“Lifting boxes, wasn’t it? He ruptured a disk.”
Rita Wright gnaws at a fingernail between answers, leaving flecks of red polish on her teeth.
“So he doesn’t work at all now?”
She shakes her head.
Outside, the patio stones are becoming speckled with rain. In the corner of the yard I see a large dog turd.
“I don’t think I can help you much more than that,” Rita Wright says. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get my washing in.”
She wants to be rid of us, and I’m willing to oblige her because I’ve had a thought.
“You’ve been very helpful indeed,” I say, standing with her. “We’ll call back later to see if Jason’s here.”
“You could ring ahead next time,” she says.
“We’ll do that, thank you.”
She hovers around us as we put our shoes back on in the hallway.
“We’ll see ourselves out, Mrs. Wright,” Woodley tells her. “You get that washing in.”
The rain’s worsened quickly. It’s pelting down. Woodley and I jog across the road.
“I’ll bet Wright’s out walking the dog,” I say when we’re both in the car. “He won’t last long in this.”
We move the car a distance from the house so Rita Wright won’t be able to see it, but we have a view of anybody arriving at the property.
Woodley pulls a piece of laminated card from his pocket.
“Look what I found on the floor by the door.”
He hands it to me. PLEASE DON’T RING THE DOORBELL BETWEEN 9 A.M. AND 5 P.M., it says, and provides a number to text instead.
“Only somebody who works night shifts would have that.”
On the back of it there’s a worn nub of blue tack where it could have been fixed to the door.
“He’s been claiming benefits and working on the sly.”
We don’t have to wait long for the man himself.
“She must have phoned him as soon as we left,” Woodley says as a man appears at the far end of the street, hunched against the rain, holding two big German shepherd dogs on leads.
“They don’t look like the kind of dogs you’d choose if you had a back injury,” Woodley says.
We get out of the car to intercept Wright. As we approach, he notices us. From the way he pauses, it’s obvious that he considers taking off but thinks better of it. When we’re still a good few meters away from him, the dogs start to bark. He settles them with a command. Rain drips off the peak of his cap. He’s wearing a raincoat but underneath it only lightweight trainers and sweatpants. Both are soaked through. It’s pretty obvious he went out in a hurry.
“You’d better come in, then,” he says. “Let me get the dogs settled first.”
He lets himself into the backyard via a side gate and we follow him through. The dogs have lost interest in us now, and we watch as he puts them into a large wooden kennel in the side return, where they shake thoroughly.
“Not house dogs, then?” Woodley asks.
Jason Wright can’t resist showing off. “They’re specialist dogs. Bred and trained in Germany. They’re not supposed to live inside.”
“Security dogs?”
“Yeah. My wife suffers from nerves.”
“On this estate?” Woodley asks, and he’s right to. The only crime we’ve had a whiff of here is bad architecture. Everything else looks shipshape.
“You can’t be too careful, Officer.” He’s got a good poker face, I’ll give him that, because what he’s saying is nonsense, especially given that Mrs. Wright’s demeanor was distinctly steely. No nerves detectable there.
“Bella!”
One of the dogs stops drinking at the sound of his voice and comes to the wire fence. She’s athletic and bright-eyed. Her ears and snout look like black velvet.
The other dog watches, its head on its paws. The inside of the pen is as immaculate as the house.
“She’s been poorly this one, haven’t you, Bella?”
His voice has gone gooey, and at the sound of her name the dog’s tail wags, but she holds herself very still.
“Good as gold, they are, but if you give them the command they’ll defend you.”
He digs in his pocket and then offers Bella a treat through the wire. The other dog gets up and approaches.
I don’t give Wright any warning. I take two handfuls of his wet coat in my fists and push him back against the wire surrounding the dogs’ pen. I don’t push him hard, but the noise is jarring.
The dogs’ reaction is instant. Both of them hurl themselves against the other side of the wire, teeth and gums bared, snarling and barking. I have no doubt their jaws would be closing around my arm or even my neck if they could get to me. I let go of Jason Wright.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he says. “Jesus!”
The dogs are still going crazy.
“Bella! Roger!” he shouts, and they back off, but reluctantly, the male dog baring his teeth.
“I think we need to have a word inside, Mr. Wright,” I say.
If these dogs are just in use to guard this house, I’ll eat my hat. I strongly suspect Wright was at the scrapyard on Monday night and had one or both of them with him. I think it’s him we heard on the recording, giving a command to the dog called Roger, and I want to know exactly what went on.
When Sofia goes into her bedroom to lie down, to check Facebook, and to try to consider what else she can do to find her brother, Maryam sits in the darkness of the room next door.
When Nur gets home, he unlocks the door, clicks on the light, and finds Maryam has been sitting alone in the dark.
She holds her finger to her lips. “Sofia’s sleeping.”
He sits down beside her and she takes his hand. They love each other very much and have since the day they met at the camp, both working at the school there. They’ve had their differences, of course, over the years, but they’ve come so far together that the bond they share is very strong.
“I gave out all the photographs,” he tells her. “Everybody says they’ll look out for Abdi.”
He’s saying that to fill the silence. He can tell she has something she wants to say.
Earlier, she looked in on her daughter and saw that Sofia was asleep on her bed. Sofia’s phone was lying out on her desk and Maryam took it. She knows her daughter’s pin code, so it was easy enough to access the photograph that Sofia took earlier.
Maryam shows it to Nur.
“Sofia says she thinks that Abdi got obsessed with this photograph when he went to Ed Sadler’s exhibition,” she tells him. “You see it’s the one he was talking about in the recording.”
Nur sees a scene from Hartisheik Camp. He sees a few faces he recognizes among the men and boys. He sees the man who was known as Farurey because of his damaged lip, and he sees the football game that’s on the television: red shirts versus burgundy and white shirts. Without looking any closer he knows exactly when this was, and which match they’re watching.