Huntingdon. Beset with mobility scooters. Once described by a Shakespearean drunk in the cells as ‘a pimple on the protruding buttock of England’. Scene of dogged animal rights protests outside the Life Sciences lab. Never short on fog.
She passes the white frontage of the Hunts Post, which signals the end of the high street, and into the darker residential streets, pavements glistening with rain and the last of the melted snows, the houses either blackly empty or glowing with their curtains drawn. She hears her own footsteps slapping on the slush and another’s behind her. A man or woman’s? She can’t be sure, though it doesn’t have the timbre of feminine shoes. Wide steps. A man. Seeming to keep pace with her. She quickens, her heartbeat thudding like a bee against glass, clenching her fists inside her pockets. She puts a hand to her handbag strap, which crosses her body, pulls the bag itself to the front. Purse, keys, phone, badge. Should she put a hand on her badge? He is still behind her and she can hear him breathing. He has taken up a threatening proximity at her back. The street is entirely empty and in front of them, the black river. She steps to the side to allow him to pass – perhaps a businessman in a hurry. He is forced to go beyond her, a hunched figure in a hoodie, his head in total shadow, his movements edgy, she notices, as he turns.
‘Hello, love, all right?’
She delivers a wan, business-like smile. He is blocking her path now.
‘What you doing out so late?’
‘Leave me alone,’ she says, high-pitched and breathy. She has reached a hand surreptitiously into her bag.
‘C’mon,’ he says. ‘Just bein’ friendly.’
Drunk? He is more quivering and energised. Drugs. Still with his face in shadow. She couldn’t pick him out in a line-up.
‘Can you let me pass, please?’ she says, and she wishes her fear wasn’t so audible.
‘Where you going? Wanna go somewhere together, you an’ me?’
She stops trying to edge around him, looks him in the eye, thinking: this could be it, the moment he punches my lights out or pulls a knife. She feels for her badge and holds it up to his face.
‘Fancy being arrested, mate?’ she says. ‘Police. Major Incident Team. I’m wondering what you know abut the disappearance of Edith Hind, seeing as how you like to threaten women.’
He is taking wide steps backwards, his palms up. ‘Woa, woa, woah,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t doing nothing. I wasn’t …’ Suddenly he turns and runs to the end of the street and onto the towpath.
It might be relief. Probably tiredness. Or hating ice skating and the limp attacks of the poet, or having been frightened, or the flickering question of who would report her missing if she disappeared, but she shoulders into a hedge in tears.
Thursday
Manon
They’ve made her fingertips sooty, the filth rubbing off on her. ‘Missing Edith had complex love life’ (Daily Mail). ‘String of lovers led her into danger, say Edith cops’ (The Mirror). Her father would say it’s fair game, a big story, and why shouldn’t they be all over it? Sex and death – there was no better combination for shifting copies. Being a local paper editor, he had a sneaking admiration for the tabloids, and part of Manon’s problem with the press is she can see both sides.
She looks up from the pile of tabloids on her knees, peering through the car window to see a muddy sky pressing down on the flat roofs of the Arbury estate in Cambridge, built like Lego. The great thumb smudge of cloud begins to release fat droplets as she and Nigel slam their car doors and head for the block.
Day four of the investigation: interview known offenders – burglars, rapists, sociopaths and addicts – with an MO that plausibly fits the bill.
Both of them now out of puff, they have reached the uppermost open walkway and they stop outside Tony Wright’s blue gloss front door. Tony Wrong, as he’s known in MIT. ‘To be fair, he hasn’t put a foot wrong since he’s been out,’ his probation officer said.
‘No one’s answering,’ says Nigel, stamping his feet next to her. He leans over the balcony and shouts, ‘Oi! Hop it!’ to a group of kids surrounding their car, and they scatter like birds.
Manon bangs again with her fist.
‘All right, all right,’ says a woman’s voice behind the door. It opens and Manon has her badge ready, mid-air.
‘Cambridgeshire Police, DS Manon Bradshaw and DC Nigel Williams. Tony in?’
The woman, mid-thirties, in a pink velour tracksuit, has skin the colour of tapioca and oversized hoop earrings. She turns, without saying anything, to reveal the word Juicy written across her back in sequins. She schlumps to the lounge where the television is on.
There is Tony, ravaged king: his face a collapsed cliff face, white hair in a loose ponytail at the nape of his neck, matching the goatee like a long drip of milk from his chin. Rounded spectacles, which make him seem curiously intellectual, or like a folk-singing hippy. His tattoo sleeves are visible, creeping all the way up to his neck.
‘Hiya, Tony,’ says Manon. They’ve known each other of old.