The Unheard

by Nicci French

  Again. I could almost reach out and touch Poppy now.

  Skye and then, when he realised that he wasn’t quite safe, Peggy. Coming to see me after he’d done it, looking tired and peaceful. He had thought it was all over and now we could be together again.

  I stood quite still in the little garden, the sun beating down and the birds singing, thinking, tiptoeing forward. Aidan wanted me. He wanted us. He thought in some horrible way that we belonged to him, and now he believed he had us: You’re on a knife edge, I heard him say.

  Poppy had watched and Poppy had listened and Poppy had tried to tell me with her drawing, her obscenities, her night terrors, the way that she clutched at me with pincer fingers, her high-wire anxiety and need. I’d seen all the signs and misread them all.

  Now she whirled round, her hair flying and her mouth agape in a shout of laughter.

  ‘I do see you move!’ she shouted in triumph. ‘I do see.’

  FIFTY-NINE

  Later Poppy was so fiercely tired that she couldn’t go to sleep. I read her a story and switched off the light and lay beside her on the bed, stroking her hair, but I could feel her tense, springy little body. The doorbell rang. I went to the door and Aidan was standing there smiling, holding up a bottle of wine.

  ‘I ordered a takeaway,’ he said. ‘I thought you wouldn’t feel like cooking after a day like today.’

  It felt like a test. I’d sent him away. I’d said I would call him and now here he was. It was a demonstration of my powerlessness. I stepped aside and he walked through.

  ‘I’m trying to get Poppy to sleep,’ I said weakly.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said. He took a wine glass from the cabinet and twisted the cap off the bottle and poured himself a drink. ‘Can I get you one?’

  ‘Not just now,’ I said.

  He sat down on the sofa and picked up a magazine, a free one that was pushed through my letterbox once a month and that I normally put straight in the bin.

  ‘This will probably take some time,’ I said.

  He smiled and raised the glass. ‘No hurry.’

  I went back into Poppy’s room. I felt unsteady. I sat down on Poppy’s bed.

  ‘Don’t you want to cuddle up and go to sleep?’

  Poppy loudly insisted that she wasn’t tired and wanted to play with me and she wanted me to stay with her for ever and ever. I noted that she didn’t want to sleep and she wanted to play, but she wanted to play in her room and she only wanted to play with me.

  ‘I want to be with you.’

  ‘You are with me, honey?’

  ‘Only you.’

  ‘We need to be nice to Aidan as well,’ I said.

  ‘Only you,’ she said firmly. ‘For ever and happy after.’

  I leaned over and told her to hush and kissed her on her forehead. I tried to tell her a story from memory and she told me I was getting it wrong, so I had to admit defeat and turn the light back on. I read a book and then another book and tried to make my voice gradually quieter and more soothing until finally I looked up and Poppy’s eyes were closed. I turned the light off and went into the living room, which didn’t feel mine any more. Aidan looked up and smiled.

  ‘I poured you a glass,’ he said. ‘I thought we’d both earned it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘I opened a bag of crisps as well. I hope that’s all right.’

  ‘That’s fine.’ I felt like an actor in the play of my own life and I had to perform the part perfectly. I took a sip of wine and it felt corrosive in my mouth. I put a crisp in my mouth to disguise the taste and the crisp felt like cardboard and my mouth became so dry I couldn’t swallow, so I needed to take another sip of the foul wine. ‘I think she’s finally asleep.’

  ‘She was overexcited,’ said Aidan. ‘Don’t you remember that from when you were a child? You become so tired that you can’t sleep.’

  ‘Yes, I do. It’s—’ I stopped. My mind was a blank. I had forgotten my lines. I literally couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  He leaned forward with an expression of concern and touched my cheek.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m tired as well.’ I laughed. It sounded convincing. ‘Just like Poppy.’ I took another sip of wine while I thought of something to say. ‘You should have phoned to let me know you were coming.’ I said this in the lightest tone I could manage. ‘I might have had people here?’

  ‘You didn’t mention it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, what would it matter? You know, like in those films where the hero surprises the heroine in a restaurant and sings to her in front of all the customers and everyone applauds at the end.’

  I thought of how I’d always hated scenes like that, even in films I liked. I could never push away the idea of how embarrassing it would be in real life, however much you loved the person who was doing it. I made myself smile.

  ‘Please don’t ever do anything like that to me. I’ve got a very low embarrassment threshold.’

  Aidan laughed. ‘I can’t guarantee it.’ He picked up the magazine. ‘I was just looking at the property ads in here. There are a couple of lovely places on the market.’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘What we need to talk about is what’s best. I’d been thinking that the question was whether you two should move in with me or I should move in with you. Probably I should move in with you because my flat is tiny and has no garden. But maybe we should both sell our flats and buy somewhere bigger together, make a new start.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ I said immediately, unable to stop myself. ‘I just couldn’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There are lots of reasons. I found moving here unbelievably stressful.’

  ‘But you were doing it on your own.’

  ‘I couldn’t do it to Poppy. She’s in such an unsettled state. She just needs stability.’

  He smiled again. ‘Don’t you see, Tess, that’s all the more reason we should do this? It would make her part of a proper family. It would give her a feeling of safety and security.’ I started to make a stammering attempt at answering this, but he carried on speaking. ‘Don’t you understand? I didn’t just fall in love with you. I fell in love with you and Poppy together. I want to protect you both. I won’t let anything happen to you. I won’t let anything come between us.’

  I was saved from having to say anything at all by the doorbell and the delivery of the food. I took the bulging plastic bag from the young woman in the motorcycle helmet.

  ‘You don’t need to tip her,’ Aidan said from behind me. ‘I added a tip online.’

  I started to distribute the containers of food on the table. I fetched plates and glasses and cutlery from the kitchen. When I opened the cutlery drawer, I saw the bread knife and – with a sudden vividness that horrified me – I imagined picking it up and walking towards Aidan, holding the knife behind me, and then plunging it into his chest. I was sure I could do it. I wanted to do it. But other images followed this in my mind: Poppy just a few feet away; years in prison or a mental institution for me; Poppy with her father, lost to me for ever.

  Aidan had ordered Thai food, which was normally a favourite of mine: the lime and the chilli and the garlic and the lemongrass. But either there was something wrong with the food or there was something wrong with me because there was a sour under taste to everything and it felt both too salty and too sweet. I drank tumbler after tumbler of water from the tap.

  ‘I think we should go away together,’ Aidan said.

  ‘You mean, just us two?’

  ‘No, the three of us. That’s what I mean by “we”.’

  ‘It’s term time.’

  ‘We could go on a weekend. I’ll find a cottage. Somewhere remote, maybe by the sea, where we can go for walks and build sandcastles with Poppy. I think it would be good to spend some intense quality time together.’

  Now I did look Aidan full in the face. I knew what he had done, but I still didn’t feel I understood this man opposite me. I i
magined a stranger eavesdropping on this conversation. Would they think they were witnessing a touching love scene? Perhaps for him it really was a touching love scene. But what kind of love was it? How was it going to be expressed when Poppy and I were with him in some remote place, out of sight, out of earshot?

  When he’d finished eating, he started to pile up the plates and the food containers.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said, but he shook his head.

  ‘I insist. You just sit there.’

  I did just sit there. I didn’t look at my phone or pick up a book. I listened to the sound of cleaning in the kitchen, the kettle, the coffee grinder, until Aidan came back with the cafetière and two mugs and some chocolate biscuits arranged on a small plate.

  I was grateful for the coffee in the way I might have been grateful for a sudden cold shower. As I drank it, no milk and very hot, I felt I was jolting myself back to life. He chatted while we drank and I nodded at the things he said. Then he got up and walked behind me and took the cup from my hand and put it on the table. I felt his lips on the nape of my neck and his hand moved down the front of my shirt and inside my bra and I said to myself: am I really going to go through with this? Can I? I thought of the old cliché: not tonight, I’ve got a headache. Tonight I really did have a headache that was located just behind my forehead and was radiating waves of nausea down through my jaw and into my neck.

  I was an object, a thing. It was not me; I was not here. I let myself be led through to the bedroom and be undressed and pushed back on the bed and kissed and pawed and licked and my limbs pushed apart and the weight of him on top of me. I held him tight so that he couldn’t see my face and I could look past him up at the ceiling.

  Afterwards he lay back and I turned the light off and felt sleepless like my daughter, except that I thought I would never be able to sleep again for the rest of my life. Aidan murmured a few things, but I tried to breathe in a rhythmical way that mimicked sleep and after a few minutes I could feel the slow coming and going of his breathing next to me in the darkness.

  Wasn’t he going to leave?

  I got out of bed and went to the bathroom and peed and then got into the shower and washed my hair and all over my body, scrubbing and scrubbing. I dried myself and got back into bed, as close to the edge on my side as I could manage. I turned on my side with my back to him and stared into the darkness.

  This man lying peacefully beside me had killed two women and was threatening to tell Jason and his lawyer about behaviour that would cause me to lose Poppy unless I stayed with him, in a monstrous charade of a relationship.

  I was in no doubt that he would do that. He would destroy me rather than lose me: that was his version of love. That was the man whose chest rose and fell in easy sleep.

  Who could I turn to? Who would believe me now? I was like the girl who had cried wolf too many times. The police didn’t believe me; to them I was bitter and paranoid and a nuisance. Jason thought I was jealous, vengeful and unhinged. My friends, sympathetic and supportive, saw me as a woman under stress, who wasn’t really coping with the life of a single mother. My GP had told me I needed to meditate and see a therapist, because the horror was in my imagination, running amok.

  It was real. This was my life. There was nobody who could rescue me.

  I thought of telling my mother. Then I thought of what had happened to Peggy, Skye’s mother.

  I knew that I had only one task: to protect Poppy. Nothing else mattered, including myself. So how could I do that? Could I lie, night after night, year after year, next to the man who had strangled Skye Nolan and then strangled her mother? I would do anything for Poppy. But that?

  I imagined again running away with Poppy, leaving the country and never coming back. It took only a few seconds of thought to see that as a hopeless fantasy. Where would I go? What would I do? In this world of computers and credit cards and passports and CCTV cameras, someone like me couldn’t possibly escape.

  But what if Aidan simply got tired of living with Poppy and me? Could I just wear him down, making him sick of me the way so many husbands get sick of their wives and wives get sick of their husbands? But I felt sure that nothing I could do would make him bored with us. He would remain fixed in his unyielding sense of ownership. He would never tire of having a woman and a little girl in a cage, to do what he wanted with.

  I turned in the bed and looked at his dim outline in the darkness. I could hear him, I could smell him. At this moment, he was entirely in my power. If it were just me, would I be able to do something to him? To make myself safe from him for ever? The knife lay in the kitchen drawer. But I wasn’t alone. What would it be like for Poppy to be the child of a murderer?

  I felt like I was staring into a deep mist, that there was an answer somewhere in that mist, if only I could find it. As I lay there, all through that terrible night, I felt I was getting nearer to it, that it was gradually hardening and taking shape as I got closer and closer and then I fell asleep.

  SIXTY

  Aidan was up early. I lay in bed and listened to him in the shower, singing to himself. Through half-closed lids, I watched him pulling on his clothes. He sat on the bed beside me; I could feel him watching me and I wanted to scream, kick out, drag my nails over his face, obliterate him. I pretended to be asleep and at last he stood up again.

  He went to the shops and came back with a disproportionate number of croissants and pastries that he warmed in the oven. He put a cloth over the little table in the garden and laid it with plates and a jam jar of yellow roses that were bending over our fence from next door. He put strawberries in a bowl. There was a cafetière of coffee for the two of us, with a jug of heated milk on the side, and a mug of foaming hot chocolate for Poppy.

  ‘And guess what?’ Triumphantly, he produced a packet of marshmallows, ripped it open and dropped two pink and two white ones into her steaming mug. ‘How’s that for a Sunday breakfast, Poppy?’

  Poppy looked at her drink, looked at Aidan, looked at me. Her face was blotchy; her mouth was a thin, straight line.

  ‘No.’

  Aidan laughed. I put a pastry on her plate and she pushed it away. I could feel the fury building inside her. Inside me.

  ‘What are the plans for today?’ Aidan asked.

  ‘We will play a game,’ said Poppy imperiously. She pointed a finger at me. ‘You have to be the mummy. I’m the baby.’

  ‘So what am I in this game?’

  Poppy flicked an angry glance at Aidan. ‘You aren’t in the game.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said mildly.

  Poppy slid off her chair, breakfast untouched, and stomped to the end of the garden, where she squatted to look for worms, jabbing her fingers into the soft earth.

  ‘I’m sorry about that. But she’ll come round to you,’ I said.

  ‘I hope so. What am I doing wrong?’

  ‘You’re doing nothing wrong.’ I took his hand under the table. ‘You’re doing everything right.’

  He leaned towards me slightly. ‘God, you are beautiful,’ he said in a low voice.

  I lifted his hand and kissed the knuckles. I saw us from the outside: a man and a woman sitting close together in the fresh summer morning, intimate, murmuring softly to each other, while a little girl played a few feet away. I just had to act that woman, smile when she would smile, reach up and touch the man’s face when she would. My role was a woman in love, while my skin crawled.

  ‘Come back tonight,’ I said softly, as ugly thoughts crammed in my throat. ‘I’ll ask Gina to have Poppy for a sleepover and she can take her to school tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s not good for us to always have Poppy around. We need some time when it’s just you and me.’

  I felt his hand on my thigh.

  Smile, I told myself. I smiled. Kiss him, I directed myself, and I put my lips on his lips and felt his mouth curve beneath mine.

  ‘Now go,’ I said. ‘I’ll give Poppy my undivided attention and to
night I’m all yours.’

  He went and I could breathe again.

  SIXTY-ONE

  I looked at the dinner table and took a deep breath. Everything had been done. All the arrangements had been made. As for the dinner itself, I had never done anything like this in my life before. I’d placed knives and forks and spoons precisely around the plates and folded patterned paper napkins on both plates. I had two different wine glasses and a tumbler for the water all placed just so, like in the sort of restaurant that had always made me feel ill at ease. I struck a match and lit the single orange candle in the middle of the table. I wondered if it was all a bit too much.

  The front doorbell rang. I looked at my watch. I had told Aidan to come at about 7.30 and the time was now 7.27. I took a deep breath and opened the door.

  ‘You look fantastic,’ he said and leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. He held up two wine bottles. ‘I wasn’t sure what we were eating.’

  As he stepped inside, he took a bunch of keys from his pocket and smiled again as he shook it.

  ‘Time I got my own key,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll get one cut for you.’

  Though I knew he already had one. He’d let himself in to search through Poppy’s room; he’d probably come at other times as well.

  I opened one of his bottles and poured wine for us both. We clinked glasses. He smiled at me and I smiled back at him. I could do this. I felt icy with hatred and rage.

  ‘We’ve got so much to talk about,’ he said.

  I sat down next to him on the sofa and offered him a dish of almonds, which I’d roasted and sprinkled with salt.

  ‘These are great,’ he said.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I mean, not that the nuts are great, but that we’ve got a lot to talk about. But can I make a suggestion?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Can we not talk about anything big this evening? I think we’ve earned ourselves an evening where we just eat and drink and don’t talk about anything important. I mean, we’ve got time, haven’t we?’

  We finished our first glass of wine and then we sat down at the table. I had made salmon blinis for a starter and for the main course I had fried two duck breasts and accompanied them with just a green salad, from a bag, tipped into a bowl and sprinkled with salad dressing from a bottle. I had gone to the supermarket and looked for what was as simple as possible while seeming like plausible dinner party food.