Girl Unknown(61)

She kept on watching me to see if I took in the significance of that. Fourteen.

There were others, she said. A crush on a teacher that had bordered on obsession. The son of a friend, his girlfriend harassed until she complained to the police. The duplicity, the relentless nature of her intent, her consuming passion for one person leading her to isolate and eliminate anyone who might stand between her and her prize. On and on she went. It was depressingly familiar, as if our story had been written for us long ago and we were merely acting out a foregone conclusion.

‘She wasn’t always like that,’ Celine said, drawing back now. I could see her account had drained her. She summoned the energy to paint a picture for me of a bright little girl, pale and beautiful, vivacious and energetic, always dancing and singing, the centre of attention – the centre of their world. As she said it, I thought of my baby – the baby I might have had – a child who could have given happiness, fulfilment. And if I had kept that baby, would David have gone to Belfast? Might there have been no Linda? No Zo?? A jab of regret came at me and in a bid to swallow it, I took a sip of my cold coffee.

Somewhere along the line, Celine told me, Zo?’s childhood energy became restless. Adolescence came on and spikes appeared in her personality. The vivacious child became a cunning and devious teenager. Unrelenting, refusing to be appeased or cajoled, her restless energy meant they could never relax, always jolting from one crisis to the next.

‘The one thing that bothers me,’ she said, ‘the one thing I’ve never been able to understand, is what brought on the change in her. It wasn’t always there – I’d have seen it. If I could just know what it was …’

She had plucked a sachet of sugar from the saucer beneath her mug, and was turning it over in her hands, nervous energy overtaking her, like a sudden itch.

‘Something she told us,’ I began, carefully because I was on uncertain ground here. ‘About your husband. She said … at least she implied … that something may have happened …’

The pain that came over her face was unmistakable. It stopped me saying what I had been about to add. Her hooded eyes opened a little wider as if in surprise. But she was not surprised. Dismayed, perhaps. ‘She told you that story?’

I nodded, a feeling of shame coming over me as if I had invented the story of abuse, not Zo?.

‘You don’t know my husband, but he’s the kindest, gentlest person you could meet. To make those claims about him – it was the worst kind of hurt. Those allegations left him reeling. He was never the same afterwards. And the worst part …’ Her voice broke for the first time. ‘The worst part was the cleverness of her lies, the way she worked on me over those few days … For just a short while I began to doubt him. I began to question my own husband, who wouldn’t harm a fly.’

She looked down at her hands. She had twisted the sachet in two, sugar spilling on to the table. ‘My doubts didn’t last. But the damage was done.’

The air between us seemed to deflate. All the stoicism had gone from her now and I sensed our conversation closing down.

‘Did you ever meet Linda?’ I asked.

‘No. I never wanted to. What would have been the point? And besides,’ she said, hardness pinching her lips into thin lines, ‘I knew that once Zo? found her birth mother, all her attention and love would be transferred from me to her. That I would be discarded. That’s how it is with Zo?. Once you’ve outlasted your use, you become expendable.’

Bitter words to speak of your own daughter. I tried to imagine an occasion when I might speak of Holly or Robbie in that way, but could not. She had grown quiet, and I could see what it had cost her, the lengths to which Zo? had pushed her.

‘You still love her,’ I said, an observation not a question.

She smiled for the first time, a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. ‘That’s the thing about love,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter if they knock you down, abuse you, push you to the brink. You still love them, don’t you? You’d forgive them anything.’

After that, things deteriorated. I made no secret of my wariness towards Zo?, and she, in turn, maintained an air of injury. Over dinner one evening, she announced that she had found a part-time job as a waitress in town. She was out more than ever now, and I had the feeling she was avoiding me. Her occupancy of the attic continued, but a new coldness had entered her presence. The days and nights continued as they had before, but something had changed between us, and I came to believe it had as much to do with the day of the hike as anything else. She knew I suspected her of something, though at the time I couldn’t name it, and I certainly didn’t mention it to her again. But whatever it was, it was foul, and underhand – whether she was, on that day, willing to hurt Holly or simply wanted to plant the notion in my head, it meant we kept our distance from each other. It was noticeable, I suppose. Robbie would often ask me where she was when he got home from school, and when I said I didn’t know, he looked peeved, as if it were my fault that she wasn’t waiting for him.

What she did next, though, I hadn’t expected. Even though it wasn’t yet May, the end of semester still weeks away, she moved out.

I had been in Tesco, doing the weekly shop, the evening light fading as I returned home and parked in the driveway. As soon as I stepped inside the hall, I heard raised voices.