‘Last thing, people,’ Stanton is saying. ‘Forensic Management Team meeting.’ Groans erupt around the room. Money talk – the FMT meetings balance investigative needs against budget. Tighten your belts, in other words. ‘We’ve been informed that we are overspending on the Hind investigation and that we should rein it in. To that end, Nigel Williams and Nick Briggs are being seconded to team two, to help on the Dent murder, while the scaled-down team continues to work on Hind.’
‘Sorry, boss,’ says Harriet, ‘but you’re cutting our team the night before Crimewatch goes out and buries us in a steaming pile of false leads?’
‘That’d be about the size of it,’ he says, up from his seat, the folders back under his arm. ‘This is the age of austerity, DI Harper. Haven’t you heard?’
‘Toast with anchovies,’ Colin is saying to Kim, as the room breaks up. ‘’Cept the oil always drips down your chin, which can greatly mar the enjoyment of Columbo.’
Miriam
She’s awake, bruised by her dream.
If she could, she would avoid sleep altogether, but the nights are so tortured and restless – cups of tea in the kitchen, endless trips to the loo, trying out various beds in the hope a cold pillow might do the trick – that she often succumbs to her exhaustion come late afternoon. In her dreams, Edith appears before her in altered states – wearing strangers’ clothes, or with a face transmogrified in some eerie way. A shapeshifter, part gangster’s moll, half ghoul.
The police have asked them whether Edith knew Tony Wright or Taylor Dent, and she wonders what web her daughter has got caught in. What does Miriam know about her own child, really? Every detail a fresh assault – the relationship with Helena, the questioning texts to Rollo. What on earth was going on in Edith’s life? Any confidence Miriam ever had in herself as a mother has been eroded, and what is that confidence built on anyway, she thinks now – the luck of one’s children? The DNA lottery? If they’re bright and successful, you congratulate yourself. If they fall by the wayside, the world judges you. These days, she could be told anything at all about Edith and she’d be forced to accommodate it, because she knows nothing. She thought Edith loved her.
Miriam picks up the Mother’s Day card, one she has retrieved from her bedside table where she treasures all the missives from her children. In Edith’s neat, perfectionist hand:
Dearest Mum,
You are the tops.
I love you, and I know I never tell you that – at least, not enough.
E x
She remembers Ian’s mock outrage. ‘Why I don’t get cards like that?’
‘Because her adoration of you is writ so large,’ Miriam said at the time. ‘She has to express it to me.’
He has been crying in his study. She heard him on her way up the stairs an hour ago, had stopped, one hand on the banister, curious to hear his upset expressed. Man sobs are so uncommon, they were quite interesting. His were strangulated, as if his tears were out to choke him. Hers come unbidden, like a flood, dissolving her outline, and it’s as if she has failed to stand up to them. A weakness of tears.
She stood listening, but she didn’t go to him. The strain is widening between them, like a jack ratcheting open a notch with every day missing; every detail a fresh violence separating them. Ian’s answer to helplessness is criticism, and she is its focus, implied in all his Rushing About Being Important; his interviewing of private investigators (a precaution); his poster printing; calls to their lawyer; and complaints to newspaper editors over intrusion. He never stops, his lined face saying to her: And what exactly have you been doing?
He never acknowledges the toll on her, in part because she keeps it to herself, like the furtive trip she has taken to Huntingdon where she walked the unsightly route beneath the concrete underpass from the station to George Street. She stopped outside Edith’s house, unable to let herself in because its interior, black with fingerprint dust, was too much a crime scene. So instead she went down to the town centre, where she looked into the eyes of every person, and wanted to lift her face to the sky and let out a wail because she didn’t know what to do. The world is tipping, vertiginous, her organs plummeting away. Fear is so physical.
No, she hasn’t told him any of this, and every time he looks for her, it seems she’s lying on the bed in the dusky half-light of their bedroom, as she is now, the back of one hand resting on her forehead. She notices the wrinkles about her knuckles, pushes at a ring – a huge citrine oval, the colour of honey, in a thick silver setting – with the pad of her thumb, rotating it.
It isn’t just her; he’s growing increasingly critical of the police, Googling the officers in the investigating team in the hope of tracking their passage through the ranks of the force, the extent of their experience and training. Except all Google brings up are snippets of ancient news stories. She wonders what Ian can extrapolate from DI Harper warning the good motorists of Bedfordshire to lock their cars in 2006. His relief at having Stanton at the helm has been short-lived, Ian’s current position on Stanton being that he ‘isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer’, hence his research into private investigators.