Anyway, all his monied private-school-educated guilt is being launched in her and Fly’s service. He has shaken his head in disgust at the memory of the Thompson and Venables case – the youngest murderers in British criminal history; the 1993 trial in which two 10-year-olds were convicted of killing a toddler; the way the public, supported by the tabloids, bayed for their blood forgetting they were children. Thompson and Venables continue to be in danger from vigilantes twenty-five years on.
Mark has used the term ‘institutionally racist’ on more than one occasion to describe the police and she has flinched, thinking of Harriet, Davy and Kim and feeling that the wrongs Fly is now suffering are probably more shabbily accidental than that. She might even be wrong about Gary Stanton and Ellie. Shagging a key witness is sackable, after all – the very essence of gross misconduct for a police officer. Stanton – who is not only married but within sniffing distance of a very sizeable pension – would not be so stupid.
No, there are no conspiracies. There is only bad luck and the very variable abilities of human beings, be they teachers, doctors or police officers. So many brainy detectives in books and on telly, and yet a great number of the officers she’s come across in twenty years in the force are, frankly, challenged in the deducing department.
Mark told her people consistently mistake black kids for being older than they are by about four years. ‘They don’t afford a black boy the same presumption of innocence or the same need for protection as they do white boys.’
She knows this from experience rather than from any study and she feels it sadly, rather than as a lefty crusade, as he seems to. She cannot change this difficulty for Fly, the way the world mistakes him time and again. How fraught with peril life will be for him. All she wants is for him to survive despite it and prosper. She’d had to have ‘the conversation’ with him, back in London, when he was repeatedly being stopped and searched: her sermon on how to behave with the police. Don’t get their backs up, don’t disagree, don’t be impolite, don’t question their authority. And she’d thought, as she said it, that what she was really saying was, ‘You cannot be fully yourself in this situation. You must reduce yourself, because the justice system that protects me is a risk to you.’
After that chat, after he had gone to sleep, she’d crept into his room and kissed him at the temple.
Yes, it is the prospect of cracking this one that is turning her head in Mark Talbot’s direction, nothing more, though sometimes he smiles at her in a way that seems keen. (She feels guilty even thinking this; even more so at how exciting the thought is.)
When the car park CCTV comes in, they will see the real killer and she can march into MCU to Harriet and Stanton and say, ‘What about this then? This knife-wielding lowlife jogging down the station steps to board a train? Huh?’ She can hardly wait.
Ellie comes in to make a cup of tea. She’s been watching television in the lounge.
‘How’s it going?’ she asks.
‘Fine,’ Manon says.
Above the surge of the kettle, Manon hears Mark’s mobile ringing beyond the glass, watches him stoop over it, looking at the ground; talking while the smoke escapes his mouth in a white river. She must not fall for this do-gooder, whose personal life is after all a mystery. What she must remember is that people like herself and Mark Talbot – people in their forties – have Heathrow-sized carousels of baggage. They have weathered too much disappointment. Bad sex, illness, less money than they ever thought possible. Verily the tawdry Bagpusses of disappointed dreams.
She is kicked in the bladder by the baby, just in case she’s forgotten this small but mighty impediment to her allure. And what will this baby leave behind once it has made use of her flesh? Ellie, who is now padding out of the room with her tea, had jiggled the empty sacks of her own breasts in front of the mirror, allowed them to fall like deflated balloons and said, ‘They don’t tell you about this on the breastfeeding posters.’ In a bid to keep hope alive, Manon sometimes clicks on Internet articles about women who get ‘the best body they’ve ever had’ in their forties (there is still time), having taken up radical exercise or some kind of raw-food juicing diet, and are grinning with maniacal intent, like they’ve just had an enema and all the bile from their recent divorce has shot out of their anus. ‘As a special treat, I have six grapes on the weekend!’
Most of us, she thinks now, observing Mark Talbot’s rotund middle and finding him no less winning for it, are carrying extra pounds which are hard to shift or lift, even in the service of humping.
Stop thinking about humping.
Pens in a Tupperware box, several with their lids missing, some with fabric nibs fraying where Solly has pressed too hard. She watches Mark take one, lacing it between his fingers as he rolls out a truculent piece of white card, pushing the dome down. He tries to make a sweeping line across the white but the pen he has chosen, a dark teal, is all dried out. His line is a whisper.
‘Try this one,’ she says, handing him a navy, and in the attempt to be quick and elegant about it she drops the pen and his outstretched arm brushes the underside of her left breast.
Oh the agony of it all.
The navy is strong and dark. He draws Hinchingbrooke Park Road, the scrubland opposite Fly’s school where Jon-Oliver’s body was found, the footpath and the blood drips on the footpath. Then the sweep of Brampton Road, the underpass, the steps down to the station car park and the blood drips found there. Soon the station CCTV will come in, she will be able to iron out this current wrinkle, and things can return to normal. She will have Fly home and she will make it up to him with an excess of top-quality mothering.
‘Hang on,’ she says. ‘Why’ve you got three blood drips on the footpath? I thought there were only two.’ She is frowning at his triangulation of Xs.
‘This one here,’ he says, circling the X on the left-hand side of the footpath, close to the body, ‘doesn’t fit with their theory because Fly didn’t walk over it. So my guess is, it’ll be left off disclosure when the paperwork has been properly sorted. But because this isn’t proper disclosure, it’s just the case file, it’s currently still in there. At trial, we’ll need it to look as if we found out about it through painstaking trawling through secondary disclosure, right? Anyway, Fly would’ve been weaving all over the place to go from this blood spot over to this one.’
Her first thought is, it’s not going to get to trial, she won’t let it.
Her second thought is, he’s right about disclosure – about the omissions and obfuscation, the way the defence is left to wade through secondary disclosure – hours and hours of CCTV deemed not to be relevant, sheafs of documents, all of it taking time (and money) and containing clues, often. How many times has she made decisions about what evidence is pertinent and what needs to be disclosed to the defence?
How often are we selective in life, she thinks now, looking at Mark Talbot – selective in what we reveal to friends (‘the holiday was bliss’) or loved ones (‘it didn’t cost that much’/‘I was held up at work’). How often are we selective in what we take as proof of reality? We choose. We are all constructing a prosecution case in one way or another.