‘I didn’t. I closed it. I thought I did, anyway. Look, I was all over the place that night. I’d had too much to drink. And I was frightened about what I was about to do – I was heading into the unknown. I knew how dangerous the journey could be. I went back and forth, stumbling about. I thought I closed the door but maybe in my haste, in my panic, I didn’t pull it firmly enough behind me.’
‘So you have stated that you walked out of Huntingdon, out towards Papworth Everard, and on the A428 you waited in an appointed lay-by until a truck pulled up beside you. Appointed by whom?’ said Harriet, looking at her notes.
‘Abdul-Ghani Khalil.’
‘The back of the lorry was opened by a man you didn’t recognise and you got in. Inside were several other stowaways of various nationalities. You were driven to what we can only guess was a port – you have stated that you could feel the sensation of the lorry boarding a ferry and driving into the hold. You were let out of the lorry in a lay-by just north of Calais in France.’
‘Well, no, it was an aire,’ she said, the r rolling in a pointedly French way.
‘I’m sorry?’ said Harriet.
‘I was let out in an aire – a French service station. I was desperately stiff and needed the loo. This was where the transfer took place – to a car, driven again by a man I didn’t know. He took me as far as Nantes. I paid him the cash as agreed – four thousand pounds.’
‘Agreed by?’
‘Abdul-Ghani Khalil,’ she said.
‘How did you meet Abdul-Ghani Khalil?’
‘No comment.’
‘Were you introduced to Abdul-Ghani Khalil by Tony Wright?’
‘No comment.’
‘Did you meet Abdul-Ghani Khalil when you were visiting Tony Wright in Whitemoor prison?’
‘No comment.’
‘Did you pay Tony Wright to effect an introduction to Abdul-Ghani Khalil?’
‘No comment.’
‘Did Tony Wright give you instructions for a pick-up which led to you being smuggled across the UK border illegally?’
‘No comment.’
‘Why did Tony Wright’s number appear twice on your phone in the week before you disappeared, once on the day before?’
‘We’re friends.’
‘What sort of friends?’
‘Just friends. Have been ever since I visited him in Whitemoor. I was upset about what I’d seen at Deeping involving my father. I wanted to talk to him about it.’
Manon wasn’t in Huntingdon for long. Once she returned to North London, there was a work hiatus while she applied for jobs, in which she ate into her savings and the income from letting out her Huntingdon flat (no point selling, given how this was a temporary situation). She took a six-month let on a flat, five doors down from Ellie’s, and installed herself and Fly in it. She double-checked with the agent: ‘So it’s one month’s notice on either side, right?’
During this time, she sat her inspector exams and Fly fell apart.
Perhaps it was the move to a separate flat (Manon felt they couldn’t keep imposing on Ellie, who wanted to move Solly out of her bedroom). Or the transition to a vast and terrifying secondary school close by. Or just an accumulation of experiences too complex for him to manage. But all of a sudden they were alone together in the face of Fly’s rage and sorrow.
‘He’s started wetting the bed, having night terrors,’ she found herself confiding to Miriam, during the hours waiting at the Old Bailey for Ian Hind’s various pre-trial hearings, either sitting on the benches outside Court One or nudging a tray along silver tracklines in the canteen. ‘I’m so knackered – up five or six times a night, changing sheets. Trying to calm him down.’
‘Like having a newborn,’ Miriam said.
It was ironic to be leaning on Miriam, who had aged but was also serene with Edith back at home. It hadn’t taken that much to persuade Edith to return with her to London, Miriam said. She had a conscience, under all that self-serving narcissism.
‘And I say that with great affection,’ Miriam said with a smile. ‘Told her it was better to go back voluntarily than be dragged back by Interpol. Told her you had made the connection with Abdul-Ghani Khalil and had mobilised French police. It was only a matter of time. She started snivelling, of course – that child is a master of self-pity – but I reassured her we’d hire good lawyers and a PR man to handle the newspapers.’
Everyone at Cambridgeshire wanted to charge the girl with wasting police time, perverting the course of justice, and anything else they could throw at her for sparking a five-week investigation at a cost of around ￡300k of taxpayers’ money. But the Hinds’ legal team, numerous and dark-suited, formulated a robust defence stating it could not be proven that she ‘intended’ the police to infer she had come to harm. The blood, the fallen coats, the door left ajar, were all the accidental detritus of a night of panic and duress. She had merely fled the source of her distress – the crime committed by her father, whom she neither wished to shelter nor betray. The fact that Cambridgeshire Police had upscaled it to a high-risk misper could hardly be laid at young Miss Hind’s door. Psychiatric reports stated she had suffered ‘mental anguish’ in rural France.