‘Why don’t you talk to Roger if you’re worried?’ Miriam said, while they got ready for bed one evening.
‘I don’t want to pull rank on Stanton just yet,’ Ian replied. ‘It could do more harm than good. Keeping my powder dry for now.’
Rog and Patty had been in touch, of course – an answer machine message and a lovely card with hibiscus on it. If there’s anything we can do …
She presses her hand into the back of her neck to massage it and thinks: these things don’t bring you together, they tear you apart. There is no place else to go except towards blame, as if into the arms of a lover. If Ian hadn’t pushed Edith so hard. If she, Miriam, wasn’t so passive. If Rollo wasn’t so alive. It was everyone’s fault because it was no one’s.
Miriam hears the bedroom door handle turn, both longing for and dreading it to be Ian, and soon enough he is sitting on the side of the bed. He strokes her arm – the one laid beside her body – and sighs deeply, but she doesn’t look at him.
‘I’m so sorry, Miri.’
He starts to cry and she heaves herself up to look at him, curious and moved by him at the same time.
‘What are you sorry for?’
‘For everything … for everything I’ve done,’ he says. He is not looking at her. He is hiding his face from her. ‘I haven’t been a good husband to you.’
‘I feel as if you hate me,’ she says.
‘Of course I don’t hate you. I love you. I love you inordinately.’
He puts his arms around her and she lifts her face to kiss him. He kisses her back, but in a way that has a full stop at the end of it, when she had hoped it would lead on. A consummation. They need to come together and this is how husbands and wives come together, but these things are so often mistimed, their meanings taken the wrong way. How often had they refused each other out of bitterness or tiredness or standoffishness or a little bit of all three?
‘Why don’t I take you out for dinner tonight?’ he says. ‘La Gaffe, or the new bistro, the French one. Might be our last chance before the oafs are back on the doorstop tomorrow.’
He is a good husband. He is here and he loves her. Inordinately.
‘It would seem like celebrating,’ she says.
‘No it wouldn’t. Come on. Get up. We don’t help Edith by being prisoners.’
Wednesday
Davy
‘Colonel Bufton Tufton’s downstairs, and he’s not happy,’ says Kim.
‘Downstairs? Ian Hind?’ says Harriet.
‘Downstairs. Pacing like a caged bear.’
‘Did we have a meeting I’ve forgotten about?’ Harriet says to Davy, who shrugs, following her at a jog to keep up with her pelt down the stairs, while she says, ‘Probably here to bollock me about something.’ Then she stops and looks at Davy. ‘It’ll be the female lover line. I didn’t think he knew. Guess the FLO filled him in. Shit, he’ll be livid. Typical Stanton, out on a jolly when the shit hits the fan.’
‘Is everything all right, Sir Ian?’ says Harriet, waiting for Davy to enter, then closing the door to interview room one.
He is pacing up and down, fast, exactly as Kim described, like a bear in a tight space who hasn’t been fed.
‘Where is Superintendent Stanton?’ he says, his navy coat flying as he turns.
‘He’s not at HQ today,’ says Harriet. ‘What’s the matter, Sir Ian?’
‘You are systematically destroying my daughter’s reputation.’
‘I don’t think saying she had a female lover is derogatory, is it?’
‘It’s prurient,’ he says. Davy isn’t entirely clear what prurient means. ‘It’s salacious.’ Ah right, thinks Davy, that’s what it means. ‘It’s dirtying her in the mind of the general public, and they don’t need much assistance, let me tell you. You are riding roughshod over my family and I—’ He is stopped by a catch of emotion in his throat, except he appears to Davy to be too angry for tears.
‘Sir Ian, I promise you that is not our intention. We want to find Edith and we want to find her alive. We’ll do anything, anything at all, and that includes embarrassing her, and possibly you, though you have no reason to be embarrassed—’
‘My wife is crying on the bed, appalled about the things you’re saying about Edie, terrified about what your sergeant told us – about Tony Wright. I looked up his offences and they’re horrific.’
‘We have looked at Tony Wright, just as we look at all known offenders with appropriate previous convictions. It’s a line of—’
‘A line? You’ve told us some knife-wielding sexual predator might have had something to do with her disappearance and then you … you leave us to it?’