Officers have been speaking to motorists and local residents this afternoon in the area where missing Edie Hudson was last seen. Her mother Samantha describes her as ‘dark-haired, slim build, wearing black clothes and make-up’. She added that if anyone has any information regarding Edie’s whereabouts they should contact the police.
‘If you’re reading this, Edie, please, please just come home. Come home.’
I clicked on the next article, dated a week or so later, from the Lewes & Ringmer Herald. This time the headline reads: ‘Police Question Caretaker in Teen Disappearance’.
Fifty-six-year-old Peter Liverly has been taken in for questioning following new information received by police. Liverly, who helps run the St Mary de Castro youth centre in Lewes, has previous convictions for assault. Edie Hudson, fifteen, has been missing since Thursday 9th October. She was wearing a long black skirt, black high-necked shirt and a leather jacket. She has connections to Eastbourne and Shoreham and the Wood Green area of London. She has been described by her teachers as ‘streetwise’, with her headmaster adding, ‘Despite everything, we are all very worried for Edie.’ Her mother Samantha Hudson, thirty-three, a resident of the Morley Wood housing estate, has previously been quoted as saying, ‘I was not surprised when she didn’t come home.’
What an odd thing to print, I think, scrolling through the rest of the articles. They all have the same tone – brief and factual, almost hectoring. One of them mentions Edie’s habit of roaming the streets till almost midnight. Another describes her as ‘no angel’. The last one, printed in January 1998, just three months after Edie was first reported missing, details how the police were winding the investigation down. A detective named Tony Marston was quoted: ‘While we will no longer be actively involved in this case, the file will remain open.’
I find a picture of Peter Liverly in an old archive of pictures on the St Mary’s church website. He was short and balding, with broad shoulders and a rosy face that hung in soft folds like rubber. He’d been released without charge, of course, but it had cost him his job. I know the way rumours germinate. They spread like a stain, like pollution. They taint you.
Samantha – Then
In the last few days I’d been getting a lot of calls. At first I spoke with everyone who asked me questions, until Tony Marston told me to stop. I’d been quoted in the newspaper, but whatever I said seemed to come out wrong. Sometimes the caller hung up as I answered; other times there was nothing but the sound of their breathing, a cough, distant traffic. Sometimes the breathing was wet and flabby, lungs full of catarrh, or muddy water. Other times it was dry like a desert wind.
Sometimes they said things.
‘I have her. I keep her locked away. She doesn’t like the dark.’
‘The Africans got her. They keep her as a slave in a caravan. I saw her at the window, begging to be let out.’
‘Your daughter wouldn’t stop screaming so I cut off her tongue.’
After a while I learned not to answer at all.
Then there were the psychics. One elderly woman called regularly, sometimes giving me contradicting information. She had visions, she told me, of my daughter with an older man, in a black car, heading north. Another caller was a man with a lisp who claimed to have an untainted Romany bloodline. He told me she was buried in a shallow grave in a field near Reading. Another, that she had eloped to marry an immigrant from a war-torn country. Another to tell me she was pregnant. Another, lying wounded in hospital. Another, lying at the bottom of a reservoir. Another. Another.
I was afraid to change my number because it was the only one Edie knew, so the calls kept coming, and the machine filtered them for me.
One night I heard the sound of the phone ringing. I woke slowly, chemically submerged, brain buzzing pleasantly. At some point during the night I’d kicked off the duvet and my skin was puckered with goosebumps. I reached for the phone by the bed just a moment too late and listened as the answer machine kicked in. Silence. The crackle of wind on the line. My mouth was dry. I needed a drink of water, to change out of my clothes. I sat up, head swimming, and then I heard it. A female voice, slightly watery, as if she’d been crying.
‘I’m sorry, Mum.’
I waited, entirely poised and still. It’s her, I told myself, and the line cut out. I picked up the receiver, frantic, saying her name over and over, Edie, Edie, talk to me, but it was just the single note of the dial tone.
I played that message over and over through the night, sleeping curled around the answer machine with the receiver hanging off the edge of the bed. I didn’t want any more calls to come through and wipe out the sound of her voice. The next morning, as the sky brightened, I called Tony Marston on his home number.
‘She phoned me.’
‘Who? Edie?’
‘Yes!’
‘What did she say?’
‘That she was sorry.’
‘What else?’
Something chipped away at the edge of my excitement. I paced the room, smoking. ‘Just that, that she was sorry.’
‘Huh, okay. Keep hold of it. I’ll have a listen later on.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Samantha.’ I didn’t like the way he said my name. I wished I’d never called him. His underwhelming reaction was like a dash of cold water. ‘How do you know it’s her?’
‘Who else would it be?’
‘Well—’ He broke off to cough thickly. ‘I don’t mean to dampen your enthu—’
‘I know her voice, Tony! I know my own daughter!’
‘Samantha, calm down. What do you want me to do?’
‘Can’t you trace the call? We could track her down inside ten minutes!’ I pitched my cigarette out the window. There was a hardness in my chest, like a stone dropping through water. ‘What about getting someone on to that?’
‘It’s not that simple, love. Not like the movies. You need the tracking device in the house before the call comes through.’
I stared at the handset for nearly a full minute, even as I could hear Tony’s voice bleating my name over and over again: Samantha, are you still there, Sam, Samantha, and then I slammed it into the wall, denting the plaster. I was sobbing as I sank on to the bed, hands over my eyes. It was her, I told myself, choking on my tears, I know it was her.
I called my brother Rupert that afternoon. Danny had died twelve years ago of pneumonia. I’d held his hand and watched his chest slowly rise and fall and rise and fall and stop. The same strong hands that had once lifted me out of the water had gone slack and cold in my own.
‘I need you here, Rupert. I’m going mad.’
When I opened the front door to him and his small suitcase he looked at me as though he had a bad smell under his nose. ‘Bloody hell, Pot, you look awful. Listen, will my car be all right out there? This is a dodgy area and I don’t want my premiums to go up.’
Over the next two days Rupert was galvanised by a roar of nervous energy – he cleaned and tidied and arranged, wiping down all the surfaces around me as if I were a typhoid carrier. He made a lot of soup – the freezer was full of the stuff, and when we couldn’t fit more in he started stockpiling it in the shed. Within the first hour of his arrival he pressed a bottle of vodka into my hand and said, ‘You need your strength.’