Missing, Presumed Read Online Free PDF Page B

phone. And what about the blood? No, I’d say she’s definitely come to harm.’
    She’s put her aviator shades down, pulling out from the kerb. Davy looks at her and shakes his head.
     
    It’s only a ten-minute drive to the station from George Street. They jog up the steps of Cambridgeshire HQ, a festival of sick-yellow brick squatting in an acreage of car park. For Davy, climbing these steps with an important job to do makes him inflate with pride and elation. He wishes someone could see him, Detective Constable Walker of
Cambridgeshire Constabulary: supporting law-abiding citizens and pursuing criminals relentlessly since 1974
. This mission statement is actually on the Cambridgeshire police website, but it could have been something Davy came up with.
    When he brought Chloe for a tour of HQ, he was smiling to himself the whole time and even though she described it as ‘a cross between a Travelodge and a conference centre’, it hadn’t dented the dignity of his calling. She said the reception, with its curved wooden desk, spider plants, and smell of brewing coffee, reminded her of an STD clinic, but what he saw – what he was so proud of – was the electronic notice board announcing the life and death work going on here (
2–4 p.m., conf. room 3: crime data integrity working group; protocol briefings: ambulance teams, Hinchingbrooke; UK cross border agency; 4–6 p.m., Commissioner
). So much sexier than the jobs he could have had: regional manager for Vodafone or selling fridges in Currys, like his school friends. Which would you rather? Flogging some twenty-four-month contract with 3,000 free minutes or wondering whether the Dutch woman got on a train to Brighton to kill herself there, or whether she was murdered? Human stories, base and sexual. The police operated in the seedy low light: drug runs, burglars in botched stick-ups, murderers who said they were nowhere near the scene but whose smart phones provided a handy GPS map of their movements. Boyfriends controlling girlfriends, friends paying off debts, love triangles, honour killings. That, or: ‘Would you like to extend your warranty on this microwave for an extra two years, sir?’
    ‘Look at you, Davy,’ Chloe had said, as he showed her the forensics lab and the phone-tracing department. ‘You’ve really drunk the Kool-Aid, haven’t you?’
    Davy and Manon enter the MIT department just as Harriet is gathering team four for her briefing: DC Kim Delaney, DC Nigel Williams, Colin Brierley – a retired DI, now civilian investigator who runs the tech side – and a couple of other DCs.
    They fall in behind their desks, shaking off their coats.
    ‘You’re going to have to hit the ground running, Stuart, I’m afraid,’ Harriet is saying as Manon shakes hands with the new recruit – an extra civilian investigator to type interviews into the HOLMES computer system and listen to Colin’s un-politically correct diatribes, lucky chap. ‘Baptism of fire. These guys will show you the ropes.’
    Davy nods his most welcoming nod at Stuart. Sometimes CIs were retired officers, like Colin, sometimes young, like this one, fresh from a three-day induction course. They were cheap and they didn’t leave the office.
    ‘Right, everyone,’ Harriet continues. ‘Edith Hind, twenty-four, Cambridge postgrad student, missing from the house she shares with Will Carter in George Street. Parents have driven up and are waiting downstairs, so let’s get a family liaison officer with them asap. Main lines are as follows. One: scene and examination. SOCO are in. I’ve just had a call from them: two wine glasses – one clean on the kitchen worktop, the other broken in the bin with traces of blood at its edges.’
    ‘She could have been waiting for someone,’ says Manon.
    ‘That was my thought,’ says Harriet. ‘Two wine glasses out ready for a rendezvous, one of them becomes a weapon. We’ll see what forensics tell us on that score.
    ‘Two: search ongoing,