Odd Child Out

by Gilly MacMillan

  “Anything else?”

  “He searched for ‘facial reconstruction,’” the tech officer says, “and that throws up all sorts of links, some of which he follows. Then he refines it to ‘cleft palate surgery’ and also ‘cleft palate surgery Somalia.’”

  “So he could be looking for a way this man might have corrected his appearance?”

  “Exactly.”

  “There’s one more thing. He also looks up a football website, a history of the Champions League.”

  Woodley looks at the printed-out photograph. He taps it with two fingers.

  “Because that’s a Champions League game,” he says. “He was trying to find out about the game the men are watching in the picture.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know. To find out which game it was? He’s a proper little Google sleuth, isn’t he?”

  “But what the hell takes him from a bit of cozy Internet searching all the way across the city to the scrapyard just a couple of hours later?”

  Woodley shrugs. “I don’t know, boss.”

  “That’s everything,” the tech officer says. “There’s no activity after 11:37.”

  I phone Sofia Mahad while the tech officer takes Woodley through the Internet activity one more time. I want to talk to her about the photograph that Abdi discussed with Ed Sadler in the recording.

  “I went to look at that photograph,” she says. “In the gallery. I wanted to see it for myself.”

  “Did you recognize any of the men in it? In particular, the man with the cleft palate, in the middle of the picture?”

  “I don’t recognize him, but this is the man Abdi was interested in. Abdi was looking for a man with a scar on his lip at the Welcome Center. He thought the man upset my mother. I was going to phone you this morning and tell you.”

  “Have your parents seen the photograph?”

  “Not yet. I’ll show them.”

  “Please can you ask them if they recognize that man?”

  “Of course.”

  I don’t give her any details about the Internet searches we’ve uncovered. I want to keep it on a need-to-know basis for now, but everything she’s telling me is adding up with what we’ve discovered.

  When I hang up, I relay everything to Woodley.

  Woodley says, “We should show the photograph to Kirsty Harris. She’s the liaison officer for the Somali community. She might have come across this man if he’s been in Bristol for a while, or know someone in the community we could talk to. But I was thinking maybe we should send it to Jamie Silva, too.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s a PC. He was tapped last year by a brand-new unit in London called the super-recognizers. They asked him to join them.”

  “Super-recognizers?” It’s a new one to me.

  “It’s a really small unit, only six or seven officers, and they all have exceptional abilities to remember faces and recognize suspects. They wanted Jamie to join them, but he said no because he didn’t want to leave Bristol.”

  “Because it’s the best city in the UK,” says the tech officer, who’s listening as he packs up his laptop.

  “You think he can recognize this man?”

  “He can if we have a picture of this guy on a database already. Jamie will probably remember seeing him before, and if he doesn’t, he’ll search through them.”

  “What makes him a better bet for that than one of our DCs?”

  “Super-recognizers are the opposite of people who have face blindness. Face-blind people can’t remember faces. It affects more people than you might think. In contrast, the officers in the Super-Recognizer Unit have almost total recall of every face they’ve ever seen.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Jamie’s a mate. We joined the force at the same time. He was bragging about it after he got tapped. And if you go out for a drink with him, he’ll happily wreck your evening by identifying every criminal in the room. There’s no such thing as off-duty for him.”

  “Okay. Definitely worth a try. Send it over to him now.”

  The call from DI Clemo puts Sofia even more on edge. She checks Facebook every five minutes to see if Abdi’s replied, but there’s nothing. She can see that he hasn’t even looked at the message she sent him yet.

  She decides to show her mum the photograph, as she promised the detective she would. She finds it on her phone. She’s also desperate to ask her mum if she deleted the recording on purpose. She’s been waiting for the right moment, but her nerve fails her. She breathes deeply before leaving her bedroom. She requires courage to approach her mum.

  Maryam is cooking. She has embarked on a laborious recipe for a sweet Somali treat that her own mother used to make on special occasions. Maryam didn’t learn the recipe from her mother. They left Hargeisa when she was too young. She was taught it by Amina, who discovered that Maryam yearned to taste it again.

  They worked together one morning in Amina’s kitchen soon after they met. Abdi slept peacefully, bound to Maryam’s back as they worked, and when the balbalow were finished and she bit into one, she did something rare. She cried.

  She has no idea why she’s making balbalow now, in the midst of this crisis, but she doesn’t know what else to do.

  Sofia arrives in the kitchen almost silently, startling Maryam.

  “Balbalow?” she asks.

  Maryam nods, and continues to knead the white dough that she’s made. The sensation of it underneath her fingers helps her to feel steady, as if her world isn’t spiraling out of control.

  “Will you look at something for me?” Sofia asks. She’s holding her phone.

  “In a minute.”

  Sofia steps out of the room and Maryam keeps kneading. She feels as if she can’t break her rhythm, as if to do so would be bad luck.

  When the dough’s formed and smooth, she puts it back into the bowl, where she mixed it with her fingers and leaves it to rest.

  She wipes her hands and goes to find her daughter.

  When Sofia shows her the photograph, Maryam has an instant reaction just as she did at the Welcome Center. It’s physical, visceral, and overwhelming. She grips the back of a chair and tries to stay upright, but a strong rush of nausea makes the world around her tilt.

  When she comes around, she’s prostrate on the sofa. Sofia’s hovering beside her, staring at her anxiously.

  “Hooyo,” Sofia says, using the Somali word for mother that softens Maryam, softens them both. “Are you all right? What happened?”

  “I don’t feel so well.”

  “Was it the photograph?”

  “I think I need to shut my eyes for a while.”

  Behind her closed eyelids Maryam fights to quell a flow of memories from the camp. She arrived there as a girl, grew up there, got a rudimentary education there, married there, and gave birth to all of her children there, except one. Many of her memories feel as if they’ve been stamped into her mind. They are vivid imprints. She cannot erase them.

  Sofia’s voice interrupts her. “Mum. Please don’t sleep. I need you to tell me why Abdi was obsessed with this photo. I think he was, but I don’t know why. Please, Mum.”

  Maryam feels her daughter’s slight hand shaking her shoulder and forces herself to open her eyes. “Where did you get this photo?” she asks.

  “I went to Ed Sadler’s exhibition. I wanted to see the picture Abdi talked about in the recording. You remember? This is it. The detective phoned me to ask if any of us recognize this man.”

  “Show it to me again.”

  Maryam’s glad she’s already lying down when another look at the photograph confirms what she already knew. It is him: the man with the split lip and the teeth like a scatter of broken rocks.

  She’d almost missed making the connection at the Welcome Center. She knew the man standing opposite her was familiar, she’d spotted the scar on his upper lip, but it wasn’t until she heard him speaking to somebody beside him in a thick, slurred voice, a v
oice that she last heard so many years ago and could never forget, that she knew who he was, and the skin on the back of her neck began to crawl.

  “Abdi doesn’t know this man,” she tells Sofia. “This man has nothing to do with him.”

  “What else, then? What could he have seen in the picture?”

  Maryam studies it. There are other familiar faces among the men, one in particular.

  “There it is,” she tells Sofia. She points at a profile buried in the shadows of the photo, at the end of a row of boys. “It’s Hassan Omar Mohammed.” She names a family friend, another Somali who came to Bristol via Hartisheik.

  Sofia zooms in and frowns as she looks at the face her mum is pointing to. She would never have recognized Hassan.

  “Are you sure?” she asks.

  “Completely sure! You don’t believe me? Look! It’s even football he’s got his eyes glued to.”

  Hassan’s known to be football mad. His prized possession nowadays is a season ticket for Bristol City football ground.

  Sofia looks at the face again, seeing more familiarity in it this time, but she’s not buying into her mother’s certainty that this is Hassan. The boy could be anybody.

  Maryam is looking at her expectantly, so Sofia feels obliged to reply, “Okay, yes, I guess that looks like Hassan,” even though she doesn’t believe it.

  Maryam unexpectedly takes her daughter in her arms, surprising her. Sofia clasps her back and finds an extraordinary comfort in the ferocity of her mother’s embrace. In fact, Maryam’s not sure if it is a younger Hassan in the photograph, though it’s not impossible.

  “I think the dough has rested,” she says when she’s released Sofia. “Will you help me make the balbalow?”

  It will be a distraction, she thinks, and Sofia’s glad of the chance to feel normal for just a few minutes. The recording has slipped from her mind.

  Side by side they roll out squares of the dough until it’s thin enough to see through. They share Maryam’s serrated cutting tool and each drives lines through their piece of dough so that it separates into small rectangles.

  Maryam shapes her rectangles into a butterfly, nipping the sides of each one together in the middle, so the wings fan out on either side. Sofia bends a ridge up the center of hers and then brings up each side, pinching them together at either end, to make the shape of a boat.

  They work in silence, each thinking.

  Maryam is trying to work out whether her suspicions about Abdi are one step closer to being true, now that she’s seen this photograph. She tries to imagine Ed Sadler at the camp. She never saw him there, but it was a very big place. Foreigners came in and out, doling out aid, setting up facilities, medical, educational, or something other, their numbers in flux depending on the political situation. Some would give gifts to the children. Sweets, mostly. Others kept a distance or left almost as soon as they had arrived. Unlike the families, they had that freedom.

  Sofia feels the relief of spending a few minutes being a child, under the wing of her mother, but she remains very uneasy.

  By the time the balbalow are arranged in neat rows, none of them touching, Sofia can’t hold back any longer, because there’s something else she’s desperate to tell Maryam.

  “But Abdi was looking for somebody at the Welcome Center,” she blurts out. “A man with a scar on his top lip.”

  Maryam catches her breath. Holds it. Composes herself.

  “So what?” she says, “It could have been anybody.”

  But her eyes cloud, and Sofia sees it. Maryam leans heavily on the kitchen counter, and bows her head.

  “You should lie down again, Hooyo,” Sofia says. “I think we might need to take you to the doctor.”

  Maryam refuses. She starts to wash up. She hopes she’s managed to divert Sofia from the truth.

  When she glances up at her reflection in the kitchen window she doesn’t see her own face, but that of the man she fears. He doesn’t have his new face, the one she saw at the refugee center, with the sewn-up lip and corrected teeth, but the old one: gashed and ugly. His eyes were the same, though, both times she saw him. They’re the kind of eyes where evil pools.

  She’s absolutely certain now that Abdi knows more than he should.

  Emma Zhang and Fiona Sadler meet at the Avon Gorge Hotel. The morning’s sunny and almost warm. A waiter mops water off two chairs and a table so the women can talk on the terrace that overlooks the gorge and the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

  At the bottom of the gorge, the tide’s in and the River Avon runs high, obscuring the muddy banks. The gorge’s rocky walls rise nearly a hundred meters to the point where the hotel terrace is built into the rock. The sunshine gleams weakly on the metal girders that suspend the bridge. In the far distance, clouds are moving, and a sharp wind threatens to bring them swiftly downriver.

  Fiona Sadler takes a rug from the back of her chair and pulls it around her shoulders. She cups her hands around a mug of tea.

  Emma Zhang puts her phone on the table between them and says, “Do you mind if I record this?”

  Fiona nods her agreement. Why not? she thinks.

  Emma sets up the phone to record and checks it twice. She’s worried that the wind will interfere with the recording, but Fiona Sadler was adamant about sitting outside, wanting privacy and looking like she felt as if the walls of the dark hotel interior were closing in on her. Better an interview with some noise interference than no interview at all.

  Emma has been weighing up how much mileage there is in this story. The phone call from Jim warning her off reporting on the case enraged her, but it also made her think there might be more of a story here than she’d thought. She knows she needs to exercise caution, though. She aspires to be a serious crime reporter, so she doesn’t want to write something that’s purely sensationalist. She’ll need a good human story and a good angle. Seeing the photo of Noah Sadler on the front page freaked her out more than she’d care to admit. She’d argued that it was too much, but her editor overruled her. “We’ve kept their names out of it,” he said. “We’re not breaking any laws.”

  The fact that he huddled with the paper’s lawyer before making that statement wasn’t lost on Emma, but neither was the advice he gave her when he hired her: “If you want to make it as a reporter, you’ve got to get the best stories out there, and sometimes that means you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”

  Hearing Jim’s voice on the phone, however angry, had also reminded Emma how much she missed him and how much he’d hurt her. She zips her coat up to her neck and wishes she’d worn her winter boots. She puts her game face on.

  “Thank you for taking the time away from the hospital to meet me,” she says.

  Fiona Sadler’s gaze is that of a lioness with her prey in her sights. Her lips move, but Emma is taking a nervous slurp of her over-frothy coffee so she doesn’t catch what the other woman says.

  “I’m sorry?” She inches the recording device toward Fiona. “Could you repeat that?”

  “My son is dead.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Noah died last night. He’s dead.”

  Fiona Sadler looks hard at Emma. It’s an almost forensic study of her reaction to the news.

  “I’m so very sorry,” Emma says, and she is. Unexpectedly, tears glaze her eyes and the sunshine seems too bright, the view of the bridge too vivid, its beauty something that produces not pleasure but a sharp ache.

  Fiona Sadler feels a moment of triumph as she watches the shock and then the emotion on Emma’s face. It’s the reaction she wanted. It’s a punishment for writing the article.

  Aware that she’s under scrutiny, Emma thinks, Pull yourself together. Take control. As her shock dissipates, she feels a quickening of excitement, a sense that this is a bigger story now, that a death means it needs to be told.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” she asks. “In your own time.”

  Fiona’s slightly taken aback by Emma’s gentle tone, but she ma
kes an effort to stay strong, and to keep this combative.

  “When you write an article like that, with a photograph like that . . .” she begins.

  “The photograph . . .”

  “No! Please don’t interrupt me. Please listen to me. An article like that hurts. You have to take responsibility for what you print. There are real people behind the stories. Real people. My son is real. Was real.”

  Fiona feels the purpose of what she’s trying to say slip away a little, as her own emotions well up. She tries to harness her concentration, and stay on track.

  “We were robbed of time with him,” she says. “We never knew how much time we were going to have with him, but every second was precious. Every single second.” It’s becoming so hard to fight back the tears.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” Emma murmurs. She’s wondering if she should reach across the table and take Fiona’s hand but decides not yet.

  “Do you understand you have to take responsibility?” Fiona asks.

  “I do understand.”

  “It’s so painful for the people you use. For us.”

  Emma takes a gamble and goes for a semi-honest approach.

  “I’m just starting out,” she says, “and I want to tell stories that matter, because I want to get to the truth. I know those stories sometimes hurt feelings, and I’m sorry you felt that way, but I think Noah’s story is important. He’s been the victim of a crime, potentially. In this political climate I think this could be buried by the police because they don’t want any more trouble with the immigrant communities.”

  “It could have been an accident.” Fiona didn’t think she’d be playing devil’s advocate, but she dislikes the journalist’s certainty. She’s starting to wish she hadn’t come here, thinking that the best place for her would have been in bed with her grief.

  “I spoke to the witness personally,” Emma says. “I don’t think it was an accident.”

  “Is that what your article said?” Though she knows Emma is its author, Fiona hasn’t actually read the piece. She’s had far too much else to deal with.