He nods. ‘Taylor brought me KFC. He got the shopping from Bestco. Taylor feeded me.’
‘Come with me, then,’ Manon says, heaving herself up off the floor in an ungainly fashion.
She walks down the corridor to the lounge. ‘Mrs Dent? Maureen?’
Maureen is lolling on the sofa, watching Cash in the Attic. She seems only semi-conscious, a tin in her hand.
‘I’m just going to take Fly out for something to eat, OK?’
‘You’re all right lovey, yes,’ says Maureen, raising her can, her chin to her chest.
Christ, thinks Manon, I could be anyone.
Fly is big, nearly as tall as her, but still a child. Unmistakably a child, she thinks, as she watches him pull on a thin jacket – the type a tennis player would wear onto court, and about as useless as gauze against the January chill. She knows she shouldn’t be taking him out. Interviews with minors (well, it was hardly an interview, was it?) – there was a whole book of protocol, including never to interview them alone. No, she wasn’t interviewing him; she was buying him eggs. The boy needed eggs and this, like her taking home a police radio, was outside the bounds of protocol.
They are looking out on an optimistic arrangement of red plastic tables and chairs on the pavement, as if this were Ipanema, not Cricklewood Broadway. Beside them is a wire mesh shelving unit full of Portuguese or Brazilian biscuits and cooking ingredients, mostly starch-based, as far as she can make out (everything on the shelves is yellow). There is a vast flat-screen television bracketed close to the ceiling behind them, booming out a Portuguese game show. The café owner smiles broadly at them, saying, ‘Scrambled?’, with her pad poised.
‘Fried,’ says Fly.
‘Scrambled,’ says Manon, frowning at Fly. ‘And extra toast.’
A bus thunders past, slapped with an advert for Wonga. Following it is a plastic bag, bowling along in mid-air, its handles like beseeching arms until it hits a woman in a sari, square in the stomach.
‘Taylor used to go dere,’ says Fly, and Manon follows his gaze to a red awning on the opposite side of the road. Momtaz Shisha Café. ‘They all knew ’im in dere.’
‘Was he into anything stronger?’
‘You mean drugs?’ He shakes his head. ‘He saw Mum and her boyfriends, all dem losers. Said he’d never touch that shit. Said if I did, he’d kill me.’
In the pit of her stomach Manon feels a resolve hardening. She has to find out what happened to Taylor Dent, what took him from this boy he so evidently loved.
‘Tell me about the time leading up to Taylor going missing,’ she says. ‘When did you last see him?’
‘Sunday, it was. We got some shopping from Bestco. He was in a right good mood. We had beans on toast, watched SpongeBob SquarePants. He told me to do my homework, get my shit together for school next day. He was on his phone, texting.’
‘Who?’
Fly shrugs. ‘I din know who he knowed. I mean, he knowed a lot of people – din tell me ’bout them.’
‘And was this on his phone, the one you used to reach him?’
Fly shrugs again. ‘Sometimes he had more than one. Sometimes not. The phones changed, the ones for his … for bidniss.’ He looks down sheepishly as if he could still get Taylor into trouble with the police.
‘Then what?’ asks Manon.
‘Then he said he had to go out. Said he be back later. Before he left, he say to me, “Everything about to get a whole lot better, bro.” And that was it, that was the last time …’ The tears fall sudden and fat. This is the first time he’s talked about it, she thinks. He looks up at her, his huge eyes liquid with loss. ‘He din come back. He never came back. I woke up an’ looked beside me.’
She pictures the sleeping bags, one of them empty when Fly woke up on Monday twelfth December. ‘Then what?’
‘I went to school. I kept callin’ him, textin’ him. I thought maybe he was workin’. Straight from school I went to the police.’
‘What did they tell you?’
‘Told me he’d turn up. Told me he not a child, so nuffin’ they could do.’
‘Can you think of any reason Taylor might have gone to East Anglia?’
‘Where dat?’ says Fly, looking at the eggs as the plate lowers to the table in front of him.
‘It’s an area, about two hours from here. Countryside. Very flat. Lots of small rivers.’ She can’t seem to make it sound much better than that. She thinks about mentioning fog, but stops short. There’s a round of applause from the television and the game show host bellows, ‘Obrigado! Obrigado!’
‘I know it don’t look like much,’ he says, setting in on the toast, ‘but this is a good place. The Persian guys are good guys.’ He nods at Momtaz. ‘They gives me free tea sometimes. And the guys in Bestco. Broken biscuits, old cakes, innit. They know about Mum. They help us, ’specially Taylor.’