Missing, Presumed (21 page)

It’s a short drive to Graham Garfie
ld’s college rooms in Corpus, and while Manon runs in to pick up his laptop (just her, nice and quiet, like she promised), Davy sits in his driver seat, checking his BlackBerry. His original request for information from EE about unknown-515 had yielded nothing, but that was before Christmas, so as soon as he was back from his festive break he requested an update, and this has just dropped into his inbox.

Manon is heaving down into the passenger seat, having put Garfield’s laptop onto the back seat.

‘He wasn’t happy,’ she says, breathless and rustling in her coat.

Davy is shifting in his seat, making himself more upright. ‘Unknown-515,’ he says, reading.

‘What about it?’

‘It’s been topped up. Biggleswade, the BP service station. Two weeks ago.’

‘That’ll have CCTV,’ she says. ‘Let’s head out there.’

‘Shouldn’t we, y’know, head back to the office, drop off the laptop, give Harriet the heads up on Helena Reed?’ asks Davy.

‘Nah,’ says Manon. She’s excitable, he’s seen that look before. When she gets the bit between her teeth, she doesn’t want to stop. ‘Come on, Davy, this could be it – this could be the thing that solves it. You and me, and a collar.’ She lifts and lowers her eyebrows at him, a bit comedy. ‘To Biggleswade!’ she says, raising aloft an imaginary sword.

Davy shakes his head and drives.

As they pull into the BP forecourt, Manon is already peering about its low slab of a roof for cameras.

‘CCTV for December twenty-third,’ she says at the counter, showing her badge to the cashier. ‘Have you got it stored somewhere?’

The cashier, a spotty young man of about twenty, is shaking his head. ‘Wiped at the start of the year,’ he says. ‘I only know ’cos I was in that day.’

‘Were you on duty on December twenty-third?’ asks Davy.

‘Nope, don’t know who was. I’d have to get my manager but he’s not about right now.’

Davy turns round at the squeak of the shop door and sees Manon already leaving. He jogs after her as she strides about the forecourt, scanning the London Road and its wide-spaced bungalows left and right.

‘We can speak to the duty manager, get the rota off of him,’ Davy suggests to her back.

She is squinting and peering, turning this way and that. ‘There!’ she says to him, pointing.

‘What?’ says Davy.

‘There, can’t you see it? Poking out of the ivy.’

On a brick wall opposite the BP garage, camouflaged by glossy foliage, is a camera – trained on the forecourt. ‘Let’s see what’s in that one.’

Back in the department, she says,
‘There you go, Colin, knock yourself out,’ and places Graham Garfield’s MacBook Air on Colin’s desk.

He lifts its sleek grey lid, saying, ‘What’s he been up to then, dirty dog?’

‘It’s his web browser history we’re interested in.’

‘All leaves a trace,’ he mutters, clicking about as if he’s owned the laptop all his life. ‘Download takes time though, going through all that data.’

The room is quieter than when they left. It seems deflated with collective exhaustion but Manon is fizzing. She wants that film, because whoever Edith was calling the day before she disappeared must hold the key, and Manon is about to get him, about to see his face. It can’t be Taylor Dent, unless you can top-up from beyond the grave (the phone companies are probably looking into this possibility) but it could be an associate of his.

Kim is passing round a tray of Thornton’s Milk Assortment, so broad and thin it bends, crackling in her hand.

‘We bumped into Helena Reed. She looked pretty torn up about the
Crimewatch
stuff. Need to keep an eye on her,’ Manon says to Harriet. Kim’s mouth is already working on a chocolate – slow, bovine ruminations – but before passing the box on, she takes another.

‘Not for me,’ says Harriet, taut as ever, perching on a desk, then up again, rounding her shoulders and pulling up her bra strap. ‘OK, let’s send a liaison officer round this arvo. They can stay with her over the weekend. Make sure you put in the paperwork, all right, Manon? Who gave us those, anyway?’ she says, nodding at the chocolates.

‘Some old bird handed them in to reception.’

‘Christ, it wouldn’t be hard to take out the whole of Cambridgeshire nick – you lot’ll eat anything.’

‘Where’s the menu guide thingy,’ Colin asks, the box having at last come his way.

‘Speed it up, Brierley,’ says Stuart.

‘I think I’ll have … No, hang on. Yes, a Nut Caress.’ With a full mouth, he says, ‘Nothing dirty among his documents so far. Looks like he and Mrs Garfield had a nice time in Broadstairs, mind.’

‘When’s that CCTV footage coming in?’ asks Harriet.

‘Any minute now,’ says Manon, clicking refresh on her emails. ‘Council said they’d have it to me within the hour.’

She creates a new email, types in DI Haverstock, and his address at Kilburn CID fills out automatically.
Just a note,
she types,
to say if anything significant comes in on the Dent enquiry, can you email me? Just keep me up to speed, that’s all.
Then she hits ‘send’.

She glances at Colin and Stuart – Colin half-clicking around Garfield’s laptop, with the odd sideways look at Stuart’s new iPad.

‘I just can’t get to grips with it,’ Stuart is saying, swiping at the screen and frowning, to which Colin says (chewing, glasses pushed up onto his bald pate), ‘That’s normal with a new gadget. You have to hate it for a time. That’s how it is.’

‘Here we go,’ Manon says to the room, opening up the new email which has just appeared in her inbox. It seems an age while the footage downloads, Harriet perching, then up again, pulling at her bra strap. Manon’s mind is feeling along the possibilities: an associate of Taylor Dent; a lover they haven’t been told about; a drug dealer whose previous convictions will be all over their system. They gather round Manon’s screen: Harriet, Davy, Kim and Colin. The grainy grey images flick and turn, one car then the next. ‘What was the timing again, Davy?’

‘It was topped up at 6.02 p.m.,’ Davy says.

Manon jumps along the timeline with her mouse, watching the tiny yellow numbers change in the corner of her screen. 5.59 p.m., and there is a figure in a familiar denim jacket with small round spectacles, hands pushed into his pockets, white hair tied in a ponytail.

The perpetual dusk of Cent
ral Lobby – its octagon reverberating with self-important shoes. Passes swinging from lapels or hung about necks on ribbons. Miriam sits on a black leather button-back chair while Ian stands nearby, reading the plate at the base of one of the alabaster statues.

Their invitation for Rog and Patty to come to Church Row had been politely declined and she and Ian know why. Ostensibly, it was because of the oafs who had returned to the doorstep – back with a vengeance since the
Crimewatch
appeal was broadcast two nights ago. Miriam could hear them from the bedroom, chatting and laughing, stubbing out their cigarettes on her flagstone step. They hung their cameras on her wrought iron railings as if they owned the place. Their shutters went mad every time Rosa put out the rubbish. Periodically, Ian became incensed and put in a call to someone or other and they retreated to the end of the street, chivvied by some local bobby, but they soon drifted back or lurked in the churchyard close to the house. Ian said the Press Complaints Commission was drafting a letter to editors, asking them to ‘respect’ the Hind family’s privacy at this distressing time’, but she’d like to see what good it would do. Everyone knew the PCC was a toothless watchdog.

Anyway, Patty had said, ‘We don’t want to give them more fodder by rolling up in a government car.’ So here she and Ian are, obedient ‘strangers’, herded through the metal detectors at St Stephen’s Gate and waiting now to be fetched.

As they dressed this morning – Miriam rolling up a pair of 10 denier tights as she sat on the edge of the bed, Ian throwing the long tongue of his tie over itself – she said to him, ‘Do you think it’s because of Edith – because of what they’ve said about her? Do you think that’s why they refused—
Damn!
’ The ladder in her tights felt like an injury. She hated the slippery feel of them, and now she had to try another pair.

‘That’d be rich, coming from him,’ Ian said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No, come on, Ian, you can’t drop a thing like that …’

‘There was a lot of it at school, that’s all.’

If she’s honest, she assumed as much, at a school like that. Dropped off at seven years old, no one to cuddle when they fell and scraped their knees, and homesickness considered a disobedience. The school churned out leaders and princes, but they were men forged in the furnace of repression. God help you if you were less than robust; if you missed your mother desperately. When she’d seen pictures of Ian as a boy, she knew that he was one of those sensitive ones: twiggy-legged, with full lips that probably quivered with his tears. He hadn’t even raised the notion of Rollo following in his footsteps (apart from some mild comments about the school’s excellent facilities for sport). He seemed to know how ferociously Miriam would guard Rollo to keep him safely at home.

Anyway, she thinks now, these things are not so clear-cut as everyone might think. Boys experiment, girls too, evidently; their feelings sway one way and another. All part of feeling the way towards adulthood.

Ian told her she was paranoid, but with Rog and Patty she has the sense of rope being let out, as if she and Ian are a boat being allowed to drift. A similar feeling with the Palace, which has remained silent. It seems to Miriam that they have become tainted – the stain of life going wrong, rather like the taint of illness or disability, weight gain, depression, financial difficulty. It has the whiff of not
succeeding
– not staying sufficiently in control.

‘Hello, you,’ says Patty, and Miriam stands, allowing Patty to clutch her arms and kiss her twice. ‘Rog is waiting in his office. Shall I lead the way?’

She clacks ahead of them, saying hello to various suits, down tiled corridors and then up into the realm of endless wood panelling.

Rog is out from behind his desk, crossing the acreage of carpet to where they have entered. ‘I thought it’d be more private here than Marsham Street,’ he says, reaching out his hand to Ian. ‘How are you holding up, both of you?’

Miriam is comforted by Roger’s corpulent bonhomie. She thinks of him as a cricketer, the white cable-knit tight over the drum of his belly, jogging towards the batsman, and lobbing the ball over-arm. All Englishness and fair play.

‘Not so well, actually,’ she says. ‘Turns out losing a child is a living torture. They don’t tell you that before you have them, do they?’

Ian frowns at her while Roger coughs fulsomely into a fist. Patty has her head cocked like a therapist or an empathising actress.

‘Come in anyway,’ says Roger. ‘It must be ghastly, all of it. Drink?’

Ian and Miriam say, ‘Thank you’ and ‘Please’ over each other.

They have been here before, shortly after they won – well, formed the coalition – back in May. The boast tour, Roger called it, laughing. He’d certainly been pleased with himself, and why not.

The room is vast, the carpet swirling away in a luxury of Persian roses, pale with antiquity. Heavy drapes and large lamps. A desk the size of a dining table. Patty is opening a highly polished rosewood cupboard to reveal a deep-set drinks cabinet, cut glasses, decanter and all.

‘Goodness,’ says Miriam. ‘Didn’t think they still made those.’ For comforting the bereft, she guesses, or firing people. Or those long nights drawing up draconian immigration policy.

‘They don’t,’ says Patty. ‘This one’s 1930s. Picked it up at Bonhams. I went with Sam – she’s got lots more time since she left Smythson.’

Miriam hasn’t the energy to deliver what Patty needs. She requires admiration. Ian and Miriam have always been quick to give it but now, standing beside Patty at the stupid Nazi-Reich drinks cabinet while Ian and Rog burble to each other on the other side of the room, and everything stripped away, she and Ian back to the bone, while Rog and Patty are still so pleased with themselves, she wonders what the basis is for any sort of friendship.

‘I just don’t think they know what they’re doing,’ Ian is saying, as Patty hands Miriam a bitter lemon in a heavy, textured glass. (Not tea,
thank God
.) She takes Ian a tumbler of whiskey, which is not at all like him, but perhaps more so, recently. ‘Saying all that stuff on
Crimewatch
, it just clouds the investigation.’

Rog has retreated behind his desk for protection. ‘I know you’re worried sick, and I can see the telly thing would have been distressing, but best thing you can do is let the police do their job.’

‘But there’s so much confusion, you see, in the investigation. They keep looking for connections where there aren’t any. One minute they say it’s this criminal, Tony Wright; then it’s her complex love life; next it’s this Dent boy. The Edith they describe, it doesn’t bear any relation …’

Ian’s tone has become needy and simultaneously Roger’s eyes have grown cold. The trace of the bully in Roger, which is the real seat of his power – a gaze which can flash like steel, the unapologetic way in which he takes up all the air space. Miriam wonders what sort of bully – what sort of punishment he employs, these things rarely being notional, not if they’re to have any heft. Perhaps the threat, simply, of being cast out from the circle of influence. The rope gets longer.

‘We thought you might be able to get the inside track,’ Ian is saying, while looking to Miriam for support.

‘I’m sure you understand, I can’t meddle in police work. Individual cases – how would it
look
…’ Roger says.

‘Oh, come off it,’ Ian says. ‘I bet you meddle all the time. I’m sure you’re right in there when the
Daily Mail
says you’re not taking a hard enough line.’

‘Ian,’ Miriam says soothingly. ‘All we want,’ she begins, but wonders what it is they want, really. Rog and Patty can’t find Edith for them, which is the only thing that matters. Perhaps they want what anyone wants from the powerful – protection. They want Roger to oil the processes, as they would be oiled for him; to protect them from shoddiness. ‘All we want,’ she tries again but her tears stop her, and in some way save them all. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ Miriam snivels as Patty hugs her. ‘Can we talk about something else, please? What’s your news? How is Calista?’