‘What about Edie? They must know something! For God’s sake—’ I looked back at them imploringly, the Rattlesnakes, skins shed and shrivelled on the floor, mean girls with bright eyes and pouty, trembling mouths, fingers intertwined as they joined hands. Moya put her head on Charlie’s shoulder. Nancy flicked me a quick glance.
‘Are we free to go, officer?’ Charlie said in a baby voice. She was looking at Omar over my head. He must have indicated that they were done because suddenly the girls stood, a black mass, floating chiffon and tight, pinching lace, secretive smiles waxy with lipstick. The smell of them was bruises and crushed violets, cheap tobacco.
‘Mrs Hudson?’ Omar asked, his hands toying with his belt. I looked up at him. ‘How many times has Edie gone missing before?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘Which is it?’
‘Do you count the time that she snuck off to her friend’s house in the middle of the night?’
‘I count that, yes.’
‘Then three. No, four times. But this is different.’
‘How so?’
He was being so patient with me. I could feel tears welling. I swallowed the hard rock in my throat.
‘Because the last times there were—’
‘Triggers?’
‘Conflicts. Yes.’ I nodded. I grasped the fabric of my skirt and bunched it in my hands.
‘And there wasn’t this time? A conflict? An argument of some kind?’
I hesitated, looking up at him. Tears hazed my eyes and rolled slowly down my cheeks, viscous as honey.
Omar smiled, revealing straight white teeth. ‘We can’t help you if you aren’t prepared to tell us the truth, Samantha.’
‘Yes. There was. She gets so angry,’ I said quietly, sniffing.
‘Okay, well. You see, in itself this is a good thing. It indicates a typical pattern of behaviour for Edie. There’s a problem, she runs away. Gets her head straight. Comes home. The reason she disappeared is fairly academic. We’re more interested in where she’s disappeared to. Edie’s a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, not a master criminal. She didn’t just vanish into thin air.’
He lowered himself into a crouch, putting his hand over mine. I hadn’t realised how much I was shaking until he stilled it, his skin warm and brown. ‘Whatever happens, we’ll keep looking.’
‘Thank you.’ I sniffed. ‘Thank you, Omar.’
I didn’t see Nathan or Omar again. They were assigned to another case, more high-profile – a schoolteacher had run off with a pupil to Cornwall – and so I printed my own posters, taking them as far as Worthing and Bexhill, hanging them in shop windows and on cafe noticeboards. MISSING, they said in fat black font, and underneath, printed slightly smaller, Can You Help Find Me?
The photo I’d chosen did not show Edie favourably. Part of me hoped she’d see it, maybe behind the counter of a newsagent she was buying Rizlas or pints of milk in, paying with handfuls of change held out in grubby hands. I thought she’d laugh if she did. The ‘Borstal photo’, she and I had called it, because she looked like she was on prison day release; unsmiling, arms folded, dark hair with a lopsided fringe she’d hacked herself in the bathroom one Sunday night. I’d originally looked for a photo of the two of us in France, one I’d had pinned to the noticeboard in the kitchen. I hadn’t been able to find it, even moving the sideboard away from the wall to see if it had slipped down behind. I grew more and more frustrated until I realised I wouldn’t be able to use it anyway. In it, Edie was smiling and tanned – the healthiest I’d ever seen her – but the advice I’d received from the family liaison officer had been to choose a picture to help the public recognise her, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her smiling.
The morning Edie left for the last time was sunny and dry. I remember that. The sky was as blue as cornflowers, frosted with drifts of white cloud. I remember that too. The clarity of that moment is so rich I could reach out and run my fingers through it. The radio was playing ‘Waterloo Sunset’. The garden smelled ripe, of tangled roots and the slow creep of autumn with its mists and moss and damp stones. High overhead, a lark trilled and twittered, sketching shapes against the sky. I can remember the sound of her feet on the stairs and the smell of toast and the incense she constantly burned in her room. Her carpet was pockmarked with burn holes like craters on a distant planet.
Afterwards I realised – all these small things; the brain can only take on so much. It hands it back to you in bite-sized pieces of grief. You simply cannot digest any more. The thought that she had disappeared seemed like a grand idea, something oblique and vast, and I couldn’t get a handle on it. But the little things I remember, and they strip away my armour bit by bit. The way the thrush had sung in the garden. Edie’s shoes in the hallway, lying aslant where they had been kicked off. Cotton-wool balls smeared with make-up at the bottom of the bathroom bin. The rich blue of her veins, her wet hair dripping on to her shoulders. This, it is a form of madness.
As I was getting ready for work that morning I discovered my necklace was missing. At one stage I’d almost grown accustomed to my make-up and clothes and jewellery disappearing, only to reappear in Edie’s bomb site of a room a week later. Only then she’d gone and taken a pair of my gold earrings, ones I wore only on very special occasions, and they hadn’t turned up in her room – or anywhere else, in fact. Edie had feigned ignorance, told me I was paranoid. I found them eventually, a month or so later, in the window of the jeweller’s on the high street. She’d sold them for just sixty pounds. I
