Ed wondered how the hell he had managed to leave it until his son was in the last months of his life to have a conversation with him that was so adult.
He couldn’t restrain himself from resenting Fiona for that. She kept our son from me, he thought. Her levels of anxiety around Noah were so high that she drove me away from him. I thought of him as a patient more often than not. I didn’t get to know him as well as I could have.
“I’m going to cancel my exhibition,” he said to Noah in the days after the final talk.
“No! I want to go to it and to the party. I’ve got months, Dad, not days. We need to do good things.”
“Good things?”
“Well, it would be stupid to do bad things. I want to see your exhibition.”
Ed broke down then.
Noah wasn’t the first dying child he’d seen, but this was the first time he could truly empathize with the parents of those little souls and their families that he’d met and photographed abroad. The way Noah was that evening shattered the barriers Ed had erected to keep himself sane in the face of what he’d seen.
It made a mockery of the bravado he and his colleagues enacted day after day as they waited in the comfort of hotels for stories that they could safely record, journalists and photographers alike always looking for the most sellable angle. They had employers, after all. They were there for money.
Ed goes downstairs and finds the notes he took. He takes his time reading through all of Noah’s wishes. When he’s done, he folds the paper up carefully and places it back in his desk drawer. He hopes with all his heart that the police will discover what happened by the canal. He wants Abdi to be at the funeral with a clear conscience, to be able to say goodbye to his friend properly. Noah would want that, too.
Ed goes upstairs again and sits on the end of their bed. “Fi,” he whispers. He lies on top of the bed beside her and fits his body around hers. Her pillow is damp. He buries his head into her hair.
She doesn’t move, and that angers him a little, because he wants to beg her, just for once, not to own this, not to make her sorrow greater than his.
After a few minutes he feels that she’s trying to ease him away.
“Too hot,” she says, but the skin on her neck is clammy cold.
Ed gets up.
He gets his travel bag out of the wardrobe and unzips it. He packs the usual gear. Not much, just the essentials.
“What are you doing?” Fi’s up on her elbows, watching him.
“I need to get away.”
“Now?”
He can only stare at her in reply.
“What about the funeral?”
“I’ll be home as soon as the autopsy is done. We can’t organize anything until then.”
“You can’t leave now. Is it work?”
He shakes his head. She gets it, finally. That he’s dreadfully lonely and has been for years. That both of them are now Noah is gone.
“Oh, Ed.”
“I can’t be here.”
“Where are you going to go?”
He’s not really sure, but there’s a place on the coast in Ireland where they went once, before Noah was born. No electricity, just a beautiful view and total seclusion. He wants to be somewhere like that.
“I’ll let you know.”
“Please don’t go.”
“I think I have to.”
So they continue in the cycle they’ve always been in, where Ed leaves and Fiona can’t make him stay because she’s not a hundred percent sure she wants him to. Both of them wonder if they ever had a true connection, or if it was parenting that bound them.
When he arrives at the airport, he sees a text from her: “I talked to the journalist, too. You never even asked how I found out you gave her the photograph.”
Woodley and I play the 999 recording to Fraser and tell her about the security guard and his dogs. We’ve taken a statement from him. In our conversation with him at his home, he eventually admitted to being at the scrapyard, but claimed to have arrived as Janet made the emergency call.
“He’s lying,” I say. “And I’d bet my badge that Janet Pritchard is, too. I think we should bring them both in for formal interviews.”
I’m not the only one with news.
One of the admin staff knocks on the window of the meeting room and points at me, making the sign for a phone call.
Ed Sadler’s on the end of the line. “Detective Inspector Clemo,” he says. “I’m going away for a couple of days. Fiona will know how to reach me. I wanted to let you know personally.”
“Thank you. I appreciate it.”
“You might not appreciate what I’m going to say next.”
“Go ahead.” The skin on the back of my neck prickles. He sounds more formal than usual. Tense.
“Fiona’s given an interview to a journalist. I’m afraid it may be somewhat—how shall I say this?—somewhat imbalanced and possibly accusatory. Detective?”
“Yes. I’m here.”
“Please don’t blame her too much. Under the circumstances, she’s not herself.”
I’m smart enough not to be destructive in front of my colleagues these days, so when the call’s over, I resist the urge to punch the wall beside Fraser’s office and take the stairs down and out of the building instead.
At the far end of the car park, where the noise of the overpass traffic will ensure my conversation is private, I phone Emma. She doesn’t pick up, and at first I don’t leave her a message, because I know I’m going to shout. I hang up and compose myself. It occurs to me that telling her to back off might be much more effective if I do it face-to-face. I redial.
“Emma,” I say, “I was wondering if you’d like to meet for a drink tonight? I’m off in half an hour. It would be nice to see you.”
Back upstairs the meeting is over and Woodley’s in conference with another person from the tech department. The bad news is that they haven’t managed to crack Abdi’s personal email account yet, but there’s good news, too.
“Our boy’s just used his social media account,” he says.
On a laptop they show me a string of messages sent between Abdi and his sister, Sofia. They’re totally mundane until the very last two.
“She sends him the photograph of the men watching a football game with the message ‘What does this mean?’ He replies, twelve minutes ago.”
Abdi’s reply says: “It means nothing. It’s best if you forget me. I’m not coming home. Sorry.”
“Fuck.”
“I know,” Woodley says.
I read Sofia’s reply: “Please come home, Abdi, or tell us where you are! We love you XXXXX.” A string of heart emojis follows.
“He’s read that last message she sent, but not reacted to it,” Woodley says.
“Where did he log on?”
“We’re working on it.”
“How long until you know?”
“Hours.”
“How many?”
“Depends on the service provider.”
“We need to get to him. Let’s not waste this.”
My phone pings: a text from Emma.
“Could meet now? At Berkeley Lounge Bar. Tied up later.”
Putting her story to bed, no doubt. I text back, “See you there.”