A sudden commotion reached them from down below. Peach barking, footsteps in the entry, a door closing, another opening and closing, voices, and more barking from Peach. Deborah didn’t like the sound of this, so she helped Simi from her stool and took her into the darkroom. There was a large cupboard where she’d once stored chemicals, empty now and the perfect size for an eight-year-old girl. Deborah told Simi to scoot inside and make no sound. “It’s probably nothing,” she murmured to the girl. “But we don’t want to take chances.”
She was on the third-floor landing when she recognised Narissa Cameron’s voice. She hurried down the stairs as Simon came out of his study, along with his colleague. Deborah’s father had apparently been the one to answer the door. The entry was, as a result, a real mash-up of humanity, because in addition to Narissa, both Zawadi and Tani were there. Who wasn’t there was the mother he’d gone to his family’s home to fetch.
She said, “What’s happened? Tani, has something happened to your mum?”
Zawadi said to her, “You allowed him to go?” She sounded incredulous.
“Zawadi, she can’t tie him to a chair,” Narissa countered.
Tani answered Deborah. “She was gone. I got told by a neighbour she left with a copper. It’s the same one came to talk to her af’er she got arrested. So now she’s arrested again and I don’t know where she got taken and I got to find her.”
“Let us deal with that.” It was Simon speaking. “If she’s with a policeman, we can sort that quickly enough.”
Deborah added, “Simon knows all sorts of police, Tani. He’ll start ringing them. We’ll find her, and I expect it won’t take very long. You need to trust us.”
Zawadi rolled her eyes at this but said nothing.
“How do you come to have Tani with you?” she asked both Zawadi and Narissa.
Simon left them then and returned to his study. Deborah heard him say, “。 . . some associates of Deborah’s,” before Narissa claimed her attention, explaining she and Zawadi had gone to north London to make the usual, formal call upon the parents of a girl—in this case Simisola—who was being sheltered by Orchid House. “I went with her because there was no available social worker and no way did I intend to let her go alone, not after what we saw yesterday when Tani showed up at Orchid House with—”
“Wait!” Deborah realised all of a sudden that Simisola was still hiding in the darkroom. “Simi will want to know Tani is well.” She ran up the stairs to fetch her.
In very short order, the siblings were reunited, with Simisola dashing down the stairs to fling herself at her brother. She cried, “Did he hurt you more, Tani? Did Papa hurt you?”
Zawadi said in an altered tone, “Opposite’s more like it, girl.”
Narissa added, speaking to Deborah, “We pulled him off the father. Please don’t let him go back there.”
“Did he manage to get the passports?” she asked. Then to Tani, “Did you find the passports?”
He shook his head.
Simisola cried, “What about Mummy? Tani, where’s Mummy?” and when he said that he didn’t know, she began to cry. She buried her face into his stomach.
“I’ll find her, Squeak,” Tani told her, his hands on the back of her head.
“You,” Zawadi said to him, “are to stay well away from both of your parents. After today”—she wore an expression that Deborah couldn’t interpret until she went on—“what’s next is a protection order. I see that. And, believe me, that doesn’t make me happy. But till it’s done, you stay right here in this house, Tani. Simisola as well.”
“No way is Pa obeying some protection order,” Tani said with considerable scorn. “I thought he would. I got talked into it by Sophie. But he won’t obey it.”
“You listen,” Zawadi told him, “because this order that we’re going to file, it’ll be delivered by a cop and that person—I’m meaning the cop—won’t leave the premises without passports. D’you understand me? Your dad’s not taking Simisola out of the country and he’s not hurting her inside the country. We’ll see to that. Now you promise me—you give me your word right here—that you won’t go back there. Full stop.”
“Wha’ about Sophie?” he asked. “He knows her name. He knows where she lives. I don’t know how but he knows. And he’ll turn up at her house, he will. Then what?”