Missing, Presumed (4 page)

‘And your friends at the theatre,’ Harriet says. ‘Could we have a list?’

‘Rog and Patty,’ says Sir Ian, looking at Harriet’s notebook. ‘That’s Roger Galloway and his wife Patricia. I’m sure their security detail will confirm everything for you.’

Manon, Davy, and Harriet shoot a glance at each other and Harriet says, ‘A word outside, you two.’

‘Don’t say anything,’ hisses Harriet, like an angry swan. ‘Don’t fucking say anything until we’re in my fucking office.’ Manon is right behind her as she pelts up the staircase. Those, she thinks, are some mightily clenched buttocks.

Once in her office, Harriet turns, breathless. ‘Fuckety, fuckety fucking fuck,’ she says. ‘Right, I’ve thought of a name for this case. We’re calling it Operation Career Fucking Suicide.’

‘Let’s just calm down,’ says Manon. ‘So he was at the theatre with the Home Secretary. All that means is that his alibi probably stacks up.’

‘Ye
think
?’ says Harriet.

‘It probably is quite tight, to be fair,’ says Davy.

Manon and Harriet look at each other, Harriet turning up her palms.

‘Right,’ she says, ‘so if we thought the press were all over it before, we should see what happens when they get hold of this. Not just the Royal Family, but “did the Home Secretary interfere with the investigation in any way?” Well, that’ll be the
Guardian
. Before I know it, I’ll be in front of some sodding select committee at the House of Commons having my career buried under a steaming pile of procedure. I predict a call from Galloway to the Commissioner in—’ she looks at her watch – ‘oooh, the next couple of hours?’

This was the nightmare of being the SIO: pressure from every quarter, having to make decisions about which lines to investigate in what order of priority, trying to work out which information is important and which can be discarded, and all those decisions being scrutinised from above and often from outside.

‘Let’s not get bamboozled by Ian Hind,’ says Manon. ‘We still need to confirm their movements.’

This appears to have a calming effect on Harriet, who takes a deep breath and allows her shoulders to drop.

‘Yes, right. You’re right. Let’s put a call in to Galloway’s security detail. I want you two to drive out and scope this country pile, Deeping. See if that key’s been disturbed. And I want CCTV from the Post Office on the first of December – see who was looking over Edith’s shoulder when she picked up all that cash. Get Kim to check whether the landlord was paid his rent. I’m assuming he was interviewed during house to house. This is looking more like aggravated burglary by the minute.’

Manon and Davy make for the door.

‘And from now on,’ Harriet calls after them, ‘we treat Sir Bufton Tufton downstairs with the utterly slavish deference he so richly deserves.’

On one of the rare occasions Harriet had come to Cromwell’s and got drunk, she’d told Manon she had two consolations in life: swearing and Elsie.

Elsie was ninety-three with Parkinson’s. She lived in a care home, which had been raided by Harriet during an investigation into abuse of the elderly. Elsie had been in better shape then, standing with the help of a frame in the pink, over-heated hallway. She’d regarded Harriet with beady, critical eyes – they all saw it. It was as if the team stood still, as Harriet and the old girl locked on to each other.
Some enchanted evening
.

Elsie shuffled into the room to be interviewed, her shins thick, the colour of pine in tan tights, chenille slippers on her rigid, calcified feet. Harriet asked Elsie if she had been mistreated by any of the staff at the home. ‘Don’t be
silly
,’ Elsie barked, and Harriet had been momentarily chastened. The balance of power was all with Elsie, who snapped and criticised (‘Ever done this before, dearie?’), but Harriet persisted. Nightgowns removed how? What if the soup was unfinished? And if you wet the bed?

Gradually it emerged that Elsie believed her forgetfulness merited the odd slap. Her shaking hands drove them mad, you see. She couldn’t dress any more – well, that’s bound to get their backs up. Who’d want to dress a scrawny old bird like me?

Harriet said to leave it there just for now, and she fled the room. When Manon next saw her, she was leaning against a panda car, smoking a cigarette, looking furious and tearful at the same time. This is what Manon likes most about Harriet – no, not likes, understands: she isn’t on an even keel. She feels the work in every fibre and it hurts her.

‘I’m going to shut that fucking place down,’ she said, the cigarette tight between her fingers. ‘And that manager’s going to prison.’

Harriet got Elsie out of there by nightfall, much as she protested. The care home was taken over by new owners and the manager received a year’s sentence for wilful neglect, which was suspended ‘for previous good character’, so she walked free, confirming all Harriet’s suspicions that the courts are ‘a fucking joke’.

Manon knows that Harriet, and most of their colleagues, cleave to the view that criminals either get off or get off lightly; that the system is stacked against the police. She’s aware that if police officers were allowed to draw up the legislation, it would probably contain the words ‘
and throw away the key
’. What worries Manon is she’s joining their ranks. It can often feel as if they’re fighting a tide of filth and losing; you only needed to do a week in child protection to lose any liberal tendencies you ever had.

Harriet became Elsie’s visiting daughter, because Elsie had no children of her own – she was twenty-five when the war took the boy she loved at Arras in 1940. His name was Teddy and she kept a photo of him by her bed, but Manon thought he was more an emblem of what had gone wrong. Elsie had had an abruption in her life. Grief had held her up, during which time she worked in a munitions factory and discovered how much she liked to work, when it had never really been an option before. When she emerged from mourning after the war, she found herself looking at a timer where the sand was running low.

‘There were no men left,’ she told Harriet, laughing. ‘None who wanted an old spinster in her thirties like me, at any rate. It just never happened for me, the family thing.’

Harriet called on Elsie every week and Manon occasionally went with her, witnessing between them a conspiratorial warmth. Elsie looked at Harriet with mischievous eyes, saying, ‘Thrash you this time.’ They played cribbage, or bridge when they could make a four with other stooped residents in the care home, though death often intervened (‘Wilf not here?’ ‘Not any more, no.’). Blackjack, beggar-my-neighbour, sudoku, and crosswords. Then, as Elsie became more vague – the shaking and the vagueness accompanying one another as if staying fixed in thought and deed was ungraspable – the games became more infantile: Guess Who?, Connect Four, puzzles, and pairs.

Elsie humanised Harriet, who had a tendency to be hard. She was the obligation that made her feel stretched and needed. Her joyful complaint. That drunken night when Harriet had confided in Manon (her kindred spirit in singleness and childlessness), she said, ‘When you don’t have kids, everyone assumes you’re some fucking ball-breaking career freak, but it’s not like that. It’s more, y’know, a cock-up. It’s something that happened
to
me. Elsie gets that. Plus, I really fucking hope someone will visit me when I’m pissing my pants in a care home.’

Davy
and Manon drive out of HQ car park in an unmarked car that wears its snow like a jaunty hat, but as soon as they turn out of the gates, they slow to a halt. The traffic is always terrible on Brampton Road, a permanent feature of their forays out on jobs, but this queue has been made worse by the diversions set up around Edith Hind’s house on George Street, combined with considerable rubbernecking from the fine folk of Huntingdon. Davy taps on the steering wheel with his gloved hand, a marker to Manon that he is unperturbed.

‘This’ll take hours,’ says Manon, slumping down into the passenger seat and wedging her feet onto the dashboard, her knees up. She has her phone in her lap, texting Bryony.

Can’t do lunch. High-risk misper just blew up in my face. M

‘Sarge,’ says Davy.

‘Hmmm?’ she says, and she looks up to see Davy casting anxious glances at her feet and at the spotless fascia of his glove box.

‘You couldn’t—’

Her phone bleeps.

No worries. Am loving my court papers. Nothing cd tear me away. Not even pepper-flavoured water. B

‘Sorry, what?’ she says to Davy.

‘Your feet,’ he says, with another furtive glance at the offending boots, as if they might detonate.

‘It’s not even your car,’ she says, her fingers working on her phone. But she takes her feet down.

Tomoz maybe. M

Is Harriet losing the plot?

Yep. Crapping herself. Victim’s family mates with Galloway.

Holy Shit.

Yup.

At least your career isn’t in cul-de-sac. May chew arm off if have to do more filing.

Go away, please, am in middle of Very Important Investigation.

All right, Mrs Big Tits. Laters. PS. It’s always the uncle. Or the stepfather. Or the boyfriend. Or possibly a complete stranger.

‘How was the date, by the way?’ Davy asks.

They are moving now –
at last
– having turned off onto the A14 towards the Fenland village of March.

‘Don’t ask.’

‘Can’t have been that bad.’

‘Can’t it?’

‘Well then, there’ll be others – other responses to your ad.’

‘It’s not an ad, Davy. I’m not selling roller blinds. It’s a profile.’

And what a work of fiction that ‘about me’ section is.

Manon cut-and-pasted most of it from someone else’s profile – a woman called Liz Temple from Berkhamsted, who claimed life was not about ‘sheltering from the thunderstorms’ but ‘learning to dance in the rain’. Except the bagging area joke – that was Manon’s and she was pretty pleased with it, feeling it made amusing reference to emotional baggage, of which there was a surfeit on the Internet.

Were she to tell the truth, her profile would go something like:

‘Mustn’t give up, Sarge,’ says Davy.

‘Like I’d take relationship advice from you. Still treating you mean, is she?’

‘She keeps me on my toes.’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

Davy is twenty-six but seems still a boy; has been in the force since eighteen, and something about him is irresistible to Manon. He has this naive intensity – like an only child, neither at home with the adults nor one of the children – and those enormous ears always on the alert. His affable demeanour and positive outlook have earned him the nickname ‘Silver’ among the DCs. Silver Lining, the boy who’s always looking on the bright side. He thinks the world might still come right if he just tries hard enough – which he does, all the time, mentoring at youth centres and looking out for every troubled child who crosses his path. But every silver lining has a cloud, and that cloud is Chloe.

Manon has seen them together more than once, though she and Davy never socialise outside the safety of office dos, Davy being of a different generation and this gulf becoming canyon-like outside the familiar hierarchies of work. One evening, however, they found themselves in the same pub, The Lord Protector on Mayfield Road. Manon was in a group from the station – a rowdy bunch, all pissed and telling terrible jokes (‘Invisible man’s at the door. Tell ’im I can’t see ’im. Hahahahahaha.’); Davy sat in a quiet corner with Chloe. Table for two.