She crawls into bed. She feels utter mortification. She thinks, What have I done?
Ed Sadler is sitting in an airport lounge. When he passed through security, he found that a copy of one of his photographs had printed out along with his boarding pass. He looked at it for a while, remembering Abdi asking about it, before putting it in a bin.
He gets another text. This time it’s from a friend telling him that they’ve just seen Fiona on TV. He battles with slow Wi-Fi but manages to watch the footage. It horrifies him. As it finishes, his flight is called. He gathers up his bag and thinks, I should have stayed with her.
Every step he takes toward the gate feels more wrong than the last, but he continues nevertheless. There’s no seating when he arrives, so he’s standing looking out over the airfield when his phone rings.
It’s Sofia Mahad’s number. Ed is tempted to ignore her call, but he knows his family isn’t the only one suffering here.
“Hello, Sofia,” he says.
Outside the window everything is lit up in the darkness. Ed can see lights on the runways, the planes and the busy service vehicles. They remind him of a hundred other trips, and lure him to somewhere, anywhere else.
“I’m so sorry,” he tells Sofia. “Fiona’s suffering very badly. I think she’s made a mistake. Her judgment isn’t what it should be at this moment, as I’m sure you’ll understand. It’s very difficult . . .”
He expects to get an earful from her, but Sofia’s not calling about the interview. There’s something else on her mind.
“Please, can you tell me exactly what Abdi asked you about when you talked about Hartisheik Camp? The night of the accident?”
Ed’s plane is beginning to board. He can hear his seat number being called.
“Sofia, I’m so sorry, can I call you back in a couple of hours? I promise I will, it’s just that I’m at the airport, and didn’t Abdi record our conversation anyway?”
“Please,” she says, “I need to hear it from you. In case he recorded only part of your conversation. I don’t think Abdi ran away because of Noah. Something else is happening, and I’m sure it’s to do with the photograph. He sent us a message on Facebook and I’m scared he’s not coming home. I’m so scared.”
He might have hung up if Sofia had been confrontational, but she sounds so very vulnerable, and he hasn’t the heart to tell her no. Part of him knows that on this occasion he probably can’t walk away from everything quite as easily as he’s done in the past. He thinks of the photo he put in the bin earlier. You can destroy a single copy of something, he thinks, but nowadays the life of an image never ends there.
“One minute.”
Ed approaches the check-in desk and tells the stewardess that he won’t be boarding the flight and that he didn’t check in a bag. He hands her his boarding card, puts his passport in his pocket, and sits down on one of the many vacated chairs.
“Sofia?” he says.
“I’m here.”
“Abdi asked me about a man.”
The conversation comes back to him in more detail than before. Sofia’s distress has jolted his memory.
“A man with a cleft palate?” she asks.
“Yes. Abdi was very curious about him. I told him everything I knew, which is that this man was known to be very dangerous. He was newly arrived in the camp at the time, and some of the families reported that they knew he’d previously been involved in some atrocities. That he was a militia soldier disguising himself as a refugee. He wasn’t the only one.”
“Did Abdi say why he wanted to know?”
“No, I don’t think he did.” Ed’s pretty sure of this. “I just assumed it was his natural curiosity. You know, he wanted to know about everything, didn’t he? I assumed the exhibition had piqued his curiosity.”
Ed is suddenly aware as he says the words of how arrogant he must sound and how he’s been looking at this the wrong way.
“This isn’t about me, is it?” he says to Sofia. “It’s about what Abdi saw. Is there anything I can do? To help?”
“Just tell me if you remember anything else at all.”
“There is one thing.” Another detail has come back to him. “I told Abdi that I thought I’d seen this man in Bristol.”
Sofia is silent for a few moments before saying, “How?”
Ed misunderstands her. “If he was in Hartisheik at any point, it’s not surprising he could have come here. Bristol’s one of the destinations in the UK that many refugees make their way to from Hartisheik.”
“I mean, how did you see him? Where?”
“I was at the climbing center with a mate, just last week. When we left, I saw a man who looked the image of him coming out of one of the houses opposite. Might have been mistaken, but I’d been looking at the photo for the exhibition, so his face was fresh in my mind.”
“For real?”
“Absolutely for real.”
He hears a doorbell ring where she is, an exchange of voices.
“Sofia?” he asks.
“I have to go,” she says.
She hangs up and Ed picks up his pace as he leaves the airport, only pausing to text Fiona to say he’s on his way home.
Becky screams at me to get back in the house and sinks down beside her boyfriend. I pull her off him and drag him up onto his feet. The stink of his aftershave is an insult.
“If you ever lay a finger on my sister again I’ll make sure you go down for a very long time, or I’ll come and deal with you myself. Do you understand?”
He nods.
“Say it.”
“I understand.” The coward can’t meet my eye. The impulse to keep beating up on him is frighteningly strong, but after a few seconds in which I’m breathing into his face, watching the flicker of his cowardice in a muscle on his cheek, I shove him backward. Not as hard as I’d like to.
He scuttles away, arms wrapped around his belly where I hit him. The roses are scattered across the pavement.
Becky takes off down the street after him, and I call out after her.
“Fuck off!” she shouts.
I watch her go. I hope I’ve made my point. I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to be that easy, though.
Upstairs, I splash water on my face in the bathroom and avoid looking at my reflection in the mirror, in case I’m reminded of my father.
Woodley phones me just as I’m toweling dry and asks me to join a video call with Jamie Silva, the so-called super-recognizer.
I sign on to my laptop, put my game face on, and find a young bald guy with a cheerful grin on the other end of the call. He’s in an office.
“I’ve got your man,” he says. “Name of Maxamud Abshir Garaar.”