‘Not unless Edith Hind was a young male of mixed race,’ says Mackeith.
‘I thought—’
‘Ah, yes, sorry about that. Spartan Rescue seem a bit jumpy about not having found the Hind girl. False alarm. Pretty obvious the minute we hooked him out. We did try and call you. You’re welcome to have a look but I’d say you guys are not needed. He’s a jumper, if you ask me. We’ll get an ID from fingerprints, I should imagine. Coroner can take it from there.’
Manon looks past Mackeith, and the throng of frogmen and uniformed officers has parted to reveal the body: muddied, discoloured, and vastly distended. A blue, marbled Buddha.
‘How long ago – any idea?’ she asks.
‘This time of year, water’s quite cold. There’s only moderate decomposition. Two to three weeks, I’d say.’
‘Did you find a wallet, phone?’ she says to the representative of Spartan Rescue, who has rustled towards them in his expensive windcheater. Navy, with pink fleecy trim.
‘No, ma’am, nothing. Just the clothes he was wearing – jeans and a hoodie and some rather expensive trainers, which would’ve helped him sink to the bottom. If you’ve nothing further, we’ll get him to the mortuary.’
They stand on the doorstep of a sawdust-coloured barn, brash new timbers bordered by prissy hedges. But when Manon and Davy walk inside, to interview the dog walker who found the body, they both look up in silent awe at the double-height atrium, thick oak beams criss-crossing the vaulted roof and cathedral-size windows.
‘We’ll try not to take up too much of your time,’ says Manon.
‘No, please. Come and sit down. Can I make you coffee?’ His voice is deep and slow. He walks with a slight stoop in his voluminous corduroys. His bowed head is gentle and apologetic.
‘Coffee would be lovely, thanks,’ says Manon. ‘It’s freezing out there.’
‘This place is amazing,’ says Davy, who has approached the window. The sky has turned pink, striated yellow; a radioactive lozenge at its centre, reflected in the river. Along its banks, leafless trees are silhouetted. The pink of the sunset – so fleshy and garish – has stretched its arm into the room, giving them all a Californian tan.
In front of the wall of windows is a refectory table with two benches, its surface strewn with newspapers. On the other side of the room, a wood-burning stove and russet-coloured dog in front of it in a basket. It raised its head when they entered but lowers it again now, un-fussed.
‘She’s very elderly,’ explains Alan Prenderghast (Davy has whispered his name in Manon’s ear), who is now at the open-plan kitchen area, turning levers on a complex silver coffee machine. The kitchen is a dark U-shape with slate-grey cupboards and black worktop.
‘Lovely view,’ Manon says, joining Davy at the windows and watching the sun squat on the horizon, peppered with birds. She looks to her right and sees a frayed armchair and a pair of binoculars on a table beside it. Silence for a while, which Davy would normally try to fill, but they are both hypnotised by the stillness and scale of the house and its view.
At last, Mr Prenderghast comes to stand next to her and is handing her a cup of coffee, froth covering its surface.
‘It’s my favourite thing about this house,’ he says, looking out with her.
Her cup’s roasted smell drifts up like smoke.
‘You see that field opposite – on the other bank of the river? Every winter it’s allowed to flood and it fills up with literally thousands of birds. Ducks, geese, swans. Teeming with life. Great skeins of them fly in from Scandinavia. I could watch it all day, the landing and the flying off. It’s a very sad view, somehow.’
His voice is calm. It is as if he is selecting every word. The ruffled sleeve of care – his voice could un-ruffle it. She looks at the view, the sunset colours like a bruise, and the bare trees. He’s right – it is the saddest view she has ever seen. She wants to stay in this kitchen, which is so warm and yet so quietly morbid – silent and slow and away from the town – even though she has never been one of those people for whom the countryside is an idyll.
‘It must’ve been a shock, finding the body,’ she says.
‘It wasn’t what I was expecting, no,’ he says. ‘I’ve never seen one before and it was much worse than I imagined, actually. Who was it?’
‘We don’t know yet. A young man. We’ll have an ID by close of play today.’
‘Not the girl, then,’ he says. ‘The one who went missing before Christmas.’
‘No. Not the girl.’
He nods, stooping to sip his coffee while his free hand digs into his trouser pocket.
Davy is sitting at the refectory table with his notepad out. ‘Can I ask what you do for a living?’ he says.
Manon has strolled over to the bookshelves, which are to one side of the stove. They are tall and crammed, with a library ladder propped against one section. Tender is the Night. American Pastoral. Far from the Madding Crowd. Birthday Letters. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas.
‘Yes, of course,’ Mr Prenderghast says to Davy. ‘I’m a systems analyst at Cambs Biotech.’
Freud. John le Carré. A history of Labour foreign policy in the post-war years.
‘What’s a systems analyst, if you don’t mind me asking?’ says Davy.
‘Oh, it’s terribly boring. I basically make the computer system work for a large pharmaceutical company – the sort of global conglomerate that Guardian readers hate.’
‘Where’s it based?’ asks Manon.
‘Outskirts of Cambridge, towards Newmarket. One of those charmless industrial estates. But I’ve been working from home this week – the office is deserted this time of year.’
‘Did you study English at university?’ asks Manon, glancing back at the bookshelves.
‘No, quite a few of those are for a course I’m doing. Open University. The others are for pleasure. I wasn’t … I didn’t go. To college, I mean.’
‘And you were walking your dog this morning?’ says Davy, pen poised.
‘Yes. My usual walk, to give Nana her run-around. Well, more of a hobble these days. We took the path along the river. Nana,’ he says, nodding at the dog, and her eyebrows move independently at this, like two caterpillars, though her head remains lowered in her basket, ‘started to scratch at some tree roots close to the bank. I kept calling her but she wouldn’t come away, so eventually I went to fetch her and that’s when I saw it. Just the back. It was face down in the water.’ He coughs. ‘I shouldn’t say “it” – I mean him.’
They are all silent for a moment, in reverence for the body.
‘Thanks, Mr Prenderghast,’ says Manon. ‘I don’t think we need to detain you any longer.’
Davy and Manon begin to gather their coats. It takes them a few moments to re-bury themselves in scarves and gloves.
‘Going out celebrating tomorrow night?’ asks Davy.
‘Ah yes, it’s New Year’s Eve, isn’t it?’ he says, smiling. ‘I’d forgotten. No, I’m afraid it’s not my thing. I’m not good with crowds.’
‘I love a New Year’s knees-up, myself,’ says Davy.
‘I’m with you, Mr Prenderghast,’ says Manon. ‘I can’t stand it.’
‘Call me Alan, please. I’ll be staying put. Watch a film maybe.’
‘What, by yourself?’ says Davy, appalled.
Manon casts Alan a conspiratorial look, as if they are Davy’s weary parents.
He laughs. ‘I do think there’s the most terrible fear of solitude these days – as if it’s some kind of disease. People can’t tolerate it. They want to be seen in a constant social whirl.’
‘I didn’t mean …’ says Davy.
‘No, no, I was only making a general point,’ he says, with one hand on the open door. ‘I can go on a bit, sorry. I’m probably defensive. Perhaps my unconscious wishes I’d go to a party, DC Walker. Well, thank you, officers. If I can help with anything else, then do call.’
Saturday
Davy
The cycle path – marvellously f
lat and open – takes him across the marshy flatlands of the Fens and though it’s bracing (he’d had to make himself brave the winter weather this morning), now he’s out in the air and going at an exhilarating speed, there’s nothing better. Davy has always kept himself active, though shift patterns sometimes intervene (especially during a whopper like the Hind case). Most mornings he runs at 6 a.m. or takes the bike out. He would never let himself slide, not after his mum and all that staying in bed or staring at the telly, shoving in chocolate bourbons like she was daring him to try and stop her.
This morning, Chloe had gone off to her job in Next on the high street – today being not just a Saturday, but New Year’s Eve, so a busy one – and he drove the car an hour out of Huntingdon, to Wisbech, so he could cycle some of the many excellent Fenland routes. He’s been yearning for time to think about how to have The Conversation with Chloe, and he’s been yearning also for a feeling of movement. There’s really nothing else like it, your body and your bike going at speed and the fresh scent of the countryside blowing into your lungs; big skies, in an enormous dome over the flatlands, and the river like a cool, grey road beside him.
He pedals harder, away from the images the river conjures, of the body from yesterday – the inflammation of his flesh, his blue-purple colour inhuman. Just a boy. And Davy can’t help but think about Ryan – what might happen to him without the protection of Aldridge House. He resolves to put in more calls, see if the social worker can do anything. Davy must try his best to stop Ryan ending up like that boy in the river, because before you know it, it can be too late, and he finds himself in a silent argument with Chloe, because she was always saying, ‘You love those kids more than me,’ and going into a sulk.
He wheels around a bend in the towpath, following the curve of the river, loving the way the bike tilts with him on it, against the laws of gravity, almost – they should topple but speed keeps his wheels turning, and the wind roars into his face and through the bare winter trees. No, he tells himself, this thinking time is not for Ryan or the Hind case, it’s for Chloe. Tonight could be the night to broach the subject of The Future, yet every time they’re together and the moment seems appropriate, something puts him off: music coming on a bit loud in the restaurant; bumping into someone they know in the pub; the urgent need for a poo (his, not hers – she’d never discuss something so vulgar).
He slows his bike and looks up at a blue sign pointing left, which says March. He could duck down there, have a nosey around Deeping. The case is bothering him more and more: Harriet still nagging away at the Tony Wright alibi; Will Carter far from in the clear, his return journey from Stoke still not verified. Manon reckons they should be looking more closely at the Director of Studies – this Graham Garfield chap – because when Davy and Manon asked about Garfield during one of their many interviews with the Hinds, they’d expressed ‘doubts’.
‘Doubts?’ Manon had said.
‘Well, Edith called us up very excited during the first term she had him. Said he’d told her she was exceptional – the brightest student he’d had in years,’ Sir Ian replied.
‘Why would that raise doubts?’ asked Davy, genuinely nonplussed.
‘Perhaps it shouldn’t have, DC Walker. But when a middle-aged man is that effusive about an attractive twenty-year-old—’
‘Come on, Ian, that’s not fair,’ Lady Hind said. ‘Maybe Edith was just working at full tilt.’
‘Yes, maybe, but there were other reasons. When she’d been out with her peers – this was when she was an undergrad – she mentioned he was often around, in the college bar and such like. Just seemed a bit … creepy, that’s all.’
‘And there’s that girl he had a fling with,’ Lady Hind said, touching her husband’s arm.
‘Yes, what was her name?’
‘Oh God, I can’t remember. Edith told us they were sleeping together. She actually said something along the lines of “Ew, gross.”’
‘None of it, of course, was threatening,’ Sir Ian said. ‘I think he’s a bit of a, well, pest is the word Edith used, to be honest.’
Dirty shagger, Davy thinks, wheeling away from the sign and the left-hand turn he hasn’t taken to March. That’s what Graham Garfield was, same thing his mum called his dad when his dad went off with Sharon – ‘dirty shagger’ and ‘selfish bastard with no thought for anyone but himself’.
Davy suggested they go easy on the Garfield chap, there being no law against being a dirty shagger, and it was not as if there was anything directly linking him to Edith on the Saturday night, his wife having confirmed that Garfield came home to her after The Crown.
‘Remember what Harriet told us, about alibis given by wives and mothers,’ said Manon. ‘You think because Garfield reads Tennyson, he couldn’t rape someone? You’re a snob, Davy Walker.’
‘Not that, he just seems too … gentlemanly, like he’s never had it rough.’
‘Posh people do fucked up just as well as everyone else,’ she said, ‘sometimes better.’
And he supposes she’d know, being half-posh herself, or on the way to it after going to Cambridge. So he’s trying to view Garfield in the light of Manon’s mistrust – the way, for example, Garfield wore the uniform of the academic (corduroys and elbow patches) and had the books he’d written facing forward on the shelf. Manon said this showed intellectual insecurity, though Davy thought it just made him look clever. Shaved heads and tattoos, that sent a different message altogether, and he thinks of Ryan again and the rough estate he used to live on (though God alone knows where he’s living now) and the unsavoury men who circle his mother.
Davy’s thoughts go round and round like the wheels on his bike, when he’s come out here to think about Chloe, because New Year’s Eve can take a romantic turn, although if he’s honest, he’d rather be going out on the razz with his friends. Chloe doesn’t meld with them too well, and whenever he’s tried to mix the two – his girlfriend and the gang from school – he’s ended up in the corner of the bar asking her over and over what the matter is. Perhaps he’ll skip The Conversation, after all, there being no hurry …
He’s forced to squeeze hard and sudden on the brakes, and he turns the front wheel sharply, the gravel spraying. A duck proceeds on its stately waddle across his path, one eye blinking at him with faint disdain, until it plops into the river to Davy’s right.
Manon
Swedish season at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse, all red velvet and the smell of brewing coffee. Women wearing big beads. She relishes the prospect of a Swedish film – it doesn’t even have to be noir. The Swedes are a nation who appreciate morbidity, unlike the British, who are just as depressed as everyone else but who like to project their darker feelings, saying to people in the street, ‘Cheer up, it might never happen!’ Cat calls like that make her want to take out her Taser.
She parks on a single yellow, less than a yard from the cinema’s broad steps. The cold is bitter and thin and she realises how fed up she is of it, how long it has been going on, tensing her body against it. Her left eye has become re-infected, the grit scratching her eyeball. It had recovered somewhat over Christmas and then, following the use of a particularly unappetising mascara, the soreness returned worse than before, her lashes gummed with a secretion which peeled away in clumps. It’s less painful if she keeps it shut. With the other eye, she sees various trouser legs and shoes on the cinema’s white step as she joins the queue, willing it to be quick so she can get out of the cold.
‘DS Bradshaw?’ says a male voice.
She looks up, still with one eye shut, and sees Alan Prenderghast stooping to search out her face.
‘Hello there,’ she says, her neck cricked – the reluctant mole. She smiles thinly, making a show of trying (but barely trying at all) to hide her disappointment at the prospect of him occupying her mind and preventing her losing herself in the film. And regret that she looks like she’s been punched in the eye.
‘So,’ he says. ‘We’ve had the same idea.’
>
‘Yes. The only way to spend New Year’s Eve, if you ask me.’ She looks away from him across the street. He strains his neck upwards to look over the heads in front and see how near they are to the kiosk. They shuffle forward slightly.
‘I found that, after yesterday, I didn’t want to be by myself after all. I felt the need to be in the town. Among people. Alive people,’ he says, with a damp sort of laugh.
‘Yes.’
‘We don’t have to sit together,’ he adds. ‘I rather love going to the cinema on my own, so I do understand.’
‘Oh, OK,’ says Manon, relieved and rejected. They shuffle forward and then to the snacks counter where she orders a real lemonade and organic popcorn, and he takes a coffee, which makes her feel like a child for ordering the sweet stuff. Then he asks for a family-sized box of Maltesers.
They walk into the dark plush of the screening room, velvet seats fraying on the arms. He nods, saying, ‘See you later, then,’ and moves down the aisle. They are watching Together by Lukas Moodysson, about a hippy commune in the 1970s and the waifs and strays who come together there.
Alan Prenderghast sits four rows ahead and to her left, so the side of his head is visible, though not his expression. Despite her obscured view, she thinks she can see him laughing when she glances across at him during the film, which she does often, the daylight scenes illuminating his head in flickering blues. She thinks she can see enjoyment written all over his shoulders. He seems to be hugging his family-sized box of Maltesers in delight and hugging his aloneness too, and taking pleasure in a good film with chocolate and a worn, comfortable seat, though who is to say whether it is his enjoyment or her own hopes for it, streaming forward like dancing rays from the projector.
She is ahead of him in the slow shuffling of people exiting the cinema. At the doorway, she smiles.
‘I’m going for a drink upstairs if you fancy joining me,’ he says.
‘Oh yes, that’s a good idea.’
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