He stands at Edith Hind’s front door and looks down the path to the men in pressed suits with puffa jackets over the top, loitering at the gate and stamping the snow off their boots. The frozen morning air emerges from their mouths in white clouds. You can tell they’re the locals because of the suits and the polished shoes – national press are scruffy. Chinos with round-neck jumpers in jaunty colours if they’re broadsheet; rumpled suits that fall at the shoulder and concertina into creases at the base of the jacket if they’re tabloid. Local reporters, on the other hand, have to live among their subjects: attend their council meetings, Christmas fairs and sports days. A pressed suit’s the least they can do.
Davy sees DS Bradshaw’s preposterous car pull up just beyond the men, on the opposite kerb. A Seventies Citroën – long nose, sagging leather seats, spindly steering wheel with gear stick to the side. She’s convinced it makes her look like Audrey Hepburn, but behind her back, the DCs at the station make reference to Inspector Clouseau, putting on exaggerated French accents and saying, ‘In the neme of the leur’ while watching from the window as she parks. Davy doesn’t care about impressions. He hates travelling in her car because it’s always cold, often doesn’t start and smells vaguely of wet dog. Thank God it’s usually him driving, her on the phone, in a warm and anonymous unmarked police vehicle.
‘C’mon, tell us something,’ says one of the reporters at the gate, but Davy pushes past him.
‘How long’s she been missing?’ asks another. ‘Any signs of a struggle? Has she been kidnapped?’
‘I’m sure there’ll be a briefing soon,’ says Davy, careful not to meet their eye.
He ducks into Manon’s car and looks at her, but she’s counting up the men at the gate through the smears on the windscreen.
Yes, she’s grumpy, but a skinny latte soon takes the edge off her, most days, anyhow – like throwing a steak into the lion enclosure. He wishes he had one to offer her now but instead he has to watch, unarmed, as she squints into the shards of broken sun. He rubs his hands together and blows into them.
Perhaps it’s her age that’s making her bad-tempered and he can understand that. She must be at least thirty-nine, the loneliness rising off her like a mist. He’d be the same if he didn’t have Chloe. He’s seen Manon, more than once, red-eyed coming out of the second floor toilets and his heart goes out to her on those occasions, watching her hurriedly wipe the snot away and try to act normal. Well, pissed off, which is normal. Him and Manon, though – somehow it works, he doesn’t know how, and this seems to rankle Chloe. Even now, pulling down on his seatbelt, Davy’s face falls as he remembers the time he described Manon as ‘good in a crisis’.
‘Good how?’ Chloe asked, trying to seem casual about it but he knew all about ‘casual’ and its parameters. Chloe’s questioning could put CID to shame. ‘You share a joke, do you? Manon make you laugh much, does she? D’you think she blow-dries her hair, then, before coming in?’ Whenever Davy makes a positive comment about her – and Davy works hard at being positive about pretty much everything – Chloe’s face can darken as fast as the April sky.
‘She sometimes sees things that others don’t,’ he’d said on this particular occasion, shovel in hand, cheerfully digging himself deeper into the pit. ‘Makes connections. Bit left-field sometimes.’
‘Well, I don’t see how that’s any more than most women have got – intuition. I mean, I can make connections between things if I want to,’ Chloe said, then barely talked to him the rest of the day.
Manon puts the car in gear, her eyes still on the men, saying, ‘Four. Just the locals.’
‘Course it’s the locals. Still early doors.’
‘Won’t be long before they ring the tabs. This time of year, missing girl. Nothing like a festive stiff to warm the cockles of your front page.’
‘She’s probably just got a new boyfriend – done a runner,’ says Davy.
‘Leaving her phone and keys and the door wide open? I don’t even go to the toilet without my phone. And what about the blood? No, I’d say she’s definitely come to harm.’
She’s put her aviator shades down, pulling out from the kerb. Davy looks at her and shakes his head.
It’s only a ten-minute drive to the station from George Street. They jog up the steps of Cambridgeshire HQ, a festival of sick-yellow brick squatting in an acreage of car park. For Davy, climbing these steps with an important job to do makes him inflate with pride and elation. He wishes someone could see him, Detective Constable Walker of Cambridgeshire Constabulary: supporting law-abiding citizens and pursuing criminals relentlessly since 1974. This mission statement is actually on the Cambridgeshire police website, but it could have been something Davy came up with.
When he brought Chloe for a tour of HQ, he was smiling to himself the whole time and even though she described it as ‘a cross between a Travelodge and a conference centre’, it hadn’t dented the dignity of his calling. She said the reception, with its curved wooden desk, spider plants, and smell of brewing coffee, reminded her of an STD clinic, but what he saw – what he was so proud of – was the electronic notice board announcing the life and death work going on here (2–4 p.m., conf. room 3: crime data integrity working group; protocol briefings: ambulance teams, Hinchingbrooke; UK cross border agency; 4–6 p.m., Commissioner). So much sexier than the jobs he could have had: regional manager for Vodafone or selling fridges in Currys, like his school friends. Which would you rather? Flogging some twenty-four-month contract with 3,000 free minutes or wondering whether the Dutch woman got on a train to Brighton to kill herself there, or whether she was murdered? Human stories, base and sexual. The police operated in the seedy low light: drug runs, burglars in botched stick-ups, murderers who said they were nowhere near the scene but whose smart phones provided a handy GPS map of their movements. Boyfriends controlling girlfriends, friends paying off debts, love triangles, honour killings. That, or: ‘Would you like to extend your warranty on this microwave for an extra two years, sir?’
‘Look at you, Davy,’ Chloe had said, as he showed her the forensics lab and the phone-tracing department. ‘You’ve really drunk the Kool-Aid, haven’t you?’
Davy and Manon enter the MIT department just as Harriet is gathering team four for her briefing: DC Kim Delaney, DC Nigel Williams, Colin Brierley – a retired DI, now civilian investigator who runs the tech side – and a couple of other DCs.
They fall in behind their desks, shaking off their coats.
‘You’re going to have to hit the ground running, Stuart, I’m afraid,’ Harriet is saying as Manon shakes hands with the new recruit – an extra civilian investigator to type interviews into the HOLMES computer system and listen to Colin’s un-politically correct diatribes, lucky chap. ‘Baptism of fire. These guys will show you the ropes.’
Davy nods his most welcoming nod at Stuart. Sometimes CIs were retired officers, like Colin, sometimes young, like this one, fresh from a three-day induction course. They were cheap and they didn’t leave the office.
‘Right, everyone,’ Harriet continues. ‘Edith Hind, twenty-four, Cambridge postgrad student, missing from the house she shares with Will Carter in George Street. Parents have driven up and are waiting downstairs, so let’s get a family liaison officer with them asap. Main lines are as follows. One: scene and examination. SOCO are in. I’ve just had a call from them: two wine glasses – one clean on the kitchen worktop, the other broken in the bin with traces of blood at its edges.’
‘She could have been waiting for someone,’ says Manon.
‘That was my thought,’ says Harriet. ‘Two wine glasses out ready for a rendezvous, one of them becomes a weapon. We’ll see what forensics tell us on that score.
‘Two: search ongoing, including dogs. Polsa should be on board by midday today. That’s Police Search Adviser,’ she says to the new chap. ‘The search teams, in other words. Three: house to house. Four: FLO and victimology. Five: media. We’ll get a photo of Edith out this morning. I’m meeting with Fergus in an hour to discuss Press strategy. Six: intel work. Colin, you’ve got her phone and her laptop. Let’s trace her car reg on ANPR – that’s Automated Number Plate Recognition, for our new recruit here. And Will Carter’s too, while we’re at it. I want all of the council’s CCTV looked at. Seven: persons of interest. That’s Will Carter, obviously, and Helena Reed, the friend she was with on Saturday night. Is that enough to be getting on with?’
‘Hypothesis, boss?’ asks Nigel. Manon says he’s needy, always looking to senior officers for answers. Davy would never express something so judgemental, though it’s fair to say Nigel is permanently exhausted since having the twins.
‘I would say she’s opened the door to someone she knows or at least to someone she wasn’t immediately afraid of. The blood indicates an injury, possibly when someone tried to remove her from the house. The amount of blood doesn’t suggest a murder on site; it’s more likely it’s come from a cut of some kind. A sexual encounter of some sort? He makes advances, she’s not keen, and there’s a blow from the wine glass in the tussle. All supposition at this point. We are within the golden hour, so let’s press on.’