Missing, Presumed (7 page)

Manon runs her tray along the counter, looking into rectangular metal pans of beans, sausages, watery mushrooms, tomatoes from a tin and scrambled eggs that have congealed into a solid square. A permanent breakfast offering in a lightless room, at 8 p.m. on a Monday evening, for people who have ceased to observe normal day and night patterns.

‘Hello, missy,’ says Larry from behind the counter. He is from Gabon. His name can’t be Larry, but he allows it, this lazy Anglicising of his name. ‘You look tired, dahling. Is long shift?’

Larry is smiling at her. He is always smiling, even though he works punishing hours on minimum wage, serving cheap food to an almost entirely white Cambridgeshire police force. Occasionally she hears him speak a beautiful African French to a female colleague behind that divisive counter. Manon often resolves to ask him about Gabon and how he came to Huntingdon, but there never seems to be a right time.

‘Big case, Larry. No rest for the wicked. Beans and sausages, please.’

She takes her tray to an empty table and looks up at the television, which is bracketed near the ceiling. Sky News is rolling out a stream on Edith Hind’s disappearance. The red ticker along the base of the screen reads:
Huntingdon latest: 24-year-old Cambridge student Edith Hind missing. Father is Sir Ian Hind, physician to the Royal Family.

She goes to get the remote control from another table. Around the room are a smattering of officers on the case or supplying auxiliary support, including Stuart, who has a habit of catching Manon’s eye in a way she finds faintly inappropriate. Davy is a couple of tables away. He picks up his tray and moves over to Manon’s table, looking expectantly at the telly as she flicks over to Channel 4+1 for the news.

‘Officers say they are very concerned about a twenty-four-year-old woman who went missing from her home in Huntingdon on Saturday night,’ says the presenter, ‘very concerned’ being code for ‘we think she’s dead’. ‘As Cambridgeshire Police launch a manhunt, we have this report.’

Their home affairs correspondent is stood in the grey slush outside Edith’s house. The blackness of the winter night is lit around him, white puffs emerging on his breath and flurries of sleet blowing about behind his head.

‘Police are investigating what happened to Edith Hind after she got home from a party in Cambridge on Saturday night.’ Manon saws into a processed sausage, its meat sickening-pale. Purest eyelid and spine, she thinks. ‘The postgraduate student was shown on CCTV laughing and singing at The Crown pub in Cambridge with friends. She and her friend Helena Reed then made their way back to Edith’s house, here in George Street, and said goodnight. What happened next is a mystery.

‘DI Harriet Harper, of Cambridgeshire’s Major Incident Team, is urging anyone with information about Edith to contact the dedicated enquiry line. Edith’s parents and her boyfriend, fellow Cambridge graduate Will Carter, will be issuing an appeal for information tomorrow morning.’

The food is filling up Manon’s belly with warmth, which spreads up to her temples and fills her with an intense desire to sleep. She wants to eat more – as she always does when she works a punishing shift – as if she can replace a soft bed with carbohydrates. She spoons in some beans.

‘She put up with me,’ Will Carter told them when they re-interviewed him in the light of the Helena Reed revelation. Manon found herself staring at him with her mouth ajar and when she looked over at Harriet, who had joined herself and Davy halfway through the interview, she had the same expression on her face:
You cannot be real
.
You are a pretend boyfriend, created by DreamWorks.

But it wore off, his handsomeness and its presence in the room, which initially made Manon wind one of her curls about a finger and Harriet hold her stomach in. The two of them questioned him about every aspect of his life with Edith, and though his barriers were down, and they were in the midst of the biggest case either of them had seen in years, nevertheless his answers had a curiously narcoleptic effect on them both. Manon rubbed her eye, which felt as if a bit of grit was caught in it, and cast a look at Harriet, who was stifling a yawn.

‘Shall we break for coffee?’ Harriet had said at one point, and they convened in whispers next to the coffee machine in MIT.

‘Every time he speaks, I want it to be over,’ said Manon, her eyes locked on the middle distance.

‘Yes,’ said Harriet. ‘It’s not boring, but it’s like you just can’t keep your mind on him at all. I found myself thinking about some shopping I have to pick up. Fascinating, isn’t it?’

Carter described how he and Edith had met – the May ball, the velvet dress she wore with a sweetheart neckline, and her reciting Yeats to him across a lawn with her stilettos in one hand and a bottle of Becks in the other.

Manon takes another bite of sausage and looks at Davy – or through him, more accurately. He is saying something about phone numbers, a phone number that was found on Edith Hind’s phone.

Soon there would be flowers – either at the site where a body was found, or outside the house – from members of the public who wrote cards saying ‘you’re safe now’ or ‘rest in peace’ or ‘looking down from heaven’. They scare her, these tragedy tourists, as if they are hungry for catastrophe, a line from the inside of them to the inside of suffering – like a hook inside the cheek of a fish. Manon knows death and she knows it is no rest or journey.
Do not go gentle into that good night.

She thinks of Lady Hind’s terrified face and realises the pain for relatives of the missing is that there is no clear face to stare into – neither the abyss of death, nor hope, but a ghastly oscillation between the two. If ever there was real purgatory, it’s this.

‘This number, unknown-515,’ Davy is saying, mouth full of egg, ‘it’s on her phone twice. Edith called it on the Monday – the twelfth, I think it was – before she disappeared, that was a twenty-minute call. Then she called it again on Friday the sixteenth. That’s got to be significant.’

‘Who’s it registered to?’

‘Pay-as-you-go, no records attached, purchased in cash in Cambridge. I’m trying to get more on it. Why would Edith be calling a dirty phone?’

Manon shovels in a final mouthful of baked beans. Her eye is irritable – gritty, the shards of sleep deprivation or the beginning of a stye – and she predicts that when she wakes tomorrow it will have inflated like a blister. That’ll look excellent when there are scores of TV cameras about. She stops herself rubbing it, even though the urge is overpowering, and knows in about three seconds she will claw at it rapaciously.

Two in the morning, our second night awake, thinks Miriam, noticing that she’d thought – told herself – Edith would be back with them by now. She should have been found. And she is aware that the passage of time – forty-eight hours now by police reckoning – is like a growing tumour for a missing person, as if time itself drains the life from their bodies. She cries every hour or so about the things Edith might have experienced. Or be experiencing still. Her own daughter and she can’t make it stop, can’t protect her. And then her mind can’t bear it and it clicks into a numb state.

The hotel room at the George is overheated in the way hotel rooms often are. Airless, the windows impossible to open, the curtains like lead. They’d pushed dinner around their plates out of a vague respect for life’s little routines, but eventually left the dining room when their awareness of the television and newspaper reporters sitting at adjacent tables became too much: constant furtive glances, the way conversation dropped when they walked by, and the lowered gazes when she accidentally met their eye. It was dirtying.

When she’s not crying, she feels disconnected, as if the hubbub is happening to someone else: the news reports, the cameras outside Edith’s house, the sheer drama of it. She is discombobulated when they are in the public eye, walking in and out of the police station or up the hotel steps, white lights shining in her face, camera flashes exploding. She allows herself to be carried along by Ian’s hand on her arm. Propelled by him. She doesn’t know what she’d do without him commanding everything.

After dinner she had a bath and, lying there, had thought about what she should wear for the television appeal. Is it wrong, that she cares about what to wear to appear on national television? She found herself wondering which outfit was more slimming – the navy jacket or mustard waterfall cardigan? How could she think about any of this (even idly wondering which seemed more grief-stricken)? Yet the mind must chew on something, else it will chew on itself.

Lying in the bath, she heard Ian on the phone to various people – to Rollo, about how soon he could fly back from Argentina (‘I’ll pay for a first-class ticket, if that’s all that’s available. Yes, yes, OK. So you’ll be home by Wednesday evening? Yes, I wish it were sooner.’). She got out of the bath at this point, wrapped a towel around herself, and took the phone from her husband.

‘Is that really the earliest you can come, darling?’ she said to Rollo. ‘I’ll feel so much better when you’re home. Did she say anything to you? No, well, OK, till Wednesday then. And Rollo? I love you, darling boy.’ Just the sound of his voice was a bolster to her tremulous heart.

Then Ian spoke to DI Harper and to Rosemary from the practice, telling her he wouldn’t be working for the foreseeable future and not to talk to the press.

Ridiculous trains of thought, wondering if she has somehow caused this. Was this her
fault
? Had she been remote as a mother? Because Edith was always over-dramatising her feelings, as if to make herself heard over a din. And this … event seems to Miriam somehow typical. Her eldest had never realised that a simple statement of fact was enough; it had to be ‘the worst time ever’ or ‘
literally
a nightmare’. Edith was always poorer, ill-er, more unhappy than the next person. It had made Miriam all the more aware of Rollo’s understatement; when he rather queasily said as a child that he didn’t feel quite right, she would rush to feel his fevered brow. When Edith wailed that she was
dying
, Miriam rolled her eyes and packed her off to school. And so are our children formed and yes, it was always going to be Edith at the centre of a drama –
a police hunt, for Christ’s sake
.

She screws her eyes tight, her head tipped back, and tears squeeze from their corners, because she loves the bones of Edith and is critical only as if she is a part of herself. This separation is like a rending of her flesh.

She sits up. We have to
do
something. She hears a sound and looks across the bed, sees Ian’s back through the charcoal dark. He is sitting on the side of the bed in his vest. He has his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and he is crying. Quietly, so as not to wake her.

She climbs over the bed to him and rubs his back.

‘I thought she’d be at Deeping,’ he says. ‘Lying on her bed with headphones in her ears, reading a book. That she’d look up and wonder what all the fuss was about.’

‘Let’s go there now, see if she’s turned up,’ says Miriam. ‘I can’t stand doing nothing. I’ve just got this feeling – that house, she loves it there. It would draw her, if she were in trouble, I mean.’

‘The police don’t want us there. Forensics are all over it.’

‘What if she’s been run over, what if she’s injured somewhere? And we don’t know. Ian, we
don’t know
.’

‘That’s why they’ve used sniffer dogs, to locate her by the scent of blood.’

‘You know an awful lot all of a sudden,’ she says, and it comes out more harshly than she intends.

‘We’ve got to
think
. Where could she have gone?’ They are both prone to this, thinking their way out of their predicaments, as if sheer force of intellect could control the random world.

‘France? I mean, I know we haven’t been for years and years, but she does speak the language.’

He shakes his head. ‘Border control – she hasn’t got her passport, remember? You should ring Christy and Jonti.’

‘Yes. They won’t know anything, but yes. She hasn’t seen Jonti in years. Does Rollo have any ideas?’

‘No, he says not, but he says he’s setting up a Find Edith Facebook page or something. I wish it didn’t take so long for him to get here. Miri,’ he says with a sudden gasp.

‘I know,’ she says.

They are in this together; they love Edith together with lion-like force. Whatever rows there had ever been between them evaporated when Edith tottered towards them on chubby legs or made a funny face or delighted them in the myriad ways she did, and they would find themselves looking in the same direction, grinning stupidly at their girl. Together. Thank God they are together. The only person in the world who feels as much terror as she does is here, by her side.

She starts to cry. ‘If she’s not all right then I will never be all right.’

‘Darling Miri, come here,’ says Ian, taking her in his arms. ‘We’ll find her. We’ll keep on looking until we find her.’

Engine’s off and the wind squalls about the car. She should get out, look lively, jog up the steps ready for a new day, but instead she rests her forehead on the steering wheel.

‘Morning,’ says a muffled voice beyond her driver’s side window. Davy, of course, smiling in at her, coffee in hand, the light glowing behind those marvellous ears, like red quotation marks. She winds down the window and a tinny hail of cold rain buffets in.

‘How does my eye look?’ she says, trying hard to open it fully.

‘Looks normal to me. I’ve got you this. Warm you up. Haven’t we got a briefing at eight?’

‘Gimme a minute,’ says Manon.

She winds up the window, using both hands and all the force of her shoulder. Davy has stepped back and is standing beside the car, holding her coffee like a royal attendant. She flips down the sun visor to look in its cloudy mirror. Her left eye is half-closed, red, and sloping downwards as if she’s been punched. She opens the car door. It is perishing cold, the chill cutting into her ankles and toes and about her wrists and neck, making her hunch and tighten. She locks her car, takes her coffee from Davy and they walk up the steps of the station.

‘Come in, both of you,’ says Harriet, from the doorway of her office. She is pulling at her bra straps. It’s as if she’s never comfortable, the upholstery springing a tack.

‘What’s happened to you?’ she says, peering at Manon’s eye.

‘Oh, nothing. Bit sore, that’s all.’

‘Looks like you’ve been beaten up.’

Harriet’s jumpy. The girl has been missing for fifty-four hours now without a single firm lead but about six possible avenues for investigation. There is mercifully still no sign of their boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Gary Stanton, yet interference is palpably not far away: in the air space above them, the vague suspicion that calls might be passing between the Home Office and Cambridgeshire Commissioner Sir Brian Peabody, the odd mention perhaps at Annabelle’s or in the Pugin Room at the House, perhaps some quiet pressure filtering down to the Chief Constable, who will certainly be taking a keen interest. ‘Best brains on this Hind girl, old chap. Wouldn’t want a cock-up on something this big.’

Manon and Davy take up seats in Harriet’s office, Manon nursing her coffee with two hands.

‘What’s happened to her?’ says Harriet, pacing. ‘It’s like she’s evaporated. There’s no CCTV, no sightings …’

‘Where are we with the search?’ asks Davy.

‘Polsa’s widened it beyond Portholme Meadow – more than a hundred officers in all – and sometime today Spartan Rescue are going to start on the River Ouse.’

‘Take a week or two for a body to float up,’ says Manon.

‘What about that Graham Garfield chap, the Director of Studies?’ asks Harriet. ‘He was sniffing about on Saturday night.’

‘His wife says he was home with her after the pub,’ says Manon.

‘Think we have to be a bit circumspect about alibis given by wives and mothers.’

There is silence for a moment.

‘Right, the press conference with the Hinds. We’re going to watch Will Carter, see how he fares. Kim Delaney is trawling River Island for clothes similar to the ones Edith was wearing on Saturday night – jeans and a blue sweatshirt.’

‘Boss?’ says Colin, at the door. ‘We’ve got something.’

They all look at him.

‘Carter had another phone. Phone mast in Huntingdon picked up activity from a T-Mobile number registered to him on Saturday night.’

They all look at each other.

‘What sort of activity?’ asks Harriet.

‘Two calls, one at 5 p.m., another at midnight. That’s all we can tell before the full traces come in, but it puts him in Huntingdon on the night we think Edith disappeared.’

‘Where’s the phone now?’

‘Dunno, it’s switched off.’

‘Have we tracked his car out of Stoke yet?’ asks Manon.

‘No, we haven’t,’ says Harriet. ‘Nigel’s doing some work on the smaller routes, checking alternative cameras. We need to question him on this – no more tea and sympathy.’

‘Hang on,’ says Manon. ‘Let’s let him do the presser, see how he holds up. Then we’ll ask him about what his phone was doing in Huntingdon when he says he was in Stoke.’

‘I want officers on the door,’ says Harriet. ‘And I want us all over his alibi. House to house in Stoke around his mother’s address, see if anyone saw him leaving earlier than they both say. And CCTV.’

Manon perches one buttock on the edge of Colin’s desk and looks up at the monitor, which shows an empty table with four chairs behind it and microphones along the front, pointing at the chairs.

The rest of the team gathers around her: Colin in his swivelly chair; Kim back from River Island; Davy, of course; and the new recruit, Stuart Leach. Manon eyes him in her periphery, her eyes flicking from his shaven head to the monitor, then back to his broad shoulders in a billowing shirt (she loves a billowing shirt on a man, especially with sharp creases), his square jaw and dark eyes, which have a certain amused mischief in them. He catches her eye and smiles.

‘So, it was the boyfriend, was it?’ he says, and she can feel all his charm being launched at her like a hand grenade – mischief slash disrespect.

‘Looks like it. We don’t know for sure,’ she says, looking upwards at the monitor and simultaneously tightening her body under his gaze. She’s going to have to cut back on the Marmite toast. ‘Here they are.’

They watch as Harriet sits in the chair to the right of the screen. The Hinds then inch into view from the left, shuffling into their seats on half-bended legs and holding hands, their gaze downward. Will Carter enters last, wearing a mid-blue shirt that brings out the slate colour of his eyes. Manon can almost hear the female reporters in the room sitting up straighter. Flashes going, the electronic burr blending into the shuffling and murmuring of the crowd settling: TV news, locals, nationals, agencies, digital channels, web reporters. Manon sees the grey hollows beneath Sir Ian’s eyes. Lady Hind’s are red-rimmed. They are silvery in their ageing, as if covered by a hoar frost. Carter runs a hand through his hair and the cameras seem to flurry in response.

Harriet introduces the pertinent facts about the investigation, the timeline of Edith’s disappearance, details of the police hotline. Her glance repeatedly flicks to Will, whose gaze is directed at the cameras.

Somewhere in the room behind Manon, a phone starts ringing.

‘Crikey, already,’ says Colin. ‘Here come the tank-top-wearing schizophrenics.’

‘Shut it, Colin,’ says Manon.

‘It’ll be the ladies offering to comfort Mr Carter,’ says Kim. ‘Even if he’s killed her, he’ll get a few marriage proposals.’

They watch Harriet introduce Sir Ian. There is a pause before he speaks.

‘We are desperately worried about Edith,’ he says, lifting his gaze to the phalanx of reporters and cameras, and for a split second, utter distaste is visible on his face. Lady Hind strokes his hand. ‘She is a resourceful, clever, and talented girl, but the circumstances of her disappearance are obviously giving cause for mounting alarm. Edith, if you are watching this, please contact us to let us know you are safe. And if anyone out there has seen our daughter, do please contact the police.’

‘Mr Carter,’ says a female voice. ‘Keeley Davis,
Hunts Post
. You must be devastated.’

‘I am. I’m … I’m …’ Will Carter looks about the room. ‘I haven’t slept. This is torture, a nightmare. We just want to know where Edie is.’

Manon thinks she can see Lady Hind close her eyes in a tiny grimace, but perhaps she’s imagining it.

‘Sorry, one more question,’ says pushy Keeley Davis, who will no doubt be off to
The
Mail
any day now, with her tight suit and that retro Nissan she drives, the automotive equivalent of a Prada handbag. ‘Was there anything about her behaviour in the days before she disappeared that gave you cause for concern?’

‘No, not at all,’ says Will. He is giving Keeley maximum eye contact, furrowed and serious and frankly adorable. ‘This is totally out of character. We were happy,
are
happy. We’re incredibly close. She is my world. Y’know, she was working hard on her PhD, looking forward to Christmas. Normal stuff.’

Harriet points to another member of the audience. ‘Yes, Terry.’

‘Terry Harcourt,
The Mirror
. Sir Ian, can you tell us more about Edith – what sort of girl is she?’

Sir Ian looks vaguely lost. ‘Well,’ he says, halting for a moment as if he hasn’t understood the question, ‘as I say, she is clever. She has a double first from Cambridge and is studying for her PhD. She is quite sporty, dedicated to the environment.’ Manon watches his bewildered face as the shutters click and the flashes blind him. He knows what they want – incontinent emoting. They want him and Miriam Hind to break down over ‘their angel’.

Harriet moves it along. ‘Yes, Andy, from
The Herald
.’

‘Sir Ian, you are physician to the Royal Family. Has the Queen sent you any messages of support?’

‘I don’t think that’s relevant to the purpose of this press conference,’ says Sir Ian.

‘Right, yes. Nick, ITN,’ says Harriet, pointing to the back of the room.

‘Sir Ian, you are personal friends with the Home Secretary. Is he putting extra resources behind this investigation?’

‘I can answer that one,’ says Harriet. ‘All the resources of the police force are at our disposal in the search for Edith. This would be the case for any high-risk missing person.’

‘Is it true you’re looking for a body?’ shouts a voice into the room.

Manon sees Lady Hind flinch. The room buzzes with enlarged murmurings.

‘What’s your name?’ asks Harriet.

‘Tony Thackeray,
Eastern Daily Press
. Missing person, more than forty-eight hours, sub-zero temperatures. This must surely become a murder investigation at some point. And isn’t it also true that Cambridgeshire MIT has been criticised in the past for not upscaling a missing person to suspected homicide early enough? The case of Lacey Pilkington …’

‘
Shit
,’ whispers Manon.

Sir Ian and Miriam frown at one another and then at Harriet, who says, ‘Our priority is to find Edith.’

‘Aye aye,’ says Colin, nodding at the screen. ‘Here’s Officer Dibble back from ’is holidays.’

They all notice Detective Chief Superintendent Gary Stanton, who has come to stand at the edge of the room, his body leaning against the wall. The buttons on his white shirt are straining; his civilian suit sharp and navy. He has the look of a man who has just stepped off a plane: his face and bald pate basted brown like a cooked turkey and shiny with good living. His gaze is on Harriet and she bristles with it.

‘We are going to have to wrap things up, I’m afraid,’ she says, shifting in her seat. She’s eager to collar Will Carter, Manon can see it in Harriet’s agitation – that’s why she’s closed it down so quick. ‘Thank you all for coming.’