Persons Unknown

14 December

Jon-Oliver

Down. Dizzy. Pitching left. He is draining away like dirty water, round and round. Stumbling not walking, the ground threatening to come up and meet him. And yet he presses on. Something’s not right.

He is swampy, heavy-footed. His shin is throbbing. A scuffle – like being spun in blind man’s buff – so quick that when it was over he thought he’d been mugged, but he patted himself down and his wallet and phone were there all right.

His muscles are soupy, unresponsive. His legs wade, the landscape too broad for him to make headway. The air is close like a wet web. He can barely draw breath.

He stumbles to the right, into a muddy wooded area in a direction he hadn’t intended to take and it’s as if the ground is reaching for him. Is it quicksand, not mud?

He’s really scared now; nervously places a hand to his chest. His shirt is wet through but it’s not raining. He looks at his hand. It is glistening dark; the colour unclear because of the dark and the orangey street lighting.

He starts to panic, cannot fill his lungs. What is happening to him?

He falls into the mud, feels some arms take him up and cradle him, looks up to see blonde hair. The alien scent of perfume.

Saskia?

‘Sass?’ he whispers, confused. Is she the cause of this, after all her stupidity? She went too far and he couldn’t stop her.

‘Sass?’

His sight dims, he is too tired.

The world dips.

Manon

Crisp in one hand, sandwich in the other; the tickle and press of light internal kneading around her pelvis, like butterflies in a sack. Seems typical that pregnancy has brought zero in the way of nausea but has instead turbo-charged Manon’s appetite.

She becomes aware of Harriet and Davy talking, urgent and low, on the other side of the open-plan office. Something’s up. They’re quickening. Manon elongates her neck, craning to hear, but her colleagues are too far away.

As they pass her desk she says, ‘Anything up?’

‘Job’s come in,’ Harriet says, but it’s clear she can’t be bothered to fill Manon in.

‘Ooh, who is it?’ Manon says, full mouth.

They ignore her.

She looks at Davy, full of himself these days; Detective Sergeant Davy Walker, promoted by the super, Gary Stanton. He might as well call Stanton ‘Daddy’. Well, he’s welcome to it. Manon is in hot pursuit of the work–life balance: desk job, regular hours, house full of children. She wants to focus on whether to sign up for an organic veg box or whether this would be taking her personal reinvention too far. You can lead a horse to uncooked beetroot …

And yet she is straining out of her seat to overhear the conversation between Harriet and Davy.

‘I could be special advisor at the scene, brackets, teas,’ she offers.

When she’d first begged Harriet for a job back in the Major Crime Unit, determined to leave behind the misery of the Met (awful boss, crushing workload) and the cost of London living, she said she’d do anything, didn’t care how boring. Cold cases.

‘You don’t want to do cold cases,’ Harriet said. ‘There is no greater career cul-de-sac than cold cases.’

‘I do, seriously. Boring dead-end redundancy’s where I’m at.’

And cold cases is where she’s ended up, while her belly enlarges (now at the five-month mark), spending quite a few of her days following her satnav inexpertly around the Fens – turn around where possible – to interview people who couldn’t remember much about last week, never mind a decade ago. Telling herself this is fine. This is what’s called Having It All (though most of the time, it feels like having small slivers of the duller bits) – home by five, pick up some Persil non-bio. You have reached your destination on your right.

Christ, really?

Harriet has marched off in a hurry.

‘Davy; oi, Davy,’ Manon hisses at him as he thumbs his mobile phone and Davy – who used to work for her, who used to do her bidding while she shushed him – shushes her with his finger. Now he’s the DS running the job while she … Well, she is quite tired to be fair.

‘Just tell me what’s up,’ she says when he’s off the phone.

‘Stabbing, male, in Hinchingbrooke Park.’

‘Nice of him to kark it so local.’

‘Actually, he might not even be dead yet,’ says Davy, eyes darting with all the thoughts he’s having, checklist and scene log and SOCO, no doubt. ‘Right by the forensics lab as well. We can all walk it from here. Really couldn’t be more convenient.’

And he is back on his mobile, heading for MCU’s double doors.

Her Nineties house, squat in its tray of mown turf, the very image of a child’s drawing complete with pitched roof and windows like eyes. Not too bright: a stoic face, happy with its lot. Around the lawn is a frill of box hedging, so low you could step over it – and what’s the point in that, she wonders, remembering the burglary prevention advice she used to dole out when she was in uniform. Plant prickly bushes under windows. Halt! This is a shrubbery!

Her key in the plastic door with its fake leaded lights, letting herself in and noticing that the reality is a step removed from what she’d hoped for, moving back to Huntingdon. She thought it would be all spacious living and glorious rural(ish) childhoods for Fly and Solly.

‘I don’t want to bring up a black boy in London,’ she said to her sister Ellie at the start of her campaign for them to move back to Cambridgeshire. This had followed Manon being summoned to the headmaster’s office at Fly’s vast, terrifying comprehensive school and an encroaching fear that he was getting in with the wrong crowd, or possibly that he was the wrong crowd.

‘That’s exactly where you should bring up a black boy,’ Ellie said.

‘And watch him get stopped and searched every five minutes of his life? Arrested for stuff he didn’t do? Looked at by old ladies who think he’s going to mug them? I watch them, you know, giving him a double take, and it breaks my fucking heart.’

‘So what, you’d rather take him out to the UKIP heartlands, would you, where he’ll be the only black boy for miles around?’ Ellie said. ‘You should see the old ladies out there.’

‘We can’t afford to stay here. The rent’s crippling me. It’s crippling you as well. Come on, we could get a big house, the four of us. Fly would never agree to leave Sol, you know that.’

Ellie looked uncertain. ‘It is astronomical,’ she admitted. ‘But God, I hate being uprooted. Having to start again somewhere new, making new friends. Makes me feel exhausted just thinking about it. I’ve got a group of mums I feel comfortably ambivalent about, right here.’

‘We could get a mansion in Huntingdon or Ely or Peterborough,’ Manon pleaded. ‘You could—’

‘Start a course of antidepressants?’

‘Go back to work.’

Their charmless four-bedroom house opposite police HQ in Hinchingbrooke is costing a fraction of what they were spending on two flats in the capital, and is more than double the size. They each – her, Ellie, 12-year-old Fly (whose trainers alone, like cruise ships adrift, have their own housing needs) and Ellie’s nearly-3-year-old Solomon – have a capacious bedroom, hers and Ellie’s both with en suites. The house has one of those bolt-on hexagonal conservatories made from uPVC and, beyond, a 150-foot lawn dotted with menacing conifers. The Bradshaws can even boast a utility room (and what says you have arrived more than a utility room?) with grey marble-effect laminate worktops.

Manon calls ‘Hello?’ into the volume of the house, clattering her keys onto a glass-topped console in the hallway (an irritant none of them could be bothered to remove – whatever domestic improvements are hatched in the utopias of the night are laid to waste in the harum-scarum day). She smells cooking – whatever Solly has just had for tea.

She stands in the doorway to the lounge, already disappointed by the scene in front of her: an oatmeal vista, its candelabra lights descending stiffly from the low ceiling (a persecution of a ceiling – she feels at times as if it is lowering in real time and will one day crush her). The three-piece suite, extra wide and squat, is the most engulfing Manon has ever sat in, so much so that she often feels she is being consumed by it. Everything beige, so that the whole atmosphere is one of porridgy comfort. They’ve lived here for five minutes, and she’s already nostalgic for the high ceilings of Victorian London.

‘Oh Fly, don’t play Temple Run with him,’ she says, removing her coat. ‘His brain’s not even formed yet.’

‘He loves it,’ Fly answers without looking up from the iPad he is hunched over, Solly nestled in his lap. Manon walks back out to hang her coat on the banister and to drop her bag at the foot of the stairs. Where is Ellie? At work? Her shifts run from 7.30 a.m. to 3.30 p.m. or 1.30 p.m. to 8.30 p.m., and this is considered part time. The entire shift usually on her feet, sometimes with no chance for a break. When she’s on nights, she’ll often have Solly all day the next day because she’s trying to save money on the childminder (Ellie’s sense of impoverishment is their microclimate). She’ll doze on the sofa while he plays in front of rolling episodes of Peppa Pig. There has never been a worse time to work for the NHS, Ellie says. The management obsessed with targets and budgets, every shift short-staffed. No love, only constraint and a communal sense of harassment. Yet her sister has also been a master of evasion lately, time thick yet hollow. The stresses and strains mingled with absences unexplained. ‘Shift ran over, sorry.’ Or, ‘Training. Kept me late.’

Manon frowns at the children: ‘He’d also love to bury his face in Haribo; doesn’t mean he can, does it?’ She strides over and lifts the iPad out of Fly’s hands and Solly – predictably – howls, launching himself, starfish-shaped, to the floor. The passion erupting from him, their three-foot Vesuvius. Solomon Bradshaw is either happy or angry. There appears to be nothing in between.

‘See what you did?’ says Fly.

Home three seconds, and already she’s the object of hatred.

‘Where’s Ellie?’ Manon asks, keeping hold of the iPad and wondering where she can hide it this time. Out in the shed? In the freezer? This is the wonder of parenting: behind every new low is a lower low, to which you thought you’d never stoop.

‘Gone out.’

‘Out? Where? Working?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Well, how long did she leave you alone with Solly?’

If she’s on a shift, she should have cleared it, made sure Manon could cover her. Or is she having some fun – heaven forfend! – leaving Manon sore, bicep straining as she holds aloft her measuring jug of what is owed and what’s been taken. A life with children has brought out in Manon her meanest spirit – never a moment when she isn’t keeping a tally.

Fly has got up, lifting Solly’s stiff body off the floor. ‘Not long,’ he says. ‘Anyway, I don’t mind. Come on dude, time for the bath.’

Manon watches them walk out towards the stairs, Solly’s puce face, his breathing juddering with outrage, his little splayed fat hands on Fly’s close-cut hair.

Flumping into an armchair, Manon feels her tiredness mingle with affection for her adopted son; so much older than his years. She’s often washed over with it – pride in his reading, in his gentleness, his soft manners, his decency, his care of Solly.

Solly’s mission statement, bellowed while trying to climb the cupboard shelves towards the biscuit tin, is MY DO DAT! He can turn purple at the prospect of being denied complete autonomy – for example, not being allowed to start the car or push his buggy blindly into oncoming traffic; eat a snail or run off with the back-door key. Hot cheeks, angry square face torn up with his despair; trousers descending below the nappy-line, impossibly short legs. His unreasonableness smiled at (most of the time), especially when, tears spurting, he rubs furiously at his eyes and shouts ‘MY NOT TIRED!’ as if the mere suggestion is a gross slur on his toddler honour.

She could sleep right now.

She could sleep walking up the stairs.

She could sleep stirring a pan at the stove.

The baby squirms, bag of eels.

Yes, it’s laughable that she should consider herself the author of Fly’s best qualities. She’s been his mother for such a short time she can no more claim credit for his good qualities than his bad. His goodness is courtesy of his alcoholic mother, Maureen Dent, slumped with her bottle of Magners in front of Cash in the Attic (no cash in their attic, in fact no attic), and down to his brother Taylor, who loved him, who took care of him, probably in much the same way Fly cares for Solly now she thinks about it – you love in the way you have been loved, after all. Taylor turned tricks on Hampstead Heath and was murdered because of it – the homicide that brought Manon and Fly together. Perhaps his goodness is down to the genes of a Nigerian father Fly has never met. The more Manon lives with children, the more she believes in the determination of genes.

Neither a child nor a teenager, though if she has to pick, Manon would place Fly closer to the adolescent camp. People who meet him think him nearer 15 than 12. She has come to realise adolescence is not switched on at once – it seeps, gradually, during late childhood. There are glimpses from age 10. Some say earlier, though she doesn’t know about that. It’s more like a litmus paper turning blue, as the hormones leach.

Fly can read a room before she can. If there is an accident in his vicinity, he acknowledges vicarious feelings of guilt; can trace the root of awkwardness in a conversation. He once said of a rather sadistic PE teacher, ‘She’s mean to us because she had an injury and now she can’t be an athlete.’ He can identify envy without judging a person for it. All this he does quietly, and though she has always thought of empathy as imbued or developed, with him it seems innate. Its flip side is heightened sensitivity – an aversion to high collars and the congestion of cuffs under his coat, which means he wears only a fraction of his wardrobe: one beloved pair of tracksuit bottoms and one hoodie – with the hood down, Manon is forever insisting, though he takes less and less notice of her. Tall black youth with his hood up? He might as well wear a sign saying ‘Arrest me now.’

Stork-like, he is all limbs. Silent much of the time and unknowable. Fly is unhappy – she knows that much, knows too that she is the cause, and this she can hardly bear. She has uprooted him, unfurled his sensitivities like wounds open to the air. He is not himself. She hopes he’ll settle in.

Even so, he has his playful moments – has begun taking pleasure in irony: putting his arm around her shoulder, towering lankily above her, and saying, ‘I’m just off out,’ and her saying, ‘No you’re not,’ and him saying, ‘That’s right, I’m not, I don’t know where that came from.’ Both of them smiling at each other. They can begin to enjoy a new kind of conversation, with meanings other than what is said.

‘You are so down with the kids,’ he’ll say to her when she puts some kind of easy-listening mum-pop on the iPod.

Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy. What is that? Lines from Twelfth Night embedded in her brain. Funny that she’d resented all the drumming and drilling at school, the tittering and yawning in uniforms as lines were delivered by lacklustre boys and girls leaning back in their chairs. The essays on Coriolanus or Much Ado. She hadn’t realised those lines would be the ones to comfort her most in the second half of her life. Perhaps the teachers knew; had thought to themselves, ‘You’ll thank me one day.’

Davy

It’s good to have Manon back, he thinks, striding across the police station car park towards the featureless grass expanse of Hinchingbrooke Park. He plans to cut through to the wooded area where the body has been found – quicker than trying to walk the enormous curve of Brampton Road. That road is gridlocked with rush-hour traffic, the headlights of school-run mums and commuters out of Huntingdon. Only around five-ish – an unusual time of day for someone to meet a violent death. And opposite a school, too.

He’s anxious to get there, to be the first. He breaks into a jog. In the distance, he can see blue lights illuminating the trees in a rhythmic sweep, the flash of a couple of fluorescent jackets.

It’s good to have her back, but Manon has to understand that things have changed. He isn’t her DC any more – she can’t sit in a car the way she used to and bark orders at him. He’ll likely be leading this case – not as SIO, that’ll be Harriet – but on the ground, running the constables. The thought makes him jog faster. He wants to get there, get started. But his excitement – or is it a stitch? – is tugged at from below by something like aversion. His body pushes forward but his inner self pulls back. He can’t do it. He isn’t up to it. He’s been over-promoted by the super, who thinks of him as a son.

Davy is panting (it’s a wonder he passed his last bleep test); his heart knocking with impatience to master the scene, and with fear also. He might be unmasked at any moment.

‘The shallowness deep within,’ Manon said, ages ago now – just after his promotion – when he’d discussed his Imposter Syndrome with her. ‘You’re not the only one, you know.’ And he’d wondered whether she meant, ‘You’re not the only one who thinks you’re a useless twat.’

Why does he keep thinking about her? He wishes she was here, that’s why. She seems a more substantial person than he does. He slows to a walk because the stitch is really painful now. Even more substantial these days: her breathing laboured, her breasts enormous. He doesn’t want to be one of those men, but it’s like trying to pretend you’re looking out to sea when there’s a vast mountain range right in your sightline.

He comes alongside the body. Looks around him. Harriet’s not here, nothing’s started yet. Within half an hour this place’ll be crawling with uniforms. Looking down, he sees the clothing has been cut open so paramedics could work on the victim’s chest – white shirt, suit jacket, wool coat, Ozwald Boateng written on the purple shimmering lining. The eyes are open, mouth too, the chest caked in dried blood and the small incision of the wound itself, evidently from a knife, like a cut in an uncooked joint of pork. Small red opening in waxy yellow flesh.

Davy looks around him again.

He crouches down unsteadily, and a gust of wind nearly pushes him on top of the corpse. He puts a hand out to balance himself. You don’t want to contaminate the scene – isn’t that the first rule, the only thing they drum into you at training? Keep your hands in your pockets.

If only he could cop a glance at that wallet that he can see poking out of the purple silk lining – then he could get started. If he could get a name off a bank card, an ID, then the story can start and this is a whopper. This one’ll be all over the news. The pressure, he can feel it already popping at his temples, is going to be massive. Keep your hands in your pockets, Davy Walker.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Davy?’ It is Harriet.

He jumps up. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘I’m not doing anything.’

‘Yeah, well, step away from the evidence until SOCO gets here,’ she says.

‘Know who he is?’ Davy asks.

‘Not yet. But he’ll still be dead in an hour after forensics have got what they need so there’s no need to be patting him down.’

He takes a step back.

‘We need to cordon this section of wood, make it wide,’ Harriet says. ‘Where’s your notebook, Davy? C’mon, or do you not want to run this scene? First priority is hands-and-knees search for a weapon. No point getting the dogs out, too many people around. But we do need community policing down here – I want the public reassured by not being able to move for police officers. We need a community inspector to go into the school, talk to the head, make sure all the kids get home safely. Same at the hospital.’

‘We should check Acer Ward,’ Davy says.

‘Yes, good thought. See if you can track down the consultant psychiatrist, ask him if they had any psychos go walkabout this afternoon. I didn’t just use that word, by the way.’

‘What about an ARV?’

‘No, leave them out – what can armed response do, realistically? Let’s not blow the budget. I want scene guards on the cordon, not the idiots we had on the last one. There’s a lot of footfall, I don’t want this scene contaminated, OK?’

‘Who found him?’

‘Judith Cole, over there,’ Harriet says, nodding towards a woman whose hair is matted against her head with blood. It’s smeared down her cheek and has soaked the collar of her coat. She has the distant look of a person who has yet to take in what has happened to her. Someone – a paramedic, probably – has placed a foil blanket over her shoulders of the kind used by runners at the end of a race.

‘She’s significant, obviously – last person to see him alive. We need her clothes for forensics.’

‘Why is there blood on her face and hair?’

‘She cradled the victim, tried to listen to his last words apparently.’

Davy is writing furiously, his hand cold and shaky. Harriet doesn’t stop, rat-a-tat-tat. ‘Also at the hospital, let’s check to see if anyone’s self-admitted. Knife wounds.’ She nods at the executive detached homes curling around the cul-de-sac adjacent to the school. ‘Over there, Snowdonia Way, that’s where I want house to house to start. And we can warn them to be vigilant while we’re at it. Set up a roadblock. We want witnesses, people who were driving in this direction.’

Davy is writing down Acer Ward while his brain tries to keep a tab on the subsequent items on the checklist. Nothing must fall off the checklist. He’s thinking Snowdonia Way, that was next, then – what? – something to do with clothes.

At the same time some other part of his brain is thinking, this isn’t a tidy one: not the usual kind of murder where the person who did it is lying smashed next to the victim or is making a cack-handed run for it towards a waiting panda car or where their perp is just, well, obvious because of the backstory: in a relationship with the victim, threatened them with it last time, just did a massive drugs deal and owed someone money. Sent a text saying, ‘I’ll get you, you’re for it.’ Their perps, often, were not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier and the cases were tidy. Dirty but clean, as in ring-fenced, not leaching towards the executive new builds of Snowdonia Way with their gas barbecues and two-car garages. Davy feels the anxiety reach its fist around his stomach.

‘So that woman Judith Cole,’ Harriet is saying, while Davy scribbles hosp – knife wounds? ‘He died in her arms apparently. At least, he was dead by the time the paramedics arrived. They tried to resuscitate him but no luck.’

‘Funny place to die,’ Davy says.

‘Yes. Very public. Who the fuck is stabbed at half four in the afternoon?’ Harriet’s swearing always peaks at a crime scene. ‘Let’s start with a statement from Mrs Cole, down at the station. Send someone to get her a change of clothes. She only lives over there, 5 Snowdonia Way.’

‘He looks well-to-do, not our usual lot,’ Davy says, nodding at the body.

He steps across the seeping ground to take a look at the man’s face the right way up. He has pouches beneath his eyes the size of teabags, a Roman nose. In fact the whole head seems Roman: his hair, cut close, curling forwards towards his forehead like Caesar’s crown of leaves. What was it made of? Manon would know.

As she walks away, Harriet adds, ‘Need to get the CCTV off the road and this footpath, if there is any.’

Time is of the essence, even when your victim is dead. Witnesses move, rain washes fibres away, memories fade. The commuter who might have noticed something vital goes home to his family, eats dinner, watches TV and soon cannot distinguish between Tuesday and Wednesday. CCTV gets inadvertently wiped by a shopkeeper who knows no better; car number plates are forgotten, descriptions blurred with other memories. They don’t call them the mists of time for nothing.

Investigations, Davy realises as he looks at his checklist without knowing quite where to begin, run on the energy of time, run against it sometimes if a living person’s in danger – a kidnap, say, or a kiddie lost. Other times it’s justice that runs against the clock. Given time, your perp can get rid of the weapon, wipe down his prints, cook up an alibi or hot-foot it to somewhere sunny. The Costa Brava is bristling with British timeshare criminals.

Time blunts all.

It’s a relief, now, to be in the warmth of the major crime unit: frying drips on the coffee-machine hotplate; the clack of fingers on computer keys; muffled mobile calls saying, ‘No I won’t be home, job’s come in.’ There is no one for Davy to call, no one who minds whether he stays out all night. There’s been no one since Chloe, and that ended more than a year ago. Not so much that she put him off all relationships, more that he didn’t get back on the horse, and now he’s not even in the vicinity of a stable.

As with investigations, so it is with heartbreak: time drains the sharpness from the picture. When Davy’d first broken up with Chloe, she was in every thought he had. He cried every day when they separated, even though it was his choice (doom balloon that she was). Nowadays, he can think of her dispassionately as a significant ex, could even bump into her without a rise in his vital signs. The love has run cold, just like it will with the evidence if he doesn’t get a shifty on.

Davy glances at his watch – 8 p.m. Being outside for three hours has made his checklist damp. He spent it standing in that patch of wood, sometimes taking a break to sit in an unmarked car, receiving updates from his DCs. Nothing from the hospital; nothing from house to house, except varying degrees of alarm; nothing from the roadblock.

He’d spotted a scene guard smoking a fag and throwing it to the ground.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at the fag butt.

‘What? Nothin’ to do with me,’ the chap said.

‘Better not be,’ Davy said, ‘because it’s going to be tested by forensics and if your DNA is anywhere near it, you’ll be in big trouble.’

‘OK, well, actually it might be mine,’