The Missing

by Daisy Pearce

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It was a bad time for him. Dad died not long after she went missing and Edie’s mother came round to the house causing trouble. Mum was in bits.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Look, Frances, she was just a kid. Kids go running off, they do stupid things. William probably barely remembers her. I doubt he’d even know her name. What he will remember is that feeling in the days after she’d disappeared, how people looked at him and talked behind his back. How it felt to come home to find the police car outside the house and Mum at the kitchen table saying, “Boys, there’s been an accident”, and her voice not quite steady. That’s what he’ll remember.’

  ‘Okay,’ I tell him, but it’s not, not really. There but for the grace of God go I, I think again. That homeless woman outside the off-licence in Tufnell Park, Kim with her student debts and Miu Miu handbags posing in her underwear, Edie, the lost girl with the hard, unremitting stare right into the camera lens. They could have been me. They were, once upon a time. Something splits open inside the hard bedrock of my memories, the ones I’ve compressed over and over again until they turned black and solid and unreachable. If you put enough weight on it you’ll bury it forever. Not true. Now one is escaping: a splatter of blue paint, bright blue, the scarred wood of the front door, the word that was daubed along the hallway. Whore.

  I turn to leave, but as I’m opening the door I look back and see Alex looking upward, towards that bird lying on the glass beneath a sharp spray of blood like a constellation. He looks troubled by it, haunted almost. I think about the police questioning him over his mother’s fall. It must be hard to live the way he does, so firmly in the closet, so desperate for her approval. No wonder he seems repressed.

  Back inside the house I find William’s laptop and open it. Unlike our home computer there’s no password on it, and the desktop opens up to a photo of William and me in Tenerife a few years ago. I’m drinking a pink cocktail decorated with glacé cherries. It tasted like cough syrup, but I had two more that afternoon, lying on a sun lounger while my shoulders burned.

  I open up the browser and after some hesitation I type in ‘Edie Hudson, Missing’. There are several matches, mainly in the smaller local papers – the Argus, the Sussex Express, the Lewes & Ringmer Herald. If Edie had gone missing today her face would’ve been all over social media in moments. A dedicated page on Facebook, a hashtag on Twitter and Instagram, a JustGiving page to fund the continued search. Back then, you relied on print media to get the story out there, and it looks as though Edie’s story didn’t circulate outside of East Sussex. I’m surprised. A vulnerable fifteen-year-old girl walks into a grove of trees and never comes out again? I would’ve thought the press would have been all over it.

  All the articles have been digitised and catalogued from print, so the photographs are grainy and undefined. The first article is small, no more than two paragraphs. There’s Edie. In this photograph she’s unsmiling, almost aggressive-looking, with her arms folded in front of her. The headline reads: ‘Mother’s Plea to Missing Girl, Fifteen’.

  Officers have been speaking to motorists and local residents this afternoon in the area where missing Edie Hudson was last seen. Her mother Samantha describes her as ‘dark-haired, slim build, wearing black clothes and make-up’. She added that if anyone has any information regarding Edie’s whereabouts they should contact the police.

  ‘If you’re reading this, Edie, please, please just come home. Come home.’

  I clicked on the next article, dated a week or so later, from the Lewes & Ringmer Herald. This time the headline reads: ‘Police Question Caretaker in Teen Disappearance’.

  Fifty-six-year-old Peter Liverly has been taken in for questioning following new information received by police. Liverly, who helps run the St Mary de Castro youth centre in Lewes, has previous convictions for assault. Edie Hudson, fifteen, has been missing since Thursday 9th October. She was wearing a long black skirt, black high-necked shirt and a leather jacket. She has connections to Eastbourne and Shoreham and the Wood Green area of London. She has been described by her teachers as ‘streetwise’, with her headmaster adding, ‘Despite everything, we are all very worried for Edie.’ Her mother Samantha Hudson, thirty-three, a resident of the Morley Wood housing estate, has previously been quoted as saying, ‘I was not surprised when she didn’t come home.’

  What an odd thing to print, I think, scrolling through the rest of the articles. They all have the same tone – brief and factual, almost hectoring. One of them mentions Edie’s habit of roaming the streets till almost midnight. Another describes her as ‘no angel’. The last one, printed in January 1998, just three months after Edie was first reported missing, details how the police were winding the investigation down. A detective named Tony Marston was quoted: ‘While we will no longer be actively involved in this case, the file will remain open.’

  I find a picture of Peter Liverly in an old archive of pictures on the St Mary’s church website. He was short and balding, with broad shoulders and a rosy face that hung in soft folds like rubber. He’d been released without charge, of course, but it had cost him his job. I know the way rumours germinate. They spread like a stain, like pollution. They taint you.

  Samantha – Then

  In the last few days I’d been getting a lot of calls. At first I spoke with everyone who asked me questions, until Tony Marston told me to stop. I’d been quoted in the newspaper, but whatever I said seemed to come out wrong. Sometimes the caller hung up as I answered; other times there was nothing but the sound of their breathing, a cough, distant traffic. Sometimes the breathing was wet and flabby, lungs full of catarrh, or muddy water. Other times it was dry like a desert wind.

  Sometimes they said things.

  ‘I have her. I keep her locked away. She doesn’t like the dark.’

  ‘The Africans got her. They keep her as a slave in a caravan. I saw her at the window, begging to be let out.’

  ‘Your daughter wouldn’t stop screaming so I cut off her tongue.’

  After a while I learned not to answer at all.

  Then there were the psychics. One elderly woman called regularly, sometimes giving me contradicting information. She had visions, she told me, of my daughter with an older man, in a black car, heading north. Another caller was a man with a lisp who claimed to have an untainted Romany bloodline. He told me she was buried in a shallow grave in a field near Reading. Another, that she had eloped to marry an immigrant from a war-torn country. Another to tell me she was pregnant. Another, lying wounded in hospital. Another, lying at the bottom of a reservoir. Another. Another.

  I was afraid to change my number because it was the only one Edie knew, so the calls kept coming, and the machine filtered them for me.

  One night I heard the sound of the phone ringing. I woke slowly, chemically submerged, brain buzzing pleasantly. At some point during the night I’d kicked off the duvet and my skin was puckered with goosebumps. I reached for the phone by the bed just a moment too late and listened as the answer machine kicked in. Silence. The crackle of wind on the line. My mouth was dry. I needed a drink of water, to change out of my clothes. I sat up, head swimming, and then I heard it. A female voice, slightly watery, as if she’d been crying.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum.’

  I waited, entirely poised and still. It’s her, I told myself, and the line cut out. I picked up the receiver, frantic, saying her name over and over, Edie, Edie, talk to me, but it was just the single note of the dial tone.

  I played that message over and over through the night, sleeping curled around the answer machine with the receiver hanging off the edge of the bed. I didn’t want any more calls to come through and wipe out the sound of her voice. The next morning, as the sky brightened, I called Tony Marston on his home number.

  ‘She phoned me.’

  ‘Who? Edie?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That she was sorry.’

  �
�What else?’

  Something chipped away at the edge of my excitement. I paced the room, smoking. ‘Just that, that she was sorry.’

  ‘Huh, okay. Keep hold of it. I’ll have a listen later on.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Samantha.’ I didn’t like the way he said my name. I wished I’d never called him. His underwhelming reaction was like a dash of cold water. ‘How do you know it’s her?’

  ‘Who else would it be?’

  ‘Well—’ He broke off to cough thickly. ‘I don’t mean to dampen your enthu—’

  ‘I know her voice, Tony! I know my own daughter!’

  ‘Samantha, calm down. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Can’t you trace the call? We could track her down inside ten minutes!’ I pitched my cigarette out the window. There was a hardness in my chest, like a stone dropping through water. ‘What about getting someone on to that?’

  ‘It’s not that simple, love. Not like the movies. You need the tracking device in the house before the call comes through.’

  I stared at the handset for nearly a full minute, even as I could hear Tony’s voice bleating my name over and over again: Samantha, are you still there, Sam, Samantha, and then I slammed it into the wall, denting the plaster. I was sobbing as I sank on to the bed, hands over my eyes. It was her, I told myself, choking on my tears, I know it was her.

  I called my brother Rupert that afternoon. Danny had died twelve years ago of pneumonia. I’d held his hand and watched his chest slowly rise and fall and rise and fall and stop. The same strong hands that had once lifted me out of the water had gone slack and cold in my own.

  ‘I need you here, Rupert. I’m going mad.’

  When I opened the front door to him and his small suitcase he looked at me as though he had a bad smell under his nose. ‘Bloody hell, Pot, you look awful. Listen, will my car be all right out there? This is a dodgy area and I don’t want my premiums to go up.’

  Over the next two days Rupert was galvanised by a roar of nervous energy – he cleaned and tidied and arranged, wiping down all the surfaces around me as if I were a typhoid carrier. He made a lot of soup – the freezer was full of the stuff, and when we couldn’t fit more in he started stockpiling it in the shed. Within the first hour of his arrival he pressed a bottle of vodka into my hand and said, ‘You need your strength.’

  ‘You sound like Mum,’ I replied, and then we both laughed until I realised one of us was crying. This is my life now, I thought. Get used to your emotional landscape shifting like time-lapse erosion, Sam. Everything is fluid, you have no constant. Except soup, I reminded myself. You constantly have fucking soup.

  I was upstairs when I heard the phone start ringing. I’d been folding laundry and staring blankly at the wall, my mind purring gently, cocooned by Valium. What was it they called it? Mother’s Little Helper? I blinked slowly.

  ‘You want me to get that?’

  ‘No,’ I answered. ‘Let the machine get it.’

  I heard the machine pick it up, but then heard Rupert lift the receiver, talking urgently. Next thing I knew he was calling to me up the stairs. ‘Pot, it’s a detective. Says he wants to talk to you. He’s got some news.’

  I can’t describe the feeling I got then. A coldness, an apprehension. Dread, like a tidal wave building and building and me beneath it, small and insignificant, waiting to get washed away. I walked slowly downstairs and took the phone from Rupert. He was looking at me with concern and barely disguised horror. This is it, I thought.

  ‘Tony,’ I said.

  ‘Sam. We’re bringing someone in.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know who Peter Liverly is?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘He’s the – I suppose you’d call him the caretaker up at the church, St Mary’s. He looks after the grounds mostly, and helps out at the youth club up there.’

  Something jogged my memory then. The night I’d gone to my women’s group and caught Edie and her boyfriend on the sofa. The group had been cancelled and the church hall locked. That man, the one with the twisted rope of scar tissue on his neck and the keyring of the cartoon bird in bright pink. He’d had dead rabbits in a bag, swinging it like a pendulum.

  Told ’em to stop coming here, all of ’em, but it don’t make a difference.

  ‘I think I’ve met him once. Odd sort,’ I said.

  ‘We’ve had a tip about him. Anonymous. I thought we’d check it out. When we arrived there this morning we found some photos.’

  A chill spread through my chest, my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. Rupert put his hand on my arm.

  ‘What kind of photos?’

  Somewhere far away, as distant as another planet, I heard Rupert mutter Oh my God under his breath. I turned away from him.

  ‘Pictures of your daughter and her friends. Some of them are candid, taken in the youth centre. We’re not too concerned about those. But the others we found are obviously taken without their permission. It looks like he’s been hiding himself and watching them for a little while now.’

  ‘What do you mean, “hiding”? Why was he doing that?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out. There’s nothing sexual about the photos, they’re terrible quality – the man can’t take a picture to save his life – but the fact he has them at all is concerning to us, especially considering Edie’s disappearance. We just want to see what he knows.’

  ‘Is he under arrest?’

  ‘No, but you’ll be first to know if anything turns up. We’re searching the rest of the church hall now.’

  ‘Thanks, Tony. Have you spoken with her boyfriend? William?’

  ‘That’s not how he described himself.’

  A memory then, like a camera flash. William on top of Edie, one hand sliding into her underwear, the look on his face when I walked in, his eyes wide and dark.

  ‘I see. You don’t find that suspicious? That he’s trying to distance himself?’

  ‘No. They’re teenagers, Sam. Fickle. He’s not suggesting he had nothing to do with her, it just wasn’t a serious relationship.’

  ‘I want to talk to him.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Tony—’

  ‘Listen. We’ve spoken with William and when we get a chance we’ll speak to his father as well, okay?’

  I heard the click of a lighter as he lit a cigarette. I could imagine him behind his desk, the surface littered with paperwork and wires and framed pictures of his kids. There would be one of those little plastic signs they sell in joke shops: Just file it in my bin. There would be coffee cups and chewing gum wrappers and an overflowing ashtray. And somewhere in there, among all that, would be a file with my daughter’s name on the top. Don’t count on it, I thought, sarcastically.

  ‘What do you mean, his father? Why? Who is he?’

  ‘Edward Thorn. His car was seen by the church the night Edie ran off, but that’s not unusual – he had some dealings at the church and in the park nearby. He was a custodian for some of the land there. They named the duck pond after him.’

  Edward Thorn. I’d heard of him, of course. He was what someone would describe as ‘very active in the community’. Tony coughed into the handset before saying, ‘Sit tight, okay, Sam? Look after yourself.’

  Sit tight. Huh. He might as well have told me to stop breathing. I stood with my head lowered to my chest after I’d hung up the phone, silent even as Rupert asked me over and over what was going on, had they found her?

  ‘I need to get out of here,’ I said. ‘I need to do something.’

  Rupert looked exasperated. He wanted to stop me, but there was a hesitation there, an expression I’d seen on his face since childhood. ‘Why did you let Samantha do that?’ our mother would cry, after I’d ridden my trike off the shed roof, after I’d poured all her Rémy Martin brandy down the drain, after I’d scraped my elbows trying to fit all the way up inside the chimney. ‘Why did you let her do it?’ Exasp
erated. Rupert would look at her dumbly and reply, ‘I just wanted to see what would happen.’

  I left the house and turned left towards Malling Fields, crossing the large park at an angle towards the bridge. I used to bring Edie to play here when she was little, pushing her on the swings as she’d sat stone-faced and unmoved.

  One day she’d asked me why I kept on bringing her back to the park when she hated it, and I’d turned to her and said sweetly, ‘Because if we don’t get out the house your mother will lose her fucking mind, darling.’

  Over the bridge, past the lido; shimmering in the summer like polished turquoise but now, deep into the autumn, the untreated water had turned malachite green beneath the heavy grey sky. On the corner of St Mary de Castro there was a single police car parked, but no officers anywhere to be seen. I pulled my hood up, hoping not to draw attention to myself. I didn’t want them to know what I was doing. I walked quickly past, angling right and down Hillman Terrace towards the school.

  It was nearly three. They’d be coming out soon. There were other parents at the gates, but only a handful. Our kids were grown up now, didn’t need us the way they used to.

  As the bell rang I stood across the road and craned my neck towards the entrance. I was still feeling the effects of the Valium I’d taken at lunchtime, but there was a rawness to it; my thin resolve had been stripped away. My hands in my pockets, I itched for a cigarette.

  Then I saw them. Just two Rattlesnakes arm in arm. Moya and Charlie, moving through the crowd like eels, glossy and sinuous in their tight dark clothes. Moya was a lot shorter than Charlie, with wild curly hair and glossy doe eyes. Charlie was tall and angular and noble-looking, like royalty. She was cover-girl pretty, with a wave of thick black hair over her shoulder. I watched them go through the school gates, heads close together, talking as if in a secret language. Something made them both laugh, Moya with her head thrown back, Charlie as if she was imparting a great secret, looking askance at her friend, one hand over her mouth to hide her secretive smile. I followed them for a while until the crowd thinned out and we were nearing the railway bridge, a tunnel of metal girders criss-crossing overhead, flaking grey paint and rust and graffiti.