Yes, My Darling Daughter

by Margaret Leroy

  I glance at Sylvie. She has The Very Hungry Caterpillar open on her lap. She’s pressing her finger into the holes where the caterpillar has eaten through. She seems unaware of everything that’s going on around her. We’re parked much farther down the road than usual. I hope we’re far enough away from the place where she always gets sick.

  A fevered curiosity has me in its grip.

  “I need to see what’s going on,” I tell him.

  “Yes, you go.” Though I know he’s curious too, that really he’d want to come with me. “I’ll stay here with Sylvie.”

  I get out. Sylvie clambers into my seat and thrusts her book into his hands.

  I walk along the path. It’s mistier here than it was on the coast. The world is breathing out moisture, I can feel the wet on my hair. The brambles snatch at the legs of my jeans, and the air around the flowering gorse is thick with coconut scent.

  I come to the track that Adam found, that snakes down the side of the quarry. Someone has cut back the bushes, and I have to stop, there’s tape across the path. Down at the bottom of the track, at the muddy margins of the pool, there’s a group of gardai standing. Most of them are in uniform, and they’re quietly talking together, and it all seems very calm and unrushed, but I notice that nobody smiles. I see a diver surface: in his rubber wet suit he’s sleek as a seal, and silver ripples move out from him. He pushes up his face mask and shouts to the waiting people, and his voice has the echoey, lonely sound of voices heard across water, as though he’s calling from very far away. Then he pulls his mask down and glides back under the surface of the pool.

  Brian is there, talking with a lean blond woman. She has a hard, polished look and an authoritative air. I think she must be senior to him.

  “Brian!”

  He hears, looks up and sees me: he doesn’t seem surprised. He raises his hand in greeting.

  “You can come through,” he calls.

  He has such a solemn air. I wish he weren’t so serious.

  I duck below the tape and scramble down the path. Insects buzz around me. They seem too loud, and ominous, like the crackling of a kettle boiling dry.

  When I come to the water margin, Brian turns to me and puts his hand on my arm.

  “Grace, this is Inspector Maria Grenville,” he says. “Maria, this is Grace Reynolds, who I told you about.”

  She has cool gray eyes and an efficient handshake.

  There’s a little silence. The woman’s gray gaze is on me. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. I realize that Brian must have told her all about us.

  “Grace,” says Brian then. “What I’m going to tell you now is in the strictest confidence.”

  I nod, not quite understanding.

  “It’s not how we’d normally do it. But the situation is really very unusual,” he says. “And we’ve sent officers round already to speak to Deirdre and Gordon . . .”

  My pulse is skittering off. I feel the beginnings of fear.

  Brian clears his throat. “It looks like you’ve been proved right—you and Sylvie,” he says.

  I’m not so sure now that I want to be right.

  “We’ve found something,” he tells me.

  For a moment he doesn’t say anything more, and I realize I am holding my breath.

  “They were on the floor of the quarry,” he says then.

  “They?”

  “The divers found two bodies—an adult and a child.”

  My heart lurches.

  “Oh God.”

  “Obviously we don’t know for sure, not till we get the forensic reports.”

  “They’re Alice and Jessica.”

  “Yes, probably, Grace,” he tells me. He’s anxious, a little defensive. “Hindsight’s a wonderful thing, of course . . . But we should have searched more thoroughly before.”

  “Do they show—? I mean, can anyone tell—how they died?” I say.

  He turns to the woman.

  “There were stones found by the bodies and caught up in their clothing,” she says. “We can’t be sure, but they don’t look like stones you’d find in the quarry.”

  “You mean—someone weighted them down?” I say. “Alice, before she killed herself? Alice put stones in their pockets—her own and her daughter’s—so that they’d drown?”

  “That would be one theory,” says the woman. “That this was all Alice’s doing.”

  But there’s something distanced about the way she says this. I know she doesn’t think it.

  “And the other theory?” I ask her. “What would the other theory be?”

  “It all needs to go to forensics, of course,” says Brian.

  “Yes, I know,” I tell him.

  “But we think there’s the mark of a gunshot on the child’s rib. We think that the child was shot before her body was put in the water. It may not have been that that killed her, but it does look as though she was shot.”

  “Alice?” I say. “Could Alice have shot her?”

  He shakes his head. “No one who knew her believed that Alice had ever handled firearms, and no one reported a stolen gun. It’s as hard to get hold of a gun here as it would be in England,” he says. “So that does seem highly unlikely.”

  “You think someone else killed them?” I say.

  “There are lots of ifs and buts,” he says. “But that’s our thinking at the moment. That they were shot by some other person. And the stones were put in their clothes to make sure the bodies stayed down, to hide the evidence. The drowned resurface in four or five days—they fill with gas and come up again. People sometimes forget that. Your murderer isn’t always the brightest spoon in the drawer. This guy, though—you feel it was all quite organized. He knew what he was doing . . .”

  “Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” says the woman.

  “Sorry, ma’am.” He turns to me. “But basically, yes, that’s our thinking. That our theory about what happened may have been totally wrong.”

  “D’you have any suspects?” I say, thinking of Gordon and what Brigid told us about him. But even as I think this, I don’t want it to be true, remembering the bashful man who showed us around Flag Cottage.

  The woman gives me a severe look. “Obviously we have to wait for the forensic surgeon’s report. We need to take it a step at a time.”

  “Yes, of course,” I say.

  “I’ll ring you, Grace,” says Brian. “As soon as there’s anything else.”

  “Can I tell Adam?” I say.

  “Certainly,” he says.

  “You’ve been very helpful,” says the woman. She shakes hands again, rather formally. “We’ll keep in touch,” she tells me.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  I climb back up the stony path, slipping a bit as loosened pebbles skid away from my feet. At the top I duck under the cordon tape. Ahead of me at the quarry entrance, the ambulance is pulling out. I suppose it will be going to Barrowmore Hospital, to the mortuary there. I think of those hushed, bleak rooms that you sometimes see on television, with steel pull-out drawers for the bodies. The ambulance moves slowly. It has its flashing lights on, but it isn’t using its siren. It seems unnervingly quiet, like something seen in a dream.

  I’m nearly back at the car. I can see Adam reading to Sylvie. They’re laughing together. I guess they’re chanting the list of food that the caterpillar has eaten: “one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone . . .” They haven’t seen me yet.

  I turn, run back along the path. There’s something else I’ve suddenly thought of, something I have to find out. I dive below the cordon tape and scramble down the track.

  Brian is still there with the blond inspector, looking out over the water.

  “Brian.” I’m gasping for breath, my voice is husky and thin.

  I clutch his wrist. The woman looks sharply at me.

  “Brian,” I say again. “When you said the bodies were probably Alice and Jessica, was there anything about them that made you think that?”

  He hesi
tates, looks to the woman as though for permission. She nods.

  “They found a bracelet,” he tells me. “On the floor of the quarry by Jessica’s body. It must have fallen off her wrist as she—well, bodies decompose, of course. It isn’t very pleasant . . .”

  “A bracelet?”

  He nods.

  “This little charm bracelet she had. It was on the list of her things when she went missing. I noticed because my daughter had a bracelet exactly the same.”

  I don’t say anything. I’m staring at him.

  He thinks I haven’t understood.

  “They were quite a fad with girls in those days,” he tells me. “They got them from Claire’s Accessories in Galway. These little bracelets. You know the kind of thing?”

  “I can imagine,” I tell him.

  “My Amy simply had to have one,” he says. “They used to collect the charms and swap them. They thought the charms would bring them luck.” He’s chewing his lip; his mouth is puckered, as though he has a bitter taste. “Well, maybe it worked for some of them. But not for Jessie,” he says.

  My heart is pounding so hard, I wonder if he can see it, if it’s making my body shake.

  “Could you show me?”

  Brian hesitates.

  “I mean, I know there must be rules about this,” I tell him. “But it could be important—you know, for Sylvie.”

  He glances at the woman.

  She nods slightly. “I’m fine with that,” she says. “In the circumstances.”

  He puts his hand on my arm.

  “Okay, I’ll show you,” he says.

  He climbs the track ahead of me. He seems to walk so slowly, taking each step with such deliberation. Something inside me is screaming at him. I’m seized by a desperate urgency—I could run all the way up the path.

  When we reach the road, he takes me across to one of the garda cars. A muscular young sergeant is sitting in the driving seat. He smells of some rather astringent cologne and he’s drinking coffee from a flask. He turns and half smiles at Brian—not a proper smile. He too has a touch of solemnity.

  Brian opens the side door.

  On the seat there’s a box that holds evidence bags of clear plastic. Brian riffles through the bags, touching them so delicately. He finds the one he’s looking for and holds it out to me.

  The sun is coming out now, and it shines on the plastic and turns it opaque for a moment—or maybe there’s something inside me that refuses to see. The world is stilled around me. There’s a splash as the sergeant tips the dregs of his coffee out the window, the snap of a twig as Brian shifts his weight, and both these sounds seem far too loud. I realize that I’m shivering. Then Brian lowers his hand, so the light doesn’t fall directly on the plastic, and I can see them clearly now, the bracelet and the charms.

  The bracelet part and the charms are made from different metals. The bracelet part is some sort of alloy, all stained with a black-brown tarnish, but the charms must be plated with silver, because they haven’t corroded—even under all that water, after all those years. I stare at the bright shapes of them. A pair of ballet shoes, a heart, an intricate J for Jessica. A tiny, glittery dragon, catching the light of the sun.

  51

  “ADAM.”

  I mouth at him through the car window, beckon to him. My body feels strange, like it’s not quite under control.

  He speaks to Sylvie, gets out of the car, closes the door behind him. His expression changes once he’s there in front of me—he has a somber, expectant look, no smile. I wonder what he’s responding to, what he can see in my face.

  I stand there for a moment, not knowing how to begin. I feel I can’t quite trust myself, that I might do something out of place—burst into tears or collapse in mirthless laughter.

  “Adam,” I say quietly. “They’ve found them.”

  “My God,” he says.

  I see the shock in his face, now that it’s really happened.

  I glance toward the car. Sylvie doesn’t look up—she seems immersed in her book.

  “They think it was murder,” I tell him. “I mean, they don’t know, but that’s what they think. There was a bullet wound.”

  My voice is shaking.

  He puts his arm around my shoulders, wrapping me in his warmth. I lean against him. I want to hide in him.

  “There’s something else, isn’t there?” he says.

  I nod. My mouth is like blotting paper.

  “There was a bracelet. By the remains of the child.” The words are solid things in my mouth. “It must have fallen off her wrist when—well, you know . . . Adam, there was a dragon charm.”

  He takes his hand from my shoulders, turns to face me. His eyes are wide. For a long, long moment he doesn’t say anything. The air between us feels shimmery and thin.

  “Sylvie’s dragon,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  He’s staring at me with that look of wide amazement.

  “I need to ring Deirdre,” I tell him. “I want to make sure she knows everything. It doesn’t seem right—that we’re here and she isn’t.”

  “No, I can see that,” he says.

  I scrabble in my bag for my phone.

  “Shit.”

  I stare at the display: it’s out of charge.

  “You can borrow mine,” he tells me.

  I have Deirdre’s number in my bag. I ring on Adam’s phone.

  She answers immediately.

  “Deirdre Walker.”

  Her voice is too high-pitched. I wouldn’t have known it was her.

  “It’s Grace,” I tell her.

  “Grace? That’s weird,” she says.

  She sounds distracted. Perhaps I’ve confused her by ringing from Adam’s phone.

  “Has somebody come to see you from the gardai?” I say.

  “About the quarry?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “He said they think they’ve found Alice and Jessica,” she says.

  I wonder if she’s in shock. She sounds remote, like she’s not really taking it in.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I just wanted to check that you knew everything.”

  “Thank you so much, Grace. That’s very thoughtful,” she says.

  “I knew that you’d want to think about what it might mean for Gemma. I don’t know if they told you, but they found a bracelet with the child’s body. I guess they might ask Gemma to say if it’s Jessica’s bracelet . . .”

  “They might ask Gemma,” she repeats, her voice still tight and high. “Well, here’s the thing—why I said it was weird that you called. I was just going to ring you about it.”

  “Oh.”

  “I can’t find her. I can’t find Gemma,” she says.

  “You can’t find her?”

  A cold dread moves through me—that this is all our fault, it’s all because of me and Adam and Sylvie; that we have made this happen. I realize I expected something like this, feared it.

  “She told me she was going to spend the night at Kirsty’s house,” says Deirdre. “Kirsty’s her closest friend. Last night, this was. I rang Gemma just now, but her phone’s switched off. And then I rang Kirsty, and Kirsty told me that Gemma had never shown up. She’d texted Kirsty to tell her there was something she needed to do.”

  I’m hunting in my mind for some banal explanation.

  “You don’t think perhaps she was doing something and didn’t want you to know? Maybe staying the night with Marcus? You know how teenagers are.”

  “That’s the first thing I thought of,” says Deirdre.

  “You’ve rung him?”

  “The phone at his house is on voice mail. I don’t understand it. There’s usually somebody there . . . Why I was going to ring you—I wondered if she’d heard about Sylvie, if she’d gone looking for you.”

  “It can’t be that. We haven’t seen her,” I say.

  “Oh.”

  “You must speak to Brian,” I tell her.

  “Yes. I will. But I need to
search for her myself, I need to be out there looking. I know all the houses she visits. I’m going to look up all her friends, go to the places she goes.” I can hear the tremor in her voice. “Look, I know she’s probably fine. But after . . . everything—you can’t tell yourself you’re stupid to worry. You know that the worst can happen.”

  There’s such fear in her.

  “You don’t have to do it alone,” I tell her. “We’ll come with you.”

  “You can’t do that,” she says.

  “No. Really. We will. We’d like to help.”

  “Would you?” She sounds so grateful.

  “You could meet us here,” I tell her. “You could speak to Brian, and then we’ll help you look for her.”

  “I’ll come straight over,” she tells me. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  I give Adam back his phone.

  “She can’t find Gemma,” I say.

  “Yes, I gathered that.”

  “I said we’d help to search for her.”

  He’s looking into my face with a frown, like he’s troubled by something he sees in me.

  “Grace.” His voice is soothing. He reaches out and pushes back my hair. “You mustn’t worry too much. She’s almost certainly fine. Kids do run off sometimes.”

  “I know,” I tell him. “But Deirdre was frantic.”

  I glance toward the car. Sylvie’s face is pressed against the window. She’s white and still and watching us intently. I feel guilty suddenly. For a moment, listening to Deirdre, I’d almost forgotten her.

  I open the door, and she scrambles out.

  “When are we going?” she says.

  “Soon, Sylvie.”

  “I don’t like it here.”

  “No, sweetheart.”

  I crouch down, put my arms around her. She lets herself be held.

  “Sylvie, was this the place where it happened?” I say. “The place where—what you said . . .”

  I can’t quite form the words.

  But this time she won’t tell me anything.

  “I don’t like it here. I don’t want to stay here,” she says.

  I glance over her shoulder—at the garda cars, the cordon tape, the man in a baggy forensic suit who is walking along the path, moving so slowly, as though the things he has seen are weighing heavily on him. I think of the horror of what they found beneath the water—just letting my mind touch lightly on this, then pulling abruptly away, as though the very thought could hurt me. Suddenly all I want is to take her away from this place.