Then She Was Gone

by Lisa Jewell

  “Here,” he says, handing her an envelope. “Open that first. I’m just popping out to my car to get your other gift.”

  “Oh,” she says, “OK.”

  He stops in the doorway and looks at her. A small smile plays on his lips.

  “Good-bye,” he says.

  She hears the front door open and close.

  The house, now that Floyd has gone, is completely silent.

  She glances down at the card in front of her and she opens it.

  It has a picture on the front of a dove in flight. It is strangely un-Christmassy.

  Inside the card is a letter. She begins to read:

  Laurel,

  I sense that you are tiring of me. I sense that you have worked out what a hundred women before you have worked out. That I’m not the man for them.

  That is fine. Because I have worked out that I am not worthy of you. And that I must let you go. And before I let you go, I must also unburden myself of an appalling, unthinkable truth. I have something of yours. It was not given to me; rather, bequeathed to me in a terrible sequence of events. I need you to know that when I first came into possession of this precious thing, it had been horribly abused by another person and for five years I have tended and cared for this possession. I have polished it and nurtured it.

  And now it is time to return it to you. I am glad we had this time together. Time for you to see me not as a monster but as a normal man. A man worthy of your affections. If only for a few short weeks. It has been an extraordinary experience for me after so many years in an emotional wasteland. A precious gift. I cannot thank you enough. And I am glad you have had a chance to get to know me, to hopefully view me as a man capable of being trusted with your most precious possession.

  My study door is unlocked. On my desktop computer I have left you a video message. Simply press play and I will explain everything.

  Yours, always and in good faith,

  Floyd Dunn

  Laurel rests the card on the table and looks through the kitchen door. Slowly she walks toward Floyd’s study. She sits in Floyd’s chair and grasps the mouse tentatively. As she touches it the screen comes to life, and there is Floyd, dressed in the same jumper he wore this morning, his face paused in an expression of terrible grief. She clicks the play button and she watches his confession.

  60

  Laurel, there are so many things I want you to know. But the first is this: when I walked into that café in November, when I chose the table next to yours, when I complimented you on your hair and invited you to share my cake, I was not trying to seduce you. You were far too beautiful and far too delicate and I would never have been so presumptuous.

  Everything that happened after that meeting was entirely unexpected, and, I can see now, with hindsight, horribly, horribly selfish.

  Earlier this year I switched on the TV to watch the news and there was a trailer for the show coming up afterward. Crimewatch. Not a show I’d normally watch. Not my thing at all. But they said they’d be staging a reconstruction of the disappearance of a girl called Ellie Mack and then a picture of Ellie Mack appeared on the screen and my heart stopped. The missing girl looked exactly like Poppy. Older than Poppy. But exactly like her.

  So I sat and I watched the show.

  “It’s been ten years since Ellie Mack, a fifteen-year-old from north London, disappeared on her way to the library,” the presenter said. “Ellie was a popular girl, well liked at school, in a happy relationship with her boyfriend of eight months, and the beloved heart and soul of her family. According to her teachers, she was set for a full house of As and A stars in the GCSE exams she was sitting that month. There appeared to be no obvious reason why this smiley, charmed girl should leave her home one Thursday morning and not return.

  “We first launched an appeal for witnesses to Ellie’s disappearance in 2005. That appeal was unsuccessful. Now, ten years on, with no sightings of Ellie and no evidence to suggest her abduction, we have staged a reconstruction. But first, here’s Ellie’s mum and dad, Laurel and Paul Mack, to remind us of the girl they haven’t seen for ten long years.”

  The footage shifted from the presenter to a video of a tired-looking couple sitting side by side in a very nice kitchen. She had a sheet of vanilla-blonde hair, cut sharp at the ends and clipped back on one side. She wore a black polo neck with the sleeves pushed back, a simple watch, no rings. He was a classic city boy: pale blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck, thick graying hair parted at the side, short at the back and longer on top, a soft, spoon-fed face that was probably steam shaved in Jermyn Street twice a week.

  It was you and Paul.

  You started talking first, to someone off camera who had been edited out. Your voice was serious and mature, like a newsreader, and you had the same broad forehead and wide-set eyes as Ellie and Poppy. I could see the line that went straight down through the three of you; it was breathtaking. You talked about the golden light of your girl, the journey she’d been taking to the stars when she went, the laughter and the dreams, the lasagna she’d asked you to save for her lunch on her return. Your eyes turned to glass as you talked. You circled your narrow wrists with your thumb and fingers. You had beautiful hands: long, elegant, feminine.

  Paul started to talk then. I don’t mean to be rude but I could tell that he was a flibbertigibbet. Well meaning but ultimately pointless. And I could tell that you were no longer a couple. Your body language was all off. He talked about the bond he’d had with his daughter—with all of his children, he hastened to add—how she’d been an open book, always told her parents everything, didn’t have any secrets. His eyes also turned to glass and flicked briefly toward you. He was hoping, desperately I could tell, for some reassurance, but he did not get it. While you spoke, pictures flashed up at intervals of Ellie: as a child at the foot of a plastic slide; on the back of a speedboat with her father’s arm around her, the wind in her hair; on Christmas Day in a silly hat; and in a restaurant with her arm around an elderly lady who looked likely to be a grandmother.

  The girl looked far too alive to be dead, I thought. Even in those slightly blurred photographs I could feel the essence of her, sense the sheer joy of her. But it was a coincidence, I persuaded myself, that’s all it was. A young girl with a fairly commonplace name who’d disappeared a year before Poppy was born and bore a striking resemblance to her.

  Then the interview faded out and the reenactment began.

  And that was when I knew, that was when all the little pieces of the puzzle fell into place and I knew it was no coincidence. There was the high road, the café on the corner of Noelle’s road, the Red Cross shop where she bought her nasty clothes. The camera panned across the street and I could even see the distant bloom of cherry blossom on the tree outside her house. My skin covered over with goose bumps.

  Because, you see, Noelle had told me once in a fit of anger that she was not Poppy’s real mother, that a girl called Ellie had had her baby for her. I hadn’t been sure at the time if it was her madness that had caused her to say such a thing or if it might in fact be true. I had never seen her naked while pregnant. She had not allowed me to touch her. But still, it seemed farfetched. I hadn’t given it too much credence.

  And if it had in fact been true, then I’d always imagined the mythical Ellie as a desperate addict, some loser that Noelle had picked up off the street and thrown some money at to carry her fake child for her. But here on my TV screen was a beautiful young girl with her whole life ahead of her, vanished off the face of the earth and last seen virtually outside Noelle’s house.

  This was not a child who would have left her family behind, her boyfriend and her future, to willingly bear a baby for a stranger. And this sent my thoughts spiraling back to those days after Noelle’s disappearance, when I’d gone to her house to collect Poppy’s things. I thought of the weird basement room I told you about, nothing in it but the stained old sofa bed, the dead hamsters, the TV with built-in VCR, the three locks on the door.

 
; And I knew, immediately, that Noelle was capable of stealing a child.

  And I knew immediately what I needed to do.

  61

  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 favors 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 sakes of their careers, who genuinely, genuinely didn’t seem to realize 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 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 realized 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 toward the horizon. I could give you Poppy.

  62

  I became fixated on you, Laurel. I raked the Internet for articles about you, for photographs and clips of the press conference you’d given the day after Ellie disappeared. You were such a refined woman. So succinct and articulate, no words wasted, no emotional incontinence, your pretty hands always twisted together so intricately, the sharply cut hair, the tailored clothes; no lace or buttons or trim. Even in your clothing choices you wasted nothing.

  And in watching you I became more and more familiar with Paul. The shirts that looked conventional at first sight until you realized that there was a contrast trim of Liberty print inside the collar. The cuff links that appeared to be tiny dog heads. The slightly unusual tortoiseshell glasses. A flash of geometric-printed silk sock inside a handmade shoe.

  Further investigation of such clothing showed that he shopped primarily at Paul Smith and Ted Baker. I began experimenting with a pair of socks here and a silk handkerchief there. Then I took myself for a proper shave in a barbershop. I had never before had a proper shave. In fact I rarely shaved; I tended to let the stubble grow out until my face itched, scratch it all off with a—generally—blunt razor, leave myself with a blotchy, butchered face, and then let it all grow back again. Clothes shopping for me was a joyless affair: a whizz around M&S with a basket twice a year. I began to enjoy browsing these boutiques for gentlemen. I liked the snake-hipped sales assistants, so eager to help, to guide me in the right direction. Then I had a proper haircut, found some products that gave my rather sparse and gravity-challenged hair the appearance of volume and lift, bought a pair of clear-lensed glasses with horn frames, and the transformation was complete.

  It was a gradual process, over the course of a couple of months. It wasn’t as if I just suddenly popped up one day with a brand-new image like one of those awful TV makeover shows. I’m not sure anyone I saw regularly even noticed.

  I just wanted to show myself to you and for you to like me. That’s all it was. For you to find me familiar. To find me the kind of person with whom you could share a slice of cake. I wanted us to be friends and then I wanted you and Poppy to be friends. Because by now I had had a DNA test done. By now I knew, with only 0.02 percent of a chance of improbability, that Poppy was not my child and that the only person she truly belonged to was you.

  I had not expected mutual attraction. I had not expected your hands inside the sleeves of my jumper in the restaurant, our desperate ascent up the stairs of my house that night, your head in the crook of my arm the following morning
. Women like you did not like men like me. And I . . .

  No. There’s no defense for it. None. I took advantage. Plain and simple.

  But I’m glad at least that you and Poppy have had a chance to get to know each other in relatively normal circumstances, not in the glare of a police operation, not in the strip-lit office of the social services, just as a child and her grandmother, sharing breakfast, going shopping, eating dinner with your family. I hope this means that in the days that follow Poppy will be seamlessly assimilated into the Mack family. I’ve given her the bare bones of the truth. I will leave it to you to decide how much more she needs to know. And remember, this house and everything in it belongs to Poppy. She’ll more than pay her own way in life.

  But that brings me to the final, and in some ways, most compelling reason for me not going straight to the police back in May of this year. You’ll notice if you look through the window to your right that there is a flower bed in the garden, newer, higher than the others. Do you see? At the very back? I dug it out in early November, just before I met you.

  Noelle Donnelly is under there.

  Before that she was in a chest freezer in my cellar. She’d been in there since the night she told me about Ellie. The night she told me Poppy wasn’t mine.

  I didn’t mean to kill her, Laurel, I promise you that. It was an accident. I went for her, I wanted to scare her, I wanted to hurt her. I mean, you can imagine, can’t you, how I was feeling, with that woman, that evil woman, in my kitchen, ripping my heart out of my chest. If you had been there, you’d have wanted to hurt her, too; I know you would. But I did not intend to kill her. Her chair went flying and her head hit the floor and . . .