Everyone around the table is silent. Everyone is thinking the same thing: it will incense Sir Ian Hind, who will be straight on the phone to Roger Galloway, who will be straight on the phone to Cambridgeshire Commissioner, Sir Brian Peabody, who will be straight on the phone to Gary Stanton.
‘I can handle it,’ he says mildly, as if reading their thoughts. ‘I’ve got to run this investigation with the same instincts I’d run any other, and that’s with the view that she’s come to harm and that a lover or sexual liaison of some kind is at the heart of her disappearance.’
‘Won’t mentioning a female lover make things hysterical?’ asks Manon.
‘Unavoidable,’ says Stanton. ‘You pour milk on the step, see who laps it up.’
‘Sorry, what?’ says Harriet.
‘We need people to come forward,’ says Stanton. ‘And to be honest, we need Edith back in the public mind.’
‘Even if it’s naked and engaging in some girl-on-girl action,’ says Colin, with an inadvertent after-snort.
‘Shouldn’t we risk-assess Helena Reed then?’ says Manon. ‘Her world will come crashing down when you go on telly and talk about a female lover. I’d say she wasn’t the toughest person to start with.’
‘Yes, we certainly need to warn her. Kim, I’d like you to go round there, talk her through the whole thing. Tell her Crimewatch is going out on Wednesday night, reassure her we’re not naming anyone, but offer her support if she needs it. She can have a liaison officer with her in her flat.’
Kim nods.
‘Can we please have an update on the Taylor Dent investigation, Harriet?’ says Stanton.
‘Right,’ says Harriet, with a deep sigh. ‘No DNA at Deeping or George Street. No phone contact, as far as we know but, of course, Dent might have had an additional phone or phones we don’t currently know about. Met’s looking into that one, and of course we’re cross-referencing with unknown-515 – the mobile Edith called twice in the week before she disappeared.’
‘What about the Dent family?’ says Stanton. ‘Anything come up?’
‘Younger brother, Fly,’ Manon says, ‘reported Taylor missing on Monday twelfth of December after school, so a week before Edith’s disappearance. Taylor hadn’t come home the night before. Went out, on some deal or other from the sounds of it. Before he left, he told his brother things were going to change, which indicates that he was going to make some money. Sounded quite pumped about it. Anyway, younger brother woke up on Monday, no Taylor in the bed next to him, got really worried but wanted to wait to see if he showed during the day. Then reported him missing, but the Met basically told him to go away and stop worrying because Taylor was seventeen and old enough to look after himself.’
‘In other words, he wasn’t worth investigating,’ says Davy, thinking of Ryan.
‘Kilburn CID have got officers working their way through Dent’s associates, but to be honest, they’re not that easy to pin down,’ Manon says.
‘Dent isn’t coming up on any rail CCTV out of London. Looks like he must’ve got here in a car,’ says Kim.
‘OK,’ says Stanton, hands flat on the desk as if steadying himself. ‘If there are no firm connections emerging between Dent and Hind, and we can’t establish ownership of unknown-515, then I’m going to have to hand the Dent murder investigation on to team two. We just don’t have the resources to run the two cases out of one team,’ says Stanton.
‘But,’ Manon blurts, and Davy looks at her. She’s shifting in her seat, saying, ‘We might find … later, I mean …’ but she trails off.
‘Last thing, people,’ Stanton is saying. ‘Forensic Management Team meeting.’ Groans erupt around the room. Money talk – the FMT meetings balance investigative needs against budget. Tighten your belts, in other words. ‘We’ve been informed that we are overspending on the Hind investigation and that we should rein it in. To that end, Nigel Williams and Nick Briggs are being seconded to team two, to help on the Dent murder, while the scaled-down team continues to work on Hind.’
‘Sorry, boss,’ says Harriet, ‘but you’re cutting our team the night before Crimewatch goes out and buries us in a steaming pile of false leads?’
‘That’d be about the size of it,’ he says, up from his seat, the folders back under his arm. ‘This is the age of austerity, DI Harper. Haven’t you heard?’
‘Toast with anchovies,’ Colin is saying to Kim, as the room breaks up. ‘’Cept the oil always drips down your chin, which can greatly mar the enjoyment of Columbo.’
Miriam
She’s awake, bruised by her dream.
If she could, she would avoid sleep altogether, but the nights are so tortured and restless – cups of tea in the kitchen, endless trips to the loo, trying out various beds in the hope a cold pillow might do the trick – that she often succumbs to her exhaustion come late afternoon. In her dreams, Edith appears before her in altered states – wearing strangers’ clothes, or with a face transmogrified in some eerie way. A shapeshifter, part gangster’s moll, half ghoul.
The police have asked them whether Edith knew Tony Wright or Taylor Dent, and she wonders what web her daughter has got caught in. What does Miriam know about her own child, really? Every detail a fresh assault – the relationship with Helena, the questioning texts to Rollo. What on earth was going on in Edith’s life? Any confidence Miriam ever had in herself as a mother has been eroded, and what is that confidence built on anyway, she thinks now – the luck of one’s children? The DNA lottery? If they’re bright and successful, you congratulate yourself. If they fall by the wayside, the world judges you. These days, she could be told anything at all about Edith and she’d be forced to accommodate it, because she knows nothing. She thought Edith loved her.
Miriam picks up the Mother’s Day card, one she has retrieved from her bedside table where she treasures all the missives from her children. In Edith’s neat, perfectionist hand:
Dearest Mum,
You are the tops.
I love you, and I know I never tell you that – at least, not enough.
E x
She remembers Ian’s mock outrage. ‘Why I don’t get cards like that?’
‘Because her adoration of you is writ so large,’ Miriam said at the time. ‘She has to express it to me.’
He has been crying in his study. She heard him on her way up the stairs an hour ago, had stopped, one hand on the banister, curious to hear his upset expressed. Man sobs are so uncommon, they were quite interesting. His were strangulated, as if his tears were out to choke him. Hers come unbidden, like a flood, dissolving her outline, and it’s as if she has failed to stand up to them. A weakness of tears.
She stood listening, but she didn’t go to him. The strain is widening between them, like a jack ratcheting open a notch with every day missing; every detail a fresh violence separating them. Ian’s answer to helplessness is criticism, and she is its focus, implied in all his Rushing About Being Important; his interviewing of private investigators (a precaution); his poster printing; calls to their lawyer; and complaints to newspaper editors over intrusion. He never stops, his lined face saying to her: And what exactly have you been doing?
He never acknowledges the toll on her, in part because she keeps it to herself, like the furtive trip she has taken to Huntingdon where she walked the unsightly route beneath the concrete underpass from the station to George Street. She stopped outside Edith’s house, unable to let herself in because its interior, black with fingerprint dust, was too much a crime scene. So instead she went down to the town centre, where she looked into the eyes of every person, and wanted to lift her face to the sky and let out a wail because she didn’t know what to do. The world is tipping, vertiginous, her organs plummeting away. Fear is so physical.
No, she hasn’t told him any of this, and every time he looks for her, it seems she’s lying on the bed in the dusky half-light of their bedroom, as she is now, the back of one hand resting on her forehead. She notices the wrinkles about her knuckles, pushes
at a ring – a huge citrine oval, the colour of honey, in a thick silver setting – with the pad of her thumb, rotating it.
It isn’t just her; he’s growing increasingly critical of the police, Googling the officers in the investigating team in the hope of tracking their passage through the ranks of the force, the extent of their experience and training. Except all Google brings up are snippets of ancient news stories. She wonders what Ian can extrapolate from DI Harper warning the good motorists of Bedfordshire to lock their cars in 2006. His relief at having Stanton at the helm has been short-lived, Ian’s current position on Stanton being that he ‘isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer’, hence his research into private investigators.
‘Why don’t you talk to Roger if you’re worried?’ Miriam said, while they got ready for bed one evening.
‘I don’t want to pull rank on Stanton just yet,’ Ian replied. ‘It could do more harm than good. Keeping my powder dry for now.’
Rog and Patty had been in touch, of course – an answer machine message and a lovely card with hibiscus on it. If there’s anything we can do …
She presses her hand into the back of her neck to massage it and thinks: these things don’t bring you together, they tear you apart. There is no place else to go except towards blame, as if into the arms of a lover. If Ian hadn’t pushed Edith so hard. If she, Miriam, wasn’t so passive. If Rollo wasn’t so alive. It was everyone’s fault because it was no one’s.
Miriam hears the bedroom door handle turn, both longing for and dreading it to be Ian, and soon enough he is sitting on the side of the bed. He strokes her arm – the one laid beside her body – and sighs deeply, but she doesn’t look at him.
‘I’m so sorry, Miri.’
He starts to cry and she heaves herself up to look at him, curious and moved by him at the same time.
‘What are you sorry for?’
‘For everything … for everything I’ve done,’ he says. He is not looking at her. He is hiding his face from her. ‘I haven’t been a good husband to you.’
‘I feel as if you hate me,’ she says.
‘Of course I don’t hate you. I love you. I love you inordinately.’
He puts his arms around her and she lifts her face to kiss him. He kisses her back, but in a way that has a full stop at the end of it, when she had hoped it would lead on. A consummation. They need to come together and this is how husbands and wives come together, but these things are so often mistimed, their meanings taken the wrong way. How often had they refused each other out of bitterness or tiredness or standoffishness or a little bit of all three?
‘Why don’t I take you out for dinner tonight?’ he says. ‘La Gaffe, or the new bistro, the French one. Might be our last chance before the oafs are back on the doorstop tomorrow.’
He is a good husband. He is here and he loves her. Inordinately.
‘It would seem like celebrating,’ she says.
‘No it wouldn’t. Come on. Get up. We don’t help Edith by being prisoners.’
Wednesday
Davy
‘Colonel Bufton Tufton’s downstairs, and he’s not happy,’ says Kim.
‘Downstairs? Ian Hind?’ says Harriet.
‘Downstairs. Pacing like a caged bear.’
‘Did we have a meeting I’ve forgotten about?’ Harriet says to Davy, who shrugs, following her at a jog to keep up with her pelt down the stairs, while she says, ‘Probably here to bollock me about something.’ Then she stops and looks at Davy. ‘It’ll be the female lover line. I didn’t think he knew. Guess the FLO filled him in. Shit, he’ll be livid. Typical Stanton, out on a jolly when the shit hits the fan.’
‘Is everything all right, Sir Ian?’ says Harriet, waiting for Davy to enter, then closing the door to interview room one.
He is pacing up and down, fast, exactly as Kim described, like a bear in a tight space who hasn’t been fed.
‘Where is Superintendent Stanton?’ he says, his navy coat flying as he turns.
‘He’s not at HQ today,’ says Harriet. ‘What’s the matter, Sir Ian?’
‘You are systematically destroying my daughter’s reputation.’
‘I don’t think saying she had a female lover is derogatory, is it?’
‘It’s prurient,’ he says. Davy isn’t entirely clear what prurient means. ‘It’s salacious.’ Ah right, thinks Davy, that’s what it means. ‘It’s dirtying her in the mind of the general public, and they don’t need much assistance, let me tell you. You are riding roughshod over my family and I—’ He is stopped by a catch of emotion in his throat, except he appears to Davy to be too angry for tears.
‘Sir Ian, I promise you that is not our intention. We want to find Edith and we want to find her alive. We’ll do anything, anything at all, and that includes embarrassing her, and possibly you, though you have no reason to be embarrassed—’
‘My wife is crying on the bed, appalled about the things you’re saying about Edie, terrified about what your sergeant told us – about Tony Wright. I looked up his offences and they’re horrific.’
‘We have looked at Tony Wright, just as we look at all known offenders with appropriate previous convictions. It’s a line of—’
‘A line? You’ve told us some knife-wielding sexual predator might have had something to do with her disappearance and then you … you leave us to it?’
‘Wright has an alibi,’ Harriet says. ‘A very strong alibi. We are just keeping you informed. Look, I know this is upsetting. The reason we assign an FLO is to try to contain these sorts of fears and to answer any questions you might have. Try to calm down, Sir Ian. If you’d like to sit—’
‘No, I don’t want to sit. Everyone’s always telling me to sit or making me drink tea. I don’t like our FLO, and anyway, I want to know what you’re doing, what the investigation is doing. I don’t want to be patted by some mooning counsellor who wishes to contain me.’
‘We are looking at all avenues. Tony Wright is one of our lines of enquiry. Another is the possibility that Edith’s personal life – her lovers – is at the heart of what’s happened to her. We’re hoping the Crimewatch appeal will flush out new information.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he says. ‘Why, then, is your sergeant also talking to us about a boy – a boy called Dent, I think his name is.’
‘That is another line of enquiry.’
‘What do you mean “another line”?’
‘Taylor Dent’s body was found in the river near Ely last week. I think DS Bradshaw informed you of that, didn’t she? We are treating it as a murder investigation and we are looking into possible connections with the disappearance of your daughter. The two events had a similar time frame. It would be quite wrong if we didn’t look into connections between the two incidents.’
‘Forgive me, forgive me, DI Harper,’ he says, frowning and shaking his head. ‘How can you possibly focus your investigation if you are vaguely looking into everything? If you have multiple lines of enquiry, if you think it might be her love life, or it might be this lowlife, or it might be the boy in the river, then what on earth is your lead? Where is your focus?’ He turns, hones in on Harriet with cold, grey eyes in a way which, Davy notices, makes her pretend to read some notes on her clipboard. ‘Inspector, is it Tony Wright or Taylor Dent? You don’t seem to know. Or is it, in fact, that you’re out of your depth being SIO on a case this big, and so you’re frantically trying to investigate everything?’ He is downright scary-furious, like a headmaster telling her off.
‘I … we’re following up all possible leads,’ says Harriet, fingering the corner of a page.
‘Which is it?’ Sir Ian booms. His knuckles are on the desk and he’s hunched over Harriet. It’s as if he’s about to bang on the table.
‘It’s hard to say exactly,’ says Harriet. ‘At this point, multiple avenues—’
‘You’re supposed to be leading this enquiry, so lead it. Is it Taylor Dent or is it Tony Wright?’
‘To be honest, neither of
them are holding up that well under scrutiny. But if I, I, I – if I had to, well, I’d say Wright is a stronger lead, but his alibi—’
Sir Ian exhales, straightens, and more gently says, ‘Right, so shouldn’t you be putting all your resources into Tony Wright then, DI Harper?’
Ian Hind marches out of the room and out of the station, into his Jaguar and back to London, they all hope.
Davy waits with Harriet outside interview room one. She is leaning against the corridor wall, head back, blowing out through pursed lips. ‘Fuck,’ she whispers. She opens her eyes and looks at Davy, still with her head back. ‘That was me at my finest. Watch and learn, Davy Walker.’
‘You certainly gave him what for.’
‘I did, didn’t I?’
‘At least he knows who’s boss,’ says Davy.
Kim is walking towards them, back from visiting Helena Reed.
‘How was she?’ asks Harriet.
‘Yeah, all right. She’s a bit out of it. I’m not sure she quite understands what it means in terms of the press an’ that.’
‘Did you make her aware?’
‘Did my best. I told her she might want to lie low, go and stay with family. Told her officers could sit with her if she wanted. She said she couldn’t go to family, was shifty about why, and said she didn’t need our support.’
‘OK, write it up, will you?’ says Harriet.
Thursday
Manon
The phones are shrieking, over and above each other, like wailing babies demanding immediate attention. She has 148 unread emails in her inbox. The chorus, persistent and shrill, of keyboards clacking, voices, and mobiles bleeping is drilling into her frontal lobe and transforming itself into piercing pain downwards towards her left eye. The department has gone into overdrive since Crimewatch was broadcast last night.
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