I knew I was babbling. The man in plain clothes interrupted me quite kindly.
‘Just routine, madam,’ he said. He introduced himself then as Detective Sergeant Paul Jarvis.
‘I’ll be in charge of this case,’ he went on, shocking me all over again somehow by referring to the death of my only son as a case.
Then he gestured to the uniformed woman officer. ‘This here is PC Janet Cox, and you must be Mrs Anderson. Is that right?’
I nodded. He murmured something I didn’t quite catch to PC Cox.
‘Look, Mrs Anderson, you must have had the most terrible shock,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we go into the kitchen? Make a nice cup of tea?’
If my brain had been functioning more sharply I would have shouted out that I didn’t want a nice cup of tea. Indeed, I couldn’t imagine there being anything nice in my life ever again. Or anything that I’d ever want, come to that.
But I had no fight left.
Sally the paramedic told PC Cox she really should do something about my burned feet, they could turn quite nasty if they weren’t given some attention. So the three of us went into the kitchen where I sat at the big old scrubbed pine table in the middle of the room, as instructed. Sally crouched by my side and removed, as carefully as she could, my slippers and beneath them the black pop socks which I almost always wore on school days. In spite of her obvious care shreds of skin came away with the socks. Sally made soothing noises, told me to sit as still as possible, and that she was off to the ambulance parked outside to fetch the right dressings. Then she left the room. Meanwhile PC Cox busied herself filling the kettle, finding mugs, milk and tea bags.
She didn’t ask me where anything was, and it didn’t occur to me to assist by telling her. When she put a mug in front of me I obediently sipped from it.
The contents tasted as if at least six spoonfuls of sugar had been added. That old chestnut about sugar being good for shock. I hated sugar in my tea. Even at that moment, the most terrible of my life, I remembered that I hated sugar in my tea.
PC Cox pointed to my abandoned shopping on the worktop and asked if she should put the food in the fridge before it spoiled, and clear away the ice cream which had started to melt and form a gooey puddle. I didn’t bother to answer, but she did so anyway.
Sally returned carrying a red and black bag from which she removed some packets of assorted dressings, and began covering the burned areas of my feet with practised efficiency.
‘You’ll need to go to your local medical centre in a few days, have that lot checked,’ she instructed.
I nodded vaguely. I actually had no interest whatsoever in the state of my feet.
PC Cox also made tea for Sally the paramedic and for herself, mumbling something about the boys being big and ugly enough to get their own when they came downstairs, and then sat at the table opposite me.
‘You must call me Janet,’ she said. ‘And I’m just here to help as much as I can. If there’s anything I can do, just shout.’
I stared at her. Yes, you can bring my son back to me, I wanted to scream. You can bring my beautiful boy back to life.
She wriggled a bit under my gaze. Bizarrely, I wondered what it must feel like to be in her situation with a complete stranger.
She asked about my husband. I explained that he was away working in the North Sea and that I had so far been unable to contact him directly. But I had emailed him an urgent message.
‘Look, you should have someone with you,’ she said. ‘Someone close. Is there a relative you could get round, or a friend?’
I shook my head again. My mother had died when I was a child, the grandmother who had more or less brought me up had also died many years previously, and I had no brothers or sisters.
The only relative I had left really was my dad, who lived in the village of Hartland, on the North Devon coast, more than an hour away. He worshipped his grandson, and was notoriously bad in a crisis. The next nightmare on my agenda would be to tell him about Robbie. Having him anywhere near would be even worse.
There were people in the village I vaguely knew and passed the time of day with, and the parents of some of the other pupils in Robbie’s school, but none of them could remotely be regarded as friends.
We were a tight-knit happy little band, our tiny family. At least I had always thought so until that dreadful evening. Even Robbie had few friends, as far as I knew, anyway, and certainly none that he brought home with him.
Robert did not encourage visitors, not when he was at home certainly, although he tolerated occasional visits from my father with reasonable grace. And he didn’t lay down any rules for when he was away or anything like that. He just wanted us to be busy and happy, he said.
‘But when I’m home I do like my family all to myself,’ he would tell me and Robbie repeatedly. ‘In our own bit of paradise.’
‘A neighbour, perhaps?’ persisted Janet Cox.
I continued to stare at her and gestured out of the window at the far end of the kitchen, where the lights had not been switched on. You could still see through it quite well. Although darkness had fallen, the sky remained as clear as I had earlier thought it would. Dartmoor stretched before us, silver and black, lit now by the moon and the stars, its distinctively jagged tors bisecting an eerily bright night sky like something out of the Tate Modern.
‘Our nearest neighbours are five miles away,’ I said. ‘We’re not exactly in and out of each other’s houses.’
PC Cox, whom I somehow could not even think of let alone address as Janet, looked perplexed.
‘There must be someone...’ she said. ‘We can’t leave you on your own. The whole team will be going soon. I suppose I may be able to stay for a bit, I’ll have to call the boss...’
There was something annoying about Janet Cox, her incongruously fluffy blonde hair brushing the stiff collar of her uniform, her eager determination to help. She had rather more the manner of a harassed social worker than a police officer.
It was strange, perhaps, that I could even be aware of such stuff at such a time, but I was.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Honestly. I’m sure my husband will soon be in touch.’
‘But he’s in the middle of the North Sea, isn’t he? He still has to get to the mainland.’
‘They’ll chopper him back. They’ll get him here fast. They do in an emergency. Look, he’ll call any minute, I’m sure.’
Actually, I wasn’t sure at all. Robert and I had spoken early that morning, before I left for school, via Skype. I thought he’d mentioned something about being on a late shift, though I wasn’t sure of anything that day. He would probably only be able to check his emails at the end of his shift, or perhaps on his break, though that was less likely. The reality was that I had little idea when he would call.
‘Don’t you have some kind of emergency contact number?’ asked PC Cox.
I glanced at her in surprise. She had her uses after all. I did have an emergency number for Amaco Limited UK. Indeed, it was me who’d insisted Robert gave me one. Just in case I ever really needed him in a hurry. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it, but then, I was barely capable of any kind of thought. And, of course, I’d never used it before. Nor indeed envisaged any kind of emergency as extreme as this one.
I stood up. Robert had written the Aberdeen number on a piece of card and I’d pinned it to the cork noticeboard on the kitchen wall by the house phone. As was my habit. It was more or less buried by other more recently attached bits of card and scraps of paper. I retrieved it. Head office, human resources department. A direct line, Robert had told me, with a link to a 24/7 duty officer, and they can always get through to us on the rigs if they need to.