Girl On Fire

36

Anne was looking good.

My ex-wife still carried herself like she was late for a photo-shoot at Vogue and was really miffed about it. She still turned heads and kept them turned when she walked – no, she strode – into the small café where we met in the shadow of Southwark Cathedral. She still had the model’s strange magic – that alchemy of height, bones and skin – of appearing to be slightly different to the rest of the human race.

An adorable alien, then, running late.

She waved to me from the door and she had checked her phone twice before she reached the corner table. Here was a woman who was moving on, ready for whatever was coming next, fitting me into a very small window.

‘Thanks for meeting me,’ she said.

‘No problem,’ I said.

Oh, the excruciating formality of former partners.

‘You must be very busy,’ she said. ‘Are they sure that was Bad Moses? The man who got shot?’

I nodded. She shuddered with theatrical horror.

‘But that’s all done and dusted,’ I said. ‘So it’s a slow day at the office.’

She nodded briskly, checked her phone again, placed it face down on the table so that she would not be tempted to peek, and signalled for the waiter. A nice young Australian came running.

‘Did you order?’ she asked me.

‘I was waiting for you.’

We both insisted that the other order first.

We got it done eventually and I reflected that we were never this polite to each other when we were living together. We were never this polite when we loved each other madly.

But we were total strangers now.

Those people we had been were gone forever – the young uniformed cop with no living relations craving a family immediately with the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and the stunning young model whose career was not panning out quite as spectacularly as planned, predicted or expected – for it turned out there were many, many beautiful girls in the world, and some of them were taller, thinner and younger than Anne, even back then.

We were a different man and woman now. I guess we both grew up. It was as simple, as everyday, as that. All we shared now was our past.

And our seven-year-old daughter.

‘Scout,’ she said. ‘She’s such a doll. And she’s been so good at our place. I have just loved the time we have had together. She’s so smart and lovely,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, and I saw Anne meant it, and I felt some ice inside me – the ice that had been frozen so hard and so unforgiving against my ex-wife for so long – begin to melt.

She tapped the table with her elaborate fingernails and I remembered that she had been a smoker. She wanted a cigarette now.

‘I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out,’ I said. ‘I know you wanted to make it work. I know that – in your heart – you want to be a good mother to Scout.’

The waiter brought our coffee.

I sipped my triple espresso and waited for him to leave.

Anne blew on her skinny soymilk latte.

‘Since Oliver lost his job, things have not been so brilliant at home,’ she said. ‘There’s the mortgage—’

I held up my hand. ‘It’s none of my business, Anne.’

A flash of defiance.

‘I love her just as much as you do,’ she said. ‘Whatever you may think.’

‘I have to believe it,’ I said. ‘Because I can’t stand the thought of Scout not being loved by you. It’s unbearable to me, that possibility. And I do know you love her, in your own way. But you love yourself more. Please – let me finish. And I think that when you have a child, you either put that child before everything else in the world – everything – or you don’t. Plenty of men don’t – can’t – put a kid before themselves. They think their happiness comes first. Or their fulfilment or destiny or sex life or whatever they want to call it, and however they want to rationalise it. But it happens with women, too. And the children – these children who get left – they get hurt. Of course they do. But the people who do the leaving – those men and women – they get hurt even more. And you have hurt yourself more than you could ever hurt Scout.’

‘Good old Max,’ she said, attempting a laugh. ‘Never knowingly off the high moral ground.’

She looked towards the door, chewed her bottom lip, and I could see that she was giving serious thought to leaving right now. Then she sighed, and I saw her eyes shining with the emotion that she was holding back.

And when I felt my heart go out to her, I thought it was some kind of sentimental feeling for what we had once shared. But then I saw it was something new.

I felt sorry for her.

‘You don’t know what’s going on in my life,’ she said bitterly. ‘The sleepless nights. The rows about money. Not knowing where the next six-figure salary is going to come from – or if it is going to come at all. Do you really want Scout in the middle of all that?’

I shook my head.

‘Scout can come back to me. With pleasure, with joy. Of course she can come back to me. My door is open to her and it will be open to her on the last day of my life. She has the key. Nothing in the world is more important to me than my daughter.’

‘Saint Max!’

‘Nowhere near it. I’m just trying to be the best father I can be, Anne. I don’t even think I’m very good at it. Work gets in the way. I’m not as selfless as I should be. But I’m trying.’

‘I tried,’ she said. ‘Bad time. That’s all.’

I felt like touching her hand, just to show her that I got it. She had not seen this coming and those are always the hardest blows.

‘I thought that nothing bad ever happened on the street where you live,’ I said. ‘I thought you had it all worked out. And I thought that you were certain to stay with Oliver forever.’

‘Well, probably we will,’ she said. ‘But things change.’

She glanced at her watch, and I wondered for a moment if there was already someone else, and then I realised that I didn’t give a damn any more. It’s a thin line between love and total indifference.

All I felt for Anne now was a memory of feelings that had long gone, and the acute awareness of this new feeling. She was a woman with a restless heart, and it was unlikely to make her happy.

There wasn’t much more to discuss.

Scout’s room in London was exactly how she had left it. Miss Davies, her beloved teacher from New Zealand, had ensured that there was a place reserved for Scout when school resumed in September.

‘I’ll get her a pet to cheer her up,’ Anne said, raising her eyebrows at this brainwave. ‘How about a hamster? Hamsters are good because they’re low maintenance and they don’t live long. I had one when I was a little girl. Squeaky.’

‘But why would Scout want a hamster?’

You couldn’t take a hamster for a walk on Hampstead Heath. The porters who worked on the night shift at Smithfield meat market would never learn the name of a hamster. Squeaky and his kind were never going to love you like we all want to be loved.

‘Scout’s dog died, didn’t he?’ Anne said. ‘I know he was very ill. Sam, right? Or was it Sid?’

‘Stan,’ I said, and then I could not stop grinning.

Because Edie’s treatment had worked.

Carrying Stan around a neighbourhood where meat had been sold for five hundred years had revived his spirit. Somewhere in that juicy universe of scent, Stan had recovered his appetite, and then his Cavalier King Charles Spaniel energy, and finally his old food-motivated self, his small heart open to the world, eager for friendship and fun with anyone on four legs or two.

‘Stan’s going to be fine,’ I said, as my ex-wife frowned at her phone.

She bolted her frothy coffee. She was keen to get on.

‘So are we finished?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’re done here.’

On the top floor at West End Central, DCI Flashman of Counter Terrorism Command had parked his enormous bulk on my workstation. As I walked into MIR-1 he wiped his fringe of white-blond hair from his forehead and smiled lopsidedly as though he was still bloody gorgeous.

‘So you got your man, Wolfe,’ he said. ‘Congratulations.’

‘SFO Jesse Tibbs got Bad Moses. Not me. Richard Halfpenny gave me a kicking until Tibbs took him out with an unregistered firearm that Halfpenny had purchased from the late Peter Fenn, the weapons dealer also known as Ozymandias.’

That was our story. And we – Jackson, Tibbs and me – would all be sticking to it.

‘No medal this time then?’ Flashman said. ‘Shame. But another one bites the dust. And his brother will do hard time for crocking that young uniform, even if the judge is an old softy. How’s he doing, by the way?’

‘PC Sykes is out of his coma but rehab is going to be long and hard,’ Whitestone said. ‘Sykes is a tough kid. I think he’ll walk again.’

Flashman clapped his large hands once. ‘So another couple of scumbags are off the streets and we can all sleep safe and sound tonight, thanks – in part at least – to London’s favourite detective, DC Wolfe.’

I stared at Flashman’s belligerent grin.

He had not come to 27 Savile Row to offer his congratulations on nailing Bad Moses.

‘Courtesy call,’ he explained, reading my mind.

The rest of my mob was facing him. Whitestone. Joy Adams. And Edie.

She looked at me and in less than an instant something passed between us with the secret telepathy of lovers.

How did it go with the ex?

Scout’s coming home.

Edie smiled.

Whitestone and Joy were still staring at Flashman, their arms crossed, unimpressed.

‘CTU are releasing Mrs Azza Khan without charges,’ Whitestone said.

‘Because – as I was explaining before you joined us, Wolfe – there’s not enough evidence to prosecute her under any of the existing terrorism laws,’ Flashman said. ‘It wasn’t Azza Khan who brought down that Air Ambulance helicopter on Lake Meadows and it wasn’t her who killed Alice Stone – it was her sons. Listen, I’ve spent hours with the woman – she’s your standard deluded, self-pitying, not-very-bright religious maniac who was allowed to settle in a country when she feels not a shred of love, affection, gratitude or loyalty towards this country. Just the opposite, in fact, between you and me and the garden gate. But then whose fault is that – hers or ours?’

‘But she’s the poison,’ Whitestone said. ‘You know she is, Flashman. Scarlet Bush was right. It all comes back to her. Her sons were standard weed-smoking failed DJs on benefits who had their tiny minds turned to jihad. And all the poison comes from her – and all the old bigots just like her who are never the ones to use the knife, or drive the van into pedestrians or detonate the suicide vest.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I know all of that. And I said to her – If it is so horrible living among all of us drinking, fornicating, freedom-loving kaffirs, then why don’t you go and live in a Muslim country, darling? And do you know what she said to me?’

‘Don’t call me darling,’ guessed Joy.

‘After that,’ Flashman said. ‘She told me – But why should I go to live in another country when every country belongs to Allah?’ But as far as CTU can tell, she has never invited and encouraged support for a proscribed organisation in violation of the Terrorism Act. I can’t prosecute her for believing what she wants to believe. It’s a free country.’

Flashman stood up, stretched and yawned.

‘So we’ll keep an eye on her,’ he said. ‘Of course we will. Azza Khan will be a person of interest for a little while, until another few thousand new persons of interest come along. We’ll do our best, all right? You want me to lock her up when she hasn’t broken any laws? When there’s been no criminal offence? What about her human rights? I’m shocked, truly shocked.’

He left us.

Whitestone looked at me. ‘I always liked the wrong brother for the Bad Moses murders,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Max.’

‘Easy mistake to make,’ I said. ‘But all they shared was that haircut. The brothers could hardly have been more different. For all the racket on social media, Richard – Bad Moses – was always just a simple-minded, violent thug who had found a cause big enough for all his frustration and hatred. It made him closer to the Khan brothers than he ever realised. But I don’t think George Halfpenny hated anyone. I think George loved this country and thought it was worth preserving. He had thought about things when he was pedalling that rickshaw around the city. He had his set of beliefs and, for the first time in his life, people were listening to him.’

‘And now he’s going down for what he did to PC Sykes,’ Whitestone said. ‘Which is a tragedy for the Sykes family and for George himself. He might have got out from behind that rickshaw and done something with his life.’

‘You never know,’ I said.

‘And how are you doing?’ Whitestone said.

My knee ached when the weather turned cold. My ribs were bruised. My intercostal muscles – the ones that lift the ribcage every time you breathe in and out – felt like they were torn. Some of my nerve ends still rattled and jangled and jumped about with a will of their own, sparking with the afterglow of the 50,000 volts of power that had recently passed through them.

But the last of the summer sunshine was shining on my city. Scout was coming home. Our dog Stan had long, good years to live. And Edie was at her workstation and already packing her bag because it was a slow day at the office. She smiled at me and ran her fingers through her red hair.

‘Never been better, boss,’ I said.