Missing, Presumed (6 page)

‘Helena, do you know what has happened to Edith?’ asks Harriet.

‘No, I don’t. I swear I don’t.’

‘Do you think Will Carter found out about your affair?’

‘I don’t think so, no.’

‘How long have you been lovers?’ asks Manon gently.

‘Lovers?’ says Helena with a soft laugh. ‘You make it sound so enchanting. It was one night – well, a night and a day – it happened twice, that’s all. A mistake, a terrible mistake. The first time she seemed affectionate, at least. She said, “It’s always been you.” But then, last Wednesday, she was out of it. I couldn’t even tell if she loved or hated me. Please, I don’t want anyone to know.’ She starts to cry. ‘My parents …’

‘It’s all right,’ says Manon. ‘We’re asking you solely for the purposes of this investigation. There is no reason for your parents or anyone else to find out. Did Edith instigate it, the relationship?’

Helena nods, the back of her hand to her mouth, her chin trembling.

‘And when was this?’

‘A week ago. I mean, the Saturday before this one.’

‘So that would be the tenth?’

‘I s’pose. She came to my flat late – about 2 a.m. – she was drunk and she, well, she kissed me.’

‘And did things progress?’

‘Yes, but I’ve never been with a woman before,’ Helena says in a rush.

‘And after that Saturday?’ says Harriet.

‘She came again on Wednesday in the day. She was much more distracted, much more … not herself at all.’

‘Not herself how?’

‘Sort of reckless. Kamikaze. I felt as if she was using me, as if she hated me. She wouldn’t look me in the eye. She’d brought a bottle of wine and we ended up in bed. When I said, “What about Will?” she snapped, “It doesn’t fucking matter.” Then she left very suddenly, as if she’d changed her mind.

‘Did you want things to continue? Is that why you went home with her on Saturday after the pub?’

‘I don’t know what I wanted. I felt, feel, confused. Chewed up and spat out, if I’m honest. I feel … mortified. I never thought anyone would find out. I swear to you, I left her in her kitchen. We didn’t even talk about it. I didn’t even have the guts to mention it. I wish I’d left her in Cambridge now. I wish I’d come back to Huntingdon by myself.’

Standing on the station steps, she blinks into the low sun, which flashes off the car roofs like knives. She can see slices of Will Carter striding towards her – his hair, his chin, a black donkey coat and scarf, but not his eyes.

Will bedded down in her lounge in the early hours of this morning, after his police interviews were done, and when she’d gone in to draw the curtains around 7 a.m., while he was in the shower, the room smelled thickly of unfamiliar male. She folded his sleeping bag and laid the pillow neatly on top, and when he came in to get dressed, she retreated to the kitchen to brew them a pot of strong coffee. They sat at the breakfast bar, hollow-eyed, going over the night’s events.

He won’t want to stay with her after this. She can’t make out his expression – is there mistrust already? – because of the distorting shards of sun. She can hardly breathe at the thought of what he is about to find out. He jogs up the station steps.

‘Are you all right?’ he asks, taking her elbow. ‘You look awful.’

‘It’s just,’ she says, ‘a bit rough in there. Scary. What’s happening.’

‘I know. They want to re-interview me for some reason, God knows why. I’ve told them everything about five times already.’

‘I guess new stuff keeps cropping up,’ she says. She is grateful to the flash and glare for obscuring his face.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ll see you back at the flat. Is it OK if I stay another night with you? Our house is cordoned off.’

‘If you want to – why don’t you see how you feel?’ She puts both hands over her forehead to create a visor. ‘Listen, Will, the police – they’re saying all sorts, trying to poke about and stuff. Don’t listen to them – I mean, not all of it can be true.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘I’m just saying, some of it is just trying to get a rise out of you, y’know? See how you’ll react.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he says.

‘Doesn’t matter, forget it.’

‘Look, I better go in. I’ll catch up with you after.’

Helena strides headlong into the light, taking wide steps because the tarmac is flat and predictable, and with some steps the sun recedes and she can see, only for it to flash off a wing mirror or window – like peering through the slats of a blind. He’ll be going into an interview room, greeting the officers who will tell him what she and Edith have done together behind his back. He might look back towards the station steps, to where they have only just spoken, run a hand through his hair in shock.

A tree provides welcome shade and she can see gridlock on the road into Huntingdon. She reaches the concrete underpass, the sun slanting against its elephant grey-green hulk, almost painterly. The cars are bumper to bumper into town, and as she reaches the top of George Street, she can sense a frisson in the air. Perhaps it is the drivers craning to see what the hold-up is; the hooting of horns, as they grow tired of the delay; the slowing pedestrians on the pavement. Helena has to weave through a throng as she nears the house itself and then she is in front of the familiar gate, which she has pushed open without thinking so many times, now cordoned with police tape and guarded by a WPC in a fluorescent windcheater and regulation black trousers, her radio crackling with blurred voices.

Ten feet further down the road is a group of men – they appear from this distance to be a black huddle, like a murder of crows landed on crumbs, but as she gets nearer, Helena sees there are one or two women among them. She sees the cameras slung over their shoulders like handbags and the notepads. They are laughing, at ease. One of them smiles at Helena as she edges past them on the pavement and she increases her pace, pushing her chin down into her scarf. She edges around the next group – two women with toddlers playing about their legs, and a pensioner with a square wheelie shopper. ‘Was at the university, apparently,’ is all she catches, to which one of the women says, ‘Terrible.’

Helena stops herself from breaking in to a run. Her heart pounds at the thought of the women turning to look at her in horror, their faces ghoulish with opprobrium, the cameras pointed at her with sudden piercing focus.

Her breathing returns to a more normal rhythm once she is safely inside her flat, until she becomes aware of the beeps coming from the answering machine in the lounge. She unwinds her scarf. Perhaps it is Dr Young. Perhaps he has heard about Edith’s disappearance on the news and has rung to check she is all right.
Beep
. She holds the scarf against her chest. Or her father. If it’s her father, she can call him back, tell him what’s happened and ask to come home for the weekend to Bromley, get away from all the intrusion and the questions.
Beep
.

What if it’s Edith herself, explaining away all the confusion in that breezy way she has – ‘Lighten up, Hels’ – like the time she’d rung on the intercom at 2 a.m. Helena answered the door irritably in her tartan pyjamas, and when she saw Edith swaying there, said, ‘Is anything wrong?’

Edith, breathing tannin from some Shiraz or Merlot, her gums stained black, giggling and pushing her way through to the lounge. Edith’s tiny lace bra was lilac with a diamante stud at its centre and so pretty against her skin. Her bones were delicate, breakable, her breasts neat and perfectly round, her arms beautifully thin. Helena found she could circle her thumb and middle finger perfectly around Edith’s wrist like a bracelet. And Edith held out to her in those lovely hands the promise of excitement and discovery, as if the only thing holding them both back was the smallness of Helena’s horizons.

‘Let’s loosen you up a bit, Hel,’ Edith murmured, biting at the corner of Helena’s mouth while her hands worked down the buttons on her pyjamas.

Helena walks slowly to the lounge, placing her scarf on the end of the sofa, unbuttoning her coat. She presses play on the answering machine.

‘Hi, this is a message for Helena Reed. It’s Bethan Jones from the
Mail on Sunday
. We’re doing a special piece on Edith Hind and I wondered if you wanted to tell us, you know, what she’s really like – as her best friend. It’d really bring the piece to life. I’m sure you’re worried about Edith and obviously coverage like this raises her profile, so if you wanted to talk, you know, to help the police appeal, then you can get in touch with me on—. I really look forward to hearing from you, Helena. Thanks, then. It’s Bethan Jones, by the way.’

He lowers his head to the left, feeling the long stretch down the side of his neck, then to the other side. His body is beginning to take umbrage at having been in a broadly vertical position for more than twenty hours. Evening now – a full night and day on shift – and they’re waiting for the 6 p.m. briefing. Only last week he’d heard a radio programme about research showing the toll night shifts take on the body, tearing through its natural rhythms, giving you cancer.

He increases the stretch by placing a hand on the top of his head and pulling gently. Even while doing this he wants to go to sleep. One side, then the other. He sees the department tilted on its side: Kim pouring herself some stewed coffee, Stuart sitting next to Colin, Harriet and Manon up front by the whiteboard, all of them gathering lugubriously, waiting for Fergus. Things are heating up in the press office.

Thirty-six hours missing. You’d expect a body or a firm sighting by now, or an injured girl, limping away from whatever trauma has befallen her. But this? Murkier and murkier it’s getting, and Davy doesn’t like the look of it.

He’s just come from interview room three, where Will Carter kept running a confused hand through his hair and saying, ‘Edith? And Helena?’ As if he and Manon had totally lost their marbles. ‘No,’ Carter mumbled. ‘No, I don’t think that can be right.’

‘Helena confirmed it to us,’ Manon said, without nearly as much sympathy as Davy would have liked.

He’s seen it all before, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less depressing – watching people reassess their entire surroundings as if buildings have been moved or reconfigured, roads diverted. The people they think they know have hidden lives: other women, other men, money stolen, debts hidden, a previous life in a cartel or on the game, children fathered in secret. It exhausts as well as fascinates him, churning it all up with their big stubby stick. Can’t you all just keep it simple, he wants to sigh. Can’t you keep it buttoned, keep your fists out of it, stop drinking, stop
shagging
? Isn’t life complicated enough?

And here was Will Carter, bewildered. He wasn’t standing up all of a sudden, like most of them did, trying to turn the table over and shouting, ‘You’re having a fucking laugh!’ or kicking a chair. No, he was rather genteelly running a hand through his hair, saying, ‘Edith and Helena? Seriously?’ And just looking mildly shocked.

‘Looking back,’ Manon said to Carter, and Davy thought, go easy, now, the man’s had a shock, ‘can you see evidence of that relationship?’

‘We were always together, always close, the three of us. I never questioned it. Shows what a fool I am.’ And Carter laughed in a self-deprecating way, which once again made Davy think, you poor chap.

Manon didn’t seem to share his sensitivity. ‘Perhaps you did know, Mr Carter,’ she said. ‘And became incensed by it. Jealous. Perhaps you came back early to confront Edith about it.’

‘No. I honestly didn’t know. And it makes me look like a total chump. And I know there are people who think you should know – you know, the inner workings of your nearest and dearest. But the fact is, if they don’t tell you …’

‘Did you have the feeling that Edith was going to leave you?’

Christ, Davy thought, give the man a sodding break.

Carter blew out through his cheeks. ‘No, no I didn’t. Are you going to tell me I’m wrong about that too? Listen, I can live with infidelity. A fling with Helena – it wouldn’t change how I feel.’ And his eyes brimmed with tears, fat droplets swelling to their bursting point but remaining just there, on the brink, beneath his slate eyes with their brown flecks. ‘But please don’t tell me she didn’t – doesn’t – love me any more. Please don’t do that, not with her missing.’

Davy had put a hand on Manon’s arm.

‘No, of course not,’ said Manon softly.

And Davy exhaled, feeling reassured she would not go in and sock him with the Jason Farrer fumble. One infidelity at a time, eh.

‘Money,’ Harriet says, bending her middle finger down in her new list of priorities. ‘Edith didn’t use banks. There was no cash in the house when we searched it. Now that either means Edith spent it all, or it was on her when she was abducted, or it was stolen and that her disappearance is the consequence of an aggravated burglary. Nigel, where are we with CCTV from the Post Office on the first of December?’

‘Owner doesn’t know how to burn it onto a DVD,’ says Nigel.

‘Well, go down there and do it for him,’ says Manon. She and Harriet exchange irritable glances.

Nigel shrugs. He’s been destroyed by life with newborn twins, thinks Davy, and now he’s too tired even to take umbrage. Have a dig, his dead eyes seem to say, I don’t care, as long as I can lie down.

‘Manon, can you take us through Will’s journey to Stoke and back, please?’ says Harriet.

‘We’ve got him travelling to Stoke, as he described, on Friday evening. He’s picked up by ANPR at three points on his outward journey and obviously his mother confirms his stay.’

‘Well, she would, wouldn’t she?’ mutters Harriet. ‘Sorry, carry on.’

‘She says he left her house in Stoke at 5.30 p.m. on Sunday evening. He says he took a longer route home because of Sunday roadworks, which means his journey took closer to three hours, getting him back to George Street at 8.30 p.m. He then spent half an hour searching the house for Edith, calling various people such as Helena Reed, before phoning her parents, and then us at 9 p.m. Now, we haven’t got that return journey on camera. Might be that the cameras are out on this route, we’re checking that, or that he was tailgated by a lorry or something, or that mud splashed on his plates, which prevented a reading—’

‘Or that he was at home murdering his girlfriend,’ snorts Stuart, with rather more confidence than is merited for a first day in the office, if you ask Davy, which no one ever does.

‘Ah, Fergus,’ says Harriet. ‘The floor’s all yours.’

Fergus Kelly, a neat man in spectacles, never a speck on his suit. He has worked in the press office for ten years, including through the mayhem of Soham, which shook him more than the rest of them because it laid waste to half his contacts and all the unsaid niceties that had previously governed the flow of information.

‘So, the tabloids are well and truly on to this now,’ Fergus says, pushing his glasses up his nose. He has a fresh outbreak of acne on his chin, incongruous for a man in his forties, but understandable when you combined stress with the heavily refined carbohydrates stocked in the canteen. One of his daughters has cerebral palsy. Davy doesn’t know what’s made him think of this, but something about Fergus being under pressure doesn’t seem fair. ‘Obviously we can use the press interest to flush out information, but we need to control it – all enquiries must go through the press office. The Hinds have agreed to do a press conference at 11 a.m. tomorrow and we may wheel Will Carter out to see how much he sweats. Obviously, in the first days, the press tend to be very helpful in promoting the police line. It’s after a couple of days,’ he rubs the sweat at his brow, ‘when there’s nothing new to report, they can become quite …’ He coughs into his fist. ‘It’s important there are no leaks,’ he adds, making eye contact with every member of the team, especially the new recruit, in a way that is pleading rather than authoritative. ‘And that we stay in control, as I say, of the flow of information.’