‘Anguish my arse,’ Harriet said.
In the opposite corner were the prosecution arguments: why did she stay away, when she saw, by reading UK press reports online, the scale of the manhunt? How could she justify not telling anyone she was alive and well, even if she didn’t wish to return?
A judge looked at the arguments and deemed there was a case to answer, the outcome yet to be determined in court.
At the Old Bailey, as legal wheels turned ever so slowly in proceedings against Ian Hind, Manon sought Miriam’s wisdom about Fly, which probably broke some protocol to do with ‘sides’ but neither woman cared.
‘All I know is I can’t take much more,’ Manon said.
‘He’s not doing it to spite you,’ said Miriam.
‘No, I know, but I can’t understand what’s going on inside him.’
‘No, I never knew what was going on in my children either,’ said Miriam, and Manon was surprised to be taken as a fellow mother. ‘It sounds to me like he needs to know that you’ll stick with him, however bad it gets, just like a mother does with a newborn baby.’
She had no idea if Miriam was right but she did stick with him, though not out of nobleness. Out of exhaustion and inertia. This was not a situation she could easily unpick.
She swapped notes with Davy, too, who had seen it all before at the drop-in centre.
‘Firm boundaries,’ Davy told her. ‘It’s still love, it just doesn’t waver. These kids can’t take any flip-flopping. Scares the life out of them.’
He is so wise, now DS Davy Walker under Stanton’s kindly wing, and resolutely single, having once more extricated himself from Chloe’s clutches following the comfort shag. His life is MIT, bike rides, and his volunteering at the youth centre. ‘More than enough,’ he told Manon when she’d asked if he was seeing anyone.
Poor Stanton. A standard review of the Hind investigation by Bedfordshire Police found that: Detective Chief Superintendent Gary Stanton overreacted in upscaling the disappearance of Edith Hind to a high-risk misper, later a suspected homicide, as there was insufficient prima facie evidence that Miss Hind had come to harm.
‘He can’t win,’ Davy told Manon, as if he were defending his own father. ‘First Lacey Pilkington, where he’s told he should have upscaled it sooner, and now this. I don’t know how he keeps going.’
‘Thinking about his pension, that’s how,’ Manon said.
She hadn’t thought it through, the situation with Fly, though she spent quite a bit of time wondering if she could get out of it. How she might tiptoe away.
Then Fly got ill.
Winter and a fever took such strong hold of him it was medieval, and no amount of paracetamol or Nurofen seemed to bring his temperature down. His heart raced like a mechanism about to spring out of its holdings. Manon couldn’t get through to the GP practice – just endless ringing or the engaged signal – so in desperation she rang Miriam, who drove round, parking Ian’s incongruous Jaguar next to the skips of Fordwych Road. She checked his vital signs.
‘Can eleven-year-olds get meningitis?’ Manon asked.
‘You’ve been on the Internet,’ Miriam scolded. ‘Never look on the Internet for medical advice. You’ll diagnose yourself with cancer. Look, you were right to call me – it is a very high temperature and we do need to keep an eye on him.’
They sat together briefly in Manon’s lounge on a sofa draped with a cheap cream throw and lit by a tiny lamp on a shelf. Miriam seemed more relaxed than Manon had seen her, though she wouldn’t take her coat off.
‘How’s Ian coping with Belmarsh?’ Manon asked.
‘Do you know, he’s all right,’ she said, sounding amused and surprised at the same time. ‘He’s reading a lot. Teaching an anatomy course to other inmates – ironic, really, as some of them have actually decapitated people. I keep worrying his imperious manner will get him on the wrong side of people – you know, he’ll ask for quince jelly with his cheese and someone will punch his lights out. But it hasn’t happened yet.’
‘The children visit him?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Both of them. We’re all doing our time,’ she said. Then, rising: ‘Look, I’ll pop round in the morning on my way to work. Then I can admit Fly if I’m worried.’
Two whole weeks the illness raged through him, though Miriam was satisfied it was only flu; like a tidal wave slapping the pier wall with all its force, his rigid body tensed against it. He shook when he stood to pee. His bedroom smelled overripe, as Manon threw open the windows and changed the sheets – a sweetness that was fetid. Eventually he could begin to read and watch TV, but he was hollow-eyed and weak. And then a terrible depression took hold and he cried for his mother and for Taylor. And he blamed Manon, resented her, because she was the nearest target for his distress. His unhappiness was so deep and wide that more than once she wondered if it would ever lift.