Ed almost never speaks to his wife like this. He almost always backs her up, smooths her feathers, lets her make the decisions, and brings her tea in the mornings when he’s home and she’s not at the hospital. In return, he gets his freedom when he needs it.
He knows what her argument’s going to be—that they and Noah deserve privacy—and the hypocrisy of it enrages him. He also knows it’s probably not wise to call her out on it, but he’s so tired of being blamed for everything. If he’s brutally honest, he also feels as if he’s trapped in a domestic setup whose sole objective has come to be the nursing of Noah, and the preservation of his life, at all costs, and rightly so, but now that Noah’s gone, the domestic framework that Ed and Fiona are left with is sparse and unlovely.
With Noah gone, Ed also knows he’s no longer a hero to anybody, and this thought destabilizes him almost as much as anything else.
“I don’t know if I can ever forgive you,” Fiona says. “I didn’t even know you talked to a journalist.”
“I forgot to tell you! I just forgot. She came to the hospital. It was an honest mistake. I had a few other things on my mind, as you might imagine.” Ed catches himself before he shouts, calms himself down.
“I did it because I thought it might help to get people’s attention so we can try to find out what happened. I regretted it afterward, believe me, because I didn’t mean for it to draw attention to Abdi or cast blame on him. I didn’t know the journalist would do that.”
“That’s the only bloody good thing that’s come out of it! Did you know there was a witness who saw Abdi push Noah? The detective hid that from us. Hid it! How is that good for Noah?”
Fiona mothers like an animal: all instinct and ferocity. It astounded Ed from the very first few hours of his son’s life, when he sat in the hospital room and watched the focus of Fiona’s being shift from him to their son. Now it alarms him. All of that energy has turned outward as Fiona seeks a scapegoat, somebody to blame for ruining the biggest project of her life before its natural time was up.
Ed’s not surprised the scapegoat’s Abdi, though it makes him angry. He believes Abdi’s a good kid, and he feels he’s seen enough of the world to trust his own judgment. He relies on that ability to assess people quickly and accurately when he’s working.
“We mustn’t turn on Abdi. Don’t believe everything you read. I’m sure the police will clarify if we ask them.”
“So one minute you’re offering a photograph of our son to the press and the next you tell me we can’t trust them?”
“Did it ever occur to you that whatever the boys were getting up to might be Noah’s idea? Noah’s fault? Remember why we took him out of primary school?”
“We lost him yesterday and you bring that up?”
“Don’t rewrite history, that’s all I’m asking.”
Ed’s run out of energy for the fight. He hasn’t got the appetite for ugly words any longer.
“Noah was the most important thing in my life, too,” he tells her, “but he wasn’t always perfect, particularly where friendships were concerned, so let’s be careful what we say or do.”
“How careful were you being when you shared that photograph? You didn’t even ask me before you did it.”
“Okay,” he says. “Okay, you’re right. I should have. I’m sorry. I’m very fucking sorry.” He holds up a hand, signaling that he’s done with this fight. He leaves the room.
Later Fiona finds herself standing in Noah’s bedroom. She takes a deep breath. She can sense and smell her son in every object and every bit of fabric, and she fancies that if she stays very still she can hear him breathing and the accompanying hiss of his oxygen mask. She thinks of his red cheeks at the party on Monday night, and how much he seemed to enjoy it.
He didn’t deserve this, whatever Ed says.
She sits down on Noah’s bed and thinks about the unfortunate incident at primary school. Noah reacted badly with that other child, it’s true, but he was under such exceptional stress.
It was the head teacher’s attitude that Fiona hated.
“We have to look at this from both sides,” she said, “and although Noah’s been gravely ill and all of our sympathies are with him, we can’t ignore the fact that he harmed another child.”
“Why did you push him?” Fi had asked Noah that night, after they’d learned that the child had broken his collarbone in the fall caused by Noah.
“He wasn’t my friend anymore.”
The next day she decided to homeschool him. She couldn’t stand the thought that friendship issues would pile up on top of everything he had to go through with his treatment. It was too much for one kid to bear.
“He’ll probably be fine” was Ed’s view. “He’ll settle back in really quickly. Are you sure it’s not you that’s finding it very difficult, more than Noah, maybe? That would be understandable.”
Fiona hated being called out on that. It always was Ed’s way to breeze in, just off a plane, the smell of travel and other women hanging off him, and openly judge her like that. He had no idea what it was like during the hard yards of Noah’s treatment, his education, his everything.
Fiona doesn’t touch anything in Noah’s room. She wants to keep every single thing in there, even the rumples in the bedding, just how Noah left it.
Woodley and I are standing outside a property on an aspirational housing estate that I estimate is ten years old. It’s a small house. The developer of the estate has mixed property styles and sizes in an ill-conceived and ill-executed attempt to create a village feel.
The door’s freshly painted and the front garden’s aggressively well tended. A small red car sits on the driveway. It’s polished to a shine.
We’re at the address where Jason Wright and his wife are registered as owner-occupiers.
“Somebody doesn’t mind dusting, then,” Woodley says. The windowsill of the front room has been used as a display area for china figurines of wedding-cake princesses in dresses with more crevasses and folds than a glacier.
The woman who opens the door is small and neat, wearing a housecoat and slippers with a heel and an explosion of fluff on the toe.
“Rita Wright?” I ask. “We’re hoping to speak to your husband.”
“He’s out.”
We didn’t call ahead because we wanted to surprise him, but I wonder if somebody’s told him we were asking questions at the garage.
“When will be he back?”
“I’m not sure. Could be ages.”
“Do you mind if we come in anyway? It would be very helpful if you could answer one or two questions for us.”
She examines our IDs hawkishly before beckoning us in. She asks us to remove our shoes and leads us to a tiny conservatory at the back of the house with a view of a paved yard that contains a painted shed and a washing line where cleaning rags are neatly pegged. Beyond it, there’s a patch of lawn.
“I’d like to ask about Jason’s employment,” I say.
“He doesn’t work. He’s on disability benefits. His back’s knackered.”
“When did that happen?”
“About six years ago. He had an accident at work.”
“Where did he work?”
“Worked for the council. Housing officer.”
“So how did he hurt his back?”