Elizabeth Is Missing (34 page)

I brush my fingers over the bud of a dandelion, the thin petals, pressed together like a nub of velvet. I can’t resist pulling them out, it’s too satisfying to feel the moment of resistance before they break away, each one a millisecond after the last. A snail moves through the undergrowth. “I’ll make you into jam,” I tell it. “I’ll squidge you up and push you through muslin and boil you with sugar.” It pulls its horns in a moment, but doesn’t stop.

And then there is a cry. “Nearly got a piece of metal in my eye. Fuck,” Helen says, climbing out of the hole she’s dug. Her language is really terrible today. “Bit of shoe buckle,” she says. “Wait a sec.” She kneels down and leans into the hole. “There’s something here. Mum!”

I get up creakily and go towards her, and she hands me a scrap of wood, pale except where the soil has made it filthy. The edges are crumbling with damp. Helen pulls more fragments from the earth, and the removal of the wood makes a cavity. Dusty soil begins to trickle downwards into it. There is something yellowish underneath, something smoothly, frighteningly, round, with rows of teeth which bite into the soil as if they could carve a path to the surface. But what do you call it, this thing with no flesh and no hair, this face that stares without any eyes? Helen won’t tell me when I ask, and as more dirt is displaced I see it has a missing piece, a crack, a mark of violence, hollow and dark against the pallor.

“Mum,” Helen says. “Go towards the house, will you?” She reaches down again as I back away and I see she’s got more wood when she stands. More wood and something circular, a little shallow pot. I know even from this distance that it’s navy blue and silver. And I know it once held peach-coloured powder rather than blackish soil. Helen scatters the contents as she walks.

“Let’s get in the car,” she says, very low, her hands on my arms. “Let’s just sit in the car.”

The passenger door is opened and I’m pressed into the seat sideways. Helen kneels on the pavement at my feet and talks into her hand. There’s something nestled in her palm and she pushes it hard against her cheek as she speaks, glancing at the side gate every few seconds, as if she thinks something will escape. Side gate, I think. The side gate is open. It seems important but I don’t know why. Slowly Helen lays out the bits of wood and the half-a-compact on the paving stones. I feel in my bag for the other half, lean down to reunite the two silver-and-blue circles and squeeze my eyes shut against the image of Sukey at our kitchen table sweeping powder over her nose. My middle is pinched by the waistband of my trousers as I bend and the blood seems to rush to my head.

The bits of crumbling wood are like the pieces of a jigsaw, like the shards of a gramophone record. I try to put them together but they are too wet and rotten, like long-stewed meat. It doesn’t matter: I already know they are part of a tea chest, the kind that Frank always had lying around his house, the kind that he stored Sukey’s clothes in after she disappeared.

“Frank,” I say, and my stomach churns. I feel as though I’m back with Audrey, drinking her father’s gin.

When she’s finished speaking, Helen eases a flat oblong away from the skin of her face and lays out more things on the pavement. A handful of broken glass, the edges smoothed like pebbles, a rusted shoe buckle, and the tiny skeletons of two birds, the bones twisted together with wire. Glass eyes are glued still to their skulls and their beaks show traces of some kind of coloured enamel. And I know the last time I came face-to-face with these beaks was in Frank’s house. They flew about her head, the mad woman said. The glass smashed and the birds flew about her head.

A bright, checkered car stops by the house and a man and woman get out. They have white shirts with bulky black vests on top and they’ve been labelled like my
KETTLE
plug and my
TEA
jar. Their label is
POLICE
. Helen jerks as if she’s about to jump to greet them, but her legs shake and she kicks the compact halves apart again. I push them together so that the hinges match up, and I brush more dirt away to make the silver stripes shine. I’ve been bent forward so long that my hands are a purplish red and I can feel my pulse in them. I am top-heavy with blood which throbs against my ears and seems to whisper, “Sukey Sukey Sukey.”

The policewoman goes through the open side gate and comes back out again. “Right,” she says. “I can confirm that you have found human remains.”

“Yes,” Helen says.

“And you’ve taken these things here out of the scene of burial?” the policewoman asks.

“Yes,” Helen says.

She is told off by the policewoman, who says we mustn’t touch anything else. She lists all the things we aren’t allowed to touch, all the things that are in a row at my feet: bits of glass, a make-up container, some wood, bird skeletons. I push myself upright, away from the collection of things, but I have to touch them. I have to.

“And this is not your garden?” the policeman asks.

“No,” Helen says, “it belongs to a friend of my mother.”

The policeman looks at me. His eyebrows go up; he takes a few steps back. “It’s you!” he says. “I can’t believe it. It is you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s me,” I say.

“Don’t you recognize me?” He hunches down so I can see his face better. There’s a boyish grin on it that reminds me of someone. “I’m the one you always report your friend Elizabeth missing to.”

I don’t react quickly enough and a twitch of disappointment crosses his mouth. “Oh, yes,” I say. “Hello.”

“It’s always me,” he says, turning to the policewoman. “I should have followed her lead: she’s been sitting on a centuries-old murder here.”

“It’s not centuries old and we don’t know it’s a murder,” the policewoman says. She pulls at her black vest and faces Helen. “Why were you digging in this garden?”

“I was looking for the body,” Helen says.

“You knew it was here?”

“No, not really.”

The policeman is told to get something from the car and he and the woman begin tying blue-and-white ribbon around a tree; it flaps in the breeze like bunting, but there are no flags, only the words
DO NOT CROSS
. While he is occupied I move my foot so the edge of my shoe is against the tiny skeleton of a bird. The contact makes it possible to breathe again. Blood drains away from my heavy head, and still it seems to speak. Is this what they mean by the blood singing in your veins? And is there a way to stop it?

“You brought the tools with you?” the policewoman says. She doesn’t notice my foot.

“I’m a gardener,” Helen tells her. “I have a gardening business. I usually have shovels, forks, trowels, in the boot of my car.”

The policewoman tells her she’ll have to take the tools for investigation and Helen says she understands. Her hand lifts once from the pavement and there are red ridges on her palm. I offer my hand, wanting to soothe the marks away, but she doesn’t notice. Instead she tries again to get up and the policeman comes closer to help her. The blood has stopped singing in my head, and now the voice is gone I want it back. I lean from the car to feel it throb again, to hear it whisper to me, and I press my fingers to the crumbling wood.

“Please don’t tamper with evidence,” the policewoman says, rolling up the leftover tape. She looks at Helen. “Why didn’t you call the police if you suspected there was a body here?”

Helen lets her arm hang limp in the policeman’s hold. “I didn’t really suspect it.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us to the station,” the policeman says.

He guides Helen away and I let my hand swoop down. In an instant I have a tiny piece of glass in my hand. I hold it hard, the edges smoothed by soil, and I can see the glass dome shining in the light of the fire, the eyes of the birds gleaming. I can see Sukey sewing on the sofa, her hair curling up the fabric behind. It’s so close and so far away and I wish for a moment the glass was sharper so that I could feel it properly.

“Are you sure you don’t want someone to sit in with you?” This man has reddish hair and freckles, so many freckles that it’s hard to make out his features, hard to tell when he smiles. “How are you doing? Would you like any water if you don’t want tea? Are you comfortable?”

No, I can’t get comfortable on this seat, my waist feels as if it’s being pummelled by the top of my trousers. I look to undo the button, but there isn’t one, only elastic. “I wish I could take these off,” I say. “And have one of those things, like a cooking pot for humans. You know. For boiling humans.”

He says he isn’t sure what I mean, and I can’t read his expression because of the freckles. His face is so marked it’s blank. Like the walls of this room. They are so blank that I don’t have to see them at all and if I look past the man sitting opposite me I have space to picture every detail of Sukey’s sitting room.

“Where’s my sister?” I say.

“Do you mean ‘daughter’? Another officer is interviewing her in another room. As I explained before, your daughter is also a witness, so we have to interview you separately. We’ve decided not to caution you, but we are going to have to take a witness statement. Do you understand?”

He’s very neat, this man, despite the mess of freckles on his skin. He sits carefully, facing me, smiling, I think. I press a pebbly piece of glass into my palm. “I’m not a witness,” I say. If only I could take my things off and slide into a pool of water.

“Bath.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s the word I was looking for.”

“Right. Good. Can you tell us anything about the body found in the garden of the property of Elizabeth Markham?”

“Elizabeth is missing,” I say, but the words are like dust.

“Yes, a colleague of mine said you’ve been in several times to report her missing. Was it Mrs. Markham you were looking for?”

I stare at the bare walls, looking through them to Sukey’s sitting room. “The house is full of things,” I say. There’s a shoe scraper by the sofa, and a chipped Chinese vase under the window. It’s full of carved walking sticks, frilly umbrellas, and an old dress sword, and it tips over whenever there’s a breeze. A little writing box has been balanced on a music stool and two marble lions sit at the foot of a washstand. There’s hardly room to move and I have to be careful.

“Mrs. Horsham? You understand what was found in the garden?”

I try to picture it, but I can’t, I don’t have the energy to think of two places. I study every bubble in the grey paint of the wall, trying to be back in that room, with Sukey. If only I could get back there, if only I could be with her again. The smell of coffee interferes, she never drank coffee, and I glance in anger at the white plastic cup on the table.

“Have you any idea how long the body might have been there? We have information—in fact, your daughter suggested—that it could have been there since 1946. Have you got anything to add to that?”

“Nineteen forty-six is when my sister went missing.”

“Susan Gerrard, formerly Susan Palmer. Is that right?”

“Sukey,” I say, and I think of blood singing, but what has blood got to do with anything?

“Sukey? That’s what you called her? And she went missing in the autumn of 1946, correct?”

“Yes. How long ago is that?”

“It’s nearly seventy years.”

I think for a moment of the cold earth around the pale bones and I feel the same cold creep inside me, and if I had known I would willingly have curled into that wooden chest and kept her company for seventy years. I would never have let her be alone all that time. I would have done anything to be near her the way this bit of glass was. I press it between my fingers, feeling how it has warmed from my touch as if some life has been forced into it.

“You’ve seen the body,” the man says. “Or perhaps I should say the skeleton. There is evidently damage to the skull. Can you tell me anything about that?”

“The glass smashed and the birds flew around her head.”

“Birds? It looks as though there’s glass and the remains of birds in with the body. Is that what you’re referring to?”

“It’s what the mad woman said.”

“The mad woman? Who do you mean by that?”

“She hated those birds, Sukey did, all dyed wings and glass eyes. One day they’d fly out and peck her. That’s what she thought. I was more afraid of the other things; the house was full of things to trip over. I thought she’d fall and break her head. I thought it was a death trap.”

“Which house is this you’re talking about?”

“Frank’s house.”

“Frank? Is that Frank Gerrard? We have him down as a possible suspect. Can you tell us anything more about him?”

“He was a jealous man, was Frank.”

“Was he?”

“I don’t know. Someone said he was.”

“Who said?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Okay, we’ll come back to that.” He takes a sip of the coffee and then one of water. “Do you have any knowledge of the whereabouts of Frank Gerrard?”

“No.”

“Did you know he had a record? For disturbing the peace, accepting stolen goods, aggravated assault.”

“I didn’t know.” The tiny bit of glass magnifies the lines on my hand and I think of Sukey sewing and not wanting to disturb her neat row of stitches, and of the fire warming me right through. If I could just get back to that room everything would be right again. I won’t look at the birds on the mantelpiece, I’ll cover them with her shawl, and I’ll help her to make a blind for the kitchen, and when Frank comes home . . .

“When Frank comes home? What? What would happen?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“Okay, I’ll ask you about that again later. Something else we have to do is to establish how the body came to be in the garden of Mrs. Markham’s property. Did your sister have any connection to it?”

“No.”

“But you do believe the body we found to be that of your sister? What made you think she would be there? Did Frank Gerrard have a connection to it, perhaps?”

“He helped someone to plant summer squash.”

“So he had access to the garden?”

“I don’t know.”

“We know he ran a removals business from 1938 to 1946. Did he perhaps deliver furniture there?”

“I don’t know.”