Missing, Presumed (32 page)

Saying it to Edith is the first time she has allowed herself to have the thought, and she is surprised by the force of her conviction. He is still her husband. One event cannot wipe away twenty-five years. Yes, she will visit him in Littlehey. It may take her some time, she may feel furious, betrayed, ashamed. But she won’t abandon him. Friends may let out the rope, but she will not.

‘How did he die?’ Edith is asking now. ‘Taylor Dent. What did Dad—’

‘Drowned,’ Miriam says. ‘In the river close to Deeping. I don’t know what his injuries were. He’d been on drugs – ketamine – which may have been what caused his death when he hit the water. Paralysed, effectively. Anyway, it’ll all come out in the trial.’

‘So he might have been alive in the boot of the car?’ Edith says, and Miriam can see the slow dawning on her face. ‘I could have helped him, if I hadn’t stayed hidden.’

‘A lot of things would have been different if you hadn’t stayed hidden,’ Miriam says, and she can’t keep the censure out of her voice. Relief that her daughter is alive is giving way to hot fury, the kind she remembers from when Edith was little – those times when she lost sight of her in a park or on a beach, and had to search wildly, shouts becoming hysterical and other mothers helping with instinctive urgency. And then when Edith or Rollo were discovered, nonchalantly playing inside a hedge or squatting in the sand, how she would tear a strip off them and make them cry, that they might experience a tiny millisecond of her fear. ‘Don’t you ever,
ever
do that again.’ At the same time holding them very, very tight.

‘How
could
you stay away?’ she asks now. ‘How could you? You must’ve seen the scale of the manhunt, what the police were doing. You must’ve known everyone thought you were dead. That we thought you were dead.’

Edith starts to cry. ‘Don’t you see? It had all gone too far. It had gone too far for me to come back …’ She is gulping, and Miriam wonders if it is guilt that’s catching in her throat. ‘It was a thing I couldn’t undo, and then Helena died. This whole series of events was set off by me and I didn’t even … I didn’t expect it. The bigger it became – all over the news, the number of police officers involved – the more impossible it was for me to come home.’

‘You couldn’t send me an email, a postcard, telling me you were all right?’ Miriam asks.

Edith turns away. There is something in this question she cannot answer.

‘Edith?’ Miriam presses.

I can feel the gaps in my story, how they must seem to her. I can hear how lame my explanation must sound. And yet, in the quiet of the French countryside, the days went by. The more you don’t make contact, the more impossible contact becomes, as if silence can enlarge like a seep of blood. And in the solitude I found space. Freedom. Something heady and illicit. I didn’t
want
to return. I can’t say that to her. It is a selfishness too far. Her face, the colour of the ash in the grate, would look at me with too much sorrow and disappointment. Well, I’ve been disappointed too.

‘He let me down,’ I whisper. ‘He wasn’t the person I thought he was. He set such high standards for me and all the while—’

‘People have inner lives, Edie; you’re old enough to know that.’

‘But why would he kill a boy?’ I say, and in saying it, I’ve answered the question to myself.

She looks away. I can see she is ashamed.

‘Mum?’

‘They were …’ she begins. ‘They were having a relationship, it seems.’

‘A relationship?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘Is he …?’

‘Is he what?’ she says, looking at me sharply. ‘Gay? Straight? Are you? Is anyone just one thing?’

‘How can you forgive him?’

‘Who said anything about forgive?’

‘You seem …’ I begin, but I can’t find the right word. Accepting?

‘Perhaps I don’t set my standards for people quite as high as yours,’ she says.

‘He has always been the one with impossible standards,’ I say. ‘The one who set the bar so high when all the while he …’ I begin to cry: corrosive, satisfying, righteous tears. ‘I wasn’t even allowed to keep my baby, settle down with Jonti, lead an average life. Oh no, that wasn’t good enough, when all the time he was …’

She looks up, shocked. ‘You could have kept the baby, Edie. We never made you—’

‘That’s not how it felt,’ I say, and I am dealing in half-truths. ‘It was made clear to me that it would have been a failure. There were so many expectations.’

‘I never knew you felt that way about the baby, darling. We didn’t see it as making you get rid of it. We saw it as helping you make a sensible decision – for your life. And maybe we were wrong. I saw Jonti recently, when I was searching for you. And the thought occurred to me that the two of you could have made it work. He’s a decent chap. But we honestly thought we were doing right by you, Edie. There’s lots of time to have a baby; you don’t have to do it at eighteen, when it’s so hard. That’s not expectation – that’s love. We wanted the best for you. I don’t mean Cambridge; I mean I didn’t want you depressed and alone at eighteen with a screaming infant on your hands.’

She is looking at me now, with the concern I have longed for. She says, ‘Oh, I know Ian can be exacting and I can see you might think we wanted you to be perfect. God, maybe there was narcissism in it. I mean, which parent doesn’t want to say: “My daughter’s gone up to Cambridge”? But that’s nothing next to loving you, Edith.’

‘How was I supposed to know what I wanted when your expectation was so
huge
,’ I say, in a wail. ‘When all I ever wanted was to please you? Why is my life defined by pleasing you, when he … when he … he’s done something so immoral!’

It has backfired.

She has stood up and I can see the rage popping at her temples. Her words come out in a low growl, only just suppressing the violence I can see she feels towards me. ‘You are the child of a
man
. An ordinary man who has strengths and weaknesses, and who descended into a crisis. Yes, he’s done something terrible, for which he will face a very harsh punishment.

‘And you are
my
child, Edie, though you show me no love at all.
You
have to decide who you are. You have to decide, Edie. It’s not enough to say we made you this, and we made you that, and expectation took away this and pressure demanded that. Stand up and be counted. And if your love ends the moment you find out your parents are people, then my God, there really is no hope for you.’

‘But he’s fallen so short,’ I say quietly. A damp squib.

‘So have you, Edith.’

We are silent. Mum has dropped onto the sofa. Her eyes are glazed. She stares into the fire and then says, ‘Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds.’ She looks at me. ‘He’s your father and you should stand by us, as we stand by you.’

‘Fly? Fly! C’mon. Homework.’

He groans from somewhere beyond the hall and she waits, looking at the dappled garden, the sun playing through the fingers of the lime trees. Honeyed patio stones radiate with the heat of the day.

‘Fly! Come on, stop wasting time.’

He joins her at the kitchen table and hauls his school bag onto his knee with am-dram weariness. His white school shirt has a pen leak at the pocket, a blot of black chequering into the cotton. He smells of sweaty boy. She makes a mental note to buy him some shower gel.

‘What treats do your teachers have in store for us this evening?’ she asks.

‘I have to, like, write a persuasive argument for something, like a party political fingy.’

‘Broadcast. Party political broadcast. OK, any ideas?’

‘Like why I should be allowed to watch TV after school like them other kids.’

‘
Those
other kids, Fly. You’re not going to be very persuasive with grammar like that. Go on, then, write it as if you’re persuading me.’

‘No one can persuade you of nothin’, DS Auntie.’

‘DI Auntie, to you.’

He splays across the table like a broken umbrella, chewing the end of his pen. He whispers to himself when he starts to write. She gets up to stir the lamb stew, which is bubbling on the hob.

‘If you finish that, you can go out for a bit,’ she says, her back to him.

‘Serious?’ he says.

‘Serious.’

It gives her pleasure to surprise him with a loosening of his restrictions, even while she knows that same pleasure will tighten to anxiety as she waits for him to come home. She can hardly refuse him these forays: along Mill Lane to the newsagent where he can buy pick-and-mix; to sit on the swings in Sumatra Road; up to Fortune Green where friends from his school congregate in the park and scale the wire fence into the play centre. He is about to turn twelve, is well over five foot, and now walks to school alone.

‘No hoodie, though,’ she says, thinking of the group of them, how they scare people on the bus. They are so tall and so burgeoning male.

He groans. ‘Why?’

‘One, because you’ll boil in this heat, even if your trousers are right down below your bum, which makes you look completely ridiculous, by the way, but we’ve had that conversation; and two, because I don’t want anyone mistaking you for something you’re not. You are a lovely, gentle, well-mannered boy, Fly. Don’t give anyone any reason to think otherwise.’

‘Why should I be stopped from wearing an item of clothing just ’cos of the colour of my skin?’

‘Maybe that should be the subject of your persuasive argument,’ she says. ‘Oh, and Fly? No smoking in the cemetery. And don’t come the innocent with me – I know you’ve done it.’

‘Whatevs,’ he says in a whisper. His disdain is gossamer light, and she thinks she can detect beneath it his pleasure at the tight boundaries she lays.

‘And I want you back by 6 p.m. sharp for supper. Ellie and Sol are coming.’

‘OK,’ he says. ‘Can I feed Solly?’

‘I’m sure Ellie would be delighted,’ she says, smiling at him. ‘What d’you reckon – rice or couscous with the stew?

‘What’s couscous?’ he says, his eyes down to his books again.

‘The grainy one, yellow.’

‘Yeah, that one.’

The room is full of pale May light and the smell of cooking meat, and she is struck by how far they’ve come in their journey to being a family of sorts.

She hadn’t thought any of it through. Fly’s mother’s illness had been swift and brutal. Three months after Ian Hind’s arrest and four months after Manon first met Maureen, the stomach cancer killed her, without pause for admission to a hospice. Manon travelled to London without a plan, telling herself whatever happened next would be temporary. She and Fly stayed with Ellie – necessity being the mother of reconciliation – in her little two-bed flat on Fordwych Road, which ran like a vein on the border between Kilburn and West Hampstead. Far from a pink paradise, Ellie had broken up with Solly’s feckless father during pregnancy, and was tearfully battling sleep deprivation without respite.

It was cramped. The baby shared Ellie’s bedroom, Manon was in the spare room, and Fly was on a put-you-up in the lounge, which he diligently tidied each morning before anyone was up. In this she saw all his worry about the precariousness of his situation.

Those two months living like that – using up all Manon’s annual leave and numerous days owing from years of night shifts and weekends on duty – allowed Fly to complete his last term at primary school, where the teachers were invested in him. And it allowed Ellie the odd night off. Ellie and Manon had some understanding of what Fly needed most – the importance of keeping to existing routines after the death of one’s mother.

‘It’s nice – having you around,’ Ellie said. ‘He brings out good things in you, Fly does.’

But the person who brought out the best in all of them was Solly. How that baby delighted them, Fly especially, who lay next to Solly on the carpet and tickled his toes, blew raspberries on his tummy, and covered his own face with his hands, removing them to say ‘Boo!’ and Solly’s chuckle would ring out, its music like a belly-burst of joy. Squawking, guffawing, high notes like piano keys – it was impossible not to smile when Solly laughed, and he appeared to spend most of his day laughing.

When all her leave was used up, Manon’s hand was forced. ‘I’ll ask Fly to stay with friends,’ she told Ellie, ‘just while I square things in Huntingdon. I don’t expect you—’

‘Don’t be silly. He has to stay here,’ Ellie told her. ‘Solly loves him. And anyway, he mustn’t be uprooted too much, not after what he’s been through. I like the company, to be honest. How long will it take you? When will you be back?’ And there was fear in Ellie’s eyes that they might be separated again.

‘Not long,’ Manon said, telling herself the changes she was about to make were temporary – a stint in the Met while she sorted out a permanent arrangement for Fly, in a foster family or some such.

Edith Hind returned to the UK with her mother, attending Cambridgeshire Police HQ voluntarily. She wanted to explain, she said. She wore a white shirt buttoned to the top, its pointy collar ever-so prudish, navy cigarette trousers over nerdish brown brogues, and glasses with thick black frames, which Manon thought were probably an affectation. The whole ensemble worked to create the impression of a serious young woman, genuinely troubled by circumstances unforeseen. Despite the demure librarian outfit, she was breathtaking: glossy auburn hair curling beneath her pointed chin; skin like alabaster; slim and graceful. Manon couldn’t stop staring, as if she were hungry for more of her, and she wondered if Edith’s beauty meant she should face greater censure. Or perhaps less. Did Manon want someone so beautiful to get away with it or did she want to enviously punish her?

She and Harriet sat on the other side of the table to Edith, who was flanked by Miriam and a very expensive lawyer.

‘I want to hear this,’ said Davy, who stood with his back to the wall. Everyone else, including Gary Stanton, watched the interview in the video room.

‘Miss Hind,’ Harriet said, with unctuous politesse, ‘there were traces of blood in the kitchen of your home in George Street – along a kitchen cabinet and some pooling on the floor, plus some drips of blood in the hallway of your home. Can you explain how they got there?’

‘Yes, yes I can,’ she said, pushing copper ropes of hair behind one ear.
Adorable
. ‘When I got back to the house with Helena, I found I was much drunker than I realised, swaying and stumbling, struggling to stay upright, to be honest.’
Innocent little laugh.
‘In the kitchen I poured myself a glass of wine – this was after Helena had gone – but in picking it up, I knocked it, hard, on the worktop and it literally smashed in my hand, cutting me across the palm. I was shocked by the amount of blood – it literally gushed from my palm. I stared at it for a moment, in that drunken way, as if it belonged to someone else, and in that time it splashed down the kitchen cupboard and onto the floor. I did a rather poor job of cleaning up the broken glass. I put the bloodied shards into the bin and got myself a new wine glass down, which I never used in the end. I stumbled upstairs holding my bleeding hand – which is why there were drips on the hallway floor – and managed to knock half the coats off their hooks as I staggered up to the bathroom for a bandage. I’m sorry,’ she said, looking Harriet in the eye, ‘if this was misconstrued as an injury following an act of violence. I had no idea it would be.’

‘Why did you leave the door to your house open?’ Harriet asks.

‘What?’

‘When Will Carter returned home, he says he found the front door ajar. Why is that?’

‘I didn’t. I closed it. I thought I did, anyway. Look, I was all over the place that night. I’d had too much to drink. And I was frightened about what I was about to do – I was heading into the unknown. I knew how dangerous the journey could be. I went back and forth, stumbling about. I thought I closed the door but maybe in my haste, in my panic, I didn’t pull it firmly enough behind me.’

‘So you have stated that you walked out of Huntingdon, out towards Papworth Everard, and on the A428 you waited in an appointed lay-by until a truck pulled up beside you. Appointed by whom?’ said Harriet, looking at her notes.

‘Abdul-Ghani Khalil.’

‘The back of the lorry was opened by a man you didn’t recognise and you got in. Inside were several other stowaways of various nationalities. You were driven to what we can only guess was a port – you have stated that you could feel the sensation of the lorry boarding a ferry and driving into the hold. You were let out of the lorry in a lay-by just north of Calais in France.’

‘Well, no, it was an aire,’ she said, the r rolling in a pointedly French way.

‘I’m sorry?’ said Harriet.

‘I was let out in an aire – a French service station. I was desperately stiff and needed the loo. This was where the transfer took place – to a car, driven again by a man I didn’t know. He took me as far as Nantes. I paid him the cash as agreed – four thousand pounds.’

‘Agreed by?’

‘Abdul-Ghani Khalil,’ she said.

‘How did you meet Abdul-Ghani Khalil?’

‘No comment.’

‘Were you introduced to Abdul-Ghani Khalil by Tony Wright?’

‘No comment.’

‘Did you meet Abdul-Ghani Khalil when you were visiting Tony Wright in Whitemoor prison?’

‘No comment.’

‘Did you pay Tony Wright to effect an introduction to Abdul-Ghani Khalil?’

‘No comment.’

‘Did Tony Wright give you instructions for a pick-up which led to you being smuggled across the UK border illegally?’

‘No comment.’

‘Why did Tony Wright’s number appear twice on your phone in the week before you disappeared, once on the day before?’

‘We’re friends.’

‘What sort of friends?’

‘Just friends. Have been ever since I visited him in Whitemoor. I was upset about what I’d seen at Deeping involving my father. I wanted to talk to him about it.’

Manon wasn’t in Huntingdon for long. Once she returned to North London, there was a work hiatus while she applied for jobs, in which she ate into her savings and the income from letting out her Huntingdon flat (no point selling, given how this was a temporary situation). She took a six-month let on a flat, five doors down from Ellie’s, and installed herself and Fly in it. She double-checked with the agent: ‘So it’s one month’s notice on either side, right?’

During this time, she sat her inspector exams and Fly fell apart.

Perhaps it was the move to a separate flat (Manon felt they couldn’t keep imposing on Ellie, who wanted to move Solly out of her bedroom). Or the transition to a vast and terrifying secondary school close by. Or just an accumulation of experiences too complex for him to manage. But all of a sudden they were alone together in the face of Fly’s rage and sorrow.

‘He’s started wetting the bed, having night terrors,’ she found herself confiding to Miriam, during the hours waiting at the Old Bailey for Ian Hind’s various pre-trial hearings, either sitting on the benches outside Court One or nudging a tray along silver tracklines in the canteen. ‘I’m so knackered – up five or six times a night, changing sheets. Trying to calm him down.’

‘Like having a newborn,’ Miriam said.

It was ironic to be leaning on Miriam, who had aged but was also serene with Edith back at home. It hadn’t taken that much to persuade Edith to return with her to London, Miriam said. She had a conscience, under all that self-serving narcissism.

‘And I say that with great affection,’ Miriam said with a smile. ‘Told her it was better to go back voluntarily than be dragged back by Interpol. Told her you had made the connection with Abdul-Ghani Khalil and had mobilised French police. It was only a matter of time. She started snivelling, of course – that child is a master of self-pity – but I reassured her we’d hire good lawyers and a PR man to handle the newspapers.’

Everyone at Cambridgeshire wanted to charge the girl with wasting police time, perverting the course of justice, and anything else they could throw at her for sparking a five-week investigation at a cost of around £300k of taxpayers’ money. But the Hinds’ legal team, numerous and dark-suited, formulated a robust defence stating it could not be proven that she ‘intended’ the police to infer she had come to harm. The blood, the fallen coats, the door left ajar, were all the accidental detritus of a night of panic and duress. She had merely fled the source of her distress – the crime committed by her father, whom she neither wished to shelter nor betray. The fact that Cambridgeshire Police had upscaled it to a high-risk misper could hardly be laid at young Miss Hind’s door. Psychiatric reports stated she had suffered ‘mental anguish’ in rural France.

‘Anguish my arse,’ Harriet said.

In the opposite corner were the prosecution arguments: why did she stay away, when she saw, by reading UK press reports online, the scale of the manhunt? How could she justify not telling anyone she was alive and well, even if she didn’t wish to return?