That piece of news, Barbara saw, snagged Zawadi’s complete attention. She said, “She didn’t come to us as a policewoman. Her name wasn’t Adaku?”
“Adaku was her birth name. It got changed to Teo Bontempi when she was adopted. As a cop—she was a detective sergeant—she used the adopted name.”
“Why did she never tell me that?”
Barbara shrugged. “Could be she didn’t trust you. Could be she was looking for something here that she knew she wouldn’t find if she identified as a cop. How’d she show up? Wander in off the street or what?”
“The local schools know about us. She would have learned about us there, if she’d told us the truth when she said she’d been doing some speaking to the female pupils about FGM.”
“That part was on the up and up.”
“So she came here, she spoke to me, and I could see she had something to offer the girls.”
“D’you mean she could offer them the fact that she’d been mutilated?”
“I mean she could offer them the fact that she was a woman willing to speak of it.” Her face bore a look that seemed to challenge Barbara to ask for more personal information.
Barbara went with, “Christ. Did it happen to you as well?”
Zawadi looked across the room to a large calendar on which activities were scrawled, along with the name of the leader of each activity. Adaku Obiaka was printed three times. Looking back at Barbara, Zawadi said without a hint of emotion, “I was six years old. It was supposed to be a holiday with my extended family, but it turned out to be something else. I was held down on the floor at my gran’s house and gone at with the blade of a pair of scissors. With everyone telling me what a privilege it was that a newly sharpened blade was being used instead of the usual.”
“Which would’ve been what?” Barbara asked.
“A razor blade, a knife, a piece of glass. Anything that cuts.”
Barbara felt somewhat lightheaded. She said, “I’m that sorry, I am.”
“I have no need of your pity,” Zawadi told her.
Barbara waved her off. “Believe me, pity’s not what I feel. Sod it, why’s this happening to girls?”
“Because no one has been able to stop it completely. It’s outlawed, people are arrested and go to trial and to prison because of it, but no one has managed to end it. And the only thing we’re able to do—Orchid House and organisations like it—is to keep the girls safe if they’re able to make their way to us.”
“Do they?”
“They do. Adaku wanted to help with that. At least that’s what she said, and I believed her. As to her life as a policewoman, I know nothing about that and I expect no one else here does either. Now, if there’s nothing else?”
“I’d like to talk to that woman Narissa and the other two. If they knew Adaku, they might know something about her that hasn’t been uncovered.”
THE MOTHERS SQUARE
LOWER CLAPTON
NORTH-EAST LONDON
Because of her chair and her emergency oxygen, getting Lilybet from The Mothers Square to Great Ormond Street—for an appointment that had taken days to arrange—had required the use of a special van kitted out for her wheelchair, as well as a seat for whoever was going to attend her during the transport. Mark knew that his wife would not consider anyone except herself attending Lilybet, so once they had her tucked up in the van—strapped into her chair with the chair itself fixed in place on the floor—Pete belted herself into the attendant’s perch while he rode in the front with the driver. Robertson elected to stay in The Mothers Square. He would be there to assist when Pietra and Mark returned with their daughter. “Don’t mind the time,” Robertson said, waving them off. “I’m happy enough here, and I want to be in the picture of what the specialist says as well.”
So off they went. It was a silent journey.
His wife had gone through his iPhone while he slept, something which, as far as Mark knew, she’d never done before. She’d found the messages. She’d found and listened to the refrain from “their song,” after which she’d tracked down the song itself in its entirety and listened to it, hearing so much more than “No, I don’t wanna fall in love . . . with you.” From there, she’d found the relevant voicemails, which, stupidly, he’d not been able to bear deleting. So she’d heard her voice, and while she would not have recognised it, she did recognise the import behind Mark darling and I feel the same and I want to be with you as well. He’d kept all of it because he was so caught up in the rightness of what he’d felt, in the mad this-is-bigger-than-both-of-us, which was always the lie that one told oneself to justify surrendering to the libido. It could never just be a case of “I want what I want and I mean to have it,” which was, at least, an honest reaction to lust. Instead, it had to be written in the stars, an embracing of fate, a headlong rush into what seemed so extraordinary that it obliterated any memory of having been at this place once or twice or three times before. This was truly a case of I’ve-never-felt-like-this-before. Everything preceding it in one’s life had been mere dress rehearsal for This Big Moment. It was incontestably real. Because of that, one could not bear to eliminate a single item that, looked upon, fired up the senses once again, reassuring oneself that, yes, it was decidedly real this time, and one was finally alive in ways that all previous finally alives were rendered meaningless.