Daisy Darker(87)

‘Did she swear?’ Nana asks, and Trixie shrugs. ‘Daisy, you know I don’t like any bad language under this roof. You must remember to use your words. But I do understand why you might be feeling a bit upset,’ she says.

Nana stands up from the kitchen table, careful not to disturb Poppins, asleep at her feet. I see that she is wearing a new pink and purple dress covered in a pattern of birds. She starts to shuffle towards the sink, in her pink and purple slippers. ‘I’ll explain everything if you’ll let me. But I might just put the kettle on first. I’m a little parched, and it is officially my birthday!’ she adds. Nana still has a bit of blood and brain matter in her hair, and a big bloody gash on the side of her face. She looks like a ghoul.

‘I’ll make the tea. You two have a lot to talk about,’ says Trixie, going to fill the kettle.

‘Well, I suppose it’s always best to begin at the beginning,’ Nana says, sitting back down in her pink and purple chair at the table. ‘It began when Trixie told me that she could see and hear you a couple of years ago. At first, I presumed she was making it up. But then she started knowing things, things that she couldn’t possibly have known unless someone had told her. I thought about all the times after you were gone, when books went missing from my library and then would sometimes turn up in your bedroom. Pages folded down just the way you used to when you couldn’t find a bookmark. The clues were always there. They always are.’ She smiles. ‘One day – Halloween last year – I saw Trixie playing Scrabble, and I watched the pieces move all by themselves on the board when it was your turn! But then she told me what really happened the night that you died. You told her your secret, and she told me.’ Nana’s face darkens. ‘That’s when we started to plan all of this.’

‘What did you think happened to me that night?’ I say.

‘Daisy wants to know what you thought happened the night she died,’ Trixie relays without waiting to be asked, then puts the kettle on the stove.

Nana looks so sad. ‘Your sisters came home from the Halloween beach party and went to bed without saying a word. Your parents and I didn’t even know that you were missing until the next day – we thought you were in your room the whole time, and had no idea that you had sneaked out to join them. My agent was still here. Do you remember that he gave me the Scrabble board that night? It was a birthday gift, and you played a game with him after dinner. It was the last time I saw you alive. He and I found you the following morning. Your broken little body had washed up on Blacksand Bay. The tide at the time when you fell – which was what we thought had happened at first – should have dragged you out to sea and along the coast. But there you were, face-down near the causeway, almost as though you had tried to swim home to Seaglass.

‘The police were called, and we were all questioned. They visited Conor and his father too . . . that’s why the silly fool killed himself soon afterwards. Mr Kennedy found a streak of your blood on the front right headlight of his Volvo. Conor had taken the car without his dad’s knowledge or permission, so Bradley Kennedy thought he’d accidentally hit you himself when driving home from the pub. He was too drunk to remember that he hadn’t driven anywhere the night before, and threw himself off the cliff in a tragic case of misguided guilt. His body was never found. Even the police believed that he was responsible for your death. That’s when I invited Conor to move in here for a while. His father had just committed suicide, and Rose had just dumped him – though none of us knew the real reason why – and he had nowhere else to go. I didn’t know he killed you.

‘I really wasn’t sure if Conor would come when I invited him here this weekend, but I’m glad that he did. Nobody else outside of this family knows the worst things about ours, and there are some things I would prefer to take to my grave. Anyone who lives long enough starts to worry about their legacy, and I didn’t much like the look of mine. The Darker family will be remembered for the right reasons now, instead of the wrong ones. Conor arriving by boat was a surprise, but I just cut the rope attaching it to the jetty once you had all gone to bed.’

‘I wondered what happened to the boat,’ says Trixie. She smiles, but Nana doesn’t.

‘When I first found out what really occurred the night that you died, I confided in my daughter-in-law, your mother. I invited her here to Seaglass and said there was something very important we needed to talk about. I didn’t tell Nancy how I suddenly knew the truth – she was already waiting for any excuse to call the men in white coats – I just told her that I was sure. That’s when she confessed that she already knew. Lily had told her. Years earlier. Your mother started sobbing, and revealed that one of the last doctors she took you to see in London thought you had a chance to live a longer life. It involved groundbreaking heart surgery, but she never shared that information, the choice, or the opportunity with anyone else, for reasons I still don’t understand. If you’d had that surgery, everything might have been different. You might still be alive now.’

‘I know,’ I whisper, but Nana doesn’t hear me.

I was here at Seaglass when they had that conversation.

That’s how I knew.

I remember Nana and my mother sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea, and talking about the doctor who might have changed my life. I remember Nancy crying, I remember Nana sounding so upset, and I remember how neither of them noticed me sobbing in the corner of the room.