‘Have you calmed down yet?’ says the voice from the hall. ‘If you calm down, then I can tell you all about it and I’ll know you’re listening good and proper. Because I’ve been given the brush-off up to now, you see, so I needed to make sure you’d stop and listen. Make yourself comfortable and I can tell you how I first met Angel. I can tell you everything that’s happened up until now.’
Calm, Manon tells herself. Keep calm, listen to the old bint and then I can get out of here. The dart of pain has subsided to a dull throb, so she heaves herself down onto the mattress on the floor, leaning her back against the wall. The sooner this woman tells her what she wants to tell her, the sooner she’ll unlock the door.
‘It started when she was knocked down by a car on the Kilburn High Road, see. I came out just like anyone would – like Nasreen did from the cash and carry – to see what all the tooting and commotion was about …’
Birdie
After that pointless trip to the police station, I popped in at the cash and carry. So when I opened up the shop, my face was mostly behind a huge Walkers Crisps cardboard box. I was balancing the box on one arm while I pushed the keys into the shop door and fell in, dropping the box to the floor. Angel had stopped texting me back at the police station, but I figured maybe she was asleep or watching telly.
I felt for the lights, and they blinked. In the plink-plink on and off of the strip lights I could see snapshots of her body, twisted at the bottom of the stairs, and then the room went dark again. Then light again. Plink, plink. Eyes open, neck snapped. And dark again. My heart went to my feet. Even in those seconds I could see she was dead.
You don’t fall down the stairs and die. You just don’t. When the lights were fully on, I could see there was a pooling of blood around her. Her body was lying the wrong way up, legs higher than her head. As I said, her neck was twisted along the floor. Eyes staring out of her blue-tinged face.
I didn’t move. I got my phone out and dialled 999 and in what felt like an instant, they came, blue lights sweeping the room from out on the street. I was standing stock still, staring at my friend, when an officer grabbed my arm quite roughly and said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind coming with me, while we secure the scene.’
I was 16 when Nanny Fielding died. Her legs were skinny and bowed in the plywood coffin the mortuary used to cart her off. Charlie Chaplin legs.
She had a low walnut sideboard with sliding doors. In it were boxes of chocolates from Christmases gone by. Dark violet creams. Chocolate-covered orange peel, like stubby worms. They had a white bloom from age but they tasted all right. I sat and I ate them all, as if I could have Nanny Fielding inside me. I went downhill after that.
I’d taken her for granted. I hadn’t realised she was the pin that kept my life together, and that without her I would flutter to the floor. I thought Nanny Fielding was a bit of a bore. I didn’t want to sit with her unless the telly was on. I didn’t want to listen to her tales, which were so long and all about the past. Mourning someone is hard work. It’s so hard it brings with it a tiredness you can’t even believe. You keep thinking you can sleep it off but you just get more tired as it goes on. I was blindsided by the guilt. I missed her so much and yet all I could remember were all the times I found her tiresome and decrepit and wondered idly what it would be like if she died, so it was as if I had ushered in her death.
The police got very quickly to work, taking a statement from me, cordoning everywhere off with their yellow and white tape. I was taken up to my flat by a lady officer who insisted I drink tea with sugar in it and who was glancing around for Angel’s stuff. She put me in the lounge, and she went through to the box room, went through her holdall, her toiletries, all her things. I’m guessing that officer took Angel’s phone, because I haven’t been able to find it since. But they didn’t know about the USB key, you see. They didn’t think to look in the seam of her coat.
I kept trying to tell this officer about Titans, and the recent attacks on Angel, but she kept undercutting me, asking how long I’d known ‘the victim’ and what was my relationship with her like, and had there been an argument between us. ‘So you were close, and yet you didn’t know her real name?’ she said. And these hints and inferences, about what Angel and I were, what we did together and meant to each other, seemed to back me into a corner. ‘You were just friends?’ and ‘How long had you been friends?’ ‘You’d only just met and yet you started living together?’ ‘And did she sleep in the spare room or did she share your bedroom?’
They kept me in the flat for hours and hours, told me they didn’t want me to ‘contaminate’ the scene.
‘Is it murder then?’ I asked.
‘We don’t know yet.’
It was the following day before I was allowed back down to the shop. They’d wanted me out altogether, but I told them I had nowhere else I could go, unless they wanted to pay for a B&B and evidently nobody did. So I stayed holed up, upstairs, wondering what was happening to her down there.
Next day, her body had gone. There was just an outline where she had lain, and the stain on the lino. The lady officer told me the body had been taken away for a postmortem to find out the cause of death.
I said, ‘Well, it wasn’t falling down the stairs, was it?’
Manon & Birdie
On the other side of the door, Manon’s bump feels hard, as if braced for something. Braxton Hicks contractions? She asks, ‘Did you call the coroner, find out what the cause of death was?’
‘Oh, you can speak, can you? I was wondering if you’d passed out in there.’
‘I’m still here.’
‘Yes, I rang the coroner. I rang him five or ten times. I rang and rang, I was put on hold, I was played every variation of Vivaldi there is. When I finally got through I was asked, “Are you a relative?” and when I said no, they said, “Then I’m afraid we cannot give out that information.”
‘I said, “She’s dead, who’s it going to hurt?” To which they said, “I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules, I just follow them.”
‘I said, “Well there must be a public record of how someone died. What if she was killed?” And they said, “If there were suspicious circumstances, or concerns raised by the postmortem, the police would investigate.” So over to you, Detective Inspector Smarty Pants, if you’re so clever.’
‘Let me out – let me out before I give birth and we can work something out.’
At last – and it’s been a good couple of hours in the box room – Manon hears the key turning in the lock. She scrambles to get up off the mattress.
There is Birdie, her jailer, in the doorway.
‘Sorry about that,’ Birdie says. ‘Needs must.’
Manon decides not to speak until she is safely out of the box room. She strides for the lounge, taking up her handbag from the sofa. She feels about for her badge.
‘I am arresting you for the false imprisonment of a police officer. You do not have to say anything—’