Odd Child Out

by Gilly MacMillan

  “Grand Theft Auto 5. It’s important. It’s better than the other versions. Better optimization, gameplay, graphics.”

  “Speak English, Woodley.”

  “I’m just teasing you, boss. It’s gaming geek speak.”

  “I understood graphics.”

  “One out of three. Could be worse.”

  “You’re making me feel old. Haven’t you got something better to be getting on with?”

  He leaves me with a small salute.

  Fraser takes forever to finish her meeting. As I wait, I toy again with Emma’s card. Each new bit of information we get about these boys colors in a little bit more of their lives for me, and makes me feel as if I know them better, but it also increases my anger about the low-life tactics she’s used to get her story.

  I find an empty meeting room and call her. I want to make it clear how I feel. Whether she’ll listen or not, I don’t know, but I’m going to try.

  The phone rings and rings until I’m certain that I’m going to get her voice mail, and it’s only as I’m clearing my throat and wondering whether I’ll leave a message, and what I want to say if I do, that she answers.

  “Jim.”

  So she didn’t delete my number, then, and that fact whitewashes my brain momentarily, leaving nothing there apart from regret that I thought that I could handle this call. I push on anyway. I’ve got no choice now. I can’t panic and hang up. It would be too humiliating.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “It’s you.”

  “Yes.”

  I want to read her the riot act. I intended to. I want to tell her that what she’s doing is wrong and unethical and to ask how could she? How could she report on crime in our city so recklessly when she knows what that can do to an investigation, to her former colleagues, and most important of all, to people who are guilty of nothing?

  “How are you?”

  She floors me once again with that innocuous question, her tone difficult to read, loading those three words with just enough meaning to bring them beyond the level of small talk, but not enough for me to be sure that she cares.

  “I’m working the case,” I say. “The incident by the canal.”

  Silence.

  “I want you to stop speaking to my witnesses.”

  “You have absolutely no right to tell me what to do.”

  “What you’re doing is wrong. You know it.”

  “How dare you?”

  I don’t even have time to draw breath before she unloads eighteen months’ worth of resentment about how badly I treated her, how she deserved more, how I have no right, absolutely no right at all, to involve myself in her life now.

  “Are you finished?” I ask when she finally runs out of words, because I’m ready to give a piece of my mind right back to her, but I’m saying it to myself because she’s hung up.

  I’m still staring at my phone, working hard to resist the impulse to throw it across the room, when Woodley pokes his head around the door.

  “There you are! The 999 recording has just been emailed to us. Are you all right, boss?”

  “I’m fine. Have you listened to it?”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “If I say I’m fine, I’m sure I’m fine. Have you listened to the recording?”

  “No. They only just sent it, and I was thinking about something else. When we were with Janet Pritchard in the portacabin, she had a phone with a glittery cover. Do you remember?”

  “I do.”

  “But the phone that rang when we were with her at her shop was an iPhone. It had that distinctive ringtone.”

  “New phone?”

  “Or she’s using two phones. One might be a burner. Explains why she didn’t use the Bluetooth in her car if she didn’t want to leave a trace of a burner phone.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud. It could be nothing, but there’s something that’s not sitting quite right with me about her and her partner.”

  “Agreed.”

  We go back to the incident room where Woodley has the link to the recording up on his screen. It sounds just as Janet Pritchard reported it.

  “Hello, emergency service operator, which service do you require?”

  “Ambulance.”

  “I’ll just connect you now.”

  A new operator comes on the line.

  “What’s the nature of your emergency?”

  “Somebody’s fallen in the canal and I don’t know if he can get out.”

  “Where is this happening?”

  “I’m down at Feeder Canal, at the lockups behind Herapath Street.”

  “Are there any distinctive features around you?”

  “They’re in the scrapyard. Hurry!”

  “Thank you. I’ll send somebody along immediately.”

  “The gates are locked.”

  “Thank you. I’ll pass that information on. What is your name, address, and your own phone number?”

  After Janet Pritchard provides her details, I click stop. By then it’s already possible to hear sirens in the distance as she’s speaking. Noah Sadler was lucky the emergency services were so close.

  “Did you hear that at the end?” Woodley says. “Play it again.”

  We listen again, taking turns using the headphones to drown out the background noise of the office, and both of us clearly hear that there’s something else there.

  “It sounds like a third party,” Woodley says when he takes the headphones off, “unless one of the lads has a very deep voice. But I can’t make out what they’re saying.”

  “Do you recall the witness mentioning anybody else?”

  He shakes his head. “She specifically said nobody else was around.”

  “Can you ask somebody to try and isolate it so we can hear it better?”

  “On it.”

  “And tell them I want it today.”

  He’s already on the phone. A raised finger tells me that he’s heard and understood.

  Fraser’s door opens and she shakes the hands of the two men who were meeting with her. Once they’ve gone, she beckons me in.

  “A missing persons alert for Abdi Mahad has gone out as widely as possible,” she tells me as I settle down. “We’ve made no mention of the fact that he’s wanted for questioning. Priority is to treat him as a vulnerable minor.”

  “I think he’s been pretty sheltered.”

  Her expression’s grim. A child at risk will do that to you, and she and I have been in this situation before.

  “We’ll do a televised appeal as well.”

  “I’ve asked Noah Sadler’s family to keep quiet about his death.”

  “Can we trust them to do that?”

  “I think so. I hope so. The mother’s very angry, she wants someone to blame, but she knows it’s in her interest to keep quiet because it means Abdi’s more likely to come home and give us some answers.”

  “Or she could get angry enough to vent all her emotions in the press and screw the case in the process.” Fraser’s mood is one of dark pessimism. I need to tread carefully.

  “I don’t think she will.”

  “But you think she holds this Somali kid responsible?”

  “I think she might do, but it’s a first reaction. It’s her grief speaking. Her husband disagrees with her.”

  “You should have leaned on the boy to talk, Jim.”

  “I know. I played it safe because I didn’t want to be accused of putting too much pressure on him. Every time I saw him he was prostrate and mute. I didn’t know what else to do. And he comes from a loving home. He hasn’t got the profile of a troublemaker.”

  “You could have leaned harder.”

  I try to distract her.

  “I’ve got my hands on a therapy journal that Noah Sadler wrote. There’s a couple of things in it that might be of interest, and I’ll keep digging.”

  “Dig into Abdi’s family and the community also, but discreetly, and le
t’s see if that turns anything up. I don’t think we can avoid it any longer. Witness?”

  “I’ve spoken to her. She said Emma posed as some kind of victim support worker to get her to talk.”

  Fraser’s nostrils flare.

  “The witness said she wouldn’t speak to any more journalists.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent confident, but I’m hopeful. Any news from Janie?”

  I don’t tell Fraser that I’ve just spoken to Emma. It would be an understatement to say that I don’t think she’d appreciate the outcome of that call.

  “She’s spoken to the paper, but I gather that was something of a dead end. She’s pulling together a carefully worded press release about the canal incident. We have to hope nobody links that story with the appeal to find Abdi. I don’t want a manhunt on my hands.”

  She stops banging things around on her desk and points the end of her pen at me.

  “I’m very worried about the welfare of this missing lad, just as you are, and I want him found safely, but don’t avoid taking him seriously as a suspect because you think his mum and dad are nice. Remember, we’re under close scrutiny from all quarters now.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  Woodley knocks on the door. “Sorry to interrupt, but they can look at the recording now, if we want to go up.”

  Fraser flicks her fingers at me in a gesture of dismissal. “Go.”

  I’m expecting a technology den, just like the cliché, a windowless space with overflowing bins and enough wiring to knit a scarf out of. In reality, we find a young, athletic-looking woman in a quiet space on the top floor of the building. She looks very much in control of the tidy suite of monitors in front of her and a healthy potted plant that’s in flower on her desk. If she swiveled her chair around, she’d enjoy a view of some of Bristol’s painted terraces stacked up on a hill in Bedminster like a row of multicolored Monopoly houses.

  First off, she listens to the recording, and then works her keyboard until she’s isolated the sound that we’re interested in.

  At first it’s a noise like two deep coughs in a row, more of an outburst of noise than anything else.

  More tweaking and she’s turned it into two words. She plays it repeatedly and screws up her nose as she concentrates.

  “Sounds like Roger Platts,” she says. “Any idea who Roger Platts is?”

  “No.” Woodley shakes his head and looks at me, but I don’t know either.

  “Can you send it to me?” I say. “That bit of it.”

  “Sure.”

  As we leave, she starts work on another recording, a phone conversation with contents so immediately sickening I wonder how many years anybody can last in that job.

  By late afternoon, Sofia has a ton of responses to her posts about Abdi. Every single person expresses shock and concern. They all promise to keep an eye out for him and to contact others to ask them to do the same. None of them has heard from him since before the weekend.

  One friend writes a long post on Sofia’s Facebook page about a former classmate of theirs who disappeared overnight and traveled to Syria to join the jihad. She had been carefully, comprehensively, and secretly radicalized, and nobody had realized until it was too late.

  Sofia logs off. She knows this isn’t what’s happened to Abdi, or at least she’s ninety-nine percent certain. In her family, they would surely have noticed.

  Nevertheless, she can’t help googling the news report on her old schoolmate, and that inevitably leads to others. She delves into one story after another about good kids around the world who were radicalized and persuaded to flee their new countries to join the jihad, leaving behind desolate loved ones who are reduced to making statements to cameras imploring them to come home, and to hiring mediators to try to extract them from war zones.

  It’s something every parent and sibling in their community fears: a return of a family member to the violence they risked their lives to flee from. It’s an immigrant nightmare. But it’s also very rare, Sofia knows that. Most of her friends have too much sense. It’s the vulnerable kids who get targeted. Though that thought leads her to ask herself, “Was Abdi vulnerable to such things?”

  She’s grateful for the distraction when her phone rings.

  It’s Tim, from the Welcome Center.

  “It’s a bit of a long shot,” he says. “But I asked around and one of my other volunteers, a guy called Dan who was working with Abdi on Friday night, mentioned that Abdi was agitated after your mum fainted and he was asking about a man. Dan hasn’t got a phone at the moment, but apparently he works at Hamilton House on Thursday, so you might find him there if you want to talk to him.”

  Sofia takes the train again. Hamilton House is only a few minutes’ walk from the gallery where Ed Sadler’s exhibition is showing. When she gets there, she climbs the steps at the front of the building and skirts around a Staffordshire terrier that’s tethered to a railing beside a bowl of water. A couple are having a coffee and a cigarette on the narrow outdoor terrace, wrapped up warmly in colorful layers.

  A large Banksy graffiti mural, The Mild Mild West—one of her favorites—is on the side of an adjoining building. The wall opposite has been entirely spray-painted in gold, and a vast mural of Jesus in a loincloth, doing a one-handed handstand, has been painted on it. Sofia has no idea if it’s supposed to mean anything.

  A woman in the ground-floor café directs her to where she can find Dan. On her way she passes yoga classes and artists’ studios and finally finds herself in a large space where chairs have been set up in rows facing a screen. Dan’s in there, fiddling with a projector. Bursts of sound and motion fill the screen for a few seconds before it dies. It’s a black-and-white film.

  He recognizes her. It’s a relief, because she doesn’t know him very well.

  “Hey,” he says. “Sofia?”

  They sit on two chairs at the back of the space.

  “Can you tell me what Abdi said on Friday?”

  “Yeah. I’m really sorry, by the way, that he’s disappeared. I’m sure he’ll be back. He always seems close to you guys, and he’s friends with, like, everyone.”

  Sofia feels herself welling up.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t mean to upset you. After your mum fainted, everybody got her sitting down and brought her stuff. Amina was all over it, making sure she was okay. Your mum was all sort of glazed and nervous and we were thinking about calling for an ambulance, but she totally refused. While she was sitting down, Abdi started looking around the room and asking people if they’d seen a man who had a scar on his top lip. Apparently he was the bloke who was by your mum when she fainted. I don’t know if Abdi felt like the man said something horrible or insulting to her and he wanted to have a go at him. But the man was gone. A couple of people remembered him, but nobody knew who he was. We were so busy that night, it was mad. But I remembered Abdi asking, because it wasn’t like him to be agitated like that. He calmed down pretty quickly after, and Daniella gave them a lift home. Sounds a bit silly now I say it like that. And you came all the way here. But Abdi was looking for a guy, and he didn’t seem like himself.”

  “It’s very helpful, thank you,” Sofia says. “I’m very grateful.”

  “Do you mind if I . . .” Dan gestures to the screen. “The film’s supposed to start in half an hour.”

  He gets up and begins to fiddle with the projector once again. As Sofia stands, it comes to life and she finds herself standing in its glare, black-and-white images playing out over the front of her coat.

  She puts up a hand so she can see her way out of the shaft of light.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “I don’t suppose you want to stay, do you?” he asks.

  “No. I need to go home.”

  “Of course. But come any time. We do film club every Thursday. You’re very welcome. And I hope you find Abdi. I know you will soon. If there’s anything else I can do to help . . .”<
br />
  Downstairs she buys a cup of jasmine tea and takes a table where she has a view of the street life.

  She gets out her phone and looks again at the photo she snapped of the image of the man with the harelip watching football that was on display in the gallery.

  It’s surely too much of a coincidence, she thinks, that the man who caused her mother to faint had a scarred top lip. Does this mean that the man in the photograph is in Bristol? Could that be why Abdi was asking about the photo on the recording? Or is she seeing impossible connections?

  She opens Facebook Messenger. The café has good Wi-Fi.

  She clicks on Abdi’s name and attaches the photograph to a message.

  “What does this mean?” she types below it, and presses send.

  She has no idea if it will get to him, but she prays that somehow it will.

  It’s six P.M. when Woodley and I arrive at the boys’ school to interview Imran Fletcher-Kapoor about his friendship with Noah and Abdi. We’re able to kill two birds with one stone because Alistair Hawkes, the teacher Abdi emailed about his essay and his scholarship concerns, will also be present.

  We meet with the headmistress first, to inform her of Noah’s death, but ask her to keep the news to herself for the time being.

  Once she’s composed herself, she shows us into a meeting room just off the school’s foyer, where Imran’s waiting with his mother and the teacher.

  “Sarah Fletcher,” she says, standing to shake our hands, adding, “I’m a solicitor,” as if we were planning to charge her son instead of chat.

  A man in chinos, a dark jacket, and a club tie introduces himself as Alistair Hawkes.

  Imran’s a fairly slight boy, though I expect he would have dwarfed Noah Sadler. He smiles nicely at us when we’re introduced, but bites his fingernails continuously, except when his mother lays a warning hand on his arm. He wears trendy black-rimmed eyeglasses and glances out of the window frequently and longingly.

  Before I can begin to ask questions, Sarah Fletcher gets in there: “Do you want to tell them in your own words, Imran?”

  He looks at Woodley and me. It’s an assessing glance, which makes me curious as to whether he’s going to cough up about the essay he sold. I think he’s wondering how much we know.