Missing, Presumed (19 page)

‘Colonel Bufton Tufton’s downstairs, and he’s not happy,’ says Kim.

‘Downstairs? Ian Hind?’ says Harriet.

‘Downstairs. Pacing like a caged bear.’

‘Did we have a meeting I’ve forgotten about?’ Harriet says to Davy, who shrugs, following her at a jog to keep up with her pelt down the stairs, while she says, ‘Probably here to bollock me about something.’ Then she stops and looks at Davy. ‘It’ll be the female lover line. I didn’t think he knew. Guess the FLO filled him in. Shit, he’ll be livid. Typical Stanton, out on a jolly when the shit hits the fan.’

‘Is everything all right, Sir Ian?’ says Harriet, waiting for Davy to enter, then closing the door to interview room one.

He is pacing up and down, fast, exactly as Kim described, like a bear in a tight space who hasn’t been fed.

‘Where is Superintendent Stanton?’ he says, his navy coat flying as he turns.

‘He’s not at HQ today,’ says Harriet. ‘What’s the matter, Sir Ian?’

‘You are systematically destroying my daughter’s reputation.’

‘I don’t think saying she had a female lover is derogatory, is it?’

‘It’s prurient,’ he says. Davy isn’t entirely clear what prurient means. ‘It’s salacious.’ Ah right, thinks Davy, that’s what it means. ‘It’s dirtying her in the mind of the general public, and they don’t need much assistance, let me tell you. You are riding roughshod over my family and I—’ He is stopped by a catch of emotion in his throat, except he appears to Davy to be too angry for tears.

‘Sir Ian, I promise you that is not our intention. We want to find Edith and we want to find her alive. We’ll do anything, anything at all, and that includes embarrassing her, and possibly you, though you have no reason to be embarrassed—’

‘My wife is crying on the bed, appalled about the things you’re saying about Edie, terrified about what your sergeant told us – about Tony Wright. I looked up his offences and they’re horrific.’

‘We have looked at Tony Wright, just as we look at all known offenders with appropriate previous convictions. It’s a line of—’

‘A line? You’ve told us some knife-wielding sexual predator might have had something to do with her disappearance and then you … you leave us to it?’

‘Wright has an alibi,’ Harriet says. ‘A very strong alibi. We are just keeping you informed. Look, I know this is upsetting. The reason we assign an FLO is to try to contain these sorts of fears and to answer any questions you might have. Try to calm down, Sir Ian. If you’d like to sit—’

‘No, I don’t want to sit. Everyone’s always telling me to sit or making me drink tea. I don’t like our FLO, and anyway, I want to know what you’re doing, what the investigation is
doing
. I don’t want to be patted by some mooning counsellor who wishes to
contain me
.’

‘We are looking at all avenues. Tony Wright is one of our lines of enquiry. Another is the possibility that Edith’s personal life – her lovers – is at the heart of what’s happened to her. We’re hoping the
Crimewatch
appeal will flush out new information.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he says. ‘Why, then, is your sergeant also talking to us about a boy – a boy called Dent, I think his name is.’

‘That is another line of enquiry.’

‘What do you mean “another line”?’

‘Taylor Dent’s body was found in the river near Ely last week. I think DS Bradshaw informed you of that, didn’t she? We are treating it as a murder investigation and we are looking into possible connections with the disappearance of your daughter. The two events had a similar time frame. It would be quite wrong if we didn’t look into connections between the two incidents.’

‘Forgive me, forgive me, DI Harper,’ he says, frowning and shaking his head. ‘How can you possibly focus your investigation if you are vaguely looking into everything? If you have multiple lines of enquiry, if you think it might be her love life, or it might be this lowlife, or it might be the boy in the river, then what on earth is your lead? Where is your focus?’ He turns, hones in on Harriet with cold, grey eyes in a way which, Davy notices, makes her pretend to read some notes on her clipboard. ‘Inspector, is it Tony Wright or Taylor Dent? You don’t seem to know. Or is it, in fact, that you’re out of your depth being SIO on a case this big, and so you’re frantically trying to investigate everything?’ He is downright scary-furious, like a headmaster telling her off.

‘I … we’re following up all possible leads,’ says Harriet, fingering the corner of a page.

‘Which is it?’ Sir Ian booms. His knuckles are on the desk and he’s hunched over Harriet. It’s as if he’s about to bang on the table.

‘It’s hard to say exactly,’ says Harriet. ‘At this point, multiple avenues—’

‘You’re supposed to be leading this enquiry, so lead it. Is it Taylor Dent or is it Tony Wright?’

‘To be honest, neither of them are holding up that well under scrutiny. But if I, I, I – if I had to, well, I’d say Wright is a stronger lead, but his alibi—’

Sir Ian exhales, straightens, and more gently says, ‘Right, so shouldn’t you be putting all your resources into Tony Wright then, DI Harper?’

Ian Hind marches out of the room and out of the station, into his Jaguar and back to London, they all hope.

Davy waits with Harriet outside interview room one. She is leaning against the corridor wall, head back, blowing out through pursed lips. ‘Fuck,’ she whispers. She opens her eyes and looks at Davy, still with her head back. ‘That was me at my finest. Watch and learn, Davy Walker.’

‘You certainly gave him what for.’

‘I did, didn’t I?’

‘At least he knows who’s boss,’ says Davy.

Kim is walking towards them, back from visiting Helena Reed.

‘How was she?’ asks Harriet.

‘Yeah, all right. She’s a bit out of it. I’m not sure she quite understands what it means in terms of the press an’ that.’

‘Did you make her aware?’

‘Did my best. I told her she might want to lie low, go and stay with family. Told her officers could sit with her if she wanted. She said she couldn’t go to family, was shifty about why, and said she didn’t need our support.’

‘OK, write it up, will you?’ says Harriet.

The phones are shrieking, over and above each other, like wailing babies demanding immediate attention. She has 148 unread emails in her inbox. The chorus, persistent and shrill, of keyboards clacking, voices, and mobiles bleeping is drilling into her frontal lobe and transforming itself into piercing pain downwards towards her left eye. The department has gone into overdrive since
Crimewatch
was broadcast last night.

Girl matching Edith’s description spotted walking south out of the town; girl matching Edith’s description seen walking west out of the town; girl matching Edith’s description spotted in Manchester; in Glasgow; in seven separate locations in London. All would have to be followed up. TI. Trace and Interview. Nothing ignored.

The sound has been muted on the television, but there is Stanton, giving more interviews, the red ticker tape running along the bottom of the screen saying –
Det Ch Supt Gary Stanton, Cambridgeshire Police: ‘Missing Edith had lesbian relationship. Complex love life at heart of investigation.’

‘Sorry, why have you been put through to this department?’ Davy is saying into the phone. ‘No, no, I don’t want to give you the inside story.’ Waits. ‘Righto, yes, thank you, putting you through to the press office, caller,’ he says, pressing various buttons on his handset and slamming down the receiver with uncharacteristic annoyance. ‘Why aren’t they putting these calls through to the media team? Why are they coming through to us?’

‘Because they lie to switchboard, that’s why,’ says Harriet.

Colin is in his element, leaping up every five minutes. ‘This one says the immigrants are to blame. If we didn’t let them flood our borders …’ He shakes his head, saying, ‘Classic.’

Manon is leafing through the pile of newspapers splayed across her desk – across all the desks – every one of them leading on the Hind investigation:
Tragic Edith had female lover
;
Edith’s lesbian trysts
;
Missing Edith had secret girlfriend, say police
. Even the broadsheets are carrying it on the front page.
The Telegraph
takes the opportunity to re-run a vast photograph of Edith in her mortar board; something for the brigadiers to gaze at while imagining her disrobed and in a steamy same-sex clinch. The
Guardian
displayed its usual distaste by running it as a basement:
Press frenzy over ‘female lover’ in Edith investigation.
It got their juices going – girl-on-girl action. Better than that: posh-girl-on-girl action. She prays no one puts two and two together and gets Helena Reed. The Met has had to deploy a protection team to Church Row in Hampstead, where the Hinds are being ferociously doorstepped.

Fergus has walked in. Dark wet patches are leaching through the cotton of his grey shirt at the armpits. His acne outbreak has reddened. He pushes his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose.

‘A word, everyone, if you don’t mind.’

The department settles, people perching or stood still, but for the phones which keep on crying out.

‘We need to be very mindful of attempts to infiltrate this investigation,’ he says. ‘Most of you will have taken calls from reporters this morning. They are hungry, very hungry indeed – under a lot of pressure for a follow-up to today’s revelations. I would strongly advise you not to exchange any details about the case when you are on your mobile phones.’

‘Are you saying we’re being hacked?’ says Stuart.

‘I wouldn’t rule it out,’ says Fergus, and he pushes his glasses up again, the sweat making them slip. ‘Just to be on the safe side, don’t talk about it on the blower. If you’re talking to each other, don’t mention names or details, and don’t talk to your family and friends about it, OK? Thanks everyone.’

The room breaks up, louder than before. Manon needs to escape the increased decibels, the heightened heat and velocity in the air, the pain shooting across one side of her brain.

‘I’m going to the canteen, Davy. D’you want a coffee or anything?’

‘This is an almighty mess,’ says Davy, and she is startled, not only to hear him express something so despairing but to see the broken expression on his face. ‘I mean, what was he thinking? This isn’t how we find out what happened to Edith. It’s just exploiting her.’

‘Normal to shake things up at this point,’ she tells him. ‘Eighteen days missing, everyone’s forgotten about her a bit. We’ve got fuck-all credible leads. Stanton’s just swirling his stick in the sand. Tea? Bacon butty?’

On the way down the stairs she texts Fly.

How is the coat?

Coat is good, but it making me shoes look bad.

She nudges Bryony, who is ahead of her in the canteen queue. ‘All right?’

‘Oooh, hello,’ says Bryony. ‘All kicking off round yours.’

‘I know. Splitting headache. Phones are ringing off the hook.’

‘Any of it sensible?’

‘Not so far. You know what it’s like.’

‘Sit with me?’

‘Five minutes, yeah.’

They take a table in the far corner, where Bryony interrogates Manon about her love life.

‘So hang on, he came by the station to ask you out, bought you antibiotic eye drops, and you haven’t called him?’ Bryony is saying, and it’s doing nothing for Manon’s headache.

The conjunctivitis was gone by Tuesday morning. She’d applied the first drops the minute she got upstairs to the department on the Monday evening, and the next day she was clear and evangelical about antibiotics’ supernatural powers. What on earth will the human race do when this medicine stops working? Die in childbirth again. Go blind with conjunctivitis. Kidney failure from cystitis. Commit suicide during a bout of toothache. She thought about it a bit, darkly, and then, on with the day! She’d been briefly full of gratitude, too, towards Alan Prenderghast, but this had evaporated just as fast as the infection so that by Wednesday afternoon, she’d forgotten that she was ever encumbered. She hadn’t got round to thanking him, and then she didn’t feel like it any more.

It is more than that, she realises now, sitting opposite Bryony and the pressure she exudes. She can’t communicate … what? Something nuanced and complex about why she doesn’t want to get involved with him. The way she stands back from the web of interaction because she can’t commit to being inside it. Her sheer ambivalence, which Bryony sees as straightforward but is anything but. Contact is difficult.

‘And yet you will put out for whatever hairy sociopath comes your way on the Internet?’ Bryony is saying.

Manon shrugs, as if to say,
Search me.

‘There’s no helping you. I literally give up.’

‘I keep meaning to ring him,’ says Manon, and she notices how her voice sounds: slow and dissociated, as if very far away. ‘I just don’t get round to it. I don’t know why.’

‘I do. He might actually be nice to you. He might treat you well and give you babies.’

‘Come off it,’ she says, frowning, and she’s angry now at being bulldozed. ‘You don’t know shit about him, Bri.’

‘I know he’s already better than the totally awful specimens you normally go out with.’

Manon has stood up abruptly. She’s had enough. ‘You fucking go out with him then.’

She walks away, hearing Bryony say, ‘Manon, come back, I—’ before the doors to the canteen shut behind her.