Girl matching Edith’s description spotted walking south out of the town; girl matching Edith’s description seen walking west out of the town; girl matching Edith’s description spotted in Manchester; in Glasgow; in seven separate locations in London. All would have to be followed up. TI. Trace and Interview. Nothing ignored.
The sound has been muted on the television, but there is Stanton, giving more interviews, the red ticker tape running along the bottom of the screen saying – Det Ch Supt Gary Stanton, Cambridgeshire Police: ‘Missing Edith had lesbian relationship. Complex love life at heart of investigation.’
‘Sorry, why have you been put through to this department?’ Davy is saying into the phone. ‘No, no, I don’t want to give you the inside story.’ Waits. ‘Righto, yes, thank you, putting you through to the press office, caller,’ he says, pressing various buttons on his handset and slamming down the receiver with uncharacteristic annoyance. ‘Why aren’t they putting these calls through to the media team? Why are they coming through to us?’
‘Because they lie to switchboard, that’s why,’ says Harriet.
Colin is in his element, leaping up every five minutes. ‘This one says the immigrants are to blame. If we didn’t let them flood our borders …’ He shakes his head, saying, ‘Classic.’
Manon is leafing through the pile of newspapers splayed across her desk – across all the desks – every one of them leading on the Hind investigation: Tragic Edith had female lover; Edith’s lesbian trysts; Missing Edith had secret girlfriend, say police. Even the broadsheets are carrying it on the front page. The Telegraph takes the opportunity to re-run a vast photograph of Edith in her mortar board; something for the brigadiers to gaze at while imagining her disrobed and in a steamy same-sex clinch. The Guardian displayed its usual distaste by running it as a basement: Press frenzy over ‘female lover’ in Edith investigation. It got their juices going – girl-on-girl action. Better than that: posh-girl-on-girl action. She prays no one puts two and two together and gets Helena Reed. The Met has had to deploy a protection team to Church Row in Hampstead, where the Hinds are being ferociously doorstepped.
Fergus has walked in. Dark wet patches are leaching through the cotton of his grey shirt at the armpits. His acne outbreak has reddened. He pushes his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose.
‘A word, everyone, if you don’t mind.’
The department settles, people perching or stood still, but for the phones which keep on crying out.
‘We need to be very mindful of attempts to infiltrate this investigation,’ he says. ‘Most of you will have taken calls from reporters this morning. They are hungry, very hungry indeed – under a lot of pressure for a follow-up to today’s revelations. I would strongly advise you not to exchange any details about the case when you are on your mobile phones.’
‘Are you saying we’re being hacked?’ says Stuart.
‘I wouldn’t rule it out,’ says Fergus, and he pushes his glasses up again, the sweat making them slip. ‘Just to be on the safe side, don’t talk about it on the blower. If you’re talking to each other, don’t mention names or details, and don’t talk to your family and friends about it, OK? Thanks everyone.’
The room breaks up, louder than before. Manon needs to escape the increased decibels, the heightened heat and velocity in the air, the pain shooting across one side of her brain.
‘I’m going to the canteen, Davy. D’you want a coffee or anything?’
‘This is an almighty mess,’ says Davy, and she is startled, not only to hear him express something so despairing but to see the broken expression on his face. ‘I mean, what was he thinking? This isn’t how we find out what happened to Edith. It’s just exploiting her.’
‘Normal to shake things up at this point,’ she tells him. ‘Eighteen days missing, everyone’s forgotten about her a bit. We’ve got fuck-all credible leads. Stanton’s just swirling his stick in the sand. Tea? Bacon butty?’
On the way down the stairs she texts Fly.
How is the coat?
Coat is good, but it making me shoes look bad.
She nudges Bryony, who is ahead of her in the canteen queue. ‘All right?’
‘Oooh, hello,’ says Bryony. ‘All kicking off round yours.’
‘I know. Splitting headache. Phones are ringing off the hook.’
‘Any of it sensible?’
‘Not so far. You know what it’s like.’
‘Sit with me?’
‘Five minutes, yeah.’
They take a table in the far corner, where Bryony interrogates Manon about her love life.
‘So hang on, he came by the station to ask you out, bought you antibiotic eye drops, and you haven’t called him?’ Bryony is saying, and it’s doing nothing for Manon’s headache.
The conjunctivitis was gone by Tuesday morning. She’d applied the first drops the minute she got upstairs to the department on the Monday evening, and the next day she was clear and evangelical about antibiotics’ supernatural powers. What on earth will the human race do when this medicine stops working? Die in childbirth again. Go blind with conjunctivitis. Kidney failure from cystitis. Commit suicide during a bout of toothache. She thought about it a bit, darkly, and then, on with the day! She’d been briefly full of gratitude, too, towards Alan Prenderghast, but this had evaporated just as fast as the infection so that by Wednesday afternoon, she’d forgotten that she was ever encumbered. She hadn’t got round to thanking him, and then she didn’t feel like it any more.
It is more than that, she realises now, sitting opposite Bryony and the pressure she exudes. She can’t communicate … what? Something nuanced and complex about why she doesn’t want to get involved with him. The way she stands back from the web of interaction because she can’t commit to being inside it. Her sheer ambivalence, which Bryony sees as straightforward but is anything but. Contact is difficult.
‘And yet you will put out for whatever hairy sociopath comes your way on the Internet?’ Bryony is saying.
Manon shrugs, as if to say, Search me.
‘There’s no helping you. I literally give up.’
‘I keep meaning to ring him,’ says Manon, and she notices how her voice sounds: slow and dissociated, as if very far away. ‘I just don’t get round to it. I don’t know why.’
‘I do. He might actually be nice to you. He might treat you well and give you babies.’
‘Come off it,’ she says, frowning, and she’s angry now at being bulldozed. ‘You don’t know shit about him, Bri.’
‘I know he’s already better than the totally awful specimens you normally go out with.’
Manon has stood up abruptly. She’s had enough. ‘You fucking go out with him then.’
She walks away, hearing Bryony say, ‘Manon, come back, I—’ before the doors to the canteen shut behind her.
Helena
Her breathing comes in jolts, stepping down in her solar plexus, then up again, catching in her throat. A ladder of tears. ‘They’re com-ing to get me,’ she says. ‘They are com-ing to ge-et me.’
‘I think if we can just go back to the dream, we can try to unravel this,’ says Dr Young, still voice of calm.
‘The-ey are com-ing to ge-et me. The papers … It’s all ov-er the papers … Oh G-o-d, oh God …’ She places her palms over her face, wet and puffy from the torrent. She wants to hide, for the earth to open and for it to close over her head, welcome grave. Exposure is everywhere, about to happen. She is about to be named. She is filthy.
‘The dream,’ he says.
In the dream, she was running down suburban streets – Newnham or her parents’ street in Bromley, she couldn’t tell. Breathless, her clothes torn, pursued by a flock of enormous black crows, with wings flying out behind them like academic cloaks, and angry beaks. Running and running from them as they gained ground, and then she turned a corner and saw her parents’ house, the front door of her childhood, and she felt a surge of relief that she would be safe. They would open the doo
r to her and she would get inside and the crows would be barred. She reached the front door and banged with her fists on it and the crows were at the gate. But the door didn’t open. Her parents didn’t answer, and the horror, the horror, she feels herself collapsing again, folding in on herself. She saw her parents at the window looking at her from the safety of the lounge, leaving her outside to face the crows.
‘They wouldn’t let me in,’ she gasps, her palms wet over her face, the tears seeping to the webbed crooks between her fingers. ‘Because I am disgusting.’
‘How are you disgusting?’
‘Because … because … the newspapers are saying she had a female lover, but I’m not, I’m not … Everyone will think I was her lover, but I wasn’t. It wasn’t like that, but everyone will think it was dirty, sordid, that I did something to her.’
‘Why would anyone make that connection? Is there something about your relationship with Edith, something about that night that you’re not being honest about?’
‘No, no, you see? You think it. You see “female lover” and you think of me. Her best friend, with her on the night she disappeared. It’s all over it – the innuendo.’
Silence.
‘But you know what did happen,’ he says. ‘The truth about that night.’
‘Yes, I know. No, no I don’t mean that. I don’t know what happened to Edith, I don’t know that. You’re trying to trip me up. You’re trying to get me to say I was involved.’
Silence, this time of a kind which seems incriminating.
‘I wonder,’ he says, ‘if you feel that I am locking you out – leaving you to the black crows – in the gap between now and our next session on Monday. All this press interest, the feeling you have of exposure … Three days is a long time to be on your own with it all.’
She is silent, except for the uneven steps of her breathing.
‘We have to leave it there,’ he says.
Davy
‘Nice road,’ he says. He presses on his key fob and the car answers with its electronic whup-whep. The lights flash twice and they walk along a pavement sparkling with frost, their breath smoking and their hands dug into their pockets. It’s a relief to be out of the frenetic heat of HQ – a million conflicting sightings of Edith and the deceiving infiltration of reporters who are back on the story.
A ribbon of mist curls through the tops of the trees. He looks into the front gardens: chequerboard tiling and the bare stems of magnolias or lilacs; bicycles chained to black iron railings; bay windows so clean they seem liquid and topped with little proud roof turrets in grey slate.
They have come to the posh part of Cambridge – Newnham – to re-interview Barbara Garfield, wife of Edith’s Director of Studies, after she called and told them she had new information to share. Didn’t everyone, after Crimewatch?
Be nice to live somewhere like this, he thinks – so comfortable with itself. Those front patches are tended by people who listen to Gardeners’ Question Time and know the names of shrubs. He bets the houses’ insides are worn but bookish, not smelly-depressing shabby, like the places they visit for work, pushing their jumpers up over their mouths and noses. No, this is easy-does-it shabby. I-know-who-I-am shabby. Persian-rug shabby.
‘Grantchester Street,’ he says, checking in his green book.
‘Left at the end here,’ says Manon.
They walk a little further.
‘Did you see,’ Davy says, ‘Stuart’s got a new iPad?’
‘That’s more Colin’s bag than mine,’ says Manon.
‘Nice one, latest kind, y’know – white one, thin as you like. Says he can’t get used to the touch screen. Just wonder how he afforded it, that’s all. Didn’t think CIs got paid that much—’ He is winded by a body slamming into him from the left. Someone who has hurtled out of the gate from one of the houses they have just passed. ‘Woah,’ he says, catching her about the shoulders. ‘Slow down. Are you all right?’
The girl is stooped over, crying, and when she looks up, Manon says, ‘Helena?’
She doesn’t speak. Her eyes are red raw, her lips swollen, and she is shaking.
‘Helena,’ says Manon again. ‘What are you doing here? Is everything all right?’
‘Everyone will know,’ she says, with pleading eyes. ‘Why did he say that, about a female lover? Why did he have to say that on telly? Everyone will know. It’s all over the papers. They’re going to want to know who.’ And she collapses into Davy’s chest.
‘Didn’t an officer come and warn you about Crimewatch? I thought DC Kim Delaney—’
‘I didn’t realise, I didn’t know how huge it would be,’ Helena says, her eyes wide with fear. ‘The television. It was on the television. I don’t know what I thought … I didn’t take it in.’
‘No one knows about you,’ says Manon. ‘It won’t come out, about you and Edith.’ She and Davy look at each other over Helena’s head. ‘No one is going to release your name, Helena. As far as the press knows, you are just the friend she was out with on Saturday night.’
‘Look, anyone comes after you, you call me,’ says Davy, pushing her away from his chest so he can dig in his pocket for a card with his number printed on it, and so that he can look her in the eye, too. Tell her it’s real. They will protect her. ‘Now get yourself home and lay low. D’you need a car? I can get someone out here—’
‘No, no,’ she says. She wipes the wet from her nose with the back of her hand and the movement makes her seem like a little girl. ‘I can get home.’
She is looking down at Davy’s little white card, with its silver star symbol topped with a royal crown and the words Cambridgeshire Constabulary following the blue circle.
‘Would you like an officer with you at your flat? We can arrange that,’ he says.
‘Why are you here?’ says Helena abruptly. ‘What are you doing on the same street as my, my, my friend … I have a friend who lives here.’
‘Just routine enquiries,’ says Manon, smiling, but this seems only to increase the terror in Helena’s eyes.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ says Davy. ‘I think I should drive you. I’ve got a car just around the corner.’
‘No, no,’ and she bridles, shaking Davy’s hand off her shoulder. ‘I’ve got somewhere to go right now. I’m not going straight home, you see. I’ll be all right.’ She sniffs. ‘It’ll all blow over, right? This storm, it’ll pass.’
Manon and Davy watch her as she turns and scurries, hunched and quick-footed, away from them down Grantchester Street.
‘Don’t like the look of her,’ says Davy. ‘We should call it in. Tell Harriet she seems vulnerable.’
‘Yup, we’ll flag it up when we get back to the office after this,’ says Manon.
Manon
‘Have you finished yet?’ asks Manon, smiling at him.
‘Not yet, no,’ Davy says, sneezing another three times.
‘Goodness me,’ says Mrs Garfield. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Do you have a cat?’ asks Davy.
‘Yes, oh goodness, sorry. Wait a minute, I’ll put her out.’
Manon takes a seat at the dining table while Davy blows his nose. They are in a sunken kitchen which gives out onto the back garden. The kitchen floor is a grid of terracotta squares and the cupboards are oak. The room smells of boiling lentils and surfaces just wiped with a faintly mildewed cloth. The dishwasher is going. The round dining table, at the garden end of the room, is covered with a wipeable oilcloth in a pale green William Morris design. On the wall is a picture of Mr and Mrs Garfield in shorts and sunglasses, leaning into one another.
‘There, she won’t bother you any more,’ says Mrs Garfield, coming back into the room and brushing at her skirt. ‘Though I can’t guarantee her fur won’t – it’s everywhere, I’m afraid. Now, what can I get you to drink? Tea? Coffee?’
‘Glass of water, if you don’t mind, Mrs Garfield,’ says Davy.
‘Sergeant?’
‘Nothing for me, thank you.
’
Mrs Garfield runs the tap, her finger feeling its temperature, saying, ‘I really don’t know why I rang. And you must be absolutely inundated after Crimewatch. The papers are full of it.’
‘Did you remember something that might be important?’ asks Manon.
‘Silly, really, and you’ve come out all this way. I mean, sometimes you think something’s a thing, and then it isn’t a thing. D’you know what I mean?’
‘Something about the night Edith went missing, perhaps?’ says Manon. ‘When your husband came back from The Crown?’
She sets the glass of water in front of Davy, who has his green book out on the dining table. Mrs Garfield doesn’t sit down with them. Instead, she returns to the kitchen counter and busies herself, clattering about with various pans and bowls. They wait.
Davy writes something in his book, the date and time probably. Manon looks out to the garden, the wet-grey paving slabs, soil silted and blown about with fallen leaves. It all seems quite dead.
Manon breaks the silence, ever so gently. ‘Is there something you’re unsure about … about Mr Garfield?’
‘He wipes his Internet history,’ Mrs Garfield says, without looking up, making circular wiping motions on the worktop with a cloth.
‘Go on,’ says Manon.
‘I don’t. I don’t wipe my Internet history. I’m only ever on the John Lewis website looking at table lamps. Or Amazon. I don’t wipe my Internet history – it wouldn’t occur to me. So why does he?’
‘It occurred to you to look for his Internet history, Mrs Garfield. Why was that?’
‘He’s always on his computer – lost in this world that I don’t know anything about. It’s like some secret door he goes through, where he’s unreachable, like the screen has stolen him from me.’ She shakes her head, then adopts a different tone. ‘It’s probably nothing – work or football scores. Reading the New Statesman. But you don’t know, do you?’ And she laughs, but the texture in the room has darkened.
Missing, Presumed Page 20
