Sophie, they say, is making a remarkable recovery, all things considered. I don’t really understand how strong she was. Is. ‘Youth, maybe,’ says the counsellor, Sally. ‘Teddy. And hope, that you’d find her.’ I’m seeing one again. I might as well, Sophie thinks it’s good for me.
And Teddy? He’s a little bundle of joy. We had to childproof the house, of course. It is full of people now. Mark’s here a surprising amount. Sophie likes it, so it’s fine, and I feel bad for him. He’s struggled with the knowledge that he stopped searching – that he gave up on her. But maybe, I thought the other day, it was neither of our faults. It came out of the blue, but something’s loosening in me.
He’s still nervous around her. And he keeps trying to say sorry to me, too. I was trying to be magnanimous, but it got to the point when I just wanted him to stop. ‘Mark, I forgive you, all right. Just please – stop following me about like a wounded puppy and make us all a cup of tea.’
‘Well,’ he said, the wind taken out of his sails, ‘there’s no need to be so rude about it.’
Incredibly, I heard a little laugh from the doorway. We looked round, both red-faced. I hadn’t realised Sophie had come into the kitchen to catch us bickering. ‘You two don’t change, do you?’ But she didn’t seem to mind. And the truth is, he doesn’t need to say sorry to me. No one does.
Ben’s been round again, too. Nicholls, I mean. He’s good company, actually – funny, in a deadpan way. Maureen at the school was right; he has got something about him, when you think about it.
I don’t know if it could be something more, one day. For now, a friend is enough. He knows: what it’s like to have something dark in your past that won’t go away.
I’ve been so lucky. I almost can’t believe it.
When I’m alone at night, my big house quiet again, everyone else asleep, and I’m in that drifting space between wakefulness and sleep, I still feel it: that cold familiar fear rising up to clutch at me again.
Because close your eyes and you know in your bones: Sophie never came home. The questions you nursed – the wheres, the whys, the what-ifs – were never answered. It’s just you, alone, waiting. No change, no revelation, no daughter returned like something from a fairytale. Just more long years to endure …
And then I catch myself and realise that I am doing it again. Because if those dark years of absence came to an end, in a way they will never end for me. They showed me. They lifted the thin veil between the safe, normal world, the one most of us live in, and the world as I know it can be – a place of sharp edges and dangers, where bad people want to hurt my loved ones and me. So I hug my arms around myself, tight, and try not to think about that night in late summer, after the storm broke.
It’s easier to do than you might think. They have stopped asking questions now, the official statements done. There were some uncomfortable articles in the papers about the first police investigation, how they were hoodwinked by the notes, the postcards, the rest of it; whispers of an inquiry by the police watchdog into the lessons to be learned.
But weren’t we all deceived by Heath? That’s the question I ask, as I tell everyone that we, as a family, want to move on, that we will address it all once we’ve some distance from the past. Maybe. And everyone accepts it. It’s surprising what people will believe.
Most of them, anyway.
It was just something Ben said once, early on, when I still had to spend all that time at the station. I was sitting outside one of those little rooms, drinking sugary vending machine coffee. The duty lawyer who sat in with us had gone off to make a phone call, when he came by to say hello.
He asked how I was doing. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. It was true. ‘I can cope with all this.’ This, I didn’t need to say, this was a walk in the park after the last two years.
‘Of course you can.’ He stretched out his legs in front of him. ‘That was Heath’s mistake, really, wasn’t it. To underestimate you.’
‘What do you mean?’ I turned to look at him.
‘Just what I said,’ he said lightly. ‘To think that you would ever let her go. He didn’t understand, did he? That there’s nothing stronger than that tie. That there’s nothing that a mother wouldn’t do for her child. Her baby. Nothing at all.’
It was something in his eyes that told me. Not just sympathy, but – a question.
‘You’re right,’ I said. I couldn’t look away. ‘There isn’t.’
The officer, DS Hopper, came back then, and told me it was time to go back in to continue with the interview, if I was ready. So we stopped there. I don’t think we’ll talk about it again.
We didn’t plan it, Sophie and I. She wasn’t in any state for that. They just assumed, from the start. My clothes were soaking, covered in blood. And I … let them. She was so young, so vulnerable, so traumatised. Of course it was me.
And I told them everything, just as it happened, until the very end.
‘Then I saw the knife,’ I said, so many times in the days that followed, as we went over and over what had unfolded. ‘It felt like it wasn’t really happening. There was no other choice, I couldn’t stop him.’
Because that’s what he taught me. Hide the lie under a little bit of truth.
I’d known what I had to do from the moment I decided to go back inside, afterwards, to pick up the knife, wiping the blade on my jeans. I’d wiped the handle, too, before wrapping my fingers back around it, making sure my prints were all over it.
I tell myself that I did the right thing. That I had no choice, that I couldn’t fail my daughter. Not after what she did.
He was on me, his hands round my throat, when I got my hand free, scrabbling for something anything. A rock, anything. But there was nothing, just bare floor. Nothing.
And then I saw her: over his shoulder; the knife held awkwardly in one hand, still tied to the other with tape. She didn’t leave. She didn’t leave – she went to get it, I realised with dawning horror. I’d thrown it away, as far as I could, with no thought of using it, just to get it off him. I couldn’t believe it was happening, I felt almost like I was removed, just watching her from outside myself, and so afraid – he’ll notice, he’ll hear her – but he doesn’t, he’s lost it, completely, so she just comes up behind him, and quietly, delicately almost, she slides it in, between his ribs, before he knows it.
He groans. He’s heavy; his fingers are still at my throat, but easing now, weakening. And suddenly I can roll him off; I can scrabble up from under him.
His blue eyes are glazed with shock, as he looks up at us both, standing there, our faces mirroring each other’s horror. He slowly puts his hand on the wound, finally understanding what’s happened: who did this to him. What he missed.
His blood is dark on the floor, already soaking into the earth.
Because she came back.