Читать книгу: «Remain Silent», страница 4

MATIS

His path to the bedroom has been blocked by Edikas.

‘The police want to talk to you,’ Edikas says. ‘I am not going to take heat from police for you.’

‘I can’t—’ Matis says.

‘You can. You can talk to them without telling them anything. This is easy. You forgot this, you don’t know that.’

Dimitri, who is increasingly man-marking Matis like a concerned nursery maid, has joined them, towering over squat, fat Edikas.

‘Hey, he doesn’t want to,’ says Dimitri.

Edikas says, ‘What’s it got to do with you?’

‘He’s my friend.’

‘Urgh, I’ve had enough of all this friendship bullshit. This was the problem with Lukas. Useless! You’re here to work.’

‘Leave him alone,’ says Dimitri, almost shouting.

‘It’s all right,’ soothes Matis. He notices Edikas fiddling in his pocket, and before he can react, Edikas’s fist comes up and out, a heavy metal fitting over his knuckles as he punches Dimitri in the face.

‘You come with me,’ Edikas says, pushing a stunned Dimitri towards the bedroom. He orders the men who are lying about on mattresses to leave. Just before closing the door, Edikas puts his head out and whistles, and the dog comes bounding up the stairs and slinks into the bedroom.

Matis hears Dimitri shout ‘Please! No!’

Hears growling, snarling, a cry of pain, then Edikas whistles and says, Enough, calling the dog off.

The door opens. Edikas walks down the stairs, the dog trotting alongside him.

Matis enters the room to find Dimitri on the floor, clutching his leg. The trousers are torn and there is a gash on his calf, bleeding profusely.

DAVY

Armed with a warrant to search the migrant house, his officers can control what goes on in there and have removed Edikas from the scene. Consequently, the conversations with migrants take a more relaxed turn. Up to a point.

There was an argument, one of the residents tells Davy and Manon, between Mr Tucker and Lukas, on the afternoon before he died. Mr Tucker came looking for him.

‘This argument, was it in English or Lithuanian?’ asks Davy.

‘Both. Mr Tucker shouting in English, Lukas shouting in Lithuanian.’

‘What was Lukas saying?’

‘“It’s not my fault. This is your business, not my business.”’

Davy is momentarily confused and wonders if the migrant is actually saying this to him, but his interpreter confirms these are Lukas’s quotes.

‘Any idea what Mr Tucker was saying?’ asks Manon.

‘Ne.’

‘Was it about Mrs Tucker do you think?’ Davy asks, aware that he’s going beyond facts and into conjecture.

The man nods.

‘What sort of a person was Lukas Balsys?’ Davy asks.

‘Depressive. Very. Always looked sad. A little bit on the outside, you know? Pessimistic.’

Davy nods, feeling affinity with the dead man. What a waste of a good depressive. ‘You think he killed himself?’ Davy asks.

‘Oh no. This was his nature. Nothing to kill himself over. I mean, he was quite cheerful about being sad. Matis said so.’

‘Where is Matis?’

Shrugs. Every time he asks about Lukas’s friend Matis, he gets a downturned mouth and a shrug. People say, ‘Out maybe, he likes a drink.’

When he asks each in turn what happened on the night Lukas died, there are furtive glances to one another, partial sentences, pinched lips. They know, but they’re not saying, Davy thinks. Either they’re protecting someone, or they’re too frightened to talk.

‘Was it unusual for Edikas to not be working yesterday?’ Davy asks a chap who has given his name as Audrius.

‘Yes, I never saw Edikas take a day off before.’

‘And how was Lukas’s relationship with Edikas? Did they argue?’

Audrius grimaces, as if short-tempered with Davy’s stupidity. ‘Edikas is not some kind of friendly uncle. He works us. He fights with all of us.’

‘They know, but they’re not saying,’ says Manon, heaving down into the passenger seat.

Davy is in the driver’s seat, checking his emails on his BlackBerry. ‘This is interesting,’ he says. ‘Previous incident involving Mr Tucker.’

‘Oooh, really? What? Pushing someone up a tree?’

‘Altercation with a motorist. Mr Tucker reckoned this motorist cut him up, so at the next traffic lights, he got out of his car and leered over the chap’s windscreen and bashed on the bonnet with his hand.’

‘Quite threatening,’ says Manon. ‘He’s certainly got a temper. Never underestimate the anger of the overlooked white middle-aged man, Davy Walker, and I say that as someone who lives with one.’

‘Has Mark been overlooked?’

‘Not really, but lots of men who are very invested in their careers feel short changed when they get to middle age and things are no longer … going as well as they thought they would.’

‘Whereas women?’

‘Ah, you’ll make me seem like a throwback. Women have other things to worry about, like being thin. Being thin and looking young, essentially.’

‘Should we talk to the victim of the assault do you think?’ Not that he hasn’t got enough to do.

‘Could do,’ she says. ‘Not sure it was an assault. I mean, having your bonnet thumped and having your head kicked in are not one and the same. Also, what do we learn? That Mr Tucker has a temper? I think we know that. Also, what does it tell us about Lukas’s murder? I mean, his death is not a flare of rage kind of crime, is it? Someone took a rope to a tree with a plan.’

‘Could’ve been an angry plan,’ says Davy.

‘Really? It’s quite a ball-ache of an angry plan. My kind of angry plan would be to push him off a building or under a train. Grab the nearest kitchen knife …’

‘But Tucker’s motive is whopping. Out of everyone, his motive is really … being humiliated like that. And Lukas living next door, and the squalid migrant place wiping the value off his house. I mean, he had grounds and the temperament, from the looks of it.’

‘Yeah, but that lot,’ she says, nodding at the migrant house, ‘they’re proper scared. They’re not scared of Tucker, are they? I think we need to work out some kind of protection set-up with Op Pheasant so they start talking.’

‘Also,’ says Davy, still reading his emails, ‘the trace on Tucker’s car has just come in, and it’s negative.’

‘Wait, which car?’ asks Manon.

‘The Beema.’

‘Ah, that’s Mrs Tucker’s car. Mr Tucker drives a Nissan Micra.’

‘OK, I’ll put a trace on that as well.’

‘Separate bank accounts too. And look how happy it’s making them.’

‘How do we track down Matis?’ Davy asks.

‘Maybe it’s time to seize Edikas’s mobile phone. Also, let’s see if that row between Lukas and Tucker escalated. Police could’ve been involved without a formal charge.’

‘Why is Dimitri supposedly demented? Seems perfectly normal to me, in fact easier to communicate with than the others.’

‘I think it’s just that he’s built like a double decker.’

DAY 3
DAVY

‘Have you seen this?’ DC Kim Delaney asks, in front of her computer screen. She leans back to give Davy a look. ‘Facebook page. One Wisbech – the anti-immigration lot. This post, here,’ she points at the screen. ‘On the day Lukas’s body was found, someone posted saying It’s time – time to get rid of the lawless vermin in our town!’

‘Charming,’ says Davy. ‘Who posted that?’

Kim squints at her screen. ‘You need some reading specs,’ adds Davy.

‘Doesn’t say. I’ll get the tech team to trace the IP address, shouldn’t be a problem. These crazies are usually super active online but kind of inert in real life. Or should I say IRL.’ Kim snorts at her own joke.

‘Except they weren’t inert on the night of Lukas’s death. Don’t show Colin this site, he’ll want to join.’

Colin Brierley, the team’s civilian investigator and tech nerd, is the Ukipper in their midst. They tolerate his slightly uncertain brand of prejudice with mild annoyance tinged with affection. ‘Bigots have feelings too,’ Manon was fond of warning them. Davy harbours a suspicion that Colin doesn’t really hate foreigners, not deep down. He’s just a man who hasn’t found his tribe or his stride, and the wilderness in which he founders intersects with other marginalised white men of a certain age with whom Davy is starting to feel a certain affinity.

These men are equally wrong-footed by clever young women, clever young Muslims, clever young gay men – anyone who appears to have access to the crucial information they lack. Information about modernity, how to live, how to prosper, how it all works.

Colin is like the office pet; sometimes he blows off, ideologically speaking, and it smells revolting, but mostly he is just there, and if he weren’t there you’d miss his rather stolid presence.

‘Right,’ says Davy. ‘Briefing everyone.’

‘Shouldn’t we do this when Manon is in?’ asks Kim. ‘She is SIO.’

‘Can’t wait for that,’ says Davy, aware that he is taking advantage of her working pattern. But he wants to press on, to take back some control for himself.

Take back control. Christ.

Forensics and SOCO have come back with DNA and fingerprints from the rope and around the scene, but for these to mean anything, the matches have to be on the database. Half the migrants in Wisbech aren’t even documented, let alone listed on databases alongside fingerprints and DNA. Of course Lukas Balsys’s DNA is everywhere, but that’s to be expected.

To Davy’s mind, there are several possible motives worth examining. One, Lukas was killed as a warning to other migrants not to snitch, to work harder, obey out of abject fear. Edikas is right in the frame on this count. Two, he was killed by other migrants in some kind of argument over money or drugs (he wants to pull local dealer Talcy Malc in for a grilling) or a girl. There was a culture of fighting in the houses of multiple occupation (HMOs) inhabited by migrants – a way of establishing the pecking order among hard nuts. Also, Bridget says, (Oh, Bridget says does she? he hears Manon say in his head) there is a higher than average level of mental health issues among the migrants, hence why they’ve got into this mess. Three, had Mr Tucker had enough of being cuckolded? Four, did Lukas get on the wrong side of the anti-immigration lot? Did he kill himself? Was he so ground down by the work, the hours, the lack of pay, the awful conditions, that he just wanted out? Davy is reluctant to go down this last road, not just because he wants a collar, but because he wants Lukas’s mother to get the compensation he feels she deserves, compensation his own mother deserves by way of rent, for not deserting him age ten. Juliet, of course, doesn’t know about that direct debit.

‘Where are we with the rope?’ he asks his team.

‘Right,’ says Kim, ‘so we know it is polypropylene rope, blue in colour, which costs £12.77 for a big roll of the stuff. And we have Edikas buying a roll of it from Homebase on Westlode Street in Spalding.’

‘Why would he buy rope in Spalding?’ Davy asks. ‘When there’s a B&Q five minutes from his house?’

‘P’raps he was in Spalding on other business?’ offers Kim. ‘Or he prefers the Homebase shopping experience.’

‘Well, which of us doesn’t? I’m just wondering if he bought it in Spalding so that he wouldn’t be caught, or remembered by the staff.’

‘Actually, chap in Homebase remembers Edikas buying the rope because the dog was foaming at the mouth, and he remembers worrying that the dog was on a not very secure rope, and he said to Edikas, “Hope the rope’s for the dog”, and Edikas kind of harrumphed like he didn’t understand a word.’

‘Good. OK, good, so Edikas bought the rope.’

‘Yes, and thanks to that staff member’s recall, we were able to look at the right date on their CCTV and we have got shop footage of Edikas making said purchase.’

‘Good. And did we ask Edikas about buying the rope that hung three people?’

‘Yes. He said some of the women wanted washing lines in their back yards, so he supplied washing line rope to three of the houses. I quote: “How will I know they heng themselves viz vashing line? Zis is not my fault. Lithuanians are sad peoples.”’

‘Very good work, Kim, and excellent accent by the way,’ says Davy. ‘Who is going over the files for the other two hanging victims?’ he asks, praying it isn’t Tired Nigel, whose work is at best slapdash, at worst incompetent.

Nigel raises his hand. Of course, thinks Davy.

‘It’s … well, I haven’t finished reading the files yet,’ Nigel says.

‘Seriously?’

‘They’re quite big files,’ says Tired/Incompetent Nigel.

Davy pauses. I can’t give it to Kim, otherwise Kim is doing everything because everything you give her, gets done. And done well. But if I leave it with Nigel, it’ll never get done.

‘Perhaps Kim could help you out with it, Nigel,’ Davy says.

‘Yeah, great,’ Nigel says, smiling broadly. Davy’s biggest problem with Nigel is he has no problem being thought of as lazy and crap. No professional pride.

‘Colin, I need you to trace Mr Tucker’s car please on the night of Lukas’s death. We’re looking for travel from Wisbech to Hinchingbrooke and back, obviously.’

‘Righto,’ says Colin.

‘And I want you to check for CCTV around the other two hangings, maybe once Kim has looked at the case files and can give you location parameters.’ He has written off Tired Nigel, they all have. He might as well be off the team. ‘I’d also like you to Google Dean Singlehurst, Colin, see what he’s been up to online. And get me an address for him, while you’re about it.’ He is surprised to see Manon walk into the room. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks, prickling with embarrassment at being caught briefing the team.

‘Couldn’t stay away, so I bunged Ted at the childminder’s. I think we need a meeting with Bridget from Op Pheasant asap. Can you call her in? And what are you doing holding a briefing?’

Davy flushes. ‘I … I just wanted to keep things moving, that’s all. I wasn’t taking advantage of your day off—’

‘It’s not a “day off”, Davy, it’s a day at the brutal coalface of childcare.’

The team has gone remarkably silent as they earwig this exchange.

‘Right, well, I wasn’t taking advantage of your working pattern.’

He hears Nigel say, ‘Awkward!’ in a high-pitched whisper.

‘Yeah, sure you weren’t. You can fill me in while we wait for Bridget.’

MANON

They are in something called a ‘break-out zone’ – a shabby common room with a worn sofa and tub chairs. In the old days it would’ve been a smoking room and it still has that nicotine-yellow tinge.

Davy is fixated on Bridget when she is looking elsewhere, but the minute she looks back at him, he’s eyes to the floor. She is wearing an impressively tight long-sleeved tee.

‘Thanks for coming in, Bridget,’ Manon says. ‘The problem we’re having is breaking open the Lithuanian hub.’

‘Welcome to my world,’ says Bridget.

‘We need them to talk about the night Lukas died, but they’re scared rigid.’

‘Yes. This is our primary problem. They won’t snitch on the gangmasters, and when we break open an HMO because we’ve got other evidence, they can’t get out of the country fast enough. Makes prosecutions very difficult.’

‘I’m not clear whether they’re terrified of Edikas or of whoever killed Lukas,’ Manon says.

‘Might be one and the same,’ Davy points out.

‘Also,’ says Bridget, ‘Edikas may have used the murder retrospectively to threaten them. You snitch, you’re next, type thing. Even if he had nothing to do with it.’

‘So what can we do?’ Manon asks. ‘Move them out of the HMO into safe accommodation?’

‘Most won’t go,’ says Bridget. ‘Even though they’re effectively slaves, in terms of payment and conditions, they are there by choice. No one is locking them up. Often they have mental health issues, shady pasts, alcoholism. They think it’s work, so they get on and do it, but don’t get paid for it. They are locked up by the language barrier, by their mistrust of authority, their dependence on the gangmasters for their basic needs. They get petty cash to buy deodorant or a packet of crisps, but no wage.’

‘What’s your view of Edikas?’ Manon asks. ‘Could he murder?’

‘Oh yes, in a heartbeat. Edikas is the hard nut to end all hard nuts. So cold he’s almost reptilian.’

Davy sticks his tongue out while crossing his eyes, presumably some extremely lame impression of a lizard.

Bridget titters.

Christ, thinks Manon. If there’s one thing she can’t stand, it’s sexual tension where she’s not remotely involved. Like the pensioner she feels, she heaves herself up out of her chair, saying ‘Get a room, you two. Oh, and Bridget? Is it always agricultural work, chicken catching, that kind of thing?’

‘Mostly. That’s where there’s a labour shortage. Also picking fruit and veg. Vasil has a sideline in block patios. It’s run by a guy called Jonas. Essentially, anything that’s really hard graft, the Lithuanians are all over it.’

Manon’s phone is going, unknown number. Her first thought is that something has happened to Teddy or Fly.

‘Hello?’

‘Manon Bradshaw?’

‘Yes.’ Nerves rising.

‘This is Hinchingbrooke Hospital.’ Oh Christ, no, please no, don’t let this be the moment. ‘We have admitted Mark Talbot with abdominal pain and he has requested that you come in. Is that OK?’

She feels a guilty relief that it’s not one of the children.

‘Yes, yes, I’ll be right there.’

Having taken the ten-minute walk from HQ to the hospital at a run, her mind full of worst-case-scenario planning, she pants over the reception desk, only just huffing out the words, ‘I’m here for Mark Talbot.’

‘Just a moment please,’ says the woman behind the desk, while typing and looking at her screen. ‘Yes, fourth floor, oncology.’

Oncology, shit, shit shit.

In fourth floor oncology, the nurse, who had presumably rung her, knows who she is.

‘He’s resting comfortably. Follow me,’ she says.

Trotting after the nurse down shining linoleum-floored corridors, Manon’s mind keeps step with Emily Dickinson:

Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

And Immortality …

There he is, familiar in this strange setting, propped up and wrapped in sheets, eyes closed. He opens them to see her, smiles, takes her hand as she sits beside him.

‘Thanks for giving me the fright of my life,’ she says, her anger like popping candy on her tongue; little explosions of it. Why is he throwing her this curveball in the midst of her first murder job in years?

‘Sorry,’ he says.

‘So what’s going on?’

‘I had the most terrible pain in my stomach,’ he says. ‘So I came in.’

‘And?’ she says.

‘They’re keeping me in to run some tests.’

‘What does that mean?’

He gives a feeble shrug. God, this is like asking Fly how his day at school went. ‘Fine’ or ‘Good’ giving her no information whatsoever.

‘Are you worried?’ she asks him.

‘A bit, yes,’ he says. ‘Are you?’

‘Well I am now. Who do I talk to?’

‘Don’t bother them. They’ve got it in hand.’

This is no time to be apologetic, she thinks. He’s always apologetic. Says things like, ‘That’s so kind’, when someone is taking his credit card details. You have to push, in the NHS more than anywhere. She wants to manage him, the situation. Get control of it because her feelings are spinning like a whirligig. Not this. Not now.

‘Stay calm,’ he says, holding her hand.

‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘Not when it’s you.’

She casts about the ward for someone, but it is empty, except for an orderly mopping. Eastern European probably. Kristine, Teddy’s childminder, is Romanian.

‘So when are you coming out?’ she demands.

‘Tomorrow, I guess.’

‘You probably just ate a dodgy bhuna,’ she says. ‘Knowing you.’

Recently, she’d held Mark close and recalled their first dirty weekend away, while they were still hot for each other. ‘What do you remember about that weekend?’ she’d asked romantically, to which he replied, literally in a heartbeat, ‘The pork pies.’

They don’t call him Mr Romance.

At all.

What if he is taken away? The worst can happen.

People don’t always get through things.

Who will she discuss everything with? Who will she talk to about what she had for lunch? ‘It was under-seasoned to be honest.’

About how well the topside of beef turned out?

‘It was my herby crust that made it,’ she’d said.

‘It was your herby crust was it?’ he’d said, smiling at her ironically.

Who will have enough irony for her now?

She remains upright only by dint of the urge to bring her children home and hold them very close indeed.

Like an unexpected belch from the deep, she wonders, Did they trace the rope?

And, rather like someone drowning who grabs that rope, she reaches the dry land of the investigation and rests there.

In every case there is evidence that doesn’t make sense, the element that threatens to unravel the whole. Even where there is doubt, they are trained to ‘think murder’, because if you assume the worst, you secure the evidence. With the Balsys murder it’s how they got him into that tree. She wonders if there might have been some kind of ladder situation on the rear side, indentations missed by SOCO then erased by rain. She wonders if they brought apparatus, the murderers. Usually, perps are faced with the problem of the dead body: far weightier and more unwieldy than anyone expects. Not so in this: they left him where he died. No attempt at concealment in that sense.

But here was the problem of getting the live body to its execution. Problem: resistance of the victim. Advantage: agency of the victim. They could use their own muscle strength, under duress obviously. Unless … unless Lukas was unconscious, drugged or beaten. Impossible, surely? He would be a literal dead weight.

What she realises is there isn’t one perp. There are many. They. It is they, not him. A group, accomplices. A joint enterprise.

What if her own partnership is at an end? She has spent so long criticising Mark, this person she tells everything to, the person who is her lifeblood, the rug beneath her feet (and just as poorly treated), her walls, her roof, her warmth, and her seasons. She has wasted their short time together not appreciating him, and what if now he is to be taken away?

He is her fit, her equal, her better half. He is the stalwart presence that allows her to yearn for freedom; the one who loves her enough to put up with her, and who else would do that, even if she wanted them, which she never would because she only wants Mark Talbot? For ever and ever, amen.

Only tests, nothing is certain yet. Just get through the tests, wait and see, she tells herself.

Whoever would be comfortable enough to read with for hours at a time without talking (they would have, were it not for Teddy). Oh Teddy! Who will love Teddy like Mark loves Teddy? Who will look down on him with the benign yet brimming adoration that Mark displays and that only she sees? Teddy isn’t even biologically his, but this has never made a difference to Mark. She should have had his babies, that a bit of his nature might live on. But a sixteen-year-old, a four-year-old and a two-year-old (had they gone again) and a partner dying of cancer (as it has become so quickly in her mind) – that would’ve been some package to deal with. Not to mention work, be it cold cases or a murder inquiry.

All their conversations about food, which were not really conversations at all but more like idle thoughts pushed outwards. Must they all be inwards now, like they used to be? What was it Joan Armatrading sang?

He is more than a lover, more than a friend. He is the recipient of her thoughts, the person she can say anything to, without fear of judgement. And she has spent so long finding fault with him, with them as a couple.

Only the other day, she’d nearly walked up to a complete stranger thinking it was Mark – in the way small children sometimes nonchalantly clasp the wrong adult’s hand – she had walked up to this stranger-man and was on the brink of telling him, ‘Time to clear the area, I’ve let an evil one go’. This is the kind of conversational gold she bestows on lucky, lucky Mark Talbot. Soon to be departed Mark Talbot. Who will she tell about her herby crust, her deadly emissions, about what they might watch on telly (‘I think we ought to watch that documentary about migration called Exodus. Apparently it’s excellent. Ooh, hang on, there’s a First Dates on planner.’)? Who will hear her smallest thoughts as if they are interesting? And he, he tells her the same things at least three or four times. She barely listens to the first rendition.

They text each other pictures of their double chins. These are love notes of sorts.

People get through things, only sometimes they don’t.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asks Fly, more aggressively than she intends.

‘Nothing.’

‘Why’re you so quiet? Things OK at school?’

‘I guess.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Leave me alone.’

Fly is her adopted son, though the word adopted seems no longer relevant. The brother of a murder victim, he’d been eleven years old with nowhere to go when she’d taken him on as a stopgap that extended. He is the light of her life: thoughtful, empathic, intelligent, kind. Black, though the word seems no longer relevant. At sixteen, he now towers over her, is a hard worker at a school, which, like all ginormous state secondaries, has its rough element.

She monitors it and Fly constantly for signs of trouble. He is about to sit his GCSEs, and she has high hopes that finally the true depth of his worth will be visible to the world. As if GCSEs could achieve such a thing! But she has always felt the world at large – teachers, mainly – have been slow to catch on to her elder son’s riches.

She follows him up the stairs, wondering if she should leave it be. He has to fight his own battles, after all.

‘Anything you want to tell me about?’ she asks, sitting on his bed.

‘Nope.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yep.’

You have to come at it sideways with children. When they are little, like Ted, it is over toys or in the bath. With Fly, she often has to submit to some incredibly tedious tale about dodgeball or Greek mythology before the truth will out. The play’s the thing …

‘What are you reading?’ she tries.

‘Madame Bovary.’

‘Oh yeah? I liked that one.’

‘Yeah, same.’

‘Is it for school?’

‘No, the librarian recommended it to me, so I thought why not?’

He sits close beside her, leans in slightly. She puts her arm around him. He sniffs. He is crying.

‘Oh lovey, tell me.’

‘It’s Sulaiman.’

‘Right, what’s he done?’

‘He’s … every time he sees me, he puts his foot out and trips me up.’

‘You what?’ she says, furious.

‘It’s super annoying.’

‘Of course it is! Have you said anything to him?’

At nursery, Teddy is taught to say ‘Stop it, I don’t like it’ as opposed to, say, biting back. But he is also taught to say ‘sharing is caring’, a line he can deliver with impressive venom while snatching a toy from another child’s vice-like grip.

‘No,’ whispers Fly.

‘Told a teacher?’

‘No.’

‘Want me to?’

‘No!’ He stands. ‘Promise you won’t.’

‘Only if you promise you will.’

If she wants to appal Fly, she only has to a) meet him at school with her wheelie shopper, or b) bust out some of her finest dance moves in public. Or c) talk to his teachers.

‘Why does he do it, d’you think?’

Fly shrugs. ‘He’s a bit rough. Thinks it’s funny.’

Fly is rather reserved, she thinks. Sometimes kids want his attention and don’t know how to get it.

‘Does he laugh, after he’s tripped you up,’ she says, wanting to hurt Sulaiman very badly indeed.

He shrugs.

‘That’s horrible, Fly. You poor thing.’

He lifts his trouser legs, shows her bruises up to his knees.

‘Jesus. We have to do something about this. Shall I talk to Sulaiman’s mum?’

‘No! Please, everyone overreacts when you get involved because of your job.’

‘Mark then? Would you like Mark to deal with it?’

He shrugs again, which is tantamount to a yes. If Mark were here, he and Manon would workshop it for about an hour and she’d feel better about it.

She quietens the urge to travel out of the house, track Sulaiman down and trip him up, saying ‘How do you like it, you little shit?’

In fact, as far as she remembers, Sulaiman is a nice kid with nice parents. Teenage boys are tricky. Hard to read, everything under the surface.

Teddy stands in the doorway of Fly’s room in his jammies. She scoops him up, squeezes him tight, which is what she’d like to do to Fly but can’t.

The spectre of Fly leaving home for university hangs over them. She harbours a fantasy he might attend her alma mater, Cambridge, and live at home, while knowing this would only be a fraction of the university experience (cheaper though). She can’t bear the thought of the house without children in it. The quietness. Just her and Mark and encroaching infirmity. Small dinners, elderly trips to the cinema (Ooh, there’s a 6 p.m. showing! Bed by 9 p.m.!)