They are silent. They both know the first seventy-two hours are critical for a high-risk missing person. You find them or you look for a body.
‘If that blood’s hers, which is pretty likely, then she could be out there bleeding in some garden or lay-by. We need dogs and we need a helicopter. I want you to set parameters for the early search. I want you to get as many bodies up here as you can to begin house to house and we’ll need to start scoping for CCTV.’
Manon nods. ‘Can I have Davy?’
‘Yep.’
‘Shame Stanton’s missing out.’
‘That’s what happens when you fuck off to the Maldives.’
Manon sends officers straight to Deeping, but there is no sign of the girl there. The helicopter takes two hours to get to them from the Midlands. It hovers loudly, searching back gardens, alleys, and motorway verges for a woman in her twenties clutching an injury, or a slumped figure. The helicopter’s underside is like a black insect against the navy sky, the beat of its blades rhythmic and relentless. It covers swathes of ground in a way officers on foot or in cars cannot hope to do. If its throbbing drone hasn’t woken the neighbours then the dogs will, panting and snuffling under hedges and straining up paths, the scent of Edith Hind still on their snouts from her nightdress. Or the door knocks, neighbours emerging with bed hair in the brash light of their hallways. It’s clod-footed, this type of early search – urgent and messy. Manon coordinates it all on the phone in Davy’s unmarked car, calling in officers from across the county, hearing them report back from house to house, keeping Harriet up to date back at the station, where she is re-interviewing Will Carter.
At 6 a.m. there is a hiatus when there are no more calls she can make, so Manon returns home for a shower and to change her clothes. She pulls at her eyes in the mirror and sees the undernourishment of the night on her skin but also the adrenalin, which has made her pupils dilate. This is why she entered the police – cases like this. Whoppers, the ones you wait weeks or months for, a whole career, even.
Harriet is the same. She’d been made DI after her work on the Soham murders, the case which shaped Cambridgeshire policing more than any other because it was so high profile and because it came to define the battle lines between police and press. The disappearance of two pretty girls in the shimmering, lazy news lull of August. The press had been on their side for one or two days, driving the appeals for witnesses, and then it grew ferocious, like a dog unmuzzled, with resources that outstripped the Major Incident Team’s. Officers suspected hacking, enraged that they themselves had to wait days for authorisation to trace phones; they found themselves showing up to interview potential witnesses, only to find reporters had been there an hour earlier. Some of the more brazen Sunday tabloids hired private detectives and they were all over it, corrupting with their money, turning over evidence, leaving their mark.
Manon holds in her hand a photograph of Edith Hind, auburn-haired and smiling – a face almost confident, the gorgeous bloom of childhood still radiating from her skin. She is wearing a mortar board and gown, with a scroll in her hand. Graduation day at Cambridge. Just like the photo Manon’s father has on the shelf.
Yes, she thinks. This will be big.
She learned as much as anyone from Soham but remained a DS because if you were smart, you realised things didn’t get better when you climbed the ranks. She wanted to stay on the ground, interviewing suspects, running her team of DCs and civilian investigators, not holed up in an office attending management courses and filling in Main-Lines-of-Enquiry forms. It certainly wasn’t, as Bryony maintained, that she was too busy humping her way around the Internet to focus on the exams.
She’s left Davy at the scene in George Street, letting in SOCO – the Scenes of Crime Officer, as it is currently known, or CSI or FSI. She has never known an organisation to love an acronym as much as the police, nor to change them so often. She longs for the day some sleepy mandarin comes up with the Crime Unit National Taskforce.
She picks up the keys to her car and goes to collect Davy, to take him to Cambridgeshire HQ for the morning briefing.
Monday
Davy