Missing, Presumed (31 page)

Some people will see it as running away but what do they know of all she’s been through? A day can feel like a year. The minutes vibrate like dying wasps. Even the seconds are shuddering, giving up as they fizzle towards a strange, unnatural calm – as if petrifaction is taking place. This might be running away yet it is so much more than that.

She waits at the baggage carousel which is sparsely dotted with business-style cases, the type that resemble a shoe box on wheels. Executive luggage going round and round in La Rochelle arrivals. It’s a strange hangar-like space, which in August throngs with pink Britons hauling folded prams off the rubber belt, sweating mothers and fathers carrying toddlers and more weight than they’d like, burgundy passports at the ready. She and Ian had been among them, all those years ago. Rollo in tears over something or other, wanting to ride in the trolley perhaps; Edie perched on the metal edge of the carousel reading, as usual. Ian scanning the belt through the jostling crowd for their motley collection of bags. But this is January, blown about by rough winds and only a smattering of passengers – the odd French businessman, eager to get outside and light a Gauloise.

The sky is filled with voluminous cloud which seem to boil up over the flat Vendée countryside. She drives under a canopy of trees, out of Fontenay-le-Comte, the roads smooth and empty. This is a spacious country. She is relieved to be away from tight little England and the reporting of Ian’s arrest. Soon there would be the prying do-gooders; friends letting out the rope. Yes, it is a relief to be in this empty land where no one knows who she is, much less cares about the depravities of her husband. Former husband, she should begin to think of him but can’t. She should have known, that’s what she returns to again and again:
she should have known
. When DS Bradshaw rang on her door last night, Miriam experienced the slowing of time, like déjà vu. The detective stepping inside the front door, saying Ian had been arrested on suspicion of murder, seemed like a repetition of an event which had already happened, time on a loop, elongated like a stretched rubber band. She nodded, giving the outward appearance of having taken in what DS Bradshaw was telling her, but Miriam felt as if she were below the surface – perhaps of a lake – the sounds slow and lugubrious. Thoughts not keeping pace, quite.

She went to Ian’s study, felt about in the desk drawer for the Nokia phone, the one with the child’s pirate stickers all over it, which should have rung alarm bells when she first discovered it but didn’t, she supposed, because Miriam had silenced them. You hear what you want to hear. See what you want to see. The phone wasn’t there, of course. She felt about, instead, for keys to the safety deposit box they kept behind the books in the lounge. You could always find the green metal box behind
Gray’s Anatomy
.

‘Are you all right?’ DS Bradshaw asked, watching her with a look of intense concern. ‘You seem … calm. Can I help you with something?’ she said, confused as to what Miriam was doing pulling books from the shelves.

At last, she unlocked the box and there it was – the phone, among some foreign currency and a Rolex given to Ian by the Sultan of Brunei. He hadn’t tried very hard to hide it.

‘I imagine you’ll be needing this,’ Miriam said, handing the phone to the detective.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Is it the boy’s?’ Miriam asked.

‘I don’t know. Possibly.’ DS Bradshaw studied Miriam’s face, then added, ‘There’s something else I need to talk to you about.’

The detective told Miriam she thought Edith was alive – ‘I don’t say that lightly, Lady Hind’ – that she may have been smuggled to France by a man called Abdul-Ghani Khalil.

‘The Tilbury Docks case, the murder,’ Miriam said.

The detective said she thought Edith had been put in contact with Khalil by Tony Wright; that the phone calls between Edith and Wright had been to establish a pick-up point on one of the motorways outside Huntingdon. Wright would have known how to avoid the CCTV cameras; Khalil would have known how to get her across the border without detection.

‘But
why
?’ Miriam asked.

‘People want to disappear all the time. Commonest thing there is. Can you think of somewhere in France she might have gone? To hide?’

Miriam’s mind felt about among her memories, like her hand patting in the central desk drawer, as she processed the idea. ‘Possibly. I don’t know.’

‘I need you to give me a list of places she would know – places you’ve been on holiday where there might be a connection for Edith – so that we can inform Interpol.’

‘Let me go,’ Miriam blurted, and she held the detective’s gaze as intensely as she was able. ‘Let me go, please.’

‘I’m sorry, I—’

‘I’m just asking you to delay, that’s all. Hold back, give me some time. A day or two, that’s all. I have an idea, but I might be wrong. Let me go and see if I can find her, coax her back. Our family’s been through enough, don’t you see?’ She was holding the detective’s arms, squeezing them, not letting her look away.

‘I can’t delay Interpol,’ the detective said, ‘but they’ll be fairly ineffective without strong leads – a place to start, I mean. France is a big country. You’ll have a head start if you don’t delay, but I should warn you, my DI knows about the Wright–Khalil connection. They’ll be interrogating Khalil on this. He might put a pin in the map for them.’

Miriam nodded. ‘I understand,’ then led the way to the front door and closed it on the sergeant. Then she sank down to the coir matting in a puddle, her cheek on its coarse weave, smelling the boot dust and feeling the freezing winter air roar in under the door’s brush strip. She went to bed soon after; her paralysis at war with the urging of the detective to make haste.

Lying in the bedroom, the dancing light playing through a chink in the curtains, she replayed the years of her marriage as if running a cine film in her mind. Did he ever want us? A wife and children? All the holidays – was he trapped, restless in every one? All the times he’d gone away for a conference or to play badminton with Roger. All their tendernesses, their various strains. The arguments and the reparation. She ran them all through a new filter, like a computer program adjusting the figures. She observed, and observed again, as if she might make the oscillation settle.

She cried, as the evening melded into night; cried then became still – cataplectic, almost. When she finally drifted off to sleep, the cine film began again, searching for clues in the crackling faded images of family life.

In the morning she heaved a suitcase down the stairs, Rollo’s perplexed expression looking up at her.

‘I’m sorry to leave you with all this,’ she said.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Well, can I come with you?’

‘No,’ she said, her palm to his cheek. ‘Darling Rollo. You must stay here. Go and visit him in prison. He needs you.’

The road down into Vouvant winds beneath trees in leaf, past Monsieur Ripaud’s riding stables, where Edith had gone on her first hack through the Forêt de Mervent without, Miriam had been horrified to learn from Ian, a helmet.

‘Where do you think we get the phrase
laissez-faire
from?’ he’d teased, bringing out the smelly cheeses which had filled the fridge of their holiday gîte with a sharp odour. ‘She survived, didn’t you, Edie?’

‘Ew, socks!’ Rollo yelled, whenever the fridge door opened and the smell hit him.

It was the summer Edith seemed to discover passion after passion – reading and horses, primarily – subsisting on a diet of French bread (soft white pillows torn from the middle) and peaches, which leaked rivulets of juice down her chin and onto her top. She hadn’t wanted Miriam to wash the trousers she rode in because they smelled of Artur, the horse she now ardently loved.

Miriam drives the car up the steep incline to the car park, in the shadow of the medieval Melusine tower. She pulls her coat from the back seat. The wind roars through the trees as she walks to the wall at the edge of the car park, peering over to the distant water below. Gusts stipple its surface into hurrying slicks like scales. She pulls the coat tightly around her and turns towards the bar-tabac, where a carousel of postcards looks as if it might keel over in the wind.

‘Une Anglaise?’
says the man behind the bar.
‘Elles sont partout.’

‘Oui, mais une Anglaise qui habite ici?’
says Miriam.
‘Il y a depuis quelques mois?’
She’s fumbling about for idioms, like rummaging in an old suitcase. The words are there, but not necessarily in the right order.

‘Bof,’
he says, turning down the corners of his mouth.
‘’sais pas.’

Miriam orders a coffee and surveys the room – a dark space with an enormous television bracketed to the wall, showing some sport or other with periodic cheers. A smattering of people, mostly watching the TV. She decides to take a table outside, despite the cold wind.

She holds down the flapping page of the guide book she has purchased at Stansted for the purposes of finding accommodation, as the barman sets down her cup and saucer. Her leather-gloved hand rests on a page titled:
The Legend of Melusine
.

According to the story, Melusine is said to have murdered her father and, as punishment for this, the lower half of her body was changed to that of a serpent every Saturday evening. Not long after, she met Raymond of Poitou and when he asked to marry her, she agreed on condition that he would never gaze upon her on a Saturday evening. Everything was fine for several years and the couple lived in the château at Vouvant, but one night he broke the promise and saw her in the form of part-woman, part-serpent.

Typical view of female sexuality, Miriam thinks. Serpent indeed. She looks up to see a group of cyclists, just beyond the cluster of outside tables, in full professional gear – Lycra leggings, cycling gloves, streamlined helmets, and wraparound mirrored sunglasses which give them the silvered look of houseflies.

When, during a disagreement, Raymond called Melusine a ‘serpent’ in front of the court, she assumed the form of a dragon and flew off, never to be seen again.

‘Excusez-moi,’
says a man’s voice, and Miriam looks up from her reading. He says he heard her in the bar, asking about a girl –
une Anglaise
– and from his rapid French, she gleans he knows of one.

‘Jeune?’
Miriam asks, squinting up at him, a hand over her brow.

‘Oui, eh bien, dans la vingtaine je suppose,’
he says.
In her twenties.
His directions come in a rush that she tries very hard to follow:
‘Tout droit, à gauche, en bas, par la rivière.’

She is discombobulated. She hadn’t quite expected this journey to yield fruit. A flight away from the chaos in England; a pilgrimage into her family’s past, yes. But might Edith
actually
be here?

Miriam hastens in the direction in which he has pointed, walking in the shadow of the shops, past the fruit and vegetable shop, and the green-gloss pharmacie, around the corner to the Place de l’Eglise, past the mairie, stuck with a limp French flag, and opposite it, Vouvant’s twelfth-century church, broad steps leading up to twin arches.

She can’t unravel any of the man’s directions from here, and as she turns, examining each possible route, she notices an elderly woman carrying laden bags, who is walking slowly with a rolling gait. The woman is breathless with the exertion as Miriam approaches her.

‘Rivière?’
Miriam asks, pointing down one of the alleys off the Place de l’Eglise.

The woman nods.
‘Oui, en bas,’
she says.

A day of sharp sun, so beautiful I’m taken with the idea of opening up the tall windows in the bedroom. I spread them wide, setting a cushion on the Juliet balcony, thinking of Lucy Honeychurch opening her shutters at the Pension Bertolini.

The sun cooks my face but the breeze is still fresh, so I’m wrapped in my thickest cardigan. My coatigan. I fetch my copy of
Jane Eyre
but I don’t read. I look out instead, calm for the first time in more than five weeks, perhaps because I haven’t done my Internet searches today. Head back against the window frame, eyes
closed, my eyelids glowing red with the brightness, I hear the patter-pat of shoes in the alley below.

Slowly I straighten, squinting, to see the top of a head beyond the wall. Grey hair. Something familiar about it, then a face upturned and her eyes meet mine, and I am stabbed by familiarity and the shock of love. Beloved face. I drop
Jane Eyre
and it falls from the balcony like a shot bird.

I launch haphazardly into the dark interior of the flat, pummelling down the stairs to open the door to her. What is she doing here? How much will she hate me for what I have done? How much does she know, and how, oh
how on earth
will I tell her? The secrets I have harboured; the secrets that will destroy her. The secrets I have been running from for five long weeks.

I unbolt the door and there is her ashen, accusatory face and she has aged ten years since I last saw her.
My fault.

‘How could you?’ she growls.

‘Mum, I … I can explain. I can, Mum,’ I say. ‘You don’t understand …’ But my words are stuck. ‘I never wanted to hurt you …’

‘How
could
you?’

‘There are so many things you don’t know,’ I cry. I cannot gather myself, cannot prevent myself crumpling into a child’s anguish.

‘I thought you were
dead
,’ she says. Her eyes red-rimmed, now brimming, her forehead furrowed with disbelief and anger. There is nothing worse than seeing your mother cry and being the cause.

‘Come in,’ I say, and I pull her towards me, take her in my arms, and she emits a cry of pain, her body heaving into mine. Her shouts, animalistic, are embarrassingly loud, bouncing off the alley walls. ‘Come in,’ I say. ‘I’ll make you some tea. I can explain, I can explain why …’

She snivels, reaches into her bag for a tissue, and wipes the wetness from her eyes and nose.

I lead her up the dark stairs to my apartment, wondering where I can begin. Explaining my disappearance means telling her things about our family that she shouldn’t have to know. I don’t know where I can start without hurting her, but I have hurt her already. I bring her into the lounge, take her handbag gently from her and lay it on the sofa, then guide her to a seated position.

‘I don’t know how to tell you,’ I say. I pace. I cannot look at her. She is looking up at me like an expectant child. ‘I know things, I saw things—’

‘He’s been arrested,’ she blurts. ‘You don’t know, do you? Your father was arrested yesterday for the murder of Taylor Dent.’

I stare at her. It doesn’t have to come from me, like some malicious lie I’ve made up; some perverse thing I’ve imagined to cause her pain. I don’t have to be the one to break it and yet I wish he hadn’t been caught. I wish she didn’t know; that he had got away with it, that they could still be together, and that I could have paid the price instead.

‘Taylor Dent? Was that his name?’ I whisper. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘You saw,’ she says. ‘You saw it happen, at Deeping.’

I nod, both of us now in a quiet daze.

‘I still don’t understand,’ she says. ‘Why run? Why did you want us to think you were dead?’

‘I didn’t!’ It comes out hysterical, and I am losing myself again. I want to tell the truth but I don’t know if I can. ‘I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t!’ I am shouting and pacing. ‘I wanted to disappear. I wanted the ground to swallow me up. I couldn’t keep his secret and I couldn’t turn him in. I couldn’t go back to Will and I couldn’t face Helena either.’

‘Helena—’

‘I know,’ I wail, fists to my stomach. ‘Helena, oh Helena.’ It comes out of my belly like fire, my guilt, my sorrow. How much I am responsible for. ‘She’s dead and it’s my fault. You don’t have to tell me, Mum. You don’t have to show me what I’ve done, what a mess I’ve made. I
know
.’

‘Edie,’ she says gently. ‘Edie, calm down. Come sit.’

We light a fire. We gingerly hold cups of fennel tea, as if they might break. They warm our hands and we lean into one another, staring at the flames as they crackle and dance. She is sitting with her knees together, more formal than me. My legs are curled beside me. There has been a lot of silence, the two of us allowing ourselves to exhale.

She is wearing a shirt with a navy William Morris design, swirling leaves and seed pods. My head is leaning on her shoulder. I stare at the pattern on the fabric, the pendant which nestles in the soft wrinkles of her chest. I am moved by her fastidiousness; how smart she looks. Her rings gleam on her fingers, but the skin on her hands is reptilian and her face is dragged downwards with sorrow and exhaustion. My poor mum. My tears fall again, and she kisses the top of my head.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’ she asks.

‘I went to Deeping on a Sunday, early December, it was. In the afternoon. Got there about three – it was still light. I needed somewhere to think, away from Will. I was thinking about splitting up with him.’ I look up into her face. ‘You knew that, didn’t you, Mum? I think you had an inkling that I was going to end it with him. Things had started with Helena, confusing stuff, and I didn’t know if they were a symptom of wanting to leave Will, or whether it was the start of something real with her – you know? I was really confused about it all, needed some headspace, away from both of them.

‘I’d more or less decided to sleep there. I was lying on your bed – you know how I love it in your bed. It started to get dark and I fell asleep. I woke to clattering sounds downstairs. The house was pitch dark by now and I sleepily thought: “Ah, Mum and Dad are here.” But then I snapped awake. I’d spoken to you – remember? – and you told me you were staying home that weekend. Dad had too much work on so you weren’t coming to Deeping. I froze, thinking it must be an intruder moving around downstairs. We’re so lax about security at Deeping. I’d locked the front door on arrival – I’m always nervous being in the countryside by myself – but all the same, that key in the porch …

‘There were footsteps coming up the stairs. My heart was pounding; I was terrified. I slipped off the bed and climbed inside your wardrobe, pulling the door closed and your clothes in front of my face. The intruder came into the room, right up to the wardrobe. I thought I was dead, but he pulled the drawer at the bottom and shoved something into it. I stayed there, cowering, as the footsteps receded. I heard more clattering downstairs, then the front door closed. I crept out of the wardrobe and onto the window seat. The sensor light had come on with his movement and I saw Dad open the boot of his car. I saw a body in the boot – a boy—’

‘Taylor Dent,’ says Miriam sadly.

‘I didn’t know his name. I’ve tried to find out since then – I’ve Googled missing people and murders in East Anglia – but there’s been nothing about a black boy killed in or near March. His death seemed to go unreported.’

‘Unlike yours,’ said Miriam.

‘Yes,’ I say, sitting upright. ‘In the weeks that followed, I was everywhere, but there was no mention of him.’ I slouch back down, against her shoulder. It is easier to tell her my story if I don’t look into her face. ‘I watched from the upstairs window. I was shaking. I mean, you don’t put someone in a boot unless you’re doing wrong by them. The boot is where you put animals, not people.’

‘Hadn’t he seen your car?’

‘I parked right at the end of the carport. You know how short the G-Wiz is – he can’t have seen it from the drive. My heart was thudding. I knew it was really bad – a boy in the boot. Dad was going through his pockets and the boy’s body was rocking, unconscious or dead. He searched until he found something I couldn’t see – a phone or a wallet – which he put in his own pocket. My mind was racing, thinking, why does someone go through a boy’s pockets – a boy who’s unconscious or dead? There was no explanation except the worst explanation.

‘Before I could run down to him, demand an explanation, the doors of the car had slammed shut and he had driven away. I went to the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe to see what he’d stashed there. It was piles and piles of money, bound together with rubber bands in a plastic bag.’

‘So you took the cash?’ she says. I nod and she smiles wanly, saying, ‘At least it stayed in the family.’

‘I thought about all the things I could do: return to George Street and Will; pretend I hadn’t seen anything; tell the police what I’d seen; tell you; go to Helena. And not one of them seemed possible. I was butting up against each option and it was like being in a dodgem car, hitting the buffers. I thought about flying to Buenos Aires to find Rollo, and then I thought about telling him. The awfulness. Then I wondered if anyone would believe me. I wondered if I would seem mad, the destroyer of our family life. I wondered if in fact I
had
gone mad, and all of it was an apparition, that I should be sectioned. I looked at the money and I thought about disappearing. And it made sense. All I knew, Mum, you have to believe me, was that I wanted to run. My only impulse was to disappear, not to hurt you.’

‘But you did hurt me. You hurt me very deeply, Edith.’

‘I couldn’t bear knowing something that would destroy you, I didn’t want to keep his secrets but I didn’t want to betray him either. I couldn’t go back to Will and I couldn’t bear Helena, the confusion of that. I was trapped, d’you see? When I looked at the money he’d left, I knew that was my way of disappearing. Money could make it happen. I could vanish, I knew people who could help me—’

‘What people?’

I get up. I can’t look at her. ‘Another tea?’ I say, taking the cup from her hand.

‘What people, Edith?’ she says.

‘Never mind that. You don’t need to know what people. That money could make me vanish, as if the ground had opened up, and that’s what I wanted.’

I come back into the room with two steaming hot mugs. ‘What’s happened to him? Where are they keeping him?’ I ask.

‘He’s in Littlehey. Rollo will visit. We’ve instructed lawyers at Kingsley Napley.’

‘Is he all right?’

‘I haven’t seen him,’ she says, and I can see the torment written on her face. ‘I will though.’ She looks up. ‘I will see him. He’s still my husband.’

Her look is defiant and I stare at her. ‘After everything he’s done …’ I begin.

She frowns. ‘I won’t explain myself to you, Edith,’ she says. ‘I won’t justify how I feel to
you
.’

We are silent again, but it is not a comfortable silence.