‘Come in, Manon. Cup o’ tea? How about you, Nigel?’
‘I’m all right, thanks, Tony,’ says Nigel, standing with his hands cupping his testicles.
‘How’re the twins doin’, Nigel?’ Tony asks. ‘That’s a lot o’ work, twins.’ His Scottish brogue adds to the affable air, the gentle grandpappy. Hard to believe he’d broken into a young woman’s flat in the dead of night, took a knife from her kitchen, which he then held to her throat, forcing her to strip. He robbed her that night, not simply of her peace of mind for all perpetuity, but every other valuable thing in her flat too. Wright was sent to Whitemoor, the maximum security prison just outside the village of March – a fifteen-year sentence – where he was a model prisoner, running the library. He’s been out on licence for eight months.
‘They are a lot of work, Tony. They’re wearing us out,’ says Nigel, smiling.
‘Tae what do I owe this honour?’ Tony asks. ‘Is there, perchance, a crime for which youse two would like tae finger me? Shopliftin’, is it? Arson? Murder?’
‘We want to ask you a few questions, Tony, that’s all,’ says Manon.
‘And if it isnae all right? What if now isnae a convenient time? Because frankly, ah’m watchin’ Loose Women right now and this Coleen Nolan, she’s got many interestin’ things tae say.’
‘Do you know anything about the disappearance of a young woman from Huntingdon, called Edith Hind?’
‘Now why would ye think that?’
‘Where were you on the night of seventeenth of December, Tony – Saturday night?’
‘Och, that’s easy, we had a lock-in an’ a singsong at The Coach. You ask anyone on the estate, everyone was there. Great night, wisn’t it, Lyn?’
Lyn nods, smoking.
‘What time did you leave The Coach, Tony?’ asks Manon.
‘Aboot 2 a.m., wis it?’ he says, looking affectionately at Lyn.
Really, butter wouldn’t melt, Manon thinks, marvelling. Dangerous people seldom broadcast their peccadilloes – you learned that in child protection. It’s not the creepy bloke in a stained mac; it’s the jolly fellow who chats to you in the queue in John Lewis.
‘And Sunday morning, Tony?’
‘Well, I got up, no’ too early after the night before,’ he laughs, the phlegm bubbling in the bottom of his throat before it turns into a cough. ‘Sorry,’ he says, his hand over his mouth. ‘Then I went tae meet Paddy at ten, as usual.’
‘Paddy your probation officer?’ says Manon.
‘That’s it. We went for a fry-up, it being Sunday mornin’. Mug o’ tea, eggs and bacon, a whole stack o’ bread an’ butter, steamed up windaes against the cold December morn. Lovely.’
God, he’s so likeable. Must stop warming to him, immediately.
‘We’ll be checking all this, you know that, Tony,’ she says.
‘Oh aye, you fill yer boots, Manon. I know you’ll do yer job. Come an’ arrest me when youse are ready.’
‘We’ll see ourselves out,’ she says.
Manon strides up Huntingdon high street towards Cromwell’s, dread churning at the prospect of the office Christmas ‘knees-up’, as Davy liked to call it – already an overstatement. Just a few of them having drinks, with their mobiles on in case the duty team needs to update them. Besides, they’re all exhausted. Colin will bore everyone rigid about the latest iPad upgrade; Nigel will ask if she’s still single and then go on about the comfortable pleasures of being ‘an old married man’, though he’ll appear to be in no hurry to get back to ‘the lovely Dawn’ and the twins.
She stops outside the bar, its silver lettering attempting to give it an air of modernity. It is the kind of place twenty-two-year-old boys come for stag dos when they haven’t the money or imagination to reach for Bratislava. Manon scans the room as her eyes adjust to the darkness. Fruit machines glow in one corner. In another, she spots her colleagues and Bryony at the centre of the group, waving to her, then making two fingers into a gun and shooting herself in the mouth.
Manon has come later than the rest. She’s been gathering in CCTV of Tony Wright’s weekend; getting nowhere tracing ‘unknown-515’ – the number Edith rang twice in the week before she vanished; and working out which computers she worked on in the college library. ‘Get all the data off that one,’ she told Nigel.
And she was still trawling through Edith’s personal hard drive, reading her PhD research, her emails, her postings on the Internet, the latest one being: ‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.’ Beneath it she wrote: ‘Not said by Nelson Mandela, but amazing anyway.’
Manon was reminded of her own youthful diaries; how much she too had been in love with a notion of herself at that age, energetically self-analysing. Edith had typed out a long passage from George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, into a Word document titled: ‘Just as I see it’.