by Nicci French
I stared at it. Skye’s flat. My flat. Peggy’s house. All the arrows between them just looked like a cartoon of confusion.
I pushed the paper aside and found a fresh one and wrote ‘Jason’s house’ on it and underlined it. What next? Under it I wrote Jason’s name, then Emily’s name, then Ben’s name.
I wrote a timeline, starting from the Sunday that Poppy had returned from Jason’s house with her drawing in thick black crayon. I looked at the calendar on my phone to work out the exact dates. It had been going on for three weeks and four days. It felt longer than that, a lifetime, or no time at all.
I cleared a space on the table and then spread out all the sheets I’d written on and looked at them. I moved the sheets around, rearranged them in different shapes. I’d hoped that by doing this a pattern would emerge, but it was just the same old mess, the same places and objects and fears. I’d taken them out of my brain and put them down on paper, but it hadn’t made any difference. It wasn’t like a jigsaw puzzle that didn’t fit together. It was worse than that. I was starting to think that they were pieces that didn’t fit together because they were from different puzzles.
I picked up my phone and looked at the time. It was twenty to three. I had missed lunch. I had been so lost in this that I had forgotten to be hungry. I checked for messages. My emails were the usual rubbish, about perfume and miracle cures and fake offers, but there was also one from a name I recognised: Inga Haydon. She was one of the women I’d found on Jason’s computer. The one who had written to me saying she didn’t know Skye Nolan and asking how I’d got her address. I’d assumed I’d never hear from her again. I clicked on the message. It was just a short question: Can I come and see you?
I stared at the sheets of paper on my table then back at my phone. It felt like something magical had happened. It also felt too good to be true. Could there be something wrong? I made myself think of the worst that it could be. Was it possible that it wasn’t really from Inga at all? Jason had only just accused me of interfering in his life. Could this be a trap? Could he be luring me into doing it again and that would give him the evidence he needed to take Poppy away from me? I looked at the message. The email address was in the name of Inga Haydon. I looked back at the previous message from her. It was the same address. Could that also have been from Jason?
I felt like I was driving myself insane. I considered it and made up my mind. I couldn’t see Inga now. I was about to collect Poppy. But later? I typed a message: What about this evening at 8 at my flat? I wrote my address. There was nothing incriminating in itself about responding to a message like that. I took a deep breath and pressed send.
Barely a minute passed before I got a message back: OK.
FIFTY-TWO
Miraculously, Poppy was in bed and asleep when the front doorbell rang. I opened the door and found myself looking at someone different from what I’d expected. Haydon was a woman of about my own age, in jeans with a brown suede jacket. Her hair was short with a parting on the right, neatly combed, almost boyish. She wore thin wire-rimmed spectacles and her face was smooth. Everything about her seemed clean and neat and organised.
As she stepped inside, she looked at me and then around at the flat with obvious curiosity.
‘And you are?’ she said.
‘Tess Moreau.’
‘Yes, I know that. I mean who are you?’
‘Can I get you a coffee? A glass of wine?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘I’m fine.’
‘A glass of water?’
‘I just want to say something and then I’ll go.’
I gestured her towards the sofa and when she sat, she remained perched on the edge. She made no move to take her jacket off. It was like she wanted to make it clear to me that she could leave at any moment.
‘Why did you get in touch with me?’ she asked. ‘What do you want?’
As briefly as I could, I told her of my relationship with Jason, how it had broken up, how we had certain ongoing problems. I didn’t specify them. I felt I needed to be careful, to take one thing at a time. As I talked, I saw her face change, flickers of different emotions passing across it. She had probably heard all about me, but not my name: Jason’s version of our break-up; the story he told to women he wanted to captivate.
‘And you,’ I said, when I had finished. ‘You had an affair with him.’
‘How do you know that? I never told anyone. I thought nobody knew apart from the two of us.’
I explained how I’d had a false view about my relationship with Jason and that I’d learned a lot about him in recent days. I didn’t say I’d hacked into his computer.
‘You didn’t answer my question.’
I thought for a moment of those words you hear in films: anything you say may be used against you. I needed to be careful what I admitted to. I didn’t want to tell Inga Haydon anything more than I absolutely had to.
‘I just know,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave it at that. But I’m surprised you’re here. I wrote to you asking if you knew anything about a woman called Skye Nolan. You said you didn’t. So why are you here?’
Inga looked down at the floor and when she looked back up, I noticed that her cheeks were flushed.
‘You know you have an idea of yourself and you do something and it’s not who you are?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not someone, you know, who has…’ She hesitated, like she was having difficulty actually saying the words. ‘Casual sex. I don’t. I’ve never been comfortable with that. And I’m not someone who would have an affair with a married man. And I don’t think you should get involved in that way with colleagues. I think it’s just wrong.’
I tried to make sense of what she was saying. ‘So you’re a colleague of Jason’s?’
‘I’m a teacher at his school. I’ve only been there since September.’
‘And you had an affair with him.’
She took several quick, deep breaths. She looked like she was suddenly feeling faint.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘I was lied to,’ she said. ‘Humiliated.’
‘I thought you said nobody knew.’
‘You can feel humiliated by yourself.’ She looked at me more directly. ‘When I got your first email I felt like I was suddenly being punched on a bruise, over and over again.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
‘You weren’t to know.’
I thought of myself entering Jason’s house, breaking into his computer, reading his private mail. I thought that maybe I was to know.
‘At first, I wanted to have nothing to do with it. I wanted to pretend to myself. Then I decided I had to see you. I had two reasons. The first was that I wondered if you had been through what I had been through and, if you had, I wanted to sit opposite you and look at you.’
I did indeed feel her looking at me and I didn’t enjoy the experience. I had felt shamed by what I’d learned, but that didn’t make me want to be part of some kind of sisterhood of shame.
‘You said there were two reasons. What was the other one?’
‘You know the expression to “get someone into bed”?’
‘Well, yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose so.’
‘Jason got me into bed. He made me feel things and believe things and then once he had got me into bed, he made it clear that it was nothing to him. Just a bit of excitement.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Was that the second thing?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve got information about him.’
‘What kind of information?’
‘Emails.’
‘To you?’
‘To another colleague.’
‘What about?’
Now her voice sounded calmer, harder. ‘You know, sexual ones. Harassing ones.’
I thought for a moment. ‘How did you get them?’
‘Someone gave them to me.’
‘And you think if they were made public
, they would be damaging to his career?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Very.’
‘Why don’t you do something with them yourself?’
‘I am. I’m offering them to you.’
‘I mean, do it yourself, make them public yourself.’
‘I don’t think it would look good coming from me.’
Before I could answer, she looked round sharply. I followed her gaze, and saw Poppy standing in the doorway. I expected her to say something about not sleeping or being thirsty or wanting a story but she was staring at Inga, her eyes wide, her mouth open, immobile.
‘Poppy,’ I said and she ran across to me and almost jumped at me. I held her in my arms and she clung to me, her face buried in my sweater, her hands gripping me so tightly that they felt like claws and almost made me cry out. I murmured consoling words into the top of her head and carried her back to her bed.
As I laid her back down, she started to sob and then almost to howl like an animal that had been cornered. I tried to soothe her but she cried and wouldn’t let me go. Finally I told her that I would just say goodbye to Inga and then I would come back and lie down with her and hold her and sing to her.
I returned to the living room and found Inga standing up, apparently ready to leave.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s got into Poppy but I need to go back and comfort her. I’ll get back in touch with you about all of this.’
‘We’ve met before,’ she said.
‘What? When did we meet?’
‘Not me and you. Me and your daughter. We didn’t exactly meet.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was once outside the house with Jason. Saying goodbye, kissing a bit. I looked up and she was in the window, looking down. She looked like a sort of ghost.’
I stared at Inga and felt nauseated by the thought of it, of Poppy noticing everything, the three-year-old girl, trying to make sense of her world, taking everything in. Was this woman trying to help me or was she getting me to do her revenge for her so she could pretend to herself it wasn’t her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have to see you out.’
‘Of course.’
‘One thing, though. The really important thing is Skye Nolan. We haven’t talked about her, but really she’s the reason I got in touch in the first place. Do you know anything about her? Anything, however trivial?’
Inga didn’t hesitate.
‘I told you in the email. I’ve never even heard the name before.’
FIFTY-THREE
That night I lay stretched out, tense and aching and fearsomely awake, while the events of the day streamed through me, in my heart and in my brain and in my blood.
Jason’s threats – he couldn’t, he couldn’t, he couldn’t – and the lawyer’s instructions, Inga’s revelations, the emails of another woman he had harassed that she offered to me as – what? Ammunition? Revenge? Something to bring him down?
Behind all of this, beneath it, overarching it all, like the air I was breathing, the fear I was living with, was the image of Poppy. Poppy standing at the window and staring out through the darkness at her father kissing a stranger, while her stepmother was in the house and her actual mother was far away. Poppy burrowing into me, gripping me with her hands like claws. Poppy bent over her drawings, giving me clues I couldn’t properly read. Poppy shouting. Poppy stumbling around the house like a terrified ghost. Poppy asking me if I had died. Poppy calling my name, night after night, Mummy Mummy Mummy. Asking for help, for rescue. Handing me a knife. Her ears like a hawk’s, her eyes on stalks, taking in the world and all its messed-up, conflicting meanings.
What should I do? Should I play safe, do nothing, sit out this terror, and trust that it would gradually blow itself out until the horror was just a memory, a nasty stain across the past? But was doing nothing actually playing it safe, or was it a way of closing my eyes and putting my hands over my ears and pretending there wasn’t a monster in the room, coming to get us?
I turned in the bed, rearranged the pillow, held my breath and listened for Poppy, but there was only thick silence.
I could instead continue my investigations, despite warnings from the police, from Jason, from Fenella. Investigations: what a grand word for my blundering attempts to find out what Poppy had seen, had heard, had foretold. I thought of the timelines and drawings and notes I had made earlier that day: anyone looking at them would say they were the indecipherable scrawls of a madwoman.
I am not mad, I am not mad, I am not mad.
I felt mad, infected with fears, prey to every ghastly image that blew through me.
At last, just before five, I got out of bed. I looked in on Poppy. She was deeply asleep, her breath slightly puffing at her lips, her lashes thick on her cheeks.
I went downstairs. It was already light and Sunny was lying curled up on himself in a rectangle of sun in the conservatory. I made myself a pot of tea and tidied things up. I picked up the thick bundle of papers on which I had written down everything the previous day and pushed it into a drawer. I chopped up strawberries for breakfast and put birdseed into the feeder. I walked into the garden, still damp from dew, the lawn mossy and the smell of honeysuckle carried by the warm breeze.
Today mustn’t be like yesterday. I dressed with care: I wanted to look orderly, sane, in control of my life. I brushed my hair and tied it into a thick braid, put on a blue cotton dress and gold stud earrings, then looked at myself in the mirror. Would I pass? Tess Moreau, a mother, a teacher, a woman on the brink.
I woke Poppy and we ate breakfast in the garden, flaky croissant and strawberries, as if it was a Sunday or we were on holiday. She held up a forefinger and said, ‘I will be a bumble and stripe and sting.’
Bernie looked out of his window above us and said, ‘Oh, a picnic. Can I join you?’
‘No,’ said Poppy. ‘Go way.’
He simply laughed; the laugh went on too long.
‘I will be a worm,’ said Poppy.
* * *
We walked hand in hand to school. At the door to Poppy’s class I bent down to kiss her. She put her face against mine and gripped the braid of my hair as if it was a rope and she could pull herself up on it. Rapunzel, I thought.
‘Don’t blink,’ she said.
We stared into each other’s eyes and then she gave me a small push. I blinked.
‘I did win,’ she said triumphantly and was gone without a backward glance.
‘Tess!’
I turned to see Laurie, standing just a bit too close, Nellie staring beadily over his shoulder.
‘I could have taken Poppy for you, no problem.’
‘Thanks. But I like to. I’ll be back to normal on Monday.’
‘Sure. Are you feeling recovered?’
‘Kind of.’
Nellie reached out and clutched my hair with her plump, sticky fist.
‘Hey there,’ said Laurie, laughing and prising her fingers loose. ‘Let’s walk back together. It’s such a beautiful day; we can go through the park.’
I fell in beside him. He talked. I saw his mouth opening and closing, his mouth smiling. Every so often he reached out and touched me on the arm.
‘You’re very silent,’ he said. ‘What are you thinking?’
I’ve always hated that question. I was thinking that Emily was going to collect Poppy from school and take her to Jason’s house. I was thinking of Jason kissing Inga while Poppy stared down at them; of Ben sitting in his boxers watching darts and scratching his belly and belching; of Emily smiling and pale and pleading. How could I let her go there? How could I prevent it?
‘I wasn’t really thinking of anything.’
‘Still waters run deep,’ he said. ‘Come and have coffee.’
I went. It felt different when Gina wasn’t there, or Jake and Poppy. Just Laurie and red-faced Nellie who, whatever she saw, could never tell. I put my bag down on the floor and remembered that the cap I’d collected earlier
in the week was still in there. I pushed the bag further under the table, out of sight.
‘Do you like dogs?’ I asked Laurie as he poured coffee beans into the grinder.
‘Dogs? I guess so? Why?’
‘You walk your mother’s dog, don’t you?’
He turned on the grinder. Nellie began to yell and without pausing he passed her half a banana to chew.
‘Winston?’ he said, when he’d finished grinding the coffee. ‘Sometimes.’
‘Do you meet other dog walkers?’
He shrugged. ‘Sure. One of the things anyone will tell you is that when you have a dog, people come up and talk to you.’
‘Yes, that’s what I’ve heard.’
‘If I was lonely, I’d get a dog.’ He poured boiling water onto the grounds and stirred. ‘But I’m not lonely.’
‘No, I guess you’re not.’
‘Gina said you’d broken up with Aidan.’
I didn’t say anything. He passed me a mug of coffee and I half-perched on a stool and took a mouthful.
‘You’ll meet someone else,’ he said.
I shrugged. My mind was full of thoughts that were broken and wouldn’t fit together.
‘I lied,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘This life. I love it, of course, don’t get me wrong.’ He gestured around him, the tidy kitchen, the little girl he had lifted off his back, her face smeared with bananas. ‘But sometimes I do get a bit lonely. Don’t you, Tess? Don’t you sometimes get lonely too?’
I stared at him. Don’t blink.
‘No.’ I put the mug down and stood up to leave. ‘I do not.’
* * *
I went home. From the garden I kept seeing Bernie in the windows above me, passing to and fro, and in the house I thought I could hear him, like hearing a mouse scrabbling and scratching. Did he have no work to do? Probably not.
I took the cap I’d collected from Poppy’s school and gazed at it, as if it could give me an answer. My mobile rang and it was Charlie.
