The Missing

by Daisy Pearce

  I made pasta, had a glass of wine. I noticed I was checking my watch more frequently as it grew darker outside. Her dinner was cooling under a plate on the worktop. I felt the faintest stirrings of unease, like telepathy. Once the hands had crawled past nine o’clock I sat beside the phone. I went through my address book, old and falling apart on its binding. It was that tall boy I was thinking of, William, with his hard, shining eyes. I didn’t know his number; I didn’t even know where he lived. My heart quickened, just a little, as outside the darkness pressed against the windows. By half past I was speaking with a girl called Kate Robinson, who was in Edie’s class at school. They had known each other for years – the soft pencil with which I’d written her details into my address book had faded to a very pale grey. Kate came to the phone after her mother had got her out of bed. I could sense that talking to me made her nervous. If I’d had more presence of mind I would have questioned why. I remember Kate as a sweet girl, with a slight lisp, short and friendly in plum-coloured corduroy. She and Edie had been inseparable all through primary.

  No, she told me, she hadn’t seen Edie. Not today.

  ‘Did you not see her at school, love?’

  Silence. She didn’t want to answer me. At the time I thought she was worried she would get Edie into trouble. I know better now.

  ‘Hello? Kate?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  Her breathing, soft and snuffly like she had a cold. She was holding the phone too close to her mouth.

  ‘Kate, please, you have to tell me. Edie isn’t in any trouble, I just need to know.’

  Her mother speaking softly to her in the background. I pictured the two of them together in their softly lit kitchen, Kate in a long nightdress that drowned her small frame, her mother reassuring her with a hand on her shoulder, stroking her hair. I envied them.

  ‘She wasn’t at school today.’

  ‘Perhaps she just had different classes to you?’

  ‘No. We have all the same classes. Except history and science because I have history on Thursdays and she has it on a Monday.’ She sniffed.

  ‘What about at lunchtime or after school?’

  ‘Nope. I didn’t see her, anyhow. She’s usually in the churchyard with her friends. That’s where they go. But it started raining today so . . .’ She tailed off.

  ‘Thank you, Kate. You can get back to bed now.’

  ‘You won’t tell Edie you spoke with me, will you? I don’t want her to know you spoke with me.’

  ‘Absolutely not. But if you do see her then you tell her that I’m looking for her and that she is to come straight home. Tell her she isn’t in trouble. Can you do that for me?’

  She told me she could and hung up. I stared at the phone for a while, silent in its cradle. Something inside me had begun to fray.

  I turned all the lights on in the house that night. Lit it up like Christmas. A beacon in the dark. Find your way home, baby. I wandered from room to room without thinking. I’d been here with Edie before, of course. Slammed doors and raised voices and her spiriting herself away for a day or two. But my mind kept circling back to the argument we’d had that morning, the way she’d driven her own head into the bathroom wall.

  There was a dent there; I’d seen it earlier when I went to the loo. A tiny depression in the plaster like a crater, alien and somehow unreal. The way she’d laughed afterwards, even as the red mark on her forehead gave way to a darker and more livid bruise. She’d left me open-mouthed and silent, her eyes glittering with malice.

  She’s just punishing you, I tried to tell myself in a calm, rational voice, she’ll be back tomorrow morning just like the last time. But still. The way she’d hurt herself, the energy she’d had, the way she’d been vibrating with it. That wasn’t normal.

  Edie isn’t normal, a rogue, disloyal voice whispered, and I rummaged in the drawer for the cigarettes I kept there, the small box of matches. That first evening passed in a series of frozen images, like a slideshow. I watched a moth driving its plump body into the window pane over and over, mystified at its stupidity. That compulsion. Over and over, even when it hurt.

  I stood in the garden and smoked beneath a thin rind of white moon. I slept fitfully on the sofa beneath an old blanket that smelled of mothballs and lavender. There were, mercifully, no dreams, but I woke cold and afraid in the pinkish light of dawn, her name jumping from my mouth. Ee-dee. That was the moment, that perfect pivot into helplessness, when I could do nothing but pitch forward into the longest day of my life.

  When I was small, about five years old or so, I had an accident. I’d accompanied my older brothers into the woods to build a den near the stream there. The heat of the day had made the fields shimmer. My eldest brother, Rupert, had stripped to his waist and climbed the thick trunk of one of the trees which crowded about the water. There were the frayed remains of a rope swing and he tugged at it, testing his weight. Finally, he said, ‘Pot’ – ‘Pot’ was his nickname for me until I was fourteen, because of my little rounded belly – ‘I think this will take your weight. In fact I’m sure of it. Want to give it a try?’

  I looked across at my other brother, Danny, older than me by a year. His jeans were stained indigo from the knees down where he had waded into the stream to fetch a stick he’d seen floating there. We called him ‘backward’ and ‘simple’ but now he would have been referred to as having ‘additional needs’. We didn’t care, though. He was our brother. He was one of us.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. The heat made everything still. A cloud of gnats were dancing just above the surface of the water.

  Rupert tied a long, thick stick to the bottom of the rope, something for me to sit on. The wood was warm from the sun. It felt nice against my skin. The rope creaked alarmingly as I settled against it, wrapping my legs about each other. Rupert pushed me away from the tree and I swung out over the glimmering water. I can remember seeing Danny, standing as he often did with that faraway look in his eyes. I swung out in an arc, seeing minnows scatter beneath my fast-moving shadow. I didn’t feel the rope break, but I heard a snap beside my ear and became suddenly engulfed in icy water. My mouth was full of it, the sharp taste of the cold. All sound disappeared with the popping of bubbles and a vast roaring noise that sounded like the engine of a jet plane, whooooosh. I couldn’t find the ground, couldn’t find the surface. I could see sunlight flickering but didn’t know which way was up and there were stones beneath my fingertips and my lungs were shrieking for breath, but there was nothing. I was being carried away, I thought, downriver. Because I was young, and shocked, I did not panic, and because I did not panic I did not die. I broke the surface, shouting, and Danny was there, waist-deep, reaching out a long skinny arm. Hands the colour of cream dipped into the water, pulling me roughly by the hair. The water filled my nose, thick as treacle. I did not know how long I was under for, only that when they pulled me out I felt like I was floating away from my body.

  I must have blacked out because one moment I was lying on the bank staring up into the sunlight sifted through leaves, and the next I was on my knees throwing up gutfuls of bile and silty water, and Danny was crying in great honking brays. I started to feel scared when I saw Rupert’s face, ghost-white, and the remains of my lunch about my feet. I realised I had lost a shoe in the water and that my mother would be cross with me. I was gripped with panic then – a huge, rumbling dread – and the taste in my mouth was the same bright taste that filled my mouth that endless, horrible day many years later. Fear, bright as neon.

  Detective Tony Marston introduced himself the way he did everything: slowly, and with great care. He took one of my hands and simply held it in both of his for a moment, catching my eye. His face was so deeply lined it appeared corrugated. Indentations were carved into his brow, his cheeks, a deep cleft in his chin. He had scruffy grey hair and blue eyes nested in creases, and what he said in his soft, coaxing voice was this: ‘My name is Detective Tony Marston and I am here to help you find your daughter.’

  I m
ade him a cup of tea and he leaned against the doorway of my tiny kitchenette. Edie had been missing now for a week. Tony had a picture of her in his hand, a school photo, unsmiling. He was talking to me, voice lifting and falling like the sea. My head was low, stomach rumbling.

  ‘Samantha, in cases like this what we usually find is that these kids come home when they’re hungry or broke. A night or two on the streets is usually a good wake-up call. Makes them think, do you see?’

  He lit a cigarette and took the tea from me. The female officer who had accompanied him was tall and thin with flat brown hair, like a reed. She sat silently, sipping milky tea. I don’t recall her ever speaking.

  ‘What do you mean, “cases like this”?’ I asked. My ears were ringing; the shock, coming in waves.

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of runaways, Samantha – is it Samantha or can I call you Sam? And I can tell you that they’ve all got one thing in common. They all discover that they can’t run away from a problem. It catches up with them in the end. Now, the good news is that this is something they discover of their own accord, usually pretty quickly, and they come home with their tail between their legs. Not all of them, mind, but most. And you said there had been conflict, did you not?’

  He looked to his colleague for confirmation. She gave him a quick nod.

  ‘It was just a silly row,’ I said. ‘Over nothing, really. A missing necklace. I thought she’d taken it – she does that sometimes, without asking, it’s just a little thing. I can’t believe she’d leave over it.’

  Tony smiled at me sympathetically, face crumpled like soft towels. ‘I have a teenager. In fact, I have two of them. You don’t need to explain this to me. But we need to know everything you can tell us because as far as we are concerned this is an open case. The more information we have, the better our chances of finding her.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘The other good news’ – here he smiled as if he really were delivering good news – ‘is that Elizabeth is what we class as a low-risk missing person. What that means is, from the information you’ve given us, there’s no risk of harm either to the public or herself.’ I thought of Edie thrashing in my arms, that bruise blooming in shades of yellow and deep violet. I stayed silent. I hadn’t told them about that. I didn’t want to look like a bad mother.

  ‘What that also means is while abduction or kidnap are a possibility, it’s minimal. As there has been a pattern of her – uh – “absconding”, if you like, that gives us hope that this is another one of those times. Her age is the thing that makes her most vulnerable, but according to the notes I’ve got here you’ve told us she is “very streetwise”.’

  Had I? Those initial days after Edie had walked out were like stones dropping from my hands.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But she’s never been gone this long before.’

  He leant forward, placed his hand on my forearm. His palm was warm. ‘We’ll find her, but in all honesty, Samantha, I think she’ll be home before the end of the week.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘End of the week,’ he said, smiling. ‘You’ll see.’

  But she wasn’t. She wasn’t home that night, or the night after. Detective Marston returned two days later, alone this time. He had a folded-up newspaper under his arm and when he came into the house he wrinkled his nose as though it smelled bad.

  ‘How are you bearing up?’

  ‘Have you got any news?’ I didn’t have time for his pleasantries. My heart had started to stutter, little palpitations at odd hours of the night like rusty machinery, trembling beneath my skin.

  ‘We haven’t found your daughter yet. But we’re making inroads, Samantha, I promise you. Can I get you some tea? Have you been sleeping?’

  I lifted my head to meet his gaze. I’d been mistaken about Marston’s eyes being blue. They were the grey of cold stone. He wasn’t smiling.

  ‘What is it? Tell me.’

  ‘Come through to the kitchen. Let’s talk in there.’

  He led me through and filled the kettle while I cleared a space on the kitchen table, shoving the junk mail and newspapers and food packets to one side. I was living off cereal and instant noodles. I was too jittery to sit down. I lit a cigarette and when I offered one to Tony he took it gratefully.

  ‘We’ve been up to your daughter’s school. Spoken with some of her teachers there. It seems Edie has had some problems engaging with her education.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Truancy. We know that, of course. The day she went missing she’d skipped school. Where did she go? We’re still looking into that. But according to our timeline she was with her friends that same Thursday evening at the youth centre at St Mary de Castro. We know that because she was seen with them as late as 7 p.m., when the caretaker was locking up. What we want to establish is, where had she been that day and what bearing does it have on her disappearance?’

  He made strong tea for us both, brown and tarry, the milk slightly turned. He handed me the sugar bowl.

  ‘Stick a few spoonfuls of that in. It’ll taste better.’

  We sat opposite each other at the table. The pouches beneath his eyes were dark purple, lined with veins.

  ‘We got the impression from Edie’s teachers that she has something of a history with the school. Aside from the truancy, there were episodes of bullying – quite severe, by the sounds of it.’

  ‘Edie never mentioned she was being bullied.’

  ‘No, no.’ He was talking softly. ‘Edie was the bully.’

  There was a pain behind my eyes like an iron band squeezing and squeezing my skull. A warning carved of stillness. In 373 BC historians recorded that all the animals deserted the Greek city of Helice just days before it was destroyed by an earthquake, alerted by some strange telepathy. Rats, snakes, weasels, running in silence. I had that same feeling now. The calm that precedes devastation.

  ‘Edie wasn’t a bully. She was difficult, but she wouldn’t—’

  ‘Samantha. You must have known.’

  You did know, a voice said. Remember that time you saw her coming in with bloodied knuckles? Or how about when she split her lip and she told you she fell over but you knew, didn’t you, Samantha? You knew. You just couldn’t confront her.

  That’s not true.

  It is true. Tell him. Tell him how much she frightened you. Her temper. Her rage.

  I straightened in my seat, suddenly defensive of Edie, feeling disloyal. You are her mother: that same voice, calm, rational. You should have been in charge.

  ‘She got in with a bad crowd. They’re the ones you need to speak to. Those girls, the ones that look like witches. Speak to them. They’ve been poisoning her!’

  ‘It’s been going on a long time.’ Tony spoke as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘Little incidents, but they build up. Jumping people in cloakrooms and toilets, theft, fist fights—’

  ‘Fist fights?’

  ‘It’s all on her record.’

  ‘It’s not.’ I shook my head vehemently. ‘I would have known.’

  ‘You know who Katie Robinson is?’

  ‘Not Katie. Kate. I spoke with her the first night Edie didn’t come home. They’re old friends, have been since they were little. Why?’

  He sighed, rubbing his temples. ‘Kate was pushed down a flight of stairs in school this year. Back in March. She said Edie had done it.’

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. If he just knew Edie, he wouldn’t have said these things. She had her faults, sure. But she wouldn’t do something like that. It was dangerous. She could have killed her.

  ‘Well, that’s bullshit.’

  ‘Kate suffered a fractured wrist and multiple bruising to her shoulders, ribs and legs. There were witnesses.’

  I sat quietly, thinking back to the conversation with Kate when Edie had first gone missing. You won’t tell Edie you spoke with me, will you? she’d said quietly. I don’t want her to know you spoke with me. How frightened she’d sounded.

  ‘I know it�
��s hard to hear—’

  ‘It’s not.’ I shook my head so hard I saw stars for a moment. ‘It’s not hard at all because it’s not true. You’re blowing it out of proportion. She was a difficult girl, and she had a hard time growing up without her dad, me working all the time. The way she responds to things is sometimes . . . excessive. I think people forget how fucking hard it all was for her. And this girl, Kate – why are we just taking her word for it? Why is she going unchallenged and just allowed to blame my daughter?’

  ‘You think she threw herself down the stairs?’

  ‘I don’t know what I think. I wasn’t there! That’s the point. No one was.’

  ‘Edie was, Samantha. And like I said, we have witnesses.’

  We stared at each other across the table. A grey pall hung in the air above us, hovering like a spirit. I glanced down at my cigarette and saw a long arc of ash, slightly drooping. I’d forgotten to smoke it. I stubbed it out.

  ‘The school said they’ve tried to make contact with you in the past.’

  ‘They have not!’

  Haven’t they? There it was again, an internal voice, so calm, so unlike my own. I tried to think. I recalled a phone call once, on a rainy evening when I’d just got in from work, later than usual. The trains had been running behind, packed with damp, heavy breathers and wet clothes. The teacher had asked me to make an appointment to go and speak with the head. Edie had been misbehaving.

  ‘What kind of misbehaviour?’

  ‘I really think it’s better for you to come in and discuss it face to face.’

  ‘Well, that’s going to be difficult. I’m on my own, you see, and I work a lot. I’ll talk to her.’

  I didn’t remember what had happened after that. I could remember thinking, I must speak to Edie about this, it’s gone too far. But I hadn’t, had I? I must have forgotten.

  No.

  I must have forgotten.