The Missing

by Daisy Pearce

  I think I know his name but I ask her the question anyway, because after all I am ‘Kim’, just a stranger in a churchyard with no prior knowledge of Edie Hudson’s disappearance. I have to keep up the pretence. Another thing I’ve got good at. ‘Oh yeah? Who was he?’

  ‘Peter Liverly. He was the groundskeeper here, among other things. He helped at the youth club Edie and her friends went to from time to time. I only met him once. He invited me into the empty church with a dead rabbit in his hands.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yeah. I just thought he was a bit strange, like most people did. When the police took him in for questioning they searched that house and found a stash of photographs he’d taken of Edie and her friends over here in the churchyard and the hall. He’d been hiding in his bedroom and taking pictures through a gap in the curtains.’

  I shiver. What a creep.

  ‘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 irregularly drawn. Someone has scrawled The Beast in large, irregular letters along the boarded windows. There’s a twinkling litter of glass in the lawn, crunching beneath our feet. Samantha explains that the windows were repeatedly smashed until they were boarded up.

  She lights a cigarette, looking for all the world like a woman at peace with herself in front of faded graffiti which reads Burn In HEll U sick FUk!

  ‘“Nothing gets more tarnished than a reputation.” That’s what my brother said.’ She tests the boards with her finger. They don’t budge.

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to get in this way,’ I tell her, and she nods in agreement.

  ‘Let’s try round the back,’ she says.

  I know something’s wrong as soon as we turn the corner of the house. It’s a tingling, like excitement. It’s dark back here in the shadow of the tall hedges and oaks of the churchyard. Samantha points out the window from which he took his photographs, the one that overlooks the churchyard. Other trespassers have left a lot of litter on the ground; broken bottles and cans and fast-food wrappers bagged and swung up into the hedge, where they hang like foul fruit. I stand on the ancient, blackened remains of something set on fire and left to burn out. I can smell something rott
en, as if an animal has crawled into the long grass to die. The shed roof has fallen in, the glass panes smashed and tools presumably stolen. I duck my head in through the crooked door. In the corner, a rat’s nest, long empty. A strand of cobweb brushes my face softly, like a whisper.

  It’s only as I pull my head out that I realise Samantha is speaking to me. ‘I’ve been calling you! Didn’t you hear me? Look, over here. There’s a gap in the boards. Looks like someone already managed to sneak in a while back. Come on.’

  I pause, swallowing drily. I don’t like how dark it is back here in the shade. I don’t like the way the house seems to be waiting gravely, like a doctor about to deliver bad news. What if she is in there? I think to myself. Have you even thought about that, Frances? What if you find her body in a freezer all wrapped in plastic, lips frozen and blue and cold? What will you say to Samantha then?

  Samantha is standing beside a window where one of the boards has been peeled away from the lower corner. She glances over at me, one hand fumbling in her pocket.

  ‘Hey, Samantha, wait—’ I begin, and then I’m quickly cut off by someone shoving against me, pinning me up against the wall. It’s her. Samantha. Her forearm presses against my windpipe and I make a noise like a tea kettle when I try to scream.

  ‘Do you think I’m fucking stupid?’ she asks.

  I struggle – I haven’t been in a fight for a good long time, but Samantha must be nearly twenty years my senior and I once put a man in hospital after he tried to mug me. I get a grip on her arm and am about to shove her away with the heel of my hand when I see what she was reaching into her pocket for. She has a knife pressed against me. I lower my hands. To be pierced by that thin blade would be painful. Samantha sees I’ve noticed, and grunts.

  She held a knife up to William’s throat, dummy, my brain tells me. I wonder how I could have been so stupid as to think coming back here with her to this deserted place would ever have been a good idea.

  ‘Just now I was calling you over and over again,’ Samantha says, her breath on my cheek. ‘And you never turned around. I know that Kim isn’t your name. I knew right away. Why are you lying to me, huh?’

  I slump against the wall. Her pupils are tiny pinpricks floating on the glassy ocean of her eyes.

  ‘It’s a small town, honey,’ she spits, ‘so tell me who you are.’

  ‘Okay, okay!’

  Samantha releases the pressure from my windpipe, but only a little. The knife stays where it is against my ribs. A pea-sized drop of blood soaks into the fabric of my T-shirt where the blade has punctured my skin.

  ‘My name is Frances Thorn. I’m married to William.’

  ‘Uh-huh. I know who he is. And what you said about his mother – Mimi? She’s really sick?’

  ‘Yes! Please, Samantha, just back off a bit.’ My voice shimmers with fear. She looks at me warily but steps back. I exhale, hands trembling.

  ‘William Thorn, huh? Always wondered what kind of woman he would end up with. I always thought he had a type.’

  I think again of the photograph I’ve seen of Edie Hudson, the one that reminded me so much of Kim and Samira: the dark hair, the haughtiness. Oh, he has a type, I think.

  ‘His dad. Edward Thorn. What do you know about him?’

  ‘Put the knife away and I’ll tell you.’

  She studies me for a moment before letting the blade slide back into the handle. She keeps the knife in her hand, though. I can tell how comfortable she is with it. It must be exhausting to be on your guard all the time.

  ‘I know he died in a car crash. I know he didn’t try to get out, even as the car was sinking. The boys don’t talk about him much.’

  ‘The boys?’

  ‘William and Alex.’

  ‘Oh yeah, the brother. The younger one. He’s an oddball, isn’t he? Still at home with his mum. It’s all a bit Norman Bates.’

  Something catches my eye. Movement in the hedgerow behind her, a rustle of leaves. Briefly, I see the rabbit bolt for the safety of the shadows, eyes like beads of obsidian.

  Samantha is still talking. ‘Edward Thorn. You want to know something about him? His car was seen at the church the night Edie went missing. I chased and chased the police to get him to give a statement, and what do you know? Not a month later he’s dead. Drove right off the bridge. Then he’s dead and any evidence in that car got washed away. Huh. He told me it was my fault Edie ran away, and you know, some days I think he was right.’

  ‘You think he had something to do with her disappearance?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Samantha, I never met him.’

  ‘But you’re married to one of his boys. They must talk about him. What kind of man he was. A drinker, a shouter, a saint. You must know. They must have said something.’

  I’m thinking. I’m thinking about the only things I know about Edward Thorn. About the well he filled in after retrieving the sheep skull from the bottom so his youngest son could display it on the shelf above his bed. About the sacks of bonemeal out in the greenhouse and Mimi whispering, ‘He boiled the bones in pots on the stove.’

  ‘I don’t – I can’t help you, Samantha.’

  ‘So why are you here? Why have you been having cosy little chats with Nancy Renard in the cafe and asking me about Edie as if you don’t already know all about her?’

  ‘I didn’t already know! I swear! First I ever heard about her was the day we arrived, when I found the photo. Honestly, Samantha!’

  ‘What photo?’

  I pull my phone from my bag and flick through until I find the one of the Rattlesnakes and William and Alex in the bright sunshine. When I show it to her I see the wince of pain it causes. I imagine she’s never had the chance to see it before. It must hurt. I look down at the place where the knife has pricked me and try to imagine that small sharp pain over and over again, for eighteen years, slowly slicing into your heart.

  ‘I found this at Thorn House. I’ve never seen William at that age. That’s why I took it, because I thought he looked funny. I didn’t know about Edie or Peter Liverly or any of this until then.’

  She looks at me suspiciously. I can see she wants a cigarette. Just moments ago my fear was huge and vivid – a technicolour cartoon explosion – but now it is ebbing away.

  I reach towards her. ‘Put the knife away, Samantha. I meant it when I said I want to help you.’

  ‘Why? You don’t know me!’ Aggressive again. Stepping right up close to me so I can feel her breath on my face.

  I lift my hands, try to keep my voice calm. ‘William’s having an affair.’

  That magpie, the sound it makes is rough, like a dog barking. Not like a bird at all. We stare at each other, Samantha and I. I swallow carefully. ‘I found out just before his mum had a fall. He doesn’t know that I know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to confront him with it. She’s nineteen.’

  ‘He’s sleeping with a nineteen-year-old?’

  ‘No, not – he’s not sleeping with her. Not yet, at least. He’s giving her money. For photos.’

  A beat. Samantha nods. ‘How do you feel about that?’

  ‘She said he’s paying for her to go to university. He buys her presents. Expensive ones. We’re meant to be saving up for a baby.’

  ‘That doesn’t answer my question. How do you feel about that?’

  ‘I – I don’t know.’ How can I articulate the feeling of betrayal? I don’t have the language for it. It makes me want to scream. I feel the anger like a pressure on my chest, one I’ve been feeling since I found the memory stick in the box room.

  ‘You going to leave him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So you’re using this, my daughter, as some sort of distraction?’

  ‘No, no. It’s not like th—’

  ‘You know, I walked in on them once, eighteen years ago. William and Edie. He had his hands in her underwear.’

  I don’t know how to respond to
that. Samantha grabs fistfuls of her hair and ties it up with a band, knotting it on top of her head. Her anger is palpable, coming towards me in waves.

  ‘I asked him to show my daughter some respect. Looks like he still hasn’t learned. I’m sorry to hear about Mimi, though. When Edie went missing Mimi used to come and check up on me, even after her husband died. “Us women have got to look out for each other,” she said. Shame she couldn’t instil her values in those boys of hers.’

  A noise then, making us both jump. Our heads switch round to the house. There’s a scraping sound, like a lock turning. Then, a soft thud. We exchange a glance.

  ‘Someone’s inside,’ I whisper.

  Samantha nods. Suddenly I am glad she has that knife. I wonder if people are squatting in there. I did it myself for a few years in my late teens. Samantha pulls her phone from her pocket and, using it as a torch, shines it through the gap in the boarding. The edges of the metal are rusty and sharp. We peer inside. The room is blue-dark and murky, like sunlight on the seabed. We can see the shrouded shapes of furniture covered in dust sheets and a doorway that appears to lead out into a hall. We both strain to listen, hearts in our throats.

  Finally Samantha says, ‘I’m going in.’

  ‘I thought you were afraid.’

  ‘I am. I’m terrified. But like you said, it’s exposure therapy, right?’

  ‘Not like this, Samantha. Jesus!’

  She doesn’t wait for me. She leans against the boarding, which gives a long, metallic shriek as it tears away from the window frame. With one foot braced against the wall she hauls herself through the narrow gap, landing with a thud on the other side. I see her lit by the glow of her phone screen for just a moment, then it cuts off. The darkness swarms in. I lean through, reaching out my arm into the cold, still darkness. My hand gropes empty air.

  ‘Samantha?’

  There’s no reply. No sound at all. I lean in further and the smell of the house hits me. Mould and rot, the sweetly cloying smell of rising damp. Beneath my weight the metal hoarding groans, my feet scrabbling for purchase on the brickwork. I’m thinking of Samantha’s dreams buried in the soft darkness, the maze, the bloodless voice calling her name, and I’m suddenly breathless with fear.