Then She Was Gone(80)

Sixty-one


You know, Laurel, all my life all I ever wanted was to feel like everyone else. I’d turn up in some different country at some new school and I’d see all the kids who’d grown up together, whose mums and dads all drank wine together at the weekends, all these laid-back kids with their in-jokes and their basement dens and their nicknames. And I’d look at them and think, How do you do that? How does that even work? I was never anywhere long enough to get a nickname. I was just ‘the new boy’. Every couple of years. ‘Hey, you, new boy.’ And being a virtual fucking genius didn’t really do me any favours either. Nobody likes a clever clogs. And I was a terrible clever clogs. My cleverness oozed out of me like goo.

Also I was not good-looking in the least. Plus bad at sports and completely disinterested. And of course I had these high-flying parents who clearly didn’t think there was any sacrifice too big for the sake of their careers, who genuinely, genuinely didn’t seem to realise that children liked being with their parents. They threw activities at me and told themselves that as long as I was busy I must surely be happy.

There was one school, one town, in Germany. I liked that school. It was an international school, kids from all over the world; a lot of them couldn’t even speak English. And a transient intake, kids coming and going all the time. So for once I had an advantage. I could speak English. And I was there for nearly four years, from eleven to fourteen. So I started off as one of the youngest and became one of the oldest. This was good stuff. Formative. Almost transformative. I’d see new kids arrive, little ones, foreign ones, tiny little Korean kids or Indian kids or Nigerian kids, struggling with the language, struggling with the culture shock. And that made me feel normal.

I had a girlfriend there. Mathilde. She was French. Quite pretty. We kissed a few times and maybe if my parents hadn’t dragged me away by the scruff of my neck at that precise moment and dropped me down in the next place, maybe I’d have had a chance to develop that normality, become a guy with a core and a soul.

As it is, I don’t think I ever really loved anyone, until Poppy came along.

And even now I’m not sure if that’s quite the right word.

After all, I have nothing to compare it to.

Why didn’t I go straight to the police after seeing Ellie on Crimewatch, that’s what you’d like to know, isn’t it? And it’s a very good question.

Firstly, at this juncture, I did not know whether Ellie was dead or alive. I did not know how long she’d been in Noelle’s basement, assuming she had ever been there. And according to the TV show, there was a slim possibility that she’d let herself into your house four years after her disappearance and helped herself to some cash and valuables. So Ellie was potentially anywhere or nowhere and the narrative was all over the place.

But that in itself was not a good enough reason to stop me telling the police what little I knew. You see, what concerned me the most was my role in this scenario. Another thing that Noelle told me the day she told me that she wasn’t Poppy’s real mother was that I was not Poppy’s real father. She told me that the baby had been conceived using sperm she’d bought off the internet. I’d locked this unpalatable little nugget away with all the other stuff she told me and stuck my head in the sands of denial. Poppy was literally, Laurel, literally the only good thing that had ever happened to me. My pride and joy. My entire raison d’être. You know how difficult my relationship with Sara-Jade has always been. You know how she hated me as a child, spat in my face, bit me and scratched me. I thought that was what fatherhood was. I thought that was the child I deserved. And then Poppy came into my life and she was so exquisite and so clever and she adored me. For the first time in my life I had something beautiful and precious that nobody else had, nobody in the world. And if she wasn’t mine then my life no longer made any sense to me.

But after watching the Crimewatch special I realised that if she was mine and if I told the police what I knew about Noelle and Ellie that there would be no police officer, no detective, no judge and no juror that would ever, in a million years, believe that Ellie had been impregnated with my sperm without my knowledge or consent. It was preposterous. Clearly. I would be done, at the very least, for aiding and abetting. And I would be done for rape of a minor. A minor that I’d never even met.

But again I prevaricated. I did not get a DNA test done even though proof that Poppy was not genetically my child would free me to report what I knew to the police. I simply wasn’t ready to let her go, Laurel. I’m so sorry.

Shortly after the Crimewatch special I read an interview with you in the Guardian. It was some kind of real-life interest story in the magazine. You said, and I quote: ‘The nightmare of the thing is the not knowing. The lack of closure. I just cannot move forward without knowing where my daughter is. It’s like walking through sinking mud. I can see something on the horizon, but I can never, ever get to it. It’s a living death.’

And then a month later there were the headlines in the papers. ‘ELLIE’S REMAINS FOUND’. You had your closure. I came to the funeral. I stood at a respectful remove. I saw your legs buckle as your husband helped you into the crematorium and saw them buckle again on the way out. Closure, it seemed, had brought you nothing but a box of bones. But I could give you something that would get you out of the sinking mud and walking towards the horizon. I could give you Poppy.