Yes, My Darling Daughter

by Margaret Leroy

  Her eyes are on me, cool and clear.

  “I’m not going back to London,” she tells me. “You can’t make me.”

  “But sweetheart, if you’re unhappy here . . .”

  “I don’t like London,” she tells me. “I don’t want to go back to London.” She stares at me. She’s tiny and fragile and utterly implacable. “London isn’t home.”

  I hate it when she says that.

  42

  WE GO BACK to Ballykilleen to speak to Brian.

  We leave Sylvie waiting in the car with picture books and a packet of potato chips. I stand where I can see the car. I wave, but all I can see is the top of her head.

  Brian doesn’t seem at all surprised to see us.

  “You two again? Well, that was quick,” he says.

  “Brian.” I swallow hard. “We didn’t quite tell you the truth, the time we came before. As you suspected.”

  He nods, waits for me to go on.

  “Why we came to see you—why we came here at all—it’s because of my daughter,” I tell him. “Because of Sylvie. There’s something wrong, and we don’t know what. She sometimes gets very upset.” I clear my throat. The words are hard to form. “And we think, well, that it’s possible—that she could be remembering a previous life.”

  He raises one skeptical eyebrow. “Well, that’s a new one on me, Grace.”

  I feel the heat in my face.

  “It’s why we asked about Flag Cottage. She seemed to get so excited when she saw it, she keeps saying she lived there before . . . Adam’s a researcher, he works at a university.” I hope that saying this will give us a more respectable air.

  To my relief, he doesn’t laugh or immediately dismiss what I’ve said. He muses on this for a moment.

  “To be honest, I’m not the kind of man who goes in for that kind of thing. You die and there’s an end of it, that’s how I see it,” he says. “But the fact is, in this line of work you need an open mind.” He leans a little toward us. His elbows are resting on the desk, his long hands wedged in his thatch of thick pale hair. “Some forces use psychics, of course. When they can’t get a lead on a case. It’s done a lot more often than the public might suppose. Well, you’ll know about that from your researches, Adam . . .”

  Adam nods.

  “So let’s push the boat out,” says Brian. “Let’s imagine that your little girl is really onto something. Talk me through that.”

  “There’s a place we’ve driven past,” I tell him. “Driving to Coldharbour from here, where the road turns away from the coast. There’s a big oak tree and a track that leads off the road. It looks like there’s an old quarry there.”

  “That’s Gaviston Pits,” says Brian. “They’ve quarried there for centuries. Dreary spot, I always think.”

  “Sylvie keeps being sick when we pass it. It’s happened twice now. Always at just the same place.”

  “Poor little kid,” says Brian with ready empathy.

  “And we wondered if something had happened there—maybe a crime or something?”

  He shakes his head. “The only major crime round here has been Alice’s disappearance. If it was a crime, that is. And her car was found ten miles away, on the road going south out of Coldharbour. There’s nothing at all to link Alice with Gaviston Pits.”

  I don’t say anything. I feel a little drag of disappointment.

  “So I guess we’ve got ourselves a mystery here,” he tells us. “Kids can get frightened of anything, of course. When my Amy was little, she had a thing about feathers. Oh, and those hot-air dryers you get in public lavatories. Absolutely terrified.”

  “But there’s water at Gaviston Pits,” I say. “And she told us this thing . . .” My voice sounds thin and hollow. “She said she died in water.” Something unreadable moves over Brian’s face when I say this. “She couldn’t tell us where it was. But we saw the water at Gaviston Pits. You could drown—or hide a body.”

  “You’re thinking, if it was suicide, that maybe Alice drowned herself and Jessica there?”

  “We wondered.”

  He shakes his head.

  “She’d never have managed to get from the road to the water. The sides are too steep, she’d never have found a way down.”

  “There’s a path down the side,” says Adam. “It isn’t all that difficult.”

  Brian is surprised. “You’ve been there?”

  “Yes,” says Adam.

  Brian doesn’t say anything.

  I glance toward Sylvie. The car is steaming up; she’s drawing faces on the window. She’s restless. Soon she’ll come and get us. I’m trying to remember all the things we need to say.

  “We talked about it with Brigid—you know, at St. Vincent’s,” I say.

  “Yes, I know Brigid,” he says.

  “And Brigid was hinting that people suspected Gordon. That Gordon used to beat Alice up.”

  Brian’s mouth is tight. “People can suspect all they like. But Gordon was out of the frame. He was on the road in Limerick when Alice disappeared. We saw the hotel register.”

  “And what about Marcus Paul?” I say. “I mean, Alice worked for Marcus. And Brigid said they were close . . .”

  Brian is shaking his head even before I’ve finished.

  “His alibi checked out,” he says. “Marcus was in Galway on the day it happened, with Brigid, at the races. In the VIP tent, most likely, guzzling lots of champagne. Lucky beggars. You’ll have met Marcus, of course?”

  “Sort of. Well no, not really,” I say, then think how stupid this sounds. I see Adam glance at me, startled.

  “Marcus—well, he’s one of those men—how to put it? Marcus knows how the world works.” I can hear the respect in Brian’s voice. “It all looks so easy for Marcus, he wears his life like it’s tailored just for him.” I think of the man I saw in the bar—his patrician air, his rather proprietorial gaze. This seems an apt description. “You’ve probably seen his house from the road. Kinvara House. Finest house in the county, that.”

  Sylvie is beckoning through the car window. She thinks we’re taking too long.

  “This quarry—Gaviston Pits,” says Adam. “Did you search it after Alice and Jessica disappeared?”

  “Well, not as such,” says Brian. “There really wasn’t a reason to.”

  “Could you search it now?” I ask him. “Would you consider doing that?”

  He smiles indulgently at me. “Sorry, Grace. The case is closed. It’s cost us hundreds of thousands already, with nothing to show for it—no result, nothing.”

  “But, if they might be under there . . .”

  He shakes his head. “It isn’t that easy,” he says.

  Adam looks rather deliberately toward Brian’s desk and the photos of his children.

  “Jessica Murphy was just the same age as your daughter Amy, you said.”

  He’s trying to speak so casually, but I see the urgency in his face, the little lines between his brows, as sharp as though cut with a blade.

  Brian nods. “There are cases that really get to you,” he tells us. “And this one got to me. I remember how it happened. It was when the family gave me a list of the things that Jessica had on. I remember the items even now. Trainers with air bubbles in the soles, and those bits of jewelry they go for—lockets and bracelets and so on—and an *NSYNC sweatshirt. Exactly like the things my Amy wore.”

  “It must really bring it home to you,” says Adam.

  Brian nods. “Yes, it does that . . . Look, I might just take myself off and have a snoop around Gaviston Pits. Considering what you told me . . .”

  43

  SYLVIE DOESN’T WANT breakfast. She says she will stay in the bedroom and play.

  I hesitate. I don’t like to have her out of my sight. But I tell myself I mustn’t be overprotective. Nothing could happen to her—it’s such a small hotel, and we won’t be far away.

  “Okay, sweetheart. If you need me, just come down to the dining room,” I tell her.

  “Y
es, Grace.”

  Adam is at our table already when I get there.

  “No Sylvie?”

  “She wasn’t hungry,” I say.

  He has a rather triumphant smile.

  “I got hold of Gordon,” he tells me. “I got his number from Brigid.”

  This amazes me.

  “But—how did you explain it? What did you say?”

  “I was pretty straight with him, really. I said that we’d driven past Flag Cottage. That Sylvie seemed to have some kind of psychic connection with it, and that she’d begged to see inside it. He’s working there this morning, and he’d be happy to show us inside.”

  I eat my breakfast quickly. I’m longing to tell her.

  Outside the door of our bedroom I feel a flicker of panic—I can’t hear any sound from the room. But then I go in and she’s there, of course, rearranging her animals.

  “Sylvie. We’re going to do what you wanted. We’re going back to Flag Cottage, and we’re going to see inside it. Adam’s fixed it,” I tell her.

  Her face is luminous.

  She’s already dressed for the day, but she insists on changing. She wants to put on her favorite clothes, her suede laced boots and her daisy dungarees.

  “Do I look nice, Grace?” she says when she’s ready. “Will they still like me?”

  “You look lovely,” I tell her, and hold her for a moment.

  She’s so happy, I’m frightened for her.

  The man who opens the door is very tall and broad-shouldered, with dandruff-flecked black hair that falls forward over his face. He’s wearing paint-stained clothes, and there’s a blur of wood dust on him. He must have been working hard. His forehead glistens, a smell of sweat hangs about him.

  “I’m Gordon Murphy,” he tells us.

  He brushes his palms on his trousers and reaches out to shake hands.

  I glance at Sylvie. She has a happy, expectant smile.

  I’m rather nervous of him, remembering what Brigid said, how there were people who thought he’d murdered Alice. But he’s not what I’d expected. There’s something hunched and cowed about him, that look tall people sometimes have, as though he’s never quite grown accustomed to using up so much space.

  We introduce ourselves.

  “And this is Sylvie,” I tell him.

  “Honestly, Grace.” She smiles benignly at me, as though I amuse her with all my mistakes. “Honestly. Of course he knows who I am.”

  She pushes past him into the hall. I’m startled. It’s so unlike her to move ahead so boldly. Gordon stands aside, and we follow her in.

  The hall has no furniture. Paintpots are piled in the corner. There’s a resinous scent of wood dust and the headachy smell of new paint. There’s a chill in the place, as though it hasn’t been heated for ages, and it has that sad, transitional feel of all uninhabited houses.

  “Sorry it’s all such a mess,” he says. “I’ve been doing a bit of sanding.”

  The kitchen and the living room lead off from the hall. Their doors are open. Sylvie darts into the kitchen. It looks much as it looked from the garden, the walls stripped back to the plaster, lumps of insulation hanging loose. Sylvie spins around rapidly, her bright glance flicking across the room. There’s such intensity to her.

  There’s a cupboard door beside the sink, as tall as a door to a room. Sylvie pulls it open. Inside is an old-fashioned walk-in pantry with floor-to-ceiling shelves.

  I’m embarrassed.

  “Sylvie. You mustn’t do that. You can’t just go opening doors in other people’s houses.”

  But it’s as if she hasn’t heard me.

  “Don’t worry,” says Gordon. “It’s okay by me. She can have a good poke around if she wants.”

  The pantry is almost empty—there’s just a pack of Marlboros and a tin of instant coffee powder. Whatever she’s looking for isn’t here. Her shoulders seem to sag a little. She closes the door, goes back into the hall. Gordon follows.

  She pushes into the living room, the room we looked into before. The tarnished mirror still hangs on the wall, holding the white of the sky and the budding green of the garden, but Gordon has swept the rubbish away and he’s started sanding the floor. A mist of wood dust hangs in the air; it catches the back of your throat.

  “It’s a lovely room,” I say to Gordon.

  “I’m planning to open the fireplace up,” he tells me. “But the old boiler’s still behind there, so it’s quite a lot of work . . .”

  “You’re selling up, your neighbor told us,” says Adam.

  Gordon nods. “It’s a while now since I lived here. We had our troubles, back then.” It’s as though the air in the place is subtly changed when he says that. “Well, maybe you’ve heard a bit about that.”

  “Yes. Just the outline,” says Adam. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I could never live here again,” says Gordon.

  He’s standing in a pool of light that falls through the wide window. In the unforgiving sunlight, you can see how lined his face is.

  “No. Of course not,” says Adam. “Of course you wouldn’t want to.”

  There are questions we need to ask him, about the disappearance, about his family. But I can’t ask these things—not now that I’ve met him and seen the grief in his face—can’t say, Sylvie might be remembering a past life here with you. She could have been your daughter or your wife . . . It seems too bizarre, too intrusive, to say that. Adam too is quiet. Perhaps he feels the same.

  Sylvie glances around briefly, but whatever it is she wants so urgently doesn’t seem to be here. She opens a door to the side of the hearth. There are steep stairs behind it. She clambers up the stairs.

  “Sylvie, be careful,” I call, not wanting to let her out of my sight.

  “She’ll be okay,” Gordon tells me. “There aren’t any holes in the floor or anything.”

  Our footsteps seem too loud on the uncarpeted stairs.

  We follow Sylvie into the bedroom that runs along the front of the house. It’s a big room stretching the width of the place, with a steeply sloping ceiling. It must have been a child’s room. There’s a rickety dressing table with cartoon cutouts stuck to it, and Tom and Jerry wallpaper that someone has started to strip in a rather random way.

  Sylvie walks around the edge of the room, trailing her fingers across the things she passes—the glass top of the dressing table, the mantelpiece, the walls—with quick little darting gestures.

  Gordon watches her, smiles. “I guess you like this room the best. Well, no surprises there.”

  “It’s my room, isn’t it?” she says to Gordon.

  “This is the one you’d choose, then, is it?” he asks her. “If you lived at Flag Cottage?”

  She frowns slightly. She turns to me.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it, Grace? It’s the best room.”

  “This was always a favorite room,” says Gordon. “It’s got a great view of the sea.”

  He gestures toward the window.

  “I was wondering whose bedroom this was?” Adam’s voice is tentative, careful. “When you were all living here in the house?”

  “It was my daughter’s room,” says Gordon. A shadow crosses his face.

  There’s a low built-in cupboard beside the fireplace. Sylvie opens the cupboard door, gets down on her knees, half disappears inside. But there’s nothing much in the cupboard, just an empty cardboard box and some scrunched-up sheets of newspaper. She crawls back out again. Her hands are dark with dust, and there’s a lost, troubled look on her face.

  I go to look through the window. When we came here at sunset, with the sky all colored, it seemed such a wonderful place, but today the view seems bleak to me, these lonely fields of gorse and stones, and beyond them the endless shivering gray of the sea. The sadness of the house presses down—a feeling of incompleteness, of something torn or broken.

  There’s another bedroom along the back of the house, looking out over the garden—the shaggy lawn and blossoming apple tree�
��and next to it a bathroom. Sylvie leads us through the rooms. In the bathroom the shower curtain is pulled across the bath. Sylvie pushes it back and checks behind it. But now there’s something saddened and disconsolate about her. Every room we enter, she seems less happy, less sure, her brightness clouding over.

  “Well, that’s it. Now you’ve seen the whole place,” says Gordon.

  “Yes. Thank you,” I say.

  At the top of the stairs, as Sylvie is just about to go down, she waits for Gordon, and reaches out and puts her hand in his. He seems at once touched and unnerved. He glances back at me anxiously, not knowing what I’ll make of this.

  “Your little one’s right,” he tells me. “You need to take care on these stairs. We wouldn’t want to go flying, would we?” Trying to smooth it over.

  They walk down the stairs together. Adam watches everything.

  She stops three steps from the bottom, lets go of Gordon’s hand.

  “I want to be jumped down,” she says.

  I go to swing her down the steps.

  “Not you, Grace,” she tells me. “Him.”

  But I do it anyway.

  Gordon turns to face us. “Well, that’s the grand tour,” he tells us. “Now, anything else I can help you folks with at all?”

  “No, I think we’ve got the picture,” says Adam. “You’ve been extremely helpful.”

  “Yes, thank you,” I say. “You’ve been so kind. Sorry we bothered you like this . . .”

  I’m about to walk to the door.

  Sylvie goes up to Gordon, presses herself against him, lifts her face toward him as though expecting a kiss. A hot embarrassment washes through me.

  Gordon blushes. He doesn’t know how to handle this. He takes a step away from her, ruffles her hair with a small, uneasy laugh.

  “Sylvie. We need to go now,” I tell her. “Let Gordon get on with his work.”

  She doesn’t move. There’s a little frown of perplexity in her face. I feel a flicker of panic. For a moment I think that she isn’t going to come—that I’ll have to drag her away from him, that she’ll start screaming.