The good humour radiates from her youngest. He has been a revelation to her since the day he was born. He cracked his first joke on the breast at two months – had come off, milky-mouthed, to smile up at her, all gums, then blew a raspberry and laughed. He was his sunshine self, right from the off.
When they’d spotted Rollo down the corridor at the police station in Huntingdon, both she and Ian felt the weak gratitude of the elderly. They ran towards him and flung their arms around him, in need of holding him close. Here were reinforcements. And even though Rollo’s relationship with Ian had always been strained – he was aware Edith was Ian’s favourite, his academic acolyte – even Ian seemed to exhale. Later, they discussed poster campaigns and fundraisers, Rollo’s Facebook and Twitter appeals forging connections and sprawling outwards like blood vessels, keeping Edith in people’s minds.
‘Thank you, son,’ Ian said, rather formally, and Miriam caught him looking at their boy with a needy gaze that she shared, as if Rollo were honey and they were the bears.
They brought him back with them to Hampstead, and with his bag slumped by the kitchen counter and the glittering sheen of the beach still at his temples, the three of them sat shell-shocked around the table, nursing tea. Tea had featured heavily in the past fortnight. Miriam sometimes felt her belly sloshing with it, like a waterbed, yet still she took tea when it was proffered, for the symbolism, she supposed – solicitude, comfort, warmth. It is the English way, after all. Since 18 December, she has taken it with two sugars.
‘I reckon she wants time alone,’ Rollo said on that first night back, getting up to boil the kettle yet again, then leaning against the kitchen worktop, and she marvelled at how big he was, her little one. ‘Time away from Will. He’s enough to do anyone’s head in.’
‘He’s a decent person,’ said Ian.
‘He’s a coma-inducing bore,’ said Rollo.
‘There are worse crimes,’ said Miriam.
‘I’m not so sure.’
‘He was always very good to Edith,’ Ian said.
‘We don’t know that, do we?’ Rollo said.
‘The police don’t think he had anything to do with it.’
‘Stop talking about her as if …’ Miriam had blurted and Rollo came over to her, cupping her head to his chest.
‘This is typical Edie,’ he muttered over her head. ‘Always hogging the attention.’
The light in the bedroom has an evening feel, though it’s mid-afternoon. They hear a group of youths shout in the street.
‘New Year’s Eve tomorrow,’ says Rollo, looking towards the window.
‘That’s all we need,’ she says.
Fireworks will no doubt sputter and fizz half the night, like some war on her feelings. She’d never before noticed the forced jollity of this time of year and what injury it adds to those who are bereft: all those television adverts demanding everyone be happy.
‘Are they still outside?’ she asks, referring to the photographers, and he shakes his head.
‘There were only two and they’ve sloped off,’ he says.
They are relieved, also, to be shot of Will, who arrived late on Christmas Eve and departed on Boxing Day, and even that was outstaying his welcome. Ian made them a cold collation – a ‘smorgasbord’, he called it – for Christmas lunch because it seemed wrong, somehow, to feast on turkey. Instead they sawed little rectangles of cheese onto sesame Ryvitas, which shed their crumbs across the table like builders’ grit (Miriam kept sweeping them into her palm, then, realising she couldn’t be bothered to get up, shook them onto the floor by her side). Paté, which had developed a liver-red crust at its edges because Ian hadn’t covered it in the fridge, pickled gherkins, and celeriac slaw, like some incongruous French picnic.
At night – endless and sleepless, all of them padding about at some point downstairs or to the bathroom – she could hear Will snivelling in the guest bedroom.
‘She was in my care,’ Will said at breakfast. ‘It was on my watch.’
She and Rollo had shared a wearied glance, Rollo waiting for his toast to pop up.
The phone starts ringing, distantly.
‘I’ll go,’ says Rollo, standing.
Miriam lifts herself from the pillow. ‘No, I’ll get it. I’m hoping it’s Christy.’
M anon
Her canteen lunch of shepherd’s pie and boiled carrots has collapsed into the four corners of its yellow polystyrene box. Brown gravy, Bisto-infused, the mince pebble-dashing her throat as it goes down. Piped mash – has it ever been potato? Not bad. Not bad at all.
She has pushed her keyboard to one side to make way for the rectangular box and the Daily Mirror, and she scans the News in Brief column, seeing Search for Edith relegated there. One paragraph on the planned television reconstruction, which will go out in the next episode of Crimewatch. Twelve days missing and Edith’s a NiB – a reflection of the investigation’s stalemate. Forensics from the scene showed only Edith’s, Will Carter’s, and Helena Reed’s DNA at George Street, as you’d expect. The blood was Edith’s but no rogue DNA on the glass shards in the kitchen bin.