Am I becoming not myself? Davy wonders now, jogging up the steps of HQ. Am I more suited to hanging out with Manon Bradshaw and the poncy Cambridge graduates who marry in jeans at register offices or not at all? The thought feels only like a loss – as if he has no place to put himself. Perhaps all he’s becoming is a snob, looking down on all the people he’s grown up with.
There is no need for Davy to cover anything up any more, and there are lots of reasons not to, like the idea that Davy himself might die, none of us being immune. Yes, Davy might die all of a sudden, and his legacy? Leaving a frightened 12-year-old incarcerated for something he didn’t do.
‘Look for the affair,’ Manon always told him when he was her DC and she was his sergeant. Look where that had got Gary Stanton. His crimson bed had turned into the narrow bed.
‘Least he died happy,’ Colin says smuttily when Davy reaches MCU, to which Davy says, ‘Not necessarily.’
There’s an awful lot of sad desperation in extra-marital sex. And with this thought, he lets himself into Stanton’s office to go through his data.
Manon
Back at the flat, Birdie sits on the sofa while Manon paces back and forth.
‘So what have we got, evidentially?’ Manon asks.
‘Ooh, evidentially. Like it,’ says Birdie.
‘Jade Canning – well, I know about that, because I was there when she was hooked out of the Welsh Harp. It was investigated by a DS, someone I worked with called Melissa Harcourt. Unheard of to put a DS in charge of a potential homicide, don’t know why they did that. Anyway, Melissa was very keen to wrap it up as a jumper. So we need to show that Jade’s body was removed from the Carlton and that the van made a journey from Mayfair to the Welsh Harp. There won’t be any CCTV but … Where’s your laptop?’
‘I hid it when we went out, just in case. I’ll get it.’
Birdie comes back into the room carrying the laptop. They switch it on and wait for it to connect to the Internet.
Reading the screen, Manon says, ‘I’m pretty sure ANPR—’
‘What’s that?’
‘Automatic Number Plate Recognition – yes, here it is. “ANPR data is stored for a period of two years. Data outside the 90-day time frame may only be accessed by a senior officer.” Fortunately, I am that officer. If we track car reg YFY to the Welsh Harp, that’s enough to re-open Jade’s case.’
‘What about Angel?’
‘I’ve put in a request to the coroner for a copy of the PM report. I’ll forward it to you as soon as I get it.’ She leans back in her chair. ‘Have to warn you though, PMs are often inconclusive. She might have died falling down the stairs and had loads of booze in her system, and the coroner might record an open verdict. An open verdict means the death is suspicious but there isn’t enough evidence to know what happened.’
Manon thinks she should perhaps care about this and she realises that Birdie cares, but all she can think about is Fly. ‘None of this helps my son.’
‘Well, the murder of Jon-Oliver must be tied up in all of it,’ says Birdie.
‘“Sass” was the last thing he said before he died. No one knew what it meant.’
‘I wonder why he was saying her name,’ Birdie says.
‘Maybe he was trying to … get a warning to her. Unless she was the one who stabbed him.’
Birdie is shaking her head. ‘She was here, doing her curtain-twitching routine.’
‘Can’t be the Dunlop & Finch lot. Why would they get rid of one of their own, when he’d just signed their biggest client?’
‘Maybe they thought he was in cahoots with Angel,’ Birdie says. ‘Maybe the boss guy, van der Lupin, was furious about her showing up at his Christmas drinks, blackmailing him, and thought she and Ross were in it together.’
Manon frowns. ‘Doesn’t make sense though. It’s one thing to clean up the Carlton mess. They didn’t kill Jade, remember, and we don’t know what the involvement with Angel’s death is, if any. I don’t think they’d risk a job like Ross. Too high profile, too messy. No, it doesn’t fit together.’
Manon looks up at the familiar building, seat of woe, which is now being spattered by fat drops of rain, the kind that splosh.
Her leaving do from Kilburn CID had been depressing. DCI Haverstock had the day off, so a desultory speech was given by a DI she barely knew. He made sparse jokes about her love of Quavers, unable to drum up any knowledge of significant cases she might have worked on. That’s because I didn’t work on anything decent, she thinks now, climbing the steps with dread determination. On my knees with the law-enforcement dustpan and brush, not standing erect, like some of the male DIs, holding a long-pole litter picker. Oh, the refuse collection analogies we weave.
The DI, whose name she can’t even remember, had ended his speech with the words, ‘To the pub!’ which resulted in low murmuring among the gathering and a lugubrious threading of coats. Manon had longed to say, ‘I’d love to but I’ve got something on.’ Not really an option on that particular occasion.
It had all contrasted sharply with her leaving do from Huntingdon a couple of years back – a series of raucous in-jokes from Harriet, a litany in fact, all of it peppered with Gary Stanton’s middle-management jargon, the source of much departmental mirth. ‘She’s an officer who knows how to deep-dive an alibi, she is no stranger to the helicopter view and she can open the kimono on key project deliverables.’
Harriet had also referenced all the perps they knew were guilty but who’d got off, prefacing them as ‘The indisputably innocent …’
‘Let us raise our glasses to the indisputably innocent Edith Hind,’ was one toast. Plastic crinkly cups, warm white wine. Manon had felt loved.
She shows her badge at the front desk. ‘Here to see DCI Sean Haverstock,’ she says.
‘Not in,’ says the desk sergeant. ‘On holiday in Dubai, if you don’t mind.’
‘Melissa Harcourt then,’ she says.
‘Just a moment please.’
The Cambridgeshire MCU gift – they’d had a proper whip-round – was in stark contrast to Kilburn’s. From this grey-hunkered office she’s now standing in (the very smell makes her tense) she’d received a mug-and-handkerchief set saying ‘I’m not always right, but I’m NEVER WRONG’, which she’d dropped off at the Cancer Research shop on her way home. She’s never understood why people like these Hallmark “witticisims”.
From Cambridgeshire, she’d got ￡300 worth of John Lewis vouchers. ‘As we all know, it is Manon’s spiritual home,’ Harriet had said. ‘If Manon Bradshaw, never knowingly under-moaned, had not become a police officer, I think we all know which well-known Partnership she would have joined.’