‘Heard a rumour that one of Edie’s friends once saw him in the bushes with his camera in one hand and his dick in the other.’
‘Urgh. Is that true?’
‘Who knows? When he was released it caused so much trouble that after a while he went to live with his son. He’s still there, as far as I know. The house kept getting trashed so in the end his son boarded it up and left it, and now no one wants to live there because it needs so much work. Besides, mud sticks, right?’
I nod. Second time I’ve heard that phrase recently. How true it is.
‘They never charged him?’
‘Taking photos without consent isn’t illegal, even of minors. They had no evidence that he had anything to do with Edie’s disappearance, although I don’t know what that was based on.’
I wonder how hard the police looked for her, really. I searched the slim volume of press cuttings from Edie’s disappearance, noted the way they’d spoken about her and her mother. The insinuation had been that she was a neglected, uncontrollable child without boundaries. ‘No angel’, they’d said. I look at Samantha, who is still staring at the house over the wall, thumb absent-mindedly rubbing at a slim scar running diagonally across the palm of her hand.
‘You know, I sometimes think – what if he had kept her in there? Like that guy in Austria?’
‘Josef Fritzl? You mean, like, in a basement?’
She shrugs. ‘Maybe. I mean, who would know, right?’
‘But the police searched the house.’
‘But they were only looking for photos. What if they missed something? A trapdoor in the floorboards? Or – or what if they didn’t look in the loft? You think they checked those places out? The garage or the shed?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Listen, Kim. One thing I am very sure of is that when girls like Edie disappear, they don’t funnel money into a big search operation. They see it as one less troublemaker on the streets. Sure, there’ll be a nod towards good police work – I mean, they took the local creep in for questioning – but the reality is you get the occasional phone call and a detective with a weak heart.’
She nods towards Tony’s grave and turns to me. She is smiling tightly. Her wavy hair is grey and wild as steel wool.
I consider her for a moment before saying, ‘You think he hid your daughter in there?’
‘I said might have.’ She’s slurring, but only a little. She drains her drink and slumps in her seat. ‘I nearly broke in once, but I bottled it. That was years ago, when you could climb in through the back windows. The son put up better security after that. He was concerned someone would burn it down.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Go in there?’ Samantha looks at me glassily, unsmiling. ‘I used to have a recurring dream about it. It was always snowing in those dreams, and my footsteps were totally silent. I could hear Edie calling me from inside the house, so I’d sneak in through the broken window. Inside, it was so dark you couldn’t see. The house was a maze, like a rabbit warren. I had to just creep blindly along the walls, following the sound of her voice. But I never reached her.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘I used to think I’d let Edie down in so many ways, but the worst of it was I always felt that I hadn’t looked for her hard enough.’
I smile grimly. She looks away, back towards the house. ‘The dream frightened me so much I never went in, and because I never went in I spent years feeling as if I hadn’t searched properly for her. It’s a – what do you call it – a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?’
‘Do you still feel like that?’
Samantha lights another cigarette. Her face is lined in that harsh way that smokers carry, like carvings in the skin.
‘Always,’ she says.
We’re both silent for a moment. I wish I could take her hand. I wish I could help her.
‘So, go on then. You’re a therapist. How do I move on from that?’
Something ignites inside me – a low burn, like a pilot light, a flickering blue flame. ‘Well, in CBT – that is, uh, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – we recommend exposure therapy. Facing your fears.’
‘Huh. Makes sense.’
‘But we do it in increments. So in your case, the first step would be walking up to the house. The next, standing beside it for a full minute. Then opening the door. Then going inside. You get the idea.’
‘Sounds like a lot of work.’
‘It is. It’s not easy. Hardest work you’ll ever do is on yourself.’
‘I’ve never been one for hard work. Maybe that’s my problem.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Uh-huh.’
I finish my drink. I can feel the weight of what’s going to happen, the way it feels as if the two of us are on an edge, tilting forward. I look across at her, this wild-haired older woman, her face hard and set and sombre.
‘I’ll come with you, if you want,’ I hear myself say, because I am always spoiling for trouble, like Samantha, like Edie.
She looks my way, lips curling into something resembling a smile.
‘Oh yeah?’ she says.
The little bungalow has been empty a long time. It’s accessible only from the road, so Samantha and I leave the churchyard and find ourselves in front of the high privet hedges that have grown around it almost as high as the roof. The little wooden gate has rotted away, the wood soft and spongy beneath my fingers. Somewhere in the trees behind the house a magpie chatters.
‘See how the windows are boarded up?’ Samantha says, pointing. Her voice is low, whispering. There are iron sheets over the windows, riveted into place. A sign in the top-left corner of one reads: This Private Property is Under Surveillance. Underneath, someone has written in marker, Didn’t see this tho, did U?
There’s other graffiti too, on the brickwork and reinforced front door. Tags, mainly, or big peace signs
