‘Just seems the ultimate selfishness.’
‘Don’t pile that on yourself,’ says Bri. ‘Did you know, rates of post-natal depression are way higher with IVF babies? The pressure to love every minute. S’just not possible.’
Manon sniffs. Nods.
‘Let’s get Fly out, shall we?’ says Bri, coming to sit at the table with Manon. ‘Who have you instructed?’
‘Mark Talbot.’
‘Good, he’s good. Why haven’t you been signed off work?’
‘I have, but I’m not having it – what good would it do? I need to be on the ground. I need to stay close to the investigation as far as they’ll let me.’
‘Which isn’t very far I’d imagine. Look, sorry about this, but it’s gone a bit quiet upstairs. Better check on the kids, make sure they’re not necking Calpol or something.’
Manon is pricked by irrational hurt, the child being left in her hour of need.
‘You have all these pleasures to come,’ Bryony says. ‘Not being able to finish a sentence, like ever.’
Fuck’s sake, thinks Manon, and patronise me as well why don’t you? Bryony nods at the pile of cardboard files she’s deposited on the dresser. ‘No peeking at my paperwork, otherwise I’ll be in deep shit, all right?’
‘No, fine,’ says Manon, barely listening. She has picked up a spiky crust from the table and is pressing it between her fingers, feeling it crumble onto the tractor oilcloth.
‘Manon?’ Bryony says. Manon looks up to where Bri has turned in the doorway. ‘I’m serious. No looking at my files, you know that, right?’
Manon frowns at her. They have worked together for years and know about one another’s work. Why is Bri emphasising the confidential aspect of her files? ‘Yes, all right, I think I’ve grasped it,’ Manon says, wondering what Bri is trying to tell her.
‘I’ll be a while upstairs. Make yourself a drink or whatever.’
Bryony gently closes the door on the kitchen and Manon rises, approaches the dresser. There on top of the pile is a denim blue folder, stuck with a white adhesive label on which has been printed: Fly Dent, Case file, followed by various dates and reference numbers.
It is a slim dossier in Manon’s shaking hand, too early in the investigation to encompass the 3,000-odd pages that will eventually be served in court. Just an OIC report, the case summary sent to the CPS along with the bare bones of the evidence they have at this stage. Manon takes out her phone and photographs every page: witness statements, pathology reports, paperwork familiar to her and yet her hand shakes as the phone’s camera attempts to focus. Click after click after click. It’s not illegal, exactly, but Bri is laying her job on the line. They must use this on the quiet. Manon doesn’t waste time reading. She closes the file and lets herself silently out of Bryony’s house.
Out in her car, she is forwarding image upon image to Mark. He calls her in the midst of it.
‘How are you getting all this?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Have you done something illegal?’
‘Look, we can make a start. This means we can start knocking down their case.’
‘Will I be disbarred for using this material?’
‘Who’s going to know? We get served this stuff eventually. We’re just seeing it six weeks early, is all.’
He pauses on the line.
‘Give me a chance to read it all and I’ll come back to you.’
Evening. Her head back on the armchair, case files spread across her knees. Sleep threatens to overcome her, but only briefly. She knows that, come 4 a.m., she’ll be working at the knot again.
She has never been a solid sleeper but her broken nights have worsened with age. She’s sure she should accept them, but the exhaustion mounts and makes the days harder. In ordinary times, her thoughts would churn like washing in the machine: mundane rotations, domestic in theme but with morsels of self-recrimination.
Put salt in the dishwasher.
Bring up Fly better.
Eat less. Detox. Get into interesting salads.
Send Internet purchase back via post office. Remember to get receipt.
Stop buying cheap tops on the Internet. (Often, she would text Bryony an image of said top with the words ‘Nice?/Not nice?’ And Bryony would invariably try to dissuade her – ‘Hot flush waiting to happen’ or ‘SAME AS EVERY OTHER TOP YOU OWN’.)
Stop eating, stop fucking eating, Jesus, and bring up Fly better.
Get Fly more books, go and see Fly’s teachers.
Stop Fly and Solly watching so much television, as this only creates window in which to buy cheap tops on the Internet.
Become Zumba instructor?
On and on and on until she falls into a deep sleep seemingly moments before her alarm goes off and then digging herself out of bed is like the exhumation of a corpse.
Not tonight. Tonight she’ll be nostalgic for the petty recriminations of the past. She hears Ellie enter the room and raises her head. Ellie has on her woollen coat, buttoned up, and a thick red scarf about her neck which has brought out the flush in her cheeks. She carries a black leather handbag gathered in folds at the clasp.
‘All right?’ says Ellie, breathless.
Manon doesn’t reply.
‘How’s Fly? Is he in Arlidge House? I was wondering if I could take Solly in to see him. D’you think they’d let me?’
Manon doesn’t reply.
‘Solly give you any trouble tonight?’
‘Solly’s not the problem.’
Ellie looks nervous. Manon knows she can make people tense – that it is her specialist skill. She contains ruthlessness.
Ellie has unwound her scarf and is squeezing it on her knee with her fist. Manon frowns at her. Sometimes, she thinks, the people she hates most are the ones who deny their ruthlessness. They view themselves as blameless in all turbulence, thinking they can’t be cold. Forgetting, for example, a seven-hour hole in their alibi.
‘How did Jon-Oliver have Fly’s number?’ Manon asks.
‘I wondered that. I guess he must have got it off my phone when I was out of the room.’
Manon nods. Then frowns.
‘Isn’t your phone passcode locked?’
‘Well, either he knew the passcode – maybe I told it to him, I can’t remember – or he got it off my phone just after I’d used it, y’know, before it’d re-locked itself,’ she says.
‘How could he send Fly those horrible texts? They’re horrible. He’s mean and nasty, telling Fly to get lost.’ She’s aware she’s saying this to Ellie as if she’s sent the texts. Manon is finding it hard to separate Jon-Oliver from Ellie. She’s finding it hard not to attack Ellie.
‘I haven’t read them,’ Ellie says. ‘He wasn’t a very nice man.’
Ellie still wears her coat. She’s perched on the edge of the sofa, as if she’d like the option to make a run for it.
‘I’m just wondering,’ says Manon, ‘where you were for seven hours on the night Jon-Oliver was murdered.’
‘I don’t have to tell you.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘I was with a man, OK? I was with a man and I don’t have to tell you about it. I have a right to a private life.’
‘It might have a bearing on the case.’