‘She’s very busy,’ Scout said.
It was always the default excuse for my ex-wife’s disappearing act. Now, at seven, Scout spat it out with a bit of an edge.
Some absent parents think they can pick it up again when the time is right, when it suits them, and I have no doubt this is true. But abandoned children will not wait for ever for the absent parent to make things right. The clock is ticking.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘You can go to this party if you want or you can skip it if you want. It’s true the other kids will be smaller than you, but I’m sure you will have a good time. But it’s up to you, Scout.’
‘I don’t have to go?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Then I’m not going,’ she said.
‘Fine,’ I said, wanting our Saturday to begin again. ‘Where we taking Stan today?’
‘The big walk on Hampstead Heath. The two-hour walk. Down The Avenue, cut across Parliament Hill, then down to the bathing ponds.’
‘Lunch in the Coffee Cup on Hampstead High Street?’
She gave me the double thumbs-up. We smiled at each other then both stole a quick glance at the party invitation, as if it had strange powers that we could not imagine.
By the time we came back from our two-hour walk on Hampstead Heath and Saturday lunch at the Coffee Cup on Hampstead High Street, I had forgotten about it. I was surprised to see it still lying on the breakfast table. But it had lost its power to hurt us.
We were left to get on with it, I thought.
And we did.
So please excuse us if we don’t give a damn any more.
But on Sunday night I was in Scout’s room laying out her school clothes for Monday morning when, half-poking out of a paint-smeared cardboard folder, I saw a painting that she had done in her first year at school.
MY FAMILY was the title.
At five, they were just starting to make sense of the world and their place in it. All the other children had drawings that seemed to be teeming with life. Stick-figure daddies with their important briefcases, and stick-figure mummies who either had a briefcase or a baby, and lots of stick-figure siblings, larger and smaller. But Scout had only her stick-figure daddy with no briefcase and a four-legged red daub with bulging black eyes.
That was the extent of Scout’s family.
Me and Stan.
The first time I had seen the painting it had torn at my heart. There was too much white space, there was too little life, and there were not enough people in Scout’s world.
And now that old painting tore at my heart again.
Because on one side of the painting Scout had added an extra figure.
A pretty lady with dark hair, hovering on the edge of the little family, the drawing rendered far more expertly two years on. As if drawing something could make it so, as if just wishing something could turn back time to when things were simple and our family was unbroken.
I tucked the drawing neatly into her file, so that she would never know I had seen it.
I had moved on. But it was too much to expect my daughter to do the same.
Scout was lounging on the sofa with Stan, playing a game on her phone.
‘Maybe you should go to that birthday party after all,’ I said, as lightly as I could.
‘OK,’ she said, very quickly, not looking up from the exploding fruit.
So when Scout was tucked up in bed and I was certain she was sleeping, I wrote the RSVP, sickened to my soul at the way the world turns the children of divorced parents into pocket diplomats, negotiating their way between a man and a woman whose love brought them into the world and who later decide to hate each other’s guts.
Then without even thinking about it I turned on the TV and watched the latest news from Borodino Street. As far as I could tell, the young man in the suit and bow tie who was addressing the crowd on Saturday morning had gone. But the flowers were still there, and Alice Stone was still smiling in all her photographs and the sombre crowds were still there, waiting for something to happen.
Moonlight streamed in through the big windows of our loft, thrown open to let in fresh air on a muggy summer night.
The great bell chimed midnight at St Paul’s Cathedral.
Sunday night slipped into Monday morning.
And I breathed in.
8
‘Who is that guy?’ Edie said.
When I walked into MIR-1 first thing Monday morning, she was watching the latest images from Borodino Street.
As they cut to the view from the helicopter, you could clearly see the same young man addressing the crowd at the end of the street. His audience was bigger today. Their faces were turned away from the house, the flowers, the mourners and the epic makeshift shrine to Alice Stone.
‘He has to be harmless,’ Edie said. ‘Doesn’t he?’
‘There are enough cops on that street to pick him up if he’s a crank,’ I said.
We watched the scene in silence. The tiny back garden was stacked high with torn-out floorboards. A skip was piled with plaster and bricks from the walls and ceilings.
‘The search teams have hollowed it out,’ I said.
‘And still no grenades,’ Edie said. ‘What happened to them, Max?’
TDC Adams answered the phone.
‘IPCC waiting for you,’ she told me.
I had clocked the IPCC investigators as soon as I had walked into West End Central and I know that they had clocked me. They were an odd couple – an overweight man in his fifties, looking crumpled in a stained cheap suit and worn out before the day had got started, and a well-groomed, gym-fit young woman with long blond hair, her eyes sharp behind large black glasses. I had made no attempt to introduce myself.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is the police watchdog with the power to decide if a serving cop who makes a split-second decision is a hero or a criminal.
They were only doing their job. But they were not my friends.
My Police Federation rep was waiting for me outside the interview room. He was one of those teak-hard old Londoners they don’t seem to make any more, a tough, scrupulously neat little man who had been some kind of Mod in his youth – there was a care taken in his clothes, his hair, the way he carried himself.
‘DC Wolfe? Andy Vine from the PFEW.’
The Police Federation of England and Wales.
We shook hands.
‘Don’t lose your rag in there,’ Vine advised me.
The two IPCC investigators were already inside. The rumpled old boy looked as though he was ready for a nap. The young blonde took brisk charge.
‘For the tape, can you identify yourself?’ she said.
‘DC Max Wolfe of Homicide and Serious Crime Command, West End Central.’
‘I’m Marilyn Flynn of the Independent Police Complaints Commission,’ she said. ‘Also present is Gordon Hunt of the IPCC.’ The old boy stirred at the mention of his name. ‘DC Wolfe has the appropriate Police Federation representation,’ Flynn noted.
Then she opened her file.
‘This is an investigation into the two firing officers on Operation Tolstoy,’ she said. ‘What was your role in the raid on Borodino Street, DC Wolfe?’
‘I was there for background briefing and to ID the targets. My department had interviewed a CI who had sold two grenades to the Khan brothers.’
‘Allegedly,’ said Flynn.
I looked at her.
I may have raised an eyebrow.
‘Allegedly sold two Cetinka hand grenades,’ she said, nodding her head for emphasis. ‘But they didn’t exist, did they? These grenades. They turned out to be a figment of your CI’s imagination.’
‘A cache of Cetinka hand grenades certainly existed because after the initial conversation with our CI we recovered two of them buried in a flower bed in a park in South London. Those were the two grenades that we photographed in West End Central. We had been informed that there were more grenades out there and that two of them had found their way to Asad and Adnan Khan. But it’s true that the Search Team have so far been unable to find them at the address in Borodino Street.’ I gave her a smile. ‘That hardly means that they do not exist.’