‘Oi. Freak,’ he said, and she kept walking. His hair was gelled up in spikes and his eyes were narrowed, like he spent his whole life squinting at things he didn’t like.
‘I said, Freak.’
Tanzie tried not to look at him. Her heart had begun to thump. She began to walk a little bit faster.
He pulled forward a bit, so that she thought maybe he was going to go away. But he stopped the car and got out and swaggered over so that he was in front of her and she couldn’t actually go any further without pushing past him. He leant to one side, like he was explaining something to someone stupid.
‘It’s rude not to answer someone when they’re talking to you. Did your mum never tell you that?’
Tanzie was so frightened that she couldn’t talk. She just shook her head.
‘Where’s your brother?’
‘I don’t know.’ Her voice came out as a whisper.
‘Yes, you do, you little four-eyed freak. Your brother thinks he’s been a bit clever messing around with my Facebook.’
‘He didn’t,’ she said. But she was a really bad liar and she knew as soon as she’d said it that he knew she was lying.
He took two steps towards her. ‘You tell him that I’m going to have him, the cocky little shit. He thinks he’s so clever. Tell him I’m going to mess with his profile for real.’
The other Fisher, the cousin whose name she never remembered, muttered something to him that Tanzie couldn’t hear. They were all out of the car now, walking slowly towards her.
‘Yeah,’ Jason Fisher said. ‘Your brother needs to understand something. He messes with something of mine, we mess around with something of his.’ He lifted his chin and spat noisily on the pavement. It sat there in front of her, a great green slug. Tanzie hesitated, not wanting to tread in it.
She wondered if they could see how hard she was breathing.
‘Get in the car.’
‘What?’
‘Get in the f**king car.’
‘No.’ She began to back away from them. She glanced around her, trying to work out if anyone was coming down the road. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a bird in a cage.
‘Get in the f**king car, Costanza.’ He said it like her name was something disgusting. She wanted to run then but she was really bad at running – her legs always swung out to the sides at the wrong angle – and she knew they would catch her. She wanted to cross the road and turn back towards home but she knew that as soon as she started to run they would get her. And then a hand landed on her shoulder.
‘Look at her hair.’
‘You know about boys, Four Eyes?’
‘Course she doesn’t know about boys. Look at the state of her.’
‘She’s got lipstick on, the little tart. Still fugly, though.’
‘Yeah, but you don’t have to look at its face, do you?’ They started laughing. Her voice came out sounding like someone else’s: ‘Just leave me alone. Nicky didn’t do anything. We just want to be left alone.’
‘We just want to be left alone.’ Their voices were mocking. Fisher took a step closer. His voice lowered. ‘Just get into the f**king car, Costanza.’
‘Leave me alone!’
He started grabbing at her then, his hands snatching at her clothes. Panic washed over her in an icy wave, tightening her throat, pushing her heart against her ribs. She tried to push him away. She might have been shouting but nobody came. The two of them grabbed her arms and were pulling her towards the car. She could hear their grunts of effort, smell their deodorant, as her feet scrabbled for purchase on the pavement. And she knew like she knew anything that she should not get inside. Because as that door opened in front of her, like the jaws of some great animal, she suddenly remembered an American statistic for girls who got into strange men’s cars. Your odds of survival dropped by 72 per cent as soon as you put your foot in that footwell. That statistic became a solid thing in front of her. Tanzie took hold of it and she hit and she kicked and she bit and she heard someone swear as her foot made contact with soft flesh and then something hit the side of her head and she reeled and spun and there was a crack as she hit the ground. Everything went sideways. There was scuffling, a distant shout. And she lifted her head and her sight was all blurry but she thought she saw Norman coming towards her across the road at a speed she’d never seen, his teeth bared and his eyes black, looking not like Norman at all but some kind of demon, and then there was a flash of red and the squeal of brakes and all Tanzie saw was something black flying into the air like a ball of washing and all she heard was the scream, the screaming that went on and on, the sound of the end of the world, the worst sound you ever heard, and she realized it was her it was her it was the sound of her own voice.
30.
Jess
He was on the ground. Jess ran, breathless, barefoot, into the street and the man was standing there, both hands on his head, rocking on his feet, saying, ‘I never even saw it. I never saw it. It just ran straight out into the road.’
Nicky was on the ground beside him, cradling his head, white as a sheet and murmuring, ‘Come on, fella. Come on.’ Tanzie was wide-eyed with shock, her arms rigid at her sides.
Jess knelt. Norman’s eyes were glass marbles. Blood seeped from his mouth and ear. ‘Oh, no, you daft old thing. Oh, Norman. Oh, no.’ She put her ear to his chest. Nothing. A great sob rose into her throat.
She felt Tanzie’s hand on her shoulder, her fist grabbing a handful of her T-shirt and pulling at it again and again. ‘Mum, make it all right. Mum, make him all right.’ Tanzie dropped to her knees and buried her face in his coat. ‘Norman. Norman.’ And then she began to howl.
Beneath her shrieking, Nicky’s words emerged garbled and confused. ‘They were trying to get Tanzie into the car. I was trying to get you but I couldn’t open the window. I just couldn’t open it and I was shouting and he just went through the garden fence. Before I could get there. He knew. He went straight through. He was trying to help her.’
Nathalie came running down the road, her shirt fastened with the wrong buttons, hair half done in rollers. She wrapped her arms around Tanzie and held her close, rocking her, trying to stop the noise.
Norman’s eyes had stilled. Perhaps focused on some distant piece of food. Jess lowered her head to his and felt her heart break.
‘I’ve called the emergency vet,’ someone said.
She stroked his big soft ear. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
‘We’ve got to do something, Jess.’ He said it again, more urgently. ‘Now.’
She put a trembling hand on Nicky’s shoulder. ‘I think he’s gone, sweetheart.’
‘No. You don’t say that. You’re the one who said we don’t say that. We don’t give in. You’re the one who says it’s all going to be okay. You don’t say that.’
And as Tanzie began to wail again, Nicky’s face crumpled. And he began to sob, one elbow bent across his face, huge, gasping sobs, as if a dam had finally broken.
Jess sat in the middle of the road, as the cars crawled around her, and the curious neighbours hovered on the front steps of their houses, and she held her old dog’s enormous bloodied head on her lap and she lifted her face to the heavens and said silently, What now? WHAT THE HELL NOW?
She didn’t see Jason Fisher climb into the car and drive away.
But the CCTV did.
31.
Tanzie
Her mother brought her indoors. Tanzie didn’t want to leave him. She didn’t want him to die out there on the Tarmac, alone, strangers staring at him with open mouths and murmured whispers, but Mum wouldn’t listen. Nigel from next door came running out and said he would take over and the next thing Mum was pulling her indoors, her arms tight around Tanzie, and as she kicked and screamed for him, her voice was close in Tanzie’s ear, arms clasped around her middle, ‘Sweetheart, it’s all all right, sweetheart, come on inside, don’t look, it’s all going to be okay.’ But even as she closed the front door, head against hers, pulling Tanzie to her, and her eyes were blind with tears, Tanzie could hear Nicky sobbing behind them in the hallway, weird jagged sobs like it wasn’t even something he knew how to do, and Mum was finally lying to her because it wasn’t going to be okay, it never could be, because it was actually the end of everything.
32.
Ed
‘Sometimes,’ Gemma said, glancing behind her at the puce, screaming child, arching its back at the next table, ‘I think the worst sort of parenting is not actually witnessed by social workers but by baristas.’ She stirred her coffee briskly, as if biting back a natural urge to say something.
The mother, her blonde corkscrew curls cascading stylishly over her back, continued to ask the child in soothing tones to stop and drink its ‘babycino’. It ignored her, possibly unable to hear her over the self-created noise levels.
‘I don’t see why we couldn’t go to the pub.’
‘At eleven fifteen in the morning? Jesus, why doesn’t she just tell him to stop? Or take him out? Does nobody know how to distract a child any more?’
The child screamed louder. Ed’s head had begun to hurt.
‘We could go.’
‘Go where?’
‘The pub. It would be quieter.’
She stared at him, and then she ran a speculative finger across his chin. ‘Ed, how much did you drink last night?’
He had emerged from the police station spent. They had met his barrister afterwards – Ed had already forgotten his name – with Paul Wilkes and two other solicitors, one of whom specialized in insider-trading cases. They sat around the mahogany table and spoke as if choreographed, laying out the prosecution case baldly, so that Ed was in no doubt about what lay ahead. Against him: the email trail, Deanna Lewis’s testimony, her brother’s phone calls, the FSA’s new determination to stamp down on perpetrators of insider trading. His own cheque, complete with signature.
Deanna had sworn that she had not known what she was doing was wrong. She stated Ed had pressed the money on her. She said that had she known what he was suggesting was illegal she would never have done it. Nor would she have told her brother.
The evidence for him: that he had plainly not gained a cent from the transaction. His legal team said – in his opinion, a little too cheerfully – that they would stress his ignorance, his ineptitude, that he was new to money, the ramifications and responsibilities of directorship. They would claim that Deanna Lewis knew very well what she was doing; that his and Deanna’s short relationship was actually evidence of her and her brother’s entrapment. The investigating team had been all over Ed’s accounts and found them gratifyingly unrewarding. He paid the full whack of tax every year. He had no investments. He had always liked things simple.
And the cheque was not addressed to her. It was in her possession, but her name was in her own writing. They would assert that she had taken a blank cheque from his home at some point during the relationship, they said.
‘But she didn’t,’ he said.
Nobody seemed to hear.
It could go either way with the prison sentence, they told him, but whatever happened Ed was undoubtedly looking at a hefty fine. And obviously the end of his time with Mayfly. He would be banned from holding a directorship, possibly for some considerable time. Ed needed to be prepared for all these things. They began to confer among themselves.
And then he had said it: ‘I want to plead guilty.’
‘What?’
The room fell silent.
‘I did tell her to do it. I didn’t think about it being illegal. I just wanted her to go away so I told her how she could make some money.’
They stared at each other.
‘Ed –’ his sister began.
‘I want to tell the truth.’