‘Is he seeing to those tomatoes again?’
I spin around. It’s Mimi. In her long nightdress studded with pink flowers and her bare feet she looks like a Victorian ghost. Her hair is a nebula about her drawn face, her cheeks sunk, deep pools of shadow.
‘He’ll get cold out there. Get him in, dear.’
She’s looking past me, towards the greenhouse. I put a hand on her shoulder. I’m shaking all over, my knees weak and watery.
‘Come on, Mimi, back to bed. It’s late.’
‘He’ll catch his death.’
‘I’ll go and get him in a minute, okay? Through here, that’s right. Back into bed.’
‘He told me his secret once,’ she says, as I pull back the covers. I stare at her in the darkness, blood ringing in my ears. My heart thuds against my ribs. I have a very clear image then of Edward Thorn in his shed at the bottom of the garden with a bag of old bones, grinding them into powder, boiling them in huge pots, bent over the stove. Tell me, Mimi. Tell me where they came from. Did you know about Edie Hudson? I look over at her, so pale she is almost transparent. Her eyes are filmy.
I say, very quietly, ‘What was the secret, Mimi? Can you remember?’
‘He said—’ She tilts her head as though listening to a distant voice. ‘He said the secret was to feed the soil, not the plant.’
Tamped down by disappointment, I tuck her in, pulling the covers up to her neck. What had I been expecting? This is madness, I tell myself sternly. You’re chasing the ghost of an old man through his widow. Look at yourself. Edie Hudson is long gone but your marriage is falling apart right here and now. That’s what you need to be looking at.
I sit awhile as she falls easily back to sleep, her breathing sliding into a deep and regular rhythm. Her small hand lies in mine, limp and cold. Just before I leave I plant a kiss on her temple, the woman who, at our wedding, took me to one side and told me I’d made her so very, very proud.
I sleep fitfully for the next two hours and then give up, brewing strong tea and heading back out into the garden. The sky is lightening to lilac, clouds drifting like unravelling wool. The air is punctuated by the bright voices of the birds. I stand at the fork in the path that splits off towards the wood on the left and the greenhouse and allotment on the right. There is a thin mist obscuring the top of the Downs but the sun, already the colour of a warm peach, will soon burn it away. I look back at Thorn House over my shoulder. The silvery panes of the windows reflect the broad blue sky. I cross the lawn on bare feet, my cup of tea curling silvery steam into the air.
Inside the greenhouse that fertile green smell of the tomatoes hits me again. I try to avoid looking upward but a morbid curiosity compels me. The poor dead bird has been scraped from the glass but there is still a smear of gore left behind, a dark stain. The tomato plants are a lush and vibrant green, the fruits glossy-skinned and plump as if they are about to pop.
The sack of bonemeal is in the far corner, slumped like a drunk with his head on his chest. Back here, cobwebs fur the window frames and the desiccated corpses of flies crunch underfoot. I reach inside and sift the gritty powder through my fingers. I find myself thinking of the last couplet of the rhyme Alex told me: Give them meat and give them bone, and pray that they leave you alone.
Beyond the greenhouse is the edge of the garden where gooseberry bushes grow in neat, orderly rows. Beyond that is the woodland, dense and thick and ancient. William told me how his father campaigned to have it protected when it was in danger of being sold off to developers in the mid- nineties. He’d sourced funding from various charities and organisations, held demonstrations, circulated petitions. In the end he raised enough money to buy the two hectares of land just beyond Thorn House and fenced it off. There are still the signs he hung up there reading Private Property and No Entry. I’ve always found it strange that he would campaign so hard to protect the land and then not allow anyone to go in there. It was just trees, after all, wasn’t it?
And the well, a voice says. Don’t forget that. My mind circles the image of a sheep’s carcass, bristling with insect and bone, lying on the cold stones at the bottom of the well, lit by the flare of the boys’ torches. Edward boarded that well up in the end. It was dangerous, Mimi had said.
I’ve only been in the woods once. William took me on one of our first visits down here to see his mother and brother. He insisted we only use the marked path, the one that leads through the trees towards the pasture fields on the other side. It was autumn, the ground in there churned mud and marshy in places, black standing water lying glassy in ditches. Roots rising from the earth like groping white hands. Dark hollows and mossy hummocks all screened by the thick trunks of the trees. It was silent and very, very still. You could do anything in there and no one would see you.
Anything.
Samantha – Now
I call Frances a little after eleven, nursing a cup of coffee close to my chest. She answers on the third ring, husky-voiced and tired-sounding.
‘I was just thinking about you,’ she says, and laughs. ‘How’s your hangover?’
‘Deceptively okay. I keep thinking it’ll catch up with me later on. That’s what happens when you get old.’
‘I always look worse than I feel. I think in a way that’s harder. I mean, I don’t mind feeling like shit but when people physically recoil at the sight of you, you know it’s been a rough night.’
Then we’re both laughing, the two of us, bonded women who only yesterday sneaked into a long-abandoned house on a trail of breadcrumbs. The pain in my head eases a little. In my little kitchen I can stand by the sink and see the places in the garden where the cats have dug holes in the flower beds, turning over the bulbs I’ve planted there. I’ll have to do them again. I don’t mind. It’s meditative, gardening. And I still hope, even now, to come across something Edie put there in the dirt nearly thirty years ago. A small plastic bracelet, a tiny rubber dinosaur, a single block of Lego.
‘I couldn’t sleep last night,’ I tell her, pulling an errant cobweb down from the ceiling. ‘I can’t believe we went in there. What were we thinking? And, Frances, what if Edie had been in the freezer?’
‘But she wasn’t.’
‘But she could have been. That’s the point. I still don’t know. After all this time, I haven’t come any closer to finding her and now I just feel like I have to do something. Anything.’
‘Are you still drunk?’
I laugh at that, rinsing my cup with the phone cradled against my shoulder. ‘I’m going to go and talk to Nancy.’
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t even care. I’ve always thought she knew more than she let on. Perhaps I can persuade her to tell me.’
I know where Nancy is going to be this morning. I know where she is going to be most mornings, and afternoons too. I don’t think some people realise how easy it is to keep track of them on Facebook. Nancy Renard is a phenomenal Facebooker, updating her status almost hourly, checking herself in everywhere she goes. I’ve got a fake profile I use to keep tabs on her, but she exposes herself so often it isn’t necessary. Just meeting my girls for lunch at Café Rouge! she’ll type, marking herself on the map at Brighton Marina, or Bluewater Shopping Centre, or Gatwick Airport. Nancy Renard checked in to the Odeon, Leicester Square. Date night with this one at Wagamamas! Nancy Renard is at the Royal Sussex County Hospital – in sooooo much pain!!!