Missing, Presumed (13 page)

‘It must’ve been a shock, finding the body,’ she says.

‘It wasn’t what I was expecting, no,’ he says. ‘I’ve never seen one before and it was much worse than I imagined, actually. Who was it?’

‘We don’t know yet. A young man. We’ll have an ID by close of play today.’

‘Not the girl, then,’ he says. ‘The one who went missing before Christmas.’

‘No. Not the girl.’

He nods, stooping to sip his coffee while his free hand digs into his trouser pocket.

Davy is sitting at the refectory table with his notepad out. ‘Can I ask what you do for a living?’ he says.

Manon has strolled over to the bookshelves, which are to one side of the stove. They are tall and crammed, with a library ladder propped against one section.
Tender is the Night. American Pastoral. Far from the Madding Crowd. Birthday Letters. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas.

‘Yes, of course,’ Mr Prenderghast says to Davy. ‘I’m a systems analyst at Cambs Biotech.’

Freud. John le Carré. A history of Labour foreign policy in the post-war years.

‘What’s a systems analyst, if you don’t mind me asking?’ says Davy.

‘Oh, it’s terribly boring. I basically make the computer system work for a large pharmaceutical company – the sort of global conglomerate that
Guardian
readers hate.’

‘Where’s it based?’ asks Manon.

‘Outskirts of Cambridge, towards Newmarket. One of those charmless industrial estates. But I’ve been working from home this week – the office is deserted this time of year.’

‘Did you study English at university?’ asks Manon, glancing back at the bookshelves.

‘No, quite a few of those are for a course I’m doing. Open University. The others are for pleasure. I wasn’t … I didn’t go. To college, I mean.’

‘And you were walking your dog this morning?’ says Davy, pen poised.

‘Yes. My usual walk, to give Nana her run-around. Well, more of a hobble these days. We took the path along the river. Nana,’ he says, nodding at the dog, and her eyebrows move independently at this, like two caterpillars, though her head remains lowered in her basket, ‘started to scratch at some tree roots close to the bank. I kept calling her but she wouldn’t come away, so eventually I went to fetch her and that’s when I saw it. Just the back. It was face down in the water.’ He coughs. ‘I shouldn’t say “it” – I mean
him
.’

They are all silent for a moment, in reverence for the body.

‘Thanks, Mr Prenderghast,’ says Manon. ‘I don’t think we need to detain you any longer.’

Davy and Manon begin to gather their coats. It takes them a few moments to re-bury themselves in scarves and gloves.

‘Going out celebrating tomorrow night?’ asks Davy.

‘Ah yes, it’s New Year’s Eve, isn’t it?’ he says, smiling. ‘I’d forgotten. No, I’m afraid it’s not my thing. I’m not good with crowds.’

‘I love a New Year’s knees-up, myself,’ says Davy.

‘I’m with you, Mr Prenderghast,’ says Manon. ‘I can’t stand it.’

‘Call me Alan, please. I’ll be staying put. Watch a film maybe.’

‘What, by yourself?’ says Davy, appalled.

Manon casts Alan a conspiratorial look, as if they are Davy’s weary parents.

He laughs. ‘I do think there’s the most terrible fear of solitude these days – as if it’s some kind of disease. People can’t tolerate it. They want to be seen in a constant social whirl.’

‘I didn’t mean …’ says Davy.

‘No, no, I was only making a general point,’ he says, with one hand on the open door. ‘I can go on a bit, sorry. I’m probably defensive. Perhaps my unconscious wishes I’d go to a party, DC Walker. Well, thank you, officers. If I can help with anything else, then do call.’

The cycle path – marvellously flat and open – takes him across the marshy flatlands of the Fens and though it’s bracing (he’d had to make himself brave the winter weather this morning), now he’s out in the air and going at an exhilarating speed, there’s nothing better. Davy has always kept himself active, though shift patterns sometimes intervene (especially during a whopper like the Hind case). Most mornings he runs at 6 a.m. or takes the bike out. He would never let himself slide, not after his mum and all that staying in bed or staring at the telly, shoving in chocolate bourbons like she was daring him to try and stop her.

This morning, Chloe had gone off to her job in Next on the high street – today being not just a Saturday, but New Year’s Eve, so a busy one – and he drove the car an hour out of Huntingdon, to Wisbech, so he could cycle some of the many excellent Fenland routes. He’s been yearning for time to think about how to have The Conversation with Chloe, and he’s been yearning also for a feeling of movement. There’s really nothing else like it, your body and your bike going at speed and the fresh scent of the countryside blowing into your lungs; big skies, in an enormous dome over the flatlands, and the river like a cool, grey road beside him.

He pedals harder, away from the images the river conjures, of the body from yesterday – the inflammation of his flesh, his blue-purple colour inhuman. Just a boy. And Davy can’t help but think about Ryan – what might happen to him without the protection of Aldridge House. He resolves to put in more calls, see if the social worker can do anything. Davy must try his best to stop Ryan ending up like that boy in the river, because before you know it, it can be too late, and he finds himself in a silent argument with Chloe, because she was always saying, ‘You love those kids more than me,’ and going into a sulk.

He wheels around a bend in the towpath, following the curve of the river, loving the way the bike tilts with him on it, against the laws of gravity, almost – they should topple but speed keeps his wheels turning, and the wind roars into his face and through the bare winter trees. No, he tells himself, this thinking time is not for Ryan or the Hind case, it’s for Chloe. Tonight could be the night to broach the subject of The Future, yet every time they’re together and the moment seems appropriate, something puts him off: music coming on a bit loud in the restaurant; bumping into someone they know in the pub; the urgent need for a poo (his, not hers – she’d never discuss something so vulgar).

He slows his bike and looks up at a blue sign pointing left, which says
March
. He could duck down there, have a nosey around Deeping. The case is bothering him more and more: Harriet still nagging away at the Tony Wright alibi; Will Carter far from in the clear, his return journey from Stoke still not verified. Manon reckons they should be looking more closely at the Director of Studies – this Graham Garfield chap – because when Davy and Manon asked about Garfield during one of their many interviews with the Hinds, they’d expressed ‘doubts’.

‘Doubts?’ Manon had said.

‘Well, Edith called us up very excited during the first term she had him. Said he’d told her she was exceptional – the brightest student he’d had in years,’ Sir Ian replied.

‘Why would that raise doubts?’ asked Davy, genuinely nonplussed.

‘Perhaps it shouldn’t have, DC Walker. But when a middle-aged man is that effusive about an attractive twenty-year-old—’

‘Come on, Ian, that’s not fair,’ Lady Hind said. ‘Maybe Edith was just working at full tilt.’

‘Yes, maybe, but there were other reasons. When she’d been out with her peers – this was when she was an undergrad – she mentioned he was often around, in the college bar and such like. Just seemed a bit … creepy, that’s all.’

‘And there’s that girl he had a fling with,’ Lady Hind said, touching her husband’s arm.

‘Yes, what was her name?’

‘Oh God, I can’t remember. Edith told us they were sleeping together. She actually said something along the lines of “Ew, gross.”’

‘None of it, of course, was threatening,’ Sir Ian said. ‘I think he’s a bit of a, well, pest is the word Edith used, to be honest.’

Dirty shagger, Davy thinks, wheeling away from the sign and the left-hand turn he hasn’t taken to March. That’s what Graham Garfield was, same thing his mum called his dad when his dad went off with Sharon – ‘dirty shagger’ and ‘selfish bastard with no thought for anyone but himself’.

Davy suggested they go easy on the Garfield chap, there being no law against being a dirty shagger, and it was not as if there was anything directly linking him to Edith on the Saturday night, his wife having confirmed that Garfield came home to her after The Crown.

‘Remember what Harriet told us, about alibis given by wives and mothers,’ said Manon. ‘You think because Garfield reads Tennyson, he couldn’t rape someone? You’re a snob, Davy Walker.’

‘Not that, he just seems too … gentlemanly, like he’s never had it rough.’

‘Posh people do fucked up just as well as everyone else,’ she said, ‘sometimes better.’

And he supposes she’d know, being half-posh herself, or on the way to it after going to Cambridge. So he’s trying to view Garfield in the light of Manon’s mistrust – the way, for example, Garfield wore the uniform of the academic (corduroys and elbow patches) and had the books he’d written facing forward on the shelf. Manon said this showed intellectual insecurity, though Davy thought it just made him look clever. Shaved heads and tattoos, that sent a different message altogether, and he thinks of Ryan again and the rough estate he used to live on (though God alone knows where he’s living now) and the unsavoury men who circle his mother.

Davy’s thoughts go round and round like the wheels on his bike, when he’s come out here to think about Chloe, because New Year’s Eve can take a romantic turn, although if he’s honest, he’d rather be going out on the razz with his friends. Chloe doesn’t meld with them too well, and whenever he’s tried to mix the two – his girlfriend and the gang from school – he’s ended up in the corner of the bar asking her over and over what the matter is. Perhaps he’ll skip The Conversation, after all, there being no hurry …

He’s forced to squeeze hard and sudden on the brakes, and he turns the front wheel sharply, the gravel spraying. A duck proceeds on its stately waddle across his path, one eye blinking at him with faint disdain, until it plops into the river to Davy’s right.

Swedish season at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse, all red velvet and the smell of brewing coffee. Women wearing big beads. She relishes the prospect of a Swedish film – it doesn’t even have to be
noir
. The Swedes are a nation who appreciate morbidity, unlike the British, who are just as depressed as everyone else but who like to project their darker feelings, saying to people in the street, ‘Cheer up, it might never happen!’ Cat calls like that make her want to take out her Taser.

She parks on a single yellow, less than a yard from the cinema’s broad steps. The cold is bitter and thin and she realises how fed up she is of it, how long it has been going on, tensing her body against it. Her left eye has become re-infected, the grit scratching her eyeball. It had recovered somewhat over Christmas and then, following the use of a particularly unappetising mascara, the soreness returned worse than before, her lashes gummed with a secretion which peeled away in clumps. It’s less painful if she keeps it shut. With the other eye, she sees various trouser legs and shoes on the cinema’s white step as she joins the queue, willing it to be quick so she can get out of the cold.

‘DS Bradshaw?’ says a male voice.

She looks up, still with one eye shut, and sees Alan Prenderghast stooping to search out her face.

‘Hello there,’ she says, her neck cricked – the reluctant mole. She smiles thinly, making a show of trying (but barely trying at all) to hide her disappointment at the prospect of him occupying her mind and preventing her losing herself in the film. And regret that she looks like she’s been punched in the eye.

‘So,’ he says. ‘We’ve had the same idea.’

‘Yes. The only way to spend New Year’s Eve, if you ask me.’ She looks away from him across the street. He strains his neck upwards to look over the heads in front and see how near they are to the kiosk. They shuffle forward slightly.

‘I found that, after yesterday, I didn’t want to be by myself after all. I felt the need to be in the town. Among people. Alive people,’ he says, with a damp sort of laugh.

‘Yes.’

‘We don’t have to sit together,’ he adds. ‘I rather love going to the cinema on my own, so I do understand.’

‘Oh, OK,’ says Manon, relieved and rejected. They shuffle forward and then to the snacks counter where she orders a real lemonade and organic popcorn, and he takes a coffee, which makes her feel like a child for ordering the sweet stuff. Then he asks for a family-sized box of Maltesers.

They walk into the dark plush of the screening room, velvet seats fraying on the arms. He nods, saying, ‘See you later, then,’ and moves down the aisle. They are watching
Together
by Lukas Moodysson, about a hippy commune in the 1970s and the waifs and strays who come together there.

Alan Prenderghast sits four rows ahead and to her left, so the side of his head is visible, though not his expression. Despite her obscured view, she thinks she can see him laughing when she glances across at him during the film, which she does often, the daylight scenes illuminating his head in flickering blues. She thinks she can see enjoyment written all over his shoulders. He seems to be hugging his family-sized box of Maltesers in delight and hugging his aloneness too, and taking pleasure in a good film with chocolate and a worn, comfortable seat, though who is to say whether it is his enjoyment or her own hopes for it, streaming forward like dancing rays from the projector.

She is ahead of him in the slow shuffling of people exiting the cinema. At the doorway, she smiles.

‘I’m going for a drink upstairs if you fancy joining me,’ he says.

‘Oh yes, that’s a good idea.’

The upstairs bar is art deco with wooden tables and ferny plants in pots. She watches him bring two coffees, squat white cups balanced on saucers, back from the bar to their table and she notices how high-waisted his trousers are. His trainers are terrible too – great white ships, the kind you’re supposed to play tennis in, not wear for leisure. He looks like Fungus the Bogeyman, she thinks, and she, with her half-swollen eye, like Quasimodo.

Sitting in a tree.

K.I.S.S.I.N.G.

‘So, what did you think?’ he says, unlooping a maroon scarf and draping it over the back of his chair.

‘I thought it was fabulous. Funny, moving, great knitwear.’

He laughs. ‘It’s a very touching idea, isn’t it, these misfits coming together and keeping each other company. That it’s better to be together.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘But they weren’t idealised. They were a genuinely motley bunch.’

‘It’s not so easy, in real life. To make contact with people.’

‘No, it isn’t. I sometimes think I don’t actually like anyone that much. That all I ever want is to be on my own. And then I can’t cope with it – with myself, just myself all the time, and it’s like
I
become the worst company of all – and there’s this awful realisation that I need people and it’s almost humiliating,’ she says.

He looks at her and smiles.

‘I don’t know where that came from.’

He shakes his head. ‘I totally get it. I live in that great barn and sometimes on a Sunday morning it’s like heaven, sitting in front of that massive window with my coffee, with the sun coming in, reading. And then by 11 a.m. I’m desperate for someone to call round, but of course they don’t, because I live in the arse end of nowhere.’

She laughs. ‘Except the police, occasionally.’

‘Or a corpse. Well, he didn’t come knocking.’

‘No. Have you recovered?’

‘I don’t think there was anything to recover from, really. I mean, it was shocking and I spent a day thinking about death more than usual – and I’m someone who thinks about death
a lot
. But it’s not like I knew him or cared for him. It was the fact he was young that bothered me.’

‘Yes.’

‘I suppose you can’t talk about the case.’

‘No.’

She rubs her eye, hard, feeling the crystals work into her eyeball.

‘That eye looks sore,’ he says.

‘Yes, I don’t know what it is. Feels like I’ve got something stuck in it which I can’t get out. Been like this on and off for a fortnight.’ And she feels the moment race towards her, unannounced, an awful parody of
Brief Encounter
, where he will feel invited to come close to her face and look deep into her eyes to see what’s there. She hadn’t intended that at all.

‘Looks like conjunctivitis to me,’ he says.

‘Really?’ she says, disappointed.

‘Yes. You can get antibiotics for it over the counter.’

Out in the street they find their cars are nose to tail. His is an anonymous silver Ford, just the kind she’d expect from a systems analyst wearing tennis shoes. The seats look as if they’ve been recently vacuumed.

‘This is me,’ she says, waiting for him to comment on her Seventies mustard Citroën with the black leather seats. Waiting for him to take in
the package
.

‘This is your car, is it?’ he says mildly.

‘Yup.’ She pats the roof.

‘Right, then,’ he says. He is digging one hand in his trouser pocket. He brings out a handkerchief and holds it to his nose. It blooms white and big across his face, and he pushes it side to side, bending his nose. She has never seen anyone under seventy use a handkerchief.

‘Do you fancy …’ she begins. ‘We could … go on somewhere?’

He looks at his watch. ‘I think everywhere will be packed with awful drunkards right about now. Sorry,’ he says, stifling a yawn, ‘I’m going to have to call it a night. This is burning the candle for an old fart like me.’

‘Right, yes, of course. I suppose we’re in opposite directions.’

‘I suppose,’ he says. ‘Well, Happy New Year.’

She wonders if he is going to bend to plant a kiss on her cheek but he shifts slightly. He places a hand on her upper arm and she lifts her cheek but he turns away.

She watches him duck into his warm, practical car.