Manon has followed the paths that tickle into the woodland along Hinchingbrooke Park Road, inching along and arguing with herself because she cannot keep her thoughts fixed. They skitter from Ellie and the secrets she keeps, to Fly in Arlidge House, and then having to go back and do that stretch of tarmac again. And then to her body. She needs food and sleep, neither of which is in plentiful supply. Her feet and hands are cold; the wind whips about her face. The baby pushes and squirms; pelvis under strain. She longs to sit down.
Keep your mind on the blood, she tells herself. Will she even see it, on grey tarmac, three weeks after the murder? She tries to recall how much it has rained since Jon-Oliver’s body was found. She is nearing the Brampton Road. She goes back a yard – she hasn’t been concentrating on the tarmac, she’s been thinking about Fly. A car without a silencer on its exhaust roars insolently past her, and she’s infuriated by it, wants to shout ‘Wanker!’ just as she feels her handbag vibrating. Mark Talbot.
‘Mark,’ she says, breathless.
‘Found anything?’
‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘Think I’ve become blood-drip blind.’
‘Why don’t you head home? I’ll take over.’
‘Are you sure? I’ve got an appointment actually at the hospital. Also, I’ve been thinking. We have to find the girl in the picture – the blonde. She’ll be a jilted ex, from what Ellie says about Jon-Oliver. Plenty of motive.’
‘Dunno,’ he says. ‘Something about that photo doesn’t smell right. I mean, if you were going to carry a photo of your loved one—’
‘I haven’t got a loved one,’ says Manon. ‘Partner,’ she corrects, realising Fly is her loved one. ‘I mean I haven’t got a partner.’
‘Right, but if you did, you’d carry a little picture in your wallet – I mean if you were going to carry anything at all. Most people don’t any more – they have photos on their phones. They have screen savers.’
She wonders what photos Mark Talbot carries – a glossy brunette wife, freckled and makeup free, two lovely children. A dog, perhaps. He’s never said.
‘What are you saying?’
‘It’s just the photo – a four-by-six photo. Seems a bit … planted to me. Odd. I’m wondering if he had it for some other reason.’
She passes the dressing-gowned smokers in wheelchairs and the slipper-shufflers trailing their catheters outside the double doors to Hinchingbrooke Hospital. NHS staff, Manon finds, are often brisk-cheery-busy. Perhaps it’s the simple pleasure of being purposeful – the job of making life better for other people. Wasn’t this why she joined the police? And when she’s on the cold cases – which Harriet had told her she’d hate – she has a satisfying sense of being needed. So many mums, dads, sisters and brothers, stranded in a state of not knowing, so that mourning can’t begin. The perpetual dusk of postponed grief. When she visits them to ask questions, they fall on her with needy gaze, wanting to revisit with a stranger the only thing that occupies their mind.
She walks down squeaky reflective corridors, through over-ripe smells of hospital food, looking up for signs to the ante-natal department. She couldn’t be less interested in this baby and she wonders if it can tell. Can a foetus pick up on maternal ambivalence in utero? She has seen posters saying stress is bad for babies and thought, what could induce more stress than DON’T FEEL STRESS IT HARMS YOUR BABY. Besides, she’s not sure she believes in ‘stress’ entirely. Surely turbulence is the ordinary rhythm of life?
In the corner of her eye, halfway down a corridor to her right, she sees a familiar figure – perhaps it’s Ellie’s stance that draws her. Her sister is leaning on a door frame, her arms folded, chatting to someone. Manon smiles, walking towards her, but when Ellie spots her, she straightens and frowns. There is a man with his back to Manon, an arm high on the door’s architrave. He’s leaning over Ellie, as someone might at a house party. You will always find him in the kitchen at parties. He turns to discover what Ellie is frowning at.
‘Boss,’ says Manon, wrong-footed. ‘I didn’t know you knew each other.’
‘Knee trouble,’ says Gary Stanton, patting his. ‘Your sister is taking very good care of me.’
Manon says, ‘Oh, right. You never mentioned it, Ellie.’
Ellie shrugs.
‘Right, well, I’ve got a scan so …’ And she turns away from them.
‘Everything been feeling all right?’ the sonographer asks briskly. ‘Bit of a cold feeling now,’ she says as she squeezes jelly onto the bump. ‘Lots of kicking?’
‘Yes, everything’s fine,’ says Manon, her mind like a jumping bean. She has to forcibly stop herself leaping off the bed with all the activity in her brain. Let’s just get this over with, she thinks, yet she hopes the sight of the baby might calm her into feeling a connection.
Fear also.
What will the sonographer find, as she sweeps her rounded joystick over Manon’s skin. A reptile? An alien? Two heads – one of them Gary Stanton’s, the other Ellie’s?
A grainy black and white image appears on the screen.
‘So everything looks good,’ says the sonographer, lining up measurement points on her screen. The baby is hammock-shaped, curled over its own protruding stomach. Giant-headed. An unfurling bean. Manon feels … curiosity. A scientific type of interest: so this is how new people are made. A perilous path – cells migrating, limbs lengthening – that miraculously goes right more than it goes wrong. Nevertheless, there is a gap, between the picture on the screen and the watery tugs and pushes inside her body. Is she supposed to feel love?
She can feel her phone vibrating inside her handbag.
‘Sorry,’ she says, without moving but digging into her bag. ‘I just have to … Mark?’
‘I’ve found something,’ he says. His voice is urgent, excited.
‘What?’
‘I think I’ve found one or two spots, on the steps down to the station.’
‘The station? But that’s a long way from the scene. Are you sure they’re related?’
‘Nope, we’ll have to get forensics out. But there’s a chance it’s Ross’s blood. And if it is, it’s a game changer.’
‘I’ll be right there, OK?’
‘Aren’t you having a scan?’
She cups a hand over the phone, saying to the sonographer, ‘Everything’s broadly OK, isn’t it?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘So I can get up?’
‘Yes,’ the sonographer says, as Manon takes some paper towels, wipes the jelly from her bump and heaves herself upright. ‘You don’t want to know the sex?’
‘Not really,’ Manon says. She is halfway out the door, doing up her trousers.
‘Photo?’ the sonographer calls after her but she is too far away to reply.
She waddles towards him, shifting her handbag from one shoulder to the other. He hasn’t looked up from the step he is examining. He is making notes in a pad. A gust of wind blows his forelock over his glasses and as he pushes it away, he sees her.
‘Here,’ he says, pointing. ‘There’s one blood drip here, and then another right on the other side over … here.’ He has descended a couple of steps. ‘And then a third, over on this side again.’
She looks out across the car park, the rows upon rows of commuters’ cars lined up outside the train station. ‘What brought you all the way over here?’