As you left the foyer with the young doctor, journalists hung back a little, demonstrating unexpected compassion. But Tara brazenly followed.

‘What do you think about Silas Hyman?’ she asked you.

For one moment you turned to her, registering her question, and then you walked quickly on.

The young doctor accompanied you swiftly past outpatient clinics, which were deserted now, the lights off. But in one empty waiting room a television had been left on. You stopped for a moment.

On the screen, a BBC ‘News 24’ interviewer was standing in front of the gates to the school. I used to tell Addie that it was a seaside house which had grown too big for the seafront and had to move inland. Now its pastel blue stuccoed façade was blackened and charred; its cream window frames burnt away to reveal pictures of the destruction inside. That gentle old building, so intricately associated with Adam’s warm hand holding mine at the beginning of the day and his running, relieved little face at the end of the day, had been brutally maimed.

You looked so shocked, and I knew what you were thinking because I’d felt the same when the rug was melting in my hands and masonry was falling around me – if fire can do this to bricks and plaster, what damage must it do to a living girl?

‘How did we get out of there?’ Jenny asked.

‘I don’t know.’

On the TV, a reporter was giving the facts but, shocked by the image on screen, I caught only fragments of what he was saying. I don’t think you were listening at all, just staring at the school’s cadaver.

‘… private school in London… cause at the moment unknown. Fortunately most children were at sports day. Otherwise the injuries and death toll… Emergency services were prevented from reaching the scene as desperate parents… One thing as yet to be explained is the arrival of press before the fire services…’

Then Mrs Healey came onto the screen, and the camera focused on her, mercifully blocking out most of the school in the background.