‘No. We haven’t – we haven’t got round to it yet.’
‘Huh. Edie wasn’t planned. I had her young. You look like a good age for a child, and you seem nice. You’d be a great mum.’
I stand very still as she pulls herself to her feet and asks me if I want a cigarette. I shake my head, tell her no, I’m sorry, I don’t smoke. I’m thinking, Edie. That name again. The disappearing girl on everyone’s lips.
When the woman removes her cap a spill of long grey hair falls over one eye. Her face is familiar to me, and it takes me a moment in my shock to place her. Then, ‘You were in the cafe,’ I tell her. ‘You saw me talking to Nancy Renard.’
‘Oh yeah? Nancy Renard. You know what the girls at her school used to call her? Nancy Retard. She was a late developer, you know? Very shy. Then she started hanging out with my daughter and her friends. It brought Nancy out of her shell a little bit, I suppose you could say. She’s a different woman now.’
‘Kids can be mean.’
She looks at me with eyes narrowed against the smoke. My mother always told me I was a terrible judge of character (‘That’s the problem with you, Frances,’ she’d say to me, leaning in too close, her breath heavy with alcohol, cheeks flushed. ‘You’re not smart enough. You get fooled by everyone.’). Well, joke’s on you, Ma, because I got wise to people very fast. Leaving home at sixteen will do that to you.
I’m sizing up this woman, Edie’s mother, I remind myself, right now. Tough and uncompromising, unruffled. With her wild, wiry hair and the sullen jut of her jaw, she looks like a good person to get into trouble with. Then I remember Alex telling me she’d once held a knife to William’s throat and my mouth dries up a little.
‘What did you say your name was?’ she asks, and immediately I lie, out of habit. It’s a legacy of being in trouble with the wrong people most of your adult life – bailiffs, dealers, nasty exes.
I stick out my hand with a smile on my face. ‘It’s Kim.’
‘I won’t shake.’ She holds up her dirty hands. ‘You new to Lewes, Kim?’
‘Sort of. I’m here with my husband. His mother’s sick.’
‘That’s too bad. Is that why you’re here? Looking for a plot to put her in?’ She laughs, which immediately turns into a barking cough.
I smile. ‘No, no. Nothing like that. I was just looking.’
‘You want to walk this way with me? I feel like I want to get out into the sunshine a bit. It’s so heavy in here. Oppressive.’
‘Sure.’
She introduces herself as Samantha Hudson and I have to bite my tongue to stop myself telling her I already know her name. I’ve read the papers. I’m already half regretting lying to her about who I am, but I don’t want her to know about my connection to William. How did Alex describe it? ‘It was a bad time for him.’ Instead I follow her through the trees towards the churchyard, where benches sit in sheaves of sunlight. I ask why she was burying the suncatcher.
Samantha looks back at me. ‘I’ve been doing it every year since Edie went missing. When she was a little kid she would bury things in the back garden – cotton reels, bars of soap, my fucking house keys – she was obsessed with it. Used to drive me crazy. I bought her a sand pit – you know, the kind you get in a big plastic clam shell – and told her to bury stuff in there if that’s what she wanted to do. But no, she went right on putting things in the dirt. I think she liked the way it felt in her hands.’ Samantha crushes her cigarette out underfoot. ‘In the beginning I think I went a bit mad, you know? I didn’t hold it together very well. I suppose it was a way to stay connected to her. Now, I think it’s just habit.’
We’re out in the churchyard again, and immediately I feel my spirits lift. She was right, it was oppressive in there, the melancholy weighing down on you. Out here the sky is pale blue and endless, stretching out towards the distant Downs. Samantha hoists her bag on to her shoulder, smiling wearily. Her jaw is square and angular, the cords in her neck tight. There is a tension about her, a hypervigilance I’ve only ever seen in military victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. I recall one veteran I treated who’d been the victim of a roadside bomb in Basra. He’d seen his friend crawling away from the explosion with his intestines trailing after him in the dust. This woman, Samantha, has the same set in her shoulders; the way she carries herself is as though she is braced against an ambush, the world turning on her.
We leave the main path and follow a smaller one, no more than a single rut worn smooth by the passage of feet. The two of us are lost in thought, contemplative. The ground rises and falls like a tide. We pass an area sectioned off by a bamboo trellis that crawls with honeysuckle and clematis. Just beyond it I can hear the low, somnolent drone of bees and see the little hives that have been built there. A metre or so further on is an old wooden bench. Samantha sits down on it with a sigh, opening her bag at her feet. I join her, the two of us looking out over the sprawling graveyard, the dense woodland, the steep hills beyond that rise and fall like music.
‘Here.’ She’s pulling something out of her bag. A bottle of beer. She opens it with the edge of her lighter, flipping the cap high into
