Missing, Presumed

by Susie Steiner

  It was cramped. The baby shared Ellie’s bedroom, Manon was in the spare room, and Fly was on a put-you-up in the lounge, which he diligently tidied each morning before anyone was up. In this she saw all his worry about the precariousness of his situation.

  Those two months living like that – using up all Manon’s annual leave and numerous days owing from years of night shifts and weekends on duty – allowed Fly to complete his last term at primary school, where the teachers were invested in him. And it allowed Ellie the odd night off. Ellie and Manon had some understanding of what Fly needed most – the importance of keeping to existing routines after the death of one’s mother.

  ‘It’s nice – having you around,’ Ellie said. ‘He brings out good things in you, Fly does.’

  But the person who brought out the best in all of them was Solly. How that baby delighted them, Fly especially, who lay next to Solly on the carpet and tickled his toes, blew raspberries on his tummy, and covered his own face with his hands, removing them to say ‘Boo!’ and Solly’s chuckle would ring out, its music like a belly-burst of joy. Squawking, guffawing, high notes like piano keys – it was impossible not to smile when Solly laughed, and he appeared to spend most of his day laughing.

  When all her leave was used up, Manon’s hand was forced. ‘I’ll ask Fly to stay with friends,’ she told Ellie, ‘just while I square things in Huntingdon. I don’t expect you—’

  ‘Don’t be silly. He has to stay here,’ Ellie told her. ‘Solly loves him. And anyway, he mustn’t be uprooted too much, not after what he’s been through. I like the company, to be honest. How long will it take you? When will you be back?’ And there was fear in Ellie’s eyes that they might be separated again.

  ‘Not long,’ Manon said, telling herself the changes she was about to make were temporary – a stint in the Met while she sorted out a permanent arrangement for Fly, in a foster family or some such.

  Edith Hind returned to the UK with her mother, attending Cambridgeshire Police HQ voluntarily. She wanted to explain, she said. She wore a white shirt buttoned to the top, its pointy collar ever-so prudish, navy cigarette trousers over nerdish brown brogues, and glasses with thick black frames, which Manon thought were probably an affectation. The whole ensemble worked to create the impression of a serious young woman, genuinely troubled by circumstances unforeseen. Despite the demure librarian outfit, she was breathtaking: glossy auburn hair curling beneath her pointed chin; skin like alabaster; slim and graceful. Manon couldn’t stop staring, as if she were hungry for more of her, and she wondered if Edith’s beauty meant she should face greater censure. Or perhaps less. Did Manon want someone so beautiful to get away with it or did she want to enviously punish her?

  She and Harriet sat on the other side of the table to Edith, who was flanked by Miriam and a very expensive lawyer.

  ‘I want to hear this,’ said Davy, who stood with his back to the wall. Everyone else, including Gary Stanton, watched the interview in the video room.

  ‘Miss Hind,’ Harriet said, with unctuous politesse, ‘there were traces of blood in the kitchen of your home in George Street – along a kitchen cabinet and some pooling on the floor, plus some drips of blood in the hallway of your home. Can you explain how they got there?’

  ‘Yes, yes I can,’ she said, pushing copper ropes of hair behind one ear. Adorable. ‘When I got back to the house with Helena, I found I was much drunker than I realised, swaying and stumbling, struggling to stay upright, to be honest.’ Innocent little laugh. ‘In the kitchen I poured myself a glass of wine – this was after Helena had gone – but in picking it up, I knocked it, hard, on the worktop and it literally smashed in my hand, cutting me across the palm. I was shocked by the amount of blood – it literally gushed from my palm. I stared at it for a moment, in that drunken way, as if it belonged to someone else, and in that time it splashed down the kitchen cupboard and onto the floor. I did a rather poor job of cleaning up the broken glass. I put the bloodied shards into the bin and got myself a new wine glass down, which I never used in the end. I stumbled upstairs holding my bleeding hand – which is why there were drips on the hallway floor – and managed to knock half the coats off their hooks as I staggered up to the bathroom for a bandage. I’m sorry,’ she said, looking Harriet in the eye, ‘if this was misconstrued as an injury following an act of violence. I had no idea it would be.’

  ‘Why did you leave the door to your house open?’ Harriet asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When Will Carter returned home, he says he found the front door ajar. Why is that?’

  ‘I didn’t. I closed it. I thought I did, anyway. Look, I was all over the place that night. I’d had too much to drink. And I was frightened about what I was about to do – I was heading into the unknown. I knew how dangerous the journey could be. I went back and forth, stumbling about. I thought I closed the door but maybe in my haste, in my panic, I didn’t pull it firmly enough behind me.’

  ‘So you have stated that you walked out of Huntingdon, out towards Papworth Everard, and on the A428 you waited in an appointed lay-by until a truck pulled up beside you. Appointed by whom?’ said Harriet, looking at her notes.

  ‘Abdul-Ghani Khalil.’

  ‘The back of the lorry was opened by a man you didn’t recognise and you got in. Inside were several other stowaways of various nationalities. You were driven to what we can only guess was a port – you have stated that you could feel the sensation of the lorry boarding a ferry and driving into the hold. You were let out of the lorry in a lay-by just north of Calais in France.’

  ‘Well, no, it was an aire,’ she said, the r rolling in a pointedly French way.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Harriet.

  ‘I was let out in an aire – a French service station. I was desperately stiff and needed the loo. This was where the transfer took place – to a car, driven again by a man I didn’t know. He took me as far as Nantes. I paid him the cash as agreed – four thousand pounds.’

  ‘Agreed by?’

  ‘Abdul-Ghani Khalil,’ she said.

  ‘How did you meet Abdul-Ghani Khalil?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Were you introduced to Abdul-Ghani Khalil by Tony Wright?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Did you meet Abdul-Ghani Khalil when you were visiting Tony Wright in Whitemoor prison?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Did you pay Tony Wright to effect an introduction to Abdul-Ghani Khalil?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Did Tony Wright give you instructions for a pick-up which led to you being smuggled across the UK border illegally?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Why did Tony Wright’s number appear twice on your phone in the week before you disappeared, once on the day before?’

  ‘We’re friends.’

  ‘What sort of friends?’

  ‘Just friends. Have been ever since I visited him in Whitemoor. I was upset about what I’d seen at Deeping involving my father. I wanted to talk to him about it.’

  Manon wasn’t in Huntingdon for long. Once she returned to North London, there was a work hiatus while she applied for jobs, in which she ate into her savings and the income from letting out her Huntingdon flat (no point selling, given how this was a temporary situation). She took a six-month let on a flat, five doors down from Ellie’s, and installed herself and Fly in it. She double-checked with the agent: ‘So it’s one month’s notice on either side, right?’

  During this time, she sat her inspector exams and Fly fell apart.

  Perhaps it was the move to a separate flat (Manon felt they couldn’t keep imposing on Ellie, who wanted to move Solly out of her bedroom). Or the transition to a vast and terrifying secondary school close by. Or just an accumulation of experiences too complex for him to manage. But all of a sudden they were alone together in the face of Fly’s rage and sorrow.

  ‘He’s started wetting the bed, having night terrors,’ she found herself confiding to Miriam
, during the hours waiting at the Old Bailey for Ian Hind’s various pre-trial hearings, either sitting on the benches outside Court One or nudging a tray along silver tracklines in the canteen. ‘I’m so knackered – up five or six times a night, changing sheets. Trying to calm him down.’

  ‘Like having a newborn,’ Miriam said.

  It was ironic to be leaning on Miriam, who had aged but was also serene with Edith back at home. It hadn’t taken that much to persuade Edith to return with her to London, Miriam said. She had a conscience, under all that self-serving narcissism.

  ‘And I say that with great affection,’ Miriam said with a smile. ‘Told her it was better to go back voluntarily than be dragged back by Interpol. Told her you had made the connection with Abdul-Ghani Khalil and had mobilised French police. It was only a matter of time. She started snivelling, of course – that child is a master of self-pity – but I reassured her we’d hire good lawyers and a PR man to handle the newspapers.’

  Everyone at Cambridgeshire wanted to charge the girl with wasting police time, perverting the course of justice, and anything else they could throw at her for sparking a five-week investigation at a cost of around £300k of taxpayers’ money. But the Hinds’ legal team, numerous and dark-suited, formulated a robust defence stating it could not be proven that she ‘intended’ the police to infer she had come to harm. The blood, the fallen coats, the door left ajar, were all the accidental detritus of a night of panic and duress. She had merely fled the source of her distress – the crime committed by her father, whom she neither wished to shelter nor betray. The fact that Cambridgeshire Police had upscaled it to a high-risk misper could hardly be laid at young Miss Hind’s door. Psychiatric reports stated she had suffered ‘mental anguish’ in rural France.

  ‘Anguish my arse,’ Harriet said.

  In the opposite corner were the prosecution arguments: why did she stay away, when she saw, by reading UK press reports online, the scale of the manhunt? How could she justify not telling anyone she was alive and well, even if she didn’t wish to return?

  A judge looked at the arguments and deemed there was a case to answer, the outcome yet to be determined in court.

  At the Old Bailey, as legal wheels turned ever so slowly in proceedings against Ian Hind, Manon sought Miriam’s wisdom about Fly, which probably broke some protocol to do with ‘sides’ but neither woman cared.

  ‘All I know is I can’t take much more,’ Manon said.

  ‘He’s not doing it to spite you,’ said Miriam.

  ‘No, I know, but I can’t understand what’s going on inside him.’

  ‘No, I never knew what was going on in my children either,’ said Miriam, and Manon was surprised to be taken as a fellow mother. ‘It sounds to me like he needs to know that you’ll stick with him, however bad it gets, just like a mother does with a newborn baby.’

  She had no idea if Miriam was right but she did stick with him, though not out of nobleness. Out of exhaustion and inertia. This was not a situation she could easily unpick.

  She swapped notes with Davy, too, who had seen it all before at the drop-in centre.

  ‘Firm boundaries,’ Davy told her. ‘It’s still love, it just doesn’t waver. These kids can’t take any flip-flopping. Scares the life out of them.’

  He is so wise, now DS Davy Walker under Stanton’s kindly wing, and resolutely single, having once more extricated himself from Chloe’s clutches following the comfort shag. His life is MIT, bike rides, and his volunteering at the youth centre. ‘More than enough,’ he told Manon when she’d asked if he was seeing anyone.

  Poor Stanton. A standard review of the Hind investigation by Bedfordshire Police found that: Detective Chief Superintendent Gary Stanton overreacted in upscaling the disappearance of Edith Hind to a high-risk misper, later a suspected homicide, as there was insufficient prima facie evidence that Miss Hind had come to harm.

  ‘He can’t win,’ Davy told Manon, as if he were defending his own father. ‘First Lacey Pilkington, where he’s told he should have upscaled it sooner, and now this. I don’t know how he keeps going.’

  ‘Thinking about his pension, that’s how,’ Manon said.

  She hadn’t thought it through, the situation with Fly, though she spent quite a bit of time wondering if she could get out of it. How she might tiptoe away.

  Then Fly got ill.

  Winter and a fever took such strong hold of him it was medieval, and no amount of paracetamol or Nurofen seemed to bring his temperature down. His heart raced like a mechanism about to spring out of its holdings. Manon couldn’t get through to the GP practice – just endless ringing or the engaged signal – so in desperation she rang Miriam, who drove round, parking Ian’s incongruous Jaguar next to the skips of Fordwych Road. She checked his vital signs.

  ‘Can eleven-year-olds get meningitis?’ Manon asked.

  ‘You’ve been on the Internet,’ Miriam scolded. ‘Never look on the Internet for medical advice. You’ll diagnose yourself with cancer. Look, you were right to call me – it is a very high temperature and we do need to keep an eye on him.’

  They sat together briefly in Manon’s lounge on a sofa draped with a cheap cream throw and lit by a tiny lamp on a shelf. Miriam seemed more relaxed than Manon had seen her, though she wouldn’t take her coat off.

  ‘How’s Ian coping with Belmarsh?’ Manon asked.

  ‘Do you know, he’s all right,’ she said, sounding amused and surprised at the same time. ‘He’s reading a lot. Teaching an anatomy course to other inmates – ironic, really, as some of them have actually decapitated people. I keep worrying his imperious manner will get him on the wrong side of people – you know, he’ll ask for quince jelly with his cheese and someone will punch his lights out. But it hasn’t happened yet.’

  ‘The children visit him?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Both of them. We’re all doing our time,’ she said. Then, rising: ‘Look, I’ll pop round in the morning on my way to work. Then I can admit Fly if I’m worried.’

  Two whole weeks the illness raged through him, though Miriam was satisfied it was only flu; like a tidal wave slapping the pier wall with all its force, his rigid body tensed against it. He shook when he stood to pee. His bedroom smelled overripe, as Manon threw open the windows and changed the sheets – a sweetness that was fetid. Eventually he could begin to read and watch TV, but he was hollow-eyed and weak. And then a terrible depression took hold and he cried for his mother and for Taylor. And he blamed Manon, resented her, because she was the nearest target for his distress. His unhappiness was so deep and wide that more than once she wondered if it would ever lift.

  The IPCC report into the death of Helena Reed, following contact with Cambridgeshire Police, resulted in a reg 14 misconduct notice for DC Monique Moynihan, who had taken the call from Helena on the night of 7 January 2011. In her witness statement, DC Moynihan stated that staffing levels in MIT that night were herself and two other detective constables. However, one of these detective constables had a period of twenty days’ leave owing and this officer had been advised by the division if he did not take the time off it would be lost. DC Moynihan stated that she raised concerns about the staffing levels with DI Kirk Tate but did not file a report on the matter. DI Tate did not recall DC Moynihan raising the issue. DC Moynihan had a number of investigations in progress on the night of Sunday 7 January, which she considered urgent. She said Miss Reed had sounded tentative and shy, but not in great distress when she had rung the department. She noted that Miss Reed had not called 999. Immediately following the call, DC Moynihan and the other detective on duty that night, DC Lee Rayner, were called out to a reported burglary.

  The IPCC additionally looked into the duty of care towards Helena Reed by MIT team four investigating the disappearance of Edith Hind. The IPCC noted that the Hind investigation was extremely high profile and required a great deal of police resource. It found that risk assessments of Helena Reed prior to the Crimewatch appeal on Wednesday 4 January 2011,
undertaken by DC Kim Delaney, and additionally a risk assessment filed by DS Manon Bradshaw, were adequate and adhered to professional standards protocol. However, interviews with Miss Reed’s psychoanalyst, Dr Young, revealed that her fragile state was in excess of officers’ assessment of her mental health.

  The IPCC issued a learning strategy document with a recommendation that all members of MIT team four, which investigated the Hind misper, undertake a duty of care refresher course and complete the two-hour training package on mental health.

  Manon hears the vibration of her mobile phone on the kitchen table and walks over to Fly’s books, patting among the papers and crumbs until she finds it. A text from DCI Havers of Kilburn CID – her new boss.

  Want you on early shift tomorrow, DI Bradshaw.

  Her current arse ache, the new job. No Harriet to chat to (now DCI at Cambridgeshire, the rest of the band still together – that rankles) and a twat like Havers lording it over her. And Fly increasingly beset by the Met’s stop and search obsession. She’s told him to keep the details, to log every single incident, in a notebook in his ever-drooping jeans back pocket, and these she follows up.

  ‘Didn’t know he was eleven,’ said one Met officer.

  ‘Try asking him,’ she replied.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs …?’

  ‘It’s DI Bradshaw.’

  They didn’t like ruffling their own, and she hoped to make it clear Fly was not to be touched, at least to all the officers at Kilburn. A white copper mothering a black boy – didn’t that set the cat among the pigeons.

  She’s worried about some of the lads he’s hanging out with at school. Another mental note: to make an appointment with the headmaster. Shower gel, see the headmaster, pick up fruit, bread, and bin bags. When did her lists get so long? She casts about for a pad and pen. Buy pad and pen for lists.

  When the six-month let expired, she signed for another six, checking again: ‘It’s one month notice on either side, right?’