Harriet is gesturing at the chair in front of them, the patient mother. Carter sits at last.
‘One minute everything was normal,’ he says, ‘and then it wasn’t. One minute we were making dinner, watching Sherlock on iPlayer, and then – about a week ago, I guess – I dunno, she cooled off, like she was cross with me. Froze when I touched her. Kept saying she had loads of work on, as if she was avoiding me. I suppose that fits with what you said about her and Helena.’
‘Can you give specific examples?’ asks Manon.
‘Well, the Saturday before … a week before …’ He colours up, doesn’t know how to refer to the ‘event’ of Edith’s disappearance, which might or might not be her death. ‘She went out, I don’t even know who with, got really drunk, and on the Sunday she spent the whole day in bed with her laptop on her knees. And then in the afternoon, about three, she put a tracksuit on and her boots and took her car keys. When I asked where she was going, she said, “Out.” It went on like that, passing each other in the house like strangers. Then on Friday, the Friday I was going to Stoke, she was suddenly really full-on, emotional. We made love – this was in the afternoon – and I thought, oh, it’s all right again, it was just a passing thing. But she started crying immediately after – after the sex, I mean – and she said, “I’m sorry.” I suppose now she was talking about Helena, I dunno. I said, “What for?” And she said, “For being a bitch to you.” I said, “You haven’t been, not so I’ve noticed.” Which was bollocks, of course, I had noticed, but I was just glad she was back with me, I wanted to be close again, and I didn’t want to argue. Anyway, it seemed to make it worse. She snapped at me, “That’s right, Will, let’s tell each other lies.” I’ll be honest – I didn’t know what was going on.’
Poor chap, Davy thinks. He wouldn’t be the first man whose girlfriend was a mystery to him. What law is it that says you can’t be a hapless good-looking bloke – well, a model, pretty much, actually – in the wrong place at the wrong time?
‘It has taken you an awfully long time to tell us all this,’ says Harriet. She wants to nail him, wants his alibi broken and an arrest before Stanton can go clod-hopping all over her investigation. She’ll be thinking he set up the phone theft – stopped at Kettering to buy a PAYG as part of his alibi – then slipped back early to Huntingdon to murder Edith because he was furious that she was leaving him, or being unfaithful, or both. It was often both.
‘It was private, all right?’ says Carter, not quite shouting, but defensive. ‘My relationship with Edie is private and I didn’t want to tell you lot about it.’
Davy looks at the ringlets springing from the back of Manon’s head and wonders what she makes of Carter. He hazards a guess: Manon would say go easy, trace the phone, track his plates, follow up on the Tesco phone shop in Kettering and the petrol stations on his return journey. Because cases, as she was forever telling him, aren’t solved on hunches. They’re solved with dogged, stoic donkey work.
Manon
Harriet takes a circular tin of Vaseline, green and white, from the depths of her handbag. Without looking at it, she twists off the lid and dabs some onto her middle finger, stroking it across her lips so they glisten. Her gaze is on the middle distance. These shifts are ageing us, Manon thinks. She keeps glazing over too, and when she does, her mind returns again and again to Deeping – its painterly swathes, colours murky and creative – perhaps because it’s the polar opposite of police HQ, all pale laminate and strip lighting. The exposure of dark corners.
People are preparing to go home. ‘We can’t keep you all here indefinitely,’ Harriet said. ‘Get some sleep. See you back here at seven tomorrow morning.’ Coats being threaded onto leaden arms, bags gathered, families phoned. (‘Yes, Dawn, I know it’s late. Well, I’m sorry, but there wasn’t anything I could— Shall I pick up something for us to eat?’)
‘Don’t walk home tonight,’ Harriet says, and Manon blinks into focus, sees her flicking her hair out from under her coat collar.
‘No, I’ve got the car. Hang on, I thought Carter was our suspect.’
‘Yeah, well, you heard Stanton.’
She’d been in on the meeting, Stanton hitching up the back of his belt, his belly its counterweight, while he told Harriet she didn’t have the evidence against Carter: ‘No body, no forensics, no witnesses, nothing.’
‘We need to shake him up,’ Harriet said, but she was already on the back foot.
Stanton doesn’t want the headlines, the pay-out in compensation if they’re wrong and the press going to town. His manner had said: You’ve both got a bit over-excited, but now my steadying hand is back on the tiller. ‘We wait,’ he told them. ‘We investigate all avenues. Trace. Interview. Eliminate.’