“But something must—”
“Stop it, Rosalba!” He snapped the order like an officer to his underling. “Your sister’s dead and we’re trying to work out what happened to her.”
Rosie said nothing. Neither did Barbara. She waited and watched and what she saw was Rosie’s eyes filling with tears. Ross apparently saw this as well. An expression of what appeared to be exasperation fleetingly crossed his face. He strode to the balcony door and breathed in the morning air deeply. After a moment, he turned back to them and said quietly, “She was still my wife, Rosalba. Despite everything. Still. I was here because she’d texted me. She’d asked me to come here as she’d wanted to talk to me.”
“About what?” Rosie asked the question quietly.
“I don’t know. She never said.”
“You were here as well, two days earlier,” Barbara said to her. Then she quickly added before Rosie could reply, “According to the neighbours, you two argued.”
Rosie could hardly lie about this, Barbara thought. She wasn’t stupid, and she would know that Nkata had shared the information she’d given him about the argument she’d had with her sister. But Barbara reckoned that Ross Carver didn’t know about the argument, and from the way he began to say something then stopped himself abruptly, she saw that he’d been clueless.
“She hadn’t been to see our parents,” Rosie told her. “She should have gone to see them regularly, but she didn’t. I was angry about that. And she was angry that I was angry. It was all very stupid. Like arguments generally are.”
“Argued a lot, you and your sister?” Barbara said.
“That’s what sisters do.”
“Shout at each other, you mean? Loud enough for the neighbours to hear? Sounds like a real set-to, to me. When was the last time she’d been to see your parents?”
Rosie pressed her lips together. Clearly, she saw the trap, but she had no choice. She could walk straight into it or she could sidestep briefly by asking her parents to lie for her. In either case, the coppers would be checking. And, in this particular situation, the truth wasn’t going to be difficult for them to uncover.
CHELSEA
SOUTH-WEST LONDON
Deborah heard the telly as she descended the stairs to the basement kitchen. An educated voice was saying, “Please understand my point. To submit to any arbitrarily dictated step is to allow our lives to be tainted by an allegation that is not only false, but also reprehensibly so. Such submission will result in a blackening of our reputations as individuals and as a couple. We absolutely refuse to countenance this denigration of our characters. We’re being targeted because one of us is an immigrant.”
“What’s going on?” Deborah asked. Both her husband and her father were in the room. Simon stood with arms crossed, leaning against the edge of the worktop and munching a piece of toast while her father put slices of cantaloupe on a serving platter. Both of them looked in her direction.
Her father said, “Sky News’s talking to that girl’s dad and her mum, the one ’t disappeared.”
“Have there been developments?”
“Just switched it on,” her father said.
“。 . . unreasonable, considering where she went, Mr. Akin.” The journalist—an Asian woman with gorgeous hair, shapely lips, and disturbingly exophthalmic eyes—was making a point.
“What we know is this,” Charles Akin said, “and we would appreciate the story being reported accurately. Bolu did not go to this organisation on her own. Bolu was taken there from the cultural centre. We don’t know why. We don’t know by whom. All we know at this point is that the director of this organisation is demanding that we meet with her and a social worker. And that is something we will not do.”
“You do see, though, how your refusal to cooperate makes it appear that Orchid House has taken the appropriate decision not to reveal—”
“I’m not interested in what my refusal looks like. I’m interested in having our daughter returned to us. She’s been taken. How can I possibly make that any clearer? She did not flee. And her mother and I have no intention of cooperating with anyone until the police arrest the director of the anti-FGM group responsible for hiding Bolu. That is false imprisonment. The police should speak to Bolu herself. They will then see that there is nothing for anyone to learn about this family.”
“And yet the director of Orchid House believes otherwise. Why would she place Bolu out of harm’s reach without Bolu herself giving her a reason?”