This was the nightmare of being the SIO: pressure from every quarter, having to make decisions about which lines to investigate in what order of priority, trying to work out which information is important and which can be discarded, and all those decisions being scrutinised from above and often from outside.
‘Let’s not get bamboozled by Ian Hind,’ says Manon. ‘We still need to confirm their movements.’
This appears to have a calming effect on Harriet, who takes a deep breath and allows her shoulders to drop.
‘Yes, right. You’re right. Let’s put a call in to Galloway’s security detail. I want you two to drive out and scope this country pile, Deeping. See if that key’s been disturbed. And I want CCTV from the Post Office on the first of December – see who was looking over Edith’s shoulder when she picked up all that cash. Get Kim to check whether the landlord was paid his rent. I’m assuming he was interviewed during house to house. This is looking more like aggravated burglary by the minute.’
Manon and Davy make for the door.
‘And from now on,’ Harriet calls after them, ‘we treat Sir Bufton Tufton downstairs with the utterly slavish deference he so richly deserves.’
On one of the rare occasions Harriet had come to Cromwell’s and got drunk, she’d told Manon she had two consolations in life: swearing and Elsie.
Elsie was ninety-three with Parkinson’s. She lived in a care home, which had been raided by Harriet during an investigation into abuse of the elderly. Elsie had been in better shape then, standing with the help of a frame in the pink, over-heated hallway. She’d regarded Harriet with beady, critical eyes – they all saw it. It was as if the team stood still, as Harriet and the old girl locked on to each other. Some enchanted evening.
Elsie shuffled into the room to be interviewed, her shins thick, the colour of pine in tan tights, chenille slippers on her rigid, calcified feet. Harriet asked Elsie if she had been mistreated by any of the staff at the home. ‘Don’t be silly,’ Elsie barked, and Harriet had been momentarily chastened. The balance of power was all with Elsie, who snapped and criticised (‘Ever done this before, dearie?’), but Harriet persisted. Nightgowns removed how? What if the soup was unfinished? And if you wet the bed?
Gradually it emerged that Elsie believed her forgetfulness merited the odd slap. Her shaking hands drove them mad, you see. She couldn’t dress any more – well, that’s bound to get their backs up. Who’d want to dress a scrawny old bird like me?
Harriet said to leave it there just for now, and she fled the room. When Manon next saw her, she was leaning against a panda car, smoking a cigarette, looking furious and tearful at the same time. This is what Manon likes most about Harriet – no, not likes, understands: she isn’t on an even keel. She feels the work in every fibre and it hurts her.
‘I’m going to shut that fucking place down,’ she said, the cigarette tight between her fingers. ‘And that manager’s going to prison.’
Harriet got Elsie out of there by nightfall, much as she protested. The care home was taken over by new owners and the manager received a year’s sentence for wilful neglect, which was suspended ‘for previous good character’, so she walked free, confirming all Harriet’s suspicions that the courts are ‘a fucking joke’.
Manon knows that Harriet, and most of their colleagues, cleave to the view that criminals either get off or get off lightly; that the system is stacked against the police. She’s aware that if police officers were allowed to draw up the legislation, it would probably contain the words ‘and throw away the key’. What worries Manon is she’s joining their ranks. It can often feel as if they’re fighting a tide of filth and losing; you only needed to do a week in child protection to lose any liberal tendencies you ever had.
Harriet became Elsie’s visiting daughter, because Elsie had no children of her own – she was twenty-five when the war took the boy she loved at Arras in 1940. His name was Teddy and she kept a photo of him by her bed, but Manon thought he was more an emblem of what had gone wrong. Elsie had had an abruption in her life. Grief had held her up, during which time she worked in a munitions factory and discovered how much she liked to work, when it had never really been an option before. When she emerged from mourning after the war, she found herself looking at a timer where the sand was running low.
‘There were no men left,’ she told Harriet, laughing. ‘None who wanted an old spinster in her thirties like me, at any rate. It just never happened for me, the family thing.’
Harriet called on Elsie every week and Manon occasionally went with her, witnessing between them a conspiratorial warmth. Elsie looked at Harriet with mischievous eyes, saying, ‘Thrash you this time.’ They played cribbage, or bridge when they could make a four with other stooped residents in the care home, though death often intervened (‘Wilf not here?’ ‘Not any more, no.’). Blackjack, beggar-my-neighbour, sudoku, and crosswords. Then, as Elsie became more vague – the shaking and the vagueness accompanying one another as if staying fixed in thought and deed was ungraspable – the games became more infantile: Guess Who?, Connect Four, puzzles, and pairs.
Elsie humanised Harriet, who had a tendency to be hard. She was the obligation that made her feel stretched and needed. Her joyful complaint. That drunken night when Harriet had confided in Manon (her kindred spirit in singleness and childlessness), she said, ‘When you don’t have kids, everyone assumes you’re some fucking ball-breaking career freak, but it’s not like that. It’s more, y’know, a cock-up. It’s something that happened to me. Elsie gets that. Plus, I really fucking hope someone will visit me when I’m pissing my pants in a care home.’
Davy and Manon drive out of HQ car park in an unmarked car that wears its snow like a jaunty hat, but as soon as they turn out of the gates, they slow to a halt. The traffic is always terrible on Brampton Road, a permanent feature of their forays out on jobs, but this queue has been made worse by the diversions set up around Edith Hind’s house on George Street, combined with considerable rubbernecking from the fine folk of Huntingdon. Davy taps on the steering wheel with his gloved hand, a marker to Manon that he is unperturbed.
‘This’ll take hours,’ says Manon, slumping down into the passenger seat and wedging her feet onto the dashboard, her knees up. She has her phone in her lap, texting Bryony.
Can’t do lunch. High-risk misper just blew up in my face. M
‘Sarge,’ says Davy.
‘Hmmm?’ she says, and she looks up to see Davy casting anxious glances at her feet and at the spotless fascia of his glove box.
‘You couldn’t—’
Her phone bleeps.
No worries. Am loving my court papers. Nothing cd tear me away. Not even pepper-flavoured water. B
‘Sorry, what?’ she says to Davy.
‘Your feet,’ he says, with another furtive glance at the offending boots, as if they might detonate.
‘It’s not even your car,’ she says, her fingers working on her phone. But she takes her feet down.
Tomoz maybe. M
Is Harriet losing the plot?
Yep. Crapping herself. Victim’s family mates with Galloway.
Holy Shit.
Yup.
At least your career isn’t in cul-de-sac. May chew arm off if have to do more filing.
Go away, please, am in middle of Very Important Investigation.
All right, Mrs Big Tits. Laters. PS. It’s always the uncle. Or the stepfather. Or the boyfriend. Or possibly a complete stranger.
‘How was the date, by the way?’ Davy asks.
They are moving now – at last – having turned off onto the A14 towards the Fenland village of March.
‘Don’t ask.’
‘Can’t have been that bad.’
‘Can’t it?’
‘Well then, there’ll be others – other responses to your ad.’
‘It’s not an ad, Davy. I’m not selling roller blinds. It’s a profile.’
And what a work of fiction that ‘about me’ section is.<
br />
Genuine, easy-going. I love life and laughter, a bottle of wine with friends, cinema and walks in the countryside. Passionate about what I do. Looking for someone to share all this amazing world has to offer.
Age: 35
Looking for: fun/a long-term relationship/let’s see what happens
Likes: sunshine, the smell of fresh coffee, walks on the beach
Dislikes: unexpected items in bagging area
Manon cut-and-pasted most of it from someone else’s profile – a woman called Liz Temple from Berkhamsted, who claimed life was not about ‘sheltering from the thunderstorms’ but ‘learning to dance in the rain’. Except the bagging area joke – that was Manon’s and she was pretty pleased with it, feeling it made amusing reference to emotional baggage, of which there was a surfeit on the Internet.
Were she to tell the truth, her profile would go something like:
Misanthrope, staring down the barrel of childlessness. Yawning ability to find fault. Can give off WoD (Whiff of Desperation). A vast, bottomless galaxy of loneliness. Educated: to an intimidating degree. Willing to hide this. Prone to tears. Can be needy. Often found Googling ‘having a baby at 40’.
Age: 39
Looking for: book-reading philanthropist with psychotherapy training who can put up shelves. Can wear glasses (relaxed about this).
Dislikes: most of the fucktards I meet on the Internet.
‘Mustn’t give up, Sarge,’ says Davy.
‘Like I’d take relationship advice from you. Still treating you mean, is she?’
‘She keeps me on my toes.’
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
Davy is twenty-six but seems still a boy; has been in the force since eighteen, and something about him is irresistible to Manon. He has this naive intensity – like an only child, neither at home with the adults nor one of the children – and those enormous ears always on the alert. His affable demeanour and positive outlook have earned him the nickname ‘Silver’ among the DCs. Silver Lining, the boy who’s always looking on the bright side. He thinks the world might still come right if he just tries hard enough – which he does, all the time, mentoring at youth centres and looking out for every troubled child who crosses his path. But every silver lining has a cloud, and that cloud is Chloe.
Manon has seen them together more than once, though she and Davy never socialise outside the safety of office dos, Davy being of a different generation and this gulf becoming canyon-like outside the familiar hierarchies of work. One evening, however, they found themselves in the same pub, The Lord Protector on Mayfield Road. Manon was in a group from the station – a rowdy bunch, all pissed and telling terrible jokes (‘Invisible man’s at the door. Tell ’im I can’t see ’im. Hahahahahaha.’); Davy sat in a quiet corner with Chloe. Table for two.
Manon had watched them as the hubbub went on around her: Davy all animation, eyes on Chloe as if she were lit by some celestial cone, describing something to her. Chloe was looking over his shoulder, her face unmoving. She was a woman in a perpetual sulk and Davy was forever chivvying her out of it.
‘Face like a slapped arse,’ said Kim Delaney, looking across the room with Manon. ‘Dunno what he sees in her.’
But to Manon it makes perfect sense. Davy’s at his best when rectifying. He often comes into the office with a carrier bag destined for the youth centre where he volunteers – ‘Choccy Weetos for Ryan’, ‘Rex needs socks’ – and the brightness in his eyes tells her how much satisfaction this tenderness gives him. Warming up a frozen, miserable girlfriend is his destiny. If Davy got together with someone indomitably cheerful … well, Manon doesn’t know what he’d do with himself. End it all, probably.
‘I believe this leads to the abode,’ he says, as they turn down a wooded track. Bare tree branches bend over the car and verges rise up on either side. The sky seems to darken as the countryside burgeons around them.
‘Drop the Shotley guff, will you?’ says Manon, irritably. Davy loves the jargon they inculcate at police school. He’s forever saying the suspect ‘has made good his escape’ with his ‘ill-gotten gains’.
‘Bit peckish?’ says Davy, reaching into his pocket for a rich tea biscuit, which he hands to her.
‘This place is a bit Hansel and Gretel, isn’t it?’ says Manon, eating the biscuit and peering up at the menacing tree fingers that reach for each other above the windscreen. The car is rocking over stones.
‘Shouldn’t be far down this track,’ says Davy.
The track is bordered by logs, sawn ends forming a honeycomb grid. Their tyres plough through mud, which splinters with ice in places. The light lowers a notch, soaked up by the seaweed-gloss leaves on a row of bushes – rhododendrons, Davy says – ribboned with snow.
He is hunched towards the windscreen as they emerge in front of an ivy-clad house, broader than it is tall, with a pitch-roofed porch and a carport to the side. The house is ensconced in countryside, the woodland growing denser and darker to the sides and behind them.
With their arrival, a sensor light has clicked on above the front door – a rectangle of fire in Manon’s eyes. The ivy running up the walls of the house is straining in at the windows, whose wooden frames are painted greyish green.
‘Glad I’m not Polsa having to search this place,’ she says.
Davy turns off the engine so that all they can hear is its ticking and a blackbird, its lonely cry seeming to tell them the place is deserted.
Manon pats along the high shelf of architrave in the porch, and there it is, among dust and dead insects – the key. She puts it in an evidence bag, then uses Edith’s set in the lock. The brass knob, green-gold, is icy even through her latex gloves, and its round skirt-plate rattles loosely. They step into a black-and-white tiled hall with slate-blue walls. The house smells of wood smoke and the outdoors – an oxygenated, muddy smell that is not quite damp. An umbrella stand is filled with brollies and walking sticks, and to their left – Manon peers around the door, painted mustard yellow – is a boot room, wallpapered with Victorian images of birds as if in a shooting lodge. She squats next to a line of wellingtons – one black pair and three green – and touches the mud that cakes them.
‘Davy?’ she calls, and he appears by her side. ‘Does this look fresh to you?’
She swaps places with him and follows the hallway out to a baronial-scale lounge. The ceiling is double height, the walls blotchy with blood-red lime wash. There is a grand open fireplace with white stone surround – the sort you could rest an elbow on when you came in from fishing in the Fenland rivers. A charred black scar runs up the back of the brickwork in the hearth. Manon squats beside the grate but it contains only the cold, crocodile husks of burnt-through logs.
The fire is surrounded on three sides by red sofas patterned with fleur-de-lys and collapsing with age and gentility. She can imagine the Hinds reading their Dickens hardbacks or their subscriptions to the New York Review of Books, fire roaring and some string music playing in the background.
From the lounge is a staircase leading up to a minstrels’ gallery and off it, the bedrooms. Manon is feeling her way, the house cast in painterly shadows. Swathes of muddy colours curling up the staircase or viewed through an open bedroom door: mustard, rose, slate blues and grey, one leading on to the next. She pushes open a door to a vast bedroom – Ian and Miriam’s, she assumes, because it is furnished with a grand French bed, its headboard framed in ornate gold and upholstered with grey linen. There is an imposingly dark French armoire, too, its bottom drawer slightly open. Manon walks to the window – a long cushion in the same grey linen has created a window seat with two Liberty-print pink blossom pillows at either end. From here she can see the front drive and their car, and she has an urge to go towards it, to drive away.
She jumps at the sound of a door slamming and her heart thuds in the shadows of the mansard window.
‘Boss?’ calls Davy, entering the room.
‘Have you checked all the downstairs rooms?’
‘Right, well, let’s check the rest of the rooms up here and the outbuildings. Then Polsa can take it from there.’
‘Not a bad little bolt-hole,’ says Davy.
Manon shivers. ‘Gives me the creeps.’
Helena
They’ve left her waiting in interview room two and in the waiting, she can’t help but rehearse what she’ll say, though she fears the rehearsal will make her appear guilty, like trying to make your face seem natural when going through passport control in Moscow or Tehran – the more you think about it, the more rictus your expression becomes. Not that she’s ever been to those places, but even in the queue at Brittany Ferries she has made a point of catching the immigration officer’s eye and smiling, so as to say, ‘You won’t find any contraband in my backpack.’
The strip light above Helena’s head fizzes then plinks, as if there’s an insect dying inside it. She’s always rehearsing, having imaginary conversations in her head which pre-empt real encounters – like she’s rehearsed her return to Dr Young’s couch after the Christmas break and how she’ll tell him all that has happened with Edith. She used to rehearse her sessions so much that when she first started with Dr Young, it had taken quite a long time to get her to diverge from the script and ‘allow things to emerge’, as he put it.
Helena hears a door slam somewhere in the corridor, brisk footsteps, and her heart quickens at the prospect of someone coming in. She sits upright, brushes at her skirt, but the footsteps clack past the door and drift away. She slouches again. They are keeping her waiting deliberately in this empty room with only a Formica table with metal legs and blue plastic chairs – two on the other side of the desk to where she is sitting, so presumably there will be two of them. Outnumbered by detectives. She’s never met a detective before.
Missing, Presumed Page 5