Had I?
I stood in the doorway to Edie’s bedroom and watched Tony as he opened and closed her drawers. The floor was still littered with her worn clothes and shoes, black tights twisted into knotted ropes and left discarded among the T-shirts and lace. Tony picked his way across carefully.
‘Find anything?’
‘Not yet.’ He looked back at me over his shoulder, his expression neutral. ‘You say the police have already been up here?’
I nodded. ‘The day I called them. They were trying to work out if she’d taken anything with her. You know, clothes, passport, money.’
‘Uh-huh. And had she?’
‘Not that we noticed. As you can see, it’s hard to tell. She wasn’t house-proud.’
‘I can’t make my daughters set the table for their own bloody dinner, let alone tidy their rooms,’ he said gruffly. ‘I know how it is.’
He used his pen to lift a scarf on the dressing table. ‘They ask you about Edie’s father?’
‘What about him?’
‘Is he local? Are they in contact? Could she have gone to live with him?’
‘No, no and no. He wouldn’t have her either way. Hasn’t seen her since she was three months old and he barely noticed her even then.’
‘Do you have contact details for him?’
I laughed nastily.
‘Okay.’ He straightened up with a grunt.
‘When can I talk to the press? I feel so useless sitting here doing nothing.’
Tony glanced over at me. There was a low light that day, robbing us of shadows and depth. Everything was grey and flat, as though viewed through dirty water. ‘I don’t know if that’s a great idea, although I can’t stop you.’
‘Why not? Surely any publicity is good publicity? I mean – I mean, Edie could be anywhere, with anyone! The more people looking out for her the better.’
‘There’s no evidence that anyone else is involved in your daughter’s disappearance and we have no reason to believe any harm has come to her. Plus this isn’t the first occasion the police have been involved when she’s run away, is it?’
I looked at him flatly. ‘You’re joking, right? She was twelve years old. She hid in the neighbour’s garden down the road, for God’s sake. Came back once it got dark.’
It had been the first time she’d run away and the only time I’d called the police. They’d found her two doors down, hiding behind the hydrangea bush. She’d broken in by climbing on to a bin and jumping over the wall. The neighbours said they hadn’t minded, but I noticed afterwards that they’d put a layer of concrete studded with jagged shards of broken glass along the top of the wall. They hadn’t liked Edie much. I once overheard them call her ‘feral’ in the newsagent’s. It had stung.
‘Think about how it looks. From the outside.’ He turned away, started opening the little drawers of her dressing table. ‘This one’s locked.’
‘I don’t have a key.’
‘Okay, well – do you have a screwdriver?’
I walked down the hallway to the airing cupboard, where the toolbox was kept. We’d lived in this house over fourteen years, Edie and I, moving in after an ill-advised stint living with my parents in their cramped terraced cottage. In the winter it was cold, with patches of damp blooming on the walls, and in the summer stifling hot, the old bricks absorbing and retaining the heat of the day. I pulled the toolbox open and took the screwdriver out. As I fastened the latch I discovered something on the floor, in the warm and the dark. A small elastic hairband with plastic bobbles. It must’ve been lying there for years. I reached out with trembling hands and lifted it between my fingers, blowing off the dust that clung to it.
A memory.
‘Mummy, will you plait my hair?’
I’d looked up to see Edie in my bedroom doorway. Six years old and cute as a button. She had dressed herself and one sock rode up to her knee, the other down to her ankle. She had a dress on, with a skirt beneath, legwarmers and a winter hat. Her woolly cardigan was too big and beginning to pill. And because she was mine, I thought she looked delightful. She climbed on to the bed next to me, plump hands holding my cheeks and studying my face.
‘You’ve cried,’ she’d said simply.
‘Yes,’ I’d told her. ‘Sometimes grown-ups feel sad.’
‘Your face is stripy black.’
I’d lifted my fingers to it and found mascara printed on to my cheeks.
‘It’s make-up,’ I’d told her.
‘Messy.’
‘Very messy. Shall I do your hair, Edie?’
She’d turned so I could plait her curly, unruly locks. Glossy brown, like polished mahogany. The sun had been as warm and soft as butter.
‘Sam?’ It was Tony, from down the hallway. ‘Sam? Don’t worry about the screwdriver. I got in.’
I came to as if surfacing from a fitful sleep. I was hugging my knees to my chest as if I was trying to make myself as small as possible, down there on the floor in the dark of the cupboard, among the lint balls and folded towels and sheets that smelt soapy and old. The hairband was still in my palm. That memory, it was so acute, so painful, it was like subsidence beneath my feet. I could feel the slippage like an aftershock, making it hard to grasp reality. Sometimes grown-ups feel sad, I’d told her, and now I couldn’t even remember why I’d cried, what trivial upset had reduced me to tears on that lucid summer day all those years ago. I remembered the feel of her hair, slippery and glossy in my fingers, how we’d giggled when I told her I’d once cut my brother’s hair half off with the kitchen scissors when I was five years old, the way it had fallen to his feet in white curls like feathers. I put the hairband
