Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner

tarmac is flat and predictable, and with some steps the sun recedes and she can see, only for it to flash off a wing mirror or window – like peering through the slats of a blind. He’ll be going into an interview room, greeting the officers who will tell him what she and Edith have done together behind his back. He might look back towards the station steps, to where they have only just spoken, run a hand through his hair in shock.
    A tree provides welcome shade and she can see gridlock on the road into Huntingdon. She reaches the concrete underpass, the sun slanting against its elephant grey-green hulk, almost painterly. The cars are bumper to bumper into town, and as she reaches the top of George Street, she can sense a frisson in the air. Perhaps it is the drivers craning to see what the hold-up is; the hooting of horns, as they grow tired of the delay; the slowing pedestrians on the pavement. Helena has to weave through a throng as she nears the house itself and then she is in front of the familiar gate, which she has pushed open without thinking so many times, now cordoned with police tape and guarded by a WPC in a fluorescent windcheater and regulation black trousers, her radio crackling with blurred voices.
    Ten feet further down the road is a group of men – they appear from this distance to be a black huddle, like a murder of crows landed on crumbs, but as she gets nearer, Helena sees there are one or two women among them. She sees the cameras slung over their shoulders like handbags and the notepads. They are laughing, at ease. One of them smiles at Helena as she edges past them on the pavement and she increases her pace, pushing her chin down into her scarf. She edges around the next group – two women with toddlers playing about their legs, and a pensioner with a square wheelie shopper. ‘Was at the university, apparently,’ is all she catches, to which one of the women says, ‘Terrible.’
    Helena stops herself from breaking in to a run. Her heart pounds at the thought of the women turning to look at her in horror, their faces ghoulish with opprobrium, the cameras pointed at her with sudden piercing focus.
    Her breathing returns to a more normal rhythm once she is safely inside her flat, until she becomes aware of the beeps coming from the answering machine in the lounge. She unwinds her scarf. Perhaps it is Dr Young. Perhaps he has heard about Edith’s disappearance on the news and has rung to check she is all right.
Beep
. She holds the scarf against her chest. Or her father. If it’s her father, she can call him back, tell him what’s happened and ask to come home for the weekend to Bromley, get away from all the intrusion and the questions.
Beep
.
    What if it’s Edith herself, explaining away all the confusion in that breezy way she has – ‘Lighten up, Hels’ – like the time she’d rung on the intercom at 2 a.m. Helena answered the door irritably in her tartan pyjamas, and when she saw Edith swaying there, said, ‘Is anything wrong?’
    Edith, breathing tannin from some Shiraz or Merlot, her gums stained black, giggling and pushing her way through to the lounge. Edith’s tiny lace bra was lilac with a diamante stud at its centre and so pretty against her skin. Her bones were delicate, breakable, her breasts neat and perfectly round, her arms beautifully thin. Helena found she could circle her thumb and middle finger perfectly around Edith’s wrist like a bracelet. And Edith held out to her in those lovely hands the promise of excitement and discovery, as if the only thing holding them both back was the smallness of Helena’s horizons.
    ‘Let’s loosen you up a bit, Hel,’ Edith murmured, biting at the corner of Helena’s mouth while her hands worked down the buttons on her pyjamas.
    Helena walks slowly to the lounge, placing her scarf on the end of the sofa, unbuttoning her coat. She presses play on the answering machine.
    ‘Hi, this is a message for Helena Reed. It’s Bethan Jones