Missing, Presumed (12 page)

‘Teaching assistant at a school in Peterborough, but it was crap.’

Davy nods, his curiosity laid gently to rest like a dead cat, and the two men sit in silence, both leaning forward, elbows on knees.

‘Why was it crap?’ Manon shouts eventually, casting an irritable glance at Davy.

‘Headmistress thought she was God’s gift, lording it about.’

Stuart addresses this to Davy, who nods placidly, ever the piercing observer of human interplay.

‘Isn’t a headmistress sort of supposed to lord it about – in her own school?’ shouts Manon again, scraping a chair in to join them.

‘She’d never listen to anyone’s opinion ’cept her own,’ he says, and she sees bitterness, the charm having fallen at one corner, like a faulty curtain.

‘Your opinion, you mean?’

‘Yeah, my opinion. Why not my opinion?’

‘Er, because you were a teaching assistant and she was the head?’

He frowns at her and then seems to remember himself, fashioning his face into an ironic smile. ‘What will you be up to over Christmas then, Sarge?’

‘Oh,’ she says, looking away. ‘I’m on the rota over Christmas.’

Manon lies in bed. She has mascara down her cheeks and the radio burbles beside her, at too low a volume for her to make out the words. She has been lying there thinking she must turn it up so she can listen, but the thought fails somehow to translate itself into action. Her limbs are heavy, sunk into the mattress, and the room is all broken apart, the ceiling rotating at a different rate and in a different direction to the walls and floor. Her clothes lie in a hastily discarded pile next to the bed. She closes her eyes but this increases the spinning, so she opens them again. If she could just turn up the volume on the radio so she could hear Control, she might get to sleep.

Her mind is a slur, a fluid, sliding mess of thoughts taking her back through time, the door to her mother’s bedroom ajar, her fourteen-year-old self, leaning on the door frame, seeing the coroner standing over the body in the bed. Ellie was behind her, and she had pushed her sister back, wanting to shield her, knowing if she saw, she would never get it out of her head.

Forward and back, a mudslide of dark association, her mind turns to Tony Wright. Deeping and Whitemoor Prison, both in the village of March. Did Wright find his way to Deeping one night, rising out of the Fenland marsh like some twisted Magwitch?

Back again, loose and morbid.
Do not go gentle into that good night.

The image she had shielded from Ellie: their mother’s eyes open, her head on the pillow, her skin purple and mottled where the blood had stopped moving – it had gathered along the base of her like red wine in a tilted glass. Lividity. She knows the word for it now, but she didn’t then. ‘The black and blue discoloration of the skin of a cadaver, resulting from an accumulation of deoxygenated blood in subcutaneous vessels.’

‘Is it just me?’ says Harriet as she and Manon gaze at the CCTV footage of Tony Wright’s various movements on the weekend of 17–18 December.

‘It isn’t just you,’ says Manon.

‘What the fuck’s he up to?’ asks Harriet.

‘Guys, Kim, Davy, come and look at this.’

They amble over, their faces in various states of disarray after the night before: Kim’s looks like a doughnut with eyes; Davy is sporting bed hair (‘Been to the Vidal Sassoon night salon, I see, Davy,’ says Manon). Nigel is permanently ravaged by sleep-deprivation, so he looks the same as always.

They look at the screen, amid yawns and eye-rubbing.

Tony Wright traversing the Arbury’s open walkways, various angles, jaunty. Coy glances at the camera. Tony Wright entering The Coach pub on the estate, a knowing smile on his perfectly captured visage. Tony Wright playing his ukulele to a packed crowd in The Coach. Tony Wright leaving The Coach at 2 a.m. after a lock-in (little wave). Sunday, 9.46 a.m., Tony on his way to meet his probation officer, hunched, hands in the pockets of his denim jacket. Tony and his probation officer entering the local greasy spoon.

‘Talk about cast iron,’ says Davy.

‘When was the last time The Coach had functioning CCTV, I mean with film in it?’ asks Harriet.

‘Never. Every nefarious deal on the estate is done in there,’ says Kim. ‘If they used CCTV, they’d have no customers.’

‘He wants us to know he’s there,’ says Harriet.

‘Which means?’ says Manon.

‘That a crime is going on elsewhere,’ says Harriet. They look at each other.

‘Wait, this crime or another crime? Someone’s kidnapping Edith Hind for him while he plays the ukulele?’ says Manon, frowning.

‘Rrrrrargh,’ says Harriet, pulling at her hair roots. ‘Why is he messing with my head? I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. Bring him in.’

‘You showing us you’ve got a face for radio, Tony?’ asks Harriet, standing over him in interview room two, her knuckles on the table. ‘All that smouldering eye contact for the camera?’

‘Now, I’m feelin’ a lot o’ negative energy coming off of you, DI Harper. I’m sensing you’re really pissed off because my alibi stacks up,’ says Tony, smiling at her like an indulgent parent. ‘Did I just ruin yer Friday, did I?’

‘What’s going on, Tony?’

‘Look, you people arrest me every time I chuff,’ says Tony, reasonably enough. ‘So these days, I walk where the cameras can see me, that way there’s no confusion. I got fucked off w’ havin’ ma arse hauled in here and bein’ shouted at fir stuff I did nae do. This is how I stop it – smile for the camera! Say cheese, Tony! S’no biggie.’

‘Do you know what happened to Edith Hind?’ Harriet demands.

Tony leans forward, his forearms on the desk. He is looking at them over the top of his glasses. Manon avoids his gaze, focusing on his dagger tattoo, the point of its blade ending at his wrist, and for some reason she wishes Davy was in the room with them.

Tony says, very low, ‘Youse two want tae watch yourselves, ye ken? ’Cos youse know, an’ I know, you dinnae have grounds tae arrest me. So unless youse want a whole lot o’ trouble – an’ I’m sayin’ this for yer own good – youse need tae back the fuck off.’ He leans back again, friendlier now. ‘Now, is there anythin’ else youse lovely lassies want tae talk about?’

‘Muuum?’

The call drifts up the stairs to where she lies fully-clothed on the bed, followed by stomping.

‘Mum?’ more gingerly at the door, and there is Rollo’s darling face. Reminding her she is still a mother.

‘Mum,’ he says, coming to sit on the side of the bed. She smiles at him, that preposterous haircut he’s brought back with him from Buenos Aires – a slant upwards from the parting like a wedge of cheese. ‘Side quiff,’ he’d told her, smoothing it upwards with a palm.

‘Can I get you anything?’ he says now. ‘Cup of tea?’ He has a hand on her shoulder. What would she do without Rollo?

‘What are you wearing?’ she says to him fondly, her voice tired – woolly like the thick shadows in the room. She hasn’t slept more than two hours at a stretch in the twelve days since Edith went missing.

He looks down. ‘This?’ Purple cardigan with shocking pink trim, buttoned up over a white shirt and beige jeans which taper tightly to the ankle. Winkle-pickers. ‘I told you, Mum, I’ve got a look.’

The good humour radiates from her youngest. He has been a revelation to her since the day he was born. He cracked his first joke on the breast at two months – had come off, milky-mouthed, to smile up at her, all gums, then blew a raspberry and laughed. He was his sunshine self, right from the off.

When they’d spotted Rollo down the corridor at the police station in Huntingdon, both she and Ian felt the weak gratitude of the elderly. They ran towards him and flung their arms around him, in need of holding him close. Here were reinforcements. And even though Rollo’s relationship with Ian had always been strained – he was aware Edith was Ian’s favourite, his academic acolyte – even Ian seemed to exhale. Later, they discussed poster campaigns and fundraisers, Rollo’s Facebook and Twitter appeals forging connections and sprawling outwards like blood vessels, keeping Edith in people’s minds.

‘Thank you, son,’ Ian said, rather formally, and Miriam caught him looking at their boy with a needy gaze that she shared, as if Rollo were honey and they were the bears.

They brought him back with them to Hampstead, and with his bag slumped by the kitchen counter and the glittering sheen of the beach still at his temples, the three of them sat shell-shocked around the table, nursing tea. Tea had featured heavily in the past fortnight. Miriam sometimes felt her belly sloshing with it, like a waterbed, yet still she took tea when it was proffered, for the symbolism, she supposed – solicitude, comfort, warmth. It is the English way, after all. Since 18 December, she has taken it with two sugars.

‘I reckon she wants time alone,’ Rollo said on that first night back, getting up to boil the kettle yet again, then leaning against the kitchen worktop, and she marvelled at how big he was, her little one. ‘Time away from Will. He’s enough to do anyone’s head in.’

‘He’s a decent person,’ said Ian.

‘He’s a coma-inducing bore,’ said Rollo.

‘There are worse crimes,’ said Miriam.

‘I’m not so sure.’

‘He was always very good to Edith,’ Ian said.

‘We don’t know that, do we?’ Rollo said.

‘The police don’t think he had anything to do with it.’

‘Stop talking about her as if …’ Miriam had blurted and Rollo came over to her, cupping her head to his chest.

‘This is typical Edie,’ he muttered over her head. ‘Always hogging the attention.’

The light in the bedroom has an evening feel, though it’s mid-afternoon. They hear a group of youths shout in the street.

‘New Year’s Eve tomorrow,’ says Rollo, looking towards the window.

‘That’s all we need,’ she says.

Fireworks will no doubt sputter and fizz half the night, like some war on her feelings. She’d never before noticed the forced jollity of this time of year and what injury it adds to those who are bereft: all those television adverts demanding everyone be happy.

‘Are they still outside?’ she asks, referring to the photographers, and he shakes his head.

‘There were only two and they’ve sloped off,’ he says.

They are relieved, also, to be shot of Will, who arrived late on Christmas Eve and departed on Boxing Day, and even that was outstaying his welcome. Ian made them a cold collation – a ‘smorgasbord’, he called it – for Christmas lunch because it seemed wrong, somehow, to feast on turkey. Instead they sawed little rectangles of cheese onto sesame Ryvitas, which shed their crumbs across the table like builders’ grit (Miriam kept sweeping them into her palm, then, realising she couldn’t be bothered to get up, shook them onto the floor by her side). Pâté, which had developed a liver-red crust at its edges because Ian hadn’t covered it in the fridge, pickled gherkins, and celeriac slaw, like some incongruous French picnic.

At night – endless and sleepless, all of them padding about at some point downstairs or to the bathroom – she could hear Will snivelling in the guest bedroom.

‘She was in my care,’ Will said at breakfast. ‘It was on my watch.’

She and Rollo had shared a wearied glance, Rollo waiting for his toast to pop up.

The phone starts ringing, distantly.

‘I’ll go,’ says Rollo, standing.

Miriam lifts herself from the pillow. ‘No, I’ll get it. I’m hoping it’s Christy.’

Her canteen lunch of shepherd’s pie and boiled carrots has collapsed into the four corners of its yellow polystyrene box. Brown gravy, Bisto-infused, the mince pebble-dashing her throat as it goes down. Piped mash – has it
ever
been potato? Not bad. Not bad at all.

She has pushed her keyboard to one side to make way for the rectangular box and the
Daily Mirror,
and she scans the News in Brief column, seeing
Search for Edith
relegated there. One paragraph on the planned television reconstruction, which will go out in the next episode of
Crimewatch
. Twelve days missing and Edith’s a NiB – a reflection of the investigation’s stalemate. Forensics from the scene showed only Edith’s, Will Carter’s, and Helena Reed’s DNA at George Street, as you’d expect. The blood was Edith’s but no rogue DNA on the glass shards in the kitchen bin.

‘Gloves,’ Harriet said, ‘or it was someone whose DNA is already there.’

Meaning Carter. They are still tracing his return journey along minor roads back from Stoke; still watching that mobile number ‘unknown-515’; still waiting for data off the Corpus college computer – everything taking an age because of Christmas rotas, skeletal staffing. Every email met with an ‘out of office’.

‘Good Christmas?’ asks Marie from Accounts as she passes Manon’s desk, the question she dreads and tries to shrug off.

‘Yeah, good thanks,’ she says, barely looking up from her newspaper and some story she’s not reading about a muscled pop star on his third marriage, though
‘This time it’s for keeps’
.

She was pulled off the Hind case Christmas Eve, onto a suspicious death. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Elderly man burnt to a charcoal slump just inside the front door of his bungalow on the outskirts of Peterborough. Cover-up for a burglary, or obtaining money with menaces, or perhaps he’d done it to himself. She picked over the charred interior of the man’s home and found a selection of wigs, cheap and matted – platinum blonde, mostly; a rail of polyester women’s dresses in a wardrobe untouched by fire; and below a jumble of dusty high heels with slits cut in the sides and back to make room for his man-sized feet. He had worked the bins for Peterborough City Council all his life.

Manon spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day tracing his family and yet there were none; at least, none that said they knew him. She tried to capture CCTV, which took double the time when no one but the dimmest or most desperate was on duty, and she included herself in that. Never go in for an operation or become a victim of violent crime on a major national holiday, that would be her advice.

Still, the death of old Mr Cross-Dresser did away with the day. She picked up a takeaway from The Spice Inn on Christmas night, stepping into the darkness of her flat and heading straight to her kitchen. She set her phone on the kitchen counter, its screen illuminated then darkening, like some sleeper rousing then turning over again in the bed, and she remembered the calls from her father she’d ignored.

Her kitchen was the one area of the flat overlooked by the mid-century modernisers: gloomy with brown floral tiles; the grouting cracked and orange behind the taps; the cupboards dark and over-twiddled with vaguely medieval handles. Bryony said she should paint the cupboards. ‘Cornforth White. Brighten it up no end.’ But Manon never got around to it. Shifts blurred into shifts, overtime into more overtime. They filled her bank account but not her fridge, so that when the tide rolled away, only empty wastes remained. A deserted life. Celery that hadn’t been opened but had gone rubbery. Pants and tights spilling from the top of the basket. Apples that were woolly to the bite, so that she spat them into the bin. Manon would determinedly fill the fridge, resolve to paint the cupboards Cornforth White while the washing machine churned; resolve, too, to eat beetroot more and take up Zumba, only to have it all disappear in the suck and tow of the next tide.

Bloated with korma, she listened to her father’s message. ‘Hi, lovey. Just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas. Um, we’ve had a good day up here. Una cooked a terrific salmon terrine to ring the changes. So that was good. Yes. Well, don’t work too hard. Call when you can, Manon, OK? Righto then. Bye.’

She had hoped for one from Ellie – even double-checked her missed calls, but nothing. So she told herself it was Ellie’s fault, this silence. She called her father back, reluctantly, because he would inevitably ask for a festive-jollity meter reading and hers was set at zero, so to head him off, she told him about the cross-dressing corpse, which left him satisfyingly at a loss. She could hear Una getting restive in the background, whispering as loudly as possible, ‘We really must go, Robert.’ So Manon had said, ‘Go on, then. Obey her.’

She wished she could call Ellie, if only to slag off Una, but the climb-down was too hard to face.

A phone rings somewhere across the room and Manon raises her head to see Davy walking back from his canteen lunch with Stuart and Nigel. Colin is Internet shopping as usual – a TV sound bar, he says. (‘You can get some real bargains in the Christmas sales.’)

Manon ignores the ringing, which is shrill in the strip-lit yellow room, bouncing off the birch laminate desks as broad as mortuary slabs.

‘Sarge?’ says Kim.

Manon turns. Kim is looking directly at her, the phone held away from her body, in a way that makes the department stop.

‘Spartan Rescue,’ says Kim. They continue to look at each other, Manon’s heart quickening. ‘A body. In the Ouse. Just shy of Ely. Dog walker found it this morning.’

No one moves.

‘Sarge?’ says Kim.

‘Tell them we’re on our way.’

‘I honestly thought …’ Davy begins.

‘Poor Miriam,’ says Kim.

‘Poor both of them,’ says Colin, and Manon looks at him. Even Colin’s face has gone slack.

Sh
e and Davy jog down the municipal stairs in silence, out to an unmarked car. Everything will be new territory for the Hinds now, a life before and a life after, and very soon that first life, the one untouched, will recede, like some blithe foreign landscape. That first life was when Manon used to read books with a torch under the duvet, the illicit thrill as her mother passed her door on her way to bed. That first life was one of lurching passions and furies, all played out against her mother’s solid breast. Not happy, exactly – she could never understand people who described their childhoods as happy. She looks across at Davy driving and thinks it’s probably how he’d describe his. Childhood seems to Manon (at least what she can remember of it), a time of frustration and effort, things that were frightening and new, and the retreat back into familiar comforts before the next foray.

Davy has pulled out onto the A14. The sky is a fragile blue, very far away, and the sunlight harsh and breakable and thin, sending its glassy shards through the windscreen so they both have to pull their visors down. They begin to leave the conurbation behind and the snow, which has all but melted in town, gains confidence the further they drive out into the Fens.

And then it happened. ‘Sudden Death Syndrome’, the coroner had said, and everything after it was another life, a new territory, one about to be discovered by the Hinds now that Edith was floating face down in the Ouse. And all the events of Manon’s life were played out in its wreckage.

Much of daily life for her fourteen-year-old self and twelve-year-old Ellie remained the same. Their father had been advised to keep the routines stable for the girls’ sake. School. Their bedrooms and the childish circus-print curtains their mother had chosen. Weekend swimming lessons. Crisps eaten on the back seat afterwards, the chlorine rising off their wet hair, their tights twisted wrongly about their sticky legs. Their father glancing back at them in the rear-view mirror, the seat empty beside him. They wandered helplessly through it, their rucksacks on their backs, gazed at by the more fortunate, their father never quite pre-empting their needs so that the shopping ran out and there was nothing to make a packed lunch with. Uniforms fished out of the dirty laundry basket and sniffed to see if they passed muster. They appeared to be functioning, did well in exams. Manon was top in her class because work, in comparison with living, was so easy. Reading was an escape. But she and Ellie were not – and she knew this even as a fourteen-year-old –
intact,
in the way other children were. There was a surface and then there was this gulf between it and their inner lives, shattered like a broken cup.

It was as if her mother had taken with her any strategy Manon ever had for living. When she got into Cambridge to read English, it was taken as a sign of success, as if no one could see it was a refuge. She hasn’t spoken to Ellie for three years now – a rift which has grown outwards in layers of resentment like rings in a tree. It began when Ellie broke with their sibling protocol: the wilfully immature hating of Una.

‘You went and
stayed
with them?’ Manon asked her, incredulous. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘Didn’t think I had to,’ Ellie said. ‘Una’s all right, once you get used to her.’

‘Una’s
all right
?’

‘Yeah, she is. You know, you have to fold the toilet paper to a point after you’ve pulled off a sheet, but apart from that—’

‘Judas.’

Davy pulls up the handbrake and they sit, listening to the car ticking. In the distance, she can see frogmen from Spartan Rescue milling about on the riverbank, and an ambulance, its back doors flung wide, a red blanket smoothed flat on a waiting stretcher. She sees the pathologist from Hitchingbrooke, Derry Mackeith, talking to a uniform.

‘I hate the smell of these,’ she says to Davy as they get out of the car.

‘MIT,’ says Mackeith, striding towards her from the riverbank. ‘To what do we owe this honour?’ The purple thread veins on his nose are livid in the cold and his breaths emerge as white puffs.

‘Is she out of the water?’ says Manon, trying to look past him, but the frogmen and Spartan Rescue officials are blocking her view.

‘She?’ says Mackeith. ‘It’s not a she.’

Manon looks at him. ‘What do you mean? Are you saying it’s not Edith Hind?’

‘Not unless Edith Hind was a young male of mixed race,’ says Mackeith.

‘I thought—’

‘Ah, yes, sorry about that. Spartan Rescue seem a bit jumpy about not having found the Hind girl. False alarm. Pretty obvious the minute we hooked him out. We did try and call you. You’re welcome to have a look but I’d say you guys are not needed. He’s a jumper, if you ask me. We’ll get an ID from fingerprints, I should imagine. Coroner can take it from there.’

Manon looks past Mackeith, and the throng of frogmen and uniformed officers has parted to reveal the body: muddied, discoloured, and vastly distended. A blue, marbled Buddha.

‘How long ago – any idea?’ she asks.

‘This time of year, water’s quite cold. There’s only moderate decomposition. Two to three weeks, I’d say.’

‘Did you find a wallet, phone?’ she says to the representative of Spartan Rescue, who has rustled towards them in his expensive windcheater. Navy, with pink fleecy trim.

‘No, ma’am, nothing. Just the clothes he was wearing – jeans and a hoodie and some rather expensive trainers, which would’ve helped him sink to the bottom. If you’ve nothing further, we’ll get him to the mortuary.’

They stand on the doorstep of a sawdust-coloured barn, brash new timbers bordered by prissy hedges. But when Manon and Davy walk inside, to interview the dog walker who found the body, they both look up in silent awe at the double-height atrium, thick oak beams criss-crossing the vaulted roof and cathedral-size windows.

‘We’ll try not to take up too much of your time,’ says Manon.

‘No, please. Come and sit down. Can I make you coffee?’ His voice is deep and slow. He walks with a slight stoop in his voluminous corduroys. His bowed head is gentle and apologetic.

‘Coffee would be lovely, thanks,’ says Manon. ‘It’s freezing out there.’

‘This place is amazing,’ says Davy, who has approached the window. The sky has turned pink, striated yellow; a radioactive lozenge at its centre, reflected in the river. Along its banks, leafless trees are silhouetted. The pink of the sunset – so fleshy and garish – has stretched its arm into the room, giving them all a Californian tan.

In front of the wall of windows is a refectory table with two benches, its surface strewn with newspapers. On the other side of the room, a wood-burning stove and russet-coloured dog in front of it in a basket. It raised its head when they entered but lowers it again now, un-fussed.

‘She’s very elderly,’ explains Alan Prenderghast (Davy has whispered his name in Manon’s ear), who is now at the open-plan kitchen area, turning levers on a complex silver coffee machine. The kitchen is a dark U-shape with slate-grey cupboards and black worktop.

‘Lovely view,’ Manon says, joining Davy at the windows and watching the sun squat on the horizon, peppered with birds. She looks to her right and sees a frayed armchair and a pair of binoculars on a table beside it. Silence for a while, which Davy would normally try to fill, but they are both hypnotised by the stillness and scale of the house and its view.

At last, Mr Prenderghast comes to stand next to her and is handing her a cup of coffee, froth covering its surface.

‘It’s my favourite thing about this house,’ he says, looking out with her.

Her cup’s roasted smell drifts up like smoke.

‘You see that field opposite – on the other bank of the river? Every winter it’s allowed to flood and it fills up with literally thousands of birds. Ducks, geese, swans. Teeming with life. Great skeins of them fly in from Scandinavia. I could watch it all day, the landing and the flying off. It’s a very sad view, somehow.’

His voice is calm. It is as if he is selecting every word. The ruffled sleeve of care – his voice could un-ruffle it. She looks at the view, the sunset colours like a bruise, and the bare trees. He’s right – it is the saddest view she has ever seen. She wants to stay in this kitchen, which is so warm and yet so quietly morbid – silent and slow and away from the town – even though she has never been one of those people for whom the countryside is an idyll.