‘I don’t know anything,’ Fly says.
‘No, well, we can sort it all out down the station,’ says Harriet.
Fly is sitting on the bottom stair, pulling on his enormous lace-ups.
Ellie, having disappeared into the kitchen for a time, has rejoined them, leaning against the banister, watching Manon make a show of bending to gather her bag, getting her coat.
‘I’m not sure, in your condition …’ Harriet says.
‘Yes,’ says Ellie. ‘I can go with Fly, you stay here with Solly.’
‘Can you all stop talking about my fucking condition? My condition is I’m Fly’s mother and I’m going with him.’
‘You can’t be his appropriate adult – you know that, right?’
‘We can talk about that on the way in.’
Manon has swivelled Fly round by the shoulders and is following him out through the front door, past Harriet, into the spattering rain and the relieving oxygen of the night. She can picture what Harriet is thinking: She’s going to be a royal pain in the arse. Well that’s right, she is.
‘And you’re not keeping him in,’ Manon says now that Harriet is following her down the path. ‘He’s coming home with me tonight.’
‘What did they ask you?’ Manon says.
They are walking back from HQ through the darkness. The wind is in the trees, loud and strong. It is the kind of wind that seems portentous. Fly has been questioned for an hour, while Manon waited, feeling increasingly persecuted by her own powerlessness.
Fly shrugs. He is hunched, his hands in his jeans pockets.
‘This really isn’t the time to be the secretive teenager,’ she says.
She’s reminded of the article she read only a day or two ago, about the teenage brain, how it is nothing like the adult brain. It is open and suggestible, an ideal sponge for learning but also in grave danger from risk-taking: that explorative impulse seemingly indiscriminate. Children, essentially, are idiots, and teenagers are children driving adult bodies, while blindfolded by hormones. The article likened them to Ferraris capable of terrifyingly high speeds with no experience of the roads and no inbuilt sense of caution. What has he done?
He sniffs.
‘Doesn’t matter how still I am, how quiet I live. The world’s still gonna throw some shit in my face.’
‘Right, so I can see you’re enjoying a pity party but you need to tell me what their line of questioning was, so we can close it down.’
Trust him, she tells herself. Trust him.
He says nothing and they trudge, listening to their shoes on the pavement. They are lit by a car’s headlamps momentarily.
‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’ she asks into the silence he is maintaining. All her doubts swirl about them like the winds that rough them up.
‘How do you mean?’ he says.
‘I don’t know. I know you’ve been unhappy and things have got … You can tell me, that’s all I’m saying. You can tell me anything and I won’t go off the deep end. Well, I might, but I’ll still love you and defend you and help you.’
‘Tell you I stabbed someone?’ he says. ‘Tell you I stabbed Solly’s dad?’
She stops. ‘If you needed to.’
‘You think I’m capable of things I haven’t even thought of.’
‘No, no, Fly, I don’t.’
She ought to trust him, she ought to know that this is a mistake and yet, she knows Harriet, Davy, Kim and Gary Stanton, officers she has worked alongside for years. She has sat with them in cars through the night. Job after job. She knows how they operate. They wouldn’t bring him in without evidence. They would be even more reluctant to bring him in because he’s her son. They must have evidence, something strong.
Another thing she knows: that we are all capable of anything.
‘Fly, slow down, will you? Look, you need to tell me, at the very least, what their line of questioning is. You need to tell me, so I can knock it down.’
‘Kept askin’ me what time I came home from school – was it 4.23 or 4.49 or whatever, like I keep track of the minutes. I said I didn’t know. I left school after tech, walked across the park, like I always do, and went straight home. Ellie said she was popping out so me an’ Sol watched some CBeebies, played Temple Run. Then you came in.’
‘What’ve they got? What evidence did they show you?’
‘They showed me on CCTV walking through the park, that’s all. But I never said I wasn’t in the park – it’s my way home. I don’t understand it. Why would I have anything to do with Solly’s dad?’
‘You haven’t been arrested, don’t forget. It hasn’t got to that. They’re probably eliminating you and this’ll be the last you’ll hear of it.’
‘They took my phone,’ he says.
‘Right. And is there anything on your phone that we ought to be worried about?’
He shrugs.
She wants to interrogate who he is at this moment – entirely the wrong moment – so she says, ‘You never told me what the fight with the Cole twins was all about. That’s not like you, to get into a fight.’
‘Nuffin.’
‘Didn’t sound like nothing. Mr Jenkins said you had to be pulled off by some geography teacher or other.’
‘Sleazy Mr Mitchell. Always defending the Cole Nazis.’
‘Nazis?’
‘They’re not very nice kids,’ Fly says.
‘Did you know their mother, Judith Cole, is the one who found Jon-Oliver dying on the heath? Cradled him while he died?’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Fly says quietly and he looks at her as if he’s in shock all over again.
Two weeks in
28 December
Davy
When you’re on your own, mid-week can seem better than a Friday. Plenty of occupation and company. Weekends are a problem; Christmas has certainly been a problem (though now he’s through it). Just him and his mum in her bungalow. Her obsessional studying of the Radio Times for the television schedules; the way she often said, ‘It’s hard, being on your own. Very hard. Old age is not for the faint-hearted, David.’ This refrain, he senses, is going to amplify with the years, given she’s only 57.
He’s over the bloody moon to be back at work, having been off since Christmas Eve. She kept asking him to go to the shop to pick up this and that, then telling him he’d got the wrong thing. ‘This isn’t the cream I asked for, David. I wanted pouring cream.’ She made him peel all the sprouts, then boiled the life out of them. By the time they reached his mouth, they were pale and mushy, disintegrating on contact.
After four days with his mother, a complex murder inquiry with an over-involved super seems to Davy like a walk in the park, though Harriet’s expression is doom-laden as she approaches his desk. Fortunately, she’s not one to ask how the festivities went, a question he dreads and prepares for in advance. (‘Ah brilliant, thanks. Too many sprouts,’ with an accompanying pat of his stomach.)