Missing, Presumed

by Susie Steiner

  He brings up several shots of Edith: eyes yearningly intense, looking straight into the lens, one with a jumper falling off her shoulder, one in which she is lying on a bed, holding her phone above her. Just you and her.

  ‘Doesn’t prove anything,’ says Stuart. ‘She put them out there. Why do that if you don’t want to be leered at?’

  ‘Proves he had an unhealthy interest in her,’ says Harriet.

  ‘What sort of bloke wouldn’t go clicking about on those? She’s a hottie. What did she expect when she took them?’ says Colin.

  ‘Erm, freedom? Autonomy?’ says Kim.

  ‘Come off it – lying on the bed like that, all come and get me,’ Stuart says.

  ‘She might not know any better,’ says Kim. ‘Everyone’s a dick at twenty-four.’

  Miriam

  She opens her eyes and blinks in an effort to adjust to the permanent dusk of the bedroom. She can hear Rosa clattering in the kitchen. Ian will be God-knows-where, rushing about Being Important Yet Again. He’s been calling in favours from his friends on the broadsheets, old Bullingdon chums, giving profile interviews to The Telegraph and The Times – ‘turning the tide’, he called it. ‘Someone has to set the record straight.’ They’ve promised to be sensitive in their probing and give him copy approval before anything is printed.

  Even Rollo has a sense of purpose; his father’s son. He is at a meeting at the offices of a missing persons charity, discussing a renewed online campaign involving a thousand tweets or some such. She doesn’t pretend to understand social media or why anyone would waste their time on it, but she is very glad Rollo has it covered.

  She hauls herself up off the bed, her hair damp and flattened, pushes her feet into her sheepskin slippers and walks out to the hall and up a flight of wonky narrow stairs, holding tight to the gentle curve of the banister to Edith’s room. On the landing between the children’s bedrooms on this uppermost floor, under a mildewed skylight, is a Victorian doll’s house in the architecture of their own. A Georgian house within a Georgian house. It was given to Edith when she was small by Ian’s mother, Edith Senior. Ian revered the doll’s house in the same way he revered his mother, had objected when Edie wanted to fill it with Polly Pockets, as if this somehow diluted its educational purity, when Miriam felt the whole point of playing was to make something your own. She’d have been rather proud if Edith had scrawled across the prim rosebud wallpaper with an indelible pen.

  Ian had insisted their baby daughter be named after his mother, when all Miriam’s friends were calling theirs Chloe or Jessica. These days, of course, the old dowager names are all the rage; even stalwarts of the Tory party call their children Florence and Alfred with a knowing wink. But back then, Miriam had shrunk from the name – softening it to Edie – yet had borne it, like the doll’s house, because she had no choice.

  She lies on Edith’s bed, in part to muss up the inert neatness of the duvet; gazes at the black violin case on top of the wardrobe, the clip frame leaning against the wall with a collage of photos from that Italian interrailing trip with Rollo, the two of them smiling on the Spanish Steps. Miriam closes her eyes in order to visualise her daughter – to set her mind on her so strongly that she is all that exists and then perhaps it will come to her: a knowledge of where Edith is and what has happened to her, as if by some supernatural telepathic intuiting. She thinks of the relatives of the missing she’s seen in the past on the news, who would not give up their dogged searches even in the face of overwhelmingly poor odds. Their final argument was always the same: ‘If they were dead, I’d know.’ Or its confluence: ‘They’re alive, I can feel it.’ She had always balked at the irrationality of these statements, the way people clung to a lie, yet now it makes perfect sense to her. They cannot cut the cord, not without a body. A body is what they need, otherwise these madnesses spring up like weeds, uncontrollable.

  Perhaps, she thinks now, there is someone – a psychic or a fortune teller – who could enter this other realm with her and tell her what has happened to her daughter. Someone with telepathic powers, who can speak with spirits or tell her the future. Not the terrible frogmen dredging rivers.

  She pads down the stairs towards the sounds of Rosa emptying the dishwasher, through to the front lounge where the curtains are drawn against the rubberneckers, the lamps lit as if it were evening. Their iMac is asleep but she only has to tap a key for it to stir into life. She daren’t Google ‘Edith Hind’. She knows all manner of salacious rumour is floating about out there, just waiting to be read and wept over; vicious messages from trolls who are actually fourteen-year-olds in affluent bedrooms, their mothers grilling their fish fingers downstairs.

  No, instead she types ‘psychic NW3’ into the search field. There are fifteen serving her area, according to the Yellow Pages, which additionally provides a useful map. She clicks on solveyourmystery.com, a site advertising tarot, palmistry, and compassionate psychic readings. It is probably the word ‘compassionate’ which secures her business.

  Manon

  It travels up her spine in a cold bubble: horror, close to excitement.

  ‘This is a fuck-up,’ Harriet is saying, pacing. ‘A massive fucking fuck-up of the first fucking order.’

  ‘When did she … Didn’t she call for assistance?’ Kim says.

  Time has slowed, thickening the air so that Manon can hardly breathe. There is a metallic taste in her mouth like blood.

  Davy says, ‘I was calling her all weekend but it went straight through to voicemail. I should’ve gone down there. I don’t understand it – she had my number. I told her to call if she needed anything.’

  He is sweating, a red patch creeping up his neck.

  ‘Apparently she rang in here late on Saturday night,’ Harriet says. ‘Call was taken by late-shift auxiliary staff, didn’t know who she was, wrote a note in a book, didn’t do anything about it. As with any death where there has been police contact, I am self-referring this to the IPCC, which will conduct an investigation alongside Professional Standards. Check if we did right by Helena Reed in our duty of care.’

  ‘When?’ says Manon, and she is surprised her voice is audible because she feels as if she is under water. ‘When did she—?’

  ‘Sometime on Sunday. The PM will tell us more.’

  In the silence which has fallen over the department, Harriet tells them how it took a while for the officers to find Helena Reed. Her flat was spotless and deserted, all the cups washed up. It was, they said, how you would leave a property if you were going away, and that’s what the officers thought at first.

  ‘She’s gone away, that’s all, gone to stay with friends, just like she said,’ said the uniform.

  ‘Hang on, in here,’ said his colleague.

  They saw the note first, laid out on a perfectly made bed, and then they found her, hanging from the hook on the back of the bedroom door, using the cord from her dressing gown.

  ‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ Manon gasps, a palm over her mouth. It is as if Helena had tidied herself away.

  The note said:

  That is not what I meant at all;

  That is not it, at all.

  ‘Bloody Cambridge students,’ says Colin. ‘Why can’t they leave a proper note like everyone else? You know You never cared or I was all alone.’

  ‘Someone hung her out to dry,’ says Davy, and Manon realises he is staring at Stuart, his fists squeezing open and shut, almost imperceptibly, at his sides.

  ‘We don’t know that,’ says Stuart, trying to keep it light, but the vein standing up on his neck gives him the frozen look of a chameleon trying to blend with his rock.

  ‘How did they know about Helena Reed and Edith?’ Davy demands, and he won’t take his eyes off Stuart, approaching him from across the room, and they all seem paralysed, the bystanders. There is so much guilt by association.

  ‘Well, it’s not hard to work out, is it? Edith’s best friend, with her on the night she disappears. Could’ve come from anyone; anyone in this bui
lding could’ve spoken to their wives or their girlfriends about it,’ Stuart is saying, stepping backwards. ‘Or one of the students, like Jason Farrer. He wasn’t exactly discreet.’

  ‘Except they don’t tend to run with it unless it’s come from the police, do they, Stuart?’ Davy is saying, and Stuart tries to walk casually behind a desk to put some distance between himself and Davy.

  ‘Still,’ Stuart says, ‘there’s no proof that it came from us.’

  ‘I’ll find out,’ says Harriet, ‘and whoever leaked it will be out on his fucking ear.’

  Which isn’t true. Manon knows it; everyone in the room knows it, except possibly Stuart. Leaks are impossible to trace and no journalist will ever name their source. The tabloids could have got this titbit from anyone.

  ‘Or she – out on her ear,’ says Stuart.

  ‘Get him away from me,’ says Davy, low and quiet, watching as Stuart makes urgently for the double doors, his mobile phone already at his ear.

  ‘Did she try you, Manon?’ Harriet says. ‘Did you have your phone on?’

  ‘Course,’ says Manon, turning to look out at the car park but seeing nothing of the view. ‘I mean, reception’s a bit patchy, and I was in and out …’ Manon’s face is prickled with a white heat, like an allergy.

  ‘Hanged,’ she murmurs to herself. She’s seen lots of victims of hanging, knows exactly what they look like – pale and bloated head to one side of the elongated neck, abrasions from the ligature. Sometimes they have fallen. Sometimes the tips of their toes touch the floor. She’s surprised the hook on the back of the door held her, but Helena Reed was not a substantial person.

  Manon’s mind feels along the territory of the things she could have done: deployed protection to Helena’s flat as soon as Crimewatch made mention of a female lover; have Davy escort Helena home from Newnham, right then on the Thursday, refusing to take no for an answer; monitored her work phone over the weekend, as she would normally have done, though she wasn’t on-call. Four days of neglect, in which Manon did none of these things, for no other reason than she just didn’t. Base, looked-for pleasures, and Manon’s hunger for them at the expense of every other thought. The shame, the shame of it.

  Soon, very soon, it is too much and the lines begin to shift. She tells herself there was nothing she could have done; that she couldn’t possibly have known; that she wasn’t on duty. Had she been on-call, her phones would have been on. She tells herself defiantly, triumphantly, that her weekend was her own, this job does not own her; so she is not lying when she defends herself to Harriet Harper. She is telling a kind of truth.

  ‘Awful,’ says Alan, as the colours darken through the double-height windows of his glorious barn. She watches the horizon, a line of fire suppressed by the blue-grey sky.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. She approaches his big body, thickened by a woollen navy cardigan with leather buttons, and puts her hands on his hips, her forehead to his chest.

  ‘Poor thing,’ he says, kissing the top of her head, and she doesn’t know if he means her or Helena Reed.

  ‘Worst thing is, she had nothing to do with it – just got caught up in someone else’s mess.’

  ‘Mmm,’ he says, his chin resting on top of her head.

  ‘She was ashamed, really ashamed,’ she says, and the bubble rises up into her throat and she feels she might cry out. ‘She just experimented, that’s all, and all of a sudden it was public and the shame of it, the guilt of it—’

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he says, his hand on her cheek, and she wonders if he means it as solace or whether he is actually asking her not to emote in his presence. She is descending and he is floating up, like the birds beyond his window. The landing and the flying off.

  ‘I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,’ she says.

  He looks at her.

  ‘The poem. She was saying she wasn’t the lead in her own play.’

  On the way over, she’d sat in her car in a traffic jam and she’d looked at all the little heads and shoulders in front of their steering wheels. All these people locked in their own thoughts, enmeshed in complicated lives, each of us believing we’re at the centre.

  ‘Wine?’ he asks, and she watches him walk away towards his grey, steely kitchen.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She sits in his sagging armchair but there is no view now that the last line of sun has been extinguished. They are together and that’s a fact, and she packs her frightened, lonely feelings away. Edith, she thinks. Edith was one of those people who saw herself as the lead. Careless and selfish. Yes, there is corrosive pleasure in blaming Edith Hind. And Helena, the attendant lord, deferential, glad to be of use.

  ‘What does it mean for the case?’ he asks, bringing her an oversized goblet of red which fills her hand. Even his glassware is nice.

  ‘There’ll be an enquiry. Independent Police Complaints Commission. See if we dealt with her properly, which we mostly did. But actually we didn’t, of course, because she asked for assistance and the night team didn’t respond, or at least not fast enough.’ But she stops short of the detail, both to him and to herself. ‘We could have stopped her,’ is all she whispers into her glass, taking a sip. He has gone back to the kitchen, turning his levers.

  ‘Will you be under investigation?’ he asks. ‘You personally, I mean.’

  She shrugs. ‘Each of us on the Hind team will be, as a matter of course. It’s standard procedure when someone dies after contact with the police. Won’t happen for months, though, not while the Hind investigation is still active.’

  He is clattering about in the kitchen. She gets up to join him there, coming up behind him and putting her hands on his hips again.

  ‘I know you have a rule,’ she says, ‘about week nights and everything, but can I stay? Please? Tonight? I don’t want to be on my own.’

  ‘Of course,’ he says, and for a moment she is relieved and she hugs his back, and then she is filled with a sense of imbalance; that he is tolerating her.

  He shares his steak, rare, and the brown and yellow grains of mustard trail in its wake of blood, the broccoli crisp and dark green. They consume a bottle of red and it makes the threat of Helena Reed come nearer and Alan’s unreachable quality, a loneliness too far. Something about him is just beyond her grasp, though she cannot identify it in anything he says precisely. Her movements are clumsy with the wine, and with her sorrow and guilt.

  She thinks they might bridge the gap in bed, that this is where the imbalance might be redressed, but he is even more distant as they come close. It is so nearly there, this almost-love, and every part of her reaches for it excessively. She towers over him, her mouth and her body, the red wine making her woolly and dark, her chest expanding so that nothing is manageable. As they finish and lie back, she bursts into tears – not demure Edwardian tears but incontinent blubbing of the kind that gives rise to rivulets of snot.

  He is up on one elbow saying, ‘What is it?’ in a voice which, though she may be imagining it, seems on the edge of being annoyed.

  ‘Do you feel the same way?’ she says, her hand over her eyes. ‘Do you?’

  He strokes her arm.

  ‘I’ve been so fucking lonely,’ she says in a guttural wail which feels good for about half a second and then feels very, very bad because he says nothing and has lain back on his grey linen pillow, staring up at the ceiling.

  Tuesday

  Miriam

  Twenty-three days missing and she has come so easily to this – to the door of a psychic she has found through solveyourmystery.com. Miriam Hind, née Davenport: once a scientist, always a rationalist, standing at the front door waiting for Julie, the palm reader.

  Hers is a 1930s semi in suburban Hendon, its windows so clean they flash what there is of the January brightness. The doorbell a singsongy chime. When Miriam telephoned yesterday, it was in a flush of impulse – she never imagined she’d be booked in the very next day. Julie’s diary was evidently not chock-a-block.

  The r
emainder of yesterday, however, and the ensuing night had cooled Miriam’s enthusiasm for palmistry; she’d seen how silly she was being. She is here on sufferance, because she has made the arrangement, and arrangements cannot be broken. They must be extricated from politely or adhered to (Englishness again). And yet she hadn’t phoned, or texted or sent an email to the ‘Contact Me’ address on the website. So many ways, these days, of extricating yourself in silence.

  I’ll explain it’s not for me, Miriam tells herself as the door opens.

  ‘Come through,’ the woman says, and Miriam steps into a light, mirrored hall with new cream carpet. The heating is on luxuriantly high.

  ‘Should I take my shoes off?’ she asks, hoping the answer will be no, because bending is not as easy as it used to be.

  ‘Please,’ she says. ‘I’ll wait for you in the lounge.’

  Her manner, the ash-blonde highlights, the taupe cardigan with sequins glinting, has all the suburban fastidiousness of a beauty therapist. Miriam follows her through to a lounge with broad doors giving out to a lawn. It smells of new carpet in here also, and there is a capacious cream leather armchair for Miriam to sink into. Communing with the spirit world is not a bad way to make a living, it would seem, even with an appointments diary as spacious as Julie’s.

  ‘So,’ she says.

  ‘So,’ says Miriam, reserve bristling.

  ‘I’m sensing great sadness, great pain,’ Julie says, her head tilted. ‘I’m seeing everything out of alignment.’

  Miriam nods. It is preposterous that she is here. She must find an appropriate hiatus in which to make her excuses. What would Ian think?

  ‘I’m feeling that you have lost hope, lost your way in this world. The pain is too much. You are confused and unhappy.’

  Oh, spare me, Miriam thinks.