“Now the butcher. Ugh. Now the ’state agent where they—”
“Sell houses, yes, we know. For God’s sake, Sophia!”
I feel Becca’s eyes on me as Sophia falls silent.
Easy to be a perfect parent when you don’t have kids, when their strange little quirks are endearing instead of infuriating. Maybe if Becca had to listen to Sophia narrate her journey to school a thousand times or heard Mina reciting Goodnight Moon every bloody night for five years, she’d get it.
Mina won’t look at her phone till she lands, but all this frustration inside me needs somewhere to go, so I take out mine. She reckons I’m the one not communicating, when she can’t even sort out the simple logistics of who’s picking up our—
I stare at my screen, at the message thread I’ve opened in preparation for giving Mina both barrels.
No need for a babysitter. I’ve sorted an early finish tomorrow, so I can
My message lies unfinished. I have a sudden memory of the call from Custody, of thrusting my phone back into my pocket yesterday afternoon, because my suspect’s brief was finally ready for disclosure.
I thought I’d sent it.
I was sure I’d sent it.
Heat rushes through me, remorse a close cousin of anger, the way it always has been. This has only happened because Mina won’t answer her phone to me now, insists on me texting. Or emailing. Emailing! Who emails their wife, for God’s sake?
It’s easier.
Easier on whom? Not me, that’s for sure. She can’t bear even to hear my voice, can she? She’d rather keep me at the end of an email, where she can pretend I’m just some administrative headache she has to deal with for Sophia’s sake.
“Stay, then,” I tell Becca, and even I can hear the bitterness in my voice. I swallow it. “Fix Sophia’s tea, maybe? She’d like that.”
She hesitates, then shrugs. “Cool.”
Is that what Mina would have done? Or would she tell me I’m wasting money we don’t have? There was a time when I couldn’t put a foot wrong in Mina’s eyes. Now I can’t do anything right.
Liar.
Cheat.
Not fit to be a father.
The worst of it is that she’s right. I am a liar. I am a cheat. She can’t hate me any more than I hate myself, can’t know that just catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror makes me sick with disgust. How did it come to this?
Butler probably has that phone bill already. She’ll have been through it with a highlighter, reading between the lines. Coloring in the end of my career.
What will I do? Being a copper isn’t like most other jobs; you don’t do it then move on, as if you worked in a bar or tried your hand at retail. It’s like teaching or being a doctor. It’s part of you. And I’m going to lose it all.
Ex-husband, ex-father, ex-copper. Things couldn’t get much worse.
As we come to the edge of town, Sophia pulls free from Becca’s hand. It’s snowing again, and her wellies leave tiny footprints on the path. She takes the corner twenty yards ahead of us, and I call her name, but she giggles and runs faster.
“Race!”
I break into a jog. Around the corner, the street’s empty. Gray slush from the road has spattered the pavements, and I search for the right-sized prints. “Sophia!”
“Chill. She’s playing hide-and-seek,” Becca says, several yards behind me. “Oh no!” she calls, pantomime-loud. “Where could Sophia be?” She grins at me, but I’m not playing.
“Sophia!”
A car passes us, and I look inside, clock the number plate, the driver, the direction of travel. It takes seconds to snatch a child. Minutes to make them disappear.
“Sophia!” I break into a run. “Come out right now. This isn’t funny.”
“She won’t come out if she thinks you’re cross with her,” Becca hisses after me, then calls out in that singsong voice: “I can’t see her anywhere!”
I stop so abruptly, I almost lose my footing. “Please don’t tell me how to parent my own child.” I turn in a circle, scanning the street. Where is she?
During any police investigation involving a kid, there’s a moment when you think: What if this were my child? What would I do? How would it feel? Only a moment, though; if you let it go on for any longer than that, you’d never get the job done.
The moment is already a minute.
“Sophia!” So loud the sound rasps in my throat and I have to cough to clear it.
“It’s no good.” Becca heaves a melodramatic sigh. “We’ll have