She lifts up the USB key, saying, ‘This is what they were after.’
They work slowly and mostly in silence, replacing whisks and peelers in drawers, folding tea towels, winding tights, restoring toiletries to an upright position in the bathroom cabinet. Except when Birdie says, ‘You’re not going to arrest me then?’ To which Manon says, ‘That can wait.’
When they have the flat back in some semblance of order, Birdie microwaves two macaroni-cheese ready meals to a scalding temperature. Manon blows at a gloopy white tube and asks if she might stay the night. ‘I can’t go home now, it’s too late.’ She doesn’t mention that she’s on the brink of physical collapse.
‘Yes, righto,’ says Birdie. ‘I’ll just put out a hand towel.’
Manon asks to borrow a mobile charger so she can call Mark, but inevitably it’s the wrong kind. She wants to let him know she’s all right but realises she doesn’t know his phone number: it’s programmed in, not memorised. On Birdie’s phone, she tries her and Ellie’s landline, knowing that they never pick it up – it’s only ever a relative or a computer banging on about mis-sold PPI. Sure enough, it rings out. She can’t remember Davy’s number.
She will solve this problem tomorrow. For now, all she can do is answer her body’s urgent request for sleep.
Day 28
11 January
Davy
On the Victoria Line to Seven Sisters, he takes in adverts saying Tired of Being Tired?
He looks from the ad to the commuters, grey-faced with ennui, and wonders if anyone looks at that ad and thinks, not me!
He might be tired but he cannot be lured by the ad saying Hello Flexible Working because he loves his job, even with the pressure and the politics; Stanton behaving erratically, Harriet holding the line while fudging it, as all middle managers do, and Manon his touchstone, on the outside of this one. She would break it open, expose the nut. Perhaps she still can. And he thinks about phoning her when he surfaces, to tell her where he’s going. It would be back-up of sorts. Slow, ambling back-up.
He waited around most of the day, sitting in the Premier Inn bar on his laptop until Kim rang to tell him the ANPR on Carruthers’ taxi tracked it back to Speedy Cars in Seven Sisters on the night of 13 December.
This is where Davy is exiting from the tube station – onto the four-lane Seven Sisters Road. Learn English for ￡30, indoor market, 7-Sisters Appliances, Ria Worldwide Money Transfer.
A really crazy-looking African guy, jittery because he’s on something, is leaning into a pram and bothering the baby inside while the mother looks away, smoking a cigarette. Davy is assaulted by smells from the fish shop, as well as over-ripe fruit, soap, incense. The early-evening sky is slate blue and all the shops are glowing. Mobile phones and luggage.
Davy wonders if he’ll be robbed, yet he is opened up by a surge of curiosity – eyes wide, nostrils sensing. What would it be like to live in this stew of nationalities, all the different foods and smells and languages, instead of among the traffic-less cul-de-sacs of Sapley where all the pensioners are paranoid? He thinks of his mother and how much she’d hate this place, her mouth twisted with suspicion and fear. This thought seems to boost his interest.
Groups of men sit outside cafés, smoking. He hears them greet each other. ‘As-salamu alaykum.’
An Asian lady walks past him carrying two enormous bottles of vegetable oil, each dragging down an arm. An alarming number of shops boast ‘mobile phone unlocking’ in neon.
He turns left on to West Green Road to where Speedy Cars is located, its signage lit up and phone numbers in big lettering around the window, with prices for airport transfers. The lobby smells of tobacco, with a patch of unstuck brown carpet laid on the floor, curling at the edges. Behind a dirty window is an office of sorts. A Middle Eastern man is on the phone.
‘Sixteen pounds. Ten to fifteen minutes, OK?’
Davy waits.
The controller comes off the phone. ‘Can I help you?’ he says.
Davy has his right hand to his jacket inside pocket. He is lifting his badge out, about to flip it open without thinking. He glances to the back of the office room. That’s when he sees him.
Bald, muscled, wearing a bomber jacket. The man from the King’s Cross CCTV. The man who looked at Ross like he was dinner. Davy carefully places his badge back inside his jacket pocket. He scans the ceiling corners. There is a white unit with a glass dome beneath it containing the camera. If he declares himself, the bald guy will make a run for it. Or there’ll be a fight, which Davy won’t win. Both, possibly. Someone will unplug the CCTV hard drive and jump on it, smash it with a hammer, or plunge it into water so that he can’t seize its contents. These people are not going to give up their secrets willingly. He cannot take out his badge.
‘I’ve … sorry, I’ve changed my mind,’ he says, smiling at the controller, and stepping outside onto the pavement.
Hand shaking, he dials 999 on his phone, keeping his voice low but urgent. ‘This is DS Davy Walker, officer 634, Cambridgeshire force. I’m at Speedy Cars at 62 West Green Road, N15. I need to urgently arrest a suspect in connection with a murder. I’m single-crewed and I’ve got no personal protection equipment.’ He tries to prevent the swell in his voice at this. He pictures the woman typing this into the system and it being simultaneously read by control who will probably have dispatched units before he’s even finished speaking. ‘I need urgent back-up, repeat urgent back-up.’
He hangs up, knowing they will come fast, very fast. And they will send lots and lots of units.
He glances in through the lobby of Speedy Cars. All the men have moved to the front of the shop and are staring at him. Some of them whisper to each other. What have they heard of his phone call?
‘How can we help you, my friend?’ says a man, not the controller or the bald man but someone with an expansive smile, who has stepped out to join him on the pavement.
‘Oh, I’m …’ Davy coughs. ‘Fine thanks. Just, waiting for some friends.’
Davy hears sirens a few streets away, decides they might be his, steps back into the lobby and whips out his badge to the man behind the window. ‘I’d like a word with—’ Davy looks about the room for the muscled bald man but he has disappeared. A lot of talk breaks out in languages Davy cannot understand. Over the top of them, Davy says, ‘Where is the bald guy that was there just a minute ago? Where is he? I want to talk to him and I want your CCTV hard drive. Now.’
Then they are awash with blue lights, the road filled with them.
Manon
They wait for the USB key to load on Birdie’s extremely slow Lenovo laptop.
‘Hi,’ she says, pacing Birdie’s living room. She has used a charger purloined from a market-stall owner of Birdie’s acquaintance. ‘It’s me.’
‘Oh thank God,’ he says, ‘I’ve been worried sick.’