Max walks through Soho with a pair of headphones over his ears. The Sony Walkman is in his jacket pocket, the volume turned up to maximum. At first, there is just static. Then the sound of two little girls’ voices fills his head.
He stops. Lights a cigarette while leaning against a wall covered in fly posters. As he listens, he drops to the ground, sitting down on a doorstep, his head in his hands. When the tape comes to the end, he exhales smoke, squinting up into the sky.
And then he presses rewind.
Joanna runs along Shaftesbury Avenue, rueing the decision to take this route as she dodges past the pottering tourists, the dawdling office workers. Still, she loves this part of London. She loves the mingling of different languages; the way Londoners walk with their heads down whereas the tourists look only upwards; she even loves the rubbish and detritus swept into piles in the gutters, that feeling of everything getting tidied and sorted and washed away clean.
The morning is clear and bright and her lungs drink in the cold fresh air. She carries on into Soho itself, up through Leicester Square, past a man hunched in a doorway listening to his headphones, thinking already of the latte and the sausage sandwich she’ll have when she’s run her ten kilometres.
It seems a lifetime ago since the New Year. During the last few months – since seeing Debbie and then resolving things with Will – she has to admit that she has felt lighter. Not indifferent, not absolved, but as if a small chip of ice has been dislodged from inside her. She can breathe easier. She has been sleeping better for the first time in years.
They have taken on a number of different cases at BTR. An environmental matter she has really got stuck into, and a case involving a death row inmate in Jamaica. They’ve nudged her away from Kirstie a little. She’s still there but not as visceral. Joanna has even managed to put the date of the judicial review hearing out of her mind.
Perhaps she has been wrong all this time, she thinks as she cuts up through Chinatown, breathing in the smell of crispy duck and noodles. Perhaps opening up is good. Maybe she should find a counsellor, someone professional to help her put what happened to Kirstie in a place that hurts her less, isn’t so intrusive, so obstructive.
Is it forgiveness she feels? She takes that thought and throws it down on the ground in front of her as she pounds the pavement, runs over it as if testing its strength. From the way her speed picks up, she realises that it’s not. She thinks about meeting Laurel Bowman face to face and can still imagine screaming at her, making her beg for forgiveness, for what she’s done. But . . . and her feet slow a little as she passes the Curzon Cinema and turns onto Frith Street … is that entirely accurate? Would she actually do that? Or would she rather sit and ask her how this could have happened? Ask her whether she wishes that things were different. Whether that ten-year-old girl exists any more or whether she has been extinguished.
Could she – ever – put the Flower Girls behind her? Could she go back to the person she was before she heard the name Laurel Bowman? That bright-eyed girl at university with all her idealistic dreams. She’d always thought she was going to be something, help people. Not fester in a pool of anger and vitriol.
Joanna glances up, to where the glass of the sky is smeared only by the white trails of planes traversing it. She sees that she’s outside a newsagent’s and feels thirsty. Sweat is coasting down her forehead and she feels warm outside for the first time this winter.
The bell rings as she enters the shop and it is as if the universe is laughing at her. Because there, slapped all over the front pages, are photos and headlines concerning the Flower Girls. Laurel Bowman’s judicial review was heard in court yesterday and judgment is expected any day now.
It is as if she can never escape. She feels a searing anger at the injustice of it. Images dance in front of her eyes and she sways in the shop. The sight of her pregnant sister sobbing with pain at Kirstie’s funeral; of the sombre police guard holding her tiny coffin; of Toby Bowman making his rotund way into court, dropping papers as he goes; of the judge looking down and making orders that affected everyone but him; of Debbie again, flicking ash into a saucer, pale hands and face, her eyes shrunken and exhausted; of the sounds of Jemima, playing upstairs in her cot; and finally of Rosie Bowman, her hood covering her face as she made her way outside in the rain.
It hits her in a rush, like the curve at the top of a rollercoaster as the car pushes out over the edge. All these images. The last twenty years of her life.
‘Are you OK?’ the newsagent asks her from behind his counter. ‘Do you need something to make you better?’
Joanna whips her head up to look at him and her eyes blaze.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I do need something.’
And, in that instant, she knows exactly what she needs to make her better.
She knows exactly what she needs to do.