Missing, Presumed

by Susie Steiner

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ she says.

  ‘Shurrup,’ says Bryony.

  Three-quarters of an hour later, they’re assembled by the front door.

  ‘How does she look?’ asks Bryony.

  ‘Million dollars,’ says Davy, smiling at her.

  ‘Davy,’ says Manon, ‘this place looks amazing.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing like a tidy-up to lift your spirits, is there?’

  Manon can feel her face crumpling and Bryony notices, saying, ‘Hey, hey, come on, don’t spoil your makeup.’

  The first drink, in the darkness of the bar, is like nectar. Manon begins to feel things loosen and dissipate. Who cares? What does it matter? Things pass!

  ‘Fuck it!’ she says, raising her glass to Bryony.

  ‘Fuck it, indeed,’ says Bryony, raising hers back.

  By the second drink, she is grateful to Alan for releasing her from the hell of suburban convention. All that domesticity. ‘So booorrrrring,’ she says to Bryony.

  ‘Bor-ring,’ says Bryony.

  ‘He wants to be friends. Texted to tell me. I mean, all of a sudden he’s Texts R Us. Friends! What is that shit?’

  ‘Dunno,’ says Bryony. ‘I always thought a good break-up meant never speaking to the person again, except when armed with scissors or in open court.’

  ‘Zactly!’

  She surveys the usual suspects: Colin, Stuart, Kim, and Nigel (having a quick half before getting back to ‘the lovely Dawn’).

  ‘The inspirational Dawn,’ whispers Bryony.

  ‘The irrefutable Dawn,’ says Manon.

  ‘The seriously fucking knackered Dawn,’ says Bryony.

  ‘Twins woke at 4 a.m. this morning,’ says Nigel, visibly depressed and gazing into his drink.

  Another reason to celebrate, thinks Manon, and orders another double at the bar. Thick and fast they come, bought by others or bought by her. She thinks life is best passed in a blur: imprecise and anaesthetised from the sharper feelings. She is drowning as the gin engulfs her, swaying on the spot, the room spinning, the music pumping in time with the blood in her arteries. She can feel the beat through the soles of her feet.

  Stuart is smiling, glittering at her dangerously. They appear to have been talking for some time. Bryony is nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Christ, haven’t you been fired yet?’ she says, lurching towards him.

  ‘They’ve got nothing on me. In fact, I’m just bedding in, getting the lie of the land, office hierarchy.’

  ‘You’re all about hierarchy, aren’t you, Stuart?’ she says. She feels as if she can say anything, to anyone’s face. ‘Like you’re obsessed.’

  ‘Who do you rate, then?’ he says, his glass raised towards their colleagues nearby. ‘Who’s a good copper?’

  ‘Me!’ she says, close enough to put her cheek on his chest. She’s tempted. Any port in a storm.

  ‘What about Harper?’ he says, and she sees that look, the same look he’d had when he had complained about the headmistress ‘lording it’ at the school where he worked.

  ‘Oh, Harriet’s good. Very good. Sexually frustrated, though.’ She burps into her fist. ‘Scuse me.’ She can’t feel the bottom half of her legs. Stuart swims in front of her. ‘Kim’s good. Solid, y’know. Unimaginative.’

  ‘Go on.’ This wily fox, his charm a lure into darkness.

  The music is so loud, she’s had to shout in his ear, to smell him. Foreign male. Exciting and dangerous. She’s shouting now, just as before, but her words have a strange echo, as if they have been emitted through a loudhailer.

  ‘Davy’ll never be a good copper,’ she bellows into the sudden silence. ‘Too busy looking on the fucking bright side.’

  Her eyes are half-closed, her mind woolly, and she has shouted the words before she registers that the music is off. Someone must’ve pulled the plug, she thinks, too late.

  And she turns, slowly, to see a row of faces staring at her. Kim, Bryony, Nigel, and Colin. Davy at the centre, hurt ears pinned back. She can practically see the follicles standing up on his head.

  She starts to burn. She is drunk but also painfully sober. Davy is staring at her and she doesn’t know if it’s simply what she has said or the fact that she has spilled it into Stuart’s malevolent ear. She is so drunk that all her movements are delayed and her eyelids half close again, though there is panic on the inside, as if she can’t persuade her body to catch up.

  ‘Davy, I—’ she begins, but the music is back on, louder than before, like she’s being punched about the head, and he has walked quickly out of the bar.

  Before she knows what’s happening, Bryony has appeared, carrying her coat and bag.

  ‘Aren’t those mine?’ she asks, but Bryony has taken her by the elbow, saying, ‘Excuse us’ to Stuart.

  ‘Oi, I was just—’ Manon protests.

  ‘Yes, we all know what you were just doing,’ says Bryony.

  Saturday

  Manon

  Everything in ruins.

  She walks the cold lounge, lighting lamps against the tinkle and spit of rain at the window.

  Her pyjamas stink – sweet, fetid alcohol, seeping out through her skin. She sits on the curved corduroy sofa and cries.

  If there was only something left: a relationship gone wrong but her work intact; her work compromised but love still offering a future. Instead, it is a desolate landscape, the death of Helena Reed at its centre like a crucifixion, her head to one side. While she was with him, she could tell herself that dereliction of duty had been in aid of something; she hadn’t wanted to be married to the job. Now, even the job won’t have her.

  She sits cross-legged on the sofa, pulls her laptop onto her knees, her phones beside her. She points the remote at the TV, so the news comes on. She needs something, anything. She needs an idea.

  She Googles Tony Wright. The various reportings of his crimes pop up; a backgrounder after his conviction, in the Eastern Daily Press. Whitemoor prison is highlighted in blue, and she clicks idly on the link. The Internet is a journey, down tributaries random and meandering; a journey in which you could lose hours, days, a week, and she’s happy to become lost. She reads the Whitemoor Wikipedia page.

  In June 2006, an inspection report from Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons criticised staff at Whitemoor Prison for ignoring prisoners, and not responding to their queries and requests for help promptly enough.

  She skims the next part.

  A further inspection report stated, in October 2008, that staff at Whitemoor Prison felt fear that Muslim inmates were attempting to radicalise others held at the jail. According to inspectors, officers tended to treat Muslim prisoners as extremists and potential security risks, even though only eight of them had been convicted of terrorist offences. Due to the concerns raised by this inspection, further visits by researchers from the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, commissioned by the Ministry of Justice, were arranged between 2009 and 2010 to interview staff and inmates.

  Manon picks up her remote to silence the TV, as something forms, indistinct at present. Cambridge Institute of Criminology. Part of the university. Tony Wright was in Whitemoor when their inspections were taking place. Tony Wright might have been interviewed by the CIC.

  She picks up her BlackBerry and finds Wilco Bennett’s number, her prison warden contact at Whitemoor.

  ‘Manon,’ he says warmly. ‘Long time.’

  ‘Everything all right, Wilco?’ she says, making a stab at the pleasantries. She has a soft spot for Wilco Bennett: pigeon fancier, holder of socially unacceptable views, which she forgives because he’s been incarcerated with sociopaths since 1989. They got to know each other during endless proceedings at Peterborough Crown Court – remand hearings, bail applications, and the attendant delays which often left them sitting on hard benches side by side beneath the courtroom.

  ‘Your Edith Hind girl,’ says Wilco. ‘Bit of a whopper, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mmm,’ she says. ‘Can I ask a f
avour, Wilco?’

  ‘Fire away,’ he says.

  ‘Tony Wright.’

  ‘Prince Charming, yes.’

  ‘Can you get me his authorised visitor list?’

  ‘’S’a while ago now, lovely. He’s been out eight months.’

  ‘I know. Are you in the office or is it your weekend off?’

  ‘No, I’m in. I’m not brilliant on the old computers; I think the AV list has to be downloaded onto the whatnot, using a doobrey.’ He chuckles at this. ‘I can never find the damned thing after that, you know? Downloaded where? Still, it’s quiet today; I’ll see if I can get someone to help me. Any particular span of time, so to speak?’

  ‘I’d like Wright’s entire AV list, if you can get it, but I want you to look at 2009 in particular. Call me back?’

  ‘Will do.’

  She lies down on the sofa, her laptop at her feet, her hands between her knees. She is cold. She hasn’t eaten since sometime late yesterday afternoon, before the Cromwell’s debacle. She reaches back, drags a blanket off the back of the sofa to cover herself. She wonders if she should call Davy, but instead turns the sound up on the TV. She lies there, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the burble of the lunchtime news; always the soft stuff – items about the Royal Family or the cost of childcare, for people raising spoons of Heinz tomato soup to their quivering lips. People wrapped in blankets, just like her. She thinks about smoking a cigarette.

  ‘The body of an Afghan man and twenty other refugees have been found in a container at Tilbury Docks,’ she hears the newsreader say. ‘A man from Ipswich has been arrested on suspicion of conspiring to facilitate illegal immigration into the UK. Abdul-Ghani Khalil, thirty-seven, was arrested alongside three men from Luton in connection with the death.’

  She reaches behind her head for a cigarette, which she lights without sitting upright, blowing smoke up into the gathering dusk.

  She throws her cigarette butt out of the open third of her car window, then winds it up. Sits, feeling a swell of tears rise in her chest, then lower, plus something else – a kamikaze element. She shouldn’t be here alone.

  In front of her, the estate road winds away into the shadowy hulk of buildings. A bin, over-full, billows with a white plastic bag stuffed in at the top. At the curve of the road is a group of youths, their hoods up, hunched, stamping foot to foot. She can’t see their faces but their bodies are febrile.

  She’s been on the estate before after nightfall, crouching over the body of a debt collector who’d been sent out here on her own to gather piddling sums for an insurance firm. A mother of three, smartly dressed, pootling into danger in her little maroon Fiat, wearing a white mohair jumper with dainty gold necklace over its roll neck. She should never have been here alone, not at night, and certainly not asking for money. Twelve pounds a week she collected from the man who would eventually stab her to death.

  Yet here is Manon, just like the debt collector, alone in the dark. No one to report her missing now, no police colleagues pulling out the stops. No backup.

  She slams her car door and makes for Tony Wright’s flat.

  ‘To what do I owe this honour?’ he says, answering the door.

  ‘Can I come in?’ she asks, and he steps back.

  She hears him lock the door behind her. ‘Cannae be too careful. All sorts round here.’

  She steps into the lounge which is dim, except for a lava lamp glowing purple on a shelf, its moving globules like slow marine life. The room smells of incense and smoke.

  ‘Lyn here?’ she says, casting about. Her heart is thumping. She feels as if the ground is tipping. What is she doing here, locked inside with Tony Wright?

  ‘No, nobody here, ma wee scone, ’cept you an’ me,’ says Tony as he walks through to a small kitchen.

  He returns carrying a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He motions to the square table against the wall and she sits at it, a whiskey glass placed before her. She thinks about the two glasses at George Street, one with blood on its shards.

  She doesn’t say no as he pours; another line she’s crossing.

  ‘So,’ he says, raising his glass to her and smiling, with that twinkle – Father Christmas and Captain Birdseye.

  ‘So,’ she says, and she drinks, hoping it will steel her nerves. The whiskey burns, a tear drop of fire descending her gullet. Her head swims and she feels sick. Perhaps he will tell her what he’s done to Edith Hind, how he got away with it, and then he will kill her. Yes, that seems likely now, and she feels calm in the face of it. She doesn’t care about herself. She lights a cigarette and so does he. There is so much camaraderie in lighting up together. Another protocol broken.

  ‘Just you and me, Tony,’ she says. ‘What’s the deal? Why was Edith on your AV list?’

  He looks at her. Blows out smoke. ‘She was in the prison doin’ some research, interviewin’ prisoners. I dinnae remember what for, was a while ago now – 2009. Whitemoor was in a right state at the time. Riots, escapes. Prison wardens were filth, abusin’ us. She was askin’ loads o’ questions about the conditions we were livin’ under in the prison. We started talkin’. And we enjoyed talkin’. So I said, if you’d like tae come back, we could talk some more.’

  ‘You were grooming her?’

  ‘Groomin’ her for what? I’ve no’ touched her.’ He leans forward, jabbing the table top with one finger. ‘Ye’ll get nothin’ on me ’cos I’ve done nothin’ tae that girl. If there’s a law says a lowlife like me cannae be pals wi’ a classy bird like that, then show me it.’

  ‘What did you talk about, when she visited you?’

  ‘About the prison, life inside. She brought me some books to read. Jude the Obscure. Well, I had a lot o’ time on ma hands, but even so, I only pretended to read the books she brought me, so that she’d like me all right. I liked talkin’ to her, and I liked lookin’ at her. No’ in a bad way – she’s a fine-lookin’ girl.’

  ‘So you talked literature, Tony, you and Edith Hind?’

  ‘Ah told ye, I only pretended to read that book just so she’d keep visitin’ me. Then ma mother died. I found myself in a very quiet place, ye ken? Inside myself, I mean. Edith came to see me just after. I was in a bad way; darkness, ken?’ He beats a fist against his heart. ‘We started talkin’ about deeper things.’

  ‘What did she call you about in the week before she disappeared?’

  ‘This an’ that.’

  ‘Ah, come on, Tony.’

  ‘Nothing special: how you doin’, Tony, what’s happening wi’ finding work, seeing your probation officer, whatnot. She’s a good person; a really good person. I never had anyone classy like her tek an interest afore. Made me want tae make an effort. Thought maybe I could have … I don’t know …’ He trails off.

  ‘Have what, Tony? Have her money? Take her life?’

  ‘Och, there you go again,’ and he gets up. Manon gets up too and they square up to each other, making the room feel small. She needs to get out of here if she’s going to make it at all, but the front door is locked. Tony is reaching into his pocket slowly. She thinks of the girl, his victim, beaten with the butt end of a knife’s handle until she couldn’t see.

  ‘Ye see what ye want tae see,’ he says, squinting as he lights another cigarette. ‘Ye see me, and in your view I’m no’ able to change. That’s fine. But I’m tellin’ ye, Edith Hind has been a good pal in my life, an’ even wi’ all this shit, I’m glad I know her.’

  ‘Know?’

  ‘Know, knew … Ah’ve no idea where she is.’

  He has sat down again, his legs effeminately crossed, regarding his cigarette held in a tight hand.

  ‘She’s alive, isn’t she?’

  ‘I told ye, I don’t know what’s happened tae the girl. I hope she’s alive, aye.’

  She has to get out of here, while the going’s good. She strides for the door, tries to open it. She pulls at the door, rattling it furiously, until he comes behind her, lays a hand on her shoulder.

&nb
sp; ‘Hey, hey, hey, calm it,’ he says, and turns her body towards his. ‘There’s no need to be jigglin’ about like that.’ He is so near to her she can smell him – cinnamon and whiskey. Her heart is pounding so furiously she wonders if he can feel it too. ‘There ye go,’ he says, and he opens the door onto a blast of freezing night.

  She is shaking, whether with fear or with cold or with relief to have got out, she cannot tell. She is shaking so much her key will not make it into the lock of her car door. She tries again, holding her wrist with her other hand, trying to steady the aiming of the key’s shaft.

  Crack.

  Sharp hot pain at the top of her skull. Then an ice cold trickle down the back of her neck. Her last sensation: her legs folding beneath her.

  The world tips.

  Sunday

  Manon

  She is all mouth; impossibly dry, thick as wool. An eye open to a white room. Has she died? It is so white, perhaps this is the afterlife, in which case, it should have a better view. A broad picture window gives out onto leafless trees and the flat roofs of municipal buildings, the sky the colour of porridge. She has a headache which threatens to split her skull.

  ‘Here, you’ll need a drink.’

  Someone is lifting her neck and she closes her mouth around a straw, the liquid so shocking it sears her temples.

  ‘You’re a lucky woman,’ he says.

  She focuses her dehydrated eyes – first on his white coat, then the stethoscope, then his black stubble. He smells of coal tar soap. His tie is lying on her body. He straightens, places her cup on the bedside unit, and she can see his olive skin and dark eyebrows. Albanian or Middle Eastern, perhaps. She would like to rearrange her hair, wipe the crust from the corners of her mouth.