‘Oh yeah? Nancy Renard. You know what the girls at her school used to call her? Nancy Retard. She was a late developer, you know? Very shy. Then she started hanging out with my daughter and her friends. It brought Nancy out of her shell a little bit, I suppose you could say. She’s a different woman now.’
‘Kids can be mean.’
She looks at me with eyes narrowed against the smoke. My mother always told me I was a terrible judge of character (‘That’s the problem with you, Frances,’ she’d say to me, leaning in too close, her breath heavy with alcohol, cheeks flushed. ‘You’re not smart enough. You get fooled by everyone.’). Well, joke’s on you, Ma, because I got wise to people very fast. Leaving home at sixteen will do that to you.
I’m sizing up this woman, Edie’s mother, I remind myself, right now. Tough and uncompromising, unruffled. With her wild, wiry hair and the sullen jut of her jaw, she looks like a good person to get into trouble with. Then I remember Alex telling me she’d once held a knife to William’s throat and my mouth dries up a little.
‘What did you say your name was?’ she asks, and immediately I lie, out of habit. It’s a legacy of being in trouble with the wrong people most of your adult life – bailiffs, dealers, nasty exes.
I stick out my hand with a smile on my face. ‘It’s Kim.’
‘I won’t shake.’ She holds up her dirty hands. ‘You new to Lewes, Kim?’
‘Sort of. I’m here with my husband. His mother’s sick.’
‘That’s too bad. Is that why you’re here? Looking for a plot to put her in?’ She laughs, which immediately turns into a barking cough.
I smile. ‘No, no. Nothing like that. I was just looking.’
‘You want to walk this way with me? I feel like I want to get out into the sunshine a bit. It’s so heavy in here. Oppressive.’
‘Sure.’
She introduces herself as Samantha Hudson and I have to bite my tongue to stop myself telling her I already know her name. I’ve read the papers. I’m already half regretting lying to her about who I am, but I don’t want her to know about my connection to William. How did Alex describe it? ‘It was a bad time for him.’ Instead I follow her through the trees towards the churchyard, where benches sit in sheaves of sunlight. I ask why she was burying the suncatcher.
Samantha looks back at me. ‘I’ve been doing it every year since Edie went missing. When she was a little kid she would bury things in the back garden – cotton reels, bars of soap, my fucking house keys – she was obsessed with it. Used to drive me crazy. I bought her a sand pit – you know, the kind you get in a big plastic clam shell – and told her to bury stuff in there if that’s what she wanted to do. But no, she went right on putting things in the dirt. I think she liked the way it felt in her hands.’ Samantha crushes her cigarette out underfoot. ‘In the beginning I think I went a bit mad, you know? I didn’t hold it together very well. I suppose it was a way to stay connected to her. Now, I think it’s just habit.’
We’re out in the churchyard again, and immediately I feel my spirits lift. She was right, it was oppressive in there, the melancholy weighing down on you. Out here the sky is pale blue and endless, stretching out towards the distant Downs. Samantha hoists her bag on to her shoulder, smiling wearily. Her jaw is square and angular, the cords in her neck tight. There is a tension about her, a hypervigilance I’ve only ever seen in military victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. I recall one veteran I treated who’d been the victim of a roadside bomb in Basra. He’d seen his friend crawling away from the explosion with his intestines trailing after him in the dust. This woman, Samantha, has the same set in her shoulders; the way she carries herself is as though she is braced against an ambush, the world turning on her.
We leave the main path and follow a smaller one, no more than a single rut worn smooth by the passage of feet. The two of us are lost in thought, contemplative. The ground rises and falls like a tide. We pass an area sectioned off by a bamboo trellis that crawls with honeysuckle and clematis. Just beyond it I can hear the low, somnolent drone of bees and see the little hives that have been built there. A metre or so further on is an old wooden bench. Samantha sits down on it with a sigh, opening her bag at her feet. I join her, the two of us looking out over the sprawling graveyard, the dense woodland, the steep hills beyond that rise and fall like music.
‘Here.’ She’s pulling something out of her bag. A bottle of beer. She opens it with the edge of her lighter, flipping the cap high into the air. Foam bubbles up the neck and she passes it to me hurriedly, saying, ‘Quick, quick, before it escapes’, and laughing. I take it and suck at the froth. It’s malty and good, dark-tasting like honey and old casks. She produces another bottle and opens it the same way. She clinks hers against mine and then leans across and pours a little out on to the grave in front of us.
I frown at the headstone. ‘Who’s Tony Marston?’ I ask, peering at the inscription. It gives the year of his death as 2001 and below that, in looping cursive, May he find peace.
I read it aloud and Samantha snorts derisively. ‘You know what he wanted on his headstone? Here lies the last fuck I ever gave. His wife said no, so now he’s stuck with that.’ She kisses her two dirty fingers and leans forward, pressing them briefly against the marble. It’s genuinely touching, without affectation, and I find myself looking away as tears threaten. Samantha gulps her beer.
‘Was he a friend of yours?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did he die?’
‘Heart attack. He smoked a pack a day. He was the detective in charge of Edie’s case back in the beginning.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’ She looks at me with her keen blue eyes.
I sip the beer again. ‘For your loss. Both your losses.’
‘You know, after Edie went missing Tony convinced me to go to a local group for bereaved parents. They ran it in Brighton. This would have been about 1999, I think, a couple of years after she first disappeared. As soon as I walked in, this man asked me to help make the teas. He said he’d read Edie’s story in some of the papers. As I was washing the cups, he said something that has always stayed with me. He said, “It’s all right for you, isn’t it? You still have hope. You don’t know what it’s like for us. You can’t even begin to imagine.”’
‘That seems harsh.’
‘The point is, she’s not dead. She’s missing. The loss is a limbo. It’s fucking purgatory.’
I take another sip of beer. A plane crosses the sky, trailing white vapour. I wonder where it’s going.
‘You know, I might be able to help you,’ I say. ‘I’m a therapist. I mainly deal with anxiety disorders, OCD, stuff like that. If I can—’
‘Aw, that’s nice of you, pet. But you’re about twenty years too late. I’ve had psychologists and psychoanalysts and forty-pound-an-hour hypnotists look inside my brain and all of them have said the same thing. There’s nothing wrong with you, you just need to move on. Okay, I’d say, sure. Tell me how I’m meant to do that. You know what happens next?’
‘Nope.’