The Missing

by Daisy Pearce

  I jerk forward as he suddenly slows down, the back of the car fishtailing a little. Speed camera. I press my hand against the glass of the window. I wonder if they see me.

  ‘You ever see someone lose control, baby? I mean, you know, really lose it? I have. Only once. It was horrifying and beautiful and I’ve never quite got it out of my mind. Imagine – you’re stepping backward into an empty lift shaft. You descend into blackness and above you, the light of the doorway you came through is falling away from you faster and faster. You know the impact is going to break all your bones and that light is dropping away to nothing. That’s what it looked like. In her eyes. The light of sanity, falling away.’

  He’s forced to slow down again as we approach town. I recognise the garage coming up on our right and remember that a little further up ahead there is a set of traffic lights. If they’re red, I tell myself, I’m going to jump from the car and start running. I think of the Russian girl with the kisses like snow. He can chase me, and he might catch me, but if he’s going to beat me with that hammer he’s going to have to do it right here on the street. My hand reaches for the handle. I’m sweating enough to make my palms slippery. There’s the lights up ahead. They’re green. Green is fine. They can still change. I need to keep him talking.

  ‘You’re the most in-control person I know,’ I say, knowing as soon as I say it it’s the wrong thing. He wanted me to ask who he was talking about. Who she was. I have a feeling I already know.

  ‘Of course I am,’ he replies. ‘I cultivate it day after day after day. You don’t know what it’s like to feel like that all the time. Like you can’t let go because if you do, you’ll fall apart. It’s a state of constant vigilance and it’s fucking exhausting. You want to know why I did what I did with Kim? Control. You want to know why I won’t turn that box room into a nursery? Control.’

  The lights are still green. There are five cars ahead of us, there’s still time, there’s still time. I stare as if I could will them to change colour with my mind. My hand is so tight on the handle I think it will come off. Then I remember. Seat belt! My other hand, the free one, moves slowly down to the latch that will free it at the last second when I wrench the door open. The lights suddenly switch to amber. I hold my breath.

  ‘It’s an illusion, control,’ he says, moving the hammer to his other hand so he can switch on the indicator. ‘My dad knew it. Even as his car filled up with water.’

  Just as we reach the lights he speeds up, pushing the car over the line just as they turn to red. I sit in shock, eyes wide, heart pounding, my hand still on the door handle, the other still wrapped around the buckle of my seat belt. I missed it. I missed my chance. William looks at me and I am shocked by what I see in his face, the blankness in his eyes. It’s like he doesn’t know who I am. He licks his lips and indicates again, turning off the main road down a side street of terraced houses. I suddenly know where we are going, even before I see the spire of St Mary de Castro over the rooftops.

  ‘William,’ I say, trying to sound composed, and failing, ‘please, pull over. We can talk. About anything you want.’

  ‘Thing is, Frances, you – you’re a case study in lack of control, aren’t you? You just can’t say no to things. Charity cases, drugs, trouble. You’re just my type, apparently.’

  ‘You make me sound like a terrible person.’

  ‘Hardly. You’re a sucker for a good cause, but now look where it’s landed you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Keep him talking, I think. You have to keep him talking.

  ‘Samantha. You couldn’t resist it, could you? A boo-hoo story about a missing girl and you’re getting ready to climb down an old well and wind up with a broken neck and you know what you’d have found? Nothing. Not a damn thing.’

  He falls silent as we turn into the strip of wasteland at the edge of the graveyard. William pulls up alongside the crumbling wall spilling with ivy. To our right is Peter Liverly’s bungalow; to our left a small, empty two-storey office block with a To Let sign attached. The road is quiet, and from here I can only see the backs of the terraced houses, silent and cast in shade. I don’t want to get out of this car. There is no one else around.

  ‘William?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Where is Edie Hudson?’

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Out.’

  We walk away from the car towards the bungalow. He’s got the hammer in his hand, hanging loose by his side as if he’s forgotten it’s there. Every time I notice it my chest floods with a gush of hot blood and I’m thrown back into my dream, the way my breath catches in my mouth, the way my feet are sucked into the ground, slowing me down as the man swinging the hammer stands over me, his eyes pitiless black holes. The broken wooden gate to the bungalow hangs askew on its single rusted hinge, but William still stands aside and indicates for me to go ahead as if he is ushering me into a high-class restaurant. Ever the gentleman, I think, and then my eye is drawn to that claw-head hammer again and my guts squeeze horribly.

  ‘I slept with Edie Hudson a handful of times,’ William says suddenly as we round the corner of the bungalow, heading towards the back of the house over the crumpled litter and overgrown grass. ‘One of those times was here.’ He points towards the brick wall, the one that runs along the back of the Liverly property, separating it from the churchyard. ‘I don’t remember much about it. She was my first proper girlfriend, although I don’t think our fumbling around in the dark deserves such an eloquent description, you know?’ He snorts laughter, but he isn’t smiling. He has that faraway look again, staring at the wall. ‘When she told me she was pregnant I was sick. I mean actually, physically sick. Right into my lap. That’s what losing control does to me. It infects me. Come on, I’ll help you through.’

  ‘Through where?’

  He walks to the wall and stands in front of it for a moment, walking back and forth a little, staring. Then he lifts his hand and runs it along the brickwork, beneath the clutch of dark green ivy that spills over the top of the wall.

  Finally he turns to me with a miserable, ghoulish smile. ‘Here.’

  I walk over and peer through the parting he has created in the foliage with his hands. There is a gap in the wall, no more than thirty inches at its widest point. He nods towards it.

  I stare at him. ‘I won’t fit!’

  ‘You will if you turn to the side. “Squeezeguts”, we used to call it. Charlie Roper, one of the Rattlesnakes, found some loose bricks on the churchyard side once, and we all got to working on it. We discovered we could make a hole big enough that we could fit through. Took us all the best part of an evening.’

  ‘What was it for?’

  ‘To get in and out the churchyard after the gates were locked, mostly. The old man didn’t like it. Liverly, he was called. Weird old thing he was, like a goblin. He used to take pictures of us out here from his bedroom window. Moya said he was a pervert. Edie wanted to burn his house down but Nancy and Alex talked her out of it. Said she’d end up in juvenile prison. One night someone smashed all these back windows and they never found out who did it, but we all knew it was Edie. She hated him. Used to chase him out the graveyard with firecrackers when he was doing his rounds.’

  ‘Jesus, that poor man.’

  ‘Uh-huh. We must have made his life hell. I was sorry about what happened to him. He was unfairly vilified. Sometimes people are such easy targets. Come on.’

  I edge through Squeezeguts with my breath held deep in my lungs. It leads out into the back of the churchyard where the old trees grow thickest; giant yews and spreading oaks, tall wavering pines. Here and there old graves spring up out of the ground, old stones smoothed away. It’s dark beneath the trees and the air is hot and still and swimming with gnats. William indicates for me to move forward with a flick of his hand.

  ‘William, you don’t have to do this. We could turn around and go back home and it’ll be fine, it’ll all be okay.’

  ‘Will it?’ he says in that same, measured tone
, looking at me sidelong as we walk through the trees over the bumpy ground.

  I nod enthusiastically. Oh God, please listen to me. ‘Yes! We’ll go back to Swindon if you want and you can play golf again and see your friends and I’ll – I’ll go back to work and we’ll eat at the Thai place at the end of the road every Friday just like before. Everything just how it was.’

  ‘I thought you were bored of that life?’

  ‘No!’ I exclaim, although of course I mean yes. ‘You’ve made me see it now. All of it. We had a good life. We had fun. We loved each other. Please don’t waste it. Please.’

  He looks at me then, considering. It’s the first time I’ve seen William look like himself since I climbed in the car with him. His face, so sunken and shadowed all the way here, eyes like blank bullets. He draws a breath and it’s him, it’s William, my William – I almost want to put my arms around him.

  ‘We can go back to before,’ I tell him softly, stepping close enough that he can feel how fast I’m breathing, how much I’m trembling. ‘All you have to do is say yes.’

  The silence is so delicate I daren’t breathe for fear of breaking it. I touch his arm and he looks down at my hand in wonder, as if he has never seen it before. He opens his mouth just as his phone rings in his pocket, and my heart jerks at the sound of it. I stare as he removes it and looks at the screen briefly before taking the call. It only lasts forty seconds or so, and at the end of it he speaks only three words: ‘Love you, Mum.’

  ‘William, please, just look at me. Here.’ I stop and he turns to face me and I try not to let my eye be drawn to that red striped hammer in his hand but I can’t help it, it’s there, and for a moment I see the head of it the way it looks in my dream, furred with hair and blood and flakes of white bone. Acid rises in my throat. ‘You’re frightening me. Whatever this is about—’

  ‘It’s about Edie Hudson. You made it about Edie Hudson.’

  ‘—we can sort it out. Please put the hammer down. Please take me home.’

  ‘I can’t do that. Not now. It’s too late. Plan B. I’m so sorry, Frances.’

  ‘What did your mum want, William? What did sh—’

  ‘Frances—’

  ‘Just tell me what this is ab—’

  His hand swings out of nowhere. I never even see him lift his arm. He strikes me on the jaw, snapping my head back so fast spit flies from my mouth. I can hear the clack of my teeth coming together, the way my mouth fills with blood. It tastes metallic, like sucking pennies. There is a glittering pain along the shelf of my jaw and up towards my left ear. I don’t fall down but I need to grab hold of the nearest tree for balance because the whole world is spinning.

  William is standing very still, his expression barely changed. I lift my hand to my jaw and it comes away smeared with blood.

  ‘Next time it’ll be the hammer,’ he says.

  I wipe my blood-smeared palm on my jeans as William nods for me to follow him. After only a second’s thought I do so. I don’t know what else to do.

  Samantha – Now

  The pain begins at the crown of my head and travels sluggishly down my neck and the rack of my spine, bloody and feverish. My head is filled with a high-pitched note, the long, singular tone of tinnitus. Alex walks through the doorway, looking oddly incongruous wheeling an old-fashioned hostess trolley. On it is the little olive teapot, a cup, a saucer and a bowl of sparkling white sugar lumps. He doesn’t look up at me and he speaks only one word to his mother: ‘Tea?’

  She nods briskly, and then, horribly, reaches out and strokes her fingers down the side of his face. ‘I forgive you, Alex,’ she says mildly. ‘For all your dirty little sins. You can’t hide anything from your mother.’

  ‘Mum, I never – I would never—’

  ‘Ah-ah,’ she says softly, and slaps him gently on the face. It’s a tap, a reprimand for a child. It’s sickening. ‘No more lying. You know what you did. You know what you are.’

  He leans over and kisses her softly on her temple, the good side of her head, the one without the ugly snarling wound stitched across it.

  She takes the tea from him with a slow, careful smile and says, ‘You always were the apple of my eye, Alex Thorn.’

  She looks over at me, smiling that same gentle smile, telling me about the tea Alex makes especially for her, using the flowers from the garden. Rosebud and chamomile, dandelion, jasmine and chrysanthemum. I let her voice fade into the background. I try not to think about Frances, about where she is and what may happen to her. I wish I could speak to her, or warn her. She’s with a killer. If only I could reach my phone. Or my knife.

  Alex says something and Mimi laughs. It’s a nice sound, like the scales on a flute. I close my eyes dreamily. An old friend of mine, Theresa, once hand-stitched me a sampler, which I’d framed and hung over my bed. One word, beautifully cross-stitched in brightly coloured threads: FUCK. When I close my eyes I can see it imprinted over and over on my eyelids in glorious technicolour and shimmering neon. It’s a clarion call. FUCK. It’s an urgency I feel running through the marrow of my bones like a voltage with a high-pitched hum. It’s an intensity that demands to be felt through the agony of my poor, throbbing head.

  My eyes snap open.

  ‘You’ve gone very pale, Samantha. I do hope you’re not going to pass out.’

  ‘I think she’s fractured her skull, Mum.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’ve no idea how hard it is to break bone with a hammer. Edward used to do it all the time for his bonemeal. He once struck a pork knuckle seven times and the bloody thing barely dented the surface. Took a mallet to it in the end. Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut!’ Again she laughs, but her face doesn’t look right. It’s her eyes, maybe. She takes another sip of tea, lifting her hand to point at me. ‘Take the scarf out of her mouth, Alex, would you? She looks like she’s got something to say.’

  He does so gingerly.

  I let the words fall from my mouth with a snap. ‘Rosebud.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  That voice I heard on the phone, the call I got the other day where I heard Edie saying ‘nosebleed’. Just because you recognised the voice, that sane, reasonable person in my head speaks up, doesn’t mean it was Edie.

  Nosebleed.

  ‘On the phone. That was the word. Not nosebleed. Rosebud. It’s what’s in your tea.’ I look from Alex to Mimi and realise I am smiling. ‘It was Frances’s voice I recognised. Not Edie. God. I was so sure.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite—’

  ‘The phone calls to my house. This is where they’ve been coming from, isn’t it? It was Frances I heard talking, not Edie. Only the phone wasn’t hung up quite quickly enough, was it? I heard her. I heard her saying “rosebud”.’ I nod towards the phone beside the bed. ‘I barely use my landline any more. I keep it because it was the only phone number Edie had for me. Other than sales calls, hers were the only ones I got. But it wasn’t her, was it?’ I look right at Mimi. ‘Your son is a killer.’

  She looks at me and to my surprise she yawns, pressing the back of her hand against her mouth. Still, her eyes settle on me, avaricious. ‘Oh, really? Which one? A moment ago you thought my Edward had killed Edie. It must be very tiring to be inside your head. So go on then. Whodunnit? Poor old Steady Eddie? Alex, my plump little black sheep? We all know he’s got it in him. Look at what he did to his own mother.’

  ‘You know who I mean.’

  ‘William? You can’t prove that.’

  ‘He got her pregnant and he got scared.’ I’m thinking more clearly now, the pain a distant drum. Some part of me notices the way Mimi’s head seems to loll on her neck, but I don’t grasp it, not then. ‘And you, your marriage was in trouble, wasn’t it? You were having counselling. Edward told me about it.’

  She laughs, but the edges of the sound are blurry. Something’s wrong. ‘Edward and I? Counselling? You’ll believe any old rubbish, won’t you? I’m afraid that was a lie, Samantha. The car wasn’t there because
we were having marriage counselling. The car was there because I’d driven William to the bloody youth club where he met your slut daughter. But my wonderful husband, my clever, honest Edward, he couldn’t live with it. With the guilt. Especially after you showed up on Halloween. Another death on your conscience. How does that feel?’ Mimi yawns again, her hand covering her mouth.

  Slowly, a realisation is building in me. ‘Edward drove off the bridge because he knew his son had killed Edie and he couldn’t live with it.’

  ‘Oh, please. My boy isn’t capable of such violence. Believe me, I know. I raised him right.’ She gives me an arch look, as if to say You wouldn’t know about that, but I’m already gone, the impact of it hitting me with a jolt, a fiery obliteration that turns my insides liquid.

  ‘Edie isn’t gone. She isn’t missing. She isn’t unaccounted for. She’s dead. And William killed her.’

  Mimi suddenly yawns again, this time so long it seems her mouth is coming unhinged at the jaw. When she looks back at me her eyes are heavy-looking, doleful. I lift my chin defiantly and stare right back at her.

  The teacup she is holding rattles against the saucer. ‘You think a seventeen-year-old boy was able to murder your wilfully violent daughter in the dark and the cold, just feet away from a group of other people, leave no evidence and dispose of the body by himself? Is that the conclusion you’ve come to? I must say, I’m disappointed.’

  She laughs uncomfortably but I notice something strange. Her face is growing slack: mouth lifted in a half-smile, eyelids drooping sadly. The hand holding the tea cup falls on to her chest and the empty cup rolls down the slope of her body into her lap.

  ‘You,’ I say, flooded with a cold and horrifying knowledge. ‘You helped him. Not Edward, not Peter Liverly. You. Why?’

  She doesn’t answer for a minute or so. Her chest rises and falls softly and her glazed eyes stare out through the window to where the robin has returned to the garden, swinging on the birdfeeder.

  When she finally speaks her voice is slurred and almost incomprehensible. ‘She would have ruined his life.’