In the novel The Clocks, Edna Brent was a nineteen year old girl who worked as a typist with the Cavendish Secretarial Bureau. She also performed the duty of a receptionist for the boss Miss Martindale.
During the inquest into the discovery of the body of an unknown man at No. 19 Wilbraham Crescent. Edna was perplexed with what she had heard from the witnesses providing evidence. Outside, she turned down an invitation to lunch from a colleague Maureen West and approached Constable Pierce asked to speak to Inspector Hardcastle. Pierce observed that the inspector was busy with the Chief Constable and told Edna that she could come to the station later. He asked if there was anything important and she walked away saying that it didn't matter except that she couldn't see "how what she had said could have been true..."
Edna did not come back after lunch and her body was later found by Edith Waterhouse, strangled in the phone box at Wilbraham Crescent.
Edna's colleagues described her as "slow on the uptake". She was always worried about something, got muddled up and made mistakes. The more she thought about something, the more muddled she became. After her murder, Inspector Hardcastle recalled that while going to the house of Mrs Lawton, the aunt of Sheila Webb and another of Edna's colleagues, he had passed someone looking like Edna. She looked uncertain, wanted to approach him about something and in the end did not. Hardcastle remembered his first impression of Edna at the Cavendish. She had been preoccupied with a broken stiletto heel and always appeared to have a sweet in the mouth. She was "a slow thinker. A girl probably distrustful of her own mental processes."