Missing, Presumed (18 page)

She has her feet up on the blue tartan First Capital Connect seats, beside a sign saying
Do Not Put Feet on Seats
. She pulls at her eyelid, peeling it away from the eyeball in an attempt to relieve the scratching. The infection has moved from irritation to pain and yet, when she has passed a chemist – on Hampstead High Street, at King’s Cross Station – the urgency of buying the antibiotics has gone from her mind. No chance now – it’s 8 p.m. and she has to be in early tomorrow for the
Crimewatch
briefing.

She told the Hinds to brace themselves for renewed press interest – photographers back on their doorstep – when the televised reconstruction of Edith’s last journey home with Helena Reed is broadcast on Wednesday evening. Telling them about Tony Wright hadn’t been easy, despite his alibi. She recalls the look of terror on Lady Hind’s face, which prevented her from describing what had become of his last victim – how he had beaten her about the head with the knife handle so that her face was purple and enlarged. Two weeks after his conviction, she killed herself.

Manon’s mobile phone vibrates somewhere deep in her bag. A text, number not recognised.

I am toasty

She smiles. Buying the coat for Fly had brought her myriad unlooked-for pleasures, as if satisfaction were refracted into a fresh rainbow. Picking out a hot-pink sequinned number and saying to him, ‘This is a good look for you’; his dry look in response, as if she were the silliest object he had ever come across. Him picking the designer labels, to which she would turn the swinging ticket and say, ‘In your dreams.’ Most of all, when they had selected together a padded cornflower-blue coat, with white stripes at the chest, she had noticed what pleasure there was in keeping him warm: the thought of the softness of the fleece lining against his skin, the waterproof outer layer sheltering him from rain. It was the best twenty-five pounds she had spent in a long time.

Shouldn’t you be in bed? M

No, cos I’m not five.

Anyway, I
am
in bed. I’m wearing it in bed.

She is smiling to herself, up the steps of HQ, into reception, thinking how she must type up her notes, prepare for tomorrow’s briefing. Her head is down, unaware of her surroundings, when Bob on the front desk says, ‘Sarge, someone to see you.’

Manon looks up, and there he is: his flappy coat, the stoop, horrifying and wonderful – Alan Prenderghast.

‘Hello,’ he says. ‘I didn’t expect to see you. I was just dropping this off.’

He holds out a small white paper bag, folded over at the top, with a green chemist sign on it. Manon opens it and takes out an oblong box. The label reads:
Chloramphenicol eye drops, for the treatment of Conjunctivitis.

‘Crikey,’ she says.

‘I feel a bit like a criminal caught in the act,’ he says.

‘Gosh – I haven’t had time, as you can see.’

‘Look,’ he says, rather urgently, ‘I don’t know the form for this. Am I still a witness or something, in the case?’

‘No, why?’

‘I was wondering if I could take you out. For dinner or something. Or a film, where we sit in the same row. Adjacent seats, even.’

There is a red patch creeping up his neck.

‘I don’t know, I’ve got a lot on at the moment.’

They both look down at the white chemist’s bag.

‘Why don’t you think about it?’ he says. ‘I’ll give you my number.’

He puts a hand out to take the chemist bag back off her and pats his pockets for a pen, only to find Bob holding one out to him. ‘I enjoyed our coffee after the film,’ he says, while writing on the bag against his palm.

‘Thanks,’ she says, looking down at his writing. The numbers are all bunched up and tight. ‘Look, I’d better go – got to prepare for a briefing first thing. Just had a murder come in, plus it’s
Crimewatch
this week,’ and she lays it there, her job as a police officer, which he must admire, what with his very pedestrian work as a systems analyst.

‘Well, OK then,’ he says, and she watches him go out of the station doors and down the steps to the car park.

When she turns, Bob is frowning.

‘What d’you do that for?’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Turn down a nice chap like him?’

‘What would you know about it, Bob?’

‘I know it’s nice to have someone to come home to.’

‘For me,’ Kim is saying thoughtfully, ‘it would have to be tuna pasta bake with back-to-back
Place in the Sun
.’

Davy is just about to put in his two pennies’ worth, which involves crackers and cheese and
Quincy
, but Harriet has shot everyone a look which says:
Shut your fucking gobs, the boss is here
.

DCS Gary Stanton has a collection of important-looking files under one arm and his buttons are straining over his stomach. Time to size up on the shirt front, Davy thinks.

The whole team is gathered around a circular table, which is part of a new stratagem brought back from the States by Stanton, when he went to NYPD on a skills swap residential last autumn. For Davy, things got much more confusing after the residential, because Stanton returned armed with incomprehensible management-speak. Davy’s all for a spot of police jargon, which clarifies the lines drawn between good and evil (only last night he watched a DCI on the news outside the Old Bailey telling how they’d ‘exposed the villain’s web of wicked lies’). But this corporate mumbo jumbo – it didn’t clarify; it did the opposite, scribbling over itself in loops and meanderings. It started with just having to ‘action’ things, instead of do them; then Stanton wanted to ‘sunset that line of investigation’, which seemed to mean not do it any more. They had moved from ‘breaking’ an alibi to ‘putting it on the radiator to see if it melts’. But then Stanton started talking about ‘shifting the paradigm’ in order to ‘leverage our synergies’, and that’s where he lost Davy altogether. At one point, Davy had felt quite worried about keeping up in the department, but then he overheard Harriet hissing at Manon, ‘What the fuck’s he talking about?’ and felt better.

Edith Hind has been missing for two weeks and the press have more or less shuffled off. But that’s about to change with the
Crimewatch
appeal, especially if what everyone is saying is true. Stanton is about to let the proverbial cat out of the bag (his words), and they’d better all be ready.

‘Right,’ Stanton says, sounding a bit out of puff. Perhaps he’s just walked up the stairs from the press office. ‘
Crimewatch
. There will obviously be a massive upscaling of media interest and we can expect to be inundated with calls from the public—’ Colin groans loudly – ‘which we need to take seriously,’ says Stanton. ‘Lot of powder, so expect some avalanches. We don’t know which sighting might be significant at this point, so I want nothing dismissed, please. I don’t care how left-field they sound. I will also be raising the issue of Edith’s love life in the appeal and the fact that she had male and female lovers. The purpose of this is not to supply fodder for the tabloids, but to flush out Edith’s previous lovers, be they secret or in the past.’

Everyone around the table is silent. Everyone is thinking the same thing: it will incense Sir Ian Hind, who will be straight on the phone to Roger Galloway, who will be straight on the phone to Cambridgeshire Commissioner, Sir Brian Peabody, who will be straight on the phone to Gary Stanton.

‘I can handle it,’ he says mildly, as if reading their thoughts. ‘I’ve got to run this investigation with the same instincts I’d run any other, and that’s with the view that she’s come to harm and that a lover or sexual liaison of some kind is at the heart of her disappearance.’

‘Won’t mentioning a female lover make things hysterical?’ asks Manon.

‘Unavoidable,’ says Stanton. ‘You pour milk on the step, see who laps it up.’

‘Sorry, what?’ says Harriet.

‘We need people to come forward,’ says Stanton. ‘And to be honest, we need Edith back in the public mind.’

‘Even if it’s naked and engaging in some girl-on-girl action,’ says Colin, with an inadvertent after-snort.

‘Shouldn’t we risk-assess Helena Reed then?’ says Manon. ‘Her world will come crashing down when you go on telly and talk about a female lover. I’d say she wasn’t the toughest person to start with.’

‘Yes, we certainly need to warn her. Kim, I’d like you to go round there, talk her through the whole thing. Tell her
Crimewatch
is going out on Wednesday night, reassure her we’re not naming anyone, but offer her support if she needs it. She can have a liaison officer with her in her flat.’

Kim nods.

‘Can we please have an update on the Taylor Dent investigation, Harriet?’ says Stanton.

‘Right,’ says Harriet, with a deep sigh. ‘No DNA at Deeping or George Street. No phone contact, as far as we know but, of course, Dent might have had an additional phone or phones we don’t currently know about. Met’s looking into that one, and of course we’re cross-referencing with unknown-515 – the mobile Edith called twice in the week before she disappeared.’

‘What about the Dent family?’ says Stanton. ‘Anything come up?’

‘Younger brother, Fly,’ Manon says, ‘reported Taylor missing on Monday twelfth of December after school, so a week before Edith’s disappearance. Taylor hadn’t come home the night before. Went out, on some deal or other from the sounds of it. Before he left, he told his brother things were going to change, which indicates that he was going to make some money. Sounded quite pumped about it. Anyway, younger brother woke up on Monday, no Taylor in the bed next to him, got really worried but wanted to wait to see if he showed during the day. Then reported him missing, but the Met basically told him to go away and stop worrying because Taylor was seventeen and old enough to look after himself.’

‘In other words, he wasn’t worth investigating,’ says Davy, thinking of Ryan.

‘Kilburn CID have got officers working their way through Dent’s associates, but to be honest, they’re not that easy to pin down,’ Manon says.

‘Dent isn’t coming up on any rail CCTV out of London. Looks like he must’ve got here in a car,’ says Kim.

‘OK,’ says Stanton, hands flat on the desk as if steadying himself. ‘If there are no firm connections emerging between Dent and Hind, and we can’t establish ownership of unknown-515, then I’m going to have to hand the Dent murder investigation on to team two. We just don’t have the resources to run the two cases out of one team,’ says Stanton.

‘But,’ Manon blurts, and Davy looks at her. She’s shifting in her seat, saying, ‘We might find … later, I mean …’ but she trails off.

‘Last thing, people,’ Stanton is saying. ‘Forensic Management Team meeting.’ Groans erupt around the room. Money talk – the FMT meetings balance investigative needs against budget. Tighten your belts, in other words. ‘We’ve been informed that we are overspending on the Hind investigation and that we should rein it in. To that end, Nigel Williams and Nick Briggs are being seconded to team two, to help on the Dent murder, while the scaled-down team continues to work on Hind.’

‘Sorry, boss,’ says Harriet, ‘but you’re cutting our team the night before
Crimewatch
goes out and buries us in a steaming pile of false leads?’

‘That’d be about the size of it,’ he says, up from his seat, the folders back under his arm. ‘This is the age of austerity, DI Harper. Haven’t you heard?’

‘Toast with anchovies,’ Colin is saying to Kim, as the room breaks up. ‘’Cept the oil always drips down your chin, which can greatly mar the enjoyment of
Columbo
.’

She’s awake, bruised by her dream.

If she could, she would avoid sleep altogether, but the nights are so tortured and restless – cups of tea in the kitchen, endless trips to the loo, trying out various beds in the hope a cold pillow might do the trick – that she often succumbs to her exhaustion come late afternoon. In her dreams, Edith appears before her in altered states – wearing strangers’ clothes, or with a face transmogrified in some eerie way. A shapeshifter, part gangster’s moll, half ghoul.

The police have asked them whether Edith knew Tony Wright or Taylor Dent, and she wonders what web her daughter has got caught in. What does Miriam know about her own child, really? Every detail a fresh assault – the relationship with Helena, the questioning texts to Rollo. What on earth was going on in Edith’s life? Any confidence Miriam ever had in herself as a mother has been eroded, and what is that confidence built on anyway, she thinks now – the luck of one’s children? The DNA lottery? If they’re bright and successful, you congratulate yourself. If they fall by the wayside, the world judges you. These days, she could be told anything at all about Edith and she’d be forced to accommodate it, because she knows nothing. She thought Edith loved her.

Miriam picks up the Mother’s Day card, one she has retrieved from her bedside table where she treasures all the missives from her children. In Edith’s neat, perfectionist hand:

Dearest Mum,

You are the tops.

I love you, and I know I never tell you that – at least, not enough.

E x

She remembers Ian’s mock outrage. ‘Why I don’t get cards like that?’

‘Because her adoration of you is writ so large,’ Miriam said at the time. ‘She has to express it to me.’

He has been crying in his study. She heard him on her way up the stairs an hour ago, had stopped, one hand on the banister, curious to hear his upset expressed. Man sobs are so uncommon, they were quite interesting. His were strangulated, as if his tears were out to choke him. Hers come unbidden, like a flood, dissolving her outline, and it’s as if she has failed to stand up to them. A weakness of tears.

She stood listening, but she didn’t go to him. The strain is widening between them, like a jack ratcheting open a notch with every day missing; every detail a fresh violence separating them. Ian’s answer to helplessness is criticism, and she is its focus, implied in all his Rushing About Being Important; his interviewing of private investigators (a precaution); his poster printing; calls to their lawyer; and complaints to newspaper editors over intrusion. He never stops, his lined face saying to her:
And what exactly have
you
been doing?

He never acknowledges the toll on her, in part because she keeps it to herself, like the furtive trip she has taken to Huntingdon where she walked the unsightly route beneath the concrete underpass from the station to George Street. She stopped outside Edith’s house, unable to let herself in because its interior, black with fingerprint dust, was too much a crime scene. So instead she went down to the town centre, where she looked into the eyes of every person, and wanted to lift her face to the sky and let out a wail because she didn’t know what to
do
. The world is tipping, vertiginous, her organs plummeting away. Fear is so
physical
.

No, she hasn’t told him any of this, and every time he looks for her, it seems she’s lying on the bed in the dusky half-light of their bedroom, as she is now, the back of one hand resting on her forehead. She notices the wrinkles about her knuckles, pushes at a ring – a huge citrine oval, the colour of honey, in a thick silver setting – with the pad of her thumb, rotating it.

It isn’t just her; he’s growing increasingly critical of the police, Googling the officers in the investigating team in the hope of tracking their passage through the ranks of the force, the extent of their experience and training. Except all Google brings up are snippets of ancient news stories. She wonders what Ian can extrapolate from DI Harper warning the good motorists of Bedfordshire to lock their cars in 2006. His relief at having Stanton at the helm has been short-lived, Ian’s current position on Stanton being that he ‘isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer’, hence his research into private investigators.

‘Why don’t you talk to Roger if you’re worried?’ Miriam said, while they got ready for bed one evening.

‘I don’t want to pull rank on Stanton just yet,’ Ian replied. ‘It could do more harm than good. Keeping my powder dry for now.’

Rog and Patty had been in touch, of course – an answer machine message and a lovely card with hibiscus on it.
If there’s anything we can do
…

She presses her hand into the back of her neck to massage it and thinks: these things don’t bring you together, they tear you apart. There is no place else to go except towards blame, as if into the arms of a lover. If Ian hadn’t pushed Edith so hard. If she, Miriam, wasn’t so passive. If Rollo wasn’t so
alive
. It was everyone’s fault because it was no one’s.

Miriam hears the bedroom door handle turn, both longing for and dreading it to be Ian, and soon enough he is sitting on the side of the bed. He strokes her arm – the one laid beside her body – and sighs deeply, but she doesn’t look at him.

‘I’m so sorry, Miri.’

He starts to cry and she heaves herself up to look at him, curious and moved by him at the same time.

‘What are you sorry for?’

‘For everything … for everything I’ve done,’ he says. He is not looking at her. He is hiding his face from her. ‘I haven’t been a good husband to you.’

‘I feel as if you hate me,’ she says.

‘Of course I don’t hate you. I love you. I love you inordinately.’

He puts his arms around her and she lifts her face to kiss him. He kisses her back, but in a way that has a full stop at the end of it, when she had hoped it would lead on. A consummation. They need to come together and this is how husbands and wives come together, but these things are so often mistimed, their meanings taken the wrong way. How often had they refused each other out of bitterness or tiredness or standoffishness or a little bit of all three?

‘Why don’t I take you out for dinner tonight?’ he says. ‘La Gaffe, or the new bistro, the French one. Might be our last chance before the oafs are back on the doorstop tomorrow.’

He is a good husband. He is here and he loves her. Inordinately.

‘It would seem like celebrating,’ she says.

‘No it wouldn’t. Come on. Get up. We don’t help Edith by being prisoners.’