‘Are you all right?’ Harriet asks.
Manon has come armed with a whole set of rehearsed arguments about Harriet’s malpractice, the team’s institutional racism or clod-hoppery or mistreatment of old friends, but instead of presenting these with barrister-like precision, Manon bursts into tears.
‘Sit down,’ Harriet says. ‘Oh God I’m sorry, this must be agony for you, especially with the pregnancy. Everything OK with the baby?’
Manon nods, unable to speak, remembering her love for Harriet. They solved the Hind case together, have long held each other in high esteem. Of all police officers, she trusts Harriet most deeply.
‘How far along are you now?’ Harriet asks.
Manon puts her fingers to her lips, swallows, nods. ‘Five and a half months. S’posed to be the best bit – the middle trimester. Y’know, glossy hair, lots of energy, rampant sex drive. Before your ankles swell up and you become an elephant.’
Harriet nods and Manon wonders if this conversation is painful for her, Harriet never having had children. They’d always bonded over that – singleness and childlessness.
Is that in ruins now?
‘Please, Harriet, just tell me what we’re facing. You know that it’s weeks of waiting before the prosecution papers are served on the defence and in that time, what, Fly’s just supposed to rot in Arlidge House? I have to be able to do something. I can’t just sit and watch this happen to him.’
Harriet is looking at her. Her expression is both concerned and remorseful. ‘If I could have it any other way, you know—’
‘You can. You can talk to me about the case, like we’ve talked about a billion other cases. I’ll never ask you for anything again. We’ve worked together for years, Harriet; we’ve worked on murder after murder. You can discuss this one with me and I promise you on my life, on my baby’s life, that no one will ever find out that you did.’
There is silence in which Harriet thinks and in which Manon dare not speak in case she disrupts a decision in her favour.
‘Come with me,’ Harriet says, rising from behind her desk. She opens the door to her office and they walk through the department, as people look up from their computers and watch them pass.
Whispering, once they are on the stairwell, Harriet puts a hand to Manon’s elbow: ‘I’m going to show you something. But you better keep it quiet. I could get sacked for this.’
Down on the second floor, they take up seats in the dark video room, which smells of warm bodies, the trace of someone’s korma. Harriet fiddles about with some footage, rewinding what Manon can tell is transport CCTV. ‘I thought you should see this,’ Harriet says, getting to the right spot on the film, then sitting back.
Manon looks at the screen. She sees Fly, little beloved figure in a sea of strangers, and she wants to reach out and touch him. He is quietly alone, her boy, in the big world. He is crossing the forecourt at King’s Cross, then the footage flicks to him descending an escalator in St Pancras. She looks at Harriet.
‘This is when he was supposed to be at school. We matched the date to when the head told us he’d failed to turn up. Took the train to King’s Cross, then the Thameslink overground to Cricklewood. Here.’
Harriet pushes some buttons and a different machine plays on an adjacent screen. Manon sees Fly on Cricklewood Broadway, just standing. His face is slack, his sadness simply the absence of animation. He stands with his rucksack on his back, his thumbs beneath the shoulder straps, chest height. He’ll have the book he’s reading in that bag, she thinks sadly.
She can see he is outside the flat he used to live in.
Fly crosses the road to Momtaz Shisha Café.
‘Then this,’ Harriet says, pushing another play – this time the screen shows council CCTV which takes in Momtaz. Fly is sitting with a man – bald, in his fifties, soldier’s build.
‘Paddy Driscoe,’ Harriet says. ‘He’s a dealer.’
She leaves it hanging there, while the hot fury burns at Manon’s temples.
‘Can I see him, please?’ she says. ‘If you could show me to Fly’s detention room, I’d like to kill him.’
‘We’re looking into this chap,’ Harriet says, ‘seeing if he has any links to Jon-Oliver Ross, who we know was an enthusiastic coke user. Look, I’m not showing you this to say it’s definitely a part of our investigation. All I wanted you to see is that Fly – well, he’s been going through something, involved in stuff. And, y’know—’
‘Come on, Harriet, it’s not like you to fluff about at the edges. Come out with it.’
‘You might not know him as well as you think you do. You might not know what he’s involved in.’
Manon thinks of all the mothers she has said this kind of thing to. Mothers who didn’t know about the glue, didn’t realise the spots weren’t adolescent acne. The mothers playing catch-up, who hadn’t realised that Minecraft had turned into pornography. And now I am that fool. She looks at the paused tape of Fly standing on Cricklewood Broadway, the striations of the pause cutting the screen through the centre with white lines, and all she can see is the face of a stranger. A sad, lost 12-year-old boy whose mind she doesn’t know.
Murmuring voices swim in and out of her thoughts, slippery fish. Bryony, Peter and Ellie still talking downstairs, or perhaps it’s the television. She doesn’t know if Fly did it, whether he is involved or innocent. It is almost impossible to stay fixed in not knowing. Instead, she ricochets. She watches Bobby’s moon and stars rotate stupidly around the walls. How are children supposed to be comforted by something so coldly mechanical? She closes her eyes.
No one has told her that becoming someone’s mother would lead her to imagine the catastrophic end to her motherhood. Her rehearsals of Fly’s demise usually involve car accidents; the idiots on the road when her nonchalant child crosses the street daydreaming or worse – with white buds in his ears. Occasionally, those dark imaginings involve Fly being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Outside a pub when a fight breaks out, that kind of thing. Innocence rolled into violence.
Not this. She hadn’t foreseen this.
She had become accustomed to feeling about the contours of her love, feeling for areas of danger. She talked to Ellie about it and Ellie said she did the same with Solly: imagined him tottering drunkenly into a road or drowning in an ornamental pond. Ellie said she feared pushing her buggy in the park towards a dog of unknown provenance, pit bull on a string, which might attack Solly’s beautiful face. It was a reminder to be vigilant, Ellie said. Danger was everywhere. Manon wondered if her fears contained something darker, some element of maternal ambivalence.