by Daisy Pearce
Frances has a band of bruising around her throat, blue and purple and a yellow the colour of nicotine stains. She keeps it covered with a scarf, and even though the doctors say she will be fine she is still talking like a one-hundred-a-day smoker, her voice as thin and crushed as dry leaves underfoot. When I found her, struggling with William in front of the yew, her face was turning ashy blue and her eyes were white and bulging. I didn’t think twice about planting Nonno’s knife between William’s shoulder blades. I had a brief flash as I did so, something sparking in my brain, Nonno using the same knife to peel an apple in a long, single coil, and then William was shouting, his hands groping to a place on his back that he couldn’t reach, and Frances was on her knees and someone – Alex, it later turned out – was racing over the grass towards us saying Oh God, oh God, and I swung at William, hard enough that he spun on his heel as my fist connected with his jaw, hit him with such force he fell backward and drove the knife in deeper.
Alex was on his phone. I fumbled with the belt around Frances’s neck and although there was a pulse she did not gasp for breath and she did not open her eyes. I said to her, hold on, and she mouthed a word at me, teeth stained with blood: Tree.
That’s when I picked up the torch. That’s when I looked inside the hole. That’s when I found my daughter.
‘Hello,’ I say to her, and offer her my arm to go through the iron gates like we’ve just got married. Frances smiles at me. While in hospital she wrote a statement for the police, naming Mimi Thorn as Edie’s murderer. William is still in custody. Alex is not. I’ve been told Mimi is unfit to stand trial. Dementia, they said. I wonder how much of Edward Thorn’s banked goodwill is still working in her favour. ‘I’ve spoken with my friends at the station,’ he had told me that Halloween. The Thorn name is still in good standing, apparently.
I squeeze Frances’s arm. ‘You look well. Don’t talk if it’s painful. I shall just assume you’re saying the same about me.’
Frances rolls her eyes. The graveyard has in the last few weeks been a hive of activity, with police and journalists and morbid little people with mobile phones and an appetite for tragedy coming to film and document and take grinning selfies in front of the last resting place of my fifteen-year-old daughter, but today it is quiet, just us and the birds. Missing girls don’t draw a crowd like a body does.
‘I brought beers,’ I tell her. ‘Thought we could sit on the bench for a while.’
‘Sounds good,’ she says huskily.
‘I heard from Moya.’ I pull a bramble off my jeans. ‘She wrote me a very short, very polite email – “Sorry for your loss” – and then in a PS at the bottom, “Edie was one of us.”’
‘That’s sweet.’
‘I know.’
Frances takes my hand in her own and squeezes it.
In the days after she was released from hospital, she came to stay at my little house on the end of the estate. I cleared Edie’s room out for her, covering the old scarred carpet with a rug and replacing the dead bulb in the bedside lamp. I threw out most of Edie’s things – clothes, books, posters – and then behind her mirror I discovered the photo of us in France, the one I’d been looking for when I made the Missing posters: the two of us standing on a bridge, arms around each other, smiling. I’d asked a passer-by to take the picture for us in my stumbling, hesitant French, while Edie had laughed behind her hands, rolling her eyes at me. I like to think she kept it because it reminded her that sometimes things were good between us. Because among the rubble, a single plant can grow. I keep the photo in my wallet now.
Frances went back to Swindon to put the house on the market – hers and William’s – and to start divorce proceedings. I told her there was no rush, but she shook her head. Smiled. Her voice was low and cracked-sounding, like something had been ripped right out of her, but she told me her plans. They are good plans. Hopeful. I don’t doubt she will see them through.
After our first beer I will tell Frances what else I have in my bag. A small box, barely heavy enough to contain my girl with her loud, volatile ways and her Molotov cocktail of a brain, but she is in there all the same; a small, black box with her ashes inside, and on the bottom, beneath the word Deceased, it reads Elizabeth Jane Hudson. I’m here to ask Frances for one last favour: to walk up to the Downs with me and release my girl to the wind. Below us will be the sun-warmed grass, the river, the town. We will stand together as the wind dances her ashes against the blue sky like long, winding ribbons, a grey comet trail disappearing over the hills.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would never have made it without the combined efforts of Jack Butler, Emily Ruston, Jane Snelgrove and all at Thomas & Mercer. Thank you for your patience and understanding. As always, thanks to the mighty Catherine Cho for championing me. I’m glad to have you in my corner.
Being a single parent is hard. You need good people around you who can lend a hand when you’re struggling. So my deep and sincere thanks to Andy and Clair for being so HELPFUL and letting me and my girl crash at theirs more times than I can count. Thank you to all my friends for their support, especially Alex, Amy B, Amy M, Lisa and Tina – you are my rocks in fast-moving water.
Anne Booty, you delight, you utter delight. I love you loads, thank you for all your support.
To my mum for everything: thank you. For my sisters Simone and Johanna, for my big bro Dominic and for my dad Berwyn, all my love.
I want to mention Hannah Williams, Tracy Meade, Damilola Taylor, Hannah Deterville, Joy Morgan, Patrick Warren and David Spencer, and all the other children who were overlooked and underreported. I wish we could have done better for you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2019 A. Murrell
Daisy Pearce was born in Cornwall and grew up on a smallholding surrounded by hippies. She read Stephen King’s Cujo and The Hamlyn Book of Horror far too young and has been fascinated with the macabre ever since.
She began writing short stories as a teenager and dropped out of a fashion journalism course at university when she realised it wasn’t anywhere near as fun as making stuff up. After spells living in London and Brighton, Daisy had her short story ‘The Black Prince’ published in One Eye Grey magazine. Another short story, ‘The Brook Witch’, was performed on stage at the Small Story Cabaret in Lewes in 2016. She has also written articles about mental health online. In 2015, The Silence won a bursary with The Literary Consultancy, and later that year Daisy also won the CHINDI Authors Competition with her short story ‘Worm Food’. Her second novel was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Award.
Daisy currently works in the library at the University of Sussex, where she shelves books and listens to podcasts on true crime and folklore. She lives in Lewes with a one-eyed Siamese cat and a nine-year-old daughter who occasionally needs reminding that ghosts and monsters aren’t real.
Sometimes she almost believes it herself.