“Do you have their contact details?”
“I’m not allowed to give those out—sorry, darling—but I can talk to them and ask them to call you.”
“And please, would you ask all the volunteers to look out for Abdi and phone us if you see him?”
“Of course. Anything we can do. We’re all very fond of him here. He’s one of our most popular volunteers.”
Sofia writes her number down on a piece of paper and gives it to Tim.
“Please feel free to get a tea before you go, if you like. You look as if you could do with it,” he says.
Sofia’s shyness means that her first instinct is to say no, but she checks herself. She hasn’t eaten anything all morning, and she’s feeling weak.
She helps herself to tea and biscuits and says hello to the volunteers she recognizes. Just as the refugees are always in flux here, so, too, are many of the volunteers. She withdraws to a table in the corner of the room and watches as refugees begin to arrive. Some are cheerful, looking forward to lessons, to a chat with friends. Others wear their experiences less lightly. There’s hot tea in this bright, welcoming room and warm support for the vulnerable, but Sofia feels their collective suffering as if it were a separate entity in the room. It becomes unbearable. She tidies up her empty mug and plate after just a few minutes, and leaves.
Maryam is also thinking about the Welcome Center as she sits beside Nur in the taxi and they drive circuits around their neighborhood and beyond.
In the moment before she fainted, she saw a ghost from her past, a version of a face not seen in the flesh for a very long time, but a regular visitor to her nightmares.
Nur takes a turn toward the train station and the Feeder Canal.
“I want to see where they were,” he says.
Maryam makes no reply.
As the taxi moves past the shopping mall where Sofia and her friends love to hang out, Maryam glances at Nur. He’s concentrating on the traffic. He’s a good driver, very careful. How she loves him.
He calls Bristol a new beginning—it makes the children laugh that he’s been calling it that for fifteen years now—but no matter how often he says it, for Maryam it feels different here. She thinks of Bristol as the place where she waits for the end, for the circle to close, because too many of the things that happened in Somalia and in the camp still sit stubbornly in her memory like unanswered questions.
If Abdi is gone or guilty of something terrible, she knows that it will break her husband.
She thinks of the man she saw at the refugee center. Of the moment her legs buckled. She thinks of her missing son and of what he might have done or be planning to do. She knows there’s a connection between all things. How could there not be?
As Nur takes the turn onto Feeder Road, her fingers move to touch a scar on her forearm.
Ed Sadler answers the door, looking as haggard and disoriented as I would expect.
We follow him inside. This time he takes us through the hallway into the kitchen, a spacious room that runs across the back of the house. A wall of glass displays the garden like a panorama.
Fiona Sadler sits at the kitchen table. She wears a pale pink sweater, and looks about as vulnerable as it’s possible to look.
“I’m so very sorry for your loss,” I say.
The look she gives me is hard to return.
“Has that boy talked yet?” she says. She spits the words out like bitter pips.
“Fi.” Ed Sadler moves to stand behind her, hands on her shoulders, massaging them.
“Do you know what, Detective, we’ve been cheated,” she says. “We were always playing for time, ever since Noah’s diagnosis. How does it happen that we only just discovered that he had months to live, if we were lucky, and now we’ve been robbed of that. Cheated.”
It’s the same message she delivered in the hospital, but this time she’s not holding back. The filters have been removed and she’s very angry. She lays clenched fists on the table in front of her. Her knuckles have a pearly shine.
“I’m afraid I need to talk to you about something difficult.” I keep my tone even, because I can’t sugarcoat this too much, however much sympathy I feel. Abdi Mahad’s reputation and possibly his safety are at stake now more than ever, and my duty has to be to him, too.
They look at me as if they cannot believe there’s anything else I can possibly throw at them.
“Did either of you see yesterday’s Bristol Echo?”
Both shake their heads. I console myself that it’s better if this comes from me, at least. It means we can attempt to inform and control their response, rather than risk their finding out by themselves and potentially doing something reckless.
“I’m very sorry to say that they ran an article on the front page that featured a photograph of Noah in intensive care.”
Fi Sadler begins to weep.
“It looks as if it was taken candidly, so we’ll be interviewing hospital staff. Do you have any idea who might have snatched a photograph of Noah?”
“No.” The word is little more than a whisper.
“I’m sorry. I understand this is very painful for you. The article also pointed to a racial attack, which we can’t speculate about until we have some firm evidence. I understand that once you’ve thought about this, you might feel tempted to speak to the press in order to put your own version of the story across, but we strongly recommend that you have no contact with them at all. I can’t stress how important this is while the investigation’s ongoing.”
“Do they know Noah’s dead?” Fiona asks.
“No. Not yet. And I’d like to keep it that way for as long as we can so we can get on with our work without being in the public eye. We can’t withhold that information forever, but I’d also like to give you both the privacy to grieve without press attention for as long as I’m able to.”
“How have they got the right to publish a photograph of our son?” Fiona says. “How do they justify that? It’s disgusting.”
“Well, whether they have the right to or not is certainly something we’ll be looking into, and if there’s an offense there, you can be sure we’ll be looking to charge somebody.”
“Does that boy know that Noah is dead?”
“Abdi has, unfortunately, gone missing.”
She stares at me, as if this is one too many pieces of information for her to absorb, and it probably is. Ed Sadler turns his back and looks out of the window. His shoulders shake.
She says, “Abdi’s responsible for this, I know he is.”
He swings around.
“Fi! You don’t know that! Stop talking like that.”
But any scraps of rationality she may have been hanging on to previously have been obliterated by grief: “Abdi was healthy. He should have protected Noah. How could he have let this happen? Noah would never have been able to walk that far or climb a fence on his own. He must have had help. Abdi has to take responsibility for this. Why has he disappeared if he’s not responsible in some way?”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Don’t I?”
Her eyes are bloodshot and her face is slick with tears.