Edie had now been missing for four days.
‘One of you must have seen something,’ I said. They looked like a group of crows – what’s that called, the collective noun? A murder. How prescient. ‘You were right there when she disappeared. Think back – is there anything at all?’
No one spoke. They’d given the barest nod towards school uniform, with white shirts and ties fatly knotted against their throats. Their make-up was thick and unguent; high, arching eyebrows, long spiked lashes and lipstick so dark it made slashes of their mouths. Collectively they wore so much jewellery they rattled when they walked. I turned to the headmaster, frustrated.
‘Don’t you have rules about what the kids wear to this school? Shouldn’t you be enforcing something?’
Mr Peterson frowned, rubbed his glasses with his sleeve. ‘We see it as – uh – a means of expression which they are entirely – ah – which is entirely valid. At this age.’
He put his glasses back on, blinking. He was a mealworm of a man. I stared at him and then turned back to the girls. Charlie, in the middle, her skirt only an inch below her gusset, slid her hands between her thighs. She was wearing frilly ankle socks and Mary-Jane shoes. Her lips were plump and wet, a deep berry brown. Her gaze drifted away from me, bored. She was looking at Omar, the police officer.
‘Are we under arrest?’ she asked. Nancy looked up from beneath her fringe, caught my eye, looked away again. ‘Because if we are, you have to caution us.’
‘I want my one phone call,’ Moya added, twisting her curly hair around her finger. She had black ripped jeans on, rubbed her leg against Nancy.
‘Who would you call?’ Charlie asked her.
‘Domino’s,’ replied Moya, and they both dissolved into giggles. I clenched my fists on my lap, looked back at the headmaster, exasperated. My daughter is fucking missing, I wanted to yell. I tried to stay calm.
Omar coughed. ‘No one is under arrest, but we need to know what happened. You said you saw Edie walk towards the back of the graveyard?’
‘That’s right,’ Moya said. She was tiny, maybe a little over five feet, and sinuously thin. She had a hard, flat chest and the big round eyes of a cartoon animal, almost liquid. ‘She walked away from us into the dark.’
‘Why did she do that?’ the other officer, Nathan, asked. ‘Had you fallen out?’
The girls shrugged, shook their heads, no. Earrings rattled like chains. Nancy lifted her head and for a moment I thought she would say something in her small, broken-bird voice. But it was Charlie again, with the chipped nail polish and ripped fishnet tights, turning to me this time, ignoring the question.
‘Where did she go the last time she ran away, Mrs Hudson?’
We stared at each other, Charlie and I. My hands tightened and squeezed. I heard an intake of breath over my shoulder, Omar’s tongue clicking.
‘There’s a history of this behaviour?’ he began.
I cut him off. ‘No. No, there’s – it’s not like that. Sometimes Edie plays up, goes off with a friend for the night.’
The girls stared at me. What was it they called themselves? Cobras? Pythons? It’s written there on Moya’s bag, scratched into the leather in jagged letters: Rattlesnakes.
‘Well, that would have been useful to know,’ he said, and I shrivelled inwardly.
Charlie smiled to herself, catching my eye. ‘Maybe she went looking for her dad,’ she said, sing-song, inspecting her nails. In that moment I hated her. I could cheerfully have shoved her through the wall. But the police had already asked me about the possibility of Edie trying to find her father. Can you give us his contact details, they’d asked, and I’d laughed nastily, lighting another cigarette. He walked out when she was three days old, I told them. Some men should just chop it off, you know? They hadn’t liked that. So far, I had not enamoured myself to these people. I was frightening them, too angry and shaken up, a wasp trapped in a bottle. I wasn’t sad enough, not yet weeping and needy. Give me time. I’ll get there.
‘What about drugs?’ I fired back. ‘I know you were all taking them.’
It was a cheap shot and it didn’t land the way I’d hoped. I wanted to shock them – show me some fucking contrition! – but Moya just smiled, displaying perfect white teeth, glossy enamel.
‘Which ones?’
‘What?’
‘Which drugs?’
She leaned over her legs to look me right in the eye.
‘I said, which drugs? MDMA? Speed? Meth?’
‘Crack?’ Charlie said, hiding her smile and widening her eyes, which were a deep subaqueous green.
‘Angel dust? PCP?’
‘I saw Edie snort a line of instant coffee once.’
They dissolved into laughter, looking at each other from the corners of their eyes. The headmaster straightened in his seat, adjusting his cuffs, saying girls, please, some decorum.
I heard the police officer – Nathan, I think, with his rough morning breath – sigh behind me, and Omar stood.
I turned to look at them. ‘What? We’re not done here! I thought you were questioning them?’
‘Not officially, we’re not. We can’t force them to cooperate. It’s wasting time.’
‘What about Edie? They must know something! For God’s sake—’ I looked back at them imploringly, the Rattlesnakes, skins shed and shrivelled on the floor, mean girls with bright eyes and pouty, trembling mouths, fingers intertwined as they joined hands. Moya put her head on Charlie’s shoulder. Nancy flicked me a quick glance.
‘Are we free to go, officer?’ Charlie said in a baby voice. She was looking at Omar over my head. He must have indicated that they were done because suddenly the girls stood, a black mass, floating chiffon and tight, pinching lace, secretive smiles waxy with lipstick. The smell of them was bruises and crushed violets, cheap tobacco.
‘Mrs Hudson?’ Omar asked, his hands toying with his belt. I looked up at him. ‘How many times has Edie gone missing before?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘Which is it?’
‘Do you count the time that she snuck off to her friend’s house in the middle of the night?’
‘I count that, yes.’
‘Then three. No, four times. But this is different.’
‘How so?’
He was being so patient with me. I could feel tears welling. I swallowed the hard rock in my throat.
‘Because the last times there were—’
‘Triggers?’
‘Conflicts. Yes.’ I nodded. I grasped the fabric of my skirt and bunched it in my hands.
‘And there wasn’t this time? A conflict? An argument of some kind?’
I hesitated, looking up at him. Tears hazed my eyes and rolled slowly down my cheeks, viscous as honey.
Omar smiled, revealing straight white teeth. ‘We can’t help you if you aren’t prepared to tell us the truth, Samantha.’
‘Yes. There was. She gets so angry,’ I said quietly, sniffing.
‘Okay, well. You see, in itself this is a good thing. It indicates a typical pattern of behaviour for Edie. There’s a problem, she runs away. Gets her head straight. Comes home. The reason she disappeared is fairly academic. We’re more interested in where she’s disappeared to. Edie’s a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, not a master criminal. She didn’t just vanish into thin air.’