‘Yes,’ I said quietly. The word was small but it filled the air, the space around me, like rubber expanding.
‘Yes.’
That Monday I decided to go back to work. My smoking was getting out of control, for one thing. I’d find myself lighting a cigarette and then craving another even as I smoked it. Also, I’d run out of Valium and the doctor had refused to give me any more.
‘It’s addictive,’ she told me briskly, shaking her head. ‘It’ll make you feel worse in the end.’
Worse? I wanted to scream. Worse than lifting the rock of my daughter’s life and finding all the horrible things down there, squirming in the dark? Worse than that, you mean?
I didn’t, of course. I smiled and thanked her and left the surgery just as a brief, hectic rainstorm had begun, drenching me through my clothes to my underwear.
On my first day back at work a woman I’d never met before from the human resources department held a fifteen-minute meeting with me and gave me a leaflet titled Dealing with Grief in the Workplace.
I handed it back to her, smiling grimly. ‘I’m not grieving,’ I told her. ‘Edie’s missing, not dead.’
‘I know how you must feel. Last year our cat disappeared for three months and I was out of my mind.’
I stared at her until she squirmed uncomfortably and told me to speak to her about anything I needed. As I left I turned back and asked her if she’d ever found her lost cat.
She looked at me, struggling to formulate a reply. Finally, she smiled sadly. ‘He got hit by a car. We only found out when his collar was found in a hedge. It’s a sad world.’
I went back to my desk with a strange, sick feeling in my stomach. Worst of all was the way my heart hurt; it ached as though it was infected. If you cut my chest open, my heart would be shrivelled, dark and sticky, and crawling with flies.
I was due to meet a counsellor on Friday afternoon but instead I drove past her offices and straight on towards Brighton, parking up at the back of London Road. It’s a long stretch of neglected grimy concrete, lined with a handful of high street shops and fast-food restaurants. The squall of bus brakes and the throb of engines choke the air; pigeons throng the gutters, searching for food. It had been raining, and the pavements were glossy mirrors stippled with rings of blackened chewing gum and cigarette butts. What I’d come here for were the pawn-brokers and cash converters, the ones who will take in a valuable object – a solid silver dragonfly necklace, for instance – and trade it for cash. If Edie had sold it – the same way she’d sold my other items, the ones I’d found in the second-hand place in Lewes – she would have come out of town to do it. She’d been burned by that before, of course. Brighton was my guess; Eastbourne maybe, if she’d been able to find the train fare. If she had come here to sell it, someone might remember her, or better still, know where she was heading. At the very least it would give me a time frame of her movements. Something solid. Something good.
It took me over two hours to walk the length of both sides of the street and by the time I got back to my car I was frustrated and tired and feeling despondent. I’d visited nineteen pawn shops and none of them had seen a necklace or a pendant fitting that description. I’d even shown a photograph of it – a picture of my mother in 1964, her hair coiled and pinned to the sides of her head, wearing an evening gown of pale blue satin and standing in the doorway of our old house on Mortimer Road. Her head is turned slightly, chin tilted upward, and the necklace rests just below her exposed clavicle. I’ve always thought my mother looks beautiful in this picture, like a movie star, one of the ones from old Hollywood, Bette Davis or Lauren Bacall maybe.
I sat in my car, smoking, thinking. Tuesday night was the ritual. There was a flutter of nerves in my stomach when I thought about it, a feeling like a rising crescendo, birds taking flight. Rupert had called me earlier and asked me if I was still intending to ‘go through with it’, as if I were contemplating hiring a hitman instead of meeting teenagers in a churchyard. He didn’t get it, and that was okay. ‘I just have to know,’ I told him. ‘I just have to slip into her skin. It might give me a clue. It might save her. It might even bring her home.’
As I drove back towards Lewes, I hesitated, just for a fraction of a second, before turning left on to the road that would take me up past the prison. I knew where Thorn House was, just outside town, over the humpback bridge. I’d driven past it before, on the days when I used to take Edie out to look at the horses in the nearby fields. She was much, much younger then, of course. Dewy-eyed but not frightened, not even with her small hand outstretched with a fistful of grass in it.
‘Keep your hand flat, honey, so it doesn’t bite,’ I’d told her. She had seemed so small as the horse bent its giant head to her, and I’d almost snatched her away. Edie had laughed, though, as that soft velvety muzzle had pressed against her skin. ‘It tickles, Mummy!’ she’d crowed. We must have passed Thorn House a number of times, but we hadn’t even noticed it then. There was a gate, of course, separating the big Georgian property from the road, and at first I drove right past it, making a turn on the right so I could drive around again and park a little way away, with the front of the house in view.
It was a quiet street, all the houses grand and imposing and concealed behind high hedges and gates and old stone walls. Behind them the woodland stretched out towards the hem of the South Downs and the soaring cliffs beyond. I leaned my car seat back a little and lit a cigarette, rolling down the window a few inches. By now the sky was turning a pale lavender colour, dusk-stained. I turned on the radio and watched and waited.
Edward Thorn’s car pulled up on the drive at four thirty, just as the streetlights were coming on. The car was one of those big ones, a proper family car, an old, well-used four-door, spattered with mud. I watched as the brake lights flared red and winked out before opening my own car door. I didn’t climb out just yet. I wanted to surprise him. I saw a man climbing stiffly from the driver’s seat wearing a wax jacket with the collar turned up, a pair of scruffy-looking jeans. He moved to the rear of the car and opened the boot and started to rummage inside. I slid silently out of my car and crossed the road quickly, hands in my pockets, face set in a grim, hard line. There was what felt like an electrical pulse running through me, crackling with charge.
Edward was pulling something from the boot, a large white object, a rectangle. As he turned it towards the road I could make out the writing on it: Private Property – NO Entry! written in thick black strokes.
‘Hey!’ I called out, starting to jog towards him, unable to keep myself from moving; it was a propulsion. I wanted to grab him, throw him against the car. But, of course, I didn’t. He turned and for a moment I saw the expression on his face change. Eyes widening, mouth opening in a slack zero. It was just a second and then he was blinking and smiling hesitantly, eyebrows raised.
‘Yes?’
‘Do you know me?’
‘I think I do, yes.’ Up close his face was heavily lined, like the gnarled trunk of a tree. His deep-set eyes were very dark, glittering like buried jewels. ‘You’re Mrs Hudson. The missing girl’s mother.’
I wasn’t expecting that.