He lowered himself into a crouch, putting his hand over mine. I hadn’t realised how much I was shaking until he stilled it, his skin warm and brown. ‘Whatever happens, we’ll keep looking.’
‘Thank you.’ I sniffed. ‘Thank you, Omar.’
I didn’t see Nathan or Omar again. They were assigned to another case, more high-profile – a schoolteacher had run off with a pupil to Cornwall – and so I printed my own posters, taking them as far as Worthing and Bexhill, hanging them in shop windows and on cafe noticeboards. MISSING, they said in fat black font, and underneath, printed slightly smaller, Can You Help Find Me?
The photo I’d chosen did not show Edie favourably. Part of me hoped she’d see it, maybe behind the counter of a newsagent she was buying Rizlas or pints of milk in, paying with handfuls of change held out in grubby hands. I thought she’d laugh if she did. The ‘Borstal photo’, she and I had called it, because she looked like she was on prison day release; unsmiling, arms folded, dark hair with a lopsided fringe she’d hacked herself in the bathroom one Sunday night. I’d originally looked for a photo of the two of us in France, one I’d had pinned to the noticeboard in the kitchen. I hadn’t been able to find it, even moving the sideboard away from the wall to see if it had slipped down behind. I grew more and more frustrated until I realised I wouldn’t be able to use it anyway. In it, Edie was smiling and tanned – the healthiest I’d ever seen her – but the advice I’d received from the family liaison officer had been to choose a picture to help the public recognise her, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her smiling.
The morning Edie left for the last time was sunny and dry. I remember that. The sky was as blue as cornflowers, frosted with drifts of white cloud. I remember that too. The clarity of that moment is so rich I could reach out and run my fingers through it. The radio was playing ‘Waterloo Sunset’. The garden smelled ripe, of tangled roots and the slow creep of autumn with its mists and moss and damp stones. High overhead, a lark trilled and twittered, sketching shapes against the sky. I can remember the sound of her feet on the stairs and the smell of toast and the incense she constantly burned in her room. Her carpet was pockmarked with burn holes like craters on a distant planet.
Afterwards I realised – all these small things; the brain can only take on so much. It hands it back to you in bite-sized pieces of grief. You simply cannot digest any more. The thought that she had disappeared seemed like a grand idea, something oblique and vast, and I couldn’t get a handle on it. But the little things I remember, and they strip away my armour bit by bit. The way the thrush had sung in the garden. Edie’s shoes in the hallway, lying aslant where they had been kicked off. Cotton-wool balls smeared with make-up at the bottom of the bathroom bin. The rich blue of her veins, her wet hair dripping on to her shoulders. This, it is a form of madness.
As I was getting ready for work that morning I discovered my necklace was missing. At one stage I’d almost grown accustomed to my make-up and clothes and jewellery disappearing, only to reappear in Edie’s bomb site of a room a week later. Only then she’d gone and taken a pair of my gold earrings, ones I wore only on very special occasions, and they hadn’t turned up in her room – or anywhere else, in fact. Edie had feigned ignorance, told me I was paranoid. I found them eventually, a month or so later, in the window of the jeweller’s on the high street. She’d sold them for just sixty pounds. I thought back to all the other things that had gone missing over the years – my seventies records, my pearl pendant, the silver bracelet studded with lapis lazuli – and my heart sank.
I’d considered getting a lock on my bedroom door but hadn’t got round to it. It had seemed excessive, and besides, I’d told myself, she’d grown out of it now. I lifted my jewellery box and tipped the contents over my bed, raking through them with my fingers. I checked the drawers and my handbag and even the pockets of my coat, getting more and more agitated. All the while Edie was in the bathroom. I’d heard the shower run briefly, and the rattle of the curtain rail. When she didn’t come out after half an hour I banged on the door with the flat of my hand.
‘Edie!’
‘In a minute!’
‘Not in a minute, now! What are you doing in there? Are you ill?’
‘I’m fine!’ The toilet flushed. ‘I just need a minute!’
‘You did this yesterday! Tied up the bathroom for nearly an hour! Other people live here too, you know!’
Silence. I paced outside the door, the small hallway closing in on me, twisting my anger tightly. Finally, the door opened a crack. Her face was pale-looking, with bright spots of colour high up on her cheeks. She’d pierced another hole in her ear, red and raw-looking, a scab of blood building up around the silver stud.
I held out my hand. ‘Where is it?’
‘What?’
‘You know what. My necklace. My favourite one, the one my mum left me.’
‘With the dragonfly on it?’ She shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen it.’
‘You’re lying.’
She rolled her eyes and tried to close the door on me. I pushed back and for a second there was a tense stand-off.
She relented with a sneer. ‘Ugh. I hate it when you’re like this.’
‘I left it in my jewellery box and now it’s not there.’
‘I said I haven’t seen it! I hate it, I wouldn’t wear it anyway!’
‘It’s not you wearing it I’m worried about, Edie, it’s you selling it.’
‘Oh, here we go—’
‘I want it put back where you found it by the time I leave the house.’
‘You need a hobby, Mum. You’ve started to imagine things.’
‘I said, put it back!’
‘I told you I don’t fucking have it!’
I reached out and grabbed her. My nails sank into her damp skin. I saw the wince of pain that pinched her face, quickly replaced by something harder and meaner.
‘Put it back or I’ll call the police.’
‘Do it. Go on! And I’ll show them the black eye you’ve given me!’
‘Wha—’
Edie lifted her hand and slapped at her own face. The air rang with the sound of it, sharp and brisk. I stared at her in horror as she did it again, her eyes watering. The right side of her face glowed brick-red.
‘Edie, stop – what are you doing?’
‘Let’s see how you like it in prison, huh? You know what they do to women in there who beat up their kids?’
This time she drove her head against the wall, staggering for a moment at the impact. I was filled with a cold horror as a trickle of blood seeped from one nostril and there was a strange, distant look in her eye. I forgot the necklace and grabbed her with panicky tightness, hard enough to leave red imprints on her skin, pulled her towards me, wrapping my arms around her as tightly as I could so her hands were pinned against her sides. Although she didn’t fight against me, she was filled with a stiffness, a rigidity that meant I had to lean her against me so that we didn’t both fall down. It was like clinging on to a plank of wood.
‘Don’t, Edie. Don’t,’ I said, again and again. She started laughing and her spittle flecked my cheeks, settled in my hair like snowflakes. Something shrivelled in me, a withered rosehip turning black.