He said, “Mum’s not lying about that part. There’d still be that: the cake and presents and the rest. Only . . .” Shit, he thought. She was only eight bloody years old. She was ages away from understanding the significance of the plan to cut her: what it would do to her now, what it would do to her later, and what it could do to her if things went south. Even he wasn’t clear on all that. But Sophie’s reaction to the Nigerian cutter coming to Bronte House had lit a fire that he wasn’t going to allow anyone to douse.
He said, “I bet no one’s told you the truth about Lim, right?”
“Lim’s with her gran, Tani. She’s having a holiday for th’ summer. She’s coming home in—”
“She won’t be coming home,” he said.
“Why?
“Because she’s dead.”
Simi’s eyes grew enormous. She shook her head. “She’s with her gran. That’s what Mummy said. She’ll be back for school. I don’t know where her gran lives, ’xactly, but she’ll be back for school. Mum said.”
He touched her cheek, wiping the tears away with his thumb. He said, “She killed herself, Squeak. She was ‘initiated,’ if that’s what you want to call it, just like it’s meant to happen to you. But it went bad, really and truly bad, and it stayed that way, and she couldn’t cope. So she unwound one of her mum’s head wraps and she used it to hang herself.”
Twelve years old she’d been, Tani thought. Simisola’s friend and idol from Mayville Estate. With an infection attacking her rampantly till she couldn’t endure the pain another moment, till death seemed the better alternative than to go on in a life that had been destroyed in the name of purity, in the name of chastity, in the name of bloody-hell-who-knew-what?
Simi said, “She didn’t! She didn’t! Mummy said—”
“Listen to me. Mum lied to you. About Lim, about this initiation rubbish, about everything. Squeak, you got to come with me. Pa invited a Nigerian woman to come to the flat. She’s meant to cut you. Mum wasn’t there when he arranged it, and he didn’t know I was there. He reckons he can plan the whole thing and no one will know till the cutter shows up. He’ll make it for when I’m not there. He’ll make it for when Mum’s not there. There’ll be some women to hold you down and—”
“No!” she shrieked. “No! No!”
She threw the chips to the ground and the Coke as well. Before he could stop her she began to run, straight through the market with no mind as to crashing into anyone who stood in her way.
BELSIZE PARK
NORTH LONDON
It was late when Lynley arrived in Belsize Park. He’d rung Daidre earlier, settling for voice mail instead of the real person. Coming at this hour was, thus, something of a risk. But they hadn’t spoken since their unhappy conversation about fear and whatever-else-it-had-been-about, and he didn’t like feeling unsettled about her, about who they were to each other, or about where they were heading. At this moment, though, it was only the end to their previous conversation that he wanted to do something about, although, truth to tell, he wasn’t at all sure what he could do about it other than say sorry. For his part. Which, of course, had been to bring up the topic in the first place, taking her words about her brother and sister and turning them on her in a fashion about which he wasn’t proud.
His final meeting of the day with Havers and Nkata had gone on longer than he’d anticipated. Both of them had reports for him, and all of them wished to sort through what they’d uncovered in order to make sense of it.
The missing smartphone meant one of several things: that someone had gone to Teo Bontempi’s flat to do away with the mobile once she had gone into hospital—knowing the mobile contained some sort of incriminating evidence—or Ross Carver was lying about the smartphone being there on her bedside table when he’d spent the night, or Mark Phinney had grabbed it when he found her unconscious in her bed. The first option suggested that whoever had struck the detective sergeant had returned later for the phone, although it begged the question why the killer had not removed the phone from the premises immediately the blow had been struck. The second option suggested that Teo Bontempi’s estranged husband had something to fear from what the phone might reveal about him. And the third option was that Mark Phinney had wanted to investigate what was on that phone. There was, of course, a fourth possibility: Someone else had removed the smartphone from Teo’s flat for reasons they’d yet to uncover.