Girl Unknown(98)

They are nearing the harbour when a sudden movement in the water catches David’s eye. He stops.

‘Look,’ he says to Holly.

They stand together and watch the giant bird rise out of the reeds, its wings spreading as it takes to the air. The great blue heron – the one David has spotted on his walks a couple of times before. He watches it rise, beating hard against the biting wind. ‘Look at it,’ he says in admiration. ‘Isn’t it magnificent?’

For some reason, the bird rising like that, so proudly, makes him think of Zo?. But Holly isn’t looking at the heron. She is looking at him, perfectly calm and yet there is a flash of alarm in her eye.

‘What is it?’ he asks.

Still she looks. He realizes her silence, which he had read as tension, is actually something else. He can see now that she has been building up to something – that she has been building up to it for months – waiting for the right moment to get him alone to tell him. And now here they are in this deserted place, nothing around them but land and water and the vast swathe of metallic grey sky.

‘I saw you,’ she says.

Her voice is low, calm. He hears the accusation in it.

‘What are you talking about, sweetheart?’

‘With her. With Zo?. After Chris left.’

Her eyes are dark and unblinking. He feels the hardness of her stare.

‘I saw you through the window. You were kissing her.’

Something is building inside him, the slow beat of the heron’s wings reverberating in his inner ear. He thinks again of the confusion on that night, the struggle within, how Linda came alive for him in that moment. The knowledge of what his daughter witnessed, brief as it was, fills him with shame. He offers no defence – and the reason he does this is the realization that he is nearing the truth. The hard kernel is within reach.

‘I told Robbie,’ she says. ‘I told him what I saw. What you did. How disgusting it was.’

Her words sear through him.

‘Holly …’

‘I told him …’

‘It’s not your fault,’ David says. He thinks of all the months she has carried the knowledge and guilt of what she had done. She seems so self-possessed, standing on the path, holding her bicycle steady at her side while the wind whips her hair around her head. But she is just a child, his child, and the need to protect her is strong.

‘What happened to Zo? – what Robbie did – you mustn’t blame yourself, sweetheart,’ he tells her. ‘You weren’t to know what would happen.’

He moves to embrace her, but something in the way she stiffens holds him back.

‘Holly,’ he says again, a pleading note entering his voice.

Such pain has come into their home. He cannot bear to think of his daughter witnessing the shameful thing he did. In the same way he can’t bear to think of her shouldering the blame for Zo?’s death.

Her gaze is utterly steady. ‘You don’t understand, do you?’ she says.

The wind is picking up now, and he has to strain to hear her.

‘I did it.’

‘What?’

‘Robbie didn’t push her. I did.’

His hands are on the handlebars and he feels the cold biting through his skin. ‘Holly – sweetheart – it was an accident. Whatever it is you think you’ve done … You’re just a child.’ An innocent, he wants to say. But the way she is looking at him, the coldness of her expression, the pity in it, he realizes that he is the innocent. How blind he has been.

‘I told him about the letter I had found too,’ she says. ‘I told him she wasn’t our sister, and he believed that made it all right, the feelings he had for her. He thought he loved her. He didn’t understand how cruel she could be.’

‘Holly,’ he says hoarsely, the cold reaching up through his limbs, gripping his heart.

‘It was disgusting, wrong. He couldn’t see that. She had infected him. In the same way she had infected you.’

‘No,’ he says again, but his voice is barely audible. ‘It was an accident. You couldn’t mean to …’ The denial falters.

‘She was just standing there by the edge, the board right behind her. It seemed so easy. So simple. She didn’t even see me until the last minute. Didn’t even know I was there.’

The wind has calmed. On all sides they are surrounded by a flat calm greyness. He stares at her, and the strangest feeling comes over him: this girl, this daughter whom he has known from the moment she was born, this daughter whom he has loved, cherished, held close to his heart – he looks at her now as he would at a stranger. He realizes that he does not know her at all.

‘So simple,’ Holly says again. ‘One shove and back she went. She didn’t even scream.’

‘But Robbie … He confessed …’

This draws her attention and she looks at him sharply, consternation crossing her brow.

‘I did it for him. Don’t you see?’ she says, insistence entering her tone. ‘The way she used him.’ Then, turning her gaze away, she continues in a quieter voice, as if her words are spoken not for David but for herself: ‘Robbie knows. He knows I did it for him. I put my arms around him and told him that everything would be all right now. That we’re safe. Nothing else matters now.’