The Missing

by Daisy Pearce

  Tony lowered himself into the seat opposite me. I didn’t know it then, but he’d already had the first in a string of heart attacks that would eventually kill him. He was grey-faced and looked suddenly old and washed out, sun-faded.

  ‘Sam, I don’t know what to tell you. I can say, though, with one hundred per cent bloody certainty, that you did not let your daughter down. You did the best you could, just like I did with mine, just like our own parents, and everyone before them.’ He took a cigarette from my pack and lit it, coughing wetly as he exhaled. Then he reached over the kitchen table and squeezed my hand. His skin felt like sun-warmed leather. Outside it started to snow, fat white flakes dusting the streets and the window frames, blanketing the roofs of parked cars.

  I wish Tony were still here. I could tell him all the things I’ve found out about Peter Liverly – about how he tried to sue the local papers for the stories they printed about him, the gilded language they used: ‘eccentric’, ‘unusual appearance’, ‘an awkward bachelor’. How he had stones thrown at his bungalow windows, how he started sleeping with a cricket bat beside him on the bed. His adult sons appeared on the local news, talking about his good work with the church, how Liverly had been a member of the Neighbourhood Watch for years and kept himself to himself.

  ‘Mud sticks, though, doesn’t it?’ the elder son said, speaking directly into the microphone, pale eyes almost colourless, just like his father’s. ‘Mud sticks. It’s ruined his life, it has. What’s he going to do now, in his seventies? I feel sorry for the woman whose kid ran off but what about all the other people suffering because of it – like my dad?’

  I don’t check my mobile until late in the morning, the sun warm on my back. I’m hanging the washing in the back garden with the radio playing quietly through the kitchen window. The Siamese from next door is sitting on my flower bed enthusiastically washing his balls. I pull my phone out and see that there is a message from Frances, sent the previous night. I remember waking up thinking I’d dreamed the phone ringing.

  I open the message cautiously, staring at the words on the screen: I know u said no more but going to the old well today. 3 p.m. F x

  I hang up a bedsheet, clothes pegs clamped between my teeth. No more. I’ve had enough. I move further along the clothes line and see the cat has moved a little to the right in a patch of syrupy sunlight. He is sniffing the ground, tail in the air, quivering slightly. I pull up a towel from the basket and pin it to the line, humming softly along to the radio. When I look back the cat is digging in the flower bed with his front paws, scrabbling a small divot in the earth.

  ‘Hey!’ I snap, stepping towards him. ‘There’s bulbs in there, you little shit!’

  He regards me with cool contemplation.

  ‘Go on, bugger off,’ I tell him, and when he moves away – slowly, tail raised – I see he has exposed something down there in the dirt. Four-year-old Edie loved the garden, and the two of us spent a lot of time squatting on the grass, pulling weeds free from the ground and making comical ripping sounds out the corners of our mouths. We dug and planted and pruned, and when I presented Edie with the stunted fruits of our first vegetable crop she glowed with excitement.

  I sink down next to the flower bed, brushing the loose dirt away with my hand. She buried things all over this garden. I thought I’d found them all. I peer closer. It’s a watch. Cherry-red plastic, digital face. The screen is frosted with condensation, the strap partially chewed. I pull it out of the ground with a hand that doesn’t feel quite like my own. I remember this watch. It was in her stocking that Christmas. She was so wowed by it she barely looked at another present that whole day. It looks incredibly small in my hands, doll-sized. It’s hard to imagine it fitting her wrist. There’s a lump in my throat. The sun, pressing hot on my shoulders. Prisms of light through my closed eyelids, like needles.

  I put the watch in one pocket and pull the phone out of the other. I swipe it open with that same distant feeling, as if I’m floating away from myself. Dis-ass-o-shi-a-shun, as my therapist had pronounced it. I know better, though. It’s my mind, breaking. I’ve been waiting for it to happen for a long, long time. At the base of my skull I can feel myself becoming untethered, as if some internal rope is working itself loose from the mooring to which I’ve secured it for eighteen years. I’m getting closer. I can feel it.

  Frances – Now

  She’s coming. I wait impatiently, one hand holding the torch against my hip. I flick it on, off, on, off. Come on, I think, although I’ve arrived at the spot early and still have a good ten minutes before the time Samantha said she’d be here. I reach for my phone and realise I have left it charging in the kitchen next to the kettle. Shit. Have I got time to head back to Thorn House before Samantha arrives? It’s a fifteen-minute walk in the other direction, along the narrow country lane. Samantha and I have agreed to meet here, next to the stile, which will take us over the ploughed field and eventually on to the bridle path that Edward Thorn fought so hard to keep to himself. Alex said it was because of his need for privacy. I wonder if perhaps there was a secret he’d been keeping. I touch the wood of the stile. It’s worn smooth by the passage of feet over the years, and warmed by the sun. I close my eyes. Edie, I think, hold on, girl. We’re coming for you.

  There’s a car approaching. Good. I stand with one foot on the stile and my arm raised so she can see me in time to slow down. I’m nervous, excited. It sounds bad, but it’s true. I was once told that the neurological responses of panic and excitement are basically the same. Heart pounding, dry mouth, shaking hands, dizziness. It’s our brain’s interpretation that takes them into fear or joy. I don’t feel joy – I’m about to head into a dark wood on a late summer’s day to look for the body of a missing girl – but there is a sense of exhilaration as I stand here, shifting from foot to foot, urging Samantha to hurry up.

  The gleam of a car over the top of the winding hedgerow, then it’s gone, hidden as it turns the corner. I hear the engine rattle as the driver changes gear and then I see it, a dark blue Ford, a solid, practical car for a solid, practical man, and my heart sinks. It’s not her. It’s William. What am I going to tell him? Now the panic rises, full-throated, and I wonder how I could ever have thought it was close to excitement.

  He slows down as he drives past me and then I see the red brake lights come on as he draws to a stop in the middle of the dusty road. I hesitate before walking towards the car with legs that feel wooden and strange. I hear his window slide down. He is keeping the engine on, and I’m hopeful he’s just going to ask what I’m doing here, where I’m headed, hopeful he’s just caught me as he drives out towards Seaford and Eastbourne along the back roads. Just a stroke of bad luck. I smile tightly. Samantha will be here any minute and I don’t want him to see her. I look back over my shoulder, straining to hear her approaching car as I bend down to the driver’s window.

  He is smiling. ‘What’re you doing, babe?’ he says.

  I can hear the radio playing, smell the lemon air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror. His voice is steady, mildly surprised. Something is wrong. I can feel it. My hand instinctively goes for my phone and then I remember it’s back at the house. I tense, and William’s smile turns to a puzzled frown.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asks. ‘What are you doing out here? You look like you’re waiting for someone.’

  ‘No, no.’ I laugh; it’s too high. ‘I’m going for a walk.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Just – around.’ Is that her car coming? I lift my head and look back but see nothing except the hedgerows. A bird lands in the road and pecks at something there. A black bird; a crow, maybe. I think of the bird that flew into the roof of the greenhouse, that smear of blood it left behind. The omen.

  ‘You need a lift?’

  ‘No, it’s fine. I’ll see you back at the house, yeah?’

  ‘You okay, Frances? You’re sweating.’

  ‘It’s hot,’ I snap, feeling my pulse rocket. Why won’t he leave?
‘Off you go, see you in a bit.’

  ‘Frances—’

  Samantha’s car; I am sure I hear it now. I can’t help looking back along the road for that glint of sunlight on chrome. William moves his hand over mine and squeezes. It’s painful and when I try to snatch it back, he pins it down tighter.

  ‘Why don’t you get in the car?’

  ‘Wh-what?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  We stare at each other. Weirdly, I don’t feel threatened by him. His gaze is blank and void of interest. He may as well be telling me about the weather. I look back down the road again, desperately.

  He sighs, switching off the engine. ‘If you’re going to run, I’ll catch you. I’m faster than you think. There’s a lot of things about me you don’t know, Frances. So come on round and get in the car.’

  There is a bright, pulsing light in my vision. It’s fear, manifesting itself. Rising, rising, like the panic in my chest and throat, rising to the crown of my skull. You are not my William, I want to say, thinking about the man who curled his arms around me in bed late last night. He is a good man. William’s grip on my hand tightens to a shimmering pain. My heart thumps giddily, drumming out a beat, over and over, run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run. And maybe I could. Up and over the stile, through the field. How long till he catches up with me, though, me with my smoker’s lungs and decades of pills and powders and cheap bottles of wine?

  I walk slow and stiff to the passenger side and open the door as he watches me indifferently through the windscreen with his soft gaze. My glance drifts over the back seat as I climb in. William’s car is, like the man himself, always neat and squared away. His glovebox contains only a roadmap and a torch. He keeps high-visibility vests and emergency supplies in the boot in case we should ever break down and get stranded, despite the fact that the furthest we’ve ever driven is to Devon. I’m always teasing him about it.

  On the back seat is a large leather bag I recognise. It’s Samantha’s. The zip has been pulled roughly open and the contents lie scattered in the footwell and across the seat itself; lip balm, lighters, keys. It makes me think of those dead bodies again, the items that were found in their pockets and recorded for identification. I feel something twist inside me, a sharp pain followed by a wave of dizziness. I grope for the door handle because now that frantic percussion, that run rabbit, run rabbit, run, has amplified and grown huge, filling me with fear. My stomach is knotted and slick as William pulls away from the side of the road and turns back towards Thorn House. I turn to face him in my seat and he looks over at me, brow furrowed.

  ‘Frances,’ he says. ‘Seat belt.’

  I pull my seat belt across me with hands that won’t keep still, feeling tears swell in my eyes. I catch sight of Samantha’s bag in the back seat again and can’t help thinking: Unknown female, 50–55: lip balm, lighters, keys. It turns me cold and silent. What has happened to her? Where is she? And how much does William know?

  We drive in silence, windows rolled down. The breeze flutters my shirt sleeves and tickles my skin. The radio is playing too loudly for us to speak and I’m afraid to reach out and turn it down. My hand is still throbbing, red marks on the skin to match William’s grip. I rub at it with my other hand to massage some feeling back in. About halfway back towards Thorn House, I see Samantha’s car. William slows down as we pass it. It has been driven off the road and parked in front of a wooden gate, hazard lights flashing. There is a handwritten sign on the windscreen reading Broke Down – Gone For Help. It’s William’s writing.

  My stomach falls. ‘William? You’re scaring me. What happened to Samantha? Is she okay?’

  ‘Me scaring you?’ He grins, and looks at me sidelong. ‘You’re Frances Thorn, you aren’t scared of anything.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, William, this isn’t funny!’

  ‘No, you’re right. It’s not.’

  He lowers the volume on the radio with his left hand and I recoil from it when I see the dried blood on his fingers. ‘What happened to your hand?’

  ‘Huh? Oh, it’s not mine.’

  There is blood on the tips of his fingers and more spattered on the cuff of his sweatshirt. I twist my T-shirt in my fists, suddenly feeling violently sick.

  ‘What’s happened? Where’s Samantha?’

  ‘I said I’ll show you. Calm down. You’ll still get to play Girl Guides with your new little friend.’

  His voice, the flat, idleness of it, as if we were rowing down a sunlit stream on a hazy day, frightens me the most. There’s no urgency. He’s not afraid. He’s almost happy. My blood runs cold as he looks back at the road again, humming along to a song on the radio. I once lived with a Russian girl who told me someone had tried to kidnap her from the small village where she lived. ‘Don’t get in the car,’ she told me in her slurred, heavy voice. Her lips tasted like snow. ‘If they get you in the car you are dead. Better to die on the street than see what they have planned for you somewhere quiet and private where people do not hear the screaming.’

  But I did it, didn’t I? I got in the car. Stupid Frances. But William wouldn’t hurt me. I look towards the blood on William’s fingertips again, and I don’t know any more. My heart keeps sending me the same message. Runrabbitrunrabbit. We’re nearly at Thorn House and suddenly I feel very sure that if I go inside I won’t come back out again. If you had asked me this morning, I would have told you that there was more chance of the sun falling out of the sky than of William – my William, strong and kind and humble – hurting me. But now I’m not so sure. It’s that blood, you see. The spots of it on his cuffs. And his voice, so calm and distant, a flat, glassy sea. He looks over at me, still smiling as we pull into the drive. I remember the first time William brought me down here to meet his family. We’d pulled up in this exact spot outside Thorn House and he’d turned to me and said, ‘My mum is going to love you.’

  Now he turns the engine off and sits quietly, his hands in his lap. I can’t take my eyes off the smears of blood on his fingertips. When I say his name he looks right at me.

  ‘What have you done with Samantha?’

  ‘Come on,’ he says.

  We go into Thorn House together, and I’m immediately struck by how quiet it seems. Even the tick of the hallway clock appears muffled, as though everything is holding its breath. I stand in the hallway shivering, although I am not cold. William removes his sweatshirt but not his shoes, which are crusted with dried mud and dirt.

  ‘You left your phone behind,’ he says, quietly. ‘I wouldn’t have known about it if Alex hadn’t told me. “Oh, Frances has left her phone,” he said. “Where’s she gone?” I asked him. You know what he told me?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘He said you were going “up on to the Downs”. But that isn’t what you told me. You said you were going into town, to the library. You were quite specific. And I couldn’t work out why you’d lie about where you were going. It made me wonder what you were hiding. So I picked up your phone.’

  ‘It has a passcode.’

  ‘It does, and of course yours is the same as your PIN. One – two – three – four. Theoretically, there are ten thousand possible four-digit combinations the numbers zero to nine can be arranged into, and you’ve gone right ahead and picked the most obvious. It’s asking for trouble. I’ve been telling you that for years.’

  He’s right; he has. I keep saying I’ll change it and not getting round to it. Now look what’s happened. He’s got blood on his cuffs.

  ‘I found your messages to Samantha. I couldn’t work out who she was at first. I thought maybe it was someone back in Swindon, but then I saw the one that said that you were thinking of going out to the old well. The one in the woods, right?’

  I nod. My hands hang limp by my sides. That’s the thing I always tell my patients about panic. There’s always a crash afterwards.

  ‘You know my father boarded that well up over twenty years ago? You know that because I told you the story of the sheep’s skull. So I
thought to myself, what’s the deal, Frances? Why are you heading out there to go and look for it? What does that have to do with Samantha? And then I remembered. Edie Hudson.’

  ‘You were her boyfriend.’

  He snorts.

  ‘I had a lot of girlfriends when I was a kid, if you can believe it. Edie was one of them. She was insane, so I dumped her. Edie was mad about it and ran away. Do I feel guilty? I did, for a while. Did I go and look for her? No. Did I want her to come back? Probably not, if I’m being honest. There you go, that’s it. That’s the story.’

  His hand, the one with the gold band of his wedding ring on, lifts to his hair. He tugs at it gently, distracted. But I see it. I see it.

  ‘I don’t know how you got involved with Samantha. Seems to me like she’s a lot more trouble than she’s worth. I remember reading all that stuff about her in the papers after Edie went missing. Come on.’

  I follow him silently down the tiled hallway. At the far end the sun slants through the large arched window that looks out on to Edward’s beloved rose bushes. My stomach is full of shrinking knots, pulling themselves tighter and tighter. When William puts the flat of his hand between my shoulder blades, the skin there grows cold with gooseflesh and it takes all my restraint not to pull away from him. He opens the door to our left, the one that leads into the kitchen.

  ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘In you go, Frances.’

  It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, grainy and diffuse. The curtains have been drawn to block out the light but I can make out the bulky shapes of the dresser, the dining table, the long old-fashioned range that heats the room in the winter. Then I see her. Samantha. She is slumped in one of the dining chairs, her chin resting on her chest, wiry hair falling over her face. A rope has been bound around her chest, restraining her. I stare in mute horror.