The rain spits into Miriam’s face, spattering the shoulders of her beige Burberry mac, too thin a layer for January, and she squints into the wind, up Chamberlayne Road towards Kensal Rise station, relieved to have said goodbye to Jonti and the guilt.
The abortion had changed Edith. Even years later it cast its sad tint, like the spring when Christy was getting married, three or four years ago now. Edith went on and on about how sorry she felt for her friend, with eyes that held Miriam’s, pleadingly. ‘Far too young. She’ll come to regret it. You can’t know who you are in your twenties. I’d hate to be settling down right now.’
Miriam descends the steps to the overground station, for the train to Hampstead Heath, remembering times when the sadness lifted and Edith’s silly, girlish joy had been allowed to escape like bubbles up the side of a glass – like the time they’d shopped for outfits for the wedding in Fenwick’s. Miriam had stared at Edith in the changing rooms as she pranced and giggled, thinking how she loved the very flesh of her. You got used to that with children, love crashing over you like waves. But then Edith had picked out a shockingly expensive dress – ￡250 – and Miriam balked, not because she didn’t have the money but because it seemed inappropriate. She had a sense of obligation – to teach Edith the value of money, that she should not grow up profligate. And, as so often in her brief career as mother, Miriam had spoiled everything. She’d dithered – ‘I don’t know, Edith, it’s an awful lot’ – and in her hesitation, Edith read censure, or a limit on love, or some coldness which wasn’t there.
No, darling, my dear one, it wasn’t that. The train is coming towards her, the tears mingling with the rain on her face. It was my own stupid inhibition. I’d buy it for you now, Edie, love, a thousand times over.
Every fond memory is tinged like this, as if Edith can turn the atmosphere, even now. In Fenwick’s she had grown sullen, maintaining her dissatisfied stance towards the ￡80 dress that Miriam bought for her from the Oasis concession, even though she had the figure for it – Edith could carry off the flimsiest high-street fashions.
Yes, Miriam was inconsistent – she loved to buy her daughter things, to express love, but no, she couldn’t buy her everything all of the time. She frowns as she boards the train, in a silent argument with Edith or some notion of her righteousness. Well, she wasn’t going to smother her spontaneity – those times when Edith was little and she’d said, ‘Let’s go to the toy shop’ just because she delighted in delighting a small person, and small people were so easy to delight, so ready to join the ride. But she’d had to say no, too, and face down the hatred. This was her lot, to be so often in the wrong, and so it had been when they went dress shopping and she’d spoiled it all for Edith.
The other passengers stare at her as she presses a tissue against her eyes, trying to stop the tears and failing, knowing that her face must be a torn-up storm of anger, regret, and defensiveness.
Edith has never been quick to forgive. Is this what her disappearance is all about – one huge sulk, like the one in Fenwick’s? Oh, she hopes so. She’d be happy to know Edith is alive and to never talk to her again. Anything, but not dead.
The wedding, at the church at the bottom of Church Row, had been so beautiful, Christy vastly pregnant in white, with a ring of flowers around her hair. Miriam and Edith sat together in a pew, and when Miriam looked to her left at Edith’s face, the tears were streaming from her daughter’s eyes and her mouth was a soundless red twist.
Ma non
‘So, Taylor Dent,’ says DI Sean Haverstock – ‘Havers’ as he seems to be called by everyone at Kilburn CID. He is bouncing back in his swivel chair. Manon guesses he’s about her age: bald, wearing a wedding ring.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘where are we with his movements in the week before he died?’
‘Nowhere, to be honest, without some decent phone work. His was pay-as-you-go, basic, not a smart phone. That’s disappeared. Registered activity in the North London area up until Sunday, eleventh of December, but that’s as you would expect.’
She nods. ‘That ties in with the PM’s time of death.’
‘Phone was then either lost, switched off, or destroyed.’
‘Who’s coming up on the call data?’
‘You’ll be surprised to hear that it was almost entirely PAYG unregistered. Dirty phones. His world—’
‘We don’t seem to know much about his world,’ she says. She wonders if Havers has made any effort at all. Has he sent detectives to interview Taylor Dent’s friends and associates? Has he tickled up his Cricklewood contacts – the kinds of guys Dent would have done business with? Has he fuck.