Priya Sandhu called at four minutes to nine, which was four minutes before she said she would, and Armani found out later that this was the only way she ever did anything.
He took it in the long room with the door shut. His mother was in the kitchen with Nicole, washing up, and he could hear them through the stone, the clink of plates, the water running, his mother's voice rising and falling as she told some story about a woman at church in Granville who had once tried to bring a goat to a wedding. Nicole was laughing. He didn't want to bring the call into that room.
"The car," Sandhu said. "A grey Skoda Octavia. Hire car. Rented eleven days ago from a depot in Coventry in the name of Ian Crawley, with a driving licence in the same name and a card registered to his company. Returned to the same depot at ten past seven this evening."
"Tonight?"
"Tonight. While you were eating your tea, probably. He handed the keys over the counter, paid a small charge for a scratch on the rear bumper without arguing, and walked out onto the main road. The depot's cameras lose him at the bus stop."
Armani was standing in front of the wall. He had his free hand flat on the desk under it, on top of the drawer.
"So he's gone."
"He's on foot or he's on a bus or somebody picked him up. That's all I know for certain." She paused. "But the hire agreement has an address on it. A flat in Moseley. Above a launderette on the Alcester Road. We've got a warrant for the morning."
"A launderette," Armani said, and he didn't know why that was the part that stuck.
"I know," Sandhu said, and he could tell she had thought the same thing. "Listen to me. Two things. Firstly, a car from Solihull will drive past your house tonight, and again in the early hours, and again tomorrow. You won't see them stop. They'll just be around. Secondly, your club has a man called Lewis who used to be one of ours. Graham's spoken to him. When you travel to London on Saturday, your mother and your partner travel with Lewis. Not on the team coach. With Lewis. Is that alright?"
"My mother won't like it."
"Your mother," Sandhu said, "struck me as somebody who will like it fine once she's met him. He's from Handsworth. His nan was from Clarendon."
Despite everything, Armani almost laughed.
"I'll call you tomorrow after we've been in," she said. "Try and sleep."
***
He told his mother and Nicole the bare shape of it, standing in the kitchen doorway with a tea towel somebody had handed him. A hire car. A flat. A search in the morning. A man called Lewis.
His mother dried her hands slowly, finger by finger.
"So he's running," she said.
"They don't know."
"He returned a car he paid for with a card in his own name, and then he walked to a bus stop." She hung the towel over the oven door handle and straightened it. "A man doing that is not going anywhere he wants to go. He's going somewhere he has to go." She looked at Armani. "That's running."
Nicole was leaning against the sink with her arms folded. "Do you still want to come to London?" she asked his mother.
"I did not fly nine hours to sit in a barn," his mother said, "however nice the barn is."
***
He slept, which surprised him.
He woke once at three and lay listening, and somewhere out on the lane beyond the hedge he heard a car go past slowly, slower than anybody would drive at three in the morning without a reason, and keep going, the sound of its engine thinning out toward Knowle until it was gone. He lay with his eyes open for a while. Then he turned over and slept again.
***
The manager called him into his office on Friday morning before training.
It was a small room with a big window looking out over the pitches, and a whiteboard with the West Ham team drawn on it already, magnets in the shape of shirts, though West Ham was eight days away. The manager was sitting behind his desk with a cup of coffee and he didn't get up.
"Graham has told me," he said. "Not everything. Enough."
"Sorry, boss."
The manager frowned at him. "Why are you sorry?"
Armani didn't have an answer to that.
"A man came into my building," the manager said, "and left a letter for one of my players, to frighten him. This is not something you should be sorry for. This is something I am angry about." He put the coffee down. "But I am not your father, and I am not a policeman. I am your coach. So I will ask you a coach's question."
"Okay."
"Is your head here? Tomorrow. In London. For sixty minutes. Is your head here, or is it in a flat in Birmingham?"
Armani thought about it honestly, because the manager would know if he didn't.
"I don't know where it'll be in the morning," he said. "But when the whistle goes it'll be on the pitch. It always is."
The manager looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded.
"Sixty minutes," he said. "That is Rhian's number, not mine. If she says fifty, it is fifty. You don't argue with her."
"I never argue with her."
"Everybody argues with her," the manager said. "Nobody wins."
***
Sandhu called at twenty past three, while he was sitting in the car park with his boots in a bag on the passenger seat.
"We've been in," she said.
He waited.
"He's gone. He'd been gone a while, I think, the fridge was empty and the bins had been done. Clothes mostly taken. A suitcase missing from the top of the wardrobe, you could see the shape of it in the dust." She paused. "He left in a hurry, but he's a tidy man, even in a hurry. He made the bed."
Armani stared through the windscreen at the line of trees at the edge of the training ground.
"But he didn't take everything," Sandhu said. "There was a cupboard under the stairs. Behind the hoover and an ironing board. Three box files. Old ones, the cardboard kind with the metal clip inside."
"What was in them?"
"Cards, in one. A lot of cards. Different names, different agencies, going back years. In the other two, notebooks. The cheap kind, school exercise books, the kind you buy in packs of ten." She stopped. When she went on her voice was careful. "There are names in them, Armani. A lot of names. Countries. Dates. Notes. We haven't been through them properly yet. It'll take weeks."
"Is my name in there?"
"Yes."
He closed his eyes.
"I'm not going to tell you any more today," Sandhu said. "Not because I'm hiding it from you. Because you've got a football match tomorrow and I'd like you to play it. On Sunday I'll come to your house, if that's alright with you, and I'll show you the page. Just yours. And then you can decide whether you want to know anything else."
"Why would he leave them?"
"I've been asking myself that all afternoon," Sandhu said. "Maybe he panicked. Maybe there wasn't room in the suitcase. Maybe he thought nobody would look behind a hoover." A pause. "Or maybe he couldn't bear to throw them away. Men like him keep everything. You know that. He kept your card for eleven years."
Armani opened his eyes. A groundsman was walking across the far pitch with a bucket, stopping every few yards to bend down and press something into the turf. Divots, probably. Repairing the morning's damage.
"Sunday," he said.
"Sunday. Play well tomorrow."
***
Lewis was waiting at the barn at eight o'clock on Saturday morning in a dark grey Range Rover, leaning against the bonnet with a coffee from Bean in each hand.
He was built like a wardrobe and spoke so softly that Nicole had to lean in to hear him. He shook Armani's hand, then Nicole's, and then he turned to Armani's mother, who had come out onto the gravel in her navy skirt and the cream cardigan with a small overnight bag, and he said, "Morning, Mrs Wilson. My nan was from May Pen," and his mother's whole face changed.
"May Pen? What was her name?"
"Hyacinth Brown. She ran a cook shop by the clock tower before she came over in sixty two."
"I know that cook shop," his mother said. "Everybody knows that cook shop. My uncle used to stop there on the way to Kingston for the curry goat."
"Her curry goat was famous."
"Her curry goat was a crime," his mother said. "It was so good it should have been illegal." She handed Lewis her overnight bag without being asked and climbed into the back of the Range Rover, and as Lewis closed the door after her he looked across the roof of the car at Armani and raised his eyebrows very slightly, and Armani understood that Sandhu had been right, and that his mother would like Lewis fine.
The team coach left Bodymoor Heath at nine. He watched the Range Rover pull out of the lane behind it and then lost it at the first roundabout, and for the whole of the journey down the M40 he kept looking at his phone, and every time there was nothing.
Bailey, in the seat beside him, had his headphones on and his eyes shut. Somewhere past Banbury he opened one eye.
"You're checking that phone like it owes you money."
"Sorry."
"Don't say sorry. Put it in your bag." Bailey shut the eye again. "It'll still be there at five o'clock."
Armani put it in his bag. He took it out again at High Wycombe. Bailey didn't say anything that time. He just reached over without opening his eyes, took the phone out of Armani's hand, and put it in his own pocket.
***
Craven Cottage was the strangest ground he had ever played at, and he loved it the moment he saw it.
The coach dropped them on Stevenage Road and they walked the last bit through the players' entrance, past the statue of Johnny Haynes outside the old red brick stand, the old Fulham captain caught in bronze mid pass. Then out through the tunnel and onto the grass. The Thames was right there. Right behind the stand at the far end, so close you could hear it, the slap of water against the embankment, gulls arguing over something on the mud. A rowing eight went past while he was standing on the touchline, eight men pulling in perfect time and a little cox at the back shouting at them, and none of them looked up at the stadium at all.
And in the corner, between the stands, the Cottage itself. A little white house with a balcony and a pitched roof that looked as if somebody had dropped it there by accident a hundred years ago and nobody had ever got round to moving it.
"It looks like a toy," Tom Ashby said, beside him.
"It's older than both of us put together."
"Older than all of us put together."
Armani walked down toward the Putney End, where the away fans would be. It wasn't full yet. Just a few early ones in claret scarves leaning on the barrier. He looked up at where the family seats were supposed to be and couldn't see anyone he knew.
He did his sprints. Forty metres. The hip noticed every one of them and let him go.
***
They found his mother and Nicole in the warm up, sitting where Lewis had put them, the corner of the Putney End nearest the river, with Lewis on the aisle like a door that had been closed.
His mother had her little Jamaican flag on her lap. She didn't hold it up this time. She just raised her hand when she saw him looking. Nicole, beside her, did the same.
And beside Nicole there were three more people he hadn't expected.
A tall woman in a bright orange headwrap, a man in a flat cap with a grey beard, and a young man in his twenties in a Brentford bobble hat who was grinning at Armani with his thumbs up like an idiot.
Nicole's mother. Nicole's father. Nicole's brother, Dwayne, who had been at the Gtech for every one of Armani's matches for two seasons and had never once let him forget he left.
He had met them before, all of them, at a long Sunday lunch in Hackney the summer they got together, where Nicole's mother had fed him until he couldn't stand and her father had asked him seventeen questions about his intentions in a voice that made it clear only one answer was acceptable. But he had never seen them sitting next to his own mother. He hadn't known they would be there. Nicole must have arranged it with Lewis, quietly, the way she arranged everything.
Nicole's mother leaned across and said something to his mother. His mother laughed. Then his mother leaned back the other way and said something to Nicole's mother, pointing at the pitch, at him, and Nicole's mother put her hand on her chest and shook her head, laughing too.
He would find out later what it was. His mother had said, *that one used to eat dirt off the ground when he was two*, and Nicole's mother had said, *so did mine, so did mine.*
He turned back toward the centre circle so they wouldn't see his face.
***
The first half went past like weather.
Fulham were good at home. They always were. Marco Silva had them pressing high and fast, Iwobi and Smith Rowe dropping into the spaces between the lines, Harry Wilson on their right drifting inside onto his left foot and looking for the far corner every time he got near the box. And on Armani's side, right in front of him, Antonee Robinson.
Armani had watched Robinson on video all week. He knew what everyone knew. Robinson was quick. Not Mendes quick, but quick, quicker than he looked, with a low centre of gravity and a way of tucking in behind you just as you thought you were away. And he was American, and he talked. He talked the whole match. Not nasty. Just constant. *Here we go. Here we go, man. That all you got? Let's go.* Armani had never played against a full back who narrated.
The first time Armani ran at him, in the eighth minute, Robinson showed him the outside and then closed it, and the ball went out for a goal kick off Armani's shin.
"There it is," Robinson said, jogging back. "There it is. Good try, though."
The second time, in the nineteenth, Armani went inside instead, and Robinson went with him, and Armani laid it off to Cash, and Cash's cross was headed away by Andersen.
"Smart," Robinson said. "That's smart. I see you."
Fulham scored in the twenty eighth minute. A corner, a flick on at the near post from Bassey, and Raúl Jiménez at the back stick heading it down into the ground and up into the roof of the net. The Hammersmith End came to life behind the goal. Over on the Riverside, people stood up and the river kept going behind them as if nothing had happened.
One nil.
Armani stood with his hands on his hips and looked up at the Putney End. He couldn't see his mother from there. He looked anyway.
***
His chance came in the thirty sixth minute, and he snatched at it.
Tielemans won the ball in midfield and played it wide to him early, and for once Robinson was caught a yard too high, and Armani was in behind him before he had time to tuck in. He went toward the box. Robinson was coming. Andersen was coming across. Watkins was in the middle, Bailey arriving at the far post, Rogers late on the edge, three men in claret, and the ball was at Armani's feet ten yards from the byline and he had time. He had a full second.
He shot.
From the edge of the six yard box, from an angle so tight that Leno only had to stand still. It hit Leno on the knee and went out for a corner, and the Putney End made the noise away ends make when a man shoots from where he shouldn't have, a groan with something sharp at the end of it.
Watkins had his arms out wide in the middle of the box. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.
Armani jogged back toward the corner flag with his face hot. He knew exactly what had happened. He had felt it happen. The number had stood up inside him at the moment he looked up, and it had been louder than Watkins and louder than Bailey and louder than everything he had learned in eleven years about where the ball should go. *Fourteen. One more. Here.* And his foot had gone before his head could stop it.
At Everton he had squared it without thinking. Here he had shot without thinking. He didn't know which one was the real him. Maybe both.
Bailey came past him on the way to the near post for the corner.
"Don't," Bailey said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't do that thing where you think about it for a week. You snatched it. Everybody snatches it. Forget it before the corner comes in."
The corner came in. It was cleared. He forgot it, mostly.
***
Half time. One nil down.
In the dressing room the manager walked up and down for a full minute without saying anything, which was worse than shouting, and then he stopped in front of the whiteboard and drew one arrow on it, from the right wing to the penalty spot, with the marker squeaking.
"They are tired on this side," he said. "Robinson goes forward. Wilson goes forward. Nobody comes back. Wilson." He didn't look at Armani. He looked at the board. "When Robinson goes, you go behind him. Into the pocket. Like Paris. And when you get it in the box, you look up. You always look up."
That was all. He didn't say anything about the thirty sixth minute. He didn't have to.
Rhian checked the hip in the corner. Four out of ten. She wrote it down and looked at the manager and held up two fingers and then made a zero with her thumb and forefinger. Twenty minutes. Armani pretended not to see.
***
The equaliser came in the fifty second minute, and it started with a run he made and ended with a ball he never touched.
Robinson went forward, as the manager had said he would, overlapping Iwobi on the Fulham left, and the ball broke loose from a tackle on the halfway line and Kamara poked it into the space behind him, and Armani was already there, in the pocket, the way he had been at the Parc des Princes. He turned and ran at Bassey, who was the last man, and as he ran he saw Robinson out of the corner of his eye, turning, sprinting back, narrating even now, *nah, nah, nah, I got him*.
Armani looked up.
Watkins was making his run across Andersen to the near post. Bailey was holding his position on the far side. And right in the middle, in the channel between the centre backs where nobody was looking, McGinn was arriving like a man late for a train, head down, legs going.
Armani didn't pass it to any of them. He dragged Bassey toward the byline with his eyes, shaping his body for the cross to Watkins, and when Bassey went with the shape he slipped it inside him, along the grass, to the edge of the box where McGinn was going to be.
McGinn was there. He didn't take a touch. He just hit it, left footed, low and hard, and it went through Andersen's legs and past Leno's left hand and in off the post.
One one.
McGinn wheeled away toward the Putney End with his tongue out and his arms going like windmills. Armani ran after him and caught him by the corner flag, and the away end came down to meet them over the hoardings, hands slapping their backs and heads, and in the middle of it all Armani looked up and found his mother.
She was on her feet. They were all on their feet, the whole family row, Nicole's mother with her headwrap gone crooked, Dwayne in his Brentford hat jumping up and down on the spot as if he had forgotten whose side he was on. And his mother was standing in the middle of them with the little flag held over her head in both hands, high and straight, not waving it. Just holding it up.
He pointed at her. She pointed back.
Robinson was waiting for him when he jogged back to the halfway line.
"Okay," Robinson said. "Okay. That was good. That was a real pass. You looked up that time."
"I always look up," Armani said.
"Not in the first half you didn't," Robinson said, grinning, and jogged off.
***
He went off in the sixty third minute.
It was the right time. He could feel the hip starting to talk in that low steady way again, and he had nearly been through once more in the fifty ninth, Leno getting down quickly to smother a low shot from a much better angle, and he had nothing left in the tank that he could spend without paying for it later. The board went up with his number on it, and he jogged off, and Ashby came on, and Armani slapped his hand on the way past.
"Robinson talks," he said. "Ignore him."
"What does he say?"
"Everything."
He sat on the bench beside Rhian with the ice pack on his hip and the coat over his knees, and he watched.
Villa won it in the eighty eighth minute. A corner from Tielemans, a header from Konsa that Leno saved, and the rebound bundled in from a yard out by Watkins with his shin, his knee, his whole body, the scruffiest goal anybody had scored all season. The Putney End didn't care. The Putney End went wild. On the bench Armani was on his feet with everybody else, the ice pack fallen somewhere in the dugout, arms around Rhian, who for once in her life allowed herself to be hugged.
Two one.
When the whistle went he walked down to the Putney End with the others to clap the fans. His mother was still holding the flag. Nicole's father had his flat cap in his hand and was waving it in small circles. Dwayne had taken his Brentford hat off and was holding it behind his back like he was embarrassed, which he should have been.
One match left. West Ham at home. A point would be enough for fourth.
Fourteen goals. Twelve assists. One match.
***
In the dressing room his phone was waiting in Bailey's jacket pocket.
Bailey handed it back to him without a word.
There were messages. There always were. He scrolled past most of them. Callum's, though, he opened.
*45 apps. 14 and 12. first half 5. you snatched it on 36, you know you did, I'm not going to lie to you. 2nd half 7. the ball to mcginn was the best pass you've made since the touch over mendy and nobody on telly will notice because it's the pass before the goal and telly is stupid. west ham last day. a point gets 4th. a goal gets 15. mum says she is coming to villa park and she is bringing food for your mum. she says you know what that means.*
He did know what that meant. Marcia from Yard Food, in Barnsley, cooking for his mother. He imagined the two of them, his mother and Marcia, in the family seats at Villa Park, sharing out containers, comparing pepper sauce. He smiled.
There was nothing from Sandhu.
***
They ate in Hackney that night, at Nicole's parents' house, a tall narrow terrace off Mare Street with a front door painted the green of a Trinidad flag that wasn't actually in the Trinidad flag, which Nicole's father said was the whole point.
Lewis sat outside in the Range Rover. Nicole's mother took him out a plate. Then another plate. Then a third, with a slice of black cake wrapped in foil on the top, and when she came back in she announced to the room that Lewis was a very polite young man and too thin, and Armani's mother said, "Everyone is too thin in this country," and both women nodded as if they had settled something important.
There was pelau and callaloo and macaroni pie and a curry chicken that Nicole's mother had started on Friday night, and there was a bottle of pepper sauce on the table that his mother tasted with the end of her fork, very carefully, and then sat back in her chair and said nothing for so long that the whole table stopped eating to watch her.
"Well?" said Nicole's mother.
"It's good," his mother said.
"Just good?"
"It's very good," his mother said, "for Trinidad."
Nicole's mother threw her head back and laughed so loudly that Dwayne knocked his glass over, and Nicole's father, who had barely said a word all evening, said, "Here we go," into his plate, and the two mothers spent the next forty minutes arguing about pepper sauce, about which island made the better rum, about whose children had been more trouble as babies, about everything, and it was the loudest and happiest Armani had heard either of them in a long time.
He sat at the end of the table with Nicole's hand in his under the tablecloth and didn't say much. He didn't need to.
Dwayne leaned across at one point and said, "That shot in the first half though."
"Don't."
"From the six yard box. On the angle. With three men in the middle."
"Dwayne."
"Mbeumo would never," Dwayne said happily, and Nicole kicked him under the table hard enough that he yelped.
He checked his phone once, in the toilet upstairs, under a framed photograph of Nicole at her graduation in a cap that was too big for her. Nothing from Sandhu. He put it away.
***
Sandhu came to the barn on Sunday afternoon at three o'clock, on her own, in a small blue Fiesta with a child seat in the back.
She was in jeans and a jumper and no lanyard. She accepted a cup of tea from Nicole and a slice of black cake from his mother, who had brought half of it back from Hackney in a tin, and she sat down at the long kitchen table and ate the cake slowly and said it was the best thing she had eaten all year, and his mother looked at her with approval.
Then she wiped her fingers on a napkin and opened her bag and took out a single sheet of paper in a clear plastic sleeve.
"This is a photocopy," she said. "The original's with forensics. I've brought you one page. Just yours." She held it face down on the table under her hand. "I'm going to give it to you, Armani. Once you've read it, you can decide who else sees it."
His mother was sitting beside him. Nicole was standing at the counter.
"She can see it," he said. "Both of them."
Sandhu nodded, and turned it over, and slid it across the table.
It was a page from an exercise book. Narrow blue lines, a red margin down the left side. The paper had gone soft at the edges in the photocopy, like a page that had been turned many times. And in the middle of it, in black ink, in the same leaning hand as the envelope, the r's tilting forward, the y's curling back underneath themselves like hooks:
*WILSON, Armani. Montego Bay. Cornwall Coll. 14.*
*Pace. Real pace. Arms out when he runs, like a child. Raw. Left foot better than he thinks.*
*Father absent. Mother, laundry, hotel, Rose Hall area. Single. Proud. Will not ask for help. Will not ask questions she thinks make her look poor.*
*Friend, Jones. Centre half. Sceptical. Keep distance.*
*Boy hungry for an adult to tell him he is special. Boy will take.*
And underneath, added later, in different ink, blue, the handwriting smaller and more hurried:
*Blocked. March. Disappointing.*
And underneath that, in black again, much newer, the ink still dark and sharp, a line that must have been written in the last year:
*Brentford. Villa. 32m. I always said.*
Nobody spoke.
Armani read it once. Then he read it again. He felt his mother beside him leaning in, reading it too, slowly, her lips moving very slightly the way they did when she read anything important. He felt Nicole come up behind his chair and stop there and put her hand on his shoulder.
*Arms out when he runs, like a child.*
His mother had said the same thing. After Paris. *You ran like when you were small. Arms out. I saw it.* The same words, the same thing seen. One of them had seen it and loved him. The other had seen it and written it down in an exercise book next to the word *raw*.
*Friend, Jones. Centre half. Sceptical. Keep distance.*
Kofi had laughed at him. Kofi had sat on the grass at the fence and laughed at *pressure is a privilege* and said it sounded like something off a calendar. And the man had seen him laugh and gone home and written *keep distance*.
Armani put his hand flat on the plastic sleeve, over Kofi's name.
His mother was still reading. She had got to the part about herself. He watched her face and saw nothing move on it at all. She read *proud* and *will not ask for help* and *will not ask questions she thinks make her look poor*, and she read them all the way through, and her face stayed perfectly still, the way it had stayed still the night she found out about the money and sat down on the kitchen chair.
Then she put her finger on the paper, very lightly, on three words.
*Boy will take.*
"He was right about that," she said quietly.
"Mama."
"He was right." She didn't look at him. She was looking at the page. "You took. Twenty thousand dollars out of my purse, on a Tuesday, while I was asleep. He was right about you."
Sandhu didn't move. Nicole's hand was tight on his shoulder.
"And he was right about me," his mother said. "I was proud. I didn't ask for help. When the light bill came I went to Mr Henry and I didn't tell anybody, not even you, and I would rather have sat in the dark than ask a neighbour. That's true. He saw that." She took her finger off the page. "He saw everything. That's what he was good at. Seeing."
She sat back in her chair. She looked at Armani then, properly, for the first time since the paper had come across the table.
"But look at what he didn't write," she said.
Armani looked at the page.
"He didn't write what you did after," his mother said. "He didn't write that you went to Mr Henry's shop every afternoon for five months after school and swept his floor and stacked his crates until you'd paid back every dollar. He didn't write that you asked that girl, Chloe, to help you with your maths. He didn't write that you sat on the bench at Cornwall for a whole season and never complained once." She tapped the bottom of the page, the blank space underneath the last line. "He didn't write that, because he wasn't watching any more. He'd gone. He only ever watched the beginning of people."
She stood up. She picked up her mug, and his, and took them to the sink, and stood there with her back to the room, running the tap, rinsing out the mugs that didn't need rinsing.
"He wrote *I always said*," she said, without turning round. "Like he made you."
"He didn't," Armani said.
"No," his mother said. "He didn't. I did. And Kofi did. And Mr Reynolds did, and Donovan Bailey, and that man in Barnsley with the three words, and the little Danish one with the glasses. And you did." She turned the tap off. "That man wrote down the first page and then he ran away. Everybody else stayed for the whole book."
***
Sandhu left at five. She took the photocopy with her, because it was evidence, and because, she said, Armani didn't need to keep it in a drawer. He agreed.
At the door she stopped.
"There are a hundred and sixty three names in those notebooks," she said quietly, so his mother wouldn't hear from the kitchen. "Five countries. Twenty six years. Yours is one of the very few that has anything written underneath it afterwards." She looked at him. "Most of them just stop. The boy's name and the notes and then nothing. He didn't follow them because there was nothing to follow. They didn't go anywhere."
Armani stood in the doorway.
"I'm telling you that," she said, "because I think it's the reason he came to your door. He's not frightened of you. Not exactly. He's frightened of what you are. You're the one that got away and then did it anyway. You're proof that he was never the reason." She took her car keys out of her pocket. "Men like him can't stand that."
"Will you find him?"
"Yes," Sandhu said, without any hesitation at all. "Not this week, maybe. But yes."
She walked to the little blue Fiesta and got in and drove away up the lane, and he watched until the car was out of sight behind the hedge.
***
That evening he sat on the bench under the apple tree.
The light was going gold across the fields. A tractor somewhere, far off. The wood pigeon starting up again with its five notes. His mother and Nicole were inside, cooking something together, he could smell thyme and garlic through the open kitchen window, and every so often one of them laughed.
He looked up into the branches.
The small green swellings were bigger now. Not much. A little. If you looked closely you could see that they had started to take a shape, a roundness, something that might one day become what it was supposed to become, if the weather held, if the summer came, if nothing knocked them off before their time.
He sat there and looked at them until the light was gone.
One match left.
*Fifteen,* Kofi said, from somewhere, from the hill, from the space on his left that had been empty for eight months.
"I know," Armani said out loud, to nobody, to the tree, to the dark. "I know."