‘Can I get a suit from your car?’
‘Here you go,’ he says, holding up his keys. ‘I’ll start a log now. Don’t tell Harriet.’
She returns, rustling in white paper, her egg-shaped hood encasing her face, and holds Davy’s arm as she pulls on some blue outer shoes.
‘Very fetching,’ he says.
‘I think so,’ says Manon, at his knees. ‘Who’s in there?’
‘Harriet and the missing girl’s boyfriend. She’s keen to shut the place down. I’d wait out here if I were you.’
Manon straightens. ‘Bollocks, I won’t touch anything. Why’ve we not got a DCI on this?’
Davy shrugs. ‘Christmas rota. Draper’s on an aggravated burglary in Peterborough. Stanton’s in the Maldives. Staffing’s back to the bone.’
She steps into the hallway where the coats have dropped from their hooks like fallen soldiers. They scatter the floor. Some of the hoods retain the pointed imprint of the hook on which they hung. Light anoraks (one navy, one red), a fleece (grey), two thick winter coats of the padded kind, one an olive parka with fur trim, the other navy. Leaning against the wall is a rucksack with the handle of a tennis racket poking out; some trainers line the skirting; a Hessian shopper with the words ‘Huntingdon Estates’ written on it. In front of her, on the laminate floor leading to the kitchen, are a couple of drips of blood – not a copious spattering or pooling of the kind they saw in killings, but the type of blood that might come from an injury such as a cut.
Harriet appears in the kitchen doorway.
‘Manon, can you come through? Watch the floor, there,’ she says as Manon tiptoes towards the threshold. ‘Don’t step in the evidence. Manon, this is Will Carter. Mr Carter, this is Detective Sergeant Bradshaw. Mr Carter has reported his girlfriend Edith Hind missing. He returned home at 9 p.m. this evening to find the front door ajar, the coats in disarray and blood over there.’ She points to a larger spatter on the kitchen floor, and some on the cupboard door just above it.
‘Miss Hind’s phone, keys, shoes, and coat were all in the house,’ Harriet says.
Will Carter is pacing, running a hand through his hair. He is preposterously handsome, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a cable-knit jumper, as if he has just stepped out of a razor advertisement. Manon glances at Harriet, who gives her a look which says: Yes, you can shut your gob now.
‘Is there anyone she might be with – a friend or relative?’ asks Manon.
‘I’ve called everyone I can think of,’ says Carter. ‘I’ve called her parents; they’re in London. They haven’t heard from her. And her friend Helena, she was with Edith last night at a party. She says she dropped Edith back here at around midnight. Hasn’t seen or heard from her today.’
‘When did you last speak to Edith?’ says Harriet.
‘Saturday early evening, just before she went out with Helena.’
‘Did she sound her normal self?’
‘Yes, I mean, it was a very quick call.’
‘And I’m sorry, Mr Carter,’ says Manon, ‘you were where?’
‘I’ve been away for the weekend in Stoke. Visiting my mum.’
‘Is there anywhere she might have gone?’ asks Manon. ‘A favourite place? Might she have just wanted time alone?’
‘I don’t see where she could have gone without her keys or her phone or her car.’
‘Car’s outside,’ explains Harriet.
‘I’ve gone through the contacts on her phone, called people who were at the party on Saturday night, our friends at college. Everyone I could think of. No one’s heard from her. I started to panic. Her parents told me to call the police. I mean, not that I wouldn’t have called, but you never know if you’re overreacting, d’you know what I mean? Can you get officers out there looking for her? It just doesn’t feel right. Something’s not right.’
‘What about her passport?’ asks Manon. ‘Is it here?’
‘I don’t know,’ Carter says. He goes to one of the kitchen drawers. ‘She keeps it in here,’ he says, pulling it out. He turns, holding up a small burgundy book. ‘It’s here. There’s a second home, Deeping – it’s her parents’ place, about half an hour’s drive away, near March. Edith’s got keys, but they’re on her key ring, there.’ He points to a bundle of keys on the kitchen table amid bits of paper with numbers written on them, an open diary, and mobile phones. ‘And anyway, you can’t get there without a car.’
‘Someone else might have driven her, perhaps?’ says Manon.
He shrugs. ‘But who? The phone, her keys – she never leaves that stuff. I mean, who does?’
‘Is there any reason she might have wanted to frighten you? Were you on good terms?’ asks Harriet.
Carter is shaking his head before she has even stopped talking. ‘No, no, she wouldn’t. We were on the best of terms. Everything’s good. Better than good. When will you start searching? It’s freezing outside and she hasn’t got her coat.’
‘How do you know, sir?’ says Harriet. ‘The coats appear to have fallen all over the place.’
‘I checked,’ says Carter. ‘I looked through them. I don’t know if I should have, but I wanted to know if she had it or not.’
‘It doesn’t look like you’ve gone through them. They appear to be as they fell.’
‘It only took a cursory look to see that her coat is there – the green one. The parka with the fur trim.’
‘Might she have taken another one?’
‘She hasn’t, I know she hasn’t, and anyway, why would they be all over the floor like that?’
‘A word, Manon, please,’ says Harriet, gesturing outside the kitchen. They step around the blood drips in the hallway and into the lounge next door, which is under-furnished and struggling to emerge from the miasma of an energy-saving light bulb. They speak in low murmurs.
‘Blimey,’ whispers Manon. ‘He’s …’ She blows out through her cheeks.
‘Very agitated, yes. What do you think? Enough to qualify as a high-risk misper? Davy and I have done a search of the house. We need to scope this country place, Deeping, soon as.’
‘Anything upstairs? Any signs of struggle?’
‘Not that I can make out. I want to shut the place down so we don’t lose anything, get SOCO looking at that blood.’
‘She might have disappeared in the early hours this morning,’ says Manon, looking at her watch.
Harriet nods. ‘That’s twenty hours.’
They are silent. They both know the first seventy-two hours are critical for a high-risk missing person. You find them or you look for a body.
‘If that blood’s hers, which is pretty likely, then she could be out there bleeding in some garden or lay-by. We need dogs and we need a helicopter. I want you to set parameters for the early search. I want you to get as many bodies up here as you can to begin house to house and we’ll need to start scoping for CCTV.’
Manon nods. ‘Can I have Davy?’
‘Yep.’
‘Shame Stanton’s missing out.’
‘That’s what happens when you fuck off to the Maldives.’
Manon sends officers straight to Deeping, but there is no sign of the girl there. The helicopter takes two hours to get to them from the Midlands. It hovers loudly, searching back gardens, alleys, and motorway verges for a woman in her twenties clutching an injury, or a slumped figure. The helicopter’s underside is like a black insect against the navy sky, the beat of its blades rhythmic and relentless. It covers swathes of ground in a way officers on foot or in cars cannot hope to do. If its throbbing drone hasn’t woken the neighbours then the dogs will, panting and snuffling under hedges and straining up paths, the scent of Edith Hind still on their snouts from her nightdress. Or the door knocks, neighbours emerging with bed hair in the brash light of their hallways. It’s clod-footed, this type of early search – urgent and messy. Manon coordinates it all on the phone in Davy’s unmarked car, calling in officers from across the county, hearing them report back from house to house, keepin
g Harriet up to date back at the station, where she is re-interviewing Will Carter.
At 6 a.m. there is a hiatus when there are no more calls she can make, so Manon returns home for a shower and to change her clothes. She pulls at her eyes in the mirror and sees the undernourishment of the night on her skin but also the adrenalin, which has made her pupils dilate. This is why she entered the police – cases like this. Whoppers, the ones you wait weeks or months for, a whole career, even.
Harriet is the same. She’d been made DI after her work on the Soham murders, the case which shaped Cambridgeshire policing more than any other because it was so high profile and because it came to define the battle lines between police and press. The disappearance of two pretty girls in the shimmering, lazy news lull of August. The press had been on their side for one or two days, driving the appeals for witnesses, and then it grew ferocious, like a dog unmuzzled, with resources that outstripped the Major Incident Team’s. Officers suspected hacking, enraged that they themselves had to wait days for authorisation to trace phones; they found themselves showing up to interview potential witnesses, only to find reporters had been there an hour earlier. Some of the more brazen Sunday tabloids hired private detectives and they were all over it, corrupting with their money, turning over evidence, leaving their mark.
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.
Monday
Davy
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.’
Missing, Presumed Page 3