Odd Child Out

by Gilly MacMillan

  Emma nods.

  “The detective didn’t tell us there was a witness,” Fiona says.

  “Is that Detective Inspector Clemo?”

  “Yes.”

  “The police can be economical with the information they share when it suits them,” Emma says. “That’s why I wrote the article.”

  She knows she’s just put a stiletto in Jim’s back, but she feels she exercised a bit of restraint. She could have pushed it in much harder.

  “What did the witness say?” Fiona asks.

  “She said that there might have been foul play, with the emphasis on might. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

  “Oh my god,” Fiona says. “Noah was so vulnerable.”

  Emma can’t help flicking her eyes across to her phone, and is reassured by the sight of the timer counting the seconds as it records. She senses that Fiona’s restraint might be about to crack, and she doesn’t want to miss a word of it, but neither does she want to remind Fiona that she’s recording their conversation by picking up the device to check it.

  “He was so desperate for a friend,” Fiona says. “He clung to that boy.”

  “What’s the name of his friend?” Emma asks.

  She makes good use of her police training to make sure her manner is appropriate and nonthreatening. She softens her voice, is sure not to interrupt.

  “Abdi Mahad. He’s a Somali boy. At school on a scholarship.”

  “Which school?”

  “Medes College.”

  Emma’s pulse quickens again, though she’s careful not to show it. She hadn’t got around to finding out where the boys were studying, and that’s one of Bristol’s top private schools. This has all the elements of a big story, and if they can get hold of some more photographs . . .

  Fiona Sadler feels as if she’s been released from all of the social niceties that bound her to speak carefully about Noah, and brought her here to hold this journalist to account.

  The dam has burst, the shackles are off, the filters removed. It’s been just thirty-six hours since her son died, her mind is addled with grief, and the fact that she’s been lied to by the police feels like a low blow. She no longer cares about being reasonable or fair—as Ed would encourage her to be—because she’s not as confident as him, and never has been. She doesn’t share his certainties and his assumptions that people are good. She doesn’t admit this to him, and it makes her feel inadequate, but now she’s ready to say what she thinks, because in a world where her son gets cancer, and the disease eats away at him relentlessly, and the police are lying to her for political reasons, what place is there for reasonable?

  She puts her mug down and talks and talks, and when she next picks it up the drink is cold and a skin has formed on top of it. She realizes she’s shivering and the journalist is looking at her with concern.

  Fiona looks properly at Emma Zhang for the first time. She doesn’t look Chinese, she thinks. Or maybe a bit around the eyes. She must have a white mother.

  Fiona doesn’t have a problem with Chinese immigrants. She feels they’ve generally been in the UK long enough to have integrated. They’re part of the furniture now. It’s the new arrivals that make her feel uncomfortable, and she puts Abdi Mahad and his family in that category.

  “I’m not racist,” she says to Emma. “It’s just that you can’t deny that these people have had experiences that make them different. My husband’s work reveals that time and time again. They’re traumatized, and do we want people with PTSD roaming through our society?”

  Even though Emma has her own strong suspicions about Abdi Mahad and his motives, she recoils internally at this comment and has to muster her professionalism. Only her desire to tell this story stops her from lecturing Fiona Sadler on how anybody suffering from PTSD must have lived through hell and deserves support, whoever they are. She thinks of her own father’s military experiences, how damaged they left him.

  She wonders if a change of subject might be in order, so she doesn’t let her feelings show, and risk alienating this woman.

  “Two things,” she says. “Firstly, there may be an opportunity to go on local TV news and tell Noah’s story. I’m talking with them about a slot at the moment, so I’ll keep you posted. It would be wonderful if we could go on together. Secondly, what I’m thinking is that this story would be so much more powerful if we could publish it with a series of photographs that show Noah growing up, and if you have one of the boys together, that could be our headline photograph. We can blank out faces.”

  “I can look through our pictures,” Fiona replies.

  “Your husband said he’d done a series,” Emma tells her. “When he provided the hospital photograph, he told me it was the latest in a series of shots. Perhaps we could use those? Only if you’re comfortable with that, of course?”

  Fiona stands up slowly. The blanket that was on her knees falls to the floor. She watches a red car cross the suspension bridge, shrunk to the size of a toy.

  It makes her think of a bead of blood, bright red on her son’s white skin. The product of the first needle they stuck in him. The first blood test.

  She feels as if she’s been talking to the journalist in a dream and now reality has bitten its way back in.

  “Ed gave you that photo?” she asks.

  “I thought you knew.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  She walks away, her footsteps increasing in pace. She pushes her way through the door that leads into the hotel, crosses the lobby, and continues out onto the street. She ignores the calls of Emma Zhang behind her and the tug of the journalist’s hand on her sleeve.

  When she arrives home, she finds Ed in the kitchen.

  “How could you?” She slaps his face as hard as she can.

  What about a reconstruction?” I suggest to Fraser. “Of the route the boys took through town. It might jog memories.”

  We’ve learned a lot today, but I want to focus on the events of Monday night and try to work out what the boys did minute by minute as they went through town. I’m still struggling to connect all the dots. A reconstruction could throw up something new.

  She sits down at her desk and pulls off a pair of heels. “God help women, Jim,” she says, massaging a bunion through her tights. “We suffer for our beauty.”

  Keeping a straight face is one of the biggest tests I’ve faced today. Sometimes I love this woman, no matter how much of a short leash she has me on.

  I look down at my hands while she pulls on a pair of battered trainers and sighs with relief. When her feet are tucked out of sight behind her desk, it’s straight back to business.

  “If we stage a reconstruction it’ll attract attention to Noah Sadler and people will ask questions about him. If he was still alive, maybe I’d do it, but I’d like to see what we can discover without it for now. Footfall, Jim. Get back out there yourself if you need to, revisit every detail until something clicks. But top tip from me: Don’t do it in high heels!”

  I allow myself to laugh this time.

  Woodley and I take another walk to the scrapyard, where a vehicle hoists clawfuls of twisted metal high against the blue sky and swivels to drop them onto a growing pile. Every time they land, it sounds like something shattering. A plane passes overhead and its vapor trails expand and dissipate in its wake, as if in response.

  We stand by the gates to the yard. I take hold of a big padlock that’s attached to a heavy-duty metal bolt.

  “It’s not adding up to me that there’s no CCTV when this is the extent of the physical security,” I say.

  Woodley surveys the scene like a builder, hands on hips, squinting a little. “They told me they don’t leave anything in the cabins overnight.”

  “But this stuff’s got to be worth something to somebody. Why fence it in so securely otherwise?” I know he’s already been here and made inquiries about how they protect their business, but the answers he got don’t feel right to me. “Shall we have a word?”

  The
yard foreman who let us in is overseeing the unloading of the scrap.

  “Is this all the security you have?” I ask him.

  “Yep.”

  “Nothing else at all?”

  “No.” The machine begins to reverse, and the beeping means Woodley has to shout to make himself heard.

  “Anything else in the area?”

  “I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask Ian.”

  “Ian?”

  “Ian Shawcross. He owns all the units around here.”

  I remember a man in a crisp white shirt and an elaborate belt buckle: Janet Pritchard’s partner.

  “Do you have a number for him?”

  “Not on me. They might down the garage. That’s Ian’s place, too.”

  Woodley and I leave the yard and walk past the row of lockups behind it where Janet Pritchard’s unit is located. At the end of the lane there’s a repair shop where two men are working on the bodywork of a Volkswagen Scirocco that’s had its plates removed.

  That’s when I spot it: On the corner of the one-story building that contains the body shop office there’s a small circular patch of paintwork lighter than the rest, and three empty holes where some screws and a cable might have been. If a camera had been there, it would have had a sight line down past the lockups and might have caught the scrapyard gate.

  A bell attached to the office door rings when we enter. The customer welcome area consists of a pair of seats that have been ripped out of the back of a vehicle and set down facing a desk. Behind the desk sits a lad who looks barely old enough to be out of school. He’s manning the landline and a large appointment book in which the heavily marked pages are swollen with ink and indentations, doubtless made by a ballpoint pen like the one he’s scratching his acne with.

  The radio’s broadcasting the weather forecast at top volume: “Winter temperatures have gone, but April showers have arrived a week early. We expect it to be wet overnight but clearing by the morning, and spring temperatures are on their way later this week.”

  “All right?” says the lad.

  “Do you have a phone number for Ian Shawcross? We need to talk to him.”

  “Who’s asking?”

  He sits up straighter when we show him our badges. “My aunty has his number,” he says. “She’s popped out for a minute.”

  Woodley and I take a seat on the makeshift sofa. It tilts us so far back that the seats can only have come out of a sports vehicle. I get up as soon as I’ve sat down.

  “Do you have CCTV on the premises?” I ask the lad.

  “No.”

  “I heard you had it taken down.” I’m working on a hunch.

  “Yeah, we did.”

  “That would be this week, would it? Yesterday, or the day before?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did it come down, then?”

  “Broken. We had to get rid of the whole system.”

  “You wouldn’t have kept the latest footage from it, would you?”

  He’s chewing gum and he masticates stickily as he thinks about this. “Don’t think so. They burnt it all.”

  “Is the CCTV the only security you had?” Woodley asks.

  “No, we’ve Ian’s brother-in-law. He does a patrol at night.”

  “Do you know what his name is?”

  “Jason Wright.”

  A woman appears in the doorway. “Can I help you?” she says.

  “Police. Asking after Ian,” the boy tells her. “You have his number, don’t you?”

  Her seen-it-all face and the way she looks at her nephew makes me think that we wouldn’t have got any answers if she’d been at the desk when we arrived.

  “I haven’t got his number on me,” she says.

  “Not to worry,” I say. “I can ask Janet.”

  She holds eye contact pretty steadily when I say that, but there’s a muscle twitching on her face that tells me she’s aware of whatever’s being covered up.

  “Your nephew’s been very helpful,” I tell her. “Very helpful indeed.”

  We walk back to HQ quickly, and I ask Woodley to get hold of an address and number for Jason Wright. We need to pay him a visit.

  I don’t tell Woodley he’s an idiot for missing the trace of the CCTV camera while we’re in the incident room.

  I wait until we’re in the car on the way to see the security guard to do that.

  It’s not the first time Ed Sadler’s been slapped by a woman, but it’s the first time his wife has raised a hand to him.

  He doesn’t slap her back, though there’s a fleeting moment when he sorely wants to, when his grief over Noah creates a violent impulse.

  He backs away from her, and the sting on his cheek brings back the memory of the last time it happened: in a hotel room, beside a half-opened shutter, by a woman who’d only just stopped being a girl, a sheet wrapped around her. The discovery that he was married loaded the blow with more force than he’d have thought she could muster.

  Fiona doesn’t just slap him; she flies at him. Her fists pound his chest and his upper arms until he catches her by the wrists.

  “What the hell?” he says.

  “You took that photograph of Noah and sent it to a journalist?”

  “Every time he’s in hospital I take a photograph, you know that. We agreed we wanted to document his journey.”

  Fiona once started a blog about Noah’s illness. It was at the beginning when people advised her it might help her if she shared their story, but Noah was ill for so long that she ran out of steam to update it. She’d noticed that people were visiting and commenting on her posts in fewer numbers as time passed. It felt to Fiona that nobody had the stamina for Noah’s cancer except her and Noah.

  “This is different. You can’t compare this to my blog.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, come on, Ed!”

  They’ve separated, and stand apart. He’s angry now, too.

  “Tell me why this is different,” he says.

  “Because you got the photograph published in the newspaper.”

  “I get all my photographs published. That’s what pays our bills.”

  “This was our son! In a paper that our friends read.”

  “How is that different?”

  “Stop asking me that when the answer is bloody obvious!”

  “Then explain it to me. Explain how my documentary process is a worthy thing when it’s other people’s children I photograph, but it’s cheap when it’s our own?”

  Ed almost never speaks to his wife like this. He almost always backs her up, smooths her feathers, lets her make the decisions, and brings her tea in the mornings when he’s home and she’s not at the hospital. In return, he gets his freedom when he needs it.

  He knows what her argument’s going to be—that they and Noah deserve privacy—and the hypocrisy of it enrages him. He also knows it’s probably not wise to call her out on it, but he’s so tired of being blamed for everything. If he’s brutally honest, he also feels as if he’s trapped in a domestic setup whose sole objective has come to be the nursing of Noah, and the preservation of his life, at all costs, and rightly so, but now that Noah’s gone, the domestic framework that Ed and Fiona are left with is sparse and unlovely.

  With Noah gone, Ed also knows he’s no longer a hero to anybody, and this thought destabilizes him almost as much as anything else.

  “I don’t know if I can ever forgive you,” Fiona says. “I didn’t even know you talked to a journalist.”

  “I forgot to tell you! I just forgot. She came to the hospital. It was an honest mistake. I had a few other things on my mind, as you might imagine.” Ed catches himself before he shouts, calms himself down.

  “I did it because I thought it might help to get people’s attention so we can try to find out what happened. I regretted it afterward, believe me, because I didn’t mean for it to draw attention to Abdi or cast blame on him. I didn’t know the journalist would do that.”

  “That’s the only bloody go
od thing that’s come out of it! Did you know there was a witness who saw Abdi push Noah? The detective hid that from us. Hid it! How is that good for Noah?”

  Fiona mothers like an animal: all instinct and ferocity. It astounded Ed from the very first few hours of his son’s life, when he sat in the hospital room and watched the focus of Fiona’s being shift from him to their son. Now it alarms him. All of that energy has turned outward as Fiona seeks a scapegoat, somebody to blame for ruining the biggest project of her life before its natural time was up.

  Ed’s not surprised the scapegoat’s Abdi, though it makes him angry. He believes Abdi’s a good kid, and he feels he’s seen enough of the world to trust his own judgment. He relies on that ability to assess people quickly and accurately when he’s working.

  “We mustn’t turn on Abdi. Don’t believe everything you read. I’m sure the police will clarify if we ask them.”

  “So one minute you’re offering a photograph of our son to the press and the next you tell me we can’t trust them?”

  “Did it ever occur to you that whatever the boys were getting up to might be Noah’s idea? Noah’s fault? Remember why we took him out of primary school?”

  “We lost him yesterday and you bring that up?”

  “Don’t rewrite history, that’s all I’m asking.”

  Ed’s run out of energy for the fight. He hasn’t got the appetite for ugly words any longer.

  “Noah was the most important thing in my life, too,” he tells her, “but he wasn’t always perfect, particularly where friendships were concerned, so let’s be careful what we say or do.”

  “How careful were you being when you shared that photograph? You didn’t even ask me before you did it.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Okay, you’re right. I should have. I’m sorry. I’m very fucking sorry.” He holds up a hand, signaling that he’s done with this fight. He leaves the room.

  Later Fiona finds herself standing in Noah’s bedroom. She takes a deep breath. She can sense and smell her son in every object and every bit of fabric, and she fancies that if she stays very still she can hear him breathing and the accompanying hiss of his oxygen mask. She thinks of his red cheeks at the party on Monday night, and how much he seemed to enjoy it.