“But Abdi was looking for somebody at the Welcome Center,” she blurts out. “A man with a scar on his top lip.”
Maryam catches her breath. Holds it. Composes herself.
“So what?” she says, “It could have been anybody.”
But her eyes cloud, and Sofia sees it. Maryam leans heavily on the kitchen counter, and bows her head.
“You should lie down again, Hooyo,” Sofia says. “I think we might need to take you to the doctor.”
Maryam refuses. She starts to wash up. She hopes she’s managed to divert Sofia from the truth.
When she glances up at her reflection in the kitchen window she doesn’t see her own face, but that of the man she fears. He doesn’t have his new face, the one she saw at the refugee center, with the sewn-up lip and corrected teeth, but the old one: gashed and ugly. His eyes were the same, though, both times she saw him. They’re the kind of eyes where evil pools.
She’s absolutely certain now that Abdi knows more than he should.
Emma Zhang and Fiona Sadler meet at the Avon Gorge Hotel. The morning’s sunny and almost warm. A waiter mops water off two chairs and a table so the women can talk on the terrace that overlooks the gorge and the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
At the bottom of the gorge, the tide’s in and the River Avon runs high, obscuring the muddy banks. The gorge’s rocky walls rise nearly a hundred meters to the point where the hotel terrace is built into the rock. The sunshine gleams weakly on the metal girders that suspend the bridge. In the far distance, clouds are moving, and a sharp wind threatens to bring them swiftly downriver.
Fiona Sadler takes a rug from the back of her chair and pulls it around her shoulders. She cups her hands around a mug of tea.
Emma Zhang puts her phone on the table between them and says, “Do you mind if I record this?”
Fiona nods her agreement. Why not? she thinks.
Emma sets up the phone to record and checks it twice. She’s worried that the wind will interfere with the recording, but Fiona Sadler was adamant about sitting outside, wanting privacy and looking like she felt as if the walls of the dark hotel interior were closing in on her. Better an interview with some noise interference than no interview at all.
Emma has been weighing up how much mileage there is in this story. The phone call from Jim warning her off reporting on the case enraged her, but it also made her think there might be more of a story here than she’d thought. She knows she needs to exercise caution, though. She aspires to be a serious crime reporter, so she doesn’t want to write something that’s purely sensationalist. She’ll need a good human story and a good angle. Seeing the photo of Noah Sadler on the front page freaked her out more than she’d care to admit. She’d argued that it was too much, but her editor overruled her. “We’ve kept their names out of it,” he said. “We’re not breaking any laws.”
The fact that he huddled with the paper’s lawyer before making that statement wasn’t lost on Emma, but neither was the advice he gave her when he hired her: “If you want to make it as a reporter, you’ve got to get the best stories out there, and sometimes that means you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”
Hearing Jim’s voice on the phone, however angry, had also reminded Emma how much she missed him and how much he’d hurt her. She zips her coat up to her neck and wishes she’d worn her winter boots. She puts her game face on.
“Thank you for taking the time away from the hospital to meet me,” she says.
Fiona Sadler’s gaze is that of a lioness with her prey in her sights. Her lips move, but Emma is taking a nervous slurp of her over-frothy coffee so she doesn’t catch what the other woman says.
“I’m sorry?” She inches the recording device toward Fiona. “Could you repeat that?”
“My son is dead.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Noah died last night. He’s dead.”
Fiona Sadler looks hard at Emma. It’s an almost forensic study of her reaction to the news.
“I’m so very sorry,” Emma says, and she is. Unexpectedly, tears glaze her eyes and the sunshine seems too bright, the view of the bridge too vivid, its beauty something that produces not pleasure but a sharp ache.
Fiona Sadler feels a moment of triumph as she watches the shock and then the emotion on Emma’s face. It’s the reaction she wanted. It’s a punishment for writing the article.
Aware that she’s under scrutiny, Emma thinks, Pull yourself together. Take control. As her shock dissipates, she feels a quickening of excitement, a sense that this is a bigger story now, that a death means it needs to be told.
“Can you tell me what happened?” she asks. “In your own time.”
Fiona’s slightly taken aback by Emma’s gentle tone, but she makes an effort to stay strong, and to keep this combative.
“When you write an article like that, with a photograph like that . . .” she begins.
“The photograph . . .”
“No! Please don’t interrupt me. Please listen to me. An article like that hurts. You have to take responsibility for what you print. There are real people behind the stories. Real people. My son is real. Was real.”
Fiona feels the purpose of what she’s trying to say slip away a little, as her own emotions well up. She tries to harness her concentration, and stay on track.
“We were robbed of time with him,” she says. “We never knew how much time we were going to have with him, but every second was precious. Every single second.” It’s becoming so hard to fight back the tears.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Emma murmurs. She’s wondering if she should reach across the table and take Fiona’s hand but decides not yet.
“Do you understand you have to take responsibility?” Fiona asks.
“I do understand.”
“It’s so painful for the people you use. For us.”
Emma takes a gamble and goes for a semi-honest approach.
“I’m just starting out,” she says, “and I want to tell stories that matter, because I want to get to the truth. I know those stories sometimes hurt feelings, and I’m sorry you felt that way, but I think Noah’s story is important. He’s been the victim of a crime, potentially. In this political climate I think this could be buried by the police because they don’t want any more trouble with the immigrant communities.”
“It could have been an accident.” Fiona didn’t think she’d be playing devil’s advocate, but she dislikes the journalist’s certainty. She’s starting to wish she hadn’t come here, thinking that the best place for her would have been in bed with her grief.
“I spoke to the witness personally,” Emma says. “I don’t think it was an accident.”
“Is that what your article said?” Though she knows Emma is its author, Fiona hasn’t actually read the piece. She’s had far too much else to deal with.
Emma nods.
“The detective didn’t tell us there was a witness,” Fiona says.
“Is that Detective Inspector Clemo?”
“Yes.”