I frown at the headstone. ‘Who’s Tony Marston?’ I ask, peering at the inscription. It gives the year of his death as 2001 and below that, in looping cursive, May he find peace.
I read it aloud and Samantha snorts derisively. ‘You know what he wanted on his headstone? Here lies the last fuck I ever gave. His wife said no, so now he’s stuck with that.’ She kisses her two dirty fingers and leans forward, pressing them briefly against the marble. It’s genuinely touching, without affectation, and I find myself looking away as tears threaten. Samantha gulps her beer.
‘Was he a friend of yours?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did he die?’
‘Heart attack. He smoked a pack a day. He was the detective in charge of Edie’s case back in the beginning.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’ She looks at me with her keen blue eyes.
I sip the beer again. ‘For your loss. Both your losses.’
‘You know, after Edie went missing Tony convinced me to go to a local group for bereaved parents. They ran it in Brighton. This would have been about 1999, I think, a couple of years after she first disappeared. As soon as I walked in, this man asked me to help make the teas. He said he’d read Edie’s story in some of the papers. As I was washing the cups, he said something that has always stayed with me. He said, “It’s all right for you, isn’t it? You still have hope. You don’t know what it’s like for us. You can’t even begin to imagine.”’
‘That seems harsh.’
‘The point is, she’s not dead. She’s missing. The loss is a limbo. It’s fucking purgatory.’
I take another sip of beer. A plane crosses the sky, trailing white vapour. I wonder where it’s going.
‘You know, I might be able to help you,’ I say. ‘I’m a therapist. I mainly deal with anxiety disorders, OCD, stuff like that. If I can—’
‘Aw, that’s nice of you, pet. But you’re about twenty years too late. I’ve had psychologists and psychoanalysts and forty-pound-an-hour hypnotists look inside my brain and all of them have said the same thing. There’s nothing wrong with you, you just need to move on. Okay, I’d say, sure. Tell me how I’m meant to do that. You know what happens next?’
‘Nope.’
Samantha makes her face go slack, her mouth fall open, aping stupidity. She lowers her voice and says, ‘Uh, gee, Mrs Hudson, uh, we can’t really help you with that part. That’ll be nine hundred pounds, please.’ She smiles, breaking the charade. It doesn’t soften her face, that smile. It simply changes it without emotion, like arithmetic.
‘I get it,’ I tell her, draining my bottle of beer. ‘Trauma freezes you. It makes you a rock in a river. The water flows around it, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but the rock doesn’t move. It can’t. It’s stuck in one particular point in time, just getting worn down by the constant pressure.’
She looks at me carefully. I know that look. It’s cautious, but not hopeful. Kindred.
‘That’s exactly it,’ she says. ‘Fuck.’
‘That’ll be nine hundred pounds, please,’ I say, imitating her, and we both laugh throatily.
‘You want another, Kim?’ she asks me, pulling a bottle from her bag. I hesitate, but only for a moment. I can smell the alcohol coming off her, her eyes slightly glazed-looking. She’s already on her way to being drunk. Still, who can blame her? I take the bottle. She watches me uncap it the same way she did, against the edge of a lighter.
She laughs. ‘That’s a wasted childhood right there.’
‘Yeah,’ I tell her. ‘By the time I was fifteen I could roll a joint blindfolded and had six types of fake ID. I wasn’t a good kid.’
‘Well, you seem to have turned out okay.’ She smiles at me again. Her narrow eyes are faded, washed-out sea glass. ‘I saw Edie going down a similar path. I always wonder how she would have turned out. Oh, don’t get me wrong. She was a good kid—’
There’s a hesitation there. I hear it a lot. It’s pre-emptive, a ‘but’ you forget to swallow. He hit me but I provoked it. I want to but I’m frightened. She was a good kid, but she made bad choices.
‘But what?’
‘Nothing. Just that. She was a good kid.’
The silence settles softly between us again. She lights another cigarette and points it towards the church wall running opposite. Just visible beyond it is a low roof. ‘See that house? This man’ – she jerks her cigarette in the direction of Tony Marston’s grave – ‘thought the man who lived there had something to do with Edie’s disappearance. He was convinced of it.’
I think I know his name but I ask her the question anyway, because after all I am ‘Kim’, just a stranger in a churchyard with no prior knowledge of Edie Hudson’s disappearance. I have to keep up the pretence. Another thing I’ve got good at. ‘Oh yeah? Who was he?’
‘Peter Liverly. He was the groundskeeper here, among other things. He helped at the youth club Edie and her friends went to from time to time. I only met him once. He invited me into the empty church with a dead rabbit in his hands.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah. I just thought he was a bit strange, like most people did. When the police took him in for questioning they searched that house and found a stash of photographs he’d taken of Edie and her friends over here in the churchyard and the hall. He’d been hiding in his bedroom and taking pictures through a gap in the curtains.’
I shiver. What
