Then She Was Gone(84)
On the seats to her right are Theo’s parents. Mr Goodman looks old but Becky Goodman still looks unfeasibly young for her age. Laurel sees the drag of skin away from her jawbone and towards her ears and holds the observation inside herself reassuringly.
Elsewhere she sees friends of Hanna’s from her schooldays, she sees Paul’s father and she sees strangers, twenty-somethings in uncomfortable shoes and too much make-up, friends of Theo’s she assumes, or colleagues from Hanna’s office.
But there are, as at every wedding, people who are not here: ghosts and shadows.
Laurel’s mother finally passed away eight months ago. But not before she’d had a chance to meet Poppy.
She’d clasped her hand and she’d said, ‘I knew it, I knew there was a reason why I was still here, I knew you were out there. I just knew you were.’ A nurse took a picture that day of the three of them. It should have been four, of course, but three was better than two. Ruby died a week later.
Laurel’s hopeless brother is not here either. He’d flown back from Dubai for Ruby’s funeral in January and said he couldn’t make two trips in one year.
And, of course, Ellie is not here.
Laurel hasn’t told Poppy the full truth about Ellie. She said that Ellie ran away from home and then got run over and left in a wood and that at some point between running away and getting run over she’d had a baby and that Noelle had adopted the baby and given her to Floyd when she couldn’t cope any more.
Neither has she told Poppy about the body in Floyd’s garden. She’d simply packed a small bag for Poppy and brought her to her flat in Barnet for a few days while the big plastic tent was erected over the flowerbed, helicopters buzzing overhead. As for Floyd himself, Laurel told Poppy that he’d taken his own life because he felt so guilty about pretending to be Poppy’s father when he wasn’t. Poppy had swallowed back tears and nodded, in that grim, brave way of hers. ‘I really didn’t mind, you know,’ she said. ‘Because he was a very good dad. He really was. He didn’t need to feel guilty. He didn’t need to die.’
‘No,’ Laurel had said, wiping a single tear from Poppy’s cheek with her thumb and then rocking her in her arms. ‘No. He didn’t.’
The bus pulls up outside the canal-side restaurant where Theo and Hanna will be holding their wedding reception. The party duly dismounts and smooths down its skirts and rebuttons its jackets, adjusts its hair against the sharp wind blowing in off the top of the water. Paul approaches. ‘Are you OK?’ he asks, his hand against the sleeve of her jacket.
Laurel nods. She is OK. Her life is upended in every way. She is a mother again at fifty-five. She is making packed lunches in the mornings and writing down term dates in her diary. She is doing two school runs a day and putting someone else before her at every juncture of her life. And she is still, of course, traumatised by the revelations of the last months of Ellie’s life. Some nights when she closes her eyes she is in that basement, trapped inside those pine-clad walls, staring desperately up at a window that no one will ever see her through. But the nightmares are starting to fade.
Her daughter is dead and her mother is dead and her husband lives with a woman who is nicer than her in hundred different ways. But she is OK. Laurel is OK. She really is. Because she has Hanna and she has Jake and now she has Poppy and Theo too. Her relationship with Sara-Jade has grown deep and strong in the months since Floyd’s death. She sees her frequently, for Poppy’s sake but also for her own. She sees something of herself in Sara-Jade, something important in some way, something to nurture.
Hanna lives with Theo now. She rents out the miserable flat in Woodside Park and Laurel no longer needs to be her cleaning lady. Everything about their previous dynamic has been transformed. They are friends. And Hanna and Poppy are the best thing to come out of the horror of Ellie’s disappearance. Poppy hero-worships Hanna and Hanna adores Poppy. They are virtually inseparable.
Laurel catches Hanna’s eye across the room as they find their way to their seats. She smiles and Hanna winks at her and blows her a kiss. Her beautiful daughter. Her golden girl.
Laurel catches the kiss and holds it next to her heart.
Epilogue
The woman clutches the piece of paper inside her hands and stares desperately through the glass screen at the policewoman sitting there. She’d told her someone would be along in a minute but that was nearly half an hour ago and she really needs to get going before she gets a parking ticket and the frozen chicken breasts in the boot of her car start to defrost.
‘Excuse me,’ she says a minute later, ‘I’m really sorry but my parking’s about to run out and I really have to go. Could I just leave this here with you?’ She holds up the piece of paper.
The policewoman looks up at her and then at the piece of paper, then back at her again. ‘Sorry?’ she says, as though she’s never seen her before or been told about the paper.
‘This letter,’ the woman says, trying her hardest not to sound impatient. ‘The letter I found in a book I got from the Red Cross shop.’
‘Right,’ says the policewoman. ‘Sure. Let me take it.’
The woman hands the letter to the policewoman and watches as she reads it, watches her facial expression change from disinterest to alarm to sadness and then to shock. ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘tell me again where you found this?’