I blink rapidly, my vision doubling as tears threaten. Yes, I know.
‘I like to think she cleared out while she had the chance. Started somewhere new without all that hanging over her. It wouldn’t have been hard, not back then. Train to London in an hour, Newhaven Harbour just down the road, then the ferry to France or beyond. She could have gone anywhere.’
‘Is that what you think? That she ran away?’
He shrugs. ‘I think they should have looked more closely at the caretaker for that church. That’s what I think.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t remember his name. Liver, maybe? He was an oddball. Used to hide in the bushes and take pictures of us coming out the youth club they used to have there, although “youth club” might be selling it a bit high. Darts and warm orange squash and custard creams, sometimes table football if someone hadn’t broken it. When the police went to his house they found hundreds of pictures of us kids.’
‘Oh my God. Why didn’t they arrest him?’
‘For what? It’s not illegal. Weird, but not illegal. There was even a rumour going round that he’d kidnapped Edie on behalf of the Freemasons. Another that he was keeping her prisoner in the crypts beneath the church. Edie’s mum got arrested once in that churchyard. She held a knife up to William’s throat. I remember seeing her picture in the papers.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Listen, Frances—’ Alex begins, and then we’re cut off by a cracking sound so sudden we both flinch and put our hands up over our heads as if the roof is coming in. I cry out, and when I finally peer upward I glimpse a smear of blood on one of the panes there.
‘What the hell was that?’ I’m saying, and Alex is laughing shakily, pressing his hands to his mouth. It’s then that I see it. A bird, a blackbird maybe, or a crow. It’s flown into the glass. Slumped body lying like a shadow against the pane. For a moment I think it has survived the impact but then I see it is just the wind stirring its feathers. I can just make out one small claw curled against the dirty glass.
‘Bad omen,’ Alex says sombrely, returning his hands to the earth. ‘It foretells a death.’
‘Oh, come on. It foretells a near-sighted crow. You’ve lived in the countryside too long.’
He doesn’t say anything, but when he looks up at me he smiles. There is a faint dusting of the grey powder on one of his cheeks.
‘You’ve got some of that stuff on you. Here, let me,’ I tell him, wiping it away with my sleeve. My heart is still racing from the shock of the bird’s swift and unexpected death. ‘What is it, anyway?
‘Bonemeal.’
‘Ugh.’
He shrugs. ‘My dad always said you’re not feeding the plants, you’re feeding the soil. Bonemeal is rich in the phosphorus and calcium that help the roses and tomatoes grow. He didn’t trust his plants to anyone else so he always made his own.’
‘His own bonemeal? How?’
‘He made friends with the owner of a slaughterhouse, took away all that was left of the carcasses. In the nineties, when mad cow disease was endemic, he switched to sheep and game and roadkill. Boiled up big pots of bones in the shed. It drove Mum crazy. He told her it was recycling. She called him Reg Christie and made him wash the surfaces down with bleach.’
‘You must miss him.’
Alex shrugs, taking a drink from his mug. I thought it was tea but I imagine I catch a whiff of whisky as he sighs. The heat in the room is growing stifling; I can feel it slowly sketching colour on my cheeks.
He looks at me with his head tilted, smiling. ‘You’re going to be all right, aren’t you, Frances? You and William.’
‘Sure.’
‘There’s that tell again.’ He grins. ‘Let me know when you work out what it is.’
I can’t help but laugh. ‘You’re so full of shit.’
‘Maybe,’ he says, his smile broadening. ‘In the meantime, do me a favour. Don’t tell William you’ve seen that picture or spoken to Nancy, okay? In fact, don’t bring up Edie Hudson at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘It was a bad time for him. Dad died not long after she went missing and Edie’s mother came round to the house causing trouble. Mum was in bits.’
‘But—’
‘Look, Frances, she was just a kid. Kids go running off, they do stupid things. William probably barely remembers her. I doubt he’d even know her name. What he will remember is that feeling in the days after she’d disappeared, how people looked at him and talked behind his back. How it felt to come home to find the police car outside the house and Mum at the kitchen table saying, “Boys, there’s been an accident”, and her voice not quite steady. That’s what he’ll remember.’
‘Okay,’ I tell him, but it’s not, not really. There but for the grace of God go I, I think again. That homeless woman outside the off-licence in Tufnell Park, Kim with her student debts and Miu Miu handbags posing in her underwear, Edie, the lost girl with the hard, unremitting stare right into the camera lens. They could have been me. They were, once upon a time. Something splits open inside the hard bedrock of my memories, the ones I’ve compressed over and over again until they turned black and solid and unreachable. If you put enough weight on it you’ll bury it forever. Not true. Now one is escaping: a splatter of blue paint, bright blue, the scarred wood of the front door, the word that was daubed along the hallway. Whore.
I turn to leave, but as I’m opening the door I look back and see Alex looking upward, towards that bird lying on the glass beneath a sharp spray of blood like a constellation. He looks troubled by it, haunted almost. I think about the police questioning him over his mother’s fall. It must be hard to live the way he does, so firmly in the closet, so desperate for her approval. No wonder he seems repressed.
Back inside the house I find William’s laptop and open it. Unlike our home computer there’s no password on it, and the desktop opens up to a photo of William and me in Tenerife a few years ago. I’m drinking a pink cocktail decorated with glacé cherries. It tasted like cough syrup, but I had two more that afternoon, lying on a sun lounger while my shoulders burned.
I open up the browser and after some hesitation I type in ‘Edie Hudson, Missing’. There are several matches, mainly in the smaller local papers – the Argus, the Sussex Express, the Lewes & Ringmer Herald. If Edie had gone missing today her face would’ve been all over social media in moments. A dedicated page on Facebook, a hashtag on Twitter and Instagram, a JustGiving page to fund the continued search. Back then, you relied on print media to get the story out there, and it looks as though Edie’s story didn’t circulate outside of East Sussex. I’m surprised. A vulnerable fifteen-year-old girl walks into a grove of trees and never comes out again? I would’ve thought the press would have been all over it.
All the articles have been digitised and catalogued from print, so the photographs are grainy and undefined. The first article is small, no more than two paragraphs. There’s Edie. In this photograph she’s unsmiling, almost aggressive-looking, with her arms folded in front of her. The headline reads: ‘Mother’s Plea to Missing Girl, Fifteen’.