Odd Child Out

by Gilly MacMillan

  “You can tell us anything,” I say. “Everything helps.”

  He looks at his mother. She nods encouragement.

  “Noah Sadler stopped Abdi from being friends with me.”

  The headmistress draws her chin back into her neck and inhales audibly through her nose. It’s a reaction either to the slighting of a boy who can no longer tell his side of the story or to something she considers untrue or perhaps exaggerated. I’m not sure which.

  Sarah Fletcher notices and counterstrikes.

  “We complained about it at the time, but nothing was done.”

  “Can you tell us a bit more?” I ask.

  Imran describes a series of small but slightly unpleasant behaviors that Noah Sadler engaged in when he returned to school after a spell in hospital. They all seemed designed to put an end to a friendship that had developed between Abdi and Imran in Noah’s absence.

  “If you take each incident separately,” his mother says, “they’re little more than a bit of wrangling over friendships, but taken together there’s no question that they constitute low-level bullying.”

  Alistair Hawkes shifts in his seat but says nothing. The headmistress remains tight-lipped and still.

  I’m not too worried about how these things affected Imran, because he looks like a pretty resilient kid to me, but it’s interesting to hear more about the power play that was going on between Noah and Imran for Abdi’s affections. It’s a complicated little triangle.

  “How do you think Abdi felt about it?” I ask.

  “He really hated it, but he felt like he had to look after Noah.”

  “Do you know why he felt that way?”

  “Because nobody else likes Noah.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s quite arrogant. He’s all right if you do what he wants, but he tells his mum if you don’t and she rings school and says you’re bullying him.”

  Alistair Hawkes clears his throat and interjects. “This did happen on one or two occasions.”

  “Did you investigate?”

  “We looked into it, but the behavior was more what we would consider high jinks than bullying. Some parents can be very sensitive to that kind of thing, though, and especially with Noah’s medical history, I think his mother felt that he might suffer more than some of our more robust students. Mr. Jacobson spoke to the boys involved.”

  The big man we interviewed previously, by the squash courts.

  I catch Imran’s eye. “How did Abdi feel about his friendship with Noah? Did he talk about it?”

  He shrugs. “Not really. A bit.”

  “Can you remember what he said?”

  “He said it was intense sometimes.”

  “In what way?”

  “Because Noah was clingy.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Maybe Noah was competitive sometimes.”

  “Competitive over what?”

  “Chess, and sometimes schoolwork.” He looks at his mum. “I didn’t get involved in that.”

  “Were they good friends to each other as well, or is it all competition?”

  “They’re best friends. They make each other laugh. It’s kind of annoying sometimes.”

  “Are you jealous of their friendship?” I’m having to make a conscious effort not to refer to Noah in the past tense.

  Imran shakes his head. “When I started at this school, I wanted to be friends with Abdi, but it wasn’t really worth it when Noah got back from hospital because he made it difficult.”

  “Did you feel cross about that?”

  “A bit at first, but I made new friends.”

  He smiles, and I believe him. He gives the impression of being pretty socially adept. I’m guessing he finds it fairly easy to make friends.

  His mother looks from me to Woodley and back again, and straightens her back.

  “Is that everything? Imran has a karate lesson to get to.”

  “There’s just one more thing I wanted to ask you about, Imran,” I say. “It won’t take a minute and then you can go. You’ve been a brilliant help so far.”

  He relaxes into a Cheshire cat smile, pleased that he’s aced it, sensing freedom.

  “It’s about an essay.”

  The smile falls from his face.

  “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever write an essay and sell it to either Abdi or Noah?”

  A shake of his head, but he’s not an accomplished liar. His eyes dart around the room as he tries to assemble an explanation. His mother slumps back in her seat, looking as if she’s sucking a lemon. There’s no surprise on her face or the faces of the teachers in the room. They all know about this already, just as I thought.

  “I helped Abdi with an essay” is what he comes up with.

  “Can you explain exactly what you mean by help?” I want details.

  “Abdi was behind with his work and he didn’t have time to do the essay.” Imran glances at the staff. “So I helped him.”

  “Once again, how exactly did you help him?”

  He chews a nail. “I wrote the essay for him.”

  “And you were aware of this?” I ask the headmistress.

  “Indeed. We dealt with it according to our procedures, and Imran’s mother was informed.”

  Sarah Fletcher-Kapoor confirms this with a curt nod.

  “Did you do that often?” I ask.

  “Just one time. Abdi was really stressed.”

  “Abdi was offered support with his organization. The incident was dealt with appropriately for each of the boys concerned.” Alistair Hawkes sticks his oar in. With thumb and forefinger, he worries at the corner of a piece of paper that’s protruding from a file on his knee. Discomfort or boredom, it’s hard to tell.

  “Did you inform his parents?” I’m wondering why they didn’t mention it to us.

  “We wrote to them. It was their preferred method of communication because of the language issues.”

  I nod, and think how easy it would have been for Abdi to intercept a letter or mistranslate it for his mother.

  Sarah Fletcher-Kapoor raises her eyebrows at me and draws her handbag onto her knee, signaling that we’ve taken up enough of her time and her son’s.

  “Are we done here? I don’t think Imran has anything else to add.”

  Imran looks at me intently, and for the first time he doesn’t fidget. He knows we’re not finished yet.

  “How much money did you get for the essay, Imran?”

  “What?” his mother says, and the staff sit up straighter—tenser, too. They obviously weren’t aware that Imran was profiting financially from his essay writing.

  “Twenty pounds, thirty pounds? Forty?”

  Imran shakes his head vigorously, but I need him to admit to this. It’s important to know whether Noah was buying favors for Abdi or Abdi was doing it himself. It will tell me where the power lay in the relationship between them.

  Woodley says, “A copy of Grand Theft Auto 5 costs forty quid if you buy it new, I’m guessing, so it had to be in that region. Though if you buy it secondhand from a friend or maybe a sixth former, it could be less.”

  “What do you think, Imran?” I say.

  I think I can spy a little bit of temper behind his eyes, though he’s containing it very effectively. He knows he’s busted, but he gives it one last go anyway.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “Imran doesn’t play violent games,” his mother says. “We would never let him have a game like that.” But as she says the words, I can see the pieces slotting together in her mind. “You sold that essay? You sold an essay so you could buy a copy of a violent computer game without us knowing? Imran! Answer me!”

  I feel a bit sorry for Imran. It wasn’t the nicest thing to do, to catch him out like that, but I get the feeling that he’ll bounce back.

  He’s hanging his head while his mother berates him and the frowns deepen on the teachers’ foreheads,
but I bet his brain is working at a hundred miles per hour to work out how to minimize the damage, and he comes up with a response impressively quickly.

  “I’m really sorry, Mum,” he says. “I did do it, but I hated the game when I tried it. I gave it away. It was horrible. I promise you, I threw it away. I felt ashamed.”

  “Who paid for the essay?” I ask him. “Noah or Abdi?”

  “It was Noah. He bought it for Abdi because Abdi didn’t have the money.”

  Woodley and I leave them in the meeting room shortly afterward.

  “I don’t think Imran’s going to make it to karate tonight,” Woodley says.

  “Very entrepreneurial kid.” I’ll admit I feel a small amount of respect for him. I would never have dared to do anything like that in school.

  “Makes me very glad I didn’t become a teacher,” Woodley says. “Can you imagine listening to all those excuses and lies over and over again?”

  “Sounds a bit like policing.”

  “Okay, yeah, fair point. But at least we can slap a pair of cuffs on them if we catch them, and their mothers don’t get involved. Honestly, what was she like? ‘I’m a solicitor.’” He mimics Sarah Fletcher-Kapoor very well.

  It makes me laugh, so I don’t remind him of Ben Finch’s mother, Rachel, or of Fiona Sadler and Maryam Mahad—all mothers who couldn’t avoid being involved in their sons’ misfortune.

  Brake lights flare around us as we join rush-hour traffic on the way back to HQ.

  I feel as if my picture of Noah Sadler’s personality is sharpening. He was very unwell, desperate for friendship, and smart enough to use all of his resources to keep it. But I wonder if he alienated Abdi with his efforts, or if Abdi enjoyed the attention and the academic help.

  It’s Abdi I find to be the more elusive character. I’m interested to know that he struggled with his studies sometimes, in spite of being very capable. I wonder how much the pressure of achieving got to him or if, as Imran said, this essay incident was a one-off.

  Either way, it doesn’t shed a great deal of clarity on the case. An overprotective friendship could give Abdi a motive to hurt Noah if things had got so intense that he snapped and lost his temper with Noah. But it would be odd for this to happen by the canal, as the location implies a fair amount of planning by the boys to get there.

  My instinct tells me that there was no premeditation here, just an accident. But then what about the witness . . .

  My frustration is building as each bit of information we find seems to put weight on a different side of the scales, balancing the probabilities that either one of the boys was more likely to cause trouble for the other.

  I also know we have only a small window to gather information discreetly. We can’t keep Noah’s death from the public for much longer, and there’s the possibility that when it comes out all hell will break loose.

  “Do you know what?” I say to Woodley. He’s tapping his fingers on the wheel to a tune from the nineties. “It’s just our bloody luck that this case is a media magnet.”

  He glances at me. “You mean after the Ben Finch case?”

  “It’s the last thing I need. They’re going to be crawling all over us as soon as they find out that Noah Sadler’s died. You know that if they can, they’re going to politicize this case because of the boys’ backgrounds, and that includes every bloody move we make. I don’t want to be working in a goldfish bowl again.”

  “Media up every orifice,” he says.

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

  “We’re making progress, boss. It’s all we can do.”

  He’s right. I must hold my nerve. This case is my chance to prove myself again but I can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. “It is,” as my mother would have said, “what it is.” That expression of pragmatism got her up every morning and sent her to bed every night, with everything around her in its rightful place, as she thought it should be. Except for her confidence in herself, which was destroyed so comprehensively by my father that she was never able to put it back together.

  When I finally get home my sister’s plate-eyed in front of the TV again, although the swelling on her face looks better and she’s cooked us a casserole. The only thing ringing alarm bells is that she’s developed a furtive addiction to her phone.

  “Is that him?” I ask as our meal is interrupted for the fourth time by a text arriving.

  “Are you my babysitter now?”

  “I thought you cut contact with him.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  She and I inherited my father’s eyes. Brown gold. A compelling, evasive color. For a second, I feel like I’m looking at him.

  “Becky.”

  “You’re not my babysitter. Let me handle this my own way.”

  She snatches up our empty plates and leaves the room, taking her phone with her.

  I tune in to the late edition of the local news and I’m pleased to see they’re rerunning the TV appeal that went out live at six. Fraser taped it from the steps of Kenneth Steele House while Woodley and I were at the school. It’s another echo of the Ben Finch case, though I was beside her that night.

  She describes Abdi Mahal as “a fifteen-year-old schoolboy of Somali origin.”

  “This behavior is very out of character for Abdi, and we’re very concerned about his well-being,” she adds, looking directly into the camera. “If you know where Abdi is, please contact us. We want to stress that Abdi is not in trouble.” The number to call scrolls along the bottom of the screen. Fraser’s done a good job: firm but friendly; concerned but not panicky.

  Becky’s back, watching from the doorway. “Is that your case?”

  “It is.”

  She sits down beside me. She’s left her phone in the other room.

  “How long’s he been missing?”

  “Nearly twenty-four hours. His friend died last night.”

  “Oh, god, that’s terrible. Is that why he’s run away?”

  “We don’t think he knows.”

  “You look tired.”

  “Why are you being so nice all of a sudden?” I’m trying to lighten the mood. I don’t want to go over and over the case.

  “You think that’s insulting? Rephrasing: You look like shit.”

  “Not as bad as you.”

  “You got me there.” She touches her eye gingerly with the tips of her fingers. “Can I ask a nosy question?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend? I wasn’t prying, but I noticed some stuff in the bathroom cupboard.”

  “We broke up.”

  “When?”

  “A long time ago. I forgot her stuff was there.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Get straight to the point, why don’t you?”

  “Are you embarrassed?”

  “No.”

  “Then answer.”

  “Yes, I loved her.”

  “Then you know how it feels for me.”

  So that’s what she’s playing at. She’s justifying herself.

  “The big difference is that neither of us was abusing the other.”

  “He can’t help himself,” she says, and I can’t believe my own clever, resourceful sister is spouting this clichéd stuff about a violent partner. “The things he’s been through, he never had a chance to grow up normally. He’s trying, but it’s what he knew.”

  “That’s not an excuse.”

  “I’m not excusing him, I’m trying to explain.”

  I’m angry now.

  “He’s an adult. He’s responsible for his own behavior. It’s a choice, Becky.”

  “It’s not always a choice for him!”

  “That’s the kind of attitude that starts by letting him off the hook if he says, ‘Pretty please, I’m sorry. Have a five-quid bunch of flowers to make up for your broken skin and—oops!—the broken bones,’ and ends with you in hospital! I’ve seen it happen. More than once!”

  She stares at me. “I tho
ught you’d understand.”

  “I thought you were smarter than this. People have to be accountable for what they do, even if you love them.”

  “I’m your sister, Jim, not some bugger you’ve just arrested who needs the riot act read. I told you, it’s complicated!”

  “Becky . . .”

  “I don’t need to listen to this. I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow night.”

  “You don’t need to be.”

  “Good night.”

  She slams the door of my bedroom and shuts herself in there for the rest of the night.

  When the clock tells me it’s time to sleep, I don’t even try.

  I throw open the window again, longing to feel the outside air, wondering not for the first time if my insomnia is a form of claustrophobia: a fear of spending time with my own thoughts, a fear that they’ll box me in.

  My bedroom door is still firmly shut, so I can’t get any stuff. I lie down on the sofa in my clothes.

  Through the window I have a perfect view of the sky, which is clear tonight, and a smattering of stars is visible.

  I think of the Sadlers rattling around that big house with only their grief for company. I think of Becky and her boyfriend and all the ways we can feel trapped by our circumstances. I think of the boy who is missing, and hope that he’s resourceful and safe, and say a prayer to a god I don’t believe in that Abdi Mahad doesn’t have blood on his hands.

  DAY 4

  Nur Mahad can’t sleep. He lies awake when he should be asleep and his mind roams through his past, searching for things that might help him to understand his present.

  Just as Maryam does, Nur cherishes a store of warm memories of his childhood in Hargeisa. It was a chaotic and happy time of his life that revolved around his mother and father, his father’s second wife who lived next door, and his many siblings and half siblings.

  Nur also remembers in detail the day his childhood ended.

  When he woke that morning, the sky was a clear pale blue, and outside his bedroom window a flock of small birds filled the branches of a tree. They called to one another in a nonstop chatter that sounded sweet and sharp all at once. Nur was nine years old and a primary school pupil. He worshipped his big brother Farah, who was stirring in the bed next to his.