Missing, Presumed (3 page)

Manon holds in her hand a photograph of Edith Hind, auburn-haired and smiling – a face almost confident, the gorgeous bloom of childhood still radiating from her skin. She is wearing a mortar board and gown, with a scroll in her hand. Graduation day at Cambridge. Just like the photo Manon’s father has on the shelf.

Yes, she thinks. This will be big.

She learned as much as anyone from Soham but remained a DS because if you were smart, you realised things didn’t get better when you climbed the ranks. She wanted to stay on the ground, interviewing suspects, running her team of DCs and civilian investigators, not holed up in an office attending management courses and filling in Main-Lines-of-Enquiry forms. It certainly wasn’t, as Bryony maintained, that she was too busy humping her way around the Internet to focus on the exams.

She’s left Davy at the scene in George Street, letting in SOCO – the Scenes of Crime Officer, as it is currently known, or CSI or FSI. She has never known an organisation to love an acronym as much as the police, nor to change them so often. She longs for the day some sleepy mandarin comes up with the Crime Unit National Taskforce.

She picks up the keys to her car and goes to collect Davy, to take him to Cambridgeshire HQ for the morning briefing.

He stands at Edith Hind’s front door and looks down the path to the men in pressed suits with puffa jackets over the top, loitering at the gate and stamping the snow off their boots. The frozen morning air emerges from their mouths in white clouds. You can tell they’re the locals because of the suits and the polished shoes – national press are scruffy. Chinos with round-neck jumpers in jaunty colours if they’re broadsheet; rumpled suits that fall at the shoulder and concertina into creases at the base of the jacket if they’re tabloid. Local reporters, on the other hand, have to live among their subjects: attend their council meetings, Christmas fairs and sports days. A pressed suit’s the least they can do.

Davy sees DS Bradshaw’s preposterous car pull up just beyond the men, on the opposite kerb. A Seventies Citroën – long nose, sagging leather seats, spindly steering wheel with gear stick to the side. She’s convinced it makes her look like Audrey Hepburn, but behind her back, the DCs at the station make reference to Inspector Clouseau, putting on exaggerated French accents and saying, ‘In the neme of the leur’ while watching from the window as she parks. Davy doesn’t care about impressions. He hates travelling in her car because it’s always cold, often doesn’t start and smells vaguely of wet dog. Thank God it’s usually him driving, her on the phone, in a warm and anonymous unmarked police vehicle.

‘C’mon, tell us something,’ says one of the reporters at the gate, but Davy pushes past him.

‘How long’s she been missing?’ asks another. ‘Any signs of a struggle? Has she been kidnapped?’

‘I’m sure there’ll be a briefing soon,’ says Davy, careful not to meet their eye.

He ducks into Manon’s car and looks at her, but she’s counting up the men at the gate through the smears on the windscreen.

Yes, she’s grumpy, but a skinny latte soon takes the edge off her, most days, anyhow – like throwing a steak into the lion enclosure. He wishes he had one to offer her now but instead he has to watch, unarmed, as she squints into the shards of broken sun. He rubs his hands together and blows into them.

Perhaps it’s her age that’s making her bad-tempered and he can understand that. She must be at least thirty-nine, the loneliness rising off her like a mist. He’d be the same if he didn’t have Chloe. He’s seen Manon, more than once, red-eyed coming out of the second floor toilets and his heart goes out to her on those occasions, watching her hurriedly wipe the snot away and try to act normal. Well, pissed off, which is normal. Him and Manon, though – somehow it works, he doesn’t know how, and this seems to rankle Chloe. Even now, pulling down on his seatbelt, Davy’s face falls as he remembers the time he described Manon as ‘good in a crisis’.

‘Good how?’ Chloe asked, trying to seem casual about it but he knew all about ‘casual’ and its parameters. Chloe’s questioning could put CID to shame. ‘You share a joke, do you? Manon make you laugh much, does she? D’you think she blow-dries her hair, then, before coming in?’ Whenever Davy makes a positive comment about her – and Davy works hard at being positive about pretty much everything – Chloe’s face can darken as fast as the April sky.

‘She sometimes sees things that others don’t,’ he’d said on this particular occasion, shovel in hand, cheerfully digging himself deeper into the pit. ‘Makes connections. Bit left-field sometimes.’

‘Well, I don’t see how that’s any more than most women have got – intuition. I mean, I can make connections between things if I want to,’ Chloe said, then barely talked to him the rest of the day.

Manon puts the car in gear, her eyes still on the men, saying, ‘Four. Just the locals.’

‘Course it’s the locals. Still early doors.’

‘Won’t be long before they ring the tabs. This time of year, missing girl. Nothing like a festive stiff to warm the cockles of your front page.’

‘She’s probably just got a new boyfriend – done a runner,’ says Davy.

‘Leaving her phone and keys and the door wide open? I don’t even go to the toilet without my phone. And what about the blood? No, I’d say she’s definitely come to harm.’

She’s put her aviator shades down, pulling out from the kerb. Davy looks at her and shakes his head.

It’s only a ten-minute drive to the station from George Street. They jog up the steps of Cambridgeshire HQ, a festival of sick-yellow brick squatting in an acreage of car park. For Davy, climbing these steps with an important job to do makes him inflate with pride and elation. He wishes someone could see him, Detective Constable Walker of
Cambridgeshire Constabulary: supporting law-abiding citizens and pursuing criminals relentlessly since 1974
. This mission statement is actually on the Cambridgeshire police website, but it could have been something Davy came up with.

When he brought Chloe for a tour of HQ, he was smiling to himself the whole time and even though she described it as ‘a cross between a Travelodge and a conference centre’, it hadn’t dented the dignity of his calling. She said the reception, with its curved wooden desk, spider plants, and smell of brewing coffee, reminded her of an STD clinic, but what he saw – what he was so proud of – was the electronic notice board announcing the life and death work going on here (
2–4 p.m., conf. room 3: crime data integrity working group; protocol briefings: ambulance teams, Hinchingbrooke; UK cross border agency; 4–6 p.m., Commissioner
). So much sexier than the jobs he could have had: regional manager for Vodafone or selling fridges in Currys, like his school friends. Which would you rather? Flogging some twenty-four-month contract with 3,000 free minutes or wondering whether the Dutch woman got on a train to Brighton to kill herself there, or whether she was murdered? Human stories, base and sexual. The police operated in the seedy low light: drug runs, burglars in botched stick-ups, murderers who said they were nowhere near the scene but whose smart phones provided a handy GPS map of their movements. Boyfriends controlling girlfriends, friends paying off debts, love triangles, honour killings. That, or: ‘Would you like to extend your warranty on this microwave for an extra two years, sir?’

‘Look at you, Davy,’ Chloe had said, as he showed her the forensics lab and the phone-tracing department. ‘You’ve really drunk the Kool-Aid, haven’t you?’

Davy and Manon enter the MIT department just as Harriet is gathering team four for her briefing: DC Kim Delaney, DC Nigel Williams, Colin Brierley – a retired DI, now civilian investigator who runs the tech side – and a couple of other DCs.

They fall in behind their desks, shaking off their coats.

‘You’re going to have to hit the ground running, Stuart, I’m afraid,’ Harriet is saying as Manon shakes hands with the new recruit – an extra civilian investigator to type interviews into the HOLMES computer system and listen to Colin’s un-politically correct diatribes, lucky chap. ‘Baptism of fire. These guys will show you the ropes.’

Davy nods his most welcoming nod at Stuart. Sometimes CIs were retired officers, like Colin, sometimes young, like this one, fresh from a three-day induction course. They were cheap and they didn’t leave the office.

‘Right, everyone,’ Harriet continues. ‘Edith Hind, twenty-four, Cambridge postgrad student, missing from the house she shares with Will Carter in George Street. Parents have driven up and are waiting downstairs, so let’s get a family liaison officer with them asap. Main lines are as follows. One: scene and examination. SOCO are in. I’ve just had a call from them: two wine glasses – one clean on the kitchen worktop, the other broken in the bin with traces of blood at its edges.’

‘She could have been waiting for someone,’ says Manon.

‘That was my thought,’ says Harriet. ‘Two wine glasses out ready for a rendezvous, one of them becomes a weapon. We’ll see what forensics tell us on that score.

‘Two: search ongoing, including dogs. Polsa should be on board by midday today. That’s Police Search Adviser,’ she says to the new chap. ‘The search teams, in other words. Three: house to house. Four: FLO and victimology. Five: media. We’ll get a photo of Edith out this morning. I’m meeting with Fergus in an hour to discuss Press strategy. Six: intel work. Colin, you’ve got her phone and her laptop. Let’s trace her car reg on ANPR – that’s Automated Number Plate Recognition, for our new recruit here. And Will Carter’s too, while we’re at it. I want all of the council’s CCTV looked at. Seven: persons of interest. That’s Will Carter, obviously, and Helena Reed, the friend she was with on Saturday night. Is that enough to be getting on with?’

‘Hypothesis, boss?’ asks Nigel. Manon says he’s needy, always looking to senior officers for answers. Davy would never express something so judgemental, though it’s fair to say Nigel is permanently exhausted since having the twins.

‘I would say she’s opened the door to someone she knows or at least to someone she wasn’t immediately afraid of. The blood indicates an injury, possibly when someone tried to remove her from the house. The amount of blood doesn’t suggest a murder on site; it’s more likely it’s come from a cut of some kind. A sexual encounter of some sort? He makes advances, she’s not keen, and there’s a blow from the wine glass in the tussle. All supposition at this point. We are within the golden hour, so let’s press on.’

She pulls out a swivel chair and wheels herself next to Colin, who smells of bonfires – the obscure brand of cigarettes he smokes.

‘What’s her phone telling us then?’ she asks.

‘In terms of the victim’s usage, nothing past 8 p.m. on Saturday night, when she texts the friend, Helena Reed,’ says Colin.

‘What does she say in that last text?’

‘“There in five. E.”’

‘Anything else?’

‘Before the party she does some texting. Someone called Jason F.’

Manon reads Colin’s screen.

What time u getting there? E

Later, somewhere to be first.

Don’t be long, will you?

Why not?

Wouldn’t like you to miss anything …

‘There are others, too,’ Colin says. ‘She texts her tutor, Graham Garfield, to say, “Hope to c u tonite.” He replies, “What’s going down?” Trying to pretend he’s not fifty-seven, if you ask me.’

‘And she says?’

‘“Karaoke, tequila, and bad behaviour.” To which he replies, “On my way!”’ says Colin.

‘What about Facebook?’

Colin clicks on his screen and up pops a collage of Edith – her neck, her arms, brown legs crossed, laughing, her head thrown back. Edith cuddling a cat. Edith in cut-off shorts. Edith wearing a Stetson. Black and white, some with colours blown out by Instagram, which gives them a smoky, Seventies sheen. Beneath these are comments to the tune of ‘Gorgeous!’ and ‘Beautiful, beautiful girl’ and ‘Stunning’. Each photo is ‘liked’ by Will Carter. In a few she’s in a living room, stretched out on the sofa with her feet in Will Carter’s lap as he nurses a goblet of red. In many of the images, another girl is somewhere off-centre or in the background, curled in an armchair reading; just a half of her face, a lick of her hair.

Over four hundred photographs.

‘They’re all of herself, pretty much,’ says Colin.

Edith’s posts are random music lyrics, Bruce Springsteen mostly. The odd literary article about Seamus Heaney or Toni Morrison. Bo Diddley is my new jam. Nick Cave is my new jam.

‘She has four hundred and eighty-two “friends”,’ Colin adds, drawing quote marks in the air.

‘D’you know how many I’ve got?’ says Manon, a yawn stretching her face, while Colin scrolls down. ‘Four. One’s my dad. One’s the electrician. I’m not even sure I know the other two.’

‘She’s a member of these groups,’ says Colin, clicking again. ‘Guerrilla Gardeners.’

‘What do they do?’

‘They grow food on communal ground. Recipes … Here’s a photo of a hot pot they made using free veg picked from a community wasteland garden. She’s a member of Cycle Power – a lobbying group which aims to ban cars.’

‘Scroll up a minute. What’s that?’ says Manon, pointing at the screen.

Colin clicks on the image and Manon reads Edith Hind’s caption:

Bunting made from recycled copies of the
FT
. Happy Christmas, planet!

She and Colin look at each other.

‘It’s a wonder she wasn’t murdered sooner,’ says Colin.

‘Those are exactly the sorts of thoughts I want you to keep to yourself,’ Manon says, rising. ‘Keep at it, Colin. Her hard drive, Google searches, matches on all her phone records.’ And then she marches across MIT to Harriet’s office.

‘So what was the interview with Carter like?’

‘Seems genuinely worried,’ says Harriet, hitching at her bra strap. ‘Keeps crying, pacing, asking for an update on the search. We need to be all over his weekend in Stoke. We can ask the Hind parents a bit more about their relationship, and the friend, Helena, whether there was anyone else in the background, boyfriend-wise. Tabs are already ringing the press office, Fergus said.’

‘It won’t be like Soham,’ says Manon. ‘Not in this climate, not after phone hacking. Things have changed.’

‘Don’t bet on it, not with her parents being who they are.’

‘Who are her parents?’

‘Sir Ian and Lady Hind. He’s an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. Fits the Royal grommets or something.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Yup. We have to tread carefully; the type who’ll complain over anything.’

‘Is it a ransom job then? He must be worth a bit.’

‘We’d have heard from them by now. Anyway, I’m not handing this to any centralised fucking crime unit, no way.’

She gets up, pacing behind the desk, as if the speed of her thoughts is physical. The wings of her jacket are pinned back by her hands on her hips. She’s full of fire, unbridled. If Manon ever went missing, she’d want Harriet to head up the search.

‘Once Polsa’s on board, the pressure will ease off a bit,’ Harriet says, as much to herself as to Manon.

The police search adviser and his specialist teams knew how to find people, or at least where to look. They would take the search further and wider than that clumsy first night: across meadows, along railway tracks, into woods, behind the doors of lock-up garages, in attics and cellars, and soon enough down below the opaque surface of rivers.

Harriet looks at her watch. ‘Eight thirty. If she went missing shortly after midnight on Saturday, then we’re talking thirty-two hours. It’s sub-zero out there.’

‘I’ll send someone to bring in the friend, Helena Reed, shall I?’

‘Yup. I’ll go and talk to the parents. Urgh, this is the bit I hate – they’ll be frantic. Then I’m meeting Fergus in the press office. We’ll probably do a short briefing at 11 a.m., just me and the agencies and locals. Got to get those photos of the girl out and an initial appeal. We need to look at her bank activity. Can you start someone on that?’

Manon and Davy slip into interview room one, where Sir Ian is pacing in a navy wool coat.

‘So, hang on a minute, you’re saying there isn’t a DCI on duty to run the search for my daughter?’ He has an imperious face, straight nose, pale eyes and thin lips. Charles Dance without the ginger colouring.

‘DC Walker and DS Bradshaw enter the room,’ says Harriet to the recording device. ‘It’s quite normal, Sir Ian, for a DI to run a case such as this. If you’d like to sit down, there are a number of things we’d like to ask you.’

‘What I want to know first is who is conducting the search. Who is
actually
out there in the snow, searching for her, because if she’s injured—’

Lady Hind, who sits at the table opposite Harriet, takes his hand and holds it to her cheek, then kisses the back of it and this seems to give him pause. Her hair is grey, in a straight bob, with a beautiful streak of white framing her face. Her coat hangs expensively, her fingers glinting with diamonds.

‘Sit down, darling,’ she says, her voice quavering with suppressed tears. ‘We must help them in any way we can.’

Sir Ian takes up a chair next to his wife.

‘Thank you,’ says Harriet. ‘Edith’s phone shows a few missed calls from you over the course of the weekend, Sir Ian. Were you having trouble reaching her?’

‘We always have trouble reaching her, don’t we?’ he says to Lady Hind. ‘She’s terrible at calling back. So we call, and we call.’ At this he gives Harriet a strained smile. ‘We were anxious to know her plans for Christmas, weren’t we, darling?’

‘She hadn’t told you her plans for Christmas?’ Manon asks, directing the question at Lady Hind.

‘Edith’s fond of prevaricating. She can be … non-committal, would you say, Ian? With us, anyway. We’d agreed she and Will would spend Christmas with us in London and then she’d said, “You never know”, or something to that effect.’

‘You never know what?’ asks Manon.

‘I took it to mean she couldn’t be certain Will would join us.’

‘So there was trouble between them?’ Harriet says.

‘No, not trouble,’ says Lady Hind. ‘Ambivalence, I’d say. They’re only twenty-four, after all. They’re not married.’

‘And this ambivalence,’ says Harriet, ‘would you say it was more on her part than his?’

‘Yes,’ says Lady Hind.

‘Has there been any violence between them – heated rows, say? Would Edith have reason to be fearful of Mr Carter?’

‘No, no, no,’ says Sir Ian. ‘It’s not like that. It’s ordinary stuff. Will is a marvellous fellow, devoted to Edie.’

‘But if he sensed her feelings were cooling, perhaps—’

‘Detective, we are not that sort of family. I’m sure you deal all the time with people whose lives are chaotic, who drink and brawl and abuse one another. But none of us – these things are not part of our lives, our experience. I’d be very surprised if Will is involved in this.’

‘Right,’ says Harriet. ‘Can you think of anyone who would want to harm Edith?’

The Hinds look at each other, their expressions bewildered. ‘No, we really can’t,’ says Lady Hind. ‘Can you tell me, how do you … Please, you have to find her, I can’t … The thought of her lost, you see …’ Her eyes brim as she looks at the officers, one to the other.

‘I’ll explain how we go forward from here,’ says Manon. ‘Search teams will work in concentric circles out from the house and, at the same time, we’ll be building a picture of Edith, working outwards from her most intimate circle – yourselves, Will Carter, Helena Reed. We’ll look at all aspects of her life, based on what you tell us, her phone, computer, bank cards. So it’s important you leave nothing out.’

‘She doesn’t have any bank cards,’ says Sir Ian. ‘She feels the whole banking industry is corrupt. According to Edie, if none of us used banks, then the whole global economic collapse wouldn’t have happened. It’s not a view I share, but she holds these beliefs very strongly. If she could pay everyone in muddy vegetables and repaired bicycle tyres, she would, but her landlord wouldn’t have it.’

‘OK, so how does she live? Where does her income come from?’ asks Harriet.

‘Me,’ he says. ‘I give her a MoneyGram transfer via the Post Office every month – £1,500 on the first. She pays the rent on the cottage in cash to the landlord – that’s £750, I think. He lives next door. I pay the utilities directly from London. The rest she lives off.’

‘So there would’ve been quite a lot of cash in the house,’ says Harriet. ‘She would have been seen collecting wads of it at the Post Office …’

‘Look, I feel it’s risky,’ says Sir Ian. ‘And I’ve argued with her about it. I’ve said I’d rather she has a bank account into which I can transfer the funds. But she just won’t have it. She says someone has to break with the status quo. I think she’d prefer not to receive any money from me, to do everything her own way, on her own terms. Twenty-four-year-olds are like that. So I don’t argue with her because I want her to have my help.’

‘Also,’ says Lady Hind, ‘and we discussed this, oh God, endlessly, because it worried us, but we reason that £750 goes more-or-less straight to the landlord, so it’s not as if it’s all under the bed.’

‘You get to a point,’ Sir Ian adds, and it’s as if he and his wife’s sentences are a continuation, ‘where you don’t want to fall out with your children because you don’t want to lose them. The balance of power shifts, you see. I want her to have my money and these are the terms on which she’ll have it.’

‘How many people know about this cash arrangement?’

‘Well, Will, of course. We have sort of been supporting Will by default because he lives in the house and we pay for the house,’ says Lady Hind. ‘As to others, Edith doesn’t keep quiet about her views. She’s quite vocal.’

‘So this weekend,’ Harriet says, ‘there should have been how much in the cottage, at a guess?’

Sir Ian glances at his phone. ‘It’s the nineteenth, so she’s halfway through the month,’ he says. ‘Christmas is a bit more expensive, so I’d imagine no more than £300. Surely not enough for someone to …’

‘You’d be surprised,’ says Harriet. ‘Why not pay her rent directly? Why not transfer that, like the utilities?’

‘The landlord gives her a slight reduction in return for cash-in-hand. I assume he’s fiddling his taxes somewhat.’

‘Fifteen hundred pounds is a generous allowance,’ says Manon. ‘Is she extravagant?’

‘Quite the opposite. Edith believes in treading lightly on the earth.’

‘But she has a car.’

‘An electric car,’ says Lady Hind. She swallows, and Manon sees she’s keeping down a swell of desperation. ‘A very old electric car. A G-Wiz. It used to be my run-around. Edith needed it when she moved to Huntingdon – to get to lectures and supervisions at Corpus and to Deeping, which is only half an hour from here.’

‘We’ll need to take a closer look at Deeping, I hope you don’t mind – get our forensic teams out there,’ says Harriet.

‘It’s almost impossible to get to without a car. Middle of the Fens, about three acres,’ says Sir Ian. ‘Quite a rough place, really. Edith loves it there but, like I say, without the G-Wiz …’

‘She might have gone with someone else,’ says Harriet.

He nods. ‘Would you like my keys?’

‘No, it’s all right, I’ve got Edith’s set. Can I ask, is there any way she could gain access without her keys? A spare set at the property, perhaps?’

‘Yes, in the porch, high up. If you feel along the architrave, there’s a key resting there for emergencies,’ says Sir Ian. ‘The house is in the middle of nowhere. Hardly anyone even knows it’s there, so we’re quite lax on security.’

Harriet is writing in her notebook. She looks up and says, ‘Now, we just need to get an account of your movements over the weekend so we can eliminate you both from the enquiry.’

‘Yes, of course,’ says Lady Hind. ‘We were at the theatre on Saturday night with friends.
King Lear
at the Almeida. After the theatre, we went for supper at Le Palmier – six of us. We left there about midnight. Yesterday, we were at home mostly with the fire on – it was so
cold
. Ian went to the office briefly in the morning, didn’t you? I made a monkfish stew for lunch. In the afternoon, we pottered about at home, reading, I watched bits of a film – one of those World War Two black and white ones. Ian was in and out of his study. In the evening, I took a delivery from my florist – she was getting all her Christmas orders out, hence why she was delivering so late on a Sunday. Then – this was about nine – Will rang, worried sick about Edith.’