Missing, Presumed

by Susie Steiner

  ‘You want to know what lies ahead. How it will all turn out. You want an end to the uncertainty – the miasma, as I like to call it. I can do tarot, palm or aura; which would you prefer?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘A general reading, perhaps. You can pay with a cheque. I don’t take cards. Or you could set up a direct debit. I recommend this to my clients – there is a reduction for three visits or more.’

  ‘Shall I?’ Miriam asks, reaching for her handbag. ‘Now?’

  She nods. Miriam writes a cheque, a flat fee of £80 for a one-off reading. No way is she falling for that direct debit baloney.

  ‘May I?’ Julie says, taking Miriam’s hand slowly in hers, as if it were a priceless ornament, and rotating it palm-up. Miriam notices her burgundy manicure, like blood-dipped talons. ‘I am seeing someone you love very deeply. Someone lost to you …’

  You are reading my age, Miriam thinks. I am of an age for grief.

  ‘A daughter, a beloved daughter, whose safety is in jeopardy.’

  You’ve read the tabloids. You’ve seen me on the news.

  ‘You want to know what has happened to your daughter,’ she says, looking Miriam in the eye, and Miriam’s heart begins to race. They both feel her hand quiver.

  ‘Yes,’ says Miriam.

  ‘You love your daughter and you are in great pain,’ she says. ‘You are tormented by thoughts of what might have happened to her. You are in an agony of uncertainty. You cannot grieve, but you dare not hope.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Miriam, and it comes out in a gasp, dirty with need. ‘Please, I …’ Miriam is now holding the woman’s hand, squeezing it.

  ‘Your daughter is alive,’ she says.

  Miriam stares at her.

  ‘Your daughter is alive,’ she says again in an exhalation, as if she too is in pain, has taken Miriam’s pain into herself.

  ‘When will she come back?’ Miriam asks. ‘Has she been taken?’

  Julie closes her eyes, stroking and holding Miriam’s hand between the two of hers. She breathes in through her nose, her eyes closed. She shakes her head.

  ‘It’s gone,’ she says. ‘Sometimes it’s too powerful. Sometimes it cannot be held.’

  ‘When will you get it back?’

  ‘You will need to come again.’

  Davy

  He knows he’s got it wrong as he proffers the cup to her and he doesn’t care. Manon can suck it up for once. She looks awful, too, perhaps as bad as him – puffy-faced, furtive.

  ‘What’s this, Davy? I don’t take it black.’

  ‘Have you listened to yourself?’ he says. Come on, if you think you’re hard enough.

  ‘All right,’ she says. ‘Jeez, who shat in your handbag?’

  He woke at 5.30 a.m., remembering abruptly, as if cut from sleep by the hard steel of his guilt. He looked at Chloe, sleeping next to him. Her hair, sticky with the various products she put on it, lay across her head like a bandage. She’s been talking about ‘taking things to the next level’ and he finds it bewildering, because even a couple of weeks ago he’d have been all for it, but now … How little he tells her of the fresh torments in his mind. Yet his distance seems only to fuel her enthusiasm, and he wonders idly if this is the secret about women that other men have known all along and that he’s been slow to grasp. Perhaps it’s what made a toerag like Stuart Leach such a success with the ladies. Stuart seems to be able to shag Marie from Accounts and then barely acknowledge her in the office.

  Davy tries Ryan’s social worker, Reeva Dell, again. She always sounds exhausted, a slow monotonous crawl to her voice. But then, social services was full of depressed people.

  ‘His mum moved, I told you – no forwarding address,’ says Reeva.

  ‘Right, but she’s still under the surname Wade?’ he says, thrumming in his mind through the police databases he could try.

  ‘No, no, hang on, she married someone. D’you want the name?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Hold on.’

  Shuffling papers, clacking on a keyboard. No budget for Vivaldi. Davy wonders what manner of sociopath Ryan’s mum’s hooked her wagon to this time.

  ‘Right, yes, she’s going under the name Jones.’

  ‘Jones? You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Why would I be kidding you, DC Walker?’

  How am I supposed to trace a Jones? he thinks. And he feels like crying, or pulling the phone from its socket and a chunk of the plaster from the wall, too.

  ‘Has Ryan taken on the Jones name? Has the new local authority been notified that he was on the “at risk” register?’

  ‘Like I said, we don’t know where they’ve gone. It’s not like she asked our permission. The boy was returned to her, don’t forget.’

  ‘Yeah, but only because …’ Davy trails off. It’s pointless hurling rocks at Reeva Dell.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t help,’ she says.

  ‘No, no, it’s fine,’ he says.

  Harriet has come to the desk he and Manon are sharing, resting her knuckles on its surface, her head low.

  ‘Helena Reed’s call log,’ says Harriet in a murmur so that only Manon and Davy can hear. ‘She tried to call you, Manon, three times.’

  Davy looks at Manon but she is rummaging in her bag for her phone as if its physical presence will explain this.

  ‘I wasn’t on-call,’ Manon says, looking up sharply at Harriet. ‘I have the right to turn my phone off at the weekend, to have a life. You might want to be married to this job, Harriet, but I don’t. Anyway, I told you, the signal can be a bit dodgy in my flat; on and off, y’know?’

  ‘I know you weren’t on-call, and this isn’t part of any official investigation,’ says Harriet. ‘I’m just asking you. You know, what the fuck, Manon?’

  ‘That’s right, it’s my fault,’ says Manon in a swell of tears, and Davy and Harriet watch her make for the double doors, almost at a run, and slap through them like a swimmer into the surf.

  ‘Graham Garfield,’ Harriet says, louder now, so the department can hear. ‘What have our background checks given us?’

  ‘One student claims he made unwanted advances, and others say he had a reputation for trying it on,’ says Kim. ‘Sounds like more of a pest than a predator. Y’know, an opportunist – he tried it on, got knocked back a few times, but every now and then he got lucky.’

  ‘Mrs Garfield know?’ says Harriet.

  ‘Doesn’t look like it.’

  ‘When we were round there she was wavering about his alibi,’ Davy says. ‘Having first said she was with him at home after he came back from The Crown, she subsequently told us she only vaguely heard his key in the door as she fell asleep.’

  The dank interior of The Lord Protector; wooden floorboards sticky, tinny tunes from fruit machines. Davy rotates his glass at their corner table and tries to tell Chloe what’s going on with him.

  He’s been attempting to explain about work, how much it’s a part of how he sees himself. He’s trying to describe their duty of care to Helena Reed and how they’d failed her, and how he couldn’t get it off his mind. They’d ticked the boxes they were supposed to tick, so why does he feel so bad?

  Some part of him is taking umbrage already at the criticism that’s heaped on them as officers – always the question of what they could have done better, faster, with immaculate paperwork and utmost sensitivity; what they should learn from what they’ve got wrong. That person on the night team, DC Monique Moynihan, will probably lose her job, and maybe that’s right. But all the while it feels like a war they’re fighting, without enough resources. They were only doing their job.

  He’s trying to form this into words to her; he needs her to understand him at this most crucial time. But when he looks up, he sees that familiar thing Chloe does with her face, allowing all her muscles to go slack in the cheeks so it’s like her face is dripping, her eyes stony, like she so often made them – distant and looking over his shoulder.

  Instead of chivvyin
g her out of it, he says, ‘What’s the matter now?’

  She shrugs. ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘No you’re not; you’re in a huff again. What is it this time?’

  She seems wrong-footed by his directness, but she maintains the hangdog slack cheeks. The cheeks of doom, he thinks. Bitter mouth.

  ‘I just think it’s weird, you caring so much for a dead girl. A lesbian dead girl,’ she says.

  ‘Tell me you’re not serious,’ he says.

  Chloe shrugs. ‘Your mind’s always on other things: poor Helena Reed, poor Ryan, isn’t Manon the genius. You’re never here, in the moment.’

  ‘Christ, Chloe, have you ever wondered why? Have you ever thought what the moment might feel like, for me?’ He is rising out of his chair now, surprising himself. ‘Being here in the moment with you is like … it’s like being sucked down into quicksand. It’s like drowning.’ He feels like ten-year-old Davy, pulling open the bedroom curtains with gusto; his mother in the bed, never getting up, one day to the next. ‘You make me suffocate, Chloe,’ he says, and he’s letting her have it – both barrels. ‘You make me suffocate in the misery of it.’

  And he finds himself grabbing his coat off the back of the chair and walking out, and even as he’s walking, he knows this is one sulk he’ll never be able to rectify.

  Manon

  Is it over so soon, after her stupid outburst in bed? Has she scared him off? He’d communicated with her from the very surface of himself in the morning and she had the feeling he was annoyed that she was cluttering up his daily routine: the showering with an astringent body wash (mint – she tried it and it made her privates sting with unnatural cold), the coffee, the dark neatness of his suit. If only she could undo it – maintain her reserve – she might be transformed in his mind into the perfect lover he almost had. Un-haveable Manon. She aches for Alan Prenderghast.

  ‘Dad?’ she says, propping herself up on her pillows, the phone to her ear.

  ‘Hello, lovely,’ he whispers. She hears him heaving in the bed, a groan in the background, and Una’s voice saying, ‘What sort of time d’you call this?’

  Manon looks at her watch. It is quarter to eleven.

  ‘Hold on,’ he says. ‘I’ll take it in the study.’

  She hears shuffling and the receiver goes down. Click. And then he picks up and his voice is expansive at last. ‘So, my darling girl, what’s the news?’

  ‘She pissed off again?’

  ‘No, Manon, don’t do that. Una was just dropping off, that’s all. Don’t … How’s things? How’s work?’

  ‘Things are all right,’ she says sadly.

  ‘Is the case getting you down? I saw on the news, that poor Reed girl. Stanton’s taking a lot of heat.’

  He is always so very interested, the police his vicarious pleasure. She thinks to tell him the truth about Helena Reed, if only she could grasp where the truth begins and ends, how far her guilt seeps into the corners of it, because he would understand, would believe in her better self. He would tell her it wasn’t her fault while acknowledging that some of it perhaps was. They would be silent on the phone, their receivers pressed to their ears, and it would be honest.

  ‘Actually, Dad, I’ve met someone.’

  ‘Really?’ he says, and his voice is genuinely taken aback.

  Christ, she thinks, I’m not that bad.

  ‘So, go on,’ he says.

  ‘His name’s Alan. Alan Prenderghast. He’s a systems analyst.’

  ‘A systems analyst?’ he says in the same voice he used to say, ‘It’s a hedgehog, is it?’ when she showed him her pictures from primary school. ‘What’s a systems analyst?’

  ‘I don’t really know. He lives just outside Ely.’

  She could have added ‘drives a Ford’ as if she is saying Darcy, yes, Pemberley.

  ‘And you like him?’ asks her father, sounding incredulous.

  ‘Not that hard to believe, is it?’

  ‘No, no, I’m sure he’s very nice,’ he says.

  Can’t he hear the wonder of Alan Prenderghast, her systems analyst from just outside Ely? With the nice glassware? And Nana the dog? Can’t he see how huge this is?

  They are silent.

  ‘When can I meet him then?’ he says eventually.

  ‘When you grow some balls and come down to visit,’ she says, without malice aforethought, as Davy would have put it.

  She pictures her father in his crumpled pyjamas, cupping the phone and casting furtive glances at the study door, surrounded by tartan with stag heads poking out from the walls like surprised intruders, as if he’s living some Highland fling as envisaged by Disney, except Una Simmons has the key to this particular hunting lodge. Una Simmons, their very own Macbeth of Moray, who finds ways in which his daughters – well, this daughter – cannot fit into their busy schedule, reasons why there isn’t room for them to stay at Christmas.

  ‘Spoken to Ellie?’ he says at last, a shot back across her bows.

  ‘No, Dad, I haven’t spoken to Ellie. Better go now, it’s late. You hop back into bed with Mein Führer.’ And she puts the phone down.

  The feeling in their house had been that Margaret Thatcher was to blame, not just for record unemployment (‘fifteen per cent of the workforce,’ her father said, shaking his head, always behind a newspaper), but for the miners, of course, and for Murdoch breaking the print unions (a soreness close to her father’s heart), and also, in some nebulous way, what had happened in the Bradshaw family. It was all bad, Thatcher and motherlessness. Her father’s sadness, in abeyance while her mother’s forceful nature lit and burned the house, became their whole microclimate after she died. It was global – despair about themselves and the world. He sighed deeply at the news; he sighed at the Guardian and switched to the newly-launched Independent (‘It is, are you?’), but tutted even at that; he sighed at old photographs.

  Ellie and Manon listened to Kate Bush in their bedroom – well, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, to be precise (‘Don’t Give Up’) and cried copiously.

  The situation continued for a good five years, during which he said he was ‘raising the girls’, though he seemed mostly to be behind a newspaper, harrumphing. He switched back to the Guardian in a further state of disillusionment and became merely grumpy, muttering about the redesign of its masthead (dual font ITC Garamond Italic next to Helvetica Black! What were they thinking?). This seemed an improvement. He went back to writing at the Fenland Citizen, where he was editor (the staff having managed quite well during his Grief-Stricken Years) – book and film reviews mostly, or the odd travel piece when it was a one-nighter to Dublin or some such and the girls could be left alone.

  Come 1997, their father began taking an interest in himself. He bought his first new items of clothing since the Seventies – a polo shirt and some chinos. He had a haircut, without being told. He began to whistle in the bathroom, to smile, and crack jokes. The root of all this did not emerge for many months and turned out not to be an organic process of healing but a woman called Una Simmons, who worked with him on the paper and wrote a household advice column called Simmons Solves. On the night of the general election, they travelled together to the printing presses in High Wycombe, ostensibly to make sure the correct front page went off stone, and the rest, as they say, was a Labour landslide. Things could only get better, so the song went, and they certainly did – for Manon’s father at least. And that was more or less when Manon lost him.

  She puts the phone on the floor, plumps her pillow and reaches across for the dial on the radio.

  Wednesday

  Miriam

  ‘No need to clean my study, can you tell Rosa? It’s got all my campaign stuff – paperwork, which I don’t want shuffled about,’ Ian says.

  ‘Yes, of course. Where are you going?’ asks Miriam. She is arranging lilies in a vase – great brutes from the Tesco Express around the corner. She doesn’t even like them, their dull dark leaves and vulgar blooms, but something about buyi
ng them spoke of a reconnect with the land of the living, thanks to Julie from Hendon. Anyway, they brought scent to a winter house.

  ‘For a quick run,’ he says. ‘You seem brighter.’ He is tying the laces on his trainers, toe on the cream upholstered kitchen chair.

  ‘Can you get your foot off that?’ she says.

  ‘Yes, sorry.’

  She hasn’t told him about Julie, of course. Julie would be taken as further evidence of her madness. But with a single visit, Julie has made things bearable.

  ‘I was thinking of going back to the practice, actually,’ she says, plumping the stems in a bid to make them fall about naturally in the vase, but they are rigid as scaffolding.

  ‘Good idea. Would do you good to be out and about. Occupy your mind.’

  ‘Stop me thinking about Edith, you mean?’

  ‘Thinking about her doesn’t find her.’

  ‘Anyway, I haven’t decided yet,’ she says.

  Her partner at the GP practice, Raj, had called just after Christmas – but only to tell her to take as long as she needed, that he had got in a locum, and that if there was anything to sign (the paperwork when you became a fundholder was beyond belief) he’d drop it round. Twenty-four days missing; three and a half weeks of life suspended, sleepless and confined. Like being under water, it was quiet and engulfing, and there was a strong desire to stay submerged, rather than push up into the brash world where people will ask how she is, how things are. Why can’t she stay home, arrange the house, remain loyal to Edith in her mind, and reinforced in that connection by Julie? Why wasn’t that all right?

  ‘Right,’ he says, pushing his keys into a shallow pocket in his joggers and zipping it shut. ‘Won’t be long.’

  An hour later, she has settled at her desk to tackle some neglected household admin: a quote for contents insurance, cheque for the milkman, a meter reading. She realises she needs a stamp and walks through to Ian’s study. He keeps a stash in the central desk drawer, among paperclips and envelopes and those plastic label holders which clip onto hanging files. They clatter now under her patting hand. The drawer is sticky and won’t pull out fully. She shuffles and lifts at the front but can’t see any little books of stamps, so she pats her hand further back, among the elastic bands and stationary dust. Pens, a torch, her finger pricked by a noticeboard pin; then something solid and square, which she can’t identify from memory. She brings it out. It is a Nokia. Old and chunky. A world away from the smart phones everyone has nowadays. Grubby about the edges of the screen. On the back are glittery pirate stickers: skull and crossbones, a boat. A child’s phone. Why would he—