“Just one time. Abdi was really stressed.”
“Abdi was offered support with his organization. The incident was dealt with appropriately for each of the boys concerned.” Alistair Hawkes sticks his oar in. With thumb and forefinger, he worries at the corner of a piece of paper that’s protruding from a file on his knee. Discomfort or boredom, it’s hard to tell.
“Did you inform his parents?” I’m wondering why they didn’t mention it to us.
“We wrote to them. It was their preferred method of communication because of the language issues.”
I nod, and think how easy it would have been for Abdi to intercept a letter or mistranslate it for his mother.
Sarah Fletcher-Kapoor raises her eyebrows at me and draws her handbag onto her knee, signaling that we’ve taken up enough of her time and her son’s.
“Are we done here? I don’t think Imran has anything else to add.”
Imran looks at me intently, and for the first time he doesn’t fidget. He knows we’re not finished yet.
“How much money did you get for the essay, Imran?”
“What?” his mother says, and the staff sit up straighter—tenser, too. They obviously weren’t aware that Imran was profiting financially from his essay writing.
“Twenty pounds, thirty pounds? Forty?”
Imran shakes his head vigorously, but I need him to admit to this. It’s important to know whether Noah was buying favors for Abdi or Abdi was doing it himself. It will tell me where the power lay in the relationship between them.
Woodley says, “A copy of Grand Theft Auto 5 costs forty quid if you buy it new, I’m guessing, so it had to be in that region. Though if you buy it secondhand from a friend or maybe a sixth former, it could be less.”
“What do you think, Imran?” I say.
I think I can spy a little bit of temper behind his eyes, though he’s containing it very effectively. He knows he’s busted, but he gives it one last go anyway.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Imran doesn’t play violent games,” his mother says. “We would never let him have a game like that.” But as she says the words, I can see the pieces slotting together in her mind. “You sold that essay? You sold an essay so you could buy a copy of a violent computer game without us knowing? Imran! Answer me!”
I feel a bit sorry for Imran. It wasn’t the nicest thing to do, to catch him out like that, but I get the feeling that he’ll bounce back.
He’s hanging his head while his mother berates him and the frowns deepen on the teachers’ foreheads, but I bet his brain is working at a hundred miles per hour to work out how to minimize the damage, and he comes up with a response impressively quickly.
“I’m really sorry, Mum,” he says. “I did do it, but I hated the game when I tried it. I gave it away. It was horrible. I promise you, I threw it away. I felt ashamed.”
“Who paid for the essay?” I ask him. “Noah or Abdi?”
“It was Noah. He bought it for Abdi because Abdi didn’t have the money.”
Woodley and I leave them in the meeting room shortly afterward.
“I don’t think Imran’s going to make it to karate tonight,” Woodley says.
“Very entrepreneurial kid.” I’ll admit I feel a small amount of respect for him. I would never have dared to do anything like that in school.
“Makes me very glad I didn’t become a teacher,” Woodley says. “Can you imagine listening to all those excuses and lies over and over again?”
“Sounds a bit like policing.”
“Okay, yeah, fair point. But at least we can slap a pair of cuffs on them if we catch them, and their mothers don’t get involved. Honestly, what was she like? ‘I’m a solicitor.’” He mimics Sarah Fletcher-Kapoor very well.
It makes me laugh, so I don’t remind him of Ben Finch’s mother, Rachel, or of Fiona Sadler and Maryam Mahad—all mothers who couldn’t avoid being involved in their sons’ misfortune.
Brake lights flare around us as we join rush-hour traffic on the way back to HQ.
I feel as if my picture of Noah Sadler’s personality is sharpening. He was very unwell, desperate for friendship, and smart enough to use all of his resources to keep it. But I wonder if he alienated Abdi with his efforts, or if Abdi enjoyed the attention and the academic help.
It’s Abdi I find to be the more elusive character. I’m interested to know that he struggled with his studies sometimes, in spite of being very capable. I wonder how much the pressure of achieving got to him or if, as Imran said, this essay incident was a one-off.
Either way, it doesn’t shed a great deal of clarity on the case. An overprotective friendship could give Abdi a motive to hurt Noah if things had got so intense that he snapped and lost his temper with Noah. But it would be odd for this to happen by the canal, as the location implies a fair amount of planning by the boys to get there.
My instinct tells me that there was no premeditation here, just an accident. But then what about the witness . . .
My frustration is building as each bit of information we find seems to put weight on a different side of the scales, balancing the probabilities that either one of the boys was more likely to cause trouble for the other.
I also know we have only a small window to gather information discreetly. We can’t keep Noah’s death from the public for much longer, and there’s the possibility that when it comes out all hell will break loose.
“Do you know what?” I say to Woodley. He’s tapping his fingers on the wheel to a tune from the nineties. “It’s just our bloody luck that this case is a media magnet.”
He glances at me. “You mean after the Ben Finch case?”
“It’s the last thing I need. They’re going to be crawling all over us as soon as they find out that Noah Sadler’s died. You know that if they can, they’re going to politicize this case because of the boys’ backgrounds, and that includes every bloody move we make. I don’t want to be working in a goldfish bowl again.”
“Media up every orifice,” he says.
“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”
“We’re making progress, boss. It’s all we can do.”
He’s right. I must hold my nerve. This case is my chance to prove myself again but I can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. “It is,” as my mother would have said, “what it is.” That expression of pragmatism got her up every morning and sent her to bed every night, with everything around her in its rightful place, as she thought it should be. Except for her confidence in herself, which was destroyed so comprehensively by my father that she was never able to put it back together.
When I finally get home my sister’s plate-eyed in front of the TV again, although the swelling on her face looks better and she’s cooked us a casserole. The only thing ringing alarm bells is that she’s developed a furtive addiction to her phone.
“Is that him?” I ask as our meal is interrupted for the fourth time by a text arriving.
“Are you my babysitter now?”
“I thought you cut contact with him.”