Then She Was Gone(69)

That girl. That bloody girl.

She’d passed over at some point. I don’t know when exactly. It was for the best, I’d say. Yes, it was for the best. According to the papers they’d scaled back the search for her. That to me said they had her as a runaway. So I decided to make it look that way.

I’d kept the bag she’d been carrying when she first arrived. Which shows, doesn’t it, that I’d been half intending to let her go at some point, that I wasn’t entirely bad. I took the keys from her bag and when I saw the mother leaving the house with her swimming kit I let myself in through her back door and I took some things that I thought the girl would have taken if she was heading out of the country: a scruffy old laptop, some cash, a pair of candlesticks that she might have wanted to sell on. I’d always liked those candlesticks – they’d sat on top of the piano by the table where we worked. I’d admired them once and the girl had said something about taking them on to the Antiques Roadshow one day to find out how much they were worth.

I also took a cake. I was reminded when I saw it there of a day when the pleasant mother had brought us two slices of still-warm chocolate cake instead of the posh biscuits and the girl had said, ‘Is it one of Hanna’s?’ and the mother had said, ‘Yes. Freshly baked.’ And the girl had turned to me and said, ‘My sister makes the best cakes in the world. You will never eat a better chocolate cake than this.’ I can’t say I can particularly recall the cake or whether or not it was the best in the world, but I do remember the girl’s face when she told me that, the anticipation shining in her eyes, the unabashed pleasure she took in the eating of it.

It’s odd, you know, because when I look back to those days when I was her tutor I feel sure I must have dreamed the whole thing, because by the end I swear I had no idea what I’d ever seen in her. No idea at all.

She was, after all, just a girl.

I looked everywhere for her passport. The passport was the key to everything. But it could not be found for love nor money. And then I had the most brilliant idea. I’d seen her sister when I’d been watching the house and the two girls were very similar to look at. So I went to the sister’s bedroom and found her passport in under a minute. I slipped it in the big bag with the computer and the candlesticks and the cake in its Tupperware box and ten minutes later I was home.

It’s hard to talk about what came next, because it did require a certain level of barbarity, I must be honest. A few years earlier, when the smell from the basement had become problematic (I had a visit from the next-door neighbours shortly after she passed, asking after it. I told them it was the drains), I’d moved the girl to a blanket box in the attic. So while Poppy stayed the night at yours I took her from there (well, I say ‘her’; I think ‘it’ would be more accurate by this stage) and I dropped her into the boot of my car along with her rucksack which I’d packed with the old clothes and the passport and I drove through the dark of night to Dover. Then I found a quiet lane deep, deep in the middle of nowhere, and I laid some of her bones down in the road and drove my car over them and then I dropped them into a ditch, dropped her rucksack at her side, kicked over some leaves and mud and left, pretty sharpish. The rest of her bones I took to a municipal dump a few miles down the road.

I thought she would be found almost immediately. I’d made hardly any effort to hide her. I wanted her found. Wanted it over. Wanted, on some subconscious level, to be caught out. I’d barely given a thought to the forensic aspect of the thing, after all, hadn’t thought about the fibres and the tyre marks and the like. But months and months passed by and it was as though it had never happened. It seemed I’d got away with it, completely.

Then the London housing market slowed down and I decided against selling my house. Life, as it was, went back to normal.

Well, I say normal, but sweet Jesus, what was normal about living with a toddler? And this toddler was a law unto herself. A monster. All she wanted, morning, noon and night, was sugar. Sugar on her cereal, sugar on her fruit, Nutella on everything otherwise she wouldn’t eat it. She would not go to sleep at night, and at nursery she was mean to the other children, she’d wallop them and trip them up; I was forever being called in. And then I’d bring her to your house for her weekly stays and she’d be, oh, the perfect little angel. All, Daddy this and Daddy that and at first of course I loved it because she was my route back to you and in that respect it had worked. But then I could see the two of you forming a kind of breakaway team. It was like you and SJ all over again. She’d sit on your lap and she’d twirl your hair and she’d look across at me as if I was nothing to her. Less than nothing.

I’d come to collect her from your house sometimes after you’d spent a day together and she’d hide behind your legs. Or hide herself in a room somewhere in the house and refuse to come out.

‘I’m not going!’ she’d say. ‘I’m staying here!’

And sometimes I’d think fuck it, fuck you both, and I’d leave and there’d be the two of you, closing the door behind me, going back into your lovely cosy house to do lovely things together. And she ate what you gave her. She’d come home and tell me about stir-fries and crispy prawns and stews from African restaurants. There was no sugar in your house, no junk food, no CBeebies, no cheap electronic toys that made noises that imprinted themselves on to your psyche forever more. None of the stuff I’d given her to shut her up. Just books and music and trips to the park.