I’m walking slowly down Eastleigh Avenue with my shadow long behind me. There is the smell of bonfires on the air; woodsmoke and charred ash, the embers of damp leaves. There’s a figure waiting by the gate. I don’t know if they see me. I don’t know if they feel the same nervous energy I do, the feeling of ropes breaking, ballasts burning. Bottles clink in my bag. I’ve got four, and my trusty lighter. A pack of cigarettes in my pocket because we all know that smoking will kill us, but today is not that day.
Frances has a band of bruising around her throat, blue and purple and a yellow the colour of nicotine stains. She keeps it covered with a scarf, and even though the doctors say she will be fine she is still talking like a one-hundred-a-day smoker, her voice as thin and crushed as dry leaves underfoot. When I found her, struggling with William in front of the yew, her face was turning ashy blue and her eyes were white and bulging. I didn’t think twice about planting Nonno’s knife between William’s shoulder blades. I had a brief flash as I did so, something sparking in my brain, Nonno using the same knife to peel an apple in a long, single coil, and then William was shouting, his hands groping to a place on his back that he couldn’t reach, and Frances was on her knees and someone – Alex, it later turned out – was racing over the grass towards us saying Oh God, oh God, and I swung at William, hard enough that he spun on his heel as my fist connected with his jaw, hit him with such force he fell backward and drove the knife in deeper.
Alex was on his phone. I fumbled with the belt around Frances’s neck and although there was a pulse she did not gasp for breath and she did not open her eyes. I said to her, hold on, and she mouthed a word at me, teeth stained with blood: Tree.
That’s when I picked up the torch. That’s when I looked inside the hole. That’s when I found my daughter.
‘Hello,’ I say to her, and offer her my arm to go through the iron gates like we’ve just got married. Frances smiles at me. While in hospital she wrote a statement for the police, naming Mimi Thorn as Edie’s murderer. William is still in custody. Alex is not. I’ve been told Mimi is unfit to stand trial. Dementia, they said. I wonder how much of Edward Thorn’s banked goodwill is still working in her favour. ‘I’ve spoken with my friends at the station,’ he had told me that Halloween. The Thorn name is still in good standing, apparently.
I squeeze Frances’s arm. ‘You look well. Don’t talk if it’s painful. I shall just assume you’re saying the same about me.’
Frances rolls her eyes. The graveyard has in the last few weeks been a hive of activity, with police and journalists and morbid little people with mobile phones and an appetite for tragedy coming to film and document and take grinning selfies in front of the last resting place of my fifteen-year-old daughter, but today it is quiet, just us and the birds. Missing girls don’t draw a crowd like a body does.
‘I brought beers,’ I tell her. ‘Thought we could sit on the bench for a while.’
‘Sounds good,’ she says huskily.
‘I heard from Moya.’ I pull a bramble off my jeans. ‘She wrote me a very short, very polite email – “Sorry for your loss” – and then in a PS at the bottom, “Edie was one of us.”’
‘That’s sweet.’
‘I know.’
Frances takes my hand in her own and squeezes it.
In the days after she was released from hospital, she came to stay at my little house on the end of the estate. I cleared Edie’s room out for her, covering the old scarred carpet with a rug and replacing the dead bulb in the bedside lamp. I threw out most of Edie’s things – clothes, books, posters – and then behind her mirror I discovered the photo of us in France, the one I’d been looking for when I made the Missing posters: the two of us standing on a bridge, arms around each other, smiling. I’d asked a passer-by to take the picture for us in my stumbling, hesitant French, while Edie had laughed behind her hands, rolling her eyes at me. I like to think she kept it because it reminded her that sometimes things were good between us. Because among the rubble, a single plant can grow. I keep the photo in my wallet now.
Frances went back to Swindon to put the house on the market – hers and William’s – and to start divorce proceedings. I told her there was no rush, but she shook her head. Smiled. Her voice was low and cracked-sounding, like something had been ripped right out of her, but she told me her plans. They are good plans. Hopeful. I don’t doubt she will see them through.
After our first beer I will tell Frances what else I have in my bag. A small box, barely heavy enough to contain my girl with her loud, volatile ways and her Molotov cocktail of a brain, but she is in there all the same; a small, black box with her ashes inside, and on the bottom, beneath the word Deceased, it reads Elizabeth Jane Hudson. I’m here to ask Frances for one last favour: to walk up to the Downs with me and release my girl to the wind. Below us will be the sun-warmed grass, the river, the town. We will stand together as the
