Missing, Presumed (30 page)

‘That you, Manon?’

Her breath catches in her throat to hear that voice. Can it possibly be? Why now? Perhaps she has a sixth sense for Manon’s heartbreak. She did when they were little.

‘Hello.’

‘I’m … I’m sorry to ring out of the blue like this.’

‘No, no.’

‘Is it a bad time?’

‘Um, well, I’m at work, in the toilets, actually. You might hear the echo.’

She pulls at some of the rough oblong towels, jabs at the tears at the rim of her eye and a corner of the towel pokes her eyeball. She bends over double, blinking and rubbing. The phone is heating up her ear as if it’s radioactive.

It wasn’t just that Ellie’s truce with Una had been a treachery too far; their rift was the calcification of years of rivalry, layers of it hardening into silence over time. Small injuries, gathering; some success Ellie had at work, which Manon couldn’t swallow; or a fabulous boyfriend; or even just a nice holiday she didn’t want to hear about. They stopped calling and then, much sooner than Manon expected, it became too hard to call. Their mother would have banged their heads together: ‘I don’t care about any awkwardness’ and ‘Get over yourselves, for God’s sake’, which would only have made it worse. But their mother is dead, their father all the way in Scotland, which might as well be Canada, Una having subsumed him like some mollusc who crept over the top of him until he disappeared.

‘How’ve you been?’ says Ellie.

‘Oh, you know …’

‘No. I don’t. It’s been three years.’

‘And that’s my fault, is it?’

Ellie sighs. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it? I’m ringing to tell you something important. I’ve had a baby. A boy. He’s three months now. Solomon. Well, we call him Solly.’

‘A baby? You’ve had a baby?’ The blood drains from Manon’s head. She nods distractedly at Kim, who is edging into a toilet cubicle. ‘Are you … Where are you living?’

‘In London. Kilburn.’

‘Wow. That’s … terrific news.’

‘Yes. I wanted you to know, Manon. In case you … Well, perhaps you’ll come up some time. Meet your nephew.’

She pictures herself the prickly pear, lonely visitor to the pink paradise of family life in Kilburn. The park and the swings and Sunday roasts so newly lost to her. Wrinkled aunt.

‘Well, it’s quite busy in MIT right now.’

‘Yes, of course. Must be. You must be a DCI by now.’

‘Not quite.’

‘I better go. Solly’s waking up. We’ve got Baby Bounce at the library this afternoon.’

Manon is so jealous she cannot speak. Envy is physical, the sensation of it: difficulty swallowing, a pain around the temples, panic, and wanting to flee the source.

‘OK, well, nice to talk to you,’ she says. ‘Bye.’

She takes more towels from the dispenser, knowing the tears will come again. Oh, but she loves Ellie, loves her so deeply, and now they have come to this – the slights embedding themselves into wounds and no one to knock their heads together except their better selves, which seem always to be in abeyance, held hostage by meaner feelings. On top of her jealousy, in a nauseous wave, comes guilt. My sister with a baby and no mother to help. My sister who I love, my love killed by jealousy. My sister who I hate for having everything I haven’t got. It is impossible to be Manon Bradshaw.

Everything is broken and she starts to cry, as Kim emerges from her cubicle to the sounds of a fulsome flush. Did Kim hear the word ‘unimaginative’ at Cromwell’s on Friday? Or is Manon blanching just at the thought?

They nod at each other silently, neither mentioning Manon’s tears nor her outburst in the bar.

Back at her desk, she calls Will Carter on the landline.

‘When did Edith first toy with the idea of criminology?’

‘Summer 2009. After we graduated, none of us – well, practically none of us – knew what to do next. She decided to do a kind of work experience with the CIC – these interviews in Whitemoor – to see if it would be something she’d like to take to postgrad level. I remember she was incredibly excited about that first visit to the prison, full of zeal about reform and education, ideas about teaching a prison course in feminist literature to make rapists explore the female experience.’

‘She talk much about Tony Wright?’

‘No, she never mentioned anyone by name. I think the visits ended almost as quickly as they began. I just remember that after a couple of trips to Whitemoor with the CIC, she became really demoralised. Said it was one of the saddest places she’d ever been in. No one treating anyone with a shred of humanity. And all these prisoners without hope and with nothing to do. She said it smelled of cabbage and bleach. She told me there was no interest in rehabilitation in prison. Just overcrowding, lack of money, and the problem of housing this jostling, violent pack of men who the state felt were uncontainable. She went to see Graham Garfield soon after and switched to an English PhD.’

‘So you weren’t aware of an ongoing relationship with Tony Wright? That Edith was visiting him?’

‘No,’ he says softly.

‘One more question, Will. Abdul-Ghani Khalil – do you know the name?’

‘The guy who’s just been arrested? The body in the container at Tilbury Docks? Of course, he’s all over the news.’

‘I wondered if Edith might have mentioned him to you.’

He is laughing.

‘Something funny, Mr Carter?’

‘You think she was part of a human trafficking ring? Nothing would surprise me about Edith any more.’ He sighs. ‘Look, I don’t know if she knew Abdul-Ghani whatever his name is. But I didn’t really know her at all, did I?’

No, you didn’t, Manon thinks, but her mind is snagged by the ringing of her replacement BlackBerry, which is scuttling across the desk with each vibration. ‘I’m going to have to go, Will, I’ve got another call coming in. Talk soon.’ She puts down the landline, picks up the mobile. ‘DS Manon Bradshaw,’ she says.

‘It’s DI Haverstock – remember me? Havers, Kilburn CID.’

‘Right, yeah, hi,’ she says, her voice a swell of impatience. She wants to interrogate the Wright–Khalil line, see whether it leads to Edith. She doesn’t want distractions.

‘I’ve got something on Taylor Dent,’ Havers is saying. ‘Turns out he had a second phone – for his various business dealings. We arrested one of his associates and he told us about it, gave us the number. Anyway, we’ve got all the data off it and there’s a voicemail you might want to listen to. We haven’t got a clue who it is, to be honest, so I’m forwarding it to people who might, even though it’s a long shot. Or would you rather I contact team two about this?’

‘No, no, I can look at it,’ she says, simultaneously typing into the police database. ‘Email the audio file over. [email protected]. Thanks.’ Then she throws her BlackBerry across the desk.

She pulls up the call data taken off Tony Wright’s phone after his arrest, highlights the numbers he called after speaking to Edith Hind – most of them dirty phones, PAYG, unregistered, no records attached.

She tries Bryony’s mobile but it goes straight to voicemail.

Need to speak to you urgently. Call me. M

Can’t. Massively up against it. Later.

No, Bri. It’s urgent. CALL ME.

‘What?’ says Bri. ‘Can’t this wait?’

‘No, it can’t. Are you sitting in front of the Khalil file?’

‘I’m
always
sitting in front of the Khalil file. I’ve started calling my kids Abdul and Ghani.’

‘I just want to run these numbers past you. Ready?’

‘What’s this about?’

‘Tell you in a sec. Ready? Unknown-638.’

Silence as Bryony types into the HOLMES system.

‘Nope.’

‘OK, unknown-422.’

‘Nope,’ says Bryony. ‘Oh wait, hang on. Yes. That’s one of his. Well, one of his associates, who basically relayed messages to him.’

‘Bingo,’ says Manon. ‘Fucking love you, Bri.’

‘What? Tell me. What’s this about?’

‘Tony Wright made contact with Khalil shortly after speaking to Edith Hind. Khalil and Wright knew each other in Whitemoor. One more thing, Bri. Khalil was trafficking people through ports. Dover, Folkestone, Tilbury Docks.’

‘That’s right – goods containers and trucks boarding P&O Ferries mainly.’

‘And was he taking people the other way?’

‘What, you mean
out
of the country? Khalil would take anyone anywhere if the money was right. I
think
– and don’t quote me on this – that there’s always a drip feed the other way. Y’know, people going back, thinking the Continent might offer a better deal, but border control couldn’t care less about that flow so we don’t investigate it. Listen, hon, I’ve really got to go.’

‘Just one more thing,’ Manon says. ‘His drop-offs and pick-ups – did he operate in Cambridgeshire?’

‘Yup,’ says Bryony. ‘All up and down the eastern coastline – out of Felixstowe, across to the M11, down through Maidstone, and out of Dover. Should we be interrogating Khalil on this, asking if he knows anything about the Hind girl?’

‘Not yet,’ says Manon. ‘Gimme a bit more time.’

‘Right, look, I’ve really got to—’

‘Yes, yes, sorry. Thanks, love. Bye.’ Manon lays her phone down on the desk.

Her email box says one new message. She puts her headphones on and listens to the audio file.

After a sprint around MIT, she locates Harriet in Stanton’s office, sunken-eyed, clicking about at the computer. Manon is panting so hard, she almost can’t get the words out. Harriet looks up.

‘What is it?’

Is this a panic attack? Why won’t her words come out?

‘What, Manon?
Speak
.’

‘Audio file,’ she gasps. ‘Audio file.’ She is pointing at the computer.

Harriet opens up the email Manon has forwarded to her inbox and plays the audio file. She and Manon do not take their eyes off each other. The voice – patrician, superior, commanding.
‘Meet me at the usual place.’

‘It’s him,’ says Harriet.

‘I know,’ says Manon.

‘It’s fucking him,’ Harriet says. ‘What date was this recorded?’

‘Sunday eleventh of December.’

‘Right, I’m authorising an ANPR trace on his plates on Sunday eleventh of December. We need to link this Dent number back to him. I’ll bet he wasn’t using his normal mobile to make that call, so it’ll be a PAYG, paid for in cash. Let’s get a date and location for its purchase – Hampstead High Street, I’ll put money on it – and let’s get our voice experts matching this recording with the recordings of our interviews with him.’

‘Shouldn’t we run it past Stanton—’

‘Fuck Stanton.’

She and Harriet have been shown into a waiting room that resembles a lounge in a country house hotel. Two leather Chesterfield sofas face each other across a Persian rug. The smell of brewing coffee. On a polished coffee table are arranged copies of
Country Life
magazine and
Homes & Gardens
, and a generous vase of flowers. Around the corners of the room, large lamps are lit.

‘Officers,’ says Ian Hind, coming out from his room and bringing with him the haste of the busy professional. ‘What a surprise. Do you have an update for us? Wouldn’t it be best to talk at home with Miriam?’

‘Is there somewhere we could speak in private?’ asks Harriet.

‘Yes, of course. Rosemary,’ he says, peering out to where his receptionist sits at a desk in the lobby, ‘no interruptions, all right? Do come through.’

He shows them into another stately room where he takes up a seat in a leather chair beside his desk.

Harriet and Manon remain standing.

‘Sir Ian,’ says Harriet, ‘I wonder if you could tell us where you were on the night of Sunday eleventh of December.’

‘The eleventh of December? Well, now, that’s two months ago. I’d have to consult my diaries, ask Miriam. Off the top of my head, I have absolutely no idea. At home, probably. I usually am on a Sunday night.’

‘You see, our cameras have snapshots of your car driving up the M11 towards East Anglia that night, in the direction of March, where your country house is.’

He taps the steeple of his fingers a couple of times, turns his mouth down, looks at them blankly, as if in confusion.

‘Yes, yes, that’s right – I popped to Deeping. There were maintenance issues to do with the house—’

‘Which you forgot to mention.’

‘I can barely remember making the trip, to be perfectly honest with you, but now that you mention it …’ He gives them a condescending smile. Then looks at his watch. ‘Is there a significance to this, because I have a patient in ten minutes and I must look over their notes.’

‘One more thing, Sir Ian,’ says Harriet. ‘You have stated that you didn’t know Taylor Dent.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And yet you left a voicemail message on his phone saying, “Meet me in the usual place,” on the eleventh of December, which was the date on which he was last seen.’

‘I’m sorry, what message?’

‘Here, I’ll play it for you,’ Manon says, opening an email on her smart phone and playing the sound file.

‘Meet me. At the usual place.’

There is silence as the three of them listen, Hind looking at the surface of his desk, Harriet and Manon scrutinising his face. He appears to be making a decision.

‘You can’t prove that’s me,’ he says.

‘Actually, we have traced the phone. It was purchased by you from Phones 4
U
on Hampstead High Street on fifteenth of July 2010. We’ve got a positive ID from the cashier,’ says Harriet.

‘Look,’ he says, ‘I want to give the police absolute assistance in finding my daughter, I really do. I was talking to Rog about it only the other day – Roger Galloway, I mean. I was at the Commons and I told Roger how talented I felt the Cambridgeshire team was – you in particular, DI Harper – and that if he was looking at fast-tracking female officers—’

‘Ian Hind, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Taylor Dent—’

‘Just a minute, detective,’ he says, sitting upright. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m sure we can come to a mutually beneficial arrangement without all that caution business.’

‘You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence—’

‘One call to Roger and you could move up the ranks very quickly indeed, smart pair like you. He’s always saying he wants to see more women in the force.’

‘He should stop promoting men, then,’ says Manon.

Harriet sighs heavily. ‘If you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?’

‘I can bury you too, you know.’

‘Do you know where Edith is?’ asks Harriet.

‘God, no, of course not. Look, can we all sit, just for a moment?’ he asks.

They nod and sit opposite him on the metal-framed chairs reserved for patients.

‘I am not a bad man,’ he says. ‘It was all sort of an accident. He was blackmailing me, you see.’

‘We would advise you to have a lawyer present before you go any further,’ says Harriet.

‘Yes, of course. Can I ask one thing? Don’t tell Rosemary outside. There’s no need to cuff me or anything, is there?’

‘No, we can walk out together.’

In an interview room at Kilburn station, after many hours with an expensive solicitor present, Sir Ian Hind signs a statement.

I met Taylor Dent six months previously, in June 2010. He was working on a building site opposite my home and he would catch my eye as I left the house, smile at me, bare-chested in the heat. I found myself attracted to him. I’ve been happily married for twenty-five years, but over the years I have had occasional sexual encounters with men. All very transactional – in the showers at the gym, that sort of thing. They were infrequent and never a relationship of any sort. My family are everything to me.

The encounters with Taylor were different. He awakened in me feelings I had last experienced at school. Up to this point, I had managed to compartmentalise my encounters with men from my life as a loving husband and father. But with Taylor, for the first time, something was building. We began meeting on Hampstead Heath. I didn’t want Miriam finding out so I bought a pay-as-you-go phone for the sole purposes of contacting him. I told myself it would soon be over – I would give him up, like a bad addiction – and life would return to normal. Yet I couldn’t stop. It was more than just the sex, for me at least.

Taylor started asking me for money. It was never explicit, what I was paying for. I would tell him I wanted to help him when we met, give him £50 usually, then it went up to £100 as he became more confident about the relationship. He was asking for money for specific things, trainers for his younger brother, that kind of thing. Then he asked if I had access to drugs at the surgery – he wanted ketamine and barbiturates. I assume he wanted to sell them on the street. I began to supply him with very small amounts, and on one occasion in late September, we took some ketamine together. The drugs made it easier for me to engage in … the things we were engaging in … the dangerous, illicit things about which I was generally inhibited.

I realised I was slipping into a lifestyle I didn’t even recognise, one which threatened everything I had – my work, my family, my marriage. I told him I wanted to stop meeting, that I’d had enough. I wanted my life back, unsullied, but I suppose he’d become dependent on my money and the supply of prescription drugs.

Towards the end of November, he threatened me. He started to tell me details about my family to prove how much he knew. He said he’d tell Edith and Rollo and Miriam what I was – what I’d been doing on the Heath with him. He wanted £10,000 to keep quiet and to go away forever. I agreed to give it to him, that’s why I left that message. I agreed to hand over the money on the evening of Sunday eleventh of December. I wanted to pay him off, told myself I was going to resolve this issue once and for all and then we could relax, I could enjoy Christmas with my family.

[Suspect breaks down in tears. Interview suspended.]

I got the money together and I also took some ketamine with me, as I had often done, to the Heath. I want to be clear: my only intention was to give him what he wanted and to start anew. I felt Taylor was a good person, and that what we’d engaged in had affection in it. I know that sounds naive, given that he was blackmailing me, but I felt he would take this money and that would be an end to it.

He was so manic – so bright-eyed, so excited. This was going to change everything for him, he said, this sum of money. He had a younger brother, as I said, and he told me this was going to make his life different. It began to feel as if Taylor was glorying over me, and that he was happy our relationship was at an end.

I told him I had the £10,000 he wanted in the boot of my car and a little something else he might enjoy. I was parked behind Jack Straw’s Castle. He came with me to the car, I handed him the bag of money and he took, by way of celebration, quite a powerful shot of ketamine from me. Then he told me that what we had been doing repulsed him – that he was glad it was over. ‘Don’t have to do that disgusting shit no more,’ he said. He looked at me with revulsion and I saw it was all about the money for him.

[Suspect breaks down again. Interview halted for several minutes.]

I saw myself, tiny and humiliated. He never loved me; he never even
liked
me. I revolted him, and all the things we’d done. Something came over me, some powerlessness which transmitted itself into pure rage. I’ve never felt so white hot with anger before. I pushed him into the open boot of the car and slammed its door down on him. I got in the car and started to drive, no idea where, just anywhere. I found myself travelling the route to Deeping, which is like second nature to me. It was as if the car was driving itself. You know what it’s like when a route is embedded in your brain – you can find yourself following it while your mind is entirely elsewhere. Before I knew it, I was on the M11. On that journey I thought: I can drive him out of London and leave him stranded, without the money. Ketamine is a potent analgesic – it causes sedation and amnesia while maintaining cardiovascular stability. He would be lost. And he would forget.

When I got to Deeping, I opened the boot and he was unconscious but alive, I checked. Ketamine, as I said, is an anaesthetic: it leaves you dissociated, feeling as if you have no control over your legs or any movement at all. I went into the house and put the bag of money into an upstairs bedroom; I don’t know why, to put it somewhere safe, out of his reach, I suppose. I thought I would return to get it later.

After putting the bag in the bottom of the wardrobe, I returned to the boot. I felt in his pockets to retrieve his mobile phone. I knew the phone could incriminate me, in terms of contact between myself and the boy – nothing else, you understand, just contact – and I was also taking away his means of getting help. I wanted him to take a long time getting home.

I got back in the car and drove along a dirt track – it was incredibly muddy – which runs across our land and over into the neighbouring farm. I stopped in a wood beside a river and hauled him out of the boot and left him there, semi-conscious, on the ground, about ten feet from the water’s edge. I did not put him in a river or drown him or cause his death. He must have come round, groggy, stumbled about and fallen into the river later.

A week after that awful night, we were informed of Edith’s disappearance. I was horrified; I still am horrified. I love my family. I would never do anything to hurt them. I know nothing of what’s happened to my daughter and I am desperate to get her back.

In my haste to get back to Miriam that night – the night with Taylor Dent – I left the money in the bedroom at Deeping. When officers went to search the house, after Edith disappeared, I was sure they’d find it and ask what I was doing with £10,000 stashed in a plastic bag in the bottom of a wardrobe. I had a plan to tell them (and Miriam) that I was paying cash for some building work to Deeping and that’s why the money was there. I waited and waited but no mention of the money ever came. Of course, I couldn’t bring it up, or ask what had been found at Deeping; it would have raised too much suspicion.