by Nicci French
‘We’re going to the station,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m not sure if this is the right time.’
I could feel the opportunity slipping through my fingers. If this ended now, I might never see them again.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I can walk some of the way with you. I think we can go along the canal. It’s not far.’
We came out into the sunshine. Charlie stood on one side of Peggy, taking her arm, and Peggy took my arm too, as little and as trusting as a child. We crossed the canal on the new bridge and descended to the towpath.
‘Tell us how you knew Skye,’ Charlie said.
I tried to think of an answer that was not entirely untrue, but that would also encourage them to keep talking to me, even to stay in touch.
‘This will probably sound a bit strange. We only met once, very recently. Just a couple of weeks ago. But it stayed in my head. I’ve thought about her a lot. And then I saw she had died. I hope you don’t mind that I’m here, a virtual stranger.’
We were walking past rows of houseboats. I was conscious that every second of this conversation was precious.
‘One of the reasons I remember Skye so clearly’ – I felt fraudulent calling her Skye, fabricating an intimacy – ‘is that she seemed very agitated about something.’
‘Yes, that’s my daughter,’ said Peggy. ‘She’d been like that for a long time.’
‘Was it worse in the weeks before she died?’
Peggy swung her head from side to side. She was tiny between the two of us. ‘I didn’t see her in the weeks before she died.’
We walked up the broad steps from the canal and reached the path that led to King’s Cross Station. I halted.
‘Could I come and see you?’ I asked Peggy. ‘I’d love to talk to you about your daughter, if you would like that.’
Charlie knitted his brows, but Peggy seemed grateful.
‘I would,’ she said. ‘I feel I need to talk at the moment. Otherwise it is like she’s…’ She lifted a fist and then opened her fingers. ‘Disappeared, into thin air. As if she was never here at all. So few people to miss her or really remember her.’
‘Then I’ll come.’
‘I live out in the wilds.’ She smiled. ‘Chelmsford, I mean.’
‘That’s no problem.’
‘I’ll probably just cry all the time.’
‘That’s no problem either. You’re allowed to cry.’
We exchanged addresses and then the pair turned to go, but after a few paces Charlie turned back. He spoke to me in a low voice.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘What?’
‘Do you have any idea how vulnerable she is?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘She might want to talk to you, but I don’t get why you want to talk to her. What are you up to?’
What was I up to? I looked up the path at Peggy, her face pinched and prematurely aged with grief, staring blankly at the brown water.
‘It’s complicated. I honestly don’t want to make things more painful than they are.’
‘That would be hard.’
‘I know.’
‘Give her a bit of time, anyway, wait for it to be not quite so raw.’
‘OK.’ But time was my enemy. ‘Can I talk to you then?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes.’
‘About Skye?’
‘Yes.’
He scowled at me, then gave a heavy shrug.
‘Can you make tomorrow early evening, at the Parliament Hill Lido? I’ll be in the café just after six.’
‘I’ll be there.’
THIRTY-THREE
I was supposed to be collecting Poppy from Jason’s at three. Even though the bus I was on took a circuitous route and I had to walk the last mile, I was half an hour early. As I made my way up the familiar road towards the house where I used to live, a message pinged onto my phone from Jason:
Delayed. Back at 3.30/4-ish.
I cursed him under my breath but rang the bell anyway, just in case. I heard shuffling footsteps and the front door opened. Ben stood there, barefooted and wearing checked trousers that might have been pyjamas. I couldn’t tell.
‘Sorry,’ I said, remembering our last meeting in the park. ‘I know I’m early. I only just got Jason’s message.’
‘Jason and Emily aren’t here.’
I could hear the dog barking from inside the house and electronic music playing somewhere.
‘I know. I’ll just go and grab a coffee and come back in an hour.’
‘I worry about Emily,’ he said, as if I hadn’t spoken, or as if I was somebody else entirely. ‘I’m her big brother. Maybe not much of a big brother recently, but you know.’
‘Why do you worry?’
‘You more than anyone should know.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I just worry.’
‘But is something wrong? I mean, wrong with her and Jason.’
‘She’s not like you,’ he said.
‘Like me?’
‘Able to stand up for herself.’
Was I able to stand up for myself? Had I ever done so with Jason?
‘What does he do?’ I asked.
The dog barked again.
I took a small step forward.
‘I hope you don’t think I’m interfering. I know we got off on the wrong foot. But I wanted to ask you something.’
‘I need to clean my teeth now.’
‘But before that, can you just—’
‘Mummy!’
I half-turned towards the street, but stopped, dislocated. The voice came from inside the house.
‘Poppy?’
And there was my daughter, bounding towards the door. She was only wearing knickers and her witch’s cloak, and there was a thick smear of jam on her cheek. Her hair was unbrushed.
‘Poppy?’ I repeated. ‘But I thought—’
‘I did do a wheel.’
‘What is this? Come here.’
I picked up Poppy and held her close.
‘How long have Jason and Emily been gone?’ I asked Ben.
‘They’re coming home soon. You’re early.’
‘I said, how long have they been gone?’
Poppy’s breath was hot in my ear. ‘When I was a fant.’
‘Tess!’ I heard Jason’s voice behind me.
I spun round, still holding Poppy. Jason and Emily were at the little iron gate. Emily looked tired and her eyes were puffy.
‘You’re early,’ Jason said.
I ignored him and spoke to Poppy.
‘Come on, darling, let’s get you dressed and home.’
‘Roxie did growl.’
I climbed the stairs, Jason behind me. I shouldered open the bedroom door and put Poppy on the bed, then started throwing her clothes into her bag.
‘Sunny will purr.’
‘He will. Here,’ I said, tossing over a tee shirt and pinafore dress. ‘Why don’t you wear these?’
‘No.’
‘You can wear the witch cloak on top.’ I looked up at Jason who was still standing in the doorway. ‘How long were you gone? Was it overnight?’
‘We didn’t leave her with a stranger.’
‘Let me help you with that.’ I found the armholes for Poppy and tugged the dress over her head and down her wriggling body.
‘Does Sunny love me?’
‘Here. Your cloak.’
‘It was a one-off.’
I stared briefly at Jason, loathing everything about him: his solid bulk, his square jaw, his masculine good looks, the way he stood with his arms folded and his legs slightly apart. Like a bull: how did I ever let him come near me?
‘We’re done here. Let’s be on our way.’
* * *
We had less than twenty-four hours before Poppy went to stay with my mother.
We went to the park together and I pushed Poppy on the swings and watched her as she clambered up the climbing frame. We fed t
he ducks and Poppy rolled down a hill and she tried to stroke all the dogs that came past. There was a black Labrador that stood peacefully and let her pull its silky ears, and a terrier with crooked legs that jumped up at her and licked her face. I thought about Skye walking dogs. Ben had a dog.
Back home, we started making a house from a large cardboard box, cutting out windows, a door, a hole for the loo-roll chimney. I was taping the wall to the ceiling with such deep concentration that when I finished and looked up, I hadn’t noticed that Poppy wasn’t there. She wasn’t even in the room. I called for her and then heard a scraping sound from another room. I guessed it was something on the hard floor of the kitchen. I ran towards the kitchen and saw Poppy coming out of it. She was holding something and it took me a moment to see that she was holding a knife – a really big sharp knife, the one I used for cutting bread and carving joints of meat.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to shout at Poppy to put it down. But I knew that if I scared her she might drop it and cut herself. In an absent moment while using it to slice an onion I had once cut my finger to the bone and I hadn’t even noticed it until the blood welled up and then I couldn’t stop it.
‘Poppy,’ I said in the warmest and most casual tone I could manage. ‘Why don’t you give that to me?’
‘It’s for Mummy,’ she said.
‘Just stand still.’
It would take just one false step, the kind of falling over or stumbling that she did ten times a day and the blade would go right through her. Slowly, still smiling I got to my knees in front of her and leaned forward, closer and closer, until I was able to grasp her little fist with one hand and her arm with the other and then gradually ease the knife out of her fingers, keeping the blade away from both of us.
When I had it away from her, I put it up on a high shelf and turned to her.
‘Poppy, you must never, never, ever touch that knife again.’
‘It’s for Mummy,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s Mummy’s. Not Poppy’s.’
I looked in the kitchen and what I saw made me want to vomit. Poppy had pulled one of the chairs over to the counter, climbed up on it, leaned over the counter and pulled the knife off the magnetic strip on the wall. Then, somehow, she had climbed back down off the chair, still holding the largest and sharpest knife in the house. All of it while I was in the next room sticking a paper house together.
‘Why for Mummy?’ I asked her.
‘What?’
It felt like she had already forgotten the whole thing. I reached for the knife and held it in front of me.
‘This. Why is it for Mummy?’
‘It’s a sword,’ she said with a frown. ‘For Mummy.’
We made rice pudding together and ate it in front of a cartoon. I ran a deep bath and lifted Poppy in, then sat beside her, soaping her pink body, cutting her nails, and at the end washing her hair and combing out the matted knots. Poppy wailed and punched me in the face and said she hated me.
I read stories to her until she fell asleep, and then sat for several minutes watching her as she twisted and turned on the pillow, put two fingers into her mouth, then burrowed into the covers.
She wet her bed in the night and cried, I cleaned her and changed her pyjamas and lifted her in beside me and lay for what felt like hours listening to her breathing, feeling the heat of her little body.
In the morning we ate cinnamon buns in the garden and Poppy persecuted Sunny and dug up worms and picked a peony blossom for me to wear in my hair. There were two golden butterflies dancing in the warm air.
Then we packed a little bag for her and took two buses and arrived with time to spare at Marylebone Station. But my mother was already there. She was wearing a thick jacket in spite of the heat; her greying hair was coming loose, and the bag she was carrying had a broken strap. There was a faint air of dishevelment about her that gave me a pang. She needed me to be protecting her, not adding to her worries.
I put my arms around her and kissed her on the cheek. She smelled the same as she always had done: the floral perfume she wore every day, and a whiff of face powder.
‘I got an early train, just to be sure,’ she said.
Poppy put her hand trustingly in her grandmother’s.
‘Will I go on Sam the gonkey?’
* * *
I watched them leave, Poppy wearing her little backpack and clutching her teddy, and I thought about all the arrivals and departures, all the meeting and goodbyes, in her short life. Did she mind? Was she homesick? Where was home for her?
And I thought about the events of the previous evening, about the knife and what Poppy had said about the knife. It was ‘for Mummy’. It was a sword. What kind of sword? Was it a sword to attack me with? Or was it a sword for me to defend myself? Was Poppy, my mysterious little child, my visitor from another planet, threatening me or trying to protect me?
I could have wept, but I wasn’t going to do that. Not yet. I had things to do and places to go.
THIRTY-FOUR
I arrived at the Parliament Hill Lido shortly before six, bought a cup of tea and found myself a seat outside the café, overlooking the water. It was a warm, soft evening and the pool was full of swimmers, some of them slow and splashy, others surging strong-shouldered through the chemical blue. It was impossible to know if Charlie was among them. I could barely remember what he looked like, except that he had a trim beard and round tortoiseshell glasses.
Then a young man, broad-shouldered and with a slight pot belly, hauled himself out of the water, took off his swimming cap and goggles and squinted towards the café. When he saw me, he lifted a hand and gestured, then disappeared into the changing rooms. A few minutes later, Charlie was sitting opposite me. He was wearing shorts and a long-sleeved tee shirt and his hair was damp, his face pink from the swim. He rummaged in his rucksack for his glasses and put them on. I felt like I was looking at him for the first time. This was the man who had cared for Skye. But also: this was the man who hadn’t been able to save her.
‘I don’t have much time.’
‘It’s good of you to see me.’
He held up a finger. ‘Before you say anything else, I want to know why you’re so interested in Skye. You met her just the once, you say, but then you turn up at her inquest and you want to go and speak to her mother. Are you a journalist?’
‘No. I’m a teacher, if you want to know. What about you?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I don’t know. Sorry for asking.’
‘I work for a tech company and if I tried to explain what my job is, you probably wouldn’t understand anyway.’
‘All right, fine,’ I said.
‘So what are you up to? Almost no one cared about Skye, so why do you care? After one meeting.’
I took a deep breath.
‘This will sound strange, but I believe I’m tied to her murder in some way.’
Charlie sat back in his chair. ‘So why are you talking to me? You should go to the police.’
‘I have.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They’re investigating,’ I said, hoping that this vague answer was enough. ‘It’s all complicated, but I think Skye might have had a connection with someone I know and maybe they killed her.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What kind of connection?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re not making sense.’
I paused because I wasn’t even making sense to myself. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. You just need to accept that I’m acting in good faith. I need to find out about Skye because I need to know why she tracked me down just before she died.’
‘She tracked you down?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She came up to me in a restaurant and behaved like she knew me.’
‘What restaurant?’
‘It’s called Angelo’s. Just a little I
talian place near London Fields.’
‘And you didn’t know her?’
‘Not that I could remember.’
He considered this. At least he wasn’t running away.
‘Why not just let the police get on with it?’
I thought of Poppy with her little backpack, hand in hand with her grandmother and clutching her teddy.
‘It’s important to me,’ I said softly.
‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie grudgingly. ‘It feels like there’s something about this I don’t understand.’
‘It’s strange to me as well.’
‘All right,’ he said, looking at his phone. ‘I’ve got to go in a few minutes. What do you want to ask?’
‘I’d just like to know what Skye was like, the places she hung out. And I guess most of all I need to know about her and men. If that’s not too painful.’
He looked away from me for a time, staring at the water. Even when he turned back towards me, he didn’t look me in the eye directly.
‘I’m not sure what to say. She would have been twenty-eight next month. She wasn’t born in London. She used to talk about herself as an Essex girl. She went to school in Chelmsford. She was an only child, never knew her father. She was—’ He stopped and grimaced. ‘Was was was. I find it strange saying that. She said that she was a bit of a wild teenager. Drugs and all that. She was really smart, but she didn’t go to uni or anything like that. She worked as a childminder for a bit, before she came to London, and then she did bits and pieces. She worked in a bar in Enfield first of all. The Crown and Anchor,’ he said before I could ask. ‘Then an Italian place that closed down. She said they took her on because she looked a bit Italian. She was a waitress and she worked in the kitchen sometimes. She used to cook a mean pizza.’
Charlie looked out at the pool, the people thrashing past.
‘I thought she was a dog walker.’
‘That was in the last year or so. She really liked that. She loved dogs. She loved all animals. Her dream was to have a refuge place for stray dogs and cats. I don’t think she ever had a realistic business plan for it.’ He tailed off.
‘Where did she walk them?’
‘Where? Mostly in that park near Kennington and in Burgess Park too, I think. It depended on which dogs she was looking after. She’d go to other parts of London as well.’
