Harriet and Stanton have entered the department and Harriet is clapping her hands for silence and saying loudly, ‘Right everybody,’ at which point Stanton says, ‘Harriet will be taking this briefing. I’ve got a press conference downstairs at nine. I think you should know, however, that my line will be that it is now more than seventy-two hours since she went missing and that, in our view, it is highly likely Edith Hind has come to harm.’
He’s reacted, Manon thinks, to Thackeray in that press conference and the criticism surrounding their last high-risk misper. Twelve-year-old Lacey Pilkington disappeared three years ago on a Peterborough estate. Stanton was SIO, then as a DCI. In a standard review, his investigation was criticised: officers had been blinded by the belief the girl was alive, which delayed appropriate action. It should have been upscaled to a suspected homicide sooner, and as a result, time and evidence were lost. Stanton, they said, had become hidebound by the emotions of the victim’s family. Who, incidentally, Manon recalls bitterly, were the ones who’d killed her.
‘I shall also be making clear,’ Stanton is saying, ‘that the main focus of our investigation is her complex love life.’ He turns, nods, and says, ‘Thanks, Harriet,’ then walks out of the department.
‘Ian Hind is going to love us,’ says Manon.
Miriam
‘Not long now,’ says Miriam, sitting in the moulded plastic chair of interview room one. ‘To see Rollo, I mean.’ She can smell vending-machine instant coffee, dispensed in those squat brown cups that crackle in the hand.
Ian doesn’t answer her. He is pacing still. She doesn’t know how he keeps going; he seems to expend so much energy every minute of the day and isn’t resting at night either. He has been out there, standing next to the parish priest who joined the community in prayer, doing his best to hide his distaste for the members of the public joining the search (and failing, in Miriam’s opinion: she’s never seen a thank-you speech so faltering and pinched), paying to print posters, T-shirts and balloons emblazoned with Edith’s smiling face and the date 17.12.2010.
He was pleased, at first, that Detective Chief Superintendent Gary Stanton was overseeing, as if someone at his own level was finally in charge – a chap – someone who could actually make something happen. Then he watched this morning’s press conference on Sky. It caused him to puff, then stand up and walk around the room, then tut again, the tension fizzing off him and transferring itself to Miriam.
More than seventy-two hours. Edith has been gone more than seventy-two hours and there is a palpable cooling in the atmosphere surrounding the investigation. It has slowed. Officers have returned to normal shift patterns. The search is ongoing, dogged, hundreds of police inching forward with sticks or torches or in diving suits, but Miriam has sensed it no longer contains the urgency of searching for someone alive.
She takes a deep breath, leans her head back, and closes her eyes. She’s not sure she can take another night in this town – another night sweating and dry-mouthed in that airless hotel room; another meal in the bar, at a slippery table, her clothes infused with the smell of deep-fat frying. She can’t wait to see the back of Huntingdon, its dirty snow, pound shops and grey, hunkered streets. She realises she harbours a fantasy that when she leaves this place, she’ll leave behind this nasty business – the terrible feelings, the sleeplessness, the way her mind oscillates wildly between terror and blankness. Back in Hampstead, she might return to the woman she was only four days ago, preparing for Christmas, snipping stems of eucalyptus, steeping dried figs in brandy, untangling strings of white pin lights. She feels a growing anger with Edith for putting her through this, as if she were some limitlessly absorbent sponge for her daughter’s mess. And then her anger makes her cry again because she wants nothing except to have Edith back.
‘Sir Ian, Lady Hind,’ says a male voice, and Miriam wipes her eyes and sees DCS Gary Stanton, DI Harriet Harper and DS Manon Bradshaw, all three re-introducing themselves.
Oh no, oh no, they must have found a body. Why all three like this? Like some ghastly triumvirate. Miriam looks up at them, a hand clasped over her mouth, her eyes flicking from one to the next.
‘There’s nothing new to report,’ says DS Bradshaw, acknowledging her terror.
‘What the hell was all that this morning?’ Ian is saying.
‘I felt I had to say what I thought,’ says Stanton, calmly. ‘I’m sorry if it was upsetting for you.’
‘Do you have any idea what the tabloids are going to be like after this?’ says Ian, though Miriam knows that it is the ‘come to harm’ line which has upset him more than any of the salacious things they said about Edith’s love life. He cannot, will not, bear it.
‘We need information. The press is the best way to flush that out.’
‘You effectively told the press she’s dead.’
‘We have to be realistic …’ says Stanton.