Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner Page B

tell me I’m wrong about that too? Listen, I can live with infidelity. A fling with Helena – it wouldn’t change how I feel.’ And his eyes brimmed with tears, fat droplets swelling to their bursting point but remaining just there, on the brink, beneath his slate eyes with their brown flecks. ‘But please don’t tell me she didn’t – doesn’t – love me any more. Please don’t do that, not with her missing.’
    Davy had put a hand on Manon’s arm.
    ‘No, of course not,’ said Manon softly.
    And Davy exhaled, feeling reassured she would not go in and sock him with the Jason Farrer fumble. One infidelity at a time, eh.
     
    ‘Money,’ Harriet says, bending her middle finger down in her new list of priorities. ‘Edith didn’t use banks. There was no cash in the house when we searched it. Now that either means Edith spent it all, or it was on her when she was abducted, or it was stolen and that her disappearance is the consequence of an aggravated burglary. Nigel, where are we with CCTV from the Post Office on the first of December?’
    ‘Owner doesn’t know how to burn it onto a DVD,’ says Nigel.
    ‘Well, go down there and do it for him,’ says Manon. She and Harriet exchange irritable glances.
    Nigel shrugs. He’s been destroyed by life with newborn twins, thinks Davy, and now he’s too tired even to take umbrage. Have a dig, his dead eyes seem to say, I don’t care, as long as I can lie down.
    ‘Manon, can you take us through Will’s journey to Stoke and back, please?’ says Harriet.
    ‘We’ve got him travelling to Stoke, as he described, on Friday evening. He’s picked up by ANPR at three points on his outward journey and obviously his mother confirms his stay.’
    ‘Well, she would, wouldn’t she?’ mutters Harriet. ‘Sorry, carry on.’
    ‘She says he left her house in Stoke at 5.30 p.m. on Sunday evening. He says he took a longer route home because of Sunday roadworks, which means his journey took closer to three hours, getting him back to George Street at 8.30 p.m. He then spent half an hour searching the house for Edith, calling various people such as Helena Reed, before phoning her parents, and then us at 9 p.m. Now, we haven’t got that return journey on camera. Might be that the cameras are out on this route, we’re checking that, or that he was tailgated by a lorry or something, or that mud splashed on his plates, which prevented a reading—’
    ‘Or that he was at home murdering his girlfriend,’ snorts Stuart, with rather more confidence than is merited for a first day in the office, if you ask Davy, which no one ever does.
    ‘Ah, Fergus,’ says Harriet. ‘The floor’s all yours.’
    Fergus Kelly, a neat man in spectacles, never a speck on his suit. He has worked in the press office for ten years, including through the mayhem of Soham, which shook him more than the rest of them because it laid waste to half his contacts and all the unsaid niceties that had previously governed the flow of information.
    ‘So, the tabloids are well and truly on to this now,’ Fergus says, pushing his glasses up his nose. He has a fresh outbreak of acne on his chin, incongruous for a man in his forties, but understandable when you combined stress with the heavily refined carbohydrates stocked in the canteen. One of his daughters has cerebral palsy. Davy doesn’t know what’s made him think of this, but something about Fergus being under pressure doesn’t seem fair. ‘Obviously we can use the press interest to flush out information, but we need to control it – all enquiries must go through the press office. The Hinds have agreed to do a press conference at 11 a.m. tomorrow and we may wheel Will Carter out to see how much he sweats. Obviously, in the first days, the press tend to be very helpful in promoting the police line. It’s after a couple of days,’ he rubs the sweat at his brow, ‘when there’s nothing new to report, they can become quite …’ He coughs into his fist.