This is more complex even than that: her son contains mysteries, corners into which she cannot shine a light. He is a closed, separate person. You have a child, you hold him close and he becomes an unknown quantity, a dark taciturn presence in your house.
Sleep chased away by her attempts, over and over, to reality-test what she knows about Fly versus what she knows about her colleagues and the procedures of the police – the burdens of proof necessary to arrest and charge. If they didn’t have evidence, he wouldn’t be locked up. The CPS wouldn’t agree to charge him. Who is her enemy, his offence or her office? Where is she supposed to draw the lines so that she might act? Harriet has shown her evidence of how little she knows about her son. She closes her eyes and thinks back to their Friday nights in Kilburn – the pretend naughtiness of those evenings, when they would come home from school and work, both excitable, shiny-eyed, impromptu hugs, ‘It’s Friiiiiday! Woo-hooo!’, dancing around the kitchen to some Taylor Swift song.
Beloved days when Fly was free to be silly – what joy – performing some ridiculous dance which involved shoulder shrugging and eyebrow raising. They would venture out to the multiplex on the Finchley Road, and for something to eat at Nando’s or Pizza Express. When they got home they would watch a chat show on TV, unwilling for the pleasures of Friday night to end. Why did she rip him away from all that?
She opens her eyes. She has to turn in the bed, so the baby she no longer wants won’t press too hard on her organs. She tells herself to calm down because her breathing is starting to feel shallow, as if there isn’t enough breath to gasp.
Truth is, Fly’s secrecy was mounting, even then back in Kilburn – accompanying his advance into adolescence. He was self-contained in a way no child should be. On Saturday mornings she would hear the washing machine on at 9 a.m. – his charlady act in full swing.
‘I can do your laundry,’ she said to him on more than one occasion.
‘Why should you?’ Fly said.
She wanted to shout, because that’s what people who love each other do – they intertwine, like the embrace of dirty tops in the basket, over and about themselves. They take each other for granted, messily. This tidying of himself and his needs saddened her.
She turns in the bed again. The baby seems to be awake, squirming and pushing on her bladder.
Fly will have a bed, at least – his own room in Arlidge House – while they sit out the interminable wait for disclosure. Eight weeks minimum, perhaps twelve, before they can look at the evidence and interrogate it, offering alternative explanations, hiring their own expert witnesses to tell the court the Crown is wrong.
Fly will have meals, she tells herself. He can survive. All he has to do is keep it together until she can investigate, as she has investigated so many other cases.
He must not make any sudden moves, not allow his anger to get the better of him, not make a noose from the sheets, not take any of the razor blades that will certainly pass under his door. She hopes he can withstand the feeling that the world is accusing him. She is less sure she can withstand the oscillation in her mind, or the waiting, because what if the end point is Fly with a knife in his hand? What if the end point is one child in prison while another is wailing in her arms?
She thinks of Fly’s empty room at their house, turned over now – drawers open, clothes taken, books flipped through. She thinks of Solly, who before having his head turned by the potent glamour of 5-year-old Bobby, would run to the door every time it opened, saying ‘Fi?’
Her belly creaks like the timbers of an old ship, the baby saying, I am inexorable. She finds it hard to remember the yearning she felt for her own biological child, like the missing square in a tile puzzle: the space that haunted the picture.
She sees this was the gap that allowed the other tiles in their arrangement to move. Now they are stuck in their allocated slots. She should have left it at that – a spacious, unfulfilled longing. Isn’t everyone haunted by a child they don’t have? The window of fertility missed or deliberately passed by. The wished-for girl in a house full of boys. The dreamy baby when the older ones have gone to school. Shouldn’t she have accepted her melancholic thoughts about unborn children, instead of acting on them?
At 4 a.m. she unpeels her eyelids. Like a zombie, arms outstretched for the door, she shuffles across the room only to find her palms against blank wall. She’s forgotten that she isn’t at home, the landscape of this house unfamiliar. On the toilet, she knows she won’t get back to sleep for a couple of hours. This gnawing time – whatever she’s working on, whatever’s misaligned in her universe, these are the hours when she’ll go at it like a knot she’s working loose, like a pebble she can’t stop fingering in her pocket. Paddy Driscoe. What’s he been doing with Paddy Driscoe? Has Driscoe taken advantage of Fly, treated him not as the 12-year-old he is, but as an adult?
Fly’s phone … if she could just call one or two of his London friends, they might know what the Paddy Driscoe angle is. But his phone will be zip-locked in an evidence bag; besides which, she always treated his friends with barely concealed suspicion. Or one of her old informants from her days at Kilburn CID? She arrested her fair share of dealers – not that they’d feel they owe her anything, especially not now that it isn’t her beat. Harriet’s probably sitting on Paddy Driscoe’s number, yet a wall has gone up between Manon and ‘them’. They are set in opposition, when they’ve always been on the same side. She could search the criminal intelligence database when she’s back in the office, but she’d be breaking every protocol about interfering with Fly’s case. The search would show up on her computer and she could be sacked for it.
She must get to Paddy Driscoe.
Day 16
30 December
Davy
Davy squints up through the top of his passenger window, needing a glimpse of sky if he is to breathe, but all he is met with is a heavy lid of porridge-coloured cloud, which seems to press down on the roof of their panda car.
His arm is aching.
He’s been holding it in the same position, out from his body, his hand resting on the central back seat, for a while now. Handcuffed to that hand, is Fly’s: daintier than his own, black at the knuckles, his neat nails peach-coloured and matt with pale half-moons. Fly, too, is looking out of his window so that he and Davy form a parting V. Davy can feel the vibrations of Fly’s emotion through the cuffs, like the tugs of an insect caught in a web.
Perhaps it’s the valet air-freshener that’s making Davy feel sick. He feels a judder through his arm and turns to look at Fly; sees the boy’s shoulders going with his tears.
‘Are you all right?’ Davy asks.
Fly turns to him, his eyes huge, lips trembling. ‘I want my mum,’ he says.
‘You’ll be all right,’ says Davy. ‘Won’t be as bad as you think.’