“Oh!” says Laurel. “That’s fabulous! He’ll love it!”
“Because, he is, isn’t he? He’s ridiculous about coffee. You know that stuff he has to have otherwise he says he’d rather drink water. Grown in Ethiopia with water from angels’ tears...”
Laurel smiles and says yes, lots of people are a bit weird about coffee these days and she really can’t tell the difference and she’s the same with wine, it all tastes the same to her unless it’s bad and as she’s talking her eyes pass across the detail of Poppy’s room and she stops and clasps her chest.
“Poppy,” she says, getting to her feet, taking a few steps across the room, “where did you get those candlesticks?”
Poppy glances up at the top shelf of her bookshelves where a pair of chunky geometric silver candlesticks are displayed.
“I don’t know,” she says, “they’ve always been there.”
Laurel reaches to pick one up. It’s hugely heavy in her hand, as she’d known it would be. Because they are her candlesticks, the candlesticks taken in the burglary four years after Ellie disappeared, the candlesticks she’s always been certain Ellie took.
“I don’t really like them,” says Poppy. “I think they were Mum’s. You can have them if you like.”
“No,” says Laurel, putting it back on the shelf, her stomach churning over and over. “No. They’re yours. You keep them.”
49
THEN
Ellie lay on the bed. The moon shone down on her, waxy blue; the foliage outside rustled in a sharp breeze, crackling and popping like distant fireworks. She tried to swing her legs off the bed, but they were too weak. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. Six days ago? Maybe seven?
She was partway to delirium, but still aware on some subliminal, terrifying level that she had been abandoned. She could hear her baby crying upstairs from time to time and an ache would emanate from her heart to every point on her body. But she had no voice to call with and no will to live. Her head was pulsing, aching, sending her strange pictures, flashes of imagery, like scenery lit up at night by strikes of lightning. She saw her mother, stirring a teabag in a mug. She saw her father, zipping up his jacket. She saw Theo, throwing a ball for his little white dog. She saw Noelle, turning over her homework, sliding her glasses up her nose. She saw a house they’d rented in the Isle of Wight one summer. She saw the pale brown pony that stood in a field at the bottom of the garden, eating apples from their hands. She saw Poppy, lying on her back on Ellie’s bed, making Os with her tiny red mouth. She saw Hanna, twirling her head around and around, her waist-length ponytail spinning above her head like a propeller. She saw her own funeral. She saw her mother crying. Her father crying. She saw the corpses of her dead hamsters sprinkled on top of her coffin like sods of earth.
She saw herself floating above her coffin.
She saw herself floating higher and higher. Below her she saw her room. Her sofa bed. The grimy, unwashed bedsheets, the tangled knot of duvet. The plastic cages filled with death. The bin overflowing with empty crisp packets. The blocked toilet bowl streaked brown with rust and bacteria.
She crossed her arms across her chest.
She closed her eyes.
She let herself float higher and higher until she could feel the clouds against her skin, until she could feel her mother’s arms tight around her, her breath against her cheek.
50
When Poppy was around two or three years old I decided to put my house on the market. You were giving me a little money here and there for her upkeep but I was too proud to ask you for more and, besides, it had never been about money, none of it. But I was poor then, Floyd. Like properly poor. I could only work when Poppy was with you and she was only with you half the time. So I decided to release some equity. We didn’t need a big house on three floors. We’d make do in a small flat.
But then of course I remembered the spanner in the works.
That girl. That bloody girl.
She’d passed over at some point. I don’t know when exactly. It was for the best, I’d say. Yes, it was for the best. According to the papers they’d scaled back the search for her. That to me said they had her as a runaway. So I decided to make it look that way.
I’d kept the bag she’d been carrying when she first arrived. Which shows, doesn’t it, that I’d been half intending to let her go at some point, that I wasn’t entirely bad. I took the keys from her bag and when I saw the mother leaving the house with her swimming kit I let myself in through her back door and I took some things that I thought the girl would have taken if she was heading out of the country: a scruffy old laptop, some cash, a pair of candlesticks that she might have wanted to sell. I’d always liked those candlesticks—they’d sat on top of the piano by the table where we worked. I’d admired them once and the girl had said something about taking them on to theAntiques Roadshowone day to find out how much they were worth.
I also took a cake. I was reminded when I saw it there of a day when the pleasant mother had brought us two slices of still-warm chocolate cake instead of the posh biscuits and the girl had said, “Is it one of Hanna’s?” and the mother had said, “Yes. Freshly baked.” And the girl had turned to me and said, “My sister makes the best cakes in the world. You will never eat a better chocolate cake than this.” I can’t say I can particularly recall the cake or whether or not it was the best in the world, but I do remember the girl’s face when she told me that, the anticipation shining in her eyes, the unabashed pleasure she took in the eating of it.
It’s odd, you know, because when I look back to those days when I was her tutor I feel sure I must have dreamed the whole thing, because by the end I swear I had no idea what I’d ever seen in her. No idea at all.
She was, after all, just a girl.
I looked everywhere for her passport. The passport was the key to everything. But it could not be found for love or money. And then I had the most brilliant idea. I’d seen her sister when I’d been watching the house and the two girls were very similar to look at. So I went to the sister’s bedroom and found her passport in under a minute. I slipped it in the big bag with the computer and the candlesticks and the cake in its Tupperware box and ten minutes later I was home.
It’s hard to talk about what came next, because it did require a certain level of barbarity, I must be honest. A few years earlier, when the smell from the basement had become problematic (I had a visit from the next-door neighbors shortly after she passed, asking after it. I told them it was the drains), I’d moved the girl to a blanket box in the attic. So while Poppy stayed the night at yours I took her from there (well, I say “her”; I think “it” would be more accurate by this stage) and I dropped her into the boot of my car along with her rucksack, which I’d packed with the old clothes and the passport, and I drove through the dark of night to Dover. Then I found a quiet lane deep, deep in the middle of nowhere, and I laid some of her bones down in the road and drove my car over them and then I dropped them into a ditch, dropped her rucksack at her side, kicked over some leaves and mud and left, pretty sharpish. The rest of her bones I took to a municipal dump a few miles down the road.
I thought she would be found almost immediately. I’d made hardly any effort to hide her. I wanted her found. Wanted it over. Wanted, on some subconscious level, to be caught out. I’d barely given a thought to the forensic aspect of the thing, after all, hadn’t thought about the fibers and the tire marks and the like. But months and months passed by and it was as though it had never happened. It seemed I’d got away with it, completely.