‘Oh come on, there’s no need to be like that. You can see why I had to do it. I needed you to listen.’
Birdie is trying to give her a stern look, similar to the one Nanny Fielding used to give her when she was a girl – opprobrium with just a twinkle of forgiveness in it. This police officer is proving to be more trouble than she’s worth. And the pregnancy – well, that’s all anyone needs in the current situation. Not only will it make her less nimble on her feet (though to look at her, was she ever nimble?) but Birdie has always found pregnant women to be overtly pleased with themselves. Oh yes, let’s all admire your sodding fecundity. She has done all this – the imprisoning, the confession – on a whim. Misguidedly perhaps.
‘Anything you do say may be given in evidence,’ Manon is saying.
‘Shhhh,’ Birdie hisses. ‘Listen.’ She is frozen, a finger pointing upwards.
Manon stops, listens. She can hear movement downstairs.
‘Someone’s in the shop,’ Manon says.
‘I locked the shop,’ Birdie whispers.
The footsteps are audibly on the stairs heading up to the flat’s front door.
‘Through here,’ Birdie whispers. She is making for the kitchen where she pulls up the sash window and straddles the window sill. Birdie has climbed out onto a metal fire escape clamped to the exterior of the building. ‘Come on,’ she hisses at Manon.
The outside air is freezing after the old-age-pensioner dry heat of the flat. Manon swings her legs over the sill, onto the fire escape with Birdie, who closes the sash and pulls Manon’s body away from the window and against the brick wall, out of sight. Birdie has a finger to her lips.
Manon wonders if she’s being played for a fool again. Is she going to push me off the fire escape? All the king’s horses and all the king’s men.
They are pinned to the wall. The great swag of cloud above them vibrates with thunder and the rain comes down in sheets. Manon inches her head forward to peer in through the kitchen window. Water is bouncing off the metal of the fire escape, off her head. She sees the edge of a brown leather jacket, the back of a bald head, an earpiece.
‘Tur ir nekas,’ the man says, or something that sounds like that. Russian or an Eastern European language?
She hears objects clatter to the floor. Are they emptying drawers? A search for something, a ransacking of Birdie’s flat.
Manon’s teeth are chattering, water pouring down her temples. She wonders how much more her poor body can take. How have these people got in? Did they have a key?
She glances at Birdie – her big glasses, like two Seventies television screens, steamed and spattered. Her hair is bedraggled, stuck to her forehead. Manon can taste the rain running into her mouth. What if Birdie and Angel are right? What if dark forces are at work and Fly is the collateral damage?
Birdie pulls her cardigan ineffectually across her bosom, the drops sitting atop its synthetic yarn like mercury. She’s certain she locked the shop, locked the back door. How have they got inside her flat? And what do they want? She pictures the USB key, still sewn into the hem of Angel’s coat.
She and Manon dare not speak. Birdie fears they are going to freeze out here on the fire escape. Or slide away, like human dinghies over the edge of a metal waterfall. A helicopter hovers loudly overhead, treading water in the clouds above them. Deafening. Are helicopters supposed to be up in storms?
‘Think they’ve gone,’ Manon whispers.
They crane their necks slowly. The flat looks like it’s been burgled. Kitchen drawers upturned, cutlery and utensils across the floor. Emboldened, they stand at the closed window for minutes, taking in the ransacking of Birdie’s flat. ‘They’ – whoever they are – have turned the place upside down.
Eventually, they muster the courage to lift the sash – a brutally loud noise.
No one comes for them.
Encouraged, they clamber in through the window.
They stand and look.
‘Loving what they’ve done with the place,’ says Birdie.
Manon rubs Birdie’s shoulder. ‘Won’t take us long to clear it up.’
There is much shaking down, fetching of towels, sloughing off outer layers. Gas fire lit. The guttural noises which accompany coming in from the cold: brrrr, and ooof, and aaaaagh. Birdie checks various rooms in the flat.
‘You know what they’ve taken?’ she says to Manon. ‘The Carlton Mayfair toiletries. Now why would they do that? What would a bunch of gangsters want with some shower gel and shampoo miniatures? Didn’t take her Crème de la Mer, mind. Just the hotel stuff. And why now? Why didn’t they take it when they pushed her down the stairs?’
‘Well, we don’t know she was pushed down the stairs,’ says Manon. ‘But also, if you want it to look like an accident, best not to ransack the flat at the same time.’
Birdie slides the chain across the front door and then feels along the hem of Angel’s coat. The tiny lighter-shaped rectangle is still there. She pushes her nose into the folds of fabric, closes her eyes. It smells of her perfume – citrussy – but mixed with Angel’s personal smell, the one which arises from the cells of a person’s skin and which is unlike anyone else’s. Birdie reminds herself – forcefully, like sticking a pin in her own hand – that she will never see Angel again.
‘Are you all right?’ Manon asks, recognising the look on Birdie’s face. She remembers those moments of coming up against death and having to shock yourself with the permanence of it. The hollow sensation of actively loving a person who cannot love you back because they are dead. And wondering who you are, if the you who was loved by them isn’t being loved by them any more.
All the hug-less years since she died. Manon’s mother was the person she most wanted in the world, the person who held Manon’s happiness and security in her hands – the person she wanted never, ever to die. And she died first, when Manon had taken on the physical form of a young woman but was deeply, needfully, a child – just 14. Manon wearing terrible, wobbly eyeliner. Manon slamming doors. Manon in the throes of hating her mother, in a state of constant criticism of the woman her mother was, the type of woman Manon would never be.
In the midst of Manon’s ordinary tussle of love and hate, her opponent died. If she could only tell her, now, how happy she is to have inherited so much. And yet her mother frowned on overblown emoting. She could show affection via a casserole or a Lemsip but not in speech or with direct eye contact. In fact, if Manon is really honest about it, she can recall all the unrequited feelings that bounced off her mother’s blank wall, the way she found Manon a bit much. Histrionic. ‘Oh do stop exaggerating.’
‘They weren’t speaking English,’ she says to Birdie. ‘Sounded like Russian to me – or Eastern European.’
Birdie is ripping at the hem of a coat hanging by the front door.