‘A fool?’ I was going to continue but he cut straight across me.
‘Can we talk practicalities?’ he said, suddenly acid. ‘Or is this all going to be deep and meaningful?’
‘The session’s for you, Ian. It’s about what you find most useful.’
He drew himself up in his chair, ramrod straight. He suddenly felt like a headmaster, like he could dole out lines or a suspension without breaking a sweat.
‘How do we come back from this?’ he demanded. ‘How do my children, my staff, ever start to feel normal again?’
‘I think the truth is, that normal will have to become something different now.’
His gaze was intense. ‘OK, so how do I make this place feel safe again?’
‘By telling the truth,’ I said, watching how his face moved downwards at the sound of the word. Did it sound more glib to his ears than I’d intended it to be? ‘Or rather – by acknowledging what’s happened instead of spreading a layer of fake normal over the top. Children are very resilient, but they’re also very sensitive. They know when they’re being lied to. I would encourage the parents to tell them that Peter’s died, not feed them stories about him having gone away.’
‘Really?’
‘They read fairy stories, see pets die, lose grandparents. They’re much better off knowing he’s died, and then having lots of support to feel safe in that reality. And Max will want to talk about his mum, I imagine, if he hasn’t already.’
‘Right.’ I could sense the anger that he was talking about, the insistent pulse of it. ‘Don’t they say tabloids have a reading age of nine? They should all be well and truly up to speed by the time they get back.’ It was hard not to find his gallows humour repellent. ‘Did you see the headlines today?’
‘I did, yes. And I found it shocking to see their faces there. I can’t imagine how hard it is for those of you who were close to them.’
The newsagent had been crowded with people when I’d walked past it today. Sarah and Peter’s photographs had been plastered across the front pages – Double Love Death in Farthing’s Village said one.
‘I wasn’t close to them,’ countered Ian. ‘I was an employer. A headmaster to Sarah’s child. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t care.’ His gaze was intense again. ‘Or that I don’t care now.’
‘Absolutely. I can see how much it’s affected you.’
Ian’s gaze swivelled to the window.
‘I tried my best.’ His voice cracked. ‘What does my best look like now?’
The emotion was right there on the surface. I decided to risk trying to draw him a little further.
‘What do you think it would look like?’
Just for a second, he looked utterly helpless, like he himself was a child, but then something hardened and calcified.
‘I asked you,’ he said.
I was going too fast. Part of him wanted to spill the emotion, but the larger part couldn’t risk it yet.
‘I would have an assembly the day the school comes back. Talk to everyone – staff and children – and let the kids know that they can talk about it in smaller groups with their teachers. The council are going to provide ongoing access to counsellors for your teachers, aren’t they?’
‘Yeah, no, I get it. Talk. Talk and talk and talk.’
His face was scarlet, the pen clasped tight in his hand again.
‘It’s OK to be angry,’ I said, making my voice gentle. ‘Something terrible has happened, and you’re right in the firing line. This might sound like therapy speak, and if it does, I can only apologise, but I think you need a lot of self-compassion right now. This isn’t your fault. You need support so you don’t feel alone with what it is you have to get through in the next few weeks.’
My eyes flicked around the room, looking for personal touches, a sense of his wider life, what might be holding him. I couldn’t find anything, just dreary MDF shelves overflowing with textbooks and ring binders.
‘It’s useless, this, isn’t it?’ he spat.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t know if it’s my fault. You’re just coming up with phrases . . .’
I paused a second, angling my next shot. He was angry, no question: it wasn’t just his face that was reddened by it, the flush spread down below the neck of his black jumper. But below the anger I sensed something else. Pain that was too raw, too dangerous, to give words to.
‘Like we said at the beginning, unless you . . .’ The words stuck in my throat, but I pushed them out. ‘Unless you murdered those two people, it is emphatically not your fault. So no, it’s not just a phrase.’ His shoulders slumped, his eyes lifting to meet mine.
‘OK. Point taken.’ His mouth stretched into an almost-smile. ‘Round one to you.’
I smiled back, paused as I formed the next thought.
‘It’s just so hard for us to believe in it, I think. The finality of death, even though it’s the one thing that’s in the job description of being human.’
He didn’t speak, just stared out of the window into the empty playground. My gaze followed his, the two of us watching a single magpie swooping downwards and landing on the roundabout. It cocked its head, gimlet-eyed, its talons tightly wrapped around one of the metal bars that quartered the surface.
‘I did try,’ he muttered eventually, eyes still trained on the black-and-white bird. It gave a loud squawk, its beak pointing skyward.
‘What did you try?’ I asked.
‘I tried, you know, I tried to keep the show on the road.’ He gave an ironic wriggle of his hands. I stayed quiet a minute, waiting to see where he’d go. ‘I’m a headmaster, not . . . some fascist dictator.’
‘What show was it you were keeping on the road, do you think?” I asked him.
‘Do you have kids?’
‘No. No I don’t,’ I said, affecting a nonchalance of my own.
‘Schools are very emotional places. Feelings run high.’
‘The police did mention that there was some kind of incident.’
Ian gave a humourless laugh.
‘If only. An incident I could’ve solved. Keep calm and carry on.’
He stared at me, challenge in his eyes. The room felt airless, the session infinite. This was day one, and it was already this complicated.
‘So how was it if it wasn’t like that?’ I asked.
‘Peter was someone who seemed to stir up a lot of feelings. He didn’t seem like he’d be that way when I hired him.’
‘And people seem to say the same thing about Sarah. How did he make you feel?’ He didn’t reply, his face immobile. ‘Did you think he was a good teacher?’
‘One of the best I’ve ever come across,’ he said, the compliment delivered without a trace of warmth. It was every bit as ambiguous as Kimberley’s answer to that same question. Then he straightened himself in his chair, the connection lost again. He’d disappeared behind his title; I could sense it. ‘We haven’t got long. Why don’t you talk to me more about how children deal with death? Help me get into the mindset of it?’
I talked him through the accepted wisdom, illustrated it with a few examples from my own patients, but he’d left the session already. And before long it was officially over, his stiff hand shooting back over the desk to shake mine.
‘Let me know if there’s anything more I can do,’ I said, aware how drained I felt by the hour we’d spent together.
‘Is this not something we’re just doing now?’ he asked, terse.
‘Not unless you want it to be. It can be an every day thing, or never again.’
He gave an efficient smile. ‘Let me give it some thought.’
He knew how to dismiss a person from his office with just a tone of voice. It came with the territory.
*
She made me jump. She was standing there, a suspiciously polite distance from Ian’s door, tapping at her iPhone with a long, manicured finger. She waited a second to look up, even though I knew she’d heard the door swing open.
‘Are you all wrapped up in there?’
‘For this session, yes,’ I said, hoping now that Ian wouldn’t tell her that it had been a complete waste of time.
‘I’m so glad I ran into you today,’ she said. ‘What you said back there, you made me realise we can’t just sit around waiting for the dust to settle. We need to move forward.’
I was sure I’d said nothing of the kind. It was a fortnight that had been punctuated by two deaths – if I, a rank outsider had said that, it would be the height of insensitivity.
‘What were you thinking?’ I asked.
‘A dinner. You know – breaking bread together. I’ve already called Lysette, and she’s agreed.’ I tried not to look surprised by that news. ‘Helena and Alex are in. Just to warn you, I’ll be mortally offended if you’re not too. Particularly as it was your idea.’
She grinned at me as she said it, angling her lovely face to the side as if I were a reluctant suitor.
‘Well yes, if it’s not an intrusion, I’d love to come.’
Would I? And also should I – all that training I’d done about confidentiality and boundaries seemed to be a complete waste of energy in Little Copping.
‘Great. I’m sorry it’s in such sad circumstances, but it’s actually very refreshing to have a new face in the village. It can all get a bit Desperate Housewives round here, if you know what I mean.’
I didn’t, but I laughed along with her, tried to convince myself that this was evidence I should like to hear.
‘Wisteria Lane here I come,’ I called after her retreating back, but she was already halfway to Ian’s office, our business satisfactorily completed.
Part of me dreaded it, but part of me was intrigued. How would it be to see the Farthings in their natural habitat?