Authors: Susie Steiner

Missing, Presumed (33 page)

BOOK: Missing, Presumed

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A judge looked at the arguments and deemed there was a case to answer, the outcome yet to be determined in court.

At the Old Bailey, as legal wheels turned ever so slowly in proceedings against Ian Hind, Manon sought Miriam’s wisdom about Fly, which probably broke some protocol to do with ‘sides’ but neither woman cared.

‘All I know is I can’t take much more,’ Manon said.

‘He’s not doing it to spite you,’ said Miriam.

‘No, I know, but I can’t understand what’s going on inside him.’

‘No, I never knew what was going on in my children either,’ said Miriam, and Manon was surprised to be taken as a fellow mother. ‘It sounds to me like he needs to know that you’ll stick with him, however bad it gets, just like a mother does with a newborn baby.’

She had no idea if Miriam was right but she did stick with him, though not out of nobleness. Out of exhaustion and inertia. This was not a situation she could easily unpick.

She swapped notes with Davy, too, who had seen it all before at the drop-in centre.

‘Firm boundaries,’ Davy told her. ‘It’s still love, it just doesn’t waver. These kids can’t take any flip-flopping. Scares the life out of them.’

He is so wise, now DS Davy Walker under Stanton’s kindly wing, and resolutely single, having once more extricated himself from Chloe’s clutches following the comfort shag. His life is MIT, bike rides, and his volunteering at the youth centre. ‘More than enough,’ he told Manon when she’d asked if he was seeing anyone.

Poor Stanton. A standard review of the Hind investigation by Bedfordshire Police found that:
Detective Chief Superintendent Gary Stanton overreacted in upscaling the disappearance of Edith Hind to a high-risk misper, later a suspected homicide, as there was insufficient prima facie evidence that Miss Hind had come to harm
.

‘He can’t win,’ Davy told Manon, as if he were defending his own father. ‘First Lacey Pilkington, where he’s told he should have upscaled it sooner, and now this. I don’t know how he keeps going.’

‘Thinking about his pension, that’s how,’ Manon said.

She hadn’t thought it through, the situation with Fly, though she spent quite a bit of time wondering if she could get out of it. How she might tiptoe away.

Then Fly got ill.

Winter and a fever took such strong hold of him it was medieval, and no amount of paracetamol or Nurofen seemed to bring his temperature down. His heart raced like a mechanism about to spring out of its holdings. Manon couldn’t get through to the GP practice – just endless ringing or the engaged signal – so in desperation she rang Miriam, who drove round, parking Ian’s incongruous Jaguar next to the skips of Fordwych Road. She checked his vital signs.

‘Can eleven-year-olds get meningitis?’ Manon asked.

‘You’ve been on the Internet,’ Miriam scolded. ‘Never look on the Internet for medical advice. You’ll diagnose yourself with cancer. Look, you were right to call me – it is a very high temperature and we do need to keep an eye on him.’

They sat together briefly in Manon’s lounge on a sofa draped with a cheap cream throw and lit by a tiny lamp on a shelf. Miriam seemed more relaxed than Manon had seen her, though she wouldn’t take her coat off.

‘How’s Ian coping with Belmarsh?’ Manon asked.

‘Do you know, he’s all right,’ she said, sounding amused and surprised at the same time. ‘He’s reading a lot. Teaching an anatomy course to other inmates – ironic, really, as some of them have actually decapitated people. I keep worrying his imperious manner will get him on the wrong side of people – you know, he’ll ask for quince jelly with his cheese and someone will punch his lights out. But it hasn’t happened yet.’

‘The children visit him?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Both of them. We’re all doing our time,’ she said. Then, rising: ‘Look, I’ll pop round in the morning on my way to work. Then I can admit Fly if I’m worried.’

Two whole weeks the illness raged through him, though Miriam was satisfied it was only flu; like a tidal wave slapping the pier wall with all its force, his rigid body tensed against it. He shook when he stood to pee. His bedroom smelled overripe, as Manon threw open the windows and changed the sheets – a sweetness that was fetid. Eventually he could begin to read and watch TV, but he was hollow-eyed and weak. And then a terrible depression took hold and he cried for his mother and for Taylor. And he blamed Manon, resented her, because she was the nearest target for his distress. His unhappiness was so deep and wide that more than once she wondered if it would ever lift.

The IPCC report into the death of Helena Reed, following contact with Cambridgeshire Police, resulted in a reg 14 misconduct notice for DC Monique Moynihan, who had taken the call from Helena on the night of 7 January 2011. In her witness statement, DC Moynihan stated that staffing levels in MIT that night were herself and two other detective constables. However, one of these detective constables had a period of twenty days’ leave owing and this officer had been advised by the division if he did not take the time off it would be lost. DC Moynihan stated that she raised concerns about the staffing levels with DI Kirk Tate but did not file a report on the matter. DI Tate did not recall DC Moynihan raising the issue. DC Moynihan had a number of investigations in progress on the night of Sunday 7 January, which she considered urgent. She said Miss Reed had sounded tentative and shy, but not in great distress when she had rung the department. She noted that Miss Reed had not called 999. Immediately following the call, DC Moynihan and the other detective on duty that night, DC Lee Rayner, were called out to a reported burglary.

The IPCC additionally looked into the duty of care towards Helena Reed by MIT team four investigating the disappearance of Edith Hind. The IPCC noted that the Hind investigation was extremely high profile and required a great deal of police resource. It found that risk assessments of Helena Reed prior to the
Crimewatch
appeal on Wednesday 4 January 2011, undertaken by DC Kim Delaney, and additionally a risk assessment filed by DS Manon Bradshaw, were adequate and adhered to professional standards protocol. However, interviews with Miss Reed’s psychoanalyst, Dr Young, revealed that her fragile state was in excess of officers’ assessment of her mental health.

The IPCC issued a learning strategy document with a recommendation that all members of MIT team four, which investigated the Hind misper, undertake a duty of care refresher course and complete the two-hour training package on mental health.

Manon hears the vibration of her mobile phone on the kitchen table and walks over to Fly’s books, patting among the papers and crumbs until she finds it. A text from DCI Havers of Kilburn CID – her new boss.

Want you on early shift tomorrow, DI Bradshaw.

Her current arse ache, the new job. No Harriet to chat to (now DCI at Cambridgeshire, the rest of the band still together – that rankles) and a twat like Havers lording it over her. And Fly increasingly beset by the Met’s stop and search obsession. She’s told him to keep the details, to log every single incident, in a notebook in his ever-drooping jeans back pocket, and these she follows up.

‘Didn’t know he was eleven,’ said one Met officer.

‘Try asking him,’ she replied.

‘Sorry, Mrs …?’

‘It’s DI Bradshaw.’

They didn’t like ruffling their own, and she hoped to make it clear Fly was not to be touched, at least to all the officers at Kilburn. A white copper mothering a black boy – didn’t that set the cat among the pigeons.

She’s worried about some of the lads he’s hanging out with at school. Another mental note: to make an appointment with the headmaster. Shower gel, see the headmaster, pick up fruit, bread, and bin bags. When did her lists get so
long
? She casts about for a pad and pen. Buy pad and pen for lists.

When the six-month let expired, she signed for another six, checking again: ‘It’s one month notice on either side, right?’

Life isn’t perfect, she thinks, as the lot of them clatter into her kitchen. It has taken her a while to get on friendly terms with this notion. She had thought perhaps it was perfect for others, just not for her. Or that she could revise and revise and revise life, as if sitting a perpetual Cambridge exam, and it would become perfect. Increasingly, she can find no evidence of perfection in any life. There’s always something: illness, divorce, bereavement, or corners of the personality that are devastating to live with. Everyone making the best of it, doing their time, together by accident – like Manon and Fly, because he had no one else and she couldn’t back out of it.

‘Sit down, everyone,’ she says. ‘Dinner’s ready. Ellie, would you like some wine?’

‘Lovely,’ says Ellie, and she hands the solid dollop that is Solly to Fly, saying, ‘Here you go, do your worst.’

Fly holds Solly about his hip, smiling his hello with a kiss into the little boy’s neck while Solly clutches Fly’s cheeks with his fat hands and lets out a delighted screech.

Manon and Fly have bought an Ikea highchair for £10 to have in their flat, and a cot for when Solly stays overnight. Fly wedges Solly into his highchair and the baby bangs on the plastic table in excited anticipation of mashed stew. Everyone is seated except Manon, who is being ‘mother’ with a ladle hovering above the plates.

‘Actually,’ she says, ‘there’s something I want to ask Fly, and I wanted all of you to be here.’

Even Solly, who has been waving his arms at the approach of the first of Fly’s spoonfuls, stops and looks up with a concerned look on his face, making all of them laugh.

‘I want to adopt you,’ she says to Fly.

‘You what?’

‘A
da-boooo!’ sings Solly.

‘I want to adopt you. I want us to be … tied. Make it legal.’

He looks at her for a moment. Then turns back to Solly with a new spoonful. ‘So you can nag me forever.’

‘So I can nag you forever, that’s right.’

She sits down and pushes a piece of lamb about the plate, where it gathers beads of couscous like a wet stone in sand.

‘Poon!’ says Solly, wrestling Fly for the spoon.

‘That’s right,’ Fly says to him. ‘Poon.’ He moons his face into Solly’s, nose to nose, and the boy screeches and clutches at Fly’s cheeks again with meaty hands.

‘Because I love you,’ Manon says.

‘Poon!’ insists Solly.

‘All right, chatty man,’ Fly says to him. ‘Here comes another one.’ He makes the spoon fly and Solly opens his mouth on cue. Then Fly takes a forkful from his own plate. ‘This stew is all right,’ he says. ‘Even though there is veg in there. Is this carrot?’

‘No, no,’ says Ellie. ‘You’re imagining it.’

‘Can I go round Zach’s to play on his PlayStation after?’ asks Fly.

‘Nope,’ says Manon.

Fly has turned to take another forkful of food. He and Manon chew on full mouthfuls, looking at each other.

‘Why do you ask when you know what the answer will be?’ Manon asks.

He shrugs. ‘For a laugh. I figure one day you’ll slip up.’

‘In your dreams. What do you reckon then, about what I just said? About becoming my son?’

‘Yeah. OK.’

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Detective Sergeant Graham McMillan of Cambridgeshire’s Major Crime Unit for his help with this book; also to Detective Sergeant Susie Hine of Cambridge CID for advice on the first draft. Inaccuracies are mine, not theirs.

Thank you Superintendent Jon Hutchinson for facilitating my visits to Cambridgeshire’s MCU.

For guidance on pathology, thank you Clare Craig, consultant pathologist at Imperial College NHS Trust. For postmortem and coroners detail, thanks to Michael Osborn, consultant histopathologist at Imperial.

For Maureen Dent’s Irish vernacular, thanks to Marissa McConville.

For Tony Wright’s Scots vernacular, thanks to Eileen MacCallum.

For advice on criminal law, thank you Daniel Burbidge.

The report published by the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in November 2011 into staff–prisoner relations in Whitemoor, on which Edith fictionally assisted as a researcher, is real. It is readily available online and is a riveting and humane read. Find it here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/217381/staff-prisoner-relations-whitemoor.pdf

Thanks Sandra Laville, of the
Guardian
, for advice on hacking and Soham.

Thanks to Sian Rickett, Susannah Waters, Alexandra Shelley, Daniel Burbidge, John Steiner, Deborah Steiner and Zoe Ross for careful reading and good advice. And to Katie Espiner and Andrea Walker for brilliant editing. Thank you Eleanor Jackson, for going out to bat for me Stateside. To Sarah Ballard, thank you for everything, as always. Thank you Tom Happold for being my first and last reader and for all your support. And George and Ben Happold for bundling in from school and filling the house with joyful noise after the silence of the attic.

About the Author

Susie Steiner began her writing career as a news reporter first on on local papers, then on the
Evening Standard
, the
Daily Telegraph
and
The Times
. In 2001 she joined the
Guardian
, where she worked as a commissioning editor for eleven years. Her first novel,
Homecoming
– described as ‘truly exceptional’ by the
Observer
– was published by Faber & Faber in 2013. She lives in London with her husband and two children.