STREATHAM
SOUTH LONDON
“My colleague’s gone to talk to the family,” Barbara concluded. “He’ll talk to Rosie as well. But there’s not much doubt that it was her.” She handed him the still of Rosie from the CCTV footage. “Doesn’t make sense that she’d be here to have a stroll round the building, does it. And according to Dr. Weatherall, the woman knocked first, and when there was no answer, she came inside. She didn’t need a key as Teo hadn’t locked the door when she’d let Dr. Weatherall in.”
“If Rosie had done something when she saw her . . . ?”
Barbara sighed. “D’you mean if she’d tried to help? That’s a tricky call, that is. Could be had Teo been taken straight to hospital, nothing that came from there would be different. Also could be she’d’ve lived through it once the pressure was taken off her brain.”
“But to do nothing. To say nothing. Just to leave her. How am I meant to interpret that aside from understanding that Rosie wanted her dead?”
“Answering that . . . ?” Barbara replied. “Too bloody far above my pay grade, that is. Except to say what I expect you already know. She had hopes of you. For years she’d had them and now she was pregnant by you. It might’ve taken a saint not to think how different things might become if she just left Teo where she was. P’rhaps she thought she’d just wait and see how things developed.”
“Still and all,” he said. He fell into silence then, and Barbara allowed the silence to hang there. If Rosie had cocked up, so had he. Barbara expected he knew that.
He finally spoke with, “I’ll do for the baby what I’ve done for Colton: money for support and my personal involvement with the child. But I won’t marry her. I can’t.”
“Something tells me things between you won’t be so easily resolved as that,” Barbara said.
“People need to marry for love. Don’t you agree?”
“People marry for all sorts of reasons. There’re times and situations when love’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Not for me. And I don’t love her. I’m fond of her. I’ve always been that. But what I did with her . . . ?” He looked from Barbara to the bronze sculptures that sat upon the credenza. “I took her suggestion,” he said. “I thought only of Teo. I acted the part. I made love to Rosie and listened to her moan and sigh and felt her come while I was inside her and through it all, I pretended she was Teo, as Teo would have been had she only been whole.”
Barbara nodded, but she found it difficult to sympathise with Carver. No matter Rosie’s part in what had happened between them, he’d gone along with it. The why of it was truly on him: No matter his claims about his indifference to Teo’s disfigurement, he couldn’t cope with her not feeling the way he—Ross Carver, not Teo herself—wanted her to feel. That inability on his part had started all of them down this road. As well intentioned as he might have been and as well meaning as he no doubt saw himself, he’d not allowed his wife to forget for an instant what she most wanted to forget about herself.
CHELSEA
SOUTH-WEST LONDON
Sophie believed none of it. Tani had rung her and had got as far as “Mum’s got the passports,” when Sophie said, “I’m coming to Chelsea,” to which he’d replied, “There’s nothing you c’n do, Soph. Everyone reckons she’s taking Simi to Nigeria and—” which she’d interrupted with, “She isn’t. She can’t be. I’m coming.” She’d then rung off.
She made very good time from the college. She’d been in a lecture when she’d seen he was ringing her, she told him. She’d ducked out of the hall to take the call. She’d arrived so quickly upon the conclusion of their conversation, she might have been transported through magic.
Tani was waiting for Sophie with Deborah St. James in her husband’s study. They had both been there for hours, in anticipation of Monifa being located at one of the airports, inside a nearby airport hotel, at St. Pancras International, or at a hotel in the train station’s vicinity. DS Nkata had told them that he would ring the instant he knew anything at all. Tani had been waiting in the study since long before dawn, joined by Deborah St. James, who’d appeared round half past seven with a tray of breakfast for him, which he hadn’t been able to eat. Sergeant Nkata hadn’t rung, however, and as the hours passed, Tani’s hopes for his sister’s safety faded. Either his mother had made an escape from the country or his father had found her. He didn’t want to think of the outcome of either possibility.