Odd Child Out (Jim Clemo #2)
Gilly MacMillan
Dedication
To my dad. You are missed.
THE NIGHT BEFORE
After Midnight
A black ribbon of water cuts through the city of Bristol, under a cold midnight sky. Reflections of street lighting float and warp on its surface.
On one side of the canal there’s a scrapyard, where heaps of crumpled metal glisten with frost. Opposite is an abandoned redbrick warehouse. Its windows are unglazed and pigeons nest on the ledges.
The silken surface of the canal water offers no clue that underneath it a current flows, more deeply than you might expect, faster and stronger.
In the scrapyard a security light comes on and a chain link fence rattles. A fifteen-year-old boy jumps from it and lands heavily beside the broken body of a car. He gets up and begins to run across the yard, head back, arms flailing, panting. He runs a jagged path and stumbles once or twice, but he keeps going.
Behind him the fence rattles a second time, and once again there’s the sound of a landing and pounding feet. It’s another boy and he’s moving faster, with strong, fluid strides, and he doesn’t stumble. The gap between them closes as the first boy reaches the unfenced bank of the canal, and understands in that moment that he has nowhere else to go.
At the edge of the water they stand, just yards from each other. Noah Sadler, his chest heaving, turns to face his pursuer.
“Abdi,” he says. He’s pleading.
Nobody who cares about them knows that they’re there.
Earlier That Evening
At the end of my last session with Dr. Manelli, the police psychotherapist, we kiss, awkwardly.
My mistake.
I think it’s on account of the euphoria I’m feeling because the sessions I’ve been forced to attend with Dr. Manelli are finally over. It’s not personal; it’s just that I don’t like discussing my life with strangers.
At goodbye time she offered me a professional handshake—long-fingered elegance and a single silver band around a black-cuffed, slender wrist—but I forgot myself and went in for a cheek peck and that’s when we found ourselves in a stiff half-clinch that was embarrassing.
“Sorry,” I say. “Anyway. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She turns away and straightens some papers on her desk, two dots of color warming her cheekbones. “Going forward, I’m always here if you need me,” she says. “My door is always open.”
“And your report?”
“Will recommend that you return immediately to the Criminal Investigations Department, as we discussed.”
“When do you think you’ll submit that?” I don’t want to sound pushy, but I don’t want any unnecessary delay, either.
“As soon as you leave my office, Detective Inspector Clemo.”
She smiles, but can’t resist a final lecture: “Please don’t forget that it can take a long time to recover from a period of depression. The feelings you’ve been having—the anger, the insomnia—don’t expect them to disappear completely. And you need to be alert to them returning. If you feel as if they might swamp you, that’s the moment I want to hear from you, not when it’s too late.”
Before I embed my fist in a wall at work again, is what she means.
I nod and take a last look around her office. It’s muted and still, a room for private conversations and troubling confidences.
It’s been six months since my therapy began. The aim was to throw me a lifeline, to save me from drowning in the guilt and remorse I felt after the Ben Finch investigation, to teach me how to accept what happened and how to move on.
Ben Finch was eight years old when he disappeared in a high-profile, high-stakes case, the details of which were plastered all over the media for weeks. I agonized over him and felt personally responsible for his fate, but I shouldn’t have. You have to preserve some professional distance, or you’re no good to anybody.
I believe I have finally accepted what happened, sort of. I’ve convinced Dr. Manelli that I have, anyhow.
I call my boss in the Criminal Investigations Department as I jog down the stairs in Manelli’s building, my eyes fixed on the pane of glass above the front door. Slicked with daylight, it represents my freedom.
Fraser doesn’t answer, so I leave her a message letting her know that I’m ready to come back to work, and ask if I can start tomorrow. “I’ll take on any case,” I tell her. I mean it. Anything will do, if it gives me a chance to rejoin the game.
As I cycle away down the tree-lined street where Dr. Manelli’s office is located, I think about how much hard graft it’s going to take to play myself back in at work, after what happened. There are a lot of people I need to impress.
Riding a wave of optimism, as I am, that doesn’t feel impossible.
I’m upbeat enough that I even notice the early blossom, and feel a surge of affection for the handsome, mercurial city I live in.
The light from the gallery spills out onto the street, brightening the dirty pavement.
Tall white letters have been stenciled on the window, smartly announcing the title of the exhibition:
EDWARD SADLER TRAVELS WITH REFUGEES
In italics beneath, there’s a description of the work on show:
Displaced Lives & Broken Places: Images from the Edge of Existence
The photograph on display in the window is huge and spotlit.
It shows a boy. He walks toward the camera against a backdrop of an intense blue sky, an azure ocean speckled with whitecaps, and a panorama of bomb-ruined buildings. He looks to be thirteen or fourteen. He wears long shorts, flip-flops, and a football shirt with the sleeves cut off. His clothes are dirty. He gazes beyond the camera and his face and posture show strain, because looped across his shoulders is a hammerhead shark. Its bloodied mouth is exposed to the camera. That, and a red slash of blood on the shark’s muscular white undercarriage are shockingly vivid against the ruined architectural backdrop: marks of life, death, and violence.
On the Way to the Fishmarket. Mogadishu, 2012, reads the caption beneath it.
It’s not the image that made Ed Sadler’s reputation, that gave him his five minutes of fame and then some, but it was syndicated to a number of prestigious news outlets, nevertheless.
The gallery’s packed with people. Everybody has a glass in hand and they’re gathered around a man. He’s standing on a chair at the end of the room. He wears khaki trousers, scuffed brown oxford shoes, a weathered leather belt, and a pale blue shirt that’s creased in a just-bought way. He has sandy-colored hair that’s darker at the roots than the tips and thicker than you might expect for a man in his early forties. He’s good-looking—broad-shouldered and square-jawed—though his wife thinks his ears protrude just a little bit far to be perfectly handsome.