Samantha makes her face go slack, her mouth fall open, aping stupidity. She lowers her voice and says, ‘Uh, gee, Mrs Hudson, uh, we can’t really help you with that part. That’ll be nine hundred pounds, please.’ She smiles, breaking the charade. It doesn’t soften her face, that smile. It simply changes it without emotion, like arithmetic.
‘I get it,’ I tell her, draining my bottle of beer. ‘Trauma freezes you. It makes you a rock in a river. The water flows around it, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but the rock doesn’t move. It can’t. It’s stuck in one particular point in time, just getting worn down by the constant pressure.’
She looks at me carefully. I know that look. It’s cautious, but not hopeful. Kindred.
‘That’s exactly it,’ she says. ‘Fuck.’
‘That’ll be nine hundred pounds, please,’ I say, imitating her, and we both laugh throatily.
‘You want another, Kim?’ she asks me, pulling a bottle from her bag. I hesitate, but only for a moment. I can smell the alcohol coming off her, her eyes slightly glazed-looking. She’s already on her way to being drunk. Still, who can blame her? I take the bottle. She watches me uncap it the same way she did, against the edge of a lighter.
She laughs. ‘That’s a wasted childhood right there.’
‘Yeah,’ I tell her. ‘By the time I was fifteen I could roll a joint blindfolded and had six types of fake ID. I wasn’t a good kid.’
‘Well, you seem to have turned out okay.’ She smiles at me again. Her narrow eyes are faded, washed-out sea glass. ‘I saw Edie going down a similar path. I always wonder how she would have turned out. Oh, don’t get me wrong. She was a good kid—’
There’s a hesitation there. I hear it a lot. It’s pre-emptive, a ‘but’ you forget to swallow. He hit me but I provoked it. I want to but I’m frightened. She was a good kid, but she made bad choices.
‘But what?’
‘Nothing. Just that. She was a good kid.’
The silence settles softly between us again. She lights another cigarette and points it towards the church wall running opposite. Just visible beyond it is a low roof. ‘See that house? This man’ – she jerks her cigarette in the direction of Tony Marston’s grave – ‘thought the man who lived there had something to do with Edie’s disappearance. He was convinced of it.’
I think I know his name but I ask her the question anyway, because after all I am ‘Kim’, just a stranger in a churchyard with no prior knowledge of Edie Hudson’s disappearance. I have to keep up the pretence. Another thing I’ve got good at. ‘Oh yeah? Who was he?’
‘Peter Liverly. He was the groundskeeper here, among other things. He helped at the youth club Edie and her friends went to from time to time. I only met him once. He invited me into the empty church with a dead rabbit in his hands.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah. I just thought he was a bit strange, like most people did. When the police took him in for questioning they searched that house and found a stash of photographs he’d taken of Edie and her friends over here in the churchyard and the hall. He’d been hiding in his bedroom and taking pictures through a gap in the curtains.’
I shiver. What a creep.
‘Heard a rumour that one of Edie’s friends once saw him in the bushes with his camera in one hand and his dick in the other.’
‘Urgh. Is that true?’
‘Who knows? When he was released it caused so much trouble that after a while he went to live with his son. He’s still there, as far as I know. The house kept getting trashed so in the end his son boarded it up and left it, and now no one wants to live there because it needs so much work. Besides, mud sticks, right?’
I nod. Second time I’ve heard that phrase recently. How true it is.
‘They never charged him?’
‘Taking photos without consent isn’t illegal, even of minors. They had no evidence that he had anything to do with Edie’s disappearance, although I don’t know what that was based on.’
I wonder how hard the police looked for her, really. I searched the slim volume of press cuttings from Edie’s disappearance, noted the way they’d spoken about her and her mother. The insinuation had been that she was a neglected, uncontrollable child without boundaries. ‘No angel’, they’d said. I look at Samantha, who is still staring at the house over the wall, thumb absent-mindedly rubbing at a slim scar running diagonally across the palm of her hand.
‘You know, I sometimes think – what if he had kept her in there? Like that guy in Austria?’
‘Josef Fritzl? You mean, like, in a basement?’
She shrugs. ‘Maybe. I mean, who would know, right?’
‘But the police searched the house.’
‘But they were only looking for photos. What if they missed something? A trapdoor in the floorboards? Or – or what if they didn’t look in the loft? You think they checked those places out? The garage or the shed?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Listen, Kim. One thing I am very sure of is that when girls like Edie disappear, they don’t funnel money into a big search operation. They see it as one less troublemaker on the streets. Sure, there’ll be a nod towards good police work – I mean, they took the local creep in for questioning – but the reality is you get the occasional phone call and a detective with a weak heart.’
She nods towards Tony’s grave and turns to me. She is smiling tightly. Her wavy hair is grey and wild as steel wool.
I consider her for a moment before saying, ‘You think he hid your daughter in there?’
‘I said might have.’ She’s slurring, but only a little. She drains her drink and slumps in her seat. ‘I nearly broke in once, but I bottled it. That was years ago, when you could climb in through the back windows. The son put up better security after that. He was concerned someone would burn it down.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Go in there?’ Samantha looks at me glassily, unsmiling. ‘I used to have a recurring dream about it. It was always snowing in those dreams, and my footsteps were totally silent. I could hear Edie calling me from inside the house, so I’d sneak in through the broken window. Inside, it was so dark you couldn’t see. The house was a maze, like a rabbit warren. I had to just creep blindly along the walls, following the sound of her voice. But I never reached her.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘I used to think I’d let Edie down in so many ways, but the worst of it was I always felt that I hadn’t looked for her hard enough.’
I smile grimly. She looks away, back towards the house. ‘The dream frightened me so much I never went in, and because I never went in I spent years feeling as if I hadn’t searched properly for her. It’s a – what do you call it – a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?’
‘Do you still feel like that?’
Samantha lights another cigarette. Her face is lined in that harsh way that smokers carry, like carvings in the skin.
‘Always,’ she says.
We’re both silent for a moment. I wish I could take her hand. I wish I could help her.
‘So, go on then. You’re a therapist. How do I move on from that?’