Lots of looking after him is tiring and difficult. In the early days, Manon cried daily with the exhaustion, the relentless servitude, the boredom, the confinement of their days, but the crying was ordinary. The care of Eddie is punctuated not just by crying (from both of them) but joy. Her son is the most fascinating and the most boring person she has ever met. His milestones bring back Solomon and she and Fly talk about Solly often. They miss his paddies, his effortful repetitions. If anyone needed to learn about dogged persistence in the face of incompetence, they should spend time with a toddler. There is no greater grit than in the short-legged, nappied person who keeps on falling down.
Life is easier without Solly, who required constant supervision of a most tedious kind. It is also easier without Ellie, who fills Manon’s mind with complicated thoughts.
It’s not that she cannot comprehend the idea of what Ellie has done. The idea, at arm’s length, is easy. It’s not as if Ellie turned the knife. And her reaction to Jon-Oliver’s death – her grief, her agitation at seeing Gareth and Branwen Ross – must’ve contained guilt and horror at the loss she had inflicted. Ellie couldn’t offer them Solly because she had harmed them too much. Did Manon balk at Ellie’s ruthlessness? Yes, she was overturned by it.
Recrimination accompanies thoughts of Ellie; her mother’s voice saying, ‘You must look out for your sister.’ Manon had, following their mother’s death, been a surrogate parent protecting Ellie, always told to make allowances. This created in her both rebellion – why should I? – and terrible guilt. She imagines her mother’s horrified face asking how Manon could have allowed all this to happen.
The swirling of guilt and recrimination makes Manon turn away, so that it has become efficacious to her internal world not to think of Ellie at all.
The baby’s tiny fat hand lies on Manon’s other breast, possessively. Recently, he’s begun pulling off – rather painfully taking the nipple with him in his powerful suction-gums – in order to look up at her and smile. Huge gummy mouth, frog-like, eyes filled with delight. It’s as if he is saying thank you for the milk, or something along the lines of ‘Isn’t this nice, we two?’
A flooding, that’s what loving him is like – an inundation, out from her solar plexus to the follicles of her hair.
She hears the door to his room open.
‘Shall I take him?’ Mark says, sleepily, in the doorway.
‘He hasn’t finished yet,’ says Manon.
She hears him turn on the bathroom light down the hall, a little later the toilet flush.
Mark wanted to be with her, and he has never wavered from it. He loves her in fact. How has she pulled off this feat, at 42 and in such haphazard fashion? They barely know each other and yet there is so much.
She’ll probably fuck it up, she thinks, as she sits up and rubs the baby’s back.
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been written without the help of DS Graham McMillan of Cambridgeshire major crime unit – my advisor on all things police-related.
I was also greatly helped by Daniel Burbidge and Mark Ashford, both partners at TV Edwards solicitors in Whitechapel. Where I have played fast and loose with police procedure or criminal justice, this is my doing, not theirs.
Certain events in this book were inspired by a real case in which two young men were falsely accused of stabbing Vitalijs Janovics in Bermondsey in 2011. I am grateful to defence barrister Tim Moloney QC of Doughty Street chambers, and solicitor Lionel Blackman, for talking to me about this case.
Thank you Stuart McWilliam of anti-corruption charity Global Witness for talking to me about shell companies, money laundering and global finance.
Thank you Nicole Toms for talking to me about the pressures and strains of nursing in the NHS.
I learnt about the culture of the City by reading Swimming with Sharks by Joris Luyendijk.
Thank you Susannah Waters for excellent editorial help. Thank you Tom Happold for reading my drafts more times than any reader should have to and for your enduring support.
Thank you Sian Rickett for your valuable insights. Christmas lunch at John Lewis is on me.
Thank you to my editors, Suzie Dooré at The Borough Press in London, and Andrea Walker at Penguin Random House in New York for the best editorial notes in the business and for cheerleading Manon every step of the way.
Last but not least, I would not be doing this without Sarah Ballard at United Agents and Eleanor Jackson at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.