Manon runs her tray along the counter, looking into rectangular metal pans of beans, sausages, watery mushrooms, tomatoes from a tin and scrambled eggs that have congealed into a solid square. A permanent breakfast offering in a lightless room, at 8 p.m. on a Monday evening, for people who have ceased to observe normal day and night patterns.
‘Hello, missy,’ says Larry from behind the counter. He is from Gabon. His name can’t be Larry, but he allows it, this lazy Anglicising of his name. ‘You look tired, dahling. Is long shift?’
Larry is smiling at her. He is always smiling, even though he works punishing hours on minimum wage, serving cheap food to an almost entirely white Cambridgeshire police force. Occasionally she hears him speak a beautiful African French to a female colleague behind that divisive counter. Manon often resolves to ask him about Gabon and how he came to Huntingdon, but there never seems to be a right time.
‘Big case, Larry. No rest for the wicked. Beans and sausages, please.’
She takes her tray to an empty table and looks up at the television, which is bracketed near the ceiling. Sky News is rolling out a stream on Edith Hind’s disappearance. The red ticker along the base of the screen reads: Huntingdon latest: 24-year-old Cambridge student Edith Hind missing. Father is Sir Ian Hind, physician to the Royal Family.
She goes to get the remote control from another table. Around the room are a smattering of officers on the case or supplying auxiliary support, including Stuart, who has a habit of catching Manon’s eye in a way she finds faintly inappropriate. Davy is a couple of tables away. He picks up his tray and moves over to Manon’s table, looking expectantly at the telly as she flicks over to Channel 4+1 for the news.
‘Officers say they are very concerned about a twenty-four-year-old woman who went missing from her home in Huntingdon on Saturday night,’ says the presenter, ‘very concerned’ being code for ‘we think she’s dead’. ‘As Cambridgeshire Police launch a manhunt, we have this report.’
Their home affairs correspondent is stood in the grey slush outside Edith’s house. The blackness of the winter night is lit around him, white puffs emerging on his breath and flurries of sleet blowing about behind his head.
‘Police are investigating what happened to Edith Hind after she got home from a party in Cambridge on Saturday night.’ Manon saws into a processed sausage, its meat sickening-pale. Purest eyelid and spine, she thinks. ‘The postgraduate student was shown on CCTV laughing and singing at The Crown pub in Cambridge with friends. She and her friend Helena Reed then made their way back to Edith’s house, here in George Street, and said goodnight. What happened next is a mystery.
‘DI Harriet Harper, of Cambridgeshire’s Major Incident Team, is urging anyone with information about Edith to contact the dedicated enquiry line. Edith’s parents and her boyfriend, fellow Cambridge graduate Will Carter, will be issuing an appeal for information tomorrow morning.’
The food is filling up Manon’s belly with warmth, which spreads up to her temples and fills her with an intense desire to sleep. She wants to eat more – as she always does when she works a punishing shift – as if she can replace a soft bed with carbohydrates. She spoons in some beans.
‘She put up with me,’ Will Carter told them when they re-interviewed him in the light of the Helena Reed revelation. Manon found herself staring at him with her mouth ajar and when she looked over at Harriet, who had joined herself and Davy halfway through the interview, she had the same expression on her face: You cannot be real. You are a pretend boyfriend, created by DreamWorks.
But it wore off, his handsomeness and its presence in the room, which initially made Manon wind one of her curls about a finger and Harriet hold her stomach in. The two of them questioned him about every aspect of his life with Edith, and though his barriers were down, and they were in the midst of the biggest case either of them had seen in years, nevertheless his answers had a curiously narcoleptic effect on them both. Manon rubbed her eye, which felt as if a bit of grit was caught in it, and cast a look at Harriet, who was stifling a yawn.
‘Shall we break for coffee?’ Harriet had said at one point, and they convened in whispers next to the coffee machine in MIT.
‘Every time he speaks, I want it to be over,’ said Manon, her eyes locked on the middle distance.
‘Yes,’ said Harriet. ‘It’s not boring, but it’s like you just can’t keep your mind on him at all. I found myself thinking about some shopping I have to pick up. Fascinating, isn’t it?’
Carter described how he and Edith had met – the May ball, the velvet dress she wore with a sweetheart neckline, and her reciting Yeats to him across a lawn with her stilettos in one hand and a bottle of Becks in the other.
Manon takes another bite of sausage and looks at Davy – or through him, more accurately. He is saying something about phone numbers, a phone number that was found on Edith Hind’s phone.
Soon there would be flowers – either at the site where a body was found, or outside the house – from members of the public who wrote cards saying ‘you’re safe now’ or ‘rest in peace’ or ‘looking down from heaven’. They scare her, these tragedy tourists, as if they are hungry for catastrophe, a line from the inside of them to the inside of suffering – like a hook inside the cheek of a fish. Manon knows death and she knows it is no rest or journey. Do not go gentle into that good night.
She thinks of Lady Hind’s terrified face and realises the pain for relatives of the missing is that there is no clear face to stare into – neither the abyss of death, nor hope, but a ghastly oscillation between the two. If ever there was real purgatory, it’s this.
‘This number, unknown-515,’ Davy is saying, mouth full of egg, ‘it’s on her phone twice. Edith called it on the Monday – the twelfth, I think it was – before she disappeared, that was a twenty-minute call. Then she called it again on Friday the sixteenth. That’s got to be significant.’
‘Who’s it registered to?’
‘Pay-as-you-go, no records attached, purchased in cash in Cambridge. I’m trying to get more on it. Why would Edith be calling a dirty phone?’
Manon shovels in a final mouthful of baked beans. Her eye is irritable – gritty, the shards of sleep deprivation or the beginning of a stye – and she predicts that when she wakes tomorrow it will have inflated like a blister. That’ll look excellent when there are scores of TV cameras about. She stops herself rubbing it, even though the urge is overpowering, and knows in about three seconds she will claw at it rapaciously.