Her canteen lunch of shepherd’s pie and boiled carrots has collapsed into the four corners of its yellow polystyrene box. Brown gravy, Bisto-infused, the mince pebble-dashing her throat as it goes down. Piped mash – has it ever been potato? Not bad. Not bad at all.
She has pushed her keyboard to one side to make way for the rectangular box and the Daily Mirror, and she scans the News in Brief column, seeing Search for Edith relegated there. One paragraph on the planned television reconstruction, which will go out in the next episode of Crimewatch. Twelve days missing and Edith’s a NiB – a reflection of the investigation’s stalemate. Forensics from the scene showed only Edith’s, Will Carter’s, and Helena Reed’s DNA at George Street, as you’d expect. The blood was Edith’s but no rogue DNA on the glass shards in the kitchen bin.
‘Gloves,’ Harriet said, ‘or it was someone whose DNA is already there.’
Meaning Carter. They are still tracing his return journey along minor roads back from Stoke; still watching that mobile number ‘unknown-515’; still waiting for data off the Corpus college computer – everything taking an age because of Christmas rotas, skeletal staffing. Every email met with an ‘out of office’.
‘Good Christmas?’ asks Marie from Accounts as she passes Manon’s desk, the question she dreads and tries to shrug off.
‘Yeah, good thanks,’ she says, barely looking up from her newspaper and some story she’s not reading about a muscled pop star on his third marriage, though ‘This time it’s for keeps’.
She was pulled off the Hind case Christmas Eve, onto a suspicious death. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Elderly man burnt to a charcoal slump just inside the front door of his bungalow on the outskirts of Peterborough. Cover-up for a burglary, or obtaining money with menaces, or perhaps he’d done it to himself. She picked over the charred interior of the man’s home and found a selection of wigs, cheap and matted – platinum blonde, mostly; a rail of polyester women’s dresses in a wardrobe untouched by fire; and below a jumble of dusty high heels with slits cut in the sides and back to make room for his man-sized feet. He had worked the bins for Peterborough City Council all his life.
Manon spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day tracing his family and yet there were none; at least, none that said they knew him. She tried to capture CCTV, which took double the time when no one but the dimmest or most desperate was on duty, and she included herself in that. Never go in for an operation or become a victim of violent crime on a major national holiday, that would be her advice.
Still, the death of old Mr Cross-Dresser did away with the day. She picked up a takeaway from The Spice Inn on Christmas night, stepping into the darkness of her flat and heading straight to her kitchen. She set her phone on the kitchen counter, its screen illuminated then darkening, like some sleeper rousing then turning over again in the bed, and she remembered the calls from her father she’d ignored.
Her kitchen was the one area of the flat overlooked by the mid-century modernisers: gloomy with brown floral tiles; the grouting cracked and orange behind the taps; the cupboards dark and over-twiddled with vaguely medieval handles. Bryony said she should paint the cupboards. ‘Cornforth White. Brighten it up no end.’ But Manon never got around to it. Shifts blurred into shifts, overtime into more overtime. They filled her bank account but not her fridge, so that when the tide rolled away, only empty wastes remained. A deserted life. Celery that hadn’t been opened but had gone rubbery. Pants and tights spilling from the top of the basket. Apples that were woolly to the bite, so that she spat them into the bin. Manon would determinedly fill the fridge, resolve to paint the cupboards Cornforth White while the washing machine churned; resolve, too, to eat beetroot more and take up Zumba, only to have it all disappear in the suck and tow of the next tide.
Bloated with korma, she listened to her father’s message. ‘Hi, lovey. Just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas. Um, we’ve had a good day up here. Una cooked a terrific salmon terrine to ring the changes. So that was good. Yes. Well, don’t work too hard. Call when you can, Manon, OK? Righto then. Bye.’
She had hoped for one from Ellie – even double-checked her missed calls, but nothing. So she told herself it was Ellie’s fault, this silence. She called her father back, reluctantly, because he would inevitably ask for a festive-jollity meter reading and hers was set at zero, so to head him off, she told him about the cross-dressing corpse, which left him satisfyingly at a loss. She could hear Una getting restive in the background, whispering as loudly as possible, ‘We really must go, Robert.’ So Manon had said, ‘Go on, then. Obey her.’
She wished she could call Ellie, if only to slag off Una, but the climb-down was too hard to face.
A phone rings somewhere across the room and Manon raises her head to see Davy walking back from his canteen lunch with Stuart and Nigel. Colin is Internet shopping as usual – a TV sound bar, he says. (‘You can get some real bargains in the Christmas sales.’)
Manon ignores the ringing, which is shrill in the strip-lit yellow room, bouncing off the birch laminate desks as broad as mortuary slabs.
‘Sarge?’ says Kim.
Manon turns. Kim is looking directly at her, the phone held away from her body, in a way that makes the department stop.
‘Spartan Rescue,’ says Kim. They continue to look at each other, Manon’s heart quickening. ‘A body. In the Ouse. Just shy of Ely. Dog walker found it this morning.’
No one moves.
‘Sarge?’ says Kim.
‘Tell them we’re on our way.’
‘I honestly thought …’ Davy begins.
‘Poor Miriam,’ says Kim.
‘Poor both of them,’ says Colin, and Manon looks at him. Even Colin’s face has gone slack.
She and Davy jog down the municipal stairs in silence, out to an unmarked car. Everything will be new territory for the Hinds now, a life before and a life after, and very soon that first life, the one untouched, will recede, like some blithe foreign landscape. That first life was when Manon used to read books with a torch under the duvet, the illicit thrill as her mother passed her door on her way to bed. That first life was one of lurching passions and furies, all played out against her mother’s solid breast. Not happy, exactly – she could never understand people who described their childhoods as happy. She looks across at Davy driving and thinks it’s probably how he’d describe his. Childhood seems to Manon (at least what she can remember of it), a time of frustration and effort, things that were frightening and new, and the retreat back into familiar comforts before the next foray.
Davy has pulled out onto the A14. The sky is a fragile blue, very far away, and the sunlight harsh and breakable and thin, sending its glassy shards through the windscreen so they both have to pull their visors down. They begin to leave the conurbation behind and the snow, which has all but melted in town, gains confidence the further they drive out into the Fens.
And then it happened. ‘Sudden Death Syndrome’, the coroner had said, and everything after it was another life, a new territory, one about to be discovered by the Hinds now that Edith was floating face down in the Ouse. And all the events of Manon’s life were played out in its wreckage.
Much of daily life for her fourteen-year-old self and twelve-year-old Ellie remained the same. Their father had been advised to keep the routines stable for the girls’ sake. School. Their bedrooms and the childish circus-print curtains their mother had chosen. Weekend swimming lessons. Crisps eaten on the back seat afterwards, the chlorine rising off their wet hair, their tights twisted wrongly about their sticky legs. Their father glancing back at them in the rear-view mirror, the seat empty beside him. They wandered helplessly through it, their rucksacks on their backs, gazed at by the more fortunate, their father never quite pre-empting their needs so that the shopping ran out and there was nothing to make a packed lunch with. Uniforms fished out of the dirty laundry basket and sniffed to see if they passed muster. They appeared to be functioning, did well in exams. Manon was top in her class because work, in comparison with living, was so easy. Reading was an escape. But she and Ellie were not – and she knew this even as a fourteen-year-old – intact, in the way other children were. There was a surface and then there was this gulf between it and their inner lives, shattered like a broken cup.
It was as if her mother had taken with her any strategy Manon ever had for living. When she got into Cambridge to read English, it was taken as a sign of success, as if no one could see it was a refuge. She hasn’t spoken to Ellie for three years now – a rift which has grown outwards in layers of resentment like rings in a tree. It began when Ellie broke with their sibling protocol: the wilfully immature hating of Una.
‘You went and stayed with them?’ Manon asked her, incredulous. ‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘Didn’t think I had to,’ Ellie said. ‘Una’s all right, once you get used to her.’
‘Una’s all right?’
‘Yeah, she is. You know, you have to fold the toilet paper to a point after you’ve pulled off a sheet, but apart from that—’
‘Judas.’
Davy pulls up the handbrake and they sit, listening to the car ticking. In the distance, she can see frogmen from Spartan Rescue milling about on the riverbank, and an ambulance, its back doors flung wide, a red blanket smoothed flat on a waiting stretcher. She sees the pathologist from Hitchingbrooke, Derry Mackeith, talking to a uniform.
‘I hate the smell of these,’ she says to Davy as they get out of the car.
‘MIT,’ says Mackeith, striding towards her from the riverbank. ‘To what do we owe this honour?’ The purple thread veins on his nose are livid in the cold and his breaths emerge as white puffs.
‘Is she out of the water?’ says Manon, trying to look past him, but the frogmen and Spartan Rescue officials are blocking her view.
‘She?’ says Mackeith. ‘It’s not a she.’
Manon looks at him. ‘What do you mean? Are you saying it’s not Edith Hind?’
‘Not unless Edith Hind was a young male of mixed race,’ says Mackeith.
‘I thought—’
‘Ah, yes, sorry about that. Spartan Rescue seem a bit jumpy about not having found the Hind girl. False alarm. Pretty obvious the minute we hooked him out. We did try and call you. You’re welcome to have a look but I’d say you guys are not needed. He’s a jumper, if you ask me. We’ll get an ID from fingerprints, I should imagine. Coroner can take it from there.’
Manon looks past Mackeith, and the throng of frogmen and uniformed officers has parted to reveal the body: muddied, discoloured, and vastly distended. A blue, marbled Buddha.
‘How long ago – any idea?’ she asks.
‘This time of year, water’s quite cold. There’s only moderate decomposition. Two to three weeks, I’d say.’
‘Did you find a wallet, phone?’ she says to the representative of Spartan Rescue, who has rustled towards them in his expensive windcheater. Navy, with pink fleecy trim.
‘No, ma’am, nothing. Just the clothes he was wearing – jeans and a hoodie and some rather expensive trainers, which would’ve helped him sink to the bottom. If you’ve nothing further, we’ll get him to the mortuary.’
They stand on the doorstep of a sawdust-coloured barn, brash new timbers bordered by prissy hedges. But when Manon and Davy walk inside, to interview the dog walker who found the body, they both look up in silent awe at the double-height atrium, thick oak beams criss-crossing the vaulted roof and cathedral-size windows.
‘We’ll try not to take up too much of your time,’ says Manon.
‘No, please. Come and sit down. Can I make you coffee?’ His voice is deep and slow. He walks with a slight stoop in his voluminous corduroys. His bowed head is gentle and apologetic.
‘Coffee would be lovely, thanks,’ says Manon. ‘It’s freezing out there.’
‘This place is amazing,’ says Davy, who has approached the window. The sky has turned pink, striated yellow; a radioactive lozenge at its centre, reflected in the river. Along its banks, leafless trees are silhouetted. The pink of the sunset – so fleshy and garish – has stretched its arm into the room, giving them all a Californian tan.
In front of the wall of windows is a refectory table with two benches, its surface strewn with newspapers. On the other side of the room, a wood-burning stove and russet-coloured dog in front of it in a basket. It raised its head when they entered but lowers it again now, un-fussed.
‘She’s very elderly,’ explains Alan Prenderghast (Davy has whispered his name in Manon’s ear), who is now at the open-plan kitchen area, turning levers on a complex silver coffee machine. The kitchen is a dark U-shape with slate-grey cupboards and black worktop.
‘Lovely view,’ Manon says, joining Davy at the windows and watching the sun squat on the horizon, peppered with birds. She looks to her right and sees a frayed armchair and a pair of binoculars on a table beside it. Silence for a while, which Davy would normally try to fill, but they are both hypnotised by the stillness and scale of the house and its view.
At last, Mr Prenderghast comes to stand next to her and is handing her a cup of coffee, froth covering its surface.
‘It’s my favourite thing about this house,’ he says, looking out with her.
Her cup’s roasted smell drifts up like smoke.
‘You see that field opposite – on the other bank of the river? Every winter it’s allowed to flood and it fills up with literally thousands of birds. Ducks, geese, swans. Teeming with life. Great skeins of them fly in from Scandinavia. I could watch it all day, the landing and the flying off. It’s a very sad view, somehow.’
His voice is calm. It is as if he is selecting every word. The ruffled sleeve of care – his voice could un-ruffle it. She looks at the view, the sunset colours like a bruise, and the bare trees. He’s right – it is the saddest view she has ever seen. She wants to stay in this kitchen, which is so warm and yet so quietly morbid – silent and slow and away from the town – even though she has never been one of those people for whom the countryside is an idyll.
‘It must’ve been a shock, finding the body,’ she says.
‘It wasn’t what I was expecting, no,’ he says. ‘I’ve never seen one before and it was much worse than I imagined, actually. Who was it?’
‘We don’t know yet. A young man. We’ll have an ID by close of play today.’
‘Not the girl, then,’ he says. ‘The one who went missing before Christmas.’
‘No. Not the girl.’
He nods, stooping to sip his coffee while his free hand digs into his trouser pocket.
Davy is sitting at the refectory table with his notepad out. ‘Can I ask what you do for a living?’ he says.
Manon has strolled over to the bookshelves, which are to one side of the stove. They are tall and crammed, with a library ladder propped against one section. Tender is the Night. American Pastoral. Far from the Madding Crowd. Birthday Letters. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas.
‘Yes, of course,’ Mr Prenderghast says to Davy. ‘I’m a systems analyst at Cambs Biotech.’
Freud. John le Carré. A history of Labour foreign policy in the post-war years.
‘What’s a systems analyst, if you don’t mind me asking?’ says Davy.
‘Oh, it’s terribly boring. I basically make the computer system work for a large pharmaceutical company – the sort of global conglomerate that Guardian readers hate.’
‘Where’s it based?’ asks Manon.
‘Outskirts of Cambridge, towards Newmarket. One of those charmless industrial estates. But I’ve been working from home this week – the office is deserted this time of year.’
‘Did you study English at university?’ asks Manon, glancing back at the bookshelves.
‘No, quite a few of those are for a course I’m doing. Open University. The others are for pleasure. I wasn’t … I didn’t go. To college, I mean.’
‘And you were walking your dog this morning?’ says Davy, pen poised.
‘Yes. My usual walk, to give Nana her run-around. Well, more of a hobble these days. We took the path along the river. Nana,’ he says, nodding at the dog, and her eyebrows move independently at this, like two caterpillars, though her head remains lowered in her basket, ‘started to scratch at some tree roots close to the bank. I kept calling her but she wouldn’t come away, so eventually I went to fetch her and that’s when I saw it. Just the back. It was face down in the water.’ He coughs. ‘I shouldn’t say “it” – I mean him.’
They are all silent for a moment, in reverence for the body.
‘Thanks, Mr Prenderghast,’ says Manon. ‘I don’t think we need to detain you any longer.’
Davy and Manon begin to gather their coats. It takes them a few moments to re-bury themselves in scarves and gloves.
‘Going out celebrating tomorrow night?’ asks Davy.
‘Ah yes, it’s New Year’s Eve, isn’t it?’ he says, smiling. ‘I’d forgotten. No, I’m afraid it’s not my thing. I’m not good with crowds.’
‘I love a New Year’s knees-up, myself,’ says Davy.
‘I’m with you, Mr Prenderghast,’ says Manon. ‘I can’t stand it.’
‘Call me Alan, please. I’ll be staying put. Watch a film maybe.’
‘What, by yourself?’ says Davy, appalled.
Manon casts Alan a conspiratorial look, as if they are Davy’s weary parents.
He laughs. ‘I do think there’s the most terrible fear of solitude these days – as if it’s some kind of disease. People can’t tolerate it. They want to be seen in a constant social whirl.’
‘I didn’t mean …’ says Davy.
‘No, no, I was only making a general point,’ he says, with one hand on the open door. ‘I can go on a bit, sorry. I’m probably defensive. Perhaps my unconscious wishes I’d go to a party, DC Walker. Well, thank you, officers. If I can help with anything else, then do call.’