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Tess: June 2018

The last time I saw Edie she was slipping through a gap in the hedge at the back of our school. One moment she was there, the next she was gone, like Alice Through the Looking Glass. And like Alice, I thought one day she’d return.

My train is sitting at a red signal, a fire on the line outside Coventry is causing delays and we’re already forty minutes late. People tut and glare at their phones. I’m the only one hoping the signal stays red.

We’ve received calls before to say a body’s been found. Only to be told later that it’s too old, too young, the wrong height. This will be another mistake. So why is my heart thudding against my chest, why is Dad so certain it’s her this time, when he’s been through so many scares before, why do I dread the train ever reaching its destination?

The gap in the hedge led to a route home via the canal. The police searched its towpath repeatedly in the week after Edie’s disappearance. Only her leather school bag was found, flung in the water, its strap caught on the bars of a discarded shopping trolley. In it were her schoolbooks, comb, Discman and a purse holding four pounds twenty-two pence in change. She even left one of her records, a Northern soul track Ray had given her.

The police brought the bag to me.

‘Do you recognise everything, is anything missing?’ a policewoman asked.

‘The photograph,’ I said.

‘What photograph?’

‘Edie keeps a photograph of us. She always carries it with her.’

It was the sole copy of a family portrait, the negatives lost long ago. In it we’re about three or four years old. Edie is sitting on Mum’s lap, looking up into her face. Mum gazes back, smiling. Dad’s turned towards them, proud and protective. I’m on Dad’s knee, swivelled away from the rest of the family, pointing to something out of shot.

There aren’t many snaps of Mum; we didn’t own a camera. Uncle Ray took them. I have the one of Mum at nineteen, just before she married Dad. She looks so like Edie, tall, slender, graceful. Her expression is difficult to read, a half-smile flickers round her lips, her eyes slightly turned from the camera, as if a full gaze would be giving too much of herself away. And there are pictures of birthdays and Christmases. But Edie loved that one of us all together, when we were very young.

‘Are you certain she had it? When was the last time you saw it?’ the policewoman asked.

‘I’m not sure, but she’d never leave it. She must have taken it with her.’

‘She may have removed it from her purse or lost it months ago.’

‘She wouldn’t remove it or lose it,’ I said. ‘She took it with her.’

The policewoman smiled, made a note and started asking me if Edie had been in any trouble recently.

Over the years I repeated to Dad, Uncle Ray and Auntie Becca about the photograph, that Edie would never leave it behind, she took it from her bag, which means she must be alive. None of them listen. Perhaps Edie knew that too, that only I would realise its significance. A message to me alone.

So I never believed she was dead, never gave up hope, but my heart still thuds as the train lurches forwards for the final stretch of the journey. Is it Edie?