She opens her eyes and blinks in an effort to adjust to the permanent dusk of the bedroom. She can hear Rosa clattering in the kitchen. Ian will be God-knows-where, rushing about Being Important Yet Again. He’s been calling in favours from his friends on the broadsheets, old Bullingdon chums, giving profile interviews to The Telegraph and The Times – ‘turning the tide’, he called it. ‘Someone has to set the record straight.’ They’ve promised to be sensitive in their probing and give him copy approval before anything is printed.
Even Rollo has a sense of purpose; his father’s son. He is at a meeting at the offices of a missing persons charity, discussing a renewed online campaign involving a thousand tweets or some such. She doesn’t pretend to understand social media or why anyone would waste their time on it, but she is very glad Rollo has it covered.
She hauls herself up off the bed, her hair damp and flattened, pushes her feet into her sheepskin slippers and walks out to the hall and up a flight of wonky narrow stairs, holding tight to the gentle curve of the banister to Edith’s room. On the landing between the children’s bedrooms on this uppermost floor, under a mildewed skylight, is a Victorian doll’s house in the architecture of their own. A Georgian house within a Georgian house. It was given to Edith when she was small by Ian’s mother, Edith Senior. Ian revered the doll’s house in the same way he revered his mother, had objected when Edie wanted to fill it with Polly Pockets, as if this somehow diluted its educational purity, when Miriam felt the whole point of playing was to make something your own. She’d have been rather proud if Edith had scrawled across the prim rosebud wallpaper with an indelible pen.
Ian had insisted their baby daughter be named after his mother, when all Miriam’s friends were calling theirs Chloe or Jessica. These days, of course, the old dowager names are all the rage; even stalwarts of the Tory party call their children Florence and Alfred with a knowing wink. But back then, Miriam had shrunk from the name – softening it to Edie – yet had borne it, like the doll’s house, because she had no choice.
She lies on Edith’s bed, in part to muss up the inert neatness of the duvet; gazes at the black violin case on top of the wardrobe, the clip frame leaning against the wall with a collage of photos from that Italian interrailing trip with Rollo, the two of them smiling on the Spanish Steps. Miriam closes her eyes in order to visualise her daughter – to set her mind on her so strongly that she is all that exists and then perhaps it will come to her: a knowledge of where Edith is and what has happened to her, as if by some supernatural telepathic intuiting. She thinks of the relatives of the missing she’s seen in the past on the news, who would not give up their dogged searches even in the face of overwhelmingly poor odds. Their final argument was always the same: ‘If they were dead, I’d know.’ Or its confluence: ‘They’re alive, I can feel it.’ She had always balked at the irrationality of these statements, the way people clung to a lie, yet now it makes perfect sense to her. They cannot cut the cord, not without a body. A body is what they need, otherwise these madnesses spring up like weeds, uncontrollable.
Perhaps, she thinks now, there is someone – a psychic or a fortune teller – who could enter this other realm with her and tell her what has happened to her daughter. Someone with telepathic powers, who can speak with spirits or tell her the future. Not the terrible frogmen dredging rivers.
She pads down the stairs towards the sounds of Rosa emptying the dishwasher, through to the front lounge where the curtains are drawn against the rubberneckers, the lamps lit as if it were evening. Their iMac is asleep but she only has to tap a key for it to stir into life. She daren’t Google ‘Edith Hind’. She knows all manner of salacious rumour is floating about out there, just waiting to be read and wept over; vicious messages from trolls who are actually fourteen-year-olds in affluent bedrooms, their mothers grilling their fish fingers downstairs.
No, instead she types ‘psychic NW3’ into the search field. There are fifteen serving her area, according to the Yellow Pages, which additionally provides a useful map. She clicks on solveyourmystery.com, a site advertising tarot, palmistry, and compassionate psychic readings. It is probably the word ‘compassionate’ which secures her business.
Manon
It travels up her spine in a cold bubble: horror, close to excitement.
‘This is a fuck-up,’ Harriet is saying, pacing. ‘A massive fucking fuck-up of the first fucking order.’
‘When did she … Didn’t she call for assistance?’ Kim says.