He clambers out from under the shrub and finds that it’s even wetter without its protective shelter. He shudders. On the railway line a train shuttles past, just three carriages, windows lit, people visible in them. Abdi considers getting a ticket and riding for as long as they’ll let him. He wonders what it would be like to throw yourself under a train, but knows he would never do that to a driver.
He relieves himself against a tree and decides he’s going to climb down the slope and find some shelter under the railway arch. It frightens him to be there, but he’s so cold he can’t stand to stay in the rain.
The slope’s covered in long grass and Abdi loses his footing, sliding down, bumping hard at the bottom. He wants to cry out in discomfort and frustration, from hatred of himself that he’s reduced so quickly to this. He thinks of his school uniform and his schoolbooks, and how much pride he felt in them. He thinks of the first clean page of a fresh new exercise book, and all the hope he used to feel, all the excitement at the possibility it contained.
He wonders if he should go home, and he starts to stand, trying not to slip again in the muddy slick he’s landed in, when he notices activity in one of the houses opposite.
A door has opened, revealing two men standing in the doorway. There’s no light on in the house, but the windows of the pub opposite cast enough of a glow that Abdi is pretty sure he knows who he’s looking at.
The sound of violins comes from the pub, the fast rise and fall of live reel music, and in the doorway opposite, as if they occupy a different world, the men exchange just a few words through slowly moving lips, before one leaves and the man who Abdi thinks he recognizes as his father steps back into the house and shuts the door behind him.
It focuses Abdi. He clambers back up the slope and withdraws into the shelter of the shrub. The blanket is soaking by now, but he draws it around his shoulders and he sits, hunched, in such a way that he can see the house.
He watches all night. A light stays on in the house until the early hours, when it snaps off and then stays dark. Still Abdi doesn’t move, even though his body feels stiff and numb.
He begins to understand what it is he wants to do, and he’s surprised to find that he no longer feels afraid.
Fiona Sadler listens to the sounds of her house after Ed has gone. What she hears most loudly is the absence of Noah. Even when he was at school she used to have a sense of him in the home. It could be the anticipation of his return, the trail of belongings he left in his wake, the turning around in her mind of all the conversations they had had and would have. Now there is nothing except the roaring emptiness of her loss.
Words from Noah’s oncologist have been cycling around her head for a week now, and they return.
“I’m so sorry. There are signs that the disease has returned.”
These were the words Fiona had been dreading for seven years, and the worst thing about them, the very worst thing, was Noah’s reaction. There was shock at first, of course, but in the aftermath, she thought he behaved as if he was relieved. Only a tiny bit, and only for an instant, but relieved nonetheless. It hurt her terribly. She wasn’t ready to let him go; she knew she never would be.
“It’s not impossible to understand that he’d feel relief,” Ed said when he arrived at the hospital, hours later. He was unshaven and unkempt. They were in the hospital café buying Noah a chocolate croissant, snatching a moment to talk privately. Upstairs in the ward Ed’s travel bag and cameras were occupying a large amount of the floor space in Noah’s room. Ed had arrived with a bag full of kitsch airport gifts as well as duty-free bottles for the nurses and chocolates for everybody on the ward, and she’d envied his ability to sit with Noah and laugh as they examined the stuff together. Noah declared a puffin soft toy to be his new favorite possession.
“I can’t bear it,” Fiona told him.
“It’s okay,” he said. They held up the queue behind them as he took her in his arms. Nobody complained.
Now that Ed’s gone again, Fiona has nothing to stabilize her, nobody in her immediate orbit to rage against and cry upon.
Her impotence creates a sort of fury in her.
She rages against the unfairness of the situation. How is it, she thinks, that Noah is dead and she and Ed are facing intrusive questions and visits from the police, while Abdi Mahad, who by the sound of it could have been responsible, is the subject of an appeal on television that emphasizes his vulnerability? Fiona has watched the appeal over and over again, rewinding it, allowing herself to get more distressed by it on every viewing.
How is it that nobody’s talking about what Noah must have gone through, about the fact that his life has been snatched from him, after everything he and they have been through? How is it that she has to hear from a journalist that there was a witness, and the police don’t seem to be paying this fact any attention?
And she has nobody to tell. Nobody who will listen and say to her, “Yes, it’s unfair.” Nobody who will say, “I’m sorry,” and “I understand,” and “I love you.” Nobody to persuade her to be reasonable, or that it would be better to ride her grief, and not lash out with it.
Fiona’s face hurts, she’s cried so much, but her tears have dried out for now. She reaches for her phone and calls the one person who’s listened to her in the last few days without judging her, and who might be able to give a voice to Noah’s side of the story.
When Emma Zhang replies, Fiona says, “I’ve changed my mind. Is it too late?”
“No,” Emma replies. “Not at all. I’m leaving for the studio shortly. I can pick you up on the way.”
After they’ve spoken, Fiona goes to her wardrobe and scans the outfits. She chooses to wear a black dress and a black jacket. She takes a shower, dries her hair, and applies some makeup, paying particular attention to the dark marks beneath her eyes. Around her neck she fastens a necklace that Noah gave her. It’s a silver chain with a small silver circle hanging from it. She looks in the mirrors, fingers the pendant.
“I love you,” she says to her reflection, but really she’s addressing the boy she’s lost.
Fifteen minutes later her doorbell rings.
The driver holds open the back door of a sleek car and she climbs in. In the backseat Emma Zhang’s waiting, and she takes Fiona’s hand.
“Okay?” she asks.
Fiona nods.
Woodley seems to be the only person smiling when I get to the office.
“What’s that on your face?” I ask him.
“It’s a bit of good news, boss.”
“Let’s hear it, then.”
“You remember what we heard on the 999 recording—someone saying what we thought was Roger Platts? I think I’ve worked out what it means.”
He beckons me to come and look at his monitor, where he’s got a website up on the screen with a big German shepherd dog as its main picture.
“This is a specialist website for schutzhund training. The type of training I’m pretty sure Jason Wright’s dogs have undergone. If you look here,” he clicks around the site, “they have a set of specific specialized commands they respond to. In German.”