Missing, Presumed (11 page)

They’ve made her fingertips sooty, the filth rubbing off on her. ‘Missing Edith had complex love life’ (
Daily Mail
). ‘String of lovers led her into danger, say Edith cops’ (
The Mirror
). Her father would say it’s fair game, a big story, and why shouldn’t they be all over it? Sex and death – there was no better combination for shifting copies. Being a local paper editor, he had a sneaking admiration for the tabloids, and part of Manon’s problem with the press is she can see both sides.

She looks up from the pile of tabloids on her knees, peering through the car window to see a muddy sky pressing down on the flat roofs of the Arbury estate in Cambridge, built like Lego. The great thumb smudge of cloud begins to release fat droplets as she and Nigel slam their car doors and head for the block.

Day four of the investigation: interview known offenders – burglars, rapists, sociopaths and addicts – with an MO that plausibly fits the bill.

Both of them now out of puff, they have reached the uppermost open walkway and they stop outside Tony Wright’s blue gloss front door. Tony
Wrong
, as he’s known in MIT. ‘To be fair, he hasn’t put a foot wrong since he’s been out,’ his probation officer said.

‘No one’s answering,’ says Nigel, stamping his feet next to her. He leans over the balcony and shouts, ‘Oi! Hop it!’ to a group of kids surrounding their car, and they scatter like birds.

Manon bangs again with her fist.

‘All right, all right,’ says a woman’s voice behind the door. It opens and Manon has her badge ready, mid-air.

‘Cambridgeshire Police, DS Manon Bradshaw and DC Nigel Williams. Tony in?’

The woman, mid-thirties, in a pink velour tracksuit, has skin the colour of tapioca and oversized hoop earrings. She turns, without saying anything, to reveal the word
Juicy
written across her back in sequins. She schlumps to the lounge where the television is on.

There is Tony, ravaged king: his face a collapsed cliff face, white hair in a loose ponytail at the nape of his neck, matching the goatee like a long drip of milk from his chin. Rounded spectacles, which make him seem curiously intellectual, or like a folk-singing hippy. His tattoo sleeves are visible, creeping all the way up to his neck.

‘Hiya, Tony,’ says Manon. They’ve known each other of old.

‘Come in, Manon. Cup o’ tea? How about you, Nigel?’

‘I’m all right, thanks, Tony,’ says Nigel, standing with his hands cupping his testicles.

‘How’re the twins doin’, Nigel?’ Tony asks. ‘That’s a lot o’ work, twins.’ His Scottish brogue adds to the affable air, the gentle grandpappy. Hard to believe he’d broken into a young woman’s flat in the dead of night, took a knife from her kitchen, which he then held to her throat, forcing her to strip. He robbed her that night, not simply of her peace of mind for all perpetuity, but every other valuable thing in her flat too. Wright was sent to Whitemoor, the maximum security prison just outside the village of March – a fifteen-year sentence – where he was a model prisoner, running the library. He’s been out on licence for eight months.

‘They are a lot of work, Tony. They’re wearing us out,’ says Nigel, smiling.

‘Tae what do I owe this honour?’ Tony asks. ‘Is there, perchance, a crime for which youse two would like tae finger me? Shopliftin’, is it? Arson? Murder?’

‘We want to ask you a few questions, Tony, that’s all,’ says Manon.

‘And if it isnae all right? What if now isnae a convenient time? Because frankly, ah’m watchin’
Loose Women
right now and this Coleen Nolan, she’s got many interestin’ things tae say.’

‘Do you know anything about the disappearance of a young woman from Huntingdon, called Edith Hind?’

‘Now why would ye think that?’

‘Where were you on the night of seventeenth of December, Tony – Saturday night?’

‘Och, that’s easy, we had a lock-in an’ a singsong at The Coach. You ask anyone on the estate, everyone was there. Great night, wisn’t it, Lyn?’

Lyn nods, smoking.

‘What time did you leave The Coach, Tony?’ asks Manon.

‘Aboot 2 a.m., wis it?’ he says, looking affectionately at Lyn.

Really, butter wouldn’t melt, Manon thinks, marvelling. Dangerous people seldom broadcast their peccadilloes – you learned that in child protection. It’s not the creepy bloke in a stained mac; it’s the jolly fellow who chats to you in the queue in John Lewis.

‘And Sunday morning, Tony?’

‘Well, I got up, no’ too early after the night before,’ he laughs, the phlegm bubbling in the bottom of his throat before it turns into a cough. ‘Sorry,’ he says, his hand over his mouth. ‘Then I went tae meet Paddy at ten, as usual.’

‘Paddy your probation officer?’ says Manon.

‘That’s it. We went for a fry-up, it being Sunday mornin’. Mug o’ tea, eggs and bacon, a whole stack o’ bread an’ butter, steamed up windaes against the cold December morn. Lovely.’

God, he’s so
likeable
. Must stop warming to him, immediately.

‘We’ll be checking all this, you know that, Tony,’ she says.

‘Oh aye, you fill yer boots, Manon. I know you’ll do yer job. Come an’ arrest me when youse are ready.’

‘We’ll see ourselves out,’ she says.

Manon strides up Huntingdon high street towards Cromwell’s, dread churning at the prospect of the office Christmas ‘knees-up’, as Davy liked to call it – already an overstatement. Just a few of them having drinks, with their mobiles on in case the duty team needs to update them. Besides, they’re all exhausted. Colin will bore everyone rigid about the latest iPad upgrade; Nigel will ask if she’s still single and then go on about the comfortable pleasures of being ‘an old married man’, though he’ll appear to be in no hurry to get back to ‘the lovely Dawn’ and the twins.

She stops outside the bar, its silver lettering attempting to give it an air of modernity. It is the kind of place twenty-two-year-old boys come for stag dos when they haven’t the money or imagination to reach for Bratislava. Manon scans the room as her eyes adjust to the darkness. Fruit machines glow in one corner. In another, she spots her colleagues and Bryony at the centre of the group, waving to her, then making two fingers into a gun and shooting herself in the mouth.

Manon has come later than the rest. She’s been gathering in CCTV of Tony Wright’s weekend; getting nowhere tracing ‘unknown-515’ – the number Edith rang twice in the week before she vanished; and working out which computers she worked on in the college library. ‘Get all the data off that one,’ she told Nigel.

And she was still trawling through Edith’s personal hard drive, reading her PhD research, her emails, her postings on the Internet, the latest one being:
‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.’
Beneath it she wrote: ‘Not said by Nelson Mandela, but amazing anyway.’

Manon was reminded of her own youthful diaries; how much she too had been in love with a notion of herself at that age, energetically self-analysing. Edith had typed out a long passage from George Eliot’s novel,
Daniel Deronda
, into a Word document titled: ‘Just as I see it’.

… her horizon was that of the genteel romance where the heroine’s soul poured out in her journal is full of vague power, originality, and general rebellion, while her life moves strictly in the sphere of fashion; and if she wanders into a swamp, the pathos lies partly, so to speak, in her having on her satin shoes. Here is a restraint which nature and society have provided on the pursuit of striking adventure; so that a soul burning with a sense of what the universe is not, and ready to take all existence as fuel, is nevertheless held captive by the ordinary wirework of social forms and does nothing particular.

Edith’s screensaver is a picture of a bare-breasted woman running towards the camera with her arms thrown up and the words
Still Not Asking For It
written across her chest. She is a member of No Means No – an anti-rape group. Her PhD is on the fight against the patriarchy in Victorian literature, with reference to John Stuart Mill (
The Subjection of Women
) and
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(‘the first radical feminist novel’). Her writing is impassioned, the beat of it like a fist punching the air.

‘Hello, chicken,’ says Bryony, handing Manon a vodka tonic as they survey the group together.

Colin is talking at full tilt to Davy, who sits forward with his elbows on his knees, nodding and listening intently. Stuart, wearing a black leather jacket and black jeans, which are arousingly tight, is chatting to Nigel. Kim is knocking back a pint.

‘I’m already having a bad time,’ says Manon.

‘Oh, come on, what’s not to like? It’s dark, there’s a faint whiff of vomit, Colin’s talking technology.’

‘You’ve got yoghurt down the back of your top,’ says Manon, picking at some dried white crust on Bryony’s cardigan. ‘At least, I hope it’s yoghurt.’ She smells her fingers and frowns.

‘Hang on,’ Bryony says, craning over her shoulder. ‘Hold this,’ and she hands Manon her drink. She rummages in her bag and fishes out a toy car, then a box of raisins and finally a wet wipe. ‘Go at it with this, will you?’

‘I put my book in the bin on the way home,’ says Manon, rubbing at Bryony’s shoulder.

‘Good for you. Is it coming off?’

They both detest MIT’s yearly Secret Santa charade, organised before the Hind case kicked off, which had played itself out in the office at leaving time – everyone with their coats on. It was about as festive as a queue for the bus. Manon had received a book on dating –
Grab Your Man Before Someone Else Does
– from the cut-price bookstore in the precinct. It was still in the pink and white striped paper bag, sealed with Sellotape, and the lack of wrapping put it firmly at Colin’s door. Colin, whose response to every crime was to shake his head saying, ‘Takes all sorts’, had received a bag of Liquorice Allsorts, with ‘Liquorice’ replaced with the word ‘Takes’. (‘Good one,’ Manon said to Bryony.) Harriet had, inappropriately enough, been given a pair of sheer stockings (‘Not Stuart, surely,’ Bryony whispered, horrified). Davy got a nodding dog for the car. Bryony a baby’s bib that said:
What happens at Grandma’s, stays at Grandma’s
.

‘Shame she’s in a home,’ Bryony whispered sadly. ‘What happens at Grandma’s is a lot of peeing in her pants and the odd ill-timed sexual outburst.’

‘That probably should stay at Grandma’s,’ Manon said.

The whole thing was like being handed a placard saying:
This is what everyone in the office thinks of you.
Stuart got a seduction kit in a tiny tin (perhaps it wasn’t off-target after all). Manon had been forced to buy for Kim, the office enigma. She literally knew nothing about Kim. Even her age was a mystery. So she’d bought her a bag of old-fashioned sweets and some socks. Kim seemed practical that way and when she’d opened it, she’d nodded and said, ‘Fair dos.’

‘Another drink?’ says Kim now, having weaved her way over to Manon and Bryony.

‘Why the fuck not?’ says Manon. ‘We’re on vodka tonics, thanks, Kim.’

‘Righto,’ says Kim, her broad back disappearing towards the bar.

‘She’s an enigma wrapped in a riddle, that woman.’

‘How did it go with the poet?’ asks Bryony.

‘He took me skating.’

‘Oh my God, you hate skating.’

‘Then he told me he was still living with his ex.’

‘This one’s sounding like a keeper. Please tell me you made your excuses and left.’

‘D’you know what? I actually did, for like the first time ever.’

‘Good on you, kiddo. How did he take it?’

‘Told me he preferred his women petite.’

‘Jeez, narrow escape then,’ says Bryony, chinking her glass against Manon’s. ‘You did the right thing.’

They stand looking out at the bar. Manon feels her shoes pinching at the sides of her toes and at the heel. Kim returns and hands them their vodkas, venturing past them to her seat with her pint. You’ve got to like that about Kim – she doesn’t impose ‘the chat’. Manon takes a sip from the glass and realises it’s a double. She’s already beginning to feel anaesthetised in her lower legs and light in her head, as if her blood were heading south. She shifts on her feet.

‘Christ, look at Davy,’ Bryony says, ‘listening away to Colin like he doesn’t want to chew off his own arm.’

‘He’s a lesson to us all, that boy.’

They drain their glasses and new ones appear – always doubles, some with Red Bull, some with tonic. The bar seems to get darker, more blurry, the music swimming in and out of Manon’s consciousness with snippets of conversation as she sways on her painful shoes, at times her eyes half closed.

She sits on the arm of Davy’s chair while he fiddles about with his phone, looking up at her by way of explanation, saying, ‘Chloe. She likes to check up on me. Make sure I’m not getting up to mischief.’

‘Make sure you’re not having any fun, more like,’ says Manon, realising too late that she’s said it out loud.

She looks to the banquette close by, where Kim is frowning and nodding, and Bryony is leaning in too close, a smudge of mascara down her face, shouting above the music in a slurry voice: ‘I moan about them, right, Kim. I mean, I’m never knowingly under-moaned. But fuck me, Kim – I don’t mean that literally, Kim,’ and she burps into her fist, ‘but fuck me, the kids, they’re everything.’

Stuart is to Manon’s right, seeming malevolently sober. He asks her where Harriet is.

‘Got a dinner with the brass – retired plods get-together or something.’

Stuart nods.

Then Davy is asking Stuart about where he’s from and what he did before joining the force.