can’t imagine anyone being cold-hearted enough to rob a corpse, but nevertheless, I’ll keep it safe. The wallet is black, an expensive but simple piece of folded leather. When I open it, a photograph falls out: a home-printed image on cheap paper.
I put out my hand to still myself, even though the plane is steady. It isn’t possible. It’s a coincidence, that’s all; a similarity to be dismissed.
But it can’t be. I know this face as well as I know my own. This is a photograph of Sophia.
FOURTEEN
PASSENGER 1B
My name is Melanie Potts, and I’m on Flight 79 to honor my brother’s memory.
The flight attendants have covered the dead body with a blanket. I don’t know what I expected them to do with it—where I imagined they’d put it—but it wasn’t that. Everyone carrying on eating and drinking, watching movies, with a dead man just meters away from them. Surreal, really.
The only other dead body I’ve seen was my brother’s. I didn’t want to see him, but I wanted to say goodbye, and afterward, I was glad to have gone. It’s true what they say, about the body being somehow empty. Just a vessel for the person who used to inhabit it. I guess, if you think of it like that, it’s not so weird to leave a body in business class.
My brother was murdered by the police. Maybe that’s not what the court records say, but I can assure you that’s what happened. Six of them—each one bigger than my baby brother—hearing an accent, making a judgment, seeing what they wanted to see.
“It was necessary to use restraint techniques,” one of the officers said in court, “as the subject was becoming increasingly violent.”
Wouldn’t you be violent if half a dozen cops were sitting on you? Wouldn’t you hit and kick and bite to get free? That’s all he did, my little bro, and they pushed him into the ground till he couldn’t take a breath. Positional asphyxia, they call it.
I call it murder.
They give good lip service to rooting out the corrupt coppers, the violent ones, the ones with grudges. Every now and then, they’ll hang one out to dry, distancing themselves so they can say he did this to himself—it had nothing to do with us. But scratch the surface and you’ll find hundreds of complaints of police brutality, thousands of incivility, of racism, bias, prejudice. They keep the law on their side because they are the law, because the Masonic lodges are full of judges and magistrates and power, and a handshake will sweep away the inconvenience of a council estate lad in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So where did that leave me? Drifting, at first. Suicidal, for long enough for it to be my new normal. I’ll be honest, there were days when I couldn’t get out of bed, or if I hauled myself outside, I found my feet walking to the middle of the motorway bridge and looking down at the lorries and thinking, Just do it. Just end it all.
But I didn’t. Because they’d have killed two people then, and what would it all have been for? What would my legacy be, my mark on the world? I’d be as unimportant—as invisible—in death as my brother was in life. In court. If I’ve learned anything from what happened, it’s that you’ve got to make every day count.
I started to raise my voice. I wrote to MPs and uploaded videos on YouTube. I met other families whose loved ones had been murdered by the police or by prison guards or by negligent nurses in hospitals where fat-cat execs only cared about the bottom line. I spoke for us all.
The invitations came from all over the country. Pressure groups, women’s institutes, schools, and charities wanting to learn and help. They came from the authorities too—from police forces and councils ticking diversity training boxes—and I swallowed my anger for long enough to deliver my message and take the check that would enable me to speak for free somewhere else.
People paid for me to speak overseas. Three years after my brother’s death, I stepped off a first-class flight to Washington and had to fight back the tears. I was making my voice count; I was making his sacrifice count. And I was glad—so very glad—that I’d never stepped off that motorway bridge.
I had more to offer the world by staying alive.
FIFTEEN
8:30 P.M. | ADAM
Becca’s shouting from upstairs, the ringing in my ears distorting her words. I