Missing, Presumed (8 page)

‘It was stolen,’ says Will Carter, pacing with a hand in his hair, the other on his hip. ‘Look, I know it looks bad but it honestly didn’t occur to me to mention it. I’ve been taken up with … just, you know, my whole mind is on Edie.’

Davy is stood with his back to the wall, behind Harriet and Manon, who are sitting at the table facing Carter. Davy has the sense that Harriet is using him as a ‘heavy’ though he doesn’t really have the face for it. He’s been told he always looks faintly embarrassed or surprised, so he’s trying to lean sardonically against the wall, as if he’s a mass of thick-set scepticism. Harriet is leaning, too – back in her chair, twirling a pencil about her fingers. The disbelieving detective. Manon, however, is sat forward, her position saying:
I want to try to understand
.

‘Go on,’ says Manon.

‘It didn’t seem important. I forgot about it.’

‘When and where was it stolen, Mr Carter?’ says Manon.

‘From my car. On Friday as I was preparing to leave. I left it on the seat, slammed the car door and ran in to get my bag. I was only going to be a minute, maybe it was more like five, but when I came out, it had gone.’

‘Did you see anyone – running away or near the car?’

‘No. I glanced in either direction but the street was empty. Maybe they were hiding behind a hedge or something, I dunno. I wouldn’t have gone after them anyway. I’m a coward when it comes to things like that – I don’t want to get punched. I think they must’ve been watching me and seized their chance when I went inside.’

‘And you didn’t think to report it?’ says Harriet.

‘I wanted to get on the road – my mum was expecting me. I’ll be honest, I didn’t think there was much the police could do. I thought it was my own stupid fault and I just had to suck it up. Anyway, I stopped at the Tesco phone shop in Kettering – it’s open late – and got a pay-as-you-go, just so I could give Edie a number, y’know, so she could call me in an emergency.’

‘Sorry, Mr Carter, but how did you not think this was relevant to our investigation?’ asks Harriet.

‘I don’t know. I just wanted you to find Edie. I was so worried, it didn’t occur to me.’

‘So you phoned Edith from Kettering?’

‘No, I texted.’

‘You didn’t want to talk to her about the fact you’d just been a victim of a crime?’

‘I tried to call her.’

‘You tried to call her,’ says Harriet, her voice dripping with exhausted frustration.

‘I did call but she was busy and she didn’t pick up. I knew she wouldn’t recognise the number so I explained in a text and she texted back saying “OK”.’

He has stopped in front of them.

Davy can’t see Harriet’s expression, but she is probably frowning. ‘Forgive me, Mr Carter, but perhaps you can see why we’re confused. You say everything’s perfect between you and Miss Hind, you say everything was normal in the run-up to her disappearance—’

‘OK, not normal.’

Harriet is gesturing at the chair in front of them, the patient mother. Carter sits at last.

‘One minute everything was normal,’ he says, ‘and then it wasn’t. One minute we were making dinner, watching
Sherlock
on iPlayer, and then – about a week ago, I guess – I dunno, she cooled off, like she was cross with me. Froze when I touched her. Kept saying she had loads of work on, as if she was avoiding me. I suppose that fits with what you said about her and Helena.’

‘Can you give specific examples?’ asks Manon.

‘Well, the Saturday before … a week before …’ He colours up, doesn’t know how to refer to the ‘event’ of Edith’s disappearance, which might or might not be her death. ‘She went out, I don’t even know who with, got really drunk, and on the Sunday she spent the whole day in bed with her laptop on her knees. And then in the afternoon, about three, she put a tracksuit on and her boots and took her car keys. When I asked where she was going, she said, “Out.” It went on like that, passing each other in the house like strangers. Then on Friday, the Friday I was going to Stoke, she was suddenly really full-on, emotional. We made love – this was in the afternoon – and I thought, oh, it’s all right again, it was just a passing thing. But she started crying immediately after – after the sex, I mean – and she said, “I’m sorry.” I suppose now she was talking about Helena, I dunno. I said, “What for?” And she said, “For being a bitch to you.” I said, “You haven’t been, not so I’ve noticed.” Which was bollocks, of course, I had noticed, but I was just glad she was back with me, I wanted to be close again, and I didn’t want to argue. Anyway, it seemed to make it worse. She snapped at me, “That’s right, Will, let’s tell each other lies.” I’ll be honest – I didn’t know what was going on.’

Poor chap, Davy thinks. He wouldn’t be the first man whose girlfriend was a mystery to him. What law is it that says you can’t be a hapless good-looking bloke – well, a model, pretty much, actually – in the wrong place at the wrong time?

‘It has taken you an awfully long time to tell us all this,’ says Harriet. She wants to nail him, wants his alibi broken and an arrest before Stanton can go clod-hopping all over her investigation. She’ll be thinking he set up the phone theft – stopped at Kettering to buy a PAYG as part of his alibi – then slipped back early to Huntingdon to murder Edith because he was furious that she was leaving him, or being unfaithful, or both. It was often both.

‘It was private, all right?’ says Carter, not quite shouting, but defensive. ‘My relationship with Edie is private and I didn’t want to tell you lot about it.’

Davy looks at the ringlets springing from the back of Manon’s head and wonders what she makes of Carter. He hazards a guess: Manon would say go easy, trace the phone, track his plates, follow up on the Tesco phone shop in Kettering and the petrol stations on his return journey. Because cases, as she was forever telling him, aren’t solved on hunches. They’re solved with dogged, stoic donkey work.

Harriet takes a circular tin of Vaseline, green and white, from the depths of her handbag. Without looking at it, she twists off the lid and dabs some onto her middle finger, stroking it across her lips so they glisten. Her gaze is on the middle distance. These shifts are ageing us, Manon thinks. She keeps glazing over too, and when she does, her mind returns again and again to Deeping – its painterly swathes, colours murky and creative – perhaps because it’s the polar opposite of police HQ, all pale laminate and strip lighting. The exposure of dark corners.

People are preparing to go home. ‘We can’t keep you all here indefinitely,’ Harriet said. ‘Get some sleep. See you back here at seven tomorrow morning.’ Coats being threaded onto leaden arms, bags gathered, families phoned. (‘Yes, Dawn, I know it’s late. Well, I’m sorry, but there wasn’t anything I could— Shall I pick up something for us to eat?’)

‘Don’t walk home tonight,’ Harriet says, and Manon blinks into focus, sees her flicking her hair out from under her coat collar.

‘No, I’ve got the car. Hang on, I thought Carter was our suspect.’

‘Yeah, well, you heard Stanton.’

She’d been in on the meeting, Stanton hitching up the back of his belt, his belly its counterweight, while he told Harriet she didn’t have the evidence against Carter: ‘No body, no forensics, no witnesses, nothing.’

‘We need to shake him up,’ Harriet said, but she was already on the back foot.

Stanton doesn’t want the headlines, the pay-out in compensation if they’re wrong and the press going to town. His manner had said: You’ve both got a bit over-excited, but now my steadying hand is back on the tiller. ‘We wait,’ he told them. ‘We investigate all avenues. Trace. Interview. Eliminate.’

‘Just … don’t walk,’ Harriet is saying, covering a yawn with her fist. ‘You don’t know – we don’t know – who’s out there.’

‘Anything on unknown-515, that mystery number on Edith’s call register, Davy?’ says Manon, as he walks towards them.

‘Nothing,’ he says.

‘Fancy a lift?’ Manon says.

He seems to falter, then says, ‘OK, yes, thanks very much.’

Manon’s wipers push doggedly at the rain but do little to dissipate the fog on her windscreen, so she winds down a window, letting in sprays of wet. Rough winds buffet the car as she pulls on to the A14 to avoid the cordon which has closed George Street and created gridlock in central Huntingdon. She’ll follow the ring road around to suburban Sapley, where Davy lives. The roads roar with wetness and the damp mingles with the musty interior of her car. On the banks of the motorway, just visible in the dark, are the last sketches of snow being pummelled by the rain.

‘Have you got any hobbies, Davy?’ she asks, peering into the dark.

‘I do, yes,’ says Davy. ‘I do my mentoring at the youth centre, kids in care. I like a spot of gardening, though I haven’t got a garden at the moment. I do help look after my mum’s.’

‘See? You’ve got plenty of hobbies. I haven’t got one.’

‘Why d’you ask?’

‘I had to fill in a hobbies section – for the dating site – and I drew a complete blank. I literally don’t have any. So I’ve decided to get hobbied up.’

‘And how is that going?’ asks Davy, with a hopefulness that would imply he’d never met Manon.

‘Awful. I hate it. I mean, what’s the point of doing something just for the sake of it, when it isn’t your job?’

‘Well, to relax.’

‘I even went to a pottery class so I’d have something to type in. But I just couldn’t get past the pointlessness of it. I mean, it’s not like I’m ever going to have a pottery wheel in my lounge, to relax with.’

‘You don’t know that. Demi Moore had one in
Ghost
,’ says Davy.

She looks at him, but he maintains his cheerful gaze straight ahead.

‘So I’m going to try Zumba instead,’ says Manon. ‘Thought I’d go tonight, actually. Help me wind down. It’s been quite full-on. Do you find that – difficulty falling asleep?’

‘Nope, not me. My head touches the pillow and bosh, I’m off. Did Harriet suggest that – the Zumba, I mean?’

Manon shoots him a sharp look. ‘No, she did not. Why? What’s she said to you?’

‘Nothing, no, nothing. It’s just good if we all keep fit, that’s all,’ says Davy. ‘For catching villains. Ah, here we are,’ he says, patting his knees. Manon slows the car and Davy gets out, then leans in through the open door. ‘Right, well, cheerio,’ he says.

He waits, but she doesn’t respond, so he closes the car door.

He’s in bright and early, and as he stands beside his desk taking off his coat, he surveys the MIT department. The support and admin staff who dominate the building have subsided into a loose, festive spirit – this being the last working week for many – and this is mulling its way into the investigations team. Kim is standing on a chair, hanging some Christmas cards on a loop of string, a row of flapping birds. One of the administrators has made an attempt to stretch some accordion gold chains between the strip lights, one of which pings off its Blu Tack, fluttering down against the wall.

Four days to Christmas, seventy-seven hours missing, the golden hour having ebbed away. He looks up at the television screen which is bracketed to the wall and sees the aerial shots of the search teams, muted on the twenty-four-hour-news channel – tiny people in navy vests with ‘Police’ on the back, or in florescent yellow windcheaters, combing squares of gardens, beating bushes with sticks; white vans on street corners; and huddles of officers bent over maps or talking to residents. All of it silent while the red ticker along the bottom of the screen says:
Missing student Edith Hind, latest: frogmen search the Ouse.
The image flicks to a navy dinghy skirting the brown soupy surface of the river. Must be the worst job, he thinks; you could only ever come up with something nasty or nothing at all. Then there’s a shot of the members of the public who have joined the search, forming a long line to inch their way across Portholme Meadow. Most appear to be chatting to one another, without so much as a glance around them.

He drapes his coat over the back of his chair and is about to get a coffee from the filter machine where it stews and burns, when Manon enters the room. He lifts his empty mug at her and she nods back, a thumbs-up. She seems to be walking gingerly, and having trouble taking off her coat. As Davy gets her a coffee, he sees Stuart, the new recruit, approach and lift the coat from her shoulders while she winces, and they both laugh at something.

Davy doesn’t know how he does it, but every time Stuart looks up from under his Disney Princess eyelashes, every woman in the room titters as if she’s at a sixth-form disco. He’s got so much confidence, like when Harriet had been talking to him about some quirk of the HOLMES database, and he’d picked a bit of fluff off the shoulder of her jacket and, momentarily, she hadn’t known what on earth to do with herself. Davy would never have the guts to be like that with senior police officers. Marvelling, he carries two coffees back to his desk, puts down his own and hands the second to Manon, who takes it while looking at her screen.

Christmas is weighing on Davy’s mind, especially what to buy his mother. Bed socks, perhaps – cashmere – or would that be too strong a reference to her bedridden years? All those weeks and months when Davy cast himself as the light bulb to her dark recess. He wants to get her something nice, because Christmas is hard on her, the way it dredged up painful memories of when his father left, seventeen years ago. She asks Davy endless questions about his father, who continues to live happily with Sharon the lollipop lady in Kent. He couldn’t, of course, go and spend Christmas with them – even though their Christmases sound rather raucous, with Sharon’s extended family gathering for one long knees-up and walks along the Whitstable seafront. No, that would be a disloyalty too far.

‘There’s a briefing,’ he says to Manon. ‘This afternoon. Child protection teams, multi-agency. It was on the board.’

‘Can’t go to that,’ says Manon, sipping her coffee. ‘Too much to do.’

‘Boss says we have to. Three-line whip.’

‘What time?’

‘Three o’clock. Short one, but we can’t get out of it.’

Davy is glad it’s compulsory. They should know, his colleagues, what’s really happening – what he sees at the youth centre. He’s been mentoring a lad called Ryan, twelve years old, who was taken into care at ten after being admitted to hospital a second time with broken forearms. There were boot prints on his skin. Every time Ryan walked through his front door at home, he got a pummelling, if not from whichever lowlife his mum was seeing, then from his mum. She liked to put her cigarettes out on him.

Davy bought Ryan a fart gun for his eleventh birthday, which Ryan looked at with contempt, saying it was for babies and he wanted a Nintendo DS or a Wii, but Davy had ignored him, letting off the gun under the table at McDonald’s so that diners at the next table began to whisper and grimace. Back at the centre, Ryan started to play with the gun, parping and trumping at his friends as they texted irritably on the red foam sofas. Ryan laughed and laughed, ticklish, tearful giggling, and it was as if he was four years old, and six years old, and eleven – all the ages he hadn’t been allowed to be. He loved to laugh, Ryan did, once he granted himself the freedom of it, which was hard to come by, and when the laughing overtook him, as it had with the fart gun, his face radiated like sparkling sunshine on water.

‘They’re sending me back,’ Ryan told Davy on his last visit.

‘Back?’ said Davy, stunned. ‘Where? Back to your mum?’

Ryan nodded, swallowing. ‘No room for me at Aldridge House no more. They cut back two of the staff – Evangeline and Rob, the only nice ones. Now there’s not enough adults for all the kids – the ratio, they call it – so I have to go.’

‘What does your mum say?’

‘Dunno, they haven’t got hold of her yet. All she cares about is the money.’ He put on a screeching voice. ‘“How am I supposed to feed ’im when I got naaa money?” C’mon, let’s play.’

Then, when they were standing around the green baize table taking turns, Ryan returned to the subject. He had the snooker cue across his shoulders, his arms draped over it like a coat hanger, and he said, ‘Least I’m not Jayden.’

‘What’s happened to him?’ asked Davy, leaning his whole body on the table to pot the red.

‘He’s been kicked out of Aldridge an’ all. Been placed in a house with two paedos. Everyone knows they’re nonces but social services say it’s all they’ve got. I’d rather be on the street.’

‘How old is Jayden?’ asks Davy, rubbing chalk on the end of his cue while Ryan walks around the table, looking for angles.

‘Ten.’

If Davy could do what he actually wanted this Christmas, he’d spend it with Ryan at the youth centre. Serving watery turkey with packet stuffing. Playing pool in his snowman tank top with a paper hat on and letting off the fart gun when Ryan least expects it.