‘They haven’t closed it, I promise. They just hit a dead end, and the Met left.’
‘I have seen no activity.Nada. None.’ More energy now. He pictured her sitting up, elbows on knees, edge of the bed, hissing into the phone.
‘I want to ask you a strange question, Mrs Lopez. They found tubes in the apartment where Lev Malnyk stayed. The police said it showed Malnyk was using, dealing—’
‘No, no, no.’
‘My friend Stevie heard you didn’t believe it.’
‘Stevie? Who is that? No, but that’s not what those tubes are for. Look, I don’t care about Lev Malnyk, maybe he was using drugs, but those tubes were for dialysis. My sister has at-home dialysis for kidney disease. Blood in, blood out.Machine cleans it when your kidney doesn’t work. Saved my sister’s life.’
‘That’s an expensive machine to have in your house.’
‘Oh, thousands of dollars, sure. Health Service would lend it unless you are rich.’
‘Thank you, Andrea.’
‘I was a nurse once. Sorry if I sound dopey. I asked for tranquillizers. They make me sleep all the time. Nina …’
It was appropriate, he thought, as she clicked off the line, that her daughter’s name was the last word in the conversation, almost as if she was reaching for the little girl as she fell back to sleep.
He opened his phone and googledKIDNEY DIALYSIS MACHINE BONNET.
The webpage returned with a question:Did you mean Kidney Dialysis Machine Bonot?
So that’s what it was. In his haste to scout the flat, Cammell-Curzon had misread the brand name and misrecognized the machine, which was understandable, a great lump of complicated white goods like that. Lev Malnyk was not 3D printing, he was on dialysis, and the police had missed it because …
Because the machine had been removed from his apartment the instant the accident happened.
The call sank Edward into deep thought, and he walked back towards his son’s resting place. As he approached the grave, he saw the willowy figure of Tara there.
‘Who were you calling?’
There was no harm in telling her. ‘The mother of Nina, the little girl who—’
‘I know who Nina is. Right now, everyone in the country knows.’
‘She’s buried over there.’ The phrase was so brutal he put his hand up to his chest and crossed himself.
‘Poor sweet little innocent lamb.’
He regarded his ex-wife with tenderness. She was always well turned-out, with dark mascara and oxblood lipstick. Tara exuded a have-to-be-somewhere-else-in-a-minute vibe, always, but reached out her arms.
‘Come here, old man.’
He sank into her body and cried.
‘What’s brought this on?’
No one else could ask that question. The death of a child didn’t ‘come on’ – it was never absent. But Edward knew what Tara meant.
‘Oh,’ he wept, ‘a number of things. Being misrecognized as someone’s dead son didn’t exactly help. Being called “sonny” by a randomer. And this Nina case.’
‘You’re not involved in that, though?’
‘Just helping the police a little.’
‘What? Did they ask you?’
