But that in itself was not a good enough reason to stop me telling the police what little I knew. You see, what concerned me the most was my role in this scenario. Another thing that Noelle told me the day she told me that she wasn’t Poppy’s real mother was that I was not Poppy’s real father. She told me that the baby had been conceived using sperm she’d bought off the Internet. I’d locked this unpalatable little nugget away with all the other stuff she told me and stuck my head in the sands of denial. Poppy was literally, Laurel,literallythe only good thing that had ever happened to me. My pride and joy. My entire raison d’être. You know how difficult my relationship with Sara has always been. You know how she hated me as a child, spat in my face, bit me and scratched me. I thought that was what fatherhood was. I thought that was the child I deserved. And then Poppy came into my life and she was so exquisite and so clever and she adored me. For the first time in my life I had something beautiful and precious that nobody else had, nobody in the world. And if she wasn’t mine, then my life no longer made any sense to me.
But after watching theCrimewatchspecial I realized that if she was mine and if I told the police what I knew about Noelle and Ellie, that there would be no police officer, no detective, no judge, and no juror that would ever, in a million years, believe that Ellie had been impregnated with my sperm without my knowledge or consent. It was preposterous. Clearly. I would be done, at the very least, for aiding and abetting. And I would be done for rape of a minor. A minor that I’d never even met.
But again I prevaricated. I did not get a DNA test done even though proof that Poppy was not genetically my child would free me to report what I knew to the police. I simply wasn’t ready to let her go, Laurel. I’m so sorry.
Shortly after theCrimewatchspecial I read an interview with you in theGuardian. It was some kind of real-life interest story in the magazine. You said, and I quote: “The nightmare of the thing is the not knowing. The lack of closure. I just cannot move forward without knowing where my daughter is. It’s like walking through sinking mud. I can see something on the horizon, but I can never, ever get to it. It’s a living death.”
And then a month later there were the headlines in the papers. “ELLIE’S REMAINS FOUND.” You had your closure. I came to the funeral. I stood at a respectful remove. I saw your legs buckle as your husband helped you into the crematorium and saw them buckle again on the way out. Closure, it seemed, had brought you nothing but a box of bones. But I could give you something that would get you out of the sinking mud and walking toward the horizon. I could give you Poppy.
62
I became fixated on you, Laurel. I raked the Internet for articles about you, for photographs and clips of the press conference you’d given the day after Ellie disappeared. You were such a refined woman. So succinct and articulate, no words wasted, no emotional incontinence, your pretty hands always twisted together so intricately, the sharply cut hair, the tailored clothes; no lace or buttons or trim. Even in your clothing choices you wasted nothing.
And in watching you I became more and more familiar with Paul. The shirts that looked conventional at first sight until you realized that there was a contrast trim of Liberty print inside the collar. The cuff links that appeared to be tiny dog heads. The slightly unusual tortoiseshell glasses. A flash of geometric-printed silk sock inside a handmade shoe.
Further investigation of such clothing showed that he shopped primarily at Paul Smith and Ted Baker. I began experimenting with a pair of socks here and a silk handkerchief there. Then I took myself for a proper shave in a barbershop. I had never before had a proper shave. In fact I rarely shaved; I tended to let the stubble grow out until my face itched, scratch it all off with a—generally—blunt razor, leave myself with a blotchy, butchered face, and then let it all grow back again. Clothes shopping for me was a joyless affair: a whizz around M&S with a basket twice a year. I began to enjoy browsing these boutiques for gentlemen. I liked the snake-hipped sales assistants, so eager to help, to guide me in the right direction. Then I had a proper haircut, found some products that gave my rather sparse and gravity-challenged hair the appearance of volume and lift, bought a pair of clear-lensed glasses with horn frames, and the transformation was complete.
It was a gradual process, over the course of a couple of months. It wasn’t as if I just suddenly popped up one day with a brand-new image like one of those awful TV makeover shows. I’m not sure anyone I saw regularly even noticed.
I just wanted to show myself to you and for you to like me. That’s all it was. For you to find me familiar. To find me the kind of person with whom you could share a slice of cake. I wanted us to be friends and then I wanted you and Poppy to be friends. Because by now I had had a DNA test done. By now I knew, with only 0.02 percent of a chance of improbability, that Poppy was not my child and that the only person she truly belonged to was you.
I had not expected mutual attraction. I had not expected your hands inside the sleeves of my jumper in the restaurant, our desperate ascent up the stairs of my house that night, your head in the crook of my arm the following morning. Women like you did not like men like me. And I...
No. There’s no defense for it. None. I took advantage. Plain and simple.
But I’m glad at least that you and Poppy have had a chance to get to know each other in relatively normal circumstances, not in the glare of a police operation, not in the strip-lit office of the social services, just as a child and her grandmother, sharing breakfast, going shopping, eating dinner with your family. I hope this means that in the days that follow Poppy will be seamlessly assimilated into the Mack family. I’ve given her the bare bones of the truth. I will leave it to you to decide how much more she needs to know. And remember, this house and everything in it belongs to Poppy. She’ll more than pay her own way in life.
But that brings me to the final, and in some ways, most compelling reason for me not going straight to the police back in May of this year. You’ll notice if you look through the window to your right that there is a flower bed in the garden, newer, higher than the others. Do you see? At the very back? I dug it out in early November, just before I met you.
Noelle Donnelly is under there.
Before that she was in a chest freezer in my cellar. She’d been in there since the night she told me about Ellie. The night she told me Poppy wasn’t mine.
I didn’t mean to kill her, Laurel, I promise you that. It was an accident. I went for her, I wanted to scare her, I wanted to hurt her. I mean, you can imagine, can’t you, how I was feeling, with that woman, that evil woman, in my kitchen, ripping my heart out of my chest. If you had been there, you’d have wanted to hurt her, too; I know you would. But Idid notintend to kill her. Her chair went flying and her head hit the floor and...
Anyway... I’ll let you decide if you want to tell the police. If you want to tell Poppy. But I couldn’t go without telling someone and I know whatever you decide to do, it will be the right thing.
Please, Laurel, forgive me. Forgive me for everything. Forgive me for meeting Noelle, for allowing her into my life; forgive me for not questioning her more when she was pregnant, for not asking more questions about the basement in her house, for not going to the police when I suspected who Poppy’s mother was, for allowing myself to fall in love with you, and for taking these last few weeks with you that were not mine to be taken. Please forgive me.
The horizon is right in front of you, Laurel. March to it right now, with Poppy by your side.
63
The film stops. Silence subsumes the house once more. A quick glance through the front window tells Laurel that Floyd’s car is gone, and that so, by extension, is he. She returns to Floyd’s office and stares at the ceiling. A choking noise comes from somewhere deep inside her. Her baby. Her baby girl. Not tramping the back roads of England with a rucksack on her back, but locked in Noelle Donnelly’s basement growing a baby for her. How long was she there for her? How was she treated? How did she die? And how could Laurel not have known? How many times had she walked those streets in the years after Ellie’s disappearance? How many times had she passed that house, her eye caught by the puff of pink cherry blossom outside Noelle’s basement window? How many times had she been but meters from her own daughter without somehow, through some powerful umbilical connection, feeling that she was there?
Tears of rage explode from her and she thumps Floyd’s desk until her fists feel bruised. She’s about to yell out again when she hears a sound behind her, the creak of the door to Floyd’s study. It opens a crack and there is Poppy. She’s wearing the little jersey and chiffon dress that Laurel bought her in H&M during their shopping expedition. Her hair is bunched inside her fist and she has a hairband and a hairbrush in her other hand.
“I’ve been trying to do a ponytail,” Poppy says, moving toward her, “a high, swingy one. But I can’t get it high enough. And it keeps going all bumpy on the top.”
Laurel smiles and gets up from her chair. “Here,” she says, turning it toward Poppy. “You sit here. I’ll see what I can do. Though it’s been a very long time since I did a high ponytail.”
Poppy sits and passes Laurel the hairband and the hairbrush. Laurel takes the bunched hair from her other hand and starts to brush it. She finds that the act is embedded in her muscle memory. How many mornings, how many times, how many ponytails has she brushed into place? And now it seems her hair-brushing days are not behind her after all. Now it seems that she is a mother again. Something warm and delicate inside her chest opens up like an unfurling flower.
“Where’s Dad?” says Poppy.
“Dad’s not here,” says Laurel carefully. “He’s had to go somewhere.”
Poppy nods. “Is it to do with what he told me last night?”