Inside the greenhouse that fertile green smell of the tomatoes hits me again. I try to avoid looking upward but a morbid curiosity compels me. The poor dead bird has been scraped from the glass but there is still a smear of gore left behind, a dark stain. The tomato plants are a lush and vibrant green, the fruits glossy-skinned and plump as if they are about to pop.
The sack of bonemeal is in the far corner, slumped like a drunk with his head on his chest. Back here, cobwebs fur the window frames and the desiccated corpses of flies crunch underfoot. I reach inside and sift the gritty powder through my fingers. I find myself thinking of the last couplet of the rhyme Alex told me: Give them meat and give them bone, and pray that they leave you alone.
Beyond the greenhouse is the edge of the garden where gooseberry bushes grow in neat, orderly rows. Beyond that is the woodland, dense and thick and ancient. William told me how his father campaigned to have it protected when it was in danger of being sold off to developers in the mid- nineties. He’d sourced funding from various charities and organisations, held demonstrations, circulated petitions. In the end he raised enough money to buy the two hectares of land just beyond Thorn House and fenced it off. There are still the signs he hung up there reading Private Property and No Entry. I’ve always found it strange that he would campaign so hard to protect the land and then not allow anyone to go in there. It was just trees, after all, wasn’t it?
And the well, a voice says. Don’t forget that. My mind circles the image of a sheep’s carcass, bristling with insect and bone, lying on the cold stones at the bottom of the well, lit by the flare of the boys’ torches. Edward boarded that well up in the end. It was dangerous, Mimi had said.
I’ve only been in the woods once. William took me on one of our first visits down here to see his mother and brother. He insisted we only use the marked path, the one that leads through the trees towards the pasture fields on the other side. It was autumn, the ground in there churned mud and marshy in places, black standing water lying glassy in ditches. Roots rising from the earth like groping white hands. Dark hollows and mossy hummocks all screened by the thick trunks of the trees. It was silent and very, very still. You could do anything in there and no one would see you.
Anything.
Samantha – Now
I call Frances a little after eleven, nursing a cup of coffee close to my chest. She answers on the third ring, husky-voiced and tired-sounding.
‘I was just thinking about you,’ she says, and laughs. ‘How’s your hangover?’
‘Deceptively okay. I keep thinking it’ll catch up with me later on. That’s what happens when you get old.’
‘I always look worse than I feel. I think in a way that’s harder. I mean, I don’t mind feeling like shit but when people physically recoil at the sight of you, you know it’s been a rough night.’
Then we’re both laughing, the two of us, bonded women who only yesterday sneaked into a long-abandoned house on a trail of breadcrumbs. The pain in my head eases a little. In my little kitchen I can stand by the sink and see the places in the garden where the cats have dug holes in the flower beds, turning over the bulbs I’ve planted there. I’ll have to do them again. I don’t mind. It’s meditative, gardening. And I still hope, even now, to come across something Edie put there in the dirt nearly thirty years ago. A small plastic bracelet, a tiny rubber dinosaur, a single block of Lego.
‘I couldn’t sleep last night,’ I tell her, pulling an errant cobweb down from the ceiling. ‘I can’t believe we went in there. What were we thinking? And, Frances, what if Edie had been in the freezer?’
‘But she wasn’t.’
‘But she could have been. That’s the point. I still don’t know. After all this time, I haven’t come any closer to finding her and now I just feel like I have to do something. Anything.’
‘Are you still drunk?’
I laugh at that, rinsing my cup with the phone cradled against my shoulder. ‘I’m going to go and talk to Nancy.’
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t even care. I’ve always thought she knew more than she let on. Perhaps I can persuade her to tell me.’
I know where Nancy is going to be this morning. I know where she is going to be most mornings, and afternoons too. I don’t think some people realise how easy it is to keep track of them on Facebook. Nancy Renard is a phenomenal Facebooker, updating her status almost hourly, checking herself in everywhere she goes. I’ve got a fake profile I use to keep tabs on her, but she exposes herself so often it isn’t necessary. Just meeting my girls for lunch at Café Rouge! she’ll type, marking herself on the map at Brighton Marina, or Bluewater Shopping Centre, or Gatwick Airport. Nancy Renard checked in to the Odeon, Leicester Square. Date night with this one at Wagamamas! Nancy Renard is at the Royal Sussex County Hospital – in sooooo much pain!!!
People think the over-forties are all digitally illiterate, unable to comprehend the advances in technology. It isn’t true. In 2002 I taught myself code and built a simple website: ‘Where is Edie Hudson?’ A counter at the bottom
