‘How come you’re still in bed?’ Fly asked, setting the cup down as he always did on her bedside table. He was wearing a polo shirt and grey school shorts, the heat of the day already building around them. Most days, she’d be in the shower by now, and the coffee he made her each day would be waiting on the table. Most days, she’d wait to hear the click of the front door to know he’d left, before tipping his coffee down the kitchen sink.
‘I’ve got a doctor’s appointment,’ she said, and regretted the word ‘doctor’ immediately; too sleepily preoccupied to prevent it slipping out.
‘Doctor? Why?’ he said, alarmed.
‘Nothing serious, routine in fact,’ she said, propping herself up in the bed, taking a sip of the coffee and trying not to visibly grimace. Brown water.
Fly was staring at her, rigid.
‘I’m fine, Fly. Honestly. I’d tell you if I wasn’t.’
He sniffed. Nodded. She recalled all the advice from counsellors, therapists, education welfare, social workers – about the terrors he carried with him. She was aware he’d been crippled by loss. Yet she could not shake off some irritation at the persistence of these shadows over them both.
‘Another scorcher by the look of it,’ she said. They were in the midst of a grimy heatwave which cooked the bins and baked the pavements. ‘I’m really fine. Go on, you get on. Wear a cap, yes?’
She heard him leave and wondered how she could do what she was about to do when her mind was so full of him. Wasn’t one child enough? Yet each time she road-tested the idea, she was surprised to encounter excitement, not fear. She was taking the bull by the horns. Or the testicles, more accurately.
She couldn’t stand to wait any more.
She couldn’t bear the waiting: to meet the right man, get to know him, find he (like all the rest) was afraid of commitment; to do her best not to put the pressure on so that she became a cauldron of internalised pressure fit to burst; to have the relationship go wrong and be so enveloped in grief, a rolling together of multiple griefs along with self-recrimination and dread of the future and to have her mind already calculating: when could it begin again and how long could it take? This way, she wasn’t waiting. She was no longer contingent on the questionable emotional register of a man she hadn’t even met yet. She’d considered the options: freezing an egg, freezing an embryo, but it all just seemed like more waiting, more contingency. No, she had decided and in the deciding she’d felt unexpectedly released. Elated. As if an enormous weight – or wait – had been lifted.
For ￡500 she had secured her initial appointment at the fertility clinic in Harley Street, grateful for the country-house lamps and Persian rugs that made it seem like some kind of luxurious spa treatment she was giving herself. Pedicure. Exfoliation. In-utero insemination.
‘What is it you want, Miss Bradshaw?’ the doctor said. He was in his fifties, silver-haired.
‘I want a baby,’ she said simply. ‘I don’t want to wait any more.’ And it seemed so clear and straightforward, she wondered why she’d spent the last decade making such a meal of it.
He nodded, consulting the piece of paper. ‘You are 42, is that right?’
‘Yes, my ovaries are probably sitting in rocking chairs, knitting!’ she said. She’d rehearsed this joke on the tube and as it came out, you could tell.
‘We’ll take a look at them now, see what they’re doing. Run some tests to ascertain your fertility.’
Smearing the cold gel across her tummy and looking at the screen, he said, ‘Lots of eggs. You seem quite fertile.’
And she’d had to hide the roar of delight inside herself. ‘Turkey baster it is then,’ she said.
As she walked out of the clinic into the searing light and heat, her phone rang. Havers – DCI Sean Haverstock, her boss and a dickwad of the first order. He said there was a body being hooked out of the Welsh Harp lake. Could she make her way there pronto? Yes, he was aware it was her day off but he didn’t have anyone else. She was to meet Melissa Harcourt at the scene.
Melissa effing Harcourt.
Nemesis.
Melissa effing Harcourt was new to Kilburn CID, the handy hook on which to hang Manon’s rivalry. The search beam of Bradshaw envy had tracked the passage of Melissa’s suits and tottery shoes across the office floor. ‘How’s she going to run in those?’ Manon muttered to a DC standing next to her, but he’d just frowned at her as if she was the bitterest object he’d ever seen.
Day upon day of Havers puffing himself up as he marvelled at Melissa’s potential.
‘She manages up,’ Manon told Ellie. Ellie hadn’t responded to this patently not-casual remark.
Melissa effing Harcourt had an engagement ring that sparkled as it caught the light. She wasn’t hugging an extra stone. She had a spring in her step, which indicated she was not, as yet, beset by the heaviness. Did Melissa’s feet balk at the re-stacking of Melissa’s body above them of a morning? They did not.
Manon would’ve liked Melissa effing Harcourt to suffer illness or a breakup or even a Reg 14 misconduct notice.
The heat was beating out the smell of rotting flesh.
In the blinding light of the day, squinting and with tissues held over their mouths, Manon and Melissa stood at the edge of the reservoir, a vast oval of open water straddling Brent and Barnet, and a magnet for corpses; they were forever hooking cadavers out of the Welsh Harp.
This particular body was bloated and blue, traces of blood crusted black around the nostrils. The stench of it was like a putrid wall and Manon’s body recoiled: her gagging reflex in full swing with the rolling away of her insides.
‘We don’t have an ID yet,’ said Melissa, her tissue still over the lower half of her face.
‘She looks young,’ Manon said. ‘In this weather, gases will have made the body bob up to the surface of the water quite fast. My guess is she died within the last couple of days. We’ll need an ID from fingerprints. And we’ll need to capture all the CCTV around the reservoir, see how she got in the water.’
‘Probably a jumper,’ said Melissa. ‘Blood around the nose looks like drugs.’
Manon looked Melissa in the eye. ‘We don’t know that,’ she said. ‘Melissa? We don’t know if she’s a jumper or a drug addict, OK? No assumptions. Even if she’s both, she deserves a proper investigation.’
That evening, at her laptop, Manon purchased a father with a simple Add to Basket and the inputting of her card details online. For ￡850 she secured the sperm of a Dane, a nationality that seemed to carry a neutral air. You couldn’t hate a Dane. Catalogue number 4063. She knew nothing more about him than the following:
Skin tone: Caucasian
Eye colour: Blue
Occupation: Doctor [impossible to resist]
Skills: Speaks Danish, English and French. Drawing, maths